Sexing the Doppelgnger: A Recourse to Poes Ligeia

Susan Yi Sencindiver
The fictional doppelgnger resists narrow categorization and
definition, yet exhibits a peculiar feature: it is claimed to be the exclusive
property of the male gender. As a sole male phenomenon, the doppelgnger
would seem to underpin the essentialist scheme of a gendered identity.
However, as the doppelgnger decisively decenters the idea of a unified
subjectivity, it cannot be presumed that gendered identity remains
miraculously intact. I seek to extend the traditional critical approaches to the
iconography of the doppelgnger narrative by inquiring how the otherness of
sexual difference forms a conceptually coherent nucleus at the interface of
recurring and intertwining associations of both the uncanny and the
doppelgnger motif. To this end, I shall resuscitate and demonstrate the
theoretical and practical value of the castration complex, aspects
underdeveloped in recent theory, by relocating it as a significant analytical
terminus of the uncanny. Doppelgnger narratives are racked with the
persistent themes of the unreliability of vision that pertain to the transposition
of symbolic castration. It is not only blindness that figures as a displaced
trope for castration, but also the sight of the castrated female and sexual
difference; a danger circumvented by veiling the female body. However, this
veiling remains tenuous as the uncanny dialectic between veiling and
unveiling also operates according to a fetishistic logic in which sexual
difference is both disavowed and affirmed. This fetishistic logic and the
doppelgnger, moreover, become two versions of the same doublingmechanism, in which the self is narcissistically protected from castration and
death by duplication of the phallus and self respectively. However, the
repressed returns as other: sexual difference - one in which womb is equated
with tomb - indelibly marks the alterity within male subjectivity and the
latters concomitant crisis. To substantiate this framework, this paper will
read Poes Ligeia as a paradigmatic example, in which Ligeia emerges as a
terrifying Medusa-like doppelgnger.
Keywords: Doppelgnger, Gender, The Uncanny, Castration, Fetishism

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No nos une el amor sino el espanto;
ser por eso que la quiero tanto. 1
- Jorge Luis Borges, Buenos Aires
Je est un autre
- Arthur Rimbaud
The fictional doppelgnger as a recurring literary device invariably
generates uneasy perplexity and anxiety for its readers as it articulates the
disturbing crisis of self-division and identity as alterity. It renders explicit
Rimbauds maxim above: the elementary yet incongruous conjunction of self
and other. However, what happens when the double is female; i.e., already
other in a phallocentric confine? Does she necessarily entail a subjectivity
that differs sexually from itself? What implications do the differing gendered
configurations of host(ess) and double have?
There are ubiquitous doppelgnger elements in Poes tales, and
although these have been subjected to various critical frameworks,
surprisingly, the question of female doubles that looms largely in his work
has been treated with relatively little exposition - despite the fact that a
number of his tales belong to the earliest examples of explicit female
doubling in literary history. The cause hereof pertains to the lack of currency
for the doppelgngerin. A female license for doubling has been overlooked
in previous criticism, or perhaps even deliberately marginalized, apparently
on account of a faulty premise: the doppelgnger motif has been claimed to
be the exclusive property of the male gender. According to Robert Alter
there is something intrinsically, and weirdly, sexless about most of the
arid Doppelgnger bachelors.2 Similarly, Otto Weininger, Freuds
contemporary, avers that the double solely appears in the male form. On the
other hand, it can be argued that their assertions merit partial validity.
Compared to the male doppelgnger, there are only a few literary instances of
an explicit female version - the pressing question is why? Weiningers own
notoriously misogynist and anti-Semitic treatise entitled Geschlecht und
Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung offers a dubious, yet unwittingly
telling, account for the resistance towards the doppelgngerin. He writes:
die Tiere erschrecken nie, wenn sie sich im Spiegel sehen, aber
kein Mensch vermchte sein Leben in einem Spiegelzimmer zu
verbringen. Oder ist auch diese Furcht, die Furcht vor dem
Doppelgnger (von der bezeichnenderweise das Weib frei ist)
biologisch, darwinistisch abzuleiten? Man braucht das

