1. In her recent book, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York, 1987), Naomi Schor demonstrates the persistence of this link in nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic theory and practice.

2. Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley, 1986). break

1. See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (New York, 1963), part 1, qu. 92; part 3, qu. 32. Innocent III is particularly virulent on the topic of woman. "Menstrual blood," he writes, "ceases in the female after conception so that the child in her womb will be nourished by it. And this blood is reckoned so detestable and impure that on contact with it fruits will fail to sprout, orchards go dry, herbs wither, the very trees let go their fruit; if a dog eat of it, he goes mad. When a child is conceived, he contacts the defect of the seed, so that lepers and monsters are born of this corruption"; On the Misery of the Human Condition , trans. Mary Dietz (New York, 1969), 9. In the misogynistic thinking of the Middle Ages, there can, in fact, be no distinction between the theological and the gynecological. Woman is a limit case of man who remains, as in Platonic thought, bound by the material, by flesh and lust. "Man was formed of dust, slime, and ashes, what is even more vile, of the filthiest seed. He was conceived from the itch of the flesh, in the heat of passion and the stench of lust, and worse yet, with the stain of sin"; ibid., 6.

2. It can be no accident, as Catherine Brown pointed out in my seminar, that the discourse of misogyny, which represents an attempt to speak of the other through the voice of the other, is so closely allied with the literary form or register whose very name implies "speaking otherwise."

3. Le Roman de la rose , ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris, 1974), lines 8561-70.

4. John of Salisbury, Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers , ed. J. B. Pike (Minneapolis, 1938), 357.

5. Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," The Canterbury Tales , ed. F. N. Robinson (Cambridge, 1957), lines 248-52.

6. "Ce n'est pas merveille trop dure/Se le mari nul temps ne dure/Contre sa femme mal pitieuse,/Envers la tençon rioteuse/Que souvent li scet aprester" (It is no great wonder if the husband doesn't last very long against his pitiless wife, if he doesn't hold out against the riotous arguments that she knows how to prepare for him); Jehan Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus , ed. A.-G. Van Hamel (Paris, 1872), lines 829-33.

7. "Car um puet oyr sovent/Um fol parler sagement./Sage est qe parle sagement"; Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles , ed. A. de Montaiglon, 6 vols. (Paris, 1872), 2:256.

8. Cited by Victor Le Clerc, "Les Fabliaux," in Histoire littéraire de la France , vol. 23 (Paris, 1895), 98.

9.   break

Et cil qui font les mariages,
Si ont trop merveilloz usages,
Et coustume si despareille
Qu'il me vient a trop grant merveille.
Ne sai d'u vient ceste folie,

Fors de rage et de desverie.
Je voi que qui cheval achete
Ja n'iert si fox que rienz y mete,
Comment que l'en l'ait bien couvert,
Sil ne le voit a descouvert;
Par tout le regarde et descueuvre.
Mes la fame si bien se cueuvre,
Ne ja n'i sera descouverte,
Ne por gaaingne ne por perte,
Ne por solaz ne por mesese,
Por ce, sans plus, que ne desplese
Devant qu'elle soit espousee.

[And those who marry have a most unusual and unnerving way of operating that surprises me greatly. I don't know whence this foolishness can come except from madness and rage. For a man who buys a horse would not be so crazy as to put any money down if he had not seen it uncovered first, no matter how well covered it was in the first place. He looks it all over and uncovers it. But woman covers herself so well that she can never be uncovered--neither for gain nor for loss, neither for solace nor for grief; for this, and no more, that she might not displease before being wed; Roman de la rose , lines 8661-77.]

10. Innocent III, Misery , 20. Chaucer repeats the topos: "Thow seyst that droppyng houses, and eek smoke,/And chidying wyves maken men to flee/Out of hir owene hous"; "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," lines 278-80.

11. Le Débat sur le "Roman de la rose": Edition critique, introduction, traductions, notes , ed. Eric Hicks (Paris, 1977), 15.

12. Ibid., 35.

11. Le Débat sur le "Roman de la rose": Edition critique, introduction, traductions, notes , ed. Eric Hicks (Paris, 1977), 15.

12. Ibid., 35.

13. Christine, whom no one would consider a misogynist, addresses the Provost of Lille in self-deprecating terms that, despite the possibility of sarcasm, would be taken as evidence of misogyny if from the pen of a man: "Bien est vray que mon petit entendement y considère grant joliveté . . ." (While it is true that my little understanding finds very amusing . . .). Then again, even so important a female figure as Hildegard of Bingen appropriates certain theological presuppositions that serve as the ontological basis of much of the misogynistic thinking of the Middle Ages: "When God saw man he saw that he was very good, for man was made in his image. But in creating woman, God was aided by man. . . . Therefore woman is the creation of man. . . . Man symbolizes the divinity of the Son of God and woman his humanity. Therefore man presides in the courts of this world since he rules over all creatures, while woman is under his rule and submits to him"; cited in Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (London, 1983), 57.

14. This is a historical aporia implicit to psychoanalytic explanations of misogyny in terms of male anger at rejecting mothers as well as to anthropological explanations involving the collective anxiety of males in dealing with the fear of feminine power. The difficulty of the former is that in biologizing misogyny it is at the same time naturalized, since there can be no escape from the basic cultural process expressed in the oedipal imposition of the father between mother and son and the son's concomitant anger. The problem with the latter is of a more logical order. To wit, if misogyny is the symptom of men's fear of the real power of women, then the more misogynistic a culture is, the stronger females can be assumed to be; in this way antifeminism represents not the derogation of women but an expression of their material enfranchise- soft

ment. See Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle, 1966); H. R. Hayes, The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil (New York, 1964).

15. Leaving aside the unknowable affective element of woman-hating, misogyny is a way of speaking about women as distinct from doing something to women, though speaking may be a form of doing and even of social practice, or at least its ideological component. Misogyny is a speech act such that the subject of the sentence is woman and the predicate is a more general term.

16. See my Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago, 1983), 37-44.

17. Philo, On the Creation (London, 1929), 227.

18. Augustine, De libero arbitrio , ed. J. H. S. Burleigh (London, 1953), 169.

19. Augustine, De ordine , ed. J. Jolivet (Paris, 1948), 444.

20. Tertullian, "On Exhortation to Chastity," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers , ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, vol. 4 (Buffalo, 1885), 54.

21. Augustine, De Libero arbitrio , 163. This is also an important concept in the Aristotelian tradition according to which in procreation man supplies the form and woman the matter; see in particular De la génération des animaux , ed. P. Louis (Paris, 1961), 3-5, 39-43.

22. Philo, On the Creation , 237

23. Tertullian, "On the Apparel of Women," in the Ante-Nicene Fathers , 4:14.

24. Ibid., 16.

25. Ibid.

23. Tertullian, "On the Apparel of Women," in the Ante-Nicene Fathers , 4:14.

24. Ibid., 16.

25. Ibid.

23. Tertullian, "On the Apparel of Women," in the Ante-Nicene Fathers , 4:14.

24. Ibid., 16.

25. Ibid.

26. Tertullian, "On the Pallium," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers , 4:9, 12.

27. Tertullian, "On the Apparel," 17.

28. Ibid., 20.

27. Tertullian, "On the Apparel," 17.

28. Ibid., 20.

29. One of the salient ironies of misogynistic discourse is that it often becomes rhetorical or ornamental in direct proportion to the extent to which it denounces woman as ornament.

30. Tertullian, "On the Apparel," 17.

31. "So true is it that it is not intrinsic worth, but rarity, which constitutes the goodness (of those things): the excessive labour, moreover, of working them with arts introduced by means of the sinful angels, who were revealers withal of the material substances themselves, joined with their rarity, excited their costliness, and hence a lust on the part of women to possess (that costliness"; ibid., 23.

32. "For they who rub their skin with medicaments, stain their cheeks with rouge, make their eyes prominent with antimony, sin against HIM. To them, I suppose, the plastic skill of God is displeasing! In their own persons, I suppose, they convict, they censure, the Artificer of all things. For censure they do when they amend, when they add to, (His work); taking these, their additions, of course, from the adversary artificer. That adversary artificer is the devil"; ibid., 20-21.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

32. "For they who rub their skin with medicaments, stain their cheeks with rouge, make their eyes prominent with antimony, sin against HIM. To them, I suppose, the plastic skill of God is displeasing! In their own persons, I suppose, they convict, they censure, the Artificer of all things. For censure they do when they amend, when they add to, (His work); taking these, their additions, of course, from the adversary artificer. That adversary artificer is the devil"; ibid., 20-21.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

32. "For they who rub their skin with medicaments, stain their cheeks with rouge, make their eyes prominent with antimony, sin against HIM. To them, I suppose, the plastic skill of God is displeasing! In their own persons, I suppose, they convict, they censure, the Artificer of all things. For censure they do when they amend, when they add to, (His work); taking these, their additions, of course, from the adversary artificer. That adversary artificer is the devil"; ibid., 20-21.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Tertullian, "On the Pallium," 8.

36. Augustine, De trinitate (Washington, D.C., 1963), 105.

37. "From that time forth she [Reason] found it hard to believe that the splendor and purity [of numbers] was sullied by the corporeal matter of words . And just as what the spirit sees is always present and is held to be immortal and numbers appear such, which sound, being a sensible thing is lost into the past"; Augustine, De ordine , 434.

38. Philo, On the Creation , 227.

39. Ibid., 237.

40. Ibid., 249.

38. Philo, On the Creation , 227.

39. Ibid., 237.

40. Ibid., 249.

38. Philo, On the Creation , 227.

39. Ibid., 237.

40. Ibid., 249.

41. Saint Chrysostom, Homily 15, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , ed. P. Schaff, vol. 9 (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1956), 441.

42. Saint Chrysostom, Homily 17, ibid., 10:116. break

43. Virginity as such is obviously a concept crucial to the study of misogyny, one too vast for even superficial treatment within the limits of the present essay. Suffice it to say that virginity, like misogyny itself, is impossible to locate since the ever narrowing definitions given by the church fathers relegate it to the realm of a pure idea. To be more precise, virginity contains a historical reference to Adam and Eve and to a theological state of man, as in Augustine's notion of technical virgins who reproduce in paradise without desire or pleasure; it contains a doctrinal reference to Mary, the Virgin who redeems Eve; and it is associated on an individual level with a lack of personal sexuality. It is here that the concept of virginity becomes more interesting, since the more one seeks to fill the category, the more elusive it becomes; and the Patristics, in their desire for the absolute (which, as absolute, is synonymous with virginity), are not satisfied until the concept of virginity, like woman, is emptied of sense. It is not enough, for example, merely to be chaste; in order to be a virgin it is necessary never to have experienced desire. Nor is the absence of desire sufficient; the stimulation of desire in another impugns one's own chastity; see John Chrysostom, Homily 15, 443. And since desire is engendered by, and can consist in, a look, a virgin, seen, is no longer a virgin. "Every public exposure of an honorable virgin is (to her) a suffering of rape," Tertullian maintains ("On the Veiling of Virgins," 29). Jerome even wonders if it is licit for virgins to bathe since, in seeing their own bodies, there is always the potential for desire: "For myself, however, I wholly disapprove of baths for a virgin of full age. Such an one should blush and feel overcome at the idea of seeing herself undressed"; Letter 107, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , 6:194. Thus there are only two possibilities: 1) virginity, as an absolute, a totality or Idea, does not exist; 2) the abstraction that virginity implies is destroyed by its articulation. This is another way of saying that the loss of virginity implied in its exposure is analogous to the loss of universality of an Idea implicit to its expression; or, there is no way of talking about virginity that does not imply a loss since the universal is always veiled by the defiling garment of words. In that case, virginity itself becomes a veil. (Jerome speaks of the "veil of chastity"; ibid., 192). Language becomes the ornament, the veil, that defiles the virgin by exposure, since the senses, equated with the body, have no direct access to an Idea, allied with the soul. "No one," John Chrysostom writes, "has anywhere seen a soul by itself stripped of the body"; "Letters to the Fallen Theodore," in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , 9:104.

44. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love , trans. John J. Parry (New York, 1969), 28.

45.

Las! or ay le cuer trop marri.
Car orendroit est tant ripeuse,
Courbée, boçue et tripeuse,
Desfigurée et contrefaite
Que ce semble estre une contraite.
Rachel est Lya devenue,
Toute grise, toute chenue,
Rude, mal entendant et sourde,
En tous ses fais est vile et lourde;
Le pis a dur et les mamelles,
Qui tant souloient estre belles,
Sont froncies, noires, souillies
Com bourses de bergier mouillies.

[Alas! now my heart is very sad, for she is now so mangy, stooped, humpbacked and pot-bellied, disfigured and undone that she seems to be a deformed person. Rachel has become Leah, all grey, white-haired, rough, continue

senile, and deaf. In all she does she is heavy and vile; her chest is hard and her breasts that used to be beautiful are wrinkled, black, spotted like the wet bags of a shepherd; Lamentations , book 1, lines 672-84.]

46. Capellanus, Courtly Love , 201, 204, 207.

47. Walter Map, De nugis curialium , ed. Montague R. James (London, 1923), 160-61.

48. Capellanus, Courtly Love , 204.

49. How, one might ask, can the reader to whom the work is addressed be other than a woman as defined in Andreas's own terms as the one subject to persuasion: "Woman is commonly found to be fickle, too, because no woman ever makes up her mind so firmly on any subject that she will not quickly change it on a little persuading from anyone"; ibid., 204.

