Body/Politics

Women and the Discourses of Science

Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth, Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134976089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Body/Politics demonstrates how many of the controversies in modern science involve or invoke the feminine body as their battleground. This groundbreaking collection addresses such scientific issues as artificial fertilization, the "crisis" in childbirth management, and the medical invention of "female" maladies and the debates surrounding them. In the process it makes an important attempt to remedy the traditional division between science and non-science by focusing on the interconnection of literary, social, and scientific discourses concerning the female body. The editors have brought together noted feminist scholars and critics from various fields. Contributers include Susan Bordo, Mary Ann Doane, Donna Haraway, Emily Martin, Mary Poovey and Paula A. Treichler.

1

In Parenthesis:
Immaculate Conceptions and Feminine Desire

Mary Jacobus

A parenthesis, according to the OED, is both “an explanatory or qualifying word, clause, or sentence inserted into a passage with which it has not necessarily any grammatical connexion” and a rhetorical figure—“a passage introduced into a context with which it has no connexion, a digression;” a figure defined by Puttenham as a “figure of tolerable disorder.” The gap between feminine desire and conception, and between conception and maternal desire, constitutes just such a disordering figure. What it disorders is our sense of a unified, coherent subject; it confronts us instead with the irreducibility of a body that is only metonymically linked to desire. The disordering figure—the intrusion of biology into the psychic realm—applies ultimately to sexuality itself, viewed as a threshold between the psychic and the somatic. An earlier age than ours tended to believe that feminine pleasure and conception went together; but as Thomas Laqueur has argued persuasively, a divorce was effected at the end of the century of Enlightenment, when medical science could no longer link the two.¹ I want to argue that this divorce has a specifically disordering effect on conceptions of the feminine subject; and that attempts to remarry feminine pleasure or desire on one hand, and conception on the other, are motivated not only by the wish to reappropriate femininity under the aspect of maternity, but also by a fundamentally theological imperative to maintain the integrity of the contemporary subject.

I'll be discussing three “scenes” or narratives of reproduction that bear on the distinction between feminine desire and conception. My first is a story by Heinrich von Kleist, “The Marquise of O—”(1808) in which Kleist reads the pregnant body as a sign of unconscious feminine desire despite his portrayal of sexuality as a disordering figure; my second narrative involves Freud's difficulty in accounting for feminine sexuality at all in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and his final reliance on a teleology derived from masculine sexuality; my third instance is the contemporary debate about surrogate motherhood, read in the light of Pope John Paul II's recent statements on artificial fertilization and reproduction and Julia Kristeva's analysis of the cult of the Virgin Mary. My aim in linking these three representations of femininity—one literary, one psychoanalytic, and one theological—is to suggest not only the traditional difficulty in specifying feminine desire without appropriating it to maternity (and hence, ultimately, to paternity) but also the problems that arise even when science, in the guise of contemporary biomedical technology, seems finally to have succeeded in freeing feminine pleasure from reproduction. Politically, women have everything to gain from this separation—the right to pleasure without conception, the right to bodily self-determination (AID [artificial insemination by donor] or abortion), the right, even, to surrogacy itself. But this is not to refuse the implications of sexual difference as they manifest themselves in the reproductive process—in the asymmetry between male fertilization and female pregnancy. To take the example of surrogacy, to treat the sperm donor and the surrogate mother as if they were comparable is to reproduce, not equality, but a traditional, deeply engrained inequality in the position of women visa vis reproduction, discourse, and even the law, as the notorious Baby M case reveals. For all their unconventional routes to motherhood, I will argue, the Marquise of O—, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Beth Whitehead (the biological mother of Baby M) figure in a discourse of maternity that is bound to reproduce the Law of the Father.

Oedipal Romance and “The Marquise of O—”

The main action of Kleist's story “The Marquise of O—” takes place literally “in parenthesis,” while the marquise herself is unconscious. A young widow, “a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children”² is surprised by a rabble of Russian soldiers who have stormed the citadel commanded by her father. Just as they are about to gang-rape her, she is rescued by a gallant Russian officer, a count, who seems to her like “an angel sent from heaven” (p. 69), addresses her in French, and leads her to safety. Kleist's narrative continues: “Stricken speechless by her ordeal, she now collapsed in a dead faint. Then—[the dash marks a missing parenthesis] the officer instructed the marquise's frightened servants, who presently arrived, to send for a doctor; he assured them that she would soon recover, replaced his hat and returned to the fighting” (p. 70). The would-be gang-rapists are identified and summarily shot. But before the widow or her family can express their gratitude to the Russian count, he is mis-reported killed in action; his (supposedly) last words are: “Giulietta! This bullet avenges you!” (p. 73); Giulietta is the marquise's name.