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Wort Doppelgnger nur zu nennen, um in den meisten
Mnnern heftiges Herzklopfen hervorzurufen.3
This passage includes an interesting footnote: Noch hat niemand von
Doppelgngerinnen gehrt ... Es gibt eine tiefe Furcht, die nur der Mann
kennt.4 This excerpt intends to adduce the singular aspect of subjectivity left
unexplained by the contemporary empirical approach to psychology - an
autonomous subjectivity certified by the acute heart-palpitation that the
doppelgnger excites. This fear presupposes the existence of (male)
subjectivity since the double causes the subversion of, yet is also intrinsic to,
the fundamental basis of identity. Since their subjectivity is not at stake,
Weiningers objectified women do not manifest the fear of the
doppelgnger nor can they figure as a hostess for a doppelgngerin.
Weiningers homology, in which sexual difference is predicated upon the
opposition between subject and object, has long permeated Western cultural
tradition and systems. As Simone de Beauvoir vindicates in The Second Sex:
femininity has been formed by relation to - and differentiation from - a male
standard, thus the corollary construction of the former as the quintessential
other, as lack, or as absence. Likewise, it follows that the female
doppelgnger can only remain the silent other of the term available in a
phallocentric economy as it is ostensibly incompatible for an other to
accommodate another other.
As a sole male phenomenon, the doppelgnger would seem to
underpin the essentialist scheme of a securely gendered identity. However,
this categorical characterization can be contested: an androcentric paradigm
already implicitly incorporates the female doppelgnger in the name of
woman owing to her allocation as mans second self, his alter ego. In
addition, as the doppelgnger decisively decenters the subject by subverting
the logic of identity, it cannot be presumed that gendered identity remains
miraculously intact. Hence, Weiningers contention of the deep fear that
only the man knows also tacitly subsumes patriarchal fears about sexual
difference, since gender - an essential specification of identity - is
jeopardized. In fact, mans deep fear is repeated in Weiningers tract - and
in this particular context the deep fear concerns the fear of woman: jene
tiefste Furcht im Manne: die Furcht vor dem Weibe, das ist die Furcht vor der
Sinnlosigkeit: das ist die Furcht vor dem lockenden Abgrund des Nichts. 5
The dangerous spectres of female sexuality, deviant sexual desire
and its transgressive power insidiously mark the alterity within male
subjectivity and the latters concomitant crisis. However, it is exigent to
emphasize that the early cases of female doubling are typically
conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters. The early literary

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doppelgngerin embodies the same destabilizing effect of eroding conceptual

categories as her male counterpart, in which demarcations between identity
and difference, self and other, and the absolutes of life and death are undone;
but introduces an added dimension: the enticing abyss of nothing within
man is understood in terms of sexual difference as seen through the lens of
male anxiety. In other words, sexual difference is misperceived as ontological
difference - a difference that Slavoj iek defines as the bare minimum of a
difference not between beings but between the minimum of an entity and the
void, nothing.6 Hence, the femininity of the doppelgngerin is discursively
constituted, an androcentric construct in which actual femininity is absent:
the doppelgngerin functions as a mirror upon which the male protagonist
projects his own desires, fears, and the failure to coincide with himself. He
misconceives female sexual difference in terms of his own fears; i.e., as
non-man, as castration - a pervasive trope for sexual difference - that
violates the narcissistic conception of body integrity and its self-image and
generates the unbearable fear of loss, of not being whole. Weiningers
masculine fantasy of the ontological nullity of woman returns in the figure of
the castrating doppelgngerin to haunt both the existential and intimate
sexual borders of the masculine I. 7
This paper undertakes to demonstrate the theoretical and practical
value of the castration complex, aspects underdeveloped in recent theory, by
relocating it as a significant analytical terminus of the uncanny; and to
illustrate how the persistent themes of the unreliability of vision do in fact
rely on the transposition of castration anxiety - in particular its relation to the
role played by women, since female genitalia have been culturally construed
as a signifier for castration.8 Freuds discussion on The Sandman focuses to a
large extent on the role played by vision: the idea that the anxiety about
ones eyes, the fear of going blind is a displaced trope for castration
anxiety.9 Blinding represents displaced castration fear, not only in terms of
the substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ, but also in terms
of the castrated maternal body. 10 Its terror is derived from the sight of
something, or to be more precise, from something absent from sight: the
negative perception of an absent maternal penis. Hence, it is befitting that
among Freuds manifold selected examples in The Uncanny, female
genitalia are presented as unheimlich.11 However, Freud himself failed to
advert to this connection. Jane Marie Todd, in her article The Veiled
Woman in Freuds Das Unheimliche, keenly discerns Freuds curious
parapraxis in the 1919 edition of The Uncanny; here, the name
Schleiermacher [which literally means veilmaker] is substituted for
Schelling.12 In his inadvertent, but telling, slip of the pen Freud unwittingly
reveals how he himself is a veilmaker: by dismissing the uncanniness of the