50. Ibid., 210. break

49. How, one might ask, can the reader to whom the work is addressed be other than a woman as defined in Andreas's own terms as the one subject to persuasion: "Woman is commonly found to be fickle, too, because no woman ever makes up her mind so firmly on any subject that she will not quickly change it on a little persuading from anyone"; ibid., 204.

50. Ibid., 210. break

1. John Heming and Henry Condell, eds., dedicatory epistle to William, Earl of Pembroke, and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, The Shakespeare First Folio (1623).

2. The Argument, "The Rape of Lucrece"; Shakespeare citations will be to The Riverside Shakespeare , ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., (Boston, 1974); references to the original edition (1594) will be to the facsimile edition published by the Scolar Press (London, 1968). Citations of poems will give line numbers within parentheses in the text.

3. T. W. Baldwin discusses the influence on The Argument of Ovid's Fasti and Livy's Historia in On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana, Ill., 1950), 108-12. James M. Tolbert argues The Argument to the poem is not by Shakespeare, "The Argument of Shakespeare's 'Lucrece': Its Sources and Authorship," Studies in English 29 (1950): 77-90.

4. There are six attested Shakespeare signatures; "By me William Shakespeare " is on page 3 of Shakespeare's will. For discussions, not always persuasive, and reproductions of Shakespeare's handwriting, see Charles Hamilton, In Search of Shakespeare (New York, 1985), esp. 38-47.

5. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley, 1986). break

6. Facsimile edition, "Hap'ly that name of chast, unhap'ly set."

7. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; facsimile ed., Kent, Ohio, 1970), 216.

8. "Bi-fold" is from Troilus and Cressida ; this is Troilus' response to Cressida's duplicity: "O madness of discourse,/That cause sets up with and against itself!/Bi-fold authority, where reason can revolt/Without perdition, and loss assume all reason/Without revolt. This is and is not Cressid!" (5.2.142-46). The passage is relevant to the Troy ekphrasis the poem develops later on, especially Troilus' dumbfounded response to "how these two did co-act": on the one hand, "Shall I not lie in publishing a truth," on the other, the hope "that doth invert th'attest of eyes and ears" (5.2.118-22).

9. Sigmund Freud, "Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality" (1922), in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1970), 162. Freud sees this as the logic of projective jealousy, and footnotes Desdemona's "Willow song" as evidence: "'I called my love false love, but what said he then?/If I court moe women, you'll couch with moe men,'" 161; see note 33, below.

10. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore, 1965); Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, 1977).

11. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston, 1969). Patricia K. Joplin discusses the rape of Philomela in Girardian and Lévi-Straussian terms in "The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours," Stanford Literature Review 1 (1984): 25-53. Nancy Vickers discusses the rhetoric of praise in "The Rape of Lucrece" in much the same terms, "'The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's 'Lucrece,'" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory , ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1985): 95-115.

12. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), esp. 161-79. Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris, 1970). Traditional commentary on the story of the rape of Lucrece is usefully reviewed in Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford, 1982). Moralizing discussions of the ethical questions raised by the rape and suicide of Lucrece rapidly become formulaic "themes for disputation." Accordingly, aspects of her story provide convenient topical commonplaces through which to display and to teach rhetorical skills; hence, the purely rhetorical tradition of arguing on both sides of the question, in utramque partem, Pro Lucrecia and Contra Lucreciam , e.g., Coluccio Salutati, George Rivers, et al.; see Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia , 38. As I argue in connection with Tarquin's "cross," the story of the rape of Lucrece systematically activates essentially, and therefore interminably, contestable questions so as to elicit from readers a suspended investment in the story that, as something suspended, determines the inevitability of rape.

This is why triangulating characterizations of the relation of desire to violence in literature, such as those to which I refer above, regularly promote, whatever their explicit intentions, an erotics that conduces to rape. The tradition behind this literary strategy is an old one, which is why I say above that the desire for violence and the violence of desire are traditional expressions of each other. A paradigm for this, one that is quite important to Shakespeare, comes at the end of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale , which seems to resolve and to defuse the opposition between a violent Mars (represented by Arcite, who is nevertheless a lover) and a desiring Venus (represented by Palamon, who is nevertheless a warrior) in the figure of Emeleye, the representative of Diana who, as goddess both of the hunt and of childbearing chastity, is image of continue

the domesticated integration of violence and desire. The terms of this happy reconciliation go back to Homer, from whom derives the medieval tradition according to which the legitimate marriage of Mars and Venus spawns as its issue the child-god Harmonia (spelled "Hermione" in the Middle Ages, a point relevant to The Winter's Tale ). In The Knight's Tale (and elsewhere) the harmonious resolution of the chiastic conjunction of a venereal Mars and a martial Venus is accomplished through the exigently accidental violence that puts an end to the public fight for love conducted by Palamon and Arcite. But this harmonious and triangulated resolution of the two lovers' quarrel is staged for a fourth point of vantage, that of amazon Hippolyta and warrior Theseus, who thus come to occupy, by virtue of their witness to triangularity, the place in which violence and desire come together in chiastic disjunction, the vantage point, therefore, of rape. "Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword," says Theseus at the opening of A Midsummer Night's Dream , "And won thy love doing thee injuries" (1.1.16-17):

Hippolyta and Theseus

Since Chaucer is the most eminent rapist in our literary tradition (thanks to the Cecily Champagne episode in which he was accused of raptus ), there are anecdotal, biographic grounds with reference to which we can understand why it is so regularly the violent case in Chaucer that Amor Vincit Omnia --usually with the help of Cupid's arrows. Chaucer consistently induces from the chiastic concatenation of violence and desire a specific form and substance of literary desire, e.g., the way, at the opening of The Canterbury Tales , a male Aphrodite (April) "pierces" a female Mars (March) or the way his/her liquidity spills forth to surround the parched channels through which it is supposed to flow: "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote,/The Droghte of March hath perced to the roote,/And bathed every veyne is swich licour . . ./Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages." I discuss the way the criss-crossed invaginations informing these lines derive from a general literary logic of erotic yearning in "The Structure of Allegorical Desire," in Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979-80 , ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Baltimore, 1981). I discuss the tradition behind the Mars-Venus topos in my forthcoming book on Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare's Will (University of California Press). We can note here, however, that The Knight's Tale occupies a central place in Shakespeare's dramatic imagination; e.g., he concludes his career by retelling the story in The Two Noble Kinsmen . I mention this because, though this essay on "The Rape of Lucrece" is primarily concerned to establish the poetics of Shakespearean rape, the argument it develops is intended to serve as a basis for a discussion of how the theatrics of rape functions in Shakespeare's plays. Again, though Shakespeare's use, in narrative and drama, of the chiastic concatenation of violence and desire is nothing but traditional, there is something novel and historically significant about the way he uses the commonplace to produce powerful literary subjectivity effects, rather than the abstract, allegorical agents through which the commonplace is motivated in pre-Shakespearean literature.

13. Cited in Riverside Shakespeare , 1837. break

14. Compare with Twelfth Night 's purple "violet," the magic flower of erotic mix-up in A Midsummer Night's Dream , which is turned purple by Cupid's erring arrow: "Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell./It fell upon a little western flower,/Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound" (2.1.165-67); also "The forward violet" of sonnet 99. Purple is the color, and violets "breathe" the odor, of Shakespearean rape.

15. A full discussion of the relation of Twelfth Night to "The Rape of Lucrece" would require an account of the way the false letter of Twelfth Night , written by a woman's hand, leads Malvolio to sport "cross-garter'd" stockings. With regard to what I argue above, it is important that the "signature" of the letter emerges from the literal connection of "cut" and "cunt": "By my life, this is my lady's hand. These be her very c's, her u's, and her t's, and thus makes she her great P's" (2.4.86-88). This is the same signature system as is developed in "The Rape of Lucrece," as Malvolio himself remarks: "And the impressure her Lucrece, with which she uses to seal" (2.4.93-94).

16. The following four paragraphs are adapted, with some revisions, from Shakespeare's Perjured Eye , 39-41, where I used this stanza to example Shakespeare's use of rhetorical chiasmus; I want here to consider how chiasmus functions thematically in "The Rape of Lucrece."

17. Cf. the inside-outside glove in Twelfth Night : "A sentence is but a chev'ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turn'd outward!" (3.1.11-12). Referring to gynecological tradition, Stephen Greenblatt gives a naturalizing account of this love-glove in "Fiction and Friction," in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought , ed. Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna, David Wellbury (Stanford, Calif., 1986), 30-63.

18. The proverb survives through Freud: "Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of libido to its height; and at all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones in order to be able to enjoy love," "A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men" (1910), in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , 67.

19. Riverside Shakespeare prints a dash, but the facsimile edition a comma.

20. The next stanza continues, "For with the nightly linen that she wears/He pens her piteous clamors in her head" (680-81); compare these "folded" "lips" and "pen" with King Lear : "If I had thee in Lipsbury pinfold, I would make thee care for me" (2.2.9-10).

21. The title on the frontispiece is Lucrece , but the running title at the head of all the pages of the facsimile edition is The Rape of Lucrece .

22. Cf. Lucrece's "'Let my good name, that senseless reputation,/For Collatine's dear love be kept unspotted:/If that be made a theme for disputation,/The branches of another root are rotted'" (820-24).

23. The relevant Freudian parallel is the Wolfman's "W-espe," which, on the one hand, at the level of the signifier, spells out the Wolfman's initials, "S. P.," on the other, as "wasp," at the level of the signified, calls up the image of the butterfly that determines the Wolfman's erotic object-choice ( coitus a tergo ) through its associations with castration and the primal scene, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918), in Three Case Histories , ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1970), 286-87. As I argue above, it is only within a specific literary tradition that the visualization of letters necessarily entails this kind of subjectifying erotic designation.

24. Example 1 does not play on "Will," but leads immediately to a thematization of epideictic "name": "He stories to her ears her husband's fame,/Won in the fields of fruitful Italy;/And decks with praises Collatine's high name" (106-8). Two stanzas continue

after example 2: "And in his will his willful eye he tired. / With more than admiration he admired" (417-18). A play on "will" occurs within example 3, but this is further amplified in the following stanza, where it is developed in terms of the logic of the "crossed," pricking "let": "'I see what crosses my attempt will bring, / I know what thorns the growing rose defends, / I think the honey guarded with a sting: / All this beforehand counsel comprehends. / But Will is deaf and hears no heedful friends'" (491-95). A play on "will" occurs within example 4, with "'Myself thy friend will kill myself. . . . This brief abridgement of my will I make.'" In example 5 redoubled "will" appears in the doubled "wil-dness." Example 6 imports the doubleness of "will" into the ambiguities of "marble will"; see footnote 26.

25. " Willm Shakspere " appears on page 2 of Shakespeare's will; also, " Willm Shakp " appears in a document relating to a legal suit. " W ^m Shakspe * " occurs on the mortgage deed of Blackfriars house.

26. This corresponds to thematic ambiguities raised by the syntax of example 6, which allow the "as" of the couplet to coordinate both male and female "will": with male will "forming"--either molding by encircling or engraving by carving--the waxy minds of women, as it chooses; and with female will, thus doubly "styled," the simulacrum--"as" as the likeness or masquerade--of the marble minds of men. In either case, Lucrece is not the "author" of her "will."

27. Cf. Tarquin's argument: "Then for thy husband and thy children's sake, / Tender my suit; bequeath not to their lot / The shame that from them no device can take, / The blemish that will never be forgot, / Worse than a slavish wipe, or birth-hour's blot; / For marks described in men's nativity / Are nature's faults, not their own infamy" (533-39).

28. Cf. Thersites' judgment in Troilus and Cressida : "All the argument is a whore and a cuckold" (2.3.72-73).

29. The synecdochical procedure that allows a part to stand "for the whole to be imagined" presupposes a figurality that works by visually imaging the trope's signified (e.g., to take the standard example, fifty sails for fifty ships); this is quite different from a figurality based on the linguistic substitution of one signifier for another signifier, which is how Jacques Lacan understands the general operation of metaphor. Lacan explains this, and points up the nominalist folly informing a synecdochical understanding of poetic trope, in "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud," in Ecrits , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), 146-78.

30. This blind spot in vision is thematically present in the poem from the very beginning; hence the book-reading context for the first MW example: "But she that never cop'd with stranger eyes, / Could pick no meaning from their parling looks, / Nor read the subtle shining secrecies / Writ in the glassy margents of such books. / She touch'd no unknown baits, nor fear'd no hooks, / Nor could she moralize his wanton sight, / More than his eyes were open to the light" (99-105).

31. Note that, at the level of the signifier, the "tide" which "outruns the eye" is articulated as "saw" and "draw," the past tenses of "to see" and "to draw."

