Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-Of-The Century France

294 Pages·1991·6.693 MB·English

by  Emily S. Apter

F·E·M·I·N·I·Z·I·N·G T·H·E F·E·T·l·S·H

Feminizing the Fetish
·
Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession
f
in Turn-o -the-Century France
EMILY APTER
Cornell University Press
ITH AC A AN D LON DON
Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.
Copyright © 1991 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from
the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House,
512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at
cornellpress.cornell.edu.
First published 1991 by Cornell University Press
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Apter, Emily S.
Feminizing the fetish : psychoanalysis and narrative obsession in turn-of-the-
century France / Emily Apter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-2653-7 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-9952-4 (pbk.)
1.French fiction—19th century—History and criticism.  2. French fiction—
20th century—History and criticism. 3. Obsessive-compulsive disorder in
literature. 4. Femininity (Psychology) in literature. 7. Narration (Rhetoric).
8.Women in literature. I. Title.
PQ653 .A77 1991
843'.809353—dc20 91-55067
The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Jacket illustration: Advertisement in Vogue, 1909.
For Eleanor and David Apter

Contents
Preface IX
1 Fetishism in Theory: Marx, Freud, Baudrillard
The Epistemology of Perversion: From Pathology
2
to Pathography 15
3 Cabinet Secrets: Peep Shows, Prostitution, and
Bric-a-bracomania in the Fin-de-siecle Interior 39
4 Unmasking the Masquerade: Fetishism and Femininity
from the Goncourt Brothers to Joan Riviere 65
5 Splitting Hairs: Female Fetishism and Postpartum
Sentimentality in Maupassant's Fiction 99
· 6 Mystical Pathography: A Case of Maso-fetishism in
the Goncourts' Madame Gervaisais 124
7 Hysterical Vision: The Scopophilic Garden from
Monet to Mirbeau 147
· 8 Master Narratives/Servant Texts: Representing the
Maid from Flaubert to Freud 1 76
· 9 Stigma Indelebile: Zola, Gide, and the Deviant Detail 210
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index
Vil

Preface
· The interdisciplinary approaches that I employ to look at the
topic of fetishism in this book-narratological, New Historical,
hermeneutical, feminist, and psychoanalytical-have often proved
difficult to reconcile. I began with an interest in that fin-de-siecle
ethos of morbid sexual obsession permeating realist narrative and
the early history of psychiatry alike, and ended with a constellation
of abstract analytical and political concerns: the poetics of reification
and specularity, the relation between theories of the gaze and the
textual representation of scopophilia ("love of looking"), the gendering
of perversion, the question of how to critique the history of
feminist social constructionism without relinquishing the subtleties
of masquerade, travesty, and mystification. Though in certain respects
this interweaving of critical theory with historically grounded
nineteenth-century French studies became unavoidably anachronistic,
I purposely wanted to blur traditional chronological perimeters in
an effort to bring the questions of contemporary psychoanalysis,
literary interpretation, and feminism into fruitful confrontation
with their formative past.
There remains, however, a definite historical consistency in the
book's concentration on the turn of the century. As distinct from
"fin de siecle" or "early modernism," each of which suggests a
clear demarcation on either side of the 1900 divide, the turn of the
century evokes a revolving door, allowing for quintessential nineteenth­
century genres and styles--realism, naturalism, decadence, symbolism­
to be seen surviving into the early twentieth century. Though they
IX