Notions of the feminine : literary essays from Dostoyevsky to Lacan

105 Pages·2015·0.951 MB·English

by  Axelrod, Mark

Notions of the Feminine
DOI: 10.1057/9781137502933.0001
LIST OF PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS (PARTIAL LISTING)
MILAN PANIC: THE LITTLE IMMIGRANT FROM SERBIA, AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY.
Peter Lang Press (Forthcoming, December 2014).
NO SYMBOLS WHERE NONE INTENDED, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
WAITING FOR GODEAU (Translation of the Balzac play, Mercadet, The Good Businessman).
Black Scat Books, San Francisco, California (October 2013).
CONSTRUCTING DIALOGUE: FROM CITIZEN KANE TO MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, Continuum
Press, New York (November 2013).
ANGELINA’S LIPS by Giuseppe Conte, Edited with Introduction. Guernica Publishing,
Toronto, Canada (April 2011).
VIAJES BORGES, TALLERES HEMINGWAY (short stories). Editorial Thule, Barcelona, Spain
(October 2009).
FICTION AT WAR: FC2 1999–2009. Three short stories from BORGES’ TRAVEL to be
included in an anthology published by FC2, Illinois State University (March 2009).
I READ IT AT THE MOVIES (screenwriting/adaptation). Heinemann Publishing
(November 2006).
BORGES’ TRAVEL, HEMINGWAY’S GARAGE (short stories), Fiction Collective 2. Normal,
Illinois (April 2004).
CHARACTER & CONFLICT: CORNERSTONES OF SCREENWRITING (screenwriting).
Heinemann Publishing (September 2004).
ASPECTS OF THE SCREENPLAY (screenwriting). Heinemann Publishing (2001).
CAPITAL CASTLES (novel). Pacific Writers Press, Tustin, California (2000).
THE POETICS OF NOVELS: Fiction & Its Execution (literary criticism). Macmillan Press,
Basingstoke, UK (November 1999).
CLOUD CASTLES (novel). Pacific Writers Press, Tustin, California (1999).
BOMBAY CALIFORNIA; OR, HOLLYWOOD SOMEWHERE WEST OF VINE (novel). Pacific
Writers Press, Tustin, California (1994).
THE POLITICS OF STYLE IN THE FICTION OF BALZAC, BECKETT & CORTÁZAR
(criticism). Macmillan Publishing, Martin’s Press, New York (1992).
NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN’S CHIMERA OR NINE METAPHORS OF VISION (visual prose).
Membrane Press, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1978).
DOI: 10.1057/9781137502933.0001
Notions of the
Feminine: Literary
Essays from
Dostoyevsky to Lacan
Mark Axelrod
Professor of Comparative Literature,
Chapman University, United States
DOI: 10.1057/9781137502933.0001
notions of the feminine
Copyright © Mark Axelrod, 2015.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by
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First edition: 2015
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137502933
As always, to my son, Matías
DOI: 10.1057/9781137502933.0001
Contents
Introduction 1
1 “Pale Whore, Pale Writer”: Is There
Punishment for the Crime? 4
2 “Blushes & Flushes”: Anna Karenina’s
Shameful Physiology 9
3 W omen in Love: D.H. Lawrence’s Paean
to Misogyny 16
4 The Virgin and the Gipsy: D.H. Lawrence’s
Paean to Misogyny 43
5 Ugly Hairy Mounds, Fierce Hairy
Armpits, and Sewer-Like Menstruations:
Women as Vulgar Commodity in
Fuentes’s The Old Gringo 59
6 Mediazation and Marginalization of
the Feminine in Böll’s Lost Honor of
Katharina Blum 69
7 Gazing from the Inside: Lacan and an
Endocrinological Notion of the Male
“Gaze” 87
Index 95
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137502933.0001
Introduction
Axelrod, Mark. Notions of the Feminine:
Literary Essays from Dostoyevsky to Lacan.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137502933.0002.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137502933.0002 1
2 Notions of the Feminine
What precipitated the writing of these essays was a suggestion from one
of my graduate students, who also suggested the name of the course:
“Women in Love and Other Emotional States.” I had previously taught a
film adaptation course using works by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Lawrence,
Fuentes, and Böll, but hadn’t been looking at the texts from the perspec-
tive of a male’s view of women, but purely from the point of view of a
screenwriter adapting a literary text to the screen. What does a writer
include? Omit? Alter, arrange, or minimize? But I thought the suggestion
engaging enough to re-read those texts from that point of view; namely,
how do the narrators of male authors perceive women.
With that in mind, I chose Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment; Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina; Lawrence’s Women in Love, of course, and The Virgin and
the Gypsy; Fuentes’s The Old Gringo; Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina
Blum; and an essay based on Lacan’s notion of The Gaze, since I thought it
germane to some of the texts. The most starting thing I discovered with
Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy were their respective views on how women
reacted in social situations in which the former’s female characters
tended to “go pale” while the latter’s tended “to blush.” I thought that
was probably a misreading on my part, but when I asked a colleague if
the words translated into English were the same in Russian, he corrobo-
rated. So, there was no mis-translation, but there was a repetition of the
words that I found unusual. In both cases, there was the implication that
women had a tendency to do one or the other, and as one reads those
texts one cannot dismiss the possibility that there might be degrees of
“paleness” or “blushiness” since it happens constantly.
I first came upon Lawrence’s misogyny, especially when it concerned
“mothers,” after reading (and later viewing) his “Rocking Horse Winner”
published in 1926, the same year as Virgin and Gypsy and six years after
Women in Love. What struck me most was how he characterized his male
characters versus his female ones and how the narrator treated physical
abuse especially in certain chapters of Women in Love.
I thought that sort of characterization of women couldn’t get much
worse until I re-read Fuentes’s The Old Gringo, presumably begun in
1964, finished in 1984, and published in 1985. The most startling issue in
the novel (which was co-translated by Fuentes) was the overt misogyny
not only in relation to white women, but all women. There were times I
had to read the original text just to make sure I wasn’t missing certain
aspects of the novel that may have been mis-translated, but I didn’t.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137502933.0002
Introduction 3
Whether in Spanish or English the attitude towards women was beyond
misinterpretation.
Böll’s Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, which was brilliantly adapted by
both Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, truly captures all
the pathos of how an innocent housekeeper has her entire life ruined
by an invasive tabloid reporter and a maladroit police investigation in
which both the reporter and the police demean her as both a woman
and a human being.
Last, I’ve chosen Lacan’s notion of the gaze, the essence of which is
drawn from his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, because I
have always had an interest in science and even received an undergradu-
ate degree in zoology. The entire physiological phenomenon of sight and
its relationship to what people actually “see” has always intrigued me,
and I thought there would be no better way to conclude a series of essays
devoted to how male novelists perceive females in some of their work by
talking a bit about Lacan and “the gaze.”
Writing these essays based on reading these texts has been very
insightful for me and has given me an interest in writing yet another
collection based on how female novelists perceive female characters.
Mark Axelrod
October, 2014
DOI: 10.1057/9781137502933.0002