32. Though this marks its climax, the poem does not end right here, but continues on for a short while, first, developing a rivalry in grief between Lucrece's father and Collatine--"Then son and father weep with equal strife, / Who should weep most, for daughter or for wife" (1791-92)--then, gesturing, very briefly, toward the promised revenge. The father-in-law versus husband competition is central to Shakespeare's understanding of a structural contradiction energizing patriarchal marriage. When, in marriage, the daughter substitutes her husband for her father, her passage from the one male to the other amounts to a forswearing of the father, e.g., Brabantio in continue

Othello : "Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see; / She has deceiv'd her father, and may thee" (1.3.292-93). For this reason, for Shakespeare, the woman has always already committed adultery by virtue of her having entered into marriage. The way the poem's conclusion scants the political consequences of the story--the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome and the institution of the republic, events to which the Argument gives more weight--suggests that Shakespeare was more concerned with the personalizing consequences of the rape, i.e., the way the "let" returns to Collatine, than with the rape's historical significance. For this reason, the poem leaves some of its readers wanting more, but more of the same , e.g., J. Quarles's extension of the story in Tarquin Banished; or, the Reward of Lust , which concerns itself with what happens to Tarquin after the rape; this was published as an appendix to a 1665 edition of Shakespeare's poem; see Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia , 179.

33. Shakespeare plays, famously, on his own name in the so-called "Will" sonnets, where, since "will" refers to both male and female genitals, his lyric first-person is designated by disjunctive copulation, e.g., sonnet 136: "Make but my name thy love, and love that still, / And then thou lovest me for my name is Will "; see Shakespeare's Perjured Eye , chap. 5. There are many " Will " ¬

More generally, it can be shown that Shakespeare regularly finds the same old story in the remarked designation of a name. Consider, as a small example, but one relevant to "The Rape of Lucrece," what Titus says in Titus Andronicus when he sees his daughter, the raped Lavinia, making inarticulate gestures because her arms have been cut off and her tongue has been torn out: "Mark, Marcus, mark! I understand her signs" (3.1.143-44). Later, Lavinia will successfully reveal her rapists' names when, after first pointing to a passage about Philomela in "Ovid's Metamorphosis," "She takes the staff in her mouth, and guides it with her stumps, and writes" (4.1.76, stage direction).

34. Claudio Guillén, "Notes Toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter," in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation , ed. Barbara Lewalski (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 70-101. Guillén argues that the diffusion of printing technology, the Humanist revival of classical epistolary modes (neo-Latin and vernacular prose and verse epistles), the incorporation of fictional letters in literary works, the publication of letter manuals, plus an increase in private correspondence, leads to the formation of a specifically literary stylization of voice: a written voice that strives to seem conversational, spontaneous, individuated, intimate. Guillén sees this as an important factor behind the rise of the novel. In a larger historical context, we can say, as Brian Stock implicitly suggests in The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, N.J., 1983), that an oral culture only becomes such after the fact of diffused literacy: a writing culture looks back to an authentic orality that exists only as a function of retrospective nostalgia. This is how the writing "post" of "The Rape of Lucrece" works to establish "The golden splendor of the sun" as "An expir'd date, cancell'd ere well begun"; in the terms proposed by continue

the Dedication, this is why "this Pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous Moity."

35. I refer here, of course, to some of the consequences arising, directly and indirectly, from the by now well-known debate between Lacan and Jacques Derrida, which centers around this claim at the end of Lacan's seminar on Poe's "The Purloined Letter": "The sender, we tell you, receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form [ une forme inversée ]. Thus it is that what the 'purloined letter,' nay, the 'letter in sufferance' means is that a letter always arrives at its destination"; Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 72 (a full version of the seminar appears in Lacan's original Ecrits [Paris, 1966]); in French, the message is inverted, not reversed (41). For Lacan, this is a shorthand way of summarizing his understanding of how it happens a subject comes to be a desiring subject when he accedes to speech, passing (though Lacan means to describe a structural, not a chronological, staging process) from an "Imaginary" register of visual identification and idealization to a different register that Lacan calls "Symbolic," which he associates with a necessary slippage of meaning inherent in subjective speech, and by reference to which he accounts for the subject's insertion into the cultural order. Derrida objects to this Lacanian claim on the grounds that it universalizes a "logocentric" determinism; he summarizes his objection by pointing out that a letter does not always arrive at its destination since it sometimes goes astray. On these grounds, Derrida proposes to oppose, deconstructively, "writing," " écriture ," to Lacan's sexist, spoken "logos"; a short version of Derrida's argument appears in "The Purveyor of Truth," trans. Willis Domingo et al., Yale French Studies 52 (1975), but the argument is considerably amplified in La Carte postale (Paris, 1980).

What I have tried to suggest through the above reading of "The Rape of Lucrece"--with its account of a subjectifying progress from true vision to false language, via the intermediating circle of Collatine's "let"--is that this debate gains its charge because it repeats a familiar literary story; this is why "The Rape of Lucrece" seems so precisely to predicate the topoi and argumentative terms of the debate. As we know from Romeo and Juliet , where a "purloined" (i.e., post-poned) letter is what causes the lovers' tragedy, literary letters always arrive at their destination precisely because they always go astray. Derrida's powerful critique of Lacan, therefore, is readily assimilable to Lacan's general claim (as is apparent in Lacan's late introduction of a third term, the "Real," to function as disjunctive supplement to the Imaginary-Symbolic dialectic). This is why it is so dangerous to rewrite literary stories in an extraliterary register, for, when one does so, one ends up acting out a Shakespearean tragedy. The point is especially important when erotic intentionality is at issue. One contemporary example will have to stand for many. In a translation of a portion of Luce Irigaray's "When Our Lips Speak Together," we read "I love you: body shared, undivided. Neither you nor I severed. There is no need for blood spilt between us. No need for a wound to remind us that blood exists. It flows within us, from us. It is familiar, close. You are quite red, and still so white. . . . The whiteness of this red appropriates nothing. It gives back as much as it receives, in luminous mutuality"; trans. Carolyn Burke, Signs 6, no. 1 (1980): 70. Commenting on this portion of the text, the translator adds an approving footnote: "Irigaray's use of 'red' and 'white' differs consciously from the traditional Western opposition of these terms as symbols of passion and purity. In general, she tries to locate a locus in writing where such 'opposites' may coexist, in a new way" (70). As we have seen, however, the Western continue

tradition does not "oppose" red and white; quite the inverse: "when our lips speak together" in Irigaray's text, therefore, they may call out in a thematic way for "luminous mutuality," but their literary effect is to replicate the inside-outside in-betweenness of "her lips sweet fold," a replication that opens up "a locus in writing" that invites the intrusive interjection of the footnote. This is a model of "reader-response," and the example suggests why it is very dangerous to underestimate the seductive subtlety of Western literariness. break

1. The Characters of Jean de La Bruyère , trans. Henry Van Laun (London, 1929), 59-60.

2. Thus, when Saint Evremond wished to portray an accomplished individual, he naturally employed the features of a woman because it was "less impossible," he said, "to find a strong and healthy masculine judgment in a woman than it was to find the charm and the natural grace of women in a man."

3. The application of this rule extends, of course, to the face. At cosmetic counters and makeup studios, customers are taught that makeup should enhance the features rather than stand out as a separate feature.

4. Cornificius, cited by Edgar De Bruynes, Etudes d'esthétique médiévale (Bruges, 1946).

5. Cicero De oratore 23.79.

6. Dionysius of Halicarnassus 1.415; in Dionysius of Halicarnassus: The Critical Essays in Two Volumes , trans. Stephen Usher (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 5, 7.

7. Quintilian Institutio oratoria , esp. preface, 2.5, 5.12, 8.3

8. Hence the insistence with which the Italian and French colorists distinguished natural from artificial color. In this sense, Dolce, in his Dialogo della pittura , differentiated the colorito of the painting from the color, color , as it emerged from the tube and whose beauty owed nothing to the talent or knowledge of the artist but only to the technique of its fabricators. In the same way, one century later, Roger de Piles distinguished the material color "that makes objects sensible to the sight" from coloris , which is the work of the painter and which includes the knowledge of chiaroscuro. "It is true that the dyers understand something about color, but they don't understand anything about coloris ," he wrote in his Dialogue sur le coloris (Paris, 1673). This distinction between color and coloris is untranslatable in English.

9. Roland Fréart de Chambray, Idée de la perfection de la peinture démontrée par les principes de l'art (Le Mans, 1662).

10. Noel Coypel, "Sur le rang que le dessin et le coloris doivent tenir entre les partyes de la peinture," Academic lecture of 26 April 1697, in Revue universelle des arts 18 (1863): 188-211.

11. Aristotle Poetics 6.50a.38ff.; in Aristotle's Poetics , trans. James Hutton (New York, 1982), 51. break

12. Antoine Gombauld, Chevalier de Méré, Des agrémens (Paris, 1677).

13. Blaise Pascal, Pensées , trans. W. F. Trotter (New York, 1958), 5.332, p. 93. Pascal means by this that the political chief, for example, who claims to govern not only public acts but private sentiments becomes tyrannical because he exceeds his scope--as when passion tries to govern reason, or vice versa.

14. Gabriel Blanchard, the only colorist of the Academy, used the expression le beau fard to characterize Rubens's paintings in a lecture delivered at the Academy on 7 November 1671, "On the Merit of Color," in response to Philippe de Champaigne's lecture of 12 June 1671, on a painting by Titian whose coloring de Champaigne severely criticized.

15. Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (Paris, 1708), 10.

16. Jean Racine, Britannicus , 2.1; in Five Plays , trans. Kenneth Muir (New York, 1960), 78-79.

17. Antonio Possevino, Biblioteca selecta (Rome, 1593). The two examples of Father Garasse and Father Possevino, like those of Father de Cressoles and Father Louis Carbone, are taken from Marc Fumaroli, L'Age de l'eloquence: Rhétorique et 'res literaria' de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique (Paris, 1980), an inexhaustible mine on this subject.

18. Fumaroli, L'Age de l'eloquence , 181, note.

19. Louis de Cressoles, Theatrum veterum rhetorum (Paris, 1620); cited in Fumaroli, L'Age de l'eloquence , 310.

20. Louis Carbone, Divinus orator vel de rhetorica divina libri septem (Venice, 1595); cited in Fumaroli, L'Age de l'eloquence , 184.

21. Fumaroli, L'Age de l'eloquence , 184, note. break

My thinking on the issue of rape and its relationship to symbolic structures has been, at every stage, challenged and refined by my discussions with Walter Benn Michaels, who has read and commented on various drafts of this essay. I am also grateful to Carol Clover and Lynn Hunt for their scrupulous readings of the penultimate version.

1. Susan Estrich focuses on the issue of consent and nonconsent in the third chapter of her powerful book on rape and the legal treatment of it; Real Rape (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), esp. 29-41.

2. Ibid., 8-26; Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York, 1975), 1-22; Camille E. Le Grande, "Rape and Rape Laws: Sexism in Society and Law," in Forcible Rape: The Crime, the Victim, and the Offender , ed. Duncan Chappell, Robley Geis, and Gilbert Geis (New York, 1977), 67-83.

1. Susan Estrich focuses on the issue of consent and nonconsent in the third chapter of her powerful book on rape and the legal treatment of it; Real Rape (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), esp. 29-41.

2. Ibid., 8-26; Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York, 1975), 1-22; Camille E. Le Grande, "Rape and Rape Laws: Sexism in Society and Law," in Forcible Rape: The Crime, the Victim, and the Offender , ed. Duncan Chappell, Robley Geis, and Gilbert Geis (New York, 1977), 67-83.

3. Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae: The History of the Pleas of the Crown , ed. Sollom Emlyn (1736); rev. ed. George Wilson (Dublin, 1778), 635.

4. Brownmiller, Against Our Will , 413-14.

5. Estrich, Real Rape , 28-29. See also Frederick J. Ludwig, Rape and the Law: The Crime and Its Proof (New York, 1977), 37-38. Characterizing Hale as "an unusually literate English jurist," Ludwig points to Hale's classification of the criminal law and proceeds to cast some doubt on his reliability in the following description:

Sir Matthew was the inventor three centuries ago of nomenclature employed today in the criminal law: felony and misdemeanor and the single-word symbol for the composite elements of behavior constituting a crime, such as burglary and rape. But Sir Matthew also presided at trials of females resulting in their conviction for witchcraft. Protection of innocent males, of course, depends upon the state of mind of the victim at the time of the alleged act of the male, and it is desirable to consider revenge, blackmail, and hallucination of the female victim. Sir Matthew perpetuated the syndrome of "a woman's revenge" in rape.

6. Ludwig, Rape and the Law , 1-2.

7. Hale, History of the Pleas of the Crown , 636.

8. Cesare Marchese de Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1764; Albany, N.Y., 1872), 50-51. break

9. R. v. Billingsley, The English and Empire Digest 15, part 17 (1947), 1210, no. 7751.

10. See Robert Chambers, A Course of Lectures on the English Law, 1767-1773 , ed. Thomas M. Curley, 2 vols. (Madison, Wisc., 1986), 1:406.

11. Chambers provides a remarkably lucid and compact narrative history of the legal treatment of rape generally; ibid., 1:405-7. His account of the circumstantial nature of evidence appears on 1:406. See also Charles Viner, A General Abridgment of Law and Equity (Dublin, 1793), 153-55, esp. 154, for a discussion of the circumstantial evidence of rape.