Kleist's narrative begins some months later, when the marquise inserts an advertisement in the newspapers to the effect “that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him” (p. 68). Kleist's source for the young widow's situation is an anecdote from Montaigne's essay “Of drunkenness” about a French village woman (also a widow) who finds herself unaccountably pregnant. She announces her willingness to marry the father, whereupon a young farmhand of hers comes forward, declaring

that he had found her, one holiday when she had taken her wine very freely, so fast asleep by her fireplace, and in so indecent a posture, that he had been able to enjoy her without waking her.³

Kleist turns Montaigne's bucolic anecdote into a story of inexplicable passion overlaid by refined sentiment and high familial drama. But the bottom line is the same—a woman's unwitting conception of a child as a result of acquaintance rape. Moreover, in Kleist's story the rape takes place in the space of a narrative absence, not outside nature, but outside consciousness. Like a parenthesis, the sexual act resulting in conception is without grammatical or logical connection to its context. Who has lost control here, we might ask—the widow, the Russian count, or Kleist himself? What is the status of a sexual encounter that not only takes place while one party is unconscious and the other in a state of sexual transport, but which must be banished from the story itself?

“The worst condition of man,” writes Montaigne, “is when he loses knowledge and control of himself.⁴ Drunkenness in Montaigne's essay is an instance of the will overcome by passion. Yet drinking in Montaigne's essay is also placed on the side of pleasure and desire, connected both with the dizzy exploits of war and with the poet's imaginative frenzy—with a form of madness defined as “any transport, however laudable, that transcends our own judgment and reason; inasmuch as wisdom is an orderly management of our soul.”⁵ By implication at least, the type of madness is not so much drunkenness as sexuality—sexuality defined as a figure for disorder of the soul. Montaigne asks (in Horace's words) “if wine can storm the very fort of wisdom”?⁶ In Kleist's story the storming of a fortress leads to the storming of a woman; clearly the exploits of war and the transports of sexual desire are adjacent. Kleist has the count make amends for “the one ignoble action he had committed in his life” (p. 77) by returning unexpectedly to press his suit on the marquise and her astonished family—without, however, confessing his crime (“All were agreed that … he seemed to he accustomed to taking ladies’ hearts, like fortresses, by storm,” p. 79). Although reluctant at first, the young widow (as yet unaware of her pregnancy) finally consents to an engagement; but before the marriage can take place, the count leaves on official business. To her consternation, the marquise's pregnancy meanwhile becomes evident; her father points a gun at her, and she leaves his house for her country estate, taking her children with her. This is how things stand when the count returns to claim the marquise as his wife, undeterred by the news of a pregnancy which he alone has suspected all along. The newspaper advertisement with which the story opens leaves him no option but to reveal himself to her and her family as her repentant rapist—whereupon she furiously refuses to marry him.

Montaigne's “Of drunkenness” goes some way toward explaining how the gallant Russian count might have rescued the marquise from gang-rape only to ravish her himself. Kleist, in fact, tells us more about what motivates the Russian count than about the nature of the marquise's desire for him; indeed, coherent motivation is precisely what she lacks (she has a body instead). We gain access to the count's unconscious processes through the vision of a swan which haunts him during the delirium of his supposedly fatal wound; he remembers

an occasion on which he had once thrown some mud at this swan, whereupon it had silently dived under the surface and re-emerged, washed clean by the water; that she had always seemed to be swimming about on a fiery surface … but that he had not been able to lure her towards him. (p. 82)

We hardly need Freud's observations on “A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men” (1910) to recognize that the Russian count is in the grip of a fantasy which compels him at once to idealize, to debase, and to rescue the woman he loves: “These various meanings of rescuing in dreams and phantasies can be recognized particularly clearly when they are found in connection with water,” writes Freud. “A man rescuing a woman from the water in a dream means that he makes her a mother, which … amounts to making her his own mother.”⁷ So much for the count. But what about the marquise's fantasy—her unconscious desire? Critics usually come up with the rapist's apology: she must have wanted it anyway.⁸ Is it rather the marquise's body that plays the part of the feminine unconscious in Kleist's story? And if she has a body instead of an unconscious, then the marquise is not a desiring subject in the same sense as the count; the only desiring subject in the story becomes a masculine one.