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doll Olympia in favour the castrating father-imago of the Sandman, Freud
elides or veils the terrifying castrative threat posed by the castrated female
body. 13
The omnipresence of visual ambiguity and ocular anxiety that informs
Poes Ligeia (1838) is most conspicuously rendered by Ligeias most
brilliant of black eyes and the black and/or golden interior of the bridal
chamber-cum-crypt.14 These are weaved together forming a concatenating
network that all share attributes associated with the phantasmagoric effect of
the draperies: the distorting and distorted light of the parti-colored fires of the
censer and the leaden hue of the tinted chamber window, which change the
appearance of the interior.15 As the chambers illusory quality, deceptive
light, and Ligeias black yet luminous eyes suggests: vision is always double
and duplicitous. Ligeias otherworldly eyes constitute the site for the
unnamed narrators scopophiliac-epistemophilia. They are the source but
also the failure for his analytic abilities.16 They are likened to stellar bodies
emitting light: the radiant lustre of her large and luminous orbs renders
the dark and occult passages of transcendentalist texts legible and their
medial function enables him to acquire a wisdom too divinely precious not
to be forbidden. Not only does her absence, i.e., the loss of her eyes, create
the narrators figurative blindness, who becomes a child groping benighted;
but her eyes also represent the failure of his analytic abilities in the
additional sense in that they themselves confound the narrator. He tries in
vain to trace home [his] own perception of the strange. The
strangeness, however, which I found in the eyes must, after all, be
referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning!17 Her eyes are of a
textual nature, but for the narrator their expression resists interpretation and
becomes mere sound or an empty signifier. What was it - that something
more profound than the well of Democritus - which lay far within the pupils
of my beloved? Poes phrase the well of Democritus may be a reference
to the latters conception of the bottomless void or empty space between
atoms, or his axiom: truth is in an abyss. The secret and strangeness of
Ligeia is deeply hidden in a most heimlich place: in her eyes, a displaced
trope for her sexuality - the loci of both an abyss and a truth beyond mans
reach. The narrators scopic obsession - his intense scrutiny of Ligeias
eyes18 - that pertains to his epistemological quest converges with his
castration anxiety. The truth to be found in Ligeias eyes translates into the
narrators (and Weiningers) fear of womans latent and alluring
boundlessness - the enticing abyss of the nothing.
Hence, we understand the necessity the narrator has felt to assume the
role of a Schleiermacher. The covering of Rowenas corpse is particularly
significant to the narrators preoccupation with troubling bodies. Not only is

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the corpse veiled, but, in fact, the narrator obsessively veils with child-like
perversity the entire chamber with the most remarkable gorgeous and
fantastic draperies. 19 Their deceptive appearances and phantasmagoric effect
reinforce the significance of their function - the disavowal of perception: the
veil engenders the illusion that there is something substantial beneath it,
while at the same time concealing the nothingness of the castrated body.
However, once removed, the mirage is dispelled: the seeker of truth only
finds a gaping void, lack of meaning, and the emergence of death. Ligeias
duplicitous eyes in the final scene are unveiled as strictly corporeal with their
former luminosity absent. Her eyes are revealed as abysmal black holes
signalling the lack of a castrated being and this horrifying sight of nothing
attests that castration can occur - or if read along Lacanian lines that
symbolic castration has occurred.
The narrator assimilates the fetishist who disavows womans
castration and posits the possibility of the phallic mother.20 The fetishized
draperies dissimulate a phallic veil that masks and replaces the pernicious
lack of the castrated body with the mother endowed with an imaginary penis
or its substitutes. This is most evident in the depiction of Ligeia as a Medusa
figure, whose decapitated head represents a fetish object par excellence.21
The motif of Medusa remains latently present throughout the tale and is
portrayed in the ubiquitous snake imagery: the references to the arabesque
patterns of the chambers interior, the serpentine pattern of the vine and
trellis, the censer - that is Saracenic in pattern from which a continual
succession of light exudes in a writhing form as if endued with a serpent
vitality, and the multibranches of the candelabra which connote Medusas
phallic hair.22 The most explicit reference to the terror of Medusa occurs
before the final revelation of the resurrected Ligeia. A glance at Medusas
head turns the viewer into stone, and likewise the narrator dares to glimpse
the spectacle and is immediately petrified:
I trembled not - I stirred not the stature, the demeanour of
the figure, rushing hurriedly through my brain, had paralyzed had chilled me into stone. I stirred not - but gazed upon the
apparition.23
Ligeia-Medusa serves as a fetish in that she both frightens and reassures; she
functions as both a site of castration and what covers the lack: the illusion of
a penile possession. Although the fetishist denies the castrating sight, he can
never fully eliminate the smouldering acknowledgement of its lack and the
inadequacy of the substitute. The nothing to be transpired behind the veil
of the penis representations always has the potential to violently emerge.