12. Brownmiller, Against Our Will , 11.

13. Ibid., 4.

12. Brownmiller, Against Our Will , 11.

13. Ibid., 4.

14. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York, 1987), 133.

15. Ludwig provides a brief history of the historical development of the notion of an age of consent; Rape and the Law , 7-10. As he notes, "The age of consent for rape, which is usually identical with that of consent for marriage, has advanced in most states by statutes which have fixed the age usually at either eighteen or at sixteen" (8).

16. See also Chambers, Lectures on English Law , 1:406.

17. Estrich, Real Rape , 100-104.

18. Brownmiller, Against Our Will , 12-13.

19. Beccaria, Essay on Crimes and Punishments , 47-48.

20. Margaret Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford, 1974), 128 and passim.

21. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore, 1987), esp. 21-22.

22. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley, 1967), 194.

23. Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's "Clarissa" (Ithaca, N. Y., 1982), 16 and 57-80.

24. Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Minneapolis, 1982), 62.

25. Thus, the law of rape is less equivocal in siding with Clarissa than many literary critics have been. See the passage cited above from Watt and particularly Judith Wilt, "He Could Go No Farther: A Modest Proposal About Lovelace and Clarissa," PMLA 92, no. 1 (1977): 19-32, which argues that the rape may well not have occurred.

26. William Beatty Warner, Reading "Clarissa": The Struggles of Interpretation (New Haven, 1979), 50-52.

27. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady , ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1985), 883. I follow the text of the Penguin edition, which offers the complete text of the first edition. Although the obvious disadvantage of this text is that it omits the material that Richardson added in the second and third editions, its advantage is its ready availability. Further references to this edition of Clarissa will appear in parentheses in the text.

28. Hale, History of the Pleas of the Crown , 631.

29. I have found no full legal articulation of the view that conception could only occur if a woman achieved orgasm and that orgasm itself had to be consensual, but, as Carol Clover pointed out to me, one would imagine that this particular line of argument was connected with eighteenth-century medical accounts of a link between female orgasm and conception. For a discussion of such views and their decline, see Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations 14 (Spring 1986): 1-41.

30. Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers , 43. break

31. Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 51.

32. Warner, Reading "Clarissa ," 90.

33. Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers , 16.

34. Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa , 88.

35. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages , trans. John H. Moran, in On the Origin of Language (New York, 1966), 9.

36. Patricia Joplin's suggestive "The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours," which I am grateful to have had the opportunity to read in typescript, argues that the rape narrative provides an occasion for a specifically female claim to articulation.

37. Carol Clover has suggested to me the possibility of tracing this representational history of rape through a film like Birth of a Nation , which, arguably, uses the question of rape in the service of a statement of its own establishment of a new representational mode. break

This paper is gratefully dedicated to the students in my course on French women's writing from the seventeenth century to the present at Brown University, Fall 1984, and University of California, Berkeley, Spring 1986. Special thanks to Carolyn Duffey for bringing to my attention the text quoted in the epigraph. Lombarda was a woman troubadour of the thirteenth century. The text is drawn from part 2 of her tenson with Barnat Arnaut d'Armagnac.

1. Sarah Kent and Jacqueline Morreau, preface to Women's Images of Men (London, 1985), 1.

2. Sarah Kent, "Looking Back," in ibid., 62.

3. Ibid., 72.

2. Sarah Kent, "Looking Back," in ibid., 62.

3. Ibid., 72.

4. A very recent exception to this rule is Jane Miller's Women Writing About Men (New York, 1986). Though our approaches to the topic could not be more different--at no point does Miller problematize the very issue of representation--a disclaimer she makes in her introduction points to an odd resonance between our analyses: "My book will be a disappointment, I expect, for anyone hoping for a gallery neatly hung with the portraits women have painted of men" (3). Indeed, despite a typological organization largely informed by the categories of kinship--chapter headings include "Fathers and Gentlemen," "Brothers," and "Sons"--Miller's book frustrates any expectation of an exhaustive taxonomy of male imagos in (Anglo-American) women's writing. Unfortunately, it also disappoints in other ways, notably by its lack of theo- soft

retical rigor. Nevertheless, it is a pioneering study of the ways in which women's disempowerment in modern Western societies translates into their writing about men.

5. Janis Glasgow, Une Esthétique de comparaison: Balzac et George Sand (Paris, 1977), 44-45. Translations in the text are mine except where otherwise noted. The awareness of a special handicap in portraying men is shared by other women writers. Charlotte Brontë, for example, writes to a friend: "In delineating male character, I labour under disadvantages; intuition and theory will not adequately supply the place of observation and experience. When I write about women, I am sure of my ground--in the other case I am not so sure"; quoted by Miller, Women Writing About Men , 39. Writing about the same issues some one hundred years later, Virginia Woolf is, if anything, more pessimistic in her conclusions than Sand: "It remains obvious . . . that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman is in her knowledge of men"; A Room of One's Own (New York, 1957), 87.

6. K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1984), 86. The recent polemic over the representation of the male protagonists in Alice Walker's The Color Purple --though it is, of course, immensely complicated by the tension between racism and sexism--provides a telling current example of the violence unleashed by women artists' attacks on male privilege. See, for example, Mel Watkins, "Sexism, Racism and Black Women Writers," The New York Times Book Review , 15 June 1986.

7. On the subject of misogyny through the ages, see Katherine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle, 1966).

8. Woolf, Room of One's Own , 94.

9. Ibid., 35.

8. Woolf, Room of One's Own , 94.

9. Ibid., 35.

10. The references here are in turn to Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction," in The New Feminist Criticism , ed. Elaine Showalter (New York, 1985), 339-60; Peggy Kamuf, "A Mother's Will," in Fictions of Feminine Desire (Lincoln, Neb., 1982), 67-96; Marianne Hirsch, "A Mother's Discourse: Incorporation and Repetition in La Princesse de Clèves ," Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 67-87; Joan de Jean, "Lafayette's Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity," PMLA 99 (October 1984): 884-902. The connection between The Princesse de Clèves and Indiana is the subject of an article by Mario Maurin, "Un Modèle d' Indiana ," French Review 50 (1976): 317-20. Noting the numerous echoes of The Princesse in Indiana , including the portrait scenes, Maurin concludes: "It is not implausible . . . that at the point of inaugurating an independent career as a novelist, George Sand should have unconsciously placed herself under the patronage of her illustrious predecessor" (320).

De Jean's article can be seen as part of a growing trend in feminist literary criticism to refine and rethink the universalist assumptions of pioneering work on "women's writing." Arguing that feminist literary criticism must take into account contextual particularities, especially the historical, de Jean writes: "Writing 'elsewhere' always takes place somewhere" (884), which is also to say someplace. Women writers in seventeenth-century France operate not within an "uncharted utopian space but a territory clearly and self-consciously defined by its creators." The "dream of a common language" (Adrienne Rich) that enabled and informed much early feminist criticism in America corresponded to the hegemony of feminists working within the dominant field of English. As the differences within difference (sexual, racial, ethnic) make their pressures felt, the continuing search for the specificities of women's writing must be coupled with the recognition of the diversity of women. My concern here is with what Miller refers to in passing as "the national constraints on the imagination" (347).

11. Nancy K. Miller, "Parables and Politics: Feminist Criticism in 1986," Paragraph 8 (October 1986): 46. break

12. Mme. de Lafayette, The Princesse de Clèves (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1982), 164, emphasis added. Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition; citations in French refer to La Princesse de Clèves (Paris, 1966).

13. Jean Fabre, as quoted by Kamuf, "A Mother's Will," 68. Kamuf's reading interestingly likens narratorial and maternal omniscience.

14. Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added," 350.

15. Michel Butor, "Sur La Princesse de Clèves ," in Répertoire I (Paris, 1960), 74-78.

16. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986), in particular p. 113. Symmetry dictates that elsewhere in the novel the scenario we have been tracing is "reversed," if only to show that it is irreversible. I refer to the scene where the princess sees M. de Nemours steal a portrait of her belonging to her husband. The differences between the two portrait scenes are telling: first, the princess's moral dilemma--should she say something to prevent the theft, thereby publicizing Nemours's love for her or, by silently acquiescing to it, encourage Nemours's passion--arises precisely from her inability to occupy the voyeur's position: she knows that Nemours knows that she has witnessed his appropriative gesture. Even in this instance, the male gaze supersedes and recontains the female. Second, rather than experiencing bliss at witnessing Nemours's desire for her portrait, the princess is embarrassed and "very much upset" (97).

17. Dalia Judovitz, "The Aesthetics of Implausibility: La Princesse de Clèves ," Modern Language Notes 99 (1984): 1053.

18. Mme. de Staël, Corinne; or, Italy , trans. Isabel Hill (New York, 1887), 122-23. The page references in the text are to this edition. When the French text is used, the reference is to Corinne; ou, l'Italie (Paris, 1985).

19. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), 81-114.

20. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London, 1924), 231-32.

21. A clear distinction must be drawn here between Mme. de Staël's ruining of representation and Corinne's more ambivalent relationship to the image, which is clearly bound up with the law of the father she would both transgress and reinscribe. Thus, when the portrait of Oswald's father (the posthumous lawgiver who prohibits the marriage of Oswald and Corinne) is nearly destroyed by water, Corinne restores it. In Corinne , female masochism and mimesis are shown to be inseparable.

22. See notes by Béatrice Didier in her edition of George Sand, Indiana (Paris, 1984), 359. Subsequent references to the French are to this edition.

23. Sainte-Beuve, Les Grands Ecrivains français: XIXe Siècle, les romanciers (Paris, 1927), 45.

24. George Sand, Indiana , trans. George Burnham Ives (Chicago, 1978), 66. The page references in the text are to this edition.

25. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985).

26. Leslie Rabine, "George Sand and the Myth of Femininity," Women and Literature 4 (1976): 8.

27. Brian Wallis, "What's Wrong with This Picture: An Introduction," in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York, 1984), xv. A central theme of this anthology is the politics of representation, its complicities with all forms of power, especially the patriarchal.

28. Nathalie Sarraute, as quoted in La Quinzaine Littéraire 192 (August 1974): 29.

29. This remark raises the question of the "consciousness" of the tradition I have been tracing. In her early Essai sur les fictions (Paris, 1979), Mme. de Staël lists The Princesse among the masterpieces written not so much by women as on women for their moral continue

instruction (48). As for Sand's affiliation with Staël, this celebrated lyrical evocation of her youthful readings attests to Sand's keen awareness of her great predecessor: "Happy time! oh my Vallée Noire! Oh Corinne!"; Lettres d'un voyageur (Paris, 1971), 207.

30. Nathalie Sarraute, Portrait of a Man Unknown , trans. Maria Jolas (London, 1959), 84. The page references included in the text are to this edition.

31. The very notion of a "female iconoclasm" is iconoclastic in that, as Mitchell points out, the great iconoclastic discourses of both Lessing and Burke align painting and beauty with the feminine. In a very different perspective, Elizabeth Berg, in an essay titled "Iconoclastic Moments: Reading the Sonnets for Helene , Writing the Portuguese Letters ," interrogates a certain feminist need to constitute secure self-representations, otherwise known as "images of women." She argues, iconoclastically, for a shattering of these "univocal images" in favor of a dissolution of all identities, especially the sexual. In Nancy K. Miller, ed., The Poetics of Gender (New York, 1986), 208-21, in particular 218.

32. When, later on in the novel, Raymon's new wife, Laure de Nangy, signs her paintings, she writes "Pastiche" next to the signatures; Indiana , 286. This crucial word is lost in the translation, which substitutes "copy" (267). Didier reads this scene as a sort of private joke, an ironic allusion to Sand's mentor's (Henri de Latouche) initial dismissal of her novel as a mere pastiche of Balzac. For more on Sand's relationship to the then dominant representational mode embodied by Balzac, see my "Idealism in the Novel: Recanonizing Sand," forthcoming. break

This essay is part of a larger project generously supported by a Henry Rutgers Research Fellowship at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. I would also like to thank Howard Horwitz, Myra Jehlen, and Lynn Wardley for their helpful readings.

1. Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street," in Great Short Works of Herman Melville , ed. Warner Berthoff (New York, 1969), 39-40. Subsequent references are cited in parentheses in the essay.

2. For an account of the icons of home and mother in popular nineteenth-century discourse see Mary Ryan's discussion of the 1850s rhetoric of domestic isolation and rest in The Empire of the Mother: American Writing About Domesticity, 1830-1860 (New York, 1982), 97-115.

The invalid, housebound Alice James, who welcomed the "divine cessation " (her emphasis) of death, represents in extremis the ethic of immobility recommended by the nineteenth-century American cult of true womanhood; The Diary of Alice James , ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1964), 232. The resemblance between female invalidism and the domestic ideal of woman at home is explored in Jean Strouse, Alice James (New York, 1979); and Ruth Bernard Yeazell, The Death and Letters of Alice James (Berkeley, 1981).