From the marquise's ambivalence and agitation at the count's tumultuous wooing, we might suspect no more than we do from the Russian officer's flushed face after rescuing the marquise. In her case, however, the body “knows” what is excluded both from her consciousness and from Kleist's narrative. What it knows is glossed by the well-known Freudian formula: child=penis. Before the count's whirlwind courtship, the marquise and her mother have exchanged some frank women's talk. The marquise is suffering from mysterious spells of nausea, giddiness, and fainting fits. She tells her mother: “‘If any woman were to tell me that she had felt just as I did a moment ago when I picked up this teacup, I should say to myself that she must he with child’” (p. 74). Her mother jokes that “she would no doubt be giving birth to the god of Fantasy.” The marquise replies (also jokingly) that “at any rate Morpheus, or one of his attendant dreams, must be the father” (p. 74). Soon after this, the Russian count returns from the dead to initiate his whirlwind courtship, “his face a little pale, but looking as beautiful as a young god” (p. 74). If this makes him Morpheus, the marquise is indeed about to give birth to “the god of Fantasy”—the fantasy he has engendered in her. The Russian count dreams of making her a mother (in Freudian terms). By the same token, does the marquise dream of making him a (that is her) father, the father of her fantasy? In the last resort, the count's function in Kleist's narrative is to give her meaning as a woman—filling her empty 0 with his child. But what she signifies is his (i.e., masculine) desire. The fulfillment of this desire rounds off the story with its domestication of sexuality-as-reproduction, or happy ending.

In Kleist's narrative, the progress of the marquise's pregnancy amounts to a discourse of the maternal body—the site where the feminine unconscious speaks. After the count has won her consent to the marriage and departed on his official mission, the marquise begins to notice “an incomprehensible change in her figure” (p. 85). She calls in a doctor and “jestingly told him what condition she believed herself to be in” (p. 86). When he confirms her diagnosis she is outraged, threatening to report him to her father. As he leaves in a huff, she pleads: “‘But, Doctor, how is what you say possible?’” The doctor replies that “she would presumably not expect him to explain the facts of life to her” (p. 86). Yet this seems to be the case; after the doctor's visit the marquise tells her mother that although her conscience is clear, she must now consult a midwife: “‘A midwife!’ exclaimed the commandant's wife indignantly, ‘a clear conscience and a midwife!’ And speech failed her” (p. 88)—just as words had failed Kleist at the crucial moment that engenders his story. Either the marquise has invented “a fable about the overturning of the whole order of nature” (p. 89), or (as the midwife puts it) “young widows who found themselves in her ladyship's position always believed themselves to have been living on desert islands” (p. 90; here the marquise faints for the second time). “With a faltering voice” the marquise then asks the midwife “what the ways of nature were, and whether such a thing as an unwitting conception was possible.” Not in her case, replies the midwife; “with the exception of the Blessed Virgin, it had never yet happened to any woman on earth” (p. 91).

An attentive reader of Kleist's story knows by this stage that the marquise conceived her child not outside the realm of nature, but in the parenthetical moment that is excluded both from her consciousness and from Kleist's story. In Kleist's own discourse, it seems that feminine sexuality, however mediated, can never fully submit to textuality. The woman's body—the hollow, open “O—” signified by the marquise's name—remains the site of something at once undecidable and contradictory, in excess of narrative.⁹ Just as desire interrupts consciousness as a wordless rift—as madness rather than reason—so conception gives rise to the absurd nonsense that the marquise must talk to herself, her mother, her doctor, and her midwife. Kleist could have specified exactly what took place between the marquise and her rescuer if he wished. Why then his reticence—miming the marquise's double consciousness (that she is pregnant, but that her pregnancy is either a joke or a miracle)? I want to suggest not simply that Kleist saw in Montaigne's bucolic anecdote the potential for a highly wrought Romantic drama of feminine denial and silenced desire. Rather, I want to suggest that feminine sexuality in Kleist's story can only be recuperated for narrative under the aegis of an Oedipal conception familiar to modern readers from the writings of Freud.

The unwritten story in “The Marquise of O—” is not so much rape as a difficulty (analagous to Freud's) in accounting for feminine sexuality at all. Kleist solves the problem, as Freud was to do a century later, by subordinating femininity to the Law of the Father. When the count presents himself in answer to the marquise's newspaper advertisement, the marquise—in her father's words, “hysterical”—no longer sees him as an angel, but as a devil. We might take the commandant's adjective seriously for a moment. Hysteria, for Freud, means body language, the conversion of unconscious sexual desire into physical symptoms, of which hysterical pregnancy is one. Remember Dora's hysterical pregnancy exactly nine months after delivering her slap of rejection to Herr K.—a hysterical pregnancy which Freud interprets as the wish that things had gone otherwise, and ultimately as displaced desire for the father. What is the marquise's “hysterical” predicament in Kleist's story? Like Dora's rejection of Herr K., her refusal of the count when he reveals himself as the father of her child could be read as masking unacknowledged desire ...