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Ligeia is a Meduzian double who uncannily returns as other. The
double was originally a narcissistic wish-fulfilment against the destruction
of the ego, an energetic denial of the power of death. However, once this
stage had been surmounted, the double reverses its aspect. From having
been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of
death. Freud highlights how in a parallel fashion,
[t]his invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction
has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of
representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a
genital symbol. 24
The multiplication of the phallus-representatives - the snakes upon Medusas
head - indicates an attempt to avert castration anxieties. Her phallic hair and
the double express two versions of the same doubling-mechanism, in which
the self is narcissistically protected from castration and death by a tropic
replacement of excess, the unbounded doubling of the penis and self
respectively. The narrator adheres to an ambitious Faustian enterprise
intending to transcend the bounds of life and death. Although his vision of
immortality is implemented, it becomes unintentionally and irretrievably
secular and is shown to be dependent on the figures of difference it tried to
negate. The final indelible image of Ligeias reconstitution in the flesh
suggests the return of a strictly physical corporeality that renders the
possibility of life after death, yet it asserts a materiality which abridges the
synthesizing moment of transcendence. The doubling-mechanism intended to
ward off death and castration inverts its effect signalling its affiliation with
the compulsive repetition of the death drive.
The narrator affronts a dreadful sight, but the paralysing power of
Ligeias gaze remains ambiguous. Does the sight of Ligeia repel and/or
attract? Fetishism operates according to the paradoxical logic of seeing while
not seeing. Similarly, Medusa summarises the perceptual duplicity of seeing
vs. being seen. Who gives rise to the process of petrifaction? Is it the
narrator-observers sight of Ligeia-Medusa or is it the Meduzian gaze itself?
Not only does the cause of the narrators meduzation present a fundamental
ambiguity, but also its effect: castration or penile possession? Does Ligeias
revival arouse the narrators terror or is his beloveds return a cause for
elation? In fact, the responsibility for the petrifaction can be located with the
narrator-observer. In the critical moment when he is chilled into stone, it is he
who ultimately observes Ligeia and assumes the unconditional role of seer: I
stirred not - but gazed upon the apparition. Ligeia does not open her eyes
until after the unveiling of her ghastly cerements in which he himself is

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subjected to her observation and is turned into the object in the act of seeing but here, the moment of meduzation has elapsed. The undecidability of the
Meduzian fetish, its both/and logic, is undone in the final scene, as narrator
himself states: Here then, at least can I never - can I never be mistaken these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes - of my lost love - of the
lady - of the LADY LIGEIA.25 Although the final unveiling and her
abysmal black eyes-as-holes ostensibly suggest the disclosure of the
nothingness of the castrated female, what the spectacle presents can neither
be the phallic and/or castrated woman. The moment of infallible certainty that he can never be mistaken - cancels the binary oppositions of the fetish,
suspends the logic of castration and the primacy of phallic value.
Furthermore, the phallocentric functioning of the gaze, through which female
castration is affirmed, is unsettled by Ligeia who looks back. Thus, one can
surmise that what the narrator glimpses is actual sexual difference or sexual
diffrance beyond binaries - one that disrupts what Irigaray coined
hommosexualit.26 Actual sexual difference is veiled as the castrated woman
who, in turn, is veiled as phallic; thus, non-binary sexual difference is twice
removed. Does the doubly veiled woman ultimately shed her ghastly
cerements? But here at the climax of the tale - meant to afford a final
anagnorisis - the tale abruptly yet appropriately ceases, since sexual
diffrance can only remain unrepresentable in a signifying system that
privileges the signifier of the phallus. Hence, Weiningers comment on
womans lack of ontological actuality surprisingly proves equitable when
modified and read in the light of the Lacanian la femme nexiste pas:
womans non-existence results not from her non-being, but from the inability
of Woman to be defined and integrated adequately in the linguistico-cultural
register of a patriarchal Symbolic - of which Ligeias incomplete name
unmarked by a patronymic also betokens. However, according to iek,
Weininger falls short in recognizing that the nothingness he discerns in
woman constitutes the very negativity that defines the notion of the
subject: Weiningers aversion to woman bears witness to the fear of the
most radical dimension of subjectivity itself: of the Void which is the
subject.27
Ligeia forces us to rethink the categories of the doppelgnger by
resisting the latters monopolization by one sex: it opens up alternate ways of
conceptualizing the bodily and sexual economy of the doppelgnger.
However, it is important to differentiate between the doppelgngerins
various visages. The doppelgngerin presented in this tale is viewed through
a male optic; hence, she does not designate a radical alterity within or divided
states of the psyche of women, but rather the irreducible existential lacunae