3. The images of hysterical postures became publicly available with the publication of Désiré M. Bourneville and Paul Reynard's Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière , 3 vols. (Paris, 1877-80). On the discourse of hysteria in America, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflicts in Nineteenth-Century America," Social Research 39 (Winter 1972): 652-78, reprinted in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 197-216. While paralysis represented only one symptom in the multivarious symptomology of hysteria that includes aphonia, depression, fatigue, nervousness, numbness, and epilepticlike seizures, it is preeminently emblematic of hysteria, I am suggesting, because of its continuity with domestic prescriptions. Hysteria in nineteenth-century America, in Smith-Rosenberg's words the disease of the Victorian bourgeois family, caricatures domesticity; in the sociological account of hysteria developed by American doctors and recently politicized by feminist investigators such as Smith-Rosenberg, the hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences of that domesticity. While current feminist reformulations of hysteria, such as the provocative rereadings of Dora collected in In Dora's Case: Freud/Hysteria/Feminism , ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York, 1985), identify hysteric gestures as a female language, I am more interested in how the visibility of hysteria historically underscores what is already visible about woman: her removal from the public sphere. In this exposition, the dynamics of motion and stasis in the photographs of hysterical seizures and poses elaborate the antinomy between movement and repose upheld by nineteenth-century domestic ideology. break

4. William James, The Principles of psychology , 2 vols. (1890; reprint ed., New York, 1950), 2:421-22.

5. Dr. D. C. Westphal coined the term in an article discussing a case of fear of open places; Journal of Mental Sciences 19 (1873): 456. An earlier version of this article appeared in Germany in Archiv für Psychiatrie 1 (1871).

6. William A. Hammond, A Treatise on Insanity (1883; reprint ed., New York, 1973), 419-22.

7. Charles Bossut, ed., Préface aux oeuvres de Blaise Pascal (Paris, 1819), xxxii; and Louis-Françisque Lelut, L'Amulette de Pascal (Paris, 1846), quoted in Hammond, A Treatise on Insanity .

8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America , ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York, 1945), 2: 146.

9. George M. Beard, American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences (New York, 1881), 96-129.

10. Hammond, A Treatise on Insanity , 422.

11. S. Weir Mitchell, Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked (1887; reprint ed., New York, 1973), 63.

12. See George Frederick Drinka's chapter on railway neuroses in The Birth of Neurosis (New York, 1984), 108-22.

13. For example, the popular domestic architect Andrew Jackson Downing declared "the true home" a "counterpoise to the great tendency toward constant changes" in American social and economic life. His house and landscape designs accordingly stressed privacy and isolation, the home as a retreat from the world; The Architecture of Country Houses (1852, reprint ed., Cambridge, 1972).

14. S. Weir Mitchell, "The Evolution of the Rest Cure," Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases (1904): 368-73. On the sexual politics of the rest cure, see Ann Douglas's pioneering essay "The Fashionable Diseases: Women's Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4, no. 1 (Summer 1973): 25-52; and Ellen L. Bassuk, "The Rest Cure: Repetition or Resolution of Victorian Women's Conflicts?" in The Female Body in Western Culture , ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 139-51.

15. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (Old Westbury, N.Y., 1973). Subsequent references to this text are cited within parentheses in the essay. Gilman recorded her nervous illness and unsuccessful experience of Mitchell's rest cure in her autobiography The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935; reprint ed., New York, 1963), 90-106. Walter Benn Michaels offers an intriguing analysis of the relations between "The Yellow Wallpaper," hysteria, and selfhood in a market economy in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley, 1987), 3-28.

16. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore the rebellion implicit in Charlotte Brontë's madwoman-in-the-attic figure, feminist historians similarly trace a history of feminism from the subversive or protofeminist features within domesticity. See, for example, Barbara Berg, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism; The Woman and the City (New York, 1980); Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978); Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn., 1981).

17. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898; reprint ed., New York, 1966); The Home: Its Work and Influence (New York, 1910).

18. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841; reprint ed., New York, 1977), 268-97. Beecher and Gilman's contributions to architectural history are described in continue

Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, 1981).

19. In nineteenth-century sentimental literature, Nina Baym writes, "Domesticity is set forth as a value scheme for ordering all of life, in competition with the ethos of money and exploitation that is perceived to prevail in American society"; Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), 27.

20. Sarah Josepha Hale, "Editor's Table," Godey's Lady's Book , February 1852, 88.

21. Ibid. For an informative analysis of biological models invoked by late nineteenth-century antifeminism, see Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1982).

20. Sarah Josepha Hale, "Editor's Table," Godey's Lady's Book , February 1852, 88.

21. Ibid. For an informative analysis of biological models invoked by late nineteenth-century antifeminism, see Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1982).

22. Hale, "Editor's Table," 88.

23. Ibid.

22. Hale, "Editor's Table," 88.

23. Ibid.

24. By a Retired Merchant, "My Wife and the Market Street Phantom," Godey's Lady's Book , September 1870, 339-42.

25. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (New York, 1982), 130-39. In The Bon Marché (Princeton, N.J., 1984), Michael Miller interestingly treats the emergence of kleptomania as an effect of the department store's display of abundant goods; in "selling consumption," the department store seemed to incite theft by offering "apéritifs du crime." Cases of kleptomania escalated with the emergence of the great store, and the store itself became the most common site of kleptomaniac thefts. I am stressing a similar complementarity between agoraphobia and the escalation of consumerism; both agoraphobia and kleptomania might be considered as diseases of sentimentalism: conditions arising from desires in a sense invented and institutionalized by market capitalism, conditions linked to woman and her sphere, the repository of selfhood within consumerist culture.

In focusing on the association of agoraphobia with consumerism, I do not mean to suggest a market determinism, but rather to trace one internalization of market capitalism that is neither simply a commodity nor a site of resistance to commodification. The agoraphobic imagination both produces and is produced by capitalism. Like any commodity, it might also serve other purposes--such as feminist resistance to domesticity.

26. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1899). On the transformation of housekeepers into consumers, see Susan Strasser's indispensable study of housework, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982), 243-62; Julie Matthaei, An Economic History of Woman in America: Women's Work, the Sexual Division of Labor, and the Development of Capitalism (New York, 1982); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983).

27. Philip Fisher brilliantly elaborates the features of this "conspicuousness" in late-nineteenth-century American culture in "The Life History of Objects: The Naturalist Novel and the City," in Hard Facts (New York, 1985), 128-78.

28. Robert Seidenberg and Karen DeCrow, Women Who Marry Houses: Panic and Protest in Agoraphobia (New York, 1983), 22-30; Alexandra Symonds, "Phobias After Marriage: Women's Declaration of Independence," Psychoanalysis and Women , ed. Jean Baker Miller (New York, 1978), 288-303.

These studies of agoraphobia depart from standard psychoanalytic accounts that, following Freud's analysis of Little Hans, view agoraphobia as a form of castration anxiety. According to Freudian analyses, agoraphobia in women also signifies an unresolved Oedipus complex--the anxiety of repressed libido manifest as "promiscuous continue

urges in the street." The traffic and publicity of streets evoke in the agoraphobic her fears of her illicit incestuous desire. Helene Deutsch notes in female agoraphobics a "dread of parturition"--a dread of being "away from home and outside in the world" that masks a dread of defloration or parturition. More recently, Julia Kristeva rereads psychoanalysis and the case of Little Hans, viewing Hans's anxiety as the surfacing of the fear underlying castration anxiety: "the frailty of the subject's signifying system." Kristeva is critiquing and redefining the meaning of castration in the Freudian formulation of the subject, identifying castration anxiety as representative of an everpresent threat to the symbolic order from the unconscious. She characterizes the unconscious as pre-Oedipal and maternal. It is thus a relation to the primacy of the mother that castration, or agoraphobia, marks.

See Sigmund Freud, "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" (1909), in The Sexual Enlightenment of Children , ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1974), 47-184; Milton Miller, "On Street Fear," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 392-411; Helene Deutsch, "The Genesis of Agoraphobia," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 51-69; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York, 1982).

In both traditional and revisionary psychoanalytic accounts, agoraphobia involves a particular association with the mother, the prototypical woman. I am concentrating on the relation between agoraphobia and a nineteenth-century ideology of womanhood. The account of agoraphobia I am developing in this essay (from the imagery of public and private space recurring through psychoanalytic as well as pre- and post-psychoanalytic representations of agoraphobia) locates agoraphobia in the social rather than psychic register; I am not exploring agoraphobia as a disease but as an organization of specific social anxieties, as the structure of domestic ideology, and thus as the structure of selfhood in a market economy. In this account, the psychoanalytic exegesis of agoraphobia, staking out a psychic territory, would be another instance of how the agoraphobic imagination works--a denial of the agora in agoraphobia to advance a radically privatized model of self.

29. Seidenberg and DeCrow, Women Who Marry Houses , 47-48.

30. The self-sustaining female culture of Gilman's 1915 Herland is also the goal of earlier feminist elaborations of domesticity such as Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's vision of "the Christian Neighborhood" in their popular manual The American Woman's Home (New York, 1869).

31. Elizabeth Hardwick, "Bartleby in Manhattan," in Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (New York, 1984), 217-31. Another interesting aspect of "Bartleby" as an urban tale is its contemporaneous appearance with articles describing the emerging phenomenon of the urban poor and homeless. I am indebted to Hans Bergmann for this point.

32. For a different interpretation of Bartleby's feminine position in the tale, see Patricia Barber, "What If Bartleby Were a Woman?" in The Authority of Experience , ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee Edwards (Amherst, Mass., 1977), 212-23. The possibilities of a "what if" school of literary criticism are limitless; I am suggesting that nineteenth-century culture defines the scrivener's mode as feminine. Bartleby's femininity, insistently encamped in the public sphere, draws attention to the public performance of the domestic. That Bartleby is a man makes his discontent with Wall Street an especially strong critique of both the market and domesticity. That is, though free to be in the world, Bartleby prefers not to. "The Yellow Wallpaper" suggests that if Bartleby were a woman, she would prefer to be in her own world, where she would circulate. Whereas Bartleby imagines pure domesticity, the woman in Gilman's story welcomes continue

its ultimate transformation. This is the difference between Bartleby's borrowed femininity and a nineteenth-century woman's given femininity.

33. Another reading of the lawyer-copyist relationship particularly suggestive to my own is Michael Rogin's interpretation of the tale as an exposé of false familial claims of employers of wage labor. In Rogin's reading, Bartleby attacks the lawyer's attempt to establish worker-employer bonds; Bartleby resists the boundaries of a sham familial relationship. In my reading, Bartleby redresses the falsity of the family not because he is "boundaryless and insatiable" as Rogin characterizes him but because the family, like the economy, is voracious and irrespective of boundaries. Bartleby insists upon the set boundaries and self-sufficiency associated with an ideal domestic economy. See Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York, 1983), 192-201.

34. Ira L. Mintz, "Psychoanalytic Therapy of Severe Anorexia: The Case of Jeanette," in Fear of Being Fat: The Treatment of Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia , ed. C. Philip Wilson et al. (New York, 1983), 217-44.

35. Hilde Bruch, The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 75-77.

36. The anorexic case against the coda of conventional femininity is persuasively presented by Kim Chernin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (New York, 1981); Susie Orbach, Fat Is a Feminist Issue (New York, 1978), and Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age (New York, 1986); Seidenberg and DeCrow, Women Who Marry Houses , 88-97; John Sours, Starving to Death in a Sea of Objects (New York, 1980).

37. Hilde Bruch, Eating Disorders (New York, 1973), 211-25. Before William Gull and Charles Lasegue introduced the nomenclature anorexia nervosa to eating disorders in 1873, Gull had recorded cases of female refusals to eat in 1868. Reports of similar cases date back to medieval times; Rudolph Bell and Caroline Bynum have identified anorexic behavior in the fasting of saints. See Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, 1985); Caroline Walker Bynum, "Fast, Feast, and Flesh," Representations 11 (Summer 1985): 1-25; and Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987).

38. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York, 1979), 5-41, 60-62.

39. Sandra Gilbert treats the literary representation of the feminist politics of anorexia in "Hunger Pains," University Publishing , Fall 1979. Two more recent feminist analyses link anorexia to the problematics of female identity following from mother-daughter relations. In Starving Women: A Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa (Dallas, 1983), analyst Angelyn Spignesi characterizes the anorexic as "our twentieth-century carrier" of the repressed female psyche. In denying the "principles of matter . . . she enacts in her disease the interpenetration of the imaginal and physical realms." This lack of demarcation between body and psyche, self and others, returns her to "the realm of the mother." Similarly focusing on the relation of the anorexic to the maternal, Kim Chernin reads anorexia as matricidal act, "a bitter warfare against the mother," enacted on the daughter's body; The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, and Identity (New York, 1985). Taking the anorexic as protagonist in a history of female experience, or placing anorexia in a maternal tradition, in a chronology of the constitution of identity and difference, suggests a fundamental relationship between maternity, anxiety, and the definition of bodily borders. My purpose here is not to dispute or advance the claim of archetypal female anxiety but rather to demonstrate how a nineteenth-century cult of motherhood and domestic mythology shaped particular discourses of border anx- soft

iety: the nullifications of Bartleby, the negotiations of agoraphobia, and the negations of anorexia.

40. Ann Douglas has aptly termed this sentimental cult of death "the domestication of death" and characterized it as a gesture by which women claimed a real estate society denied them; The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977), 240-72.

41. Job 3.11-16. break

It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the help I received from friends and colleagues at various stages of writing this article. Michael Fried first alerted me to the existence of the monotypes. Steve Nichols invited me to present my Degas work at an MLA divisional session. As mentioned below, Susan Suleiman's acute reading made clear the necessity for further interpretative work. Bill Warner wrote a careful, sophisticated, and challenging critique of an early draft, which helped me sharpen and extend my argument. Eunice Lipton and Carol Armstrong reassured me that specialists in the field did not find my readings aberrant. (Unfortunately, Eunice Lipton's book, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life [Berkeley, 1986], was published too late for me to be able to take its findings into account.) Susanna Barrows offered useful suggestions from the historian's point of view. Audiences at Louisiana State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Boston University, and New York University forced me to confront the bewildering diversity of viewers' responses to the monotypes.

1. Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin in Oeuvres , ed. J. Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1960), 2:1173. All translations in this essay are my own.

2. Ibid.

1. Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin in Oeuvres , ed. J. Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1960), 2:1173. All translations in this essay are my own.

2. Ibid.

3. Paul Valéry, "Philosophie de la danse," in ibid., 1:1403.

4. Stéphane Mallarmé, "Crayonné au théâtre," in Oeuvres complètes , ed. H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, 1945), 304.

5. Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin , 1173.

6. This metamorphosis follows the story told by Ovid of the beautiful Gorgon, raped in the temple of Athena by Poseidon, god of the sea, and then punished by Athena by having her lovely hair turned into snakes.

7. Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin , 1202. Theodore Reff echoes Valéry's remark in "Edgar Degas and Dance": "Like the laundress pressing down hard on her iron or yawning, overheated and exhausted, like the street-walker waiting on the café terrace in a continue

torpor, the dancer in Degas' work is often not an embodiment of feminine charm but of the lower-class woman's struggle for survival, burdened and deformed by her labors"; Arts Magazine 53, no. 3 (November 1978): 147.

8. "Marchandes à la toilette" and "danseuses" are already associated with prostitution by Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet in his pioneering study De la Prostitution dans la ville de Paris , 2 vols. (Paris, 1836), 1:183-84. Subsequent studies mention "blanchisseuses," "repasseuses," and "modistes" as likely to be sexually available. See for example C.J. Lecour, La Prostitution à Paris et à Londres 1789-1877, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1882), 197-200; or Octave Uzanne, Parisiennes de ce temps (Paris, 1910), 421-22. Both are cited by Carol Armstrong in her brilliant doctoral dissertation, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Princeton University, 1986), 74-75. Susan Hollis Clayson attributes the appeal of the "modiste" as a motif for the impressionist painters (Renoir, Degas, Manet) to her combining an ambiguous sexuality (was she or was she not for sale like the hats in her store?) with a "commodified" social condition. See her stimulating dissertation, Representations of Prostitution in Early Third-Republic France (University of California, Los Angeles, 1984). The social and cultural conditions for the prevalent association of laundresses with a debased working-class sexuality are read from an illuminating ideological perspective by Eunice Lipton, "The Laundress in Late Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Imagery, Ideology, and Edgar Degas," Art History 3, no. 3 (September 1980): 295-313. For an analysis of the role of the caféconcert as a prostitutional arena, see T.J. Clark's superb chapter "A Bar at the FoliesBergère," in The Painting of Modern Life (New York, 1985).

9. As Carol Armstrong points out, Degas's Famille Cardinal monotype series, made to illustrate Ludovic Halévy's stories about two sisters, both dancers at the Paris Opéra, is his most explicit rendering of the social and sexual meanings of the coulisses; Odd Man Out , 84-99. For reproductions of these images, see Jean Adhémar and Françoise Cachin, Degas: The Complete Etchings, Lithographs, and Monotypes (London, 1974), monotypes nos. 56-82. For a discussion of the Jockey Club's special role in these venal transactions, see Joseph-Antoine Roy, Histoire du Jockey Club de Paris (Paris, 1958).

10. The monotype technique was apparently invented by the Genovese artist Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1600-1665). William Blake made a series of twelve beautiful monotypes in 1795 on themes from the Bible, Milton, and Shakespeare. For other artists who have used the medium, see the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum exhibition, The Painterly Print: Monotypes from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (New York, 1980).

11. Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out , 215-16, has persuasively shown that Degas's use of the monotype base is remarkably original in that it actually reverses the traditional role of chiaroscuro. Instead of reinforcing the bond between surface and ground, the monotype foundation, she argues, produces a kind of negative effect, as of an emptiness that tends toward the obliteration of surface gesture and detail.

12. The sketches illustrating La Fille Elisa have been published by Theodore Reff in The Notebooks of Edgar Degas , 2 vols. (New York, 1985), notebook 28, nos. 26-27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 45, and 65 (described by Reff in 1:130).

13. Adhémar and Cachin, Degas , 75. Among Degas's friends, Cachin mentions the Halévys and Rouarts. Artists she considers likely to have seen the monotypes (no evidence is cited) are Paul-Albert Bartholomé and Camille Pissaro and, perhaps, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin. A number of monotypes in the dark-field manner of scenes not explicitly related to brothel life carry scratched-in dedications to friends of Degas; see ibid., monotypes nos. 160, 161, 163, and 165. break

14. See Eugenia Janis, "The Role of the Monotype in the Working Method of Degas," Burlington Magazine 109 (January-February 1967). Janis drew up the first comprehensive catalogue of the monotypes for an exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum in 1968; Degas Monotypes: Essay, Catalogue, and Checklist (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).

15. Adhémar and Cachin, Degas , 80.

16. Typically, Valéry refers to Huysmans's writing on Degas precisely at the moment when he wants to buttress his assertion of the artist's misogyny; Degas Danse Dessin , 1204.

17. J.-K. Huysmans, Certains (Paris, 1975), 294.

18. Ibid., 296.

17. J.-K. Huysmans, Certains (Paris, 1975), 294.

18. Ibid., 296.

19. Auguste Renoir also found something peculiarly chaste about Degas's bordello images. Ambroise Vollard quotes him as saying: "When one paints a bordello, it's often pornographic, but always hopelessly sad. Only Degas could give an air of rejoicing to such a subject along with the look of an Egyptian bas-relief. This quasi-religious and chaste aspect of his work, which makes it so great, becomes still more pronounced when he treats the prostitute"; Degas (Paris, 1924), 59-60.

20. Here Huysmans, who did not publish his comments on Degas's pastels until 1889, is echoing the praise Octave Mirbeau proclaimed three years earlier for Degas's rigorously unsentimental and antiromantic depictions of women. They do not "inspire passion or sensual desire," Mirbeau writes. "On the contrary, there is a ferocity that speaks clearly of a disdain for women and a horror of love. It is the same bitter philosophy, the same arrogant vision, that one finds in his studies of dancers"; La France , 21 May 1886; quoted in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886 , The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco catalogue (San Francisco, 1986), 453. Huysmans, it seems, codified in its most extreme terms an interpretation of Degas's attitude toward women that had already gained a certain acceptance among professional critics. See Martha Ward's excellent review of the criticism of the 1886 exhibition, as focused on the question of Degas's misogyny, "The Rhetoric of Independence and Innovation," in The New Painting , 430-34.

21. Huysmans, Certains , 297.

22. Ibid.

21. Huysmans, Certains , 297.

22. Ibid.

23. Freud remarks of the scopophilic instinct that it begins as a narcissistic formation. Its first stage, which is never left behind, is autoerotic: "It has indeed an object, but that object is part of the subject's own body"; "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works , ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1964), 14:130.

24. Edward Snow, A Study of Vermeer (Berkeley, 1979), 28.

25. Carol Armstrong, "Edgar Degas and the Representation of the Female Body," in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives , ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 239.

26. Eunice Lipton, "Degas' Bathers: The Case for Realism," Arts Magazine 54 (May 1980): 96.

27. Armstrong, "Degas and the Female Body," 238.

28. A number of the reviewers of Degas's contribution to the 1886 exhibition specifically define the observer's perspective as that of a voyeur: Degas, writes Gustave Geffroy, "wanted to paint a woman who did not know she was being watched , as one would see her hidden by a curtain or through a keyhole"; La Justice , 26 May 1886; quoted in The New Painting , 453. Geffroy notes the obliqueness of Degas's points of view but apparently considers them to be realistically determined by the voyeur's adoption of concealed places for clandestine observation. As Martha Ward, "Rhetoric of Independence and continue

Innovation," 432, remarks, the voyeuristic perspective was felt by the critics to reveal woman as instinctual animal. Only one critic, Octave Maus, in L'Art moderne (Brussels), 27 June 1886, was able to see anything positive about the exposure of woman's unself-conscious physicality. He imagined the bathers as domestic cats cleaning themselves, whereas the majority of the critics chose to compare their gestures to the wild movements of monkeys or frogs; see The New Painting , 432-33.

29. Armstrong, "Degas and the Female Body," 239.

30. Snow, Study of Vermeer , 30. In a letter of 1884, Degas describes what seems to be precisely such an ontologically negative self-assessment: "If you were a bachelor and fifty years old (which I became a month ago), you would have moments such as I have when you would close yourself up like a door, and not only to friends. You suppress everything around you, and, once alone, you annihilate yourself, you kill yourself finally, out of disgust"; Lettres de Degas , ed. Marcel Guérin (Paris, 1931), 64-65.

31. In La Revue de demain for May-June 1886, Henri Fèvre remarked: "Degas lays bare for us the streetwalker's modern, swollen, pasty flesh. In the ambiguous bedrooms of registered houses, where certain ladies fill the social and utilitarian role of great collectors of love, fat women wash themselves, brush themselves, soak themselves, and wipe themselves off in basins as big as troughs"; quoted in The New Painting , 453. Another reviewer, J.M. Michel, associated Degas's bathing women with Zola's notorious heroine Nana: "Nana bathing, washing herself with a sponge, taking care of herself, arming herself for battle--that is the Impressionist ideal," he remarks sarcastically; La Petite Gazette , 18 May 1886; quoted in The New Painting , 453. In her article on the bathers, Eunice Lipton argues that the only women they could conceivably represent are prostitutes because depiction of middle-class women bathing would have constituted an ideologically unthinkable breach of decorum. Moreover, the postures of the women washing themselves and the decor of their surroundings are reproduced quite clearly in a number of the brothel scenes, whose only difference from the bather pastels is that in the former a client is looking on. Although this resemblance is indubitable, it is strange that more reviewers did not see the bathing women as whores and that Huysmans, atuned as he was to this subject matter, did not spell out the identification. One can only conclude that the signs of the figures' social identity must have been ambiguous enough that they failed to add up into a single readily acceptable meaning.

32. The derivation from personal experience is put into question not only by Degas's notorious personal shyness and sexual reticence but also by his having represented prostitutes naked in the brothel salon when they usually appeared partially clothed in shifts and corsets. This is how they are dressed, as they wait for clients and gossip among themselves, in the brothel scenes painted by Constantin Guys, some of which were owned by Degas's friend Manet. Susan Hollis Clayson argues that the props of Degas's brothel scenes, upholstered furniture, large mirrors, and fancy chandeliers are sufficient to identify the category of brothel portrayed as a deluxe grande tolérance , where specialized erotic services were available to a wealthy clientele of connoisseurs; "Avant-Garde and Pompier Images of Nineteenth-Century Prostitution: The Matter of Modernism, Modernity, and Social Ideology," in Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers , ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax, N.S., 1983), 56-58. The prostitutes' nudity may have been a feature of such luxurious establishments. This argument, though plausible, is not totally convincing because the props of Degas's scenes are so repetitive that they seem to belong to a typically Degasian repertoire of motifs, which could well have a literary origin, rather than to any specifically realistic inten- soft

tion. First among the literary descriptions of prostitutes that Degas would surely have known and admired are those of Baudelaire in his essay on Guys, "Le Peintre de la vie moderne." Baudelaire's marvelous evocation of life in a bordello could almost serve as a description of Degas's images:

Without trying, sometimes they assume poses so daring and noble that the most fastidious sculptor would be enchanted, were the sculptors of today sufficiently bold and imaginative to seize on nobility wherever it was to be found, even in the mire. At other times, they show themselves prostrated in attitudes of desperate boredom, in the apathetic poses of public house patrons, masculine in their cynicism, smoking cigarettes to kill time, with the resignation of oriental fatalism. They sprawl on sofas, with their skirts rounded in back, spread out like a double fan in front, or they balance on the edge of stools and chairs. They are heavy, dull, stupid, extravagant, with eyes varnished by alcohol and foreheads swollen by stubbornness.

Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1961), 1189.

33. All these etchings are included in Georges Bloch, Pablo Picasso , vol. 4: Catalogue of the Printed Graphic Work, 1970-1972 (Berne, 1979).

34. The degree to which this project is free to treat the real as material for private fantasy is strikingly illustrated by two etchings in the Degas series (Bloch, nos. 1968 and 1969), where suddenly the whorehouse appears as an ideal Hellas and a prostitute becomes an Arcadian deity dallying with a faun.

35. T.J. Clark, Painting of Modern Life , 111. Clark's brilliant and challenging chapter on Olympia demonstrates how Manet's painting subverts both the conventions of the nude and the social category of the courtisane and inscribes the signs of class, albeit ambivalently, in the prostitute's nakedness.

36. Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin , 1173.

37. Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes , 304.

38. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , ed. Philip Reiff (New York, 1963), 216.