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within male consciousness; i.e., the male doppelgnger dons the veil of a
female doppelgnger.
According to the myth of Medusa, Perseus can never catch a direct
glance of her actual appearance, since he makes use of his reflecting shield as
a mirror in order to avoid petrifaction. He can only gaze at her refracted
specular-image. Her true (sexual) difference exceeds representation, and thus
she is only present as an index of the unrepresentable. The mirrored
simulacrum of Ligeia-Medusas castrated-decapitated head constitutes the
reflections and projections of a castrative incompleteness hidden deep within
the narrators own psyche: the intolerable ontological nullity around which
subjectivity is structured - that intimate, yet abysmal part of the self which we
endeavour not to see.

Notes
1

We are united, not by love but by horror;

that must be why I love her so.
2
Robert Alter, Playing Host to the Doppelgnger, TLS (1986): 1190.
3
[no animal is made afraid by seeing its reflection in a mirror, but no man
would be able to spend his life in a room surrounded with mirrors. Or can this
fear, the fear of the doppelgnger (the female is characteristically devoid of
this fear) be explained biologically, Darwinistically? One need only
mention the word doppelgnger in order to call forth acute heart-palpitation
in most men.]
Otto Weininger, Sex and Character with Interlinear Translation, Ed. Robert
Willis: 267-8. 25. Mar. 2007. <www.theabsolute.net/ottow/geschlecht.pdf>.
My translation.
4
[Female doppelgngers are not heard of ... There is a deep fear that only the
man knows.]
ibid., 269.
5
[that deepest fear in the man: the fear of the woman, that is the fear of
meaninglessness: that is the fear of the enticing abyss of the nothing.]
ibid., 405.
6
Slavoj iek, The Parallax View, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) 24.
7
Das Weib hat keinen Teil an der ontologischen Realitt. [The woman has
no part in ontological reality]
ibid., 389.
8
Freuds treatment of the uncanny forms an excessive conglomerate of
aporetic explications. Towards the end of his essay, his Musterung is reduced
to two distinct sources which he purports occasion the feeling of
uncanniness: on the one hand, in his reading of E. T. A. Hoffmanns The

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Sandman, this feeling is effected by the castration complex, i.e., it arises

whenever infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more
revived by some impression; on the other hand, when the primitive beliefs
which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. He initially
discards Jentsch idea that uncanny fear originates from intellectual
uncertainty - the incapacity to determine the status of an object. Recent
criticism considers this as the crucial limitation in his reading, and instead
subscribes to the primacy of intellectual uncertainty. In her essay, Fiction
and Its Phantoms, Hlne Cixous effectively discerns the discrepancies of
Freuds text. She argues that Freuds exposition of the castration complex is
itself a form of repression. He is at pains to convince us how castration
anxiety constitutes the primum mobile of the uncanny; but the repressed
incongruent element refuses its reduction, only to return when Freud
concedes that We must be prepared to admit that there are other elements
beside those we have so far laid down as determining the production of
uncanny feelings, and is compelled to partially retract his former
interpretation: are we after all justified in entirely ignoring intellectual
uncertainty as a factor? According to the main premise of Cixous article,
his text on the uncanny both constates and performs its content; i.e., he
cannot quell the subversive presence of intellectual uncertainty as the
investigation itself comprises this uncanny uncertainty. In effect, this fear of
reproducing Freuds (mis)reading causes the tendency of numerous critics to
cautiously side-step the problematics of castration anxiety or relegate it as a
subsidiary source of the uncanny.
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny. The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism, Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. (NY & London: W. W. Norton & Co.,
Inc, 2001) 948-50.
Hlne Cixous, Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freuds Das
Unheimliche, New Literary History 7.3 (1976): 525-548.
By presenting the notion of castration, I do not endorse psychoanalytically
based theories of sexual difference. As Juliet Mitchell points out
psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society but an
analysis of one. Indeed, it is rather the fuller implications and preteritions of
a masculine theoretical economy that will be illustrated ensuing.
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1975) xv.
9
Freud, The Uncanny, 939.
10
The threat of castration is effected by way of two procedures. In contrast to
the direct threat of castration posed by the father precipitating the subsidence
of the Oedipal phase, the maternal body plays an indirect role. On

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apprehending the anatomical differences between the sexes, the deemed
maternal absence of a male organ, the childs infantile theory of sexuality i.e., the theory that every human being, regardless of sex, is equipped with a
penis - is replaced by a new assumption: that females have been castrated,
which in turn renders the possibility of castration visible to the child.
Sigmund Freud, On the Sexual Theories of Children (1908). The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud . Ed. James
Strachey. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974) 207.
11
The female genital organs are the entrance to the former Heim [home] of
all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time
and in the beginning. The uncanny marks the return of something familiar
and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only
through the process of repression. In this sense, our once intimate
relationship with the heimlich womb - i.e. inanimate state anterior to life returns as a reversion of the repressed, thus becoming frightening and
uncanny. Womens sex organs pose an uncanny fear in more than one sense.
In Fetishism, Freud states that [p]robably no male human being is spared
the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital it is as though the
last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one [the sight of the female
genital] is retained as a fetish.
Freud, The Uncanny, 944-7.
Sigmund Freud, Fetishism. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism,
Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. (NY & London: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc, 2001)
954. My italics.
12
Jane Marie Todd, The Veiled Woman in Freuds Das Unheimliche,
Signs 11.3 (1986): 522.
13
ibid., 523.
14
Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales, (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1994) 50.
15
[T]he rays of either the sun or moon, passing through [the pane], fell with
a ghastly lustre on the objects within.
ibid., 57.
16
Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the
Aesthetic, (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992) 331.
17
Poe, 49-54.
18
ibid., 50-1.
19
The lofty walls, gigantic in height were hung from summit to foot, in
vast folds, with a heavy and massive-looking tapestry - tapestry of a material
which was found alike as a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans
and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the
curtains which partially shaded the window.

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ibid., 57-8.
20
The Freudian schema of the fetish constitutes an operation of
undecidability that permits the feminine body to be seen as both whole and
castrated, since the construction of the fetish rests simultaneously on two
contrary premises: both the disavowal and the affirmation of castration.
Hence, the fetish functions to allay mans castration anxiety, to elude the
threat that sexual difference represents to his narcissism.
Freud, Fetishism, 955.
21
The ur-text on this ambiguous motif is naturally Freuds essay, Medusas
Head. Since [t]o decapiate = to castrate, Perseus decapitation of
Medusas head violently inflicts upon her a vaginal wound. The terror of
Medusa stems from the sight of the castrated and terrifying genitals of the
Mother. However, the phallic serpentine hair upon Medusas head alleviates
the castration fear for the male observer: frightening they may be in
themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for
they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror.
Furthermore, Freud extrapolates the mythological petrifaction to the erection
of the penis: [t]his sight of Medusas head makes the spectator stiff with
terror, turns him to stone becoming stiff means an erection he is still in
possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact.
Sigmund Freud, Medusas Head, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love
(NY: Collier, 1993) 212-213.
22
Poe, 57.
23
ibid., 63-4.
24
Freud, The Uncanny, 940.
25
Poe, 64. My emphasis.
26
Hommosexualit designates the homogeneity of a same-sex system, in
which sexual difference is defined in terms of one denomination: the unitary
presence or absence of the penis/phallus. Hence, the male/female binary
remains within a single sexual economy that merely dissimulates a difference
between the sexes but is, in fact, a disavowal of this difference. Likewise, the
phallic mother and the fetish are to be subsumed under the heading of
hommosexualit as they both serve as a conduit for a phallic economy.
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Tr. Catherine Porter, (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1985) 194-96.
27
Slavoj iek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and
Causality, (London & NY: Verso, 2005) 143-5.

Susan Yi Sencindiver

13

_______________________________________________________

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