39. Here my argument joins up with that developed by R. Howard Bloch in his stimulating contribution to this issue of Representations . Bloch shows that the early misogynistic tradition of biblical exegesis interpreted woman as "a tropological turning away" from the proper and literal, which is synonymous with male being.

40. For an excellent discussion of the relation of Degas's imagery to the graphic language of caricature, see Carol Armstrong's chapter "Reading the Oeuvre of Degas" in Odd Man Out .

41. Beatrice Farwell has written interestingly about the relation of "realist" treatments of the nude to the popular tradition of erotic imagery. See "Courbet's 'Baigneuses' and the Rhetorical Feminine Image," in Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970 , ed. Thomas Hart and Linda Nochlin (New York, 1972), 65-79.

42. The influence of pornographic photographs on the iconography of Manet's Olympia has been studied by Gerald Needham, "Manet, 'Olympia,' and Pornographic Photography," in ibid., 81-89. The stereoscopic photograph that Needham reproduces of a bare-breasted woman ironing shows a motif used by Degas treated from a purely voyeuristic point of view.

43. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 177.

44. Many of the monotype images, especially those done in the dark-field manner, convey an almost tactile sense of this marking, insofar as Degas often modeled the women's bodies by pressing on the ink with his fingers, leaving visible imprints.

45. I first encountered this interpretation of the monotypes in Clayson, Representations of continue

Prostitution in Early Third-Republic France , to which I am greatly indebted. Although Clayson remarks that "it is a hopeless task to gauge the misogynistic content of an image" (105), her illuminating analysis of the monotypes constitutes an implicit defense of Degas's representational practice. "The point of [the prostitutes'] particular, tenacious physicality," she writes, "seems to embed them in a world of the sheerly material, where the subjective 'self' has been suspended, cancelled, or long since overridden. Degas' prostitutes lead an existence in which the 'self' and the body have become the same, and the women's sexuality has been lost entirely to the world of exchange" (115).

46. My thinking about pornography is indebted to two articles, John Ellis, "Photography/Pornography/Art/Pornography," Screen 21, no. 1 (Spring 1980); and Graham Knight and Berkeley Kaite, "Fetishism and Pornography: Some Thoughts on the Pornographic Eye/I," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 9, no. 3 (Fall 1985). I would like to thank Constance Penley for recommending these articles.

47. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London, 1973), 59. In Das Passagen-Werk , 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1982), 1:637, Benjamin declares pithily that "love of prostitutes is the apotheosis of intuitive feeling for the commodity [ Einfühlung in die Ware ]."

48. Berthe Morisot, Correspondance , ed. Denis Rouart (Paris, 1950), 23.

49. Ibid., 31.

48. Berthe Morisot, Correspondance , ed. Denis Rouart (Paris, 1950), 23.

49. Ibid., 31.

50. Quoted in Adhémar and Cachin, Degas , 86.

51. Norma Broude, "Degas' 'Misogyny,'" The Art Bulletin 59 (March 1977): 95-107. Broude combines a biographical approach with thematic and visual analysis to conclude that Degas valued intellectual independence, creative accomplishments, and individual character in women. Broude's argument, based on her readings of Degas's portraits of women of his own social class, has trouble accounting for his pictures of lower-class women, whom she finds to be "reduced to types" (101).

52. Carol Armstrong, "The Myth of Degas," chap. 5 of Odd Man Out , esp. 352-58. The components of the myth that I enumerate below are those identified by Armstrong.

53. At the outset of a monumental four-volume monograph on Degas, P. A. Lemoisne suggests that the peculiarity of his subject makes the endeavor he is undertaking almost impossible. Since Degas's works are "so full of reticences, so willfully effaced," he remarks, to understand the artist's evolution one should get to know the man.

But if there was ever a man difficult to know, walled up as he was in an impregnable discretion, a kind of timidity that made him caustic and often severe when he felt menaced, that man was Degas. . . . When you try to get closer to the man, you soon find yourself turning in a vicious circle, Degas having been truly himself, audacious despite an insurmountable modesty, ardent despite a fierce reserve, decisive despite eternal scruples, brilliant despite an innate sobriety of expression, only in his works.

Degas et son oeuvre , 4 vols. (Paris, 1942), 1:1-2. One aspect of the Degas myth that biographers have built up from the meagerest of evidence into an indisputable cause of the artist's misogyny is his impotence. For example, Roy McMullen declares that "there can be little doubt that [the] reason for [Degas's] celibacy . . . was impotence--either psychic or physical impotence, and perhaps, as is often the case, a combination of the two"; Degas: His Life, Times, and Work (London, 1985), 268. In an article entitled "Degas as a Human Being," the thesis of which is that the artist barely qualified, Benedict Nicholson speculates that "there may be something in the theory that he was a repressed homosexual"; Burlington Magazine 105 (June 1963): 239. break

54. See Roy McMullen, Degas , 7-8. In the 1830s the family paid to have a bogus genealogy drawn up to confirm their noble heritage and their claim to the aristocratic name de Gas . According to his niece's report, Degas said that he changed the spelling of the family name because "the nobility is not in the habit of working. Since I want to work, I will assume the name of a commoner"; Jeanne Fevre, Mon oncle Degas (Geneva, 1949), 23.

55. Paul Gauguin, Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals (Bloomington, Ind., 1958), 131.

56. Nothing this and other conflicts in Degas's class position, Eunice Lipton concludes that it was because "Degas had little at stake in the prejudices of a particular social group" and was located "outside conventional social and emotional structures" that he was able to develop "a unique and subversive vision of society"; "The Laundress in French Culture," 310. Although the implied causality here is somewhat reductive, Lipton's analysis is helpful insofar as it locates Degas on the margins of the dominant ideology. According to her interpretation, Degas is aware of his implication in the ideological structures of patriarchy, especially in its voyeuristic debasement of women, but is determined to distance himself from those structures so as to frame their operation in art.

57. In the brilliant conclusion to her thesis, Carol Armstrong discusses Degas's photographic self-portraits as exercises in viewing a self that cannot be represented as a subject seeing and discusses the portrait of Mallarmé and Renoir, in which Degas is an effaced presence reflected and negated in a play of mirror images. She reads these photographs as emblematic of Degas's life-long preoccupation with "the act of vision as a fact of self-negation"; Odd Man Out , 411.

58. The possibility of such a reading was suggested in Susan Suleiman's discussion of an earlier version of this paper presented at the third annual Conference on Twentieth-Century Literature in French at Baton Rouge. I am grateful to Professor Suleiman for her perceptive and stimulating critique, to which I hope the present version of my paper is at least a partially adequate response.

59. Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre , 1:119. break

I owe a special debt of gratitude to James Cunniff and Lynn Hunt for criticism and encouragement. Particular thanks to James (not Lynn) for sitting with me through not a few of these movies.

1. Films referred to in this essay are: Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), Aliens (James Cameron, continue

1986), All of Me (Carl Reiner, 1984), An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981), The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, 1979), Behind the Green Door (Mitchell Brothers, 1972), The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Blood Feast (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1963), Blow-Out (Brian De Palma, 1981), Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984), Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972), Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980), Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980), Every Woman Has a Fantasy (Edwin Brown, 1984), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), The Eyes of Laura Mars (Irvin Kershner, 1978), The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980), Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972), Friday the Thirteenth (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), Friday the Thirteenth, Part II (Steve Miner, 1981), Friday the Thirteenth, Part III (Steve Miner, 1982), Friday the Thirteenth: The Final Chapter (Joseph Zito, 1984), Friday the Thirteenth, Part V: A New Beginning (Danny Steinmann, 1985), Friday the Thirteenth, Part VI: Jason Lives (Tom McLoughlin, 1986), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), Halloween 2 (Rick Rosenthal, 1981), Halloween III: The Witch (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1983), He Knows You're Alone (Armand Mastroianni, 1981), Hell Night (Tom DeSimone, 1981), I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1981), It's Alive (Larry Cohen, 1974), Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), King Kong (Merian B. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933), Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972), Macabre (William Castle, 1958), Motel Hell (Kevin Connor, 1980), Mother's Day (Charles Kauffman, 1980), Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981), A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1985), A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985), Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922), The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976), Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1973), Play Misty for Me (Clint Eastwood, 1971), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Psycho II (Richard Franklin, 1983), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Jones; screenplay by Rita Mae Brown, 1983), Splatter University (Richard W. Haris, 1985), Strait-Jacket (William Castle, 1964), Taboo (Kirdy Stevens, 1980), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre II (Tobe Hooper, 1986), Totsiee (Sydney Pollack, 1982), Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1959), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), Wolfen (Michael Wadleigh, 1981).

2. Morris Dickstein, "The Aesthetics of Fright," American Film 5 (1980): 34.

3. "Will Rogers said he never met a man he didn't like, and I can truly say the same about the cinema," Harvey R. Greenberg says in his paean to horror, The Movies on Your Mind (New York, 1975); yet his claim does not extend to the "plethora of execrable imitations [of Psycho ] that debased cinema" (137).

4. William Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower (New York, 1985).

5. "Job Bob Briggs" was evidently invented as a solution to the Dallas Times Herald 's problem of "how to cover trashy movies." See Calvin Trillin's "American Chronicles: The Life and Times of Joe Bob Briggs, So Far," The New Yorker , 22 December 1986, 73-88.

6. Lew Brighton, "Saturn in Retrograde; or, The Texas Jump Cut," The Film Journal 7 (1975): 25.

7. Stephen Koch, "Fashions in Pornography: Murder as Cinematic Chic," Harper's , November 1976, 108-9.

8. Robin Wood, "Return of the Repressed," Film Comment 14 (1978): 30.

9. Robin Wood, "Beauty Bests the Beast," American Film 8 (1983): 63.

10. Dickstein, "The Aesthetics of Fright," 34.

11. "The 'Uncanny,'" in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund continue

Freud , ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 17:244. Originally published in Imago 5/6 (1919): 317.

12. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1964), 278.

13. William Castle, Step Right Up! I'm Gonna Scare the Pants Off America (New York, 1978).

14. Given the number of permutations, it is no surprise that new strategies keep emerging. Only a few years ago, a director hit upon the idea of rendering the point of view of an infant through use of an I-camera at floor level with a double-vision image (Larry Cohen, It's Alive ). Nearly a century after technology provided a radically different means of telling a story, filmmakers are still uncovering the possibilities.

15. Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, in reference to Friday the Thirteenth I , in Video Movie Guide: 1987 (New York, 1987), 690. Robin Wood, "Beauty Bests the Beast," 65, notes that the first-person camera also serves to preserve the secret of the killer's identity for a final surprise--crucial to many films--but adds: "The sense of indeterminate, unidentified, possibly supernatural or superhuman Menace feeds the spectator's fantasy of power, facilitating a direct spectator-camera identification by keeping the intermediary character, while signified to be present, as vaguely defined as possible." Brian De Palma's Blow-Out opens with a parody of just this cinematic habit.

16. On this widely discussed topic, see especially Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York, 1983), 194-236; and Lesley Stern, "Point of View: The Blind Spot," Film Reader 4 (1979): 214-36.

17. In this essay I have used the term identification vaguely and generally to refer both to primary and secondary processes. See especially Mary Ann Doane, "Misrecognition and Identity," Cine-Tracts 11 (1980): 25-32; also Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier," in his The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington, Ind., n.d.).

18. Mark Nash, " Vampyr and the Fantastic," Screen 17 (1976): 37. Nash coins the term cinefantastic to refer to this play.

19. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London, 1981), 31.

20. As Dickstein puts it, "The 'art' of horror film is a ludicrous notion since horror, even at its most commercially exploitative, is genuinely subcultural like the wild child that can never be tamed, or the half-human mutant who appeals to our secret fascination with deformity and the grotesque"; "The Aesthetics of Fright," 34.

21. James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York, 1985), 84.

22. Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York, 1983).

23. Wood, "Return of the Repressed," 26. In Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street , it is the nightmare itself, shared by the teenagers who live on Elm Street, that is fatal. One by one they are killed by the murderer of their collective dream. The one girl who survives does so by first refusing to sleep and then, at the same time that she acknowledges her parents' inadequacies, by conquering the feelings that prompt the deadly nightmare. See, as an example of the topic dream/horror, Dennis L. White, "The Poetics of Horror," Cinema Journal 10 (1971): 1-18.

24. It is not just the profit margin that fuels the production of low horror. It is also the fact that, thanks to the irrelevance of production values, the initial stake is within the means of a small group of investors. Low horror is thus for all practical purposes the only way an independent filmmaker can break into the market. Add to this the filmmaker's unusual degree of control over the product and one begins to understand why it is that low horror engages the talents of such people as Stephanie Rothman, continue

George Romero, Wes Craven, and Larry Cohen. As V. Vale and Andrea Juno put it, "The value of low-budget films is: they can be transcendent expressions of a single person's individual vision and quirky originality. When a corporation decides to invest $20 million in a film, a chain of command regulates each step, and no person is allowed free rein. Meetings with lawyers, accountants, and corporate boards are what films in Hollywood are all about"; Incredibly Strange Films , ed. V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Re/Search 10 (San Francisco, 1986), 5.

25. Despite the film industry's interest in demographics, there is no in-depth study of the composition of the slasher-film audience. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures , 69-72 and 306-7, relies on personal observation and the reports of critics, which are remarkably consistent over time and from place to place; my own observations concur. The audience is mostly between the ages of twelve and twenty, disproportionately male. Some critics remark on a contingent of older men who sit separately and who, in Twitchell's view, are there "not to be frightened, but to participate" specifically in the "stab-at-female" episodes. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel corroborate the observation.

26. The development of the human-sausage theme is typical of the back-and-forth borrowing in low horror. Texas Chain Saw Massacre I hints at it; Motel Hell turns it into an industry ("Farmer Vincent's Smoked Meats: This is It!" proclaims a local billboard); and Texas Chain Saw Massacre II expands it to a statewide chili-tasting contest.

27. "The release of sexuality in the horror film is always presented as perverted, monstrous, and excessive, both the perversion and the excess being the logical outcome of repressing. Nowhere is this carried further than in Texas [ Chain Saw ] Massacre [ I ]. Here sexuality is totally perverted from its functions, into sadism, violence, and cannibalism. It is striking that there is no suggestion anywhere that Sally is the object of an overtly sexual threat; she is to be tormented, killed, dismembered, and eaten, but not raped"; Wood, "Return of the Repressed," 31.

28. With some exceptions: for example, the spear gun used in the sixth killing in Friday the Thirteenth III .

29. Stuart Kaminsky, American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory of Popular Film (New York, 1977), 107.

30. The shower sequence in Psycho is probably the most echoed scene in all of film history. The bathtub scene in I Spit on Your Grave (not properly speaking a slasher, though with a number of generic affinities) is to my knowledge the only effort to reverse the terms.

31. Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower , 35. It may be argued that Blood Feast (1963), in which a lame Egyptian caterer slaughters one woman after another for their bodily parts (all in the service of Ishtar), provides the serial-murder model.

32. This theme too is spoofed in Motel Hell . Farmer Vincent's victims are two hookers, a kinky couple looking for same (he puts them in room #1 of the motel), and Terry and her boyfriend Bo, out for kicks on a motorcycle. When Terry (allowed to survive) wonders aloud why someone would try to kill them, Farmer Vincent answers her by asking pointedly whether they were married. "No," she says, in a tone of resignation, as if accepting the logic.

33. Further: "Scenes in which women whimper helplessly and do nothing to defend themselves are ridiculed by the audience, who find it hard to believe that anyone--male or female--would simply allow someone to kill them with nary a protest," Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower , 55-56.

34. Splatter University (1984) is a disturbing exception. Professor Julie Parker is clearly established as a Final Girl from the outset and then killed just after the beginning of continue

what we are led to believe will be the Final Girl sequence (she kicks the killer, a psychotic priest-scholar who keeps his knife sheathed in a crucifix, in the groin, runs for the elevator--and then is trapped and stabbed to death). So meticulously are the conventions observed, and then so grossly violated, that we can only assume sadistic intentionality. This is a film in which (with the exception of an asylum orderly in the preface) only females are killed, and in highly sexual circumstances.

35. This film is complicated by the fact that the action is envisaged as a living dream. Nancy finally kills the killer by killing her part of the collective nightmare. See note 23 above.

36. Spoto, Dark Side of Genius , 454. See also William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 246-341.

37. "The Philosophy of Composition," in Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe , ed. G. R. Thompson (New York, 1970), 55.

38. As quoted in Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower , 56.

39. As quoted in ibid., 41.

38. As quoted in Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower , 56.

39. As quoted in ibid., 41.

40. Spoto, Dark Side of Genius , 483.

41. Silvia Bovenschen, "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?" New German Critique 10 (1977): 114. See also Doane, "Misrecognition and Identity."

42. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London, 1983), 15. The discussion of the gendered "gaze" is lively and extensive. See above all Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (1975): 6-18; reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings , ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 3rd ed. (New York, 1985), 803-16; also Christine Gledhill, "Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism," Quarterly Review of Film Studies (1978); reprinted in Mast and Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism , 817-45.

43. Wood, "Beauty Bests the Beast," 64.

44. The locus classicus in this connection is the view-from-the-coffin shot in Carl Dreyer's Vampyr , in which the I-camera sees through the eyes of a dead man. See Nash, " Vampyr and the Fantastic," esp. 32-33. The 1987 remake of The Little Shop of Horrors (itself originally a low-budget horror film, made the same year as Psycho in two days) lets us see the dentist from the proximate point of view of the patient's tonsils.

45. Two points in this paragraph deserve emending. One is the suggestion that rape is common in these films; it is in fact virtually absent, by definition (see note 27 above). The other is the characterization of the Final Girl as "sexy." She may be attractive (though typically less so than her friends), but she is with few exceptions sexually inactive. For a detailed analysis of point-of-view manipulation, together with a psychoanalytic interpretation of the dynamic, see Steve Neale, " Halloween : Suspense, Aggression, and the Look," Framework 14 (1981).

46. Wood is struck by the willingness of the teenaged audience to identify "against" itself, with the forces of the enemy of youth. "Watching it [ Texas Chain Saw Massacre I ] recently with a large, half-stoned youth audience, who cheered and applauded every one of Leatherface's outrages against their representatives on the screen, was a terrifying experience"; "Return of the Repressed," 32.

47. "I really appreciate the way audiences respond," Gail Anne Hurd, producer of Aliens , is reported to have said. "They buy it. We don't get people, even rednecks, leaving the theater saying, 'That was stupid. No woman would do that.' You don't have to be a liberal ERA supporter to root for Ripley"; as reported in the San Francisco Examiner Datebook , 10 August 1986, 19. Time , 28 July 1986, 56, suggests that Ripley's maternal continue

impulses (she squares off against the worst aliens of all in her quest to save a little girl) give the audience "a much stronger rooting interest in Ripley, and that gives the picture resonances unusual in a popcorn epic."

48. Further: "When she [the mother] referred to the infant as a male, I just went along with it. Wonder how that child turned out--male, female, or something else entirely?" The birth is understood to be parthenogenetic, and the bisexual child, literally equipped with both sets of genitals, is figured as the reborn Christ.

49. Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks," in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism , ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, American Film Institute monograph series (Los Angeles, 1984), 90. Williams's emphasis on the phallic leads her to dismiss slasher killers as a "non-specific male killing force" and hence a degeneration in the tradition. "In these films the recognition and affinity between woman and monster of classic horror film gives way to pure identity: she is the monster, her mutilated body is the only visible horror" (96). This analysis does not do justice to the obvious bisexuality of slasher killers, nor does it take into account the new strength of the female victim. The slasher film may not, in balance, be more subversive than traditional horror, but it is certainly not less so.

50. Freud, "The 'Uncanny,'" 245. See also Neale, " Halloween ," esp. 28-29.

51. "The woman's exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimization. The place of her specularization is transformed into the locus of a process of seeing designed to unveil an aggression against itself"; Mary Ann Doane, "The 'Woman's Film,'" in Re-Vision , 72.

52. John Carpenter interviewed by Todd McCarthy, "Trick and Treat," Film Comment 16 (1980): 23-24.

53. This is not so in traditional film, nor in heterosexual pornography, in any case. Gay male pornography, however, films some male bodies in much the same way that heterosexual pornography films female bodies.

54. Compare the visual treatment of the (male) rape in Deliverance with the (female) rapes in Hitchcock's Frenzy or Wes Craven's Last House on the Left or Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring . The latter films study the victims' faces at length and in closeup during the act; the first looks at the act intermittently and in long shot, focusing less on the actual victim than on the victim's friend who must look on.

55. Marcus, The Other Victorians , 260-61. Marcus distinguishes two phases in the development of flagellation literature: one in which the figure being beaten is a boy, and the second, in which the figure is a girl. The very shift indicates, at some level, the irrelevance of apparent sex. "The sexual identity of the figure being beaten is remarkably labile. Sometimes he is represented as a boy, sometimes as a girl, sometimes as a combination of the two--a boy dressed as a girl, or the reverse." The girls often have sexually ambiguous names, as well. The beater is a female, but in Marcus's reading a phallic one--muscular, possessed of body hair--representing the father.

56. Ibid., 125-27.

55. Marcus, The Other Victorians , 260-61. Marcus distinguishes two phases in the development of flagellation literature: one in which the figure being beaten is a boy, and the second, in which the figure is a girl. The very shift indicates, at some level, the irrelevance of apparent sex. "The sexual identity of the figure being beaten is remarkably labile. Sometimes he is represented as a boy, sometimes as a girl, sometimes as a combination of the two--a boy dressed as a girl, or the reverse." The girls often have sexually ambiguous names, as well. The beater is a female, but in Marcus's reading a phallic one--muscular, possessed of body hair--representing the father.

56. Ibid., 125-27.

57. Further: "Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. . . . The perfect 'woman of mystery' is one who is blonde, subtle, and Nordic. . . . Movie titles, like women, should be easy to remember without being familiar, intriguing but never obvious, warm yet refreshing, suggest action, not impassiveness, and finally give a clue without revealing the plot. Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title, like the perfect woman, is difficult to find"; as quoted by Spoto, Dark Side of Genius , 431.

58. This would seem to be the point of the final sequence of Brian De Palma's Blow-Out , continue

in which we see the boyfriend of the victim-hero stab the killer to death but later hear the television announce that the woman herself vanquished the killer. The frame plot of the film has to do with the making of a slasher film ("Co-Ed Frenzy"), and it seems clear that De Palma means his ending to stand as a comment on the Final Girl formula of the genre. De Palma's (and indirectly Hitchcock's) insistence that only men can kill men, or protect women from men, deserves a separate essay.

59. The term is Judith Fetterly's. See her The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington, Ind., 1978).

60. On the possible variety of responses to a single film, see Norman N. Holland, "I-ing Film," Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 654-71.

61. Marcus, The Other Victorians , 127. Marcus contents himself with noting that the scene demonstrates a "confusion of sexual identity." In the literature of flagellation, he adds, "this confused identity is also present, but it is concealed and unacknowledged." But it is precisely the femaleness of the beaten figures that does acknowledge it.

62. Freud, "The 'Uncanny,'" esp. 219-21 and 226-27.

63. Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 216.

64. Not a few critics have argued that the ambiguity is the unintentional result of bad filmmaking.

65. So argues Susan Barrowclough: The "male spectator takes the part not of the male, but of the female. Contrary to the assumption that the male uses pornography to confirm and celebrate his gender's sexual activity and dominance, is the possibility of his pleasure in identifying with a 'feminine' passivity or subordination." See her review of Not a Love Story in Screen 23 (1982): 35-36. Alan Soble seconds the proposal in his Pornography: Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality (New Haven, 1986), 93. Porn/sexploitation filmmaker Joe Sarno: "My point of view is more or less always from the woman's point of view; the fairy tales that my films are based on are from the woman's point of view; I stress the efficacy of women for themselves. In general, I focus on the female orgasm as much as I can"; as quoted in Vale and Juno, Incredibly Strange Films , 94. "Male identification with women," Kaja Silverman writes, "has not received the same amount of critical attention [as sublimation into professional 'showing off' and reversal into scopophilia], although it would seem the most potentially destabilizing, at least as far as gender is concerned." See her discussion of the "Great Male Renunciation" in "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture , ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 141.

66. Elaine Showalter, "Critical Cross Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year," Raritan 3 (1983): 138.

67. Whatever its other functions, the scene that reveals the Final Girl in a degree of undress serves to underscore her femaleness. One reviewer of Aliens remarks that she couldn't help wondering why in the last scene, just as in Alien , "we have Ripley wandering around clad only in her underwear. A little reminder of her gender, lest we lose sight of it behind all that firepower?"; Christine Schoefer, East Bay Express , 5 September 1986, 37.

68. Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 12.

69. Kaja Silverman, "Masochism and Subjectivity," Framework 12 (1979): 5. Needless to say, this is not the explanation for the girl-hero offered by the industry. Time magazine on Aliens : "As Director Cameron says, the endless 'remulching' of the masculine hero by the 'male-dominated industry' is, if nothing else, commercially shortsighted. 'They choose to ignore that 50% of the audience is female. And I've been told that it has been proved demographically that 80% of the time it's women who decide which film continue

to see'"; 28 July 1986. It is of course not Cameron who established the female hero of the series but Ridley Scott (in Alien ), and it is fair to assume, from his careful manipulation of the formula, that Scott got her from the slasher film, where she has flourished for some time with audiences that are heavily male. Cameron's analysis is thus both self-serving and beside the point.

70. If this analysis is correct, we may expect horror films of the future to feature Final Boys as well as Final Girls. Two recent figures may be incipient examples: Jesse, the pretty boy in A Nightmare on Elm Street II , and Ashley, the character who dies last in The Evil Dead (1983). Neither quite plays the role, but their names, and in the case of Jesse the characterization, seem to play on the tradition.

71. For the opposite view (based on classic horror in both literary and cinematic manifestations), see Franco Moretti, "The Dialectic of Fear," New Left Review 136 (1982): 67-85.

72. Vale and Juno, Incredibly Strange Films , 5.

73. Tania Modleski, "The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Post-modern Theory," in Studies in Entertainment , 155-66. (Like Modleski, I stress that my comments are based on many slashers, not all of them.) This important essay (and volume) appeared too late for me to take it into full account in the text. break