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Michael Miller

Dr. Jeffrey W. Timmons

ENG400 - 29120

April 16, 2016

Freud: The Final Father Figure of Feminism

Question 2: Why do you think Freud and/or psychoanalysis exert such an influence on

these women theorists? Why do they make such use of its ideas, concept, and/or implications?

During the rise of second-wave feminism, Freudian psychoanalysis became a tool that

female literary critics used to analyze the patriarchal society in which they were beginning to

gain a foothold. After gaining some legal ground with the Declaration of Womens Rights of

1848 and, eventually, the right to vote during first-wave feminism, female writers and critics

were now faced with both the implications and the possibilities of defining either an existence

within a Freud-proven patriarchal society of female suppression or of creating a subset of an

entirely female society ( Leitch 1923). This notion, in turn, gave rise to Queer Theory as an all-

inclusive subset of individuals who have suffered from societys perpetual patriarchy, evidenced

by the writings of Adrienne Rich and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Other critics, including Laura

Mulvey and literary duo Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have, it would seem, found a

freedom of female-empowering thought through Freuds assertions that society is dominated by

the male subconscious. The goals of their criticism may vary vastly, but the underlying strength

of persuasion as well as of impression was dominated by one last father figure Sigmund

Freud.

Laura Mulvey is the first to admit that although psychoanalysis doesnt solve the problem

of patriarchy, it does provide a meaningful lens through which to analyze society. She uses
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psychoanalysis as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal

society has structured film form (2084). Throughout her critique of film, especially focused on

the relationship between the viewer and the subject, Mulvey calls on Freuds analysis both of the

Oedipal complex as well as fetishism. Woman, she asserts, then stands in patriarchal culture

as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his

fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of

woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning (2084-5). Cinema, as identified

by Mulvey, is the one artistic medium that is, for men, strong enough to allow temporary loss of

ego while simultaneously reinforcing it, and, through this dichotomy of experience, provides

heterosexual males with the ability to reinforce subconscious desires (2087). Her goal, then, was

to fight against the way cinema builds the way she [the female actress] is to be looked at into

the spectacle itself based on the Freudian insight of unconscious repression (2094).

Joining the defense of womankind against a phallic-obsessed society is writer Adrienne

Rich who viewed Freudian psychoanalysis as a path to view heterosexuality itself as an

institution of oppression instead of an assumed natural state (Leitch 1589). Rich seeks to

harmonize lesbian sexuality with a feminist movement that had largely opposed it in its efforts to

gain normalization and defends contemporary feminism against penis-envy by highlighting

a central fact of womens history: that women have always resisted male tyranny (1606). By

desexualizing feminism, Rich hoped that the movement might be further strengthened by a

broader definition of lesbian relationships, including the non-sexual varieties that she noted in

Charlotte Brontes novels (1608).

Likewise, Eve Sedgwick believed that psychoanalysis could help break down barriers of

identifying the terms gender against sex in ways that Feminism alone could not, and
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although she acknowledged that Queer Theory is the product of Feminisms focus on a single

gender, she wrote specifically to move criticism, and Feminism, beyond a point of female-centric

to begin including all varieties of individuals who have been oppressed by a universal patriarchal

society (2474). She identifies the Freudian influence on any sort of societal criticism as a primary

question of who is to have control of womens (biologically) distinctive reproductive

capability (2471). In literature in particular, she argues, critics must first ask two questions:

how a variety of forms of oppression intertwine systemically with each other and how gender

influences text even where the culturally marked gender (female) is not present (2474-5). By

building upon Freudian precepts of male domination, Sedgwick offers a broadened view of

literary criticism to include not only the feminine approach, but also the gay, lesbian, bisexual,

transgendered, and queer subconscious perpetually dominated and supressed by societys

obsession with the phallic.

Finally, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar extend Harold Blooms version of the

anxiety of influence, which is dominated by the Oedipal complex, to female writers by

describing their experience as an anxiety of authorship built upon an intense need to break free

of patriarchal constraints struggling against a need to be accepted in a society based upon those

patriarchal constraints (1927). Female authors, they argue, seek out women to emulate for their

bravery in separating themselves as writers away from societys view of the uneducated,

submissive housewife, whereas men seek to both replicate and replace their father-like literary

predecessors (1929). Agreeing with feminist theorist Juliet Mitchell, the pair argue that

psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one, and

it is this Freudian base upon which they build their argument to understand the psychosomatic

effects that patriarchal society has had on female writers (1928).

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Individually, each author draws on singular Freudian concepts such as the Oedipal

complex, subject-object relationship, displacement, and fetishism to strengthen their criticism of

society and understanding of art and literature. Together they present the massive impact that

psychoanalysis has had not only on the enlightening of the human realm of the unconscious, but

also as tool of cultural and artistic critique that advanced the views of the female, the queer, and

all other individuals submitted to a male-dominated history of repression and suppression. By

offering his radical new view of subjectivity, Freud deeply affected the analysis of characters,

authors, and readers, enabling a new understand of split, hidden, or contradictory desires and

intentions, and by using literature as a primary and very public example of these latent,

contradictory desires, he opened up the world of criticism and enabled this group of female

writers to offer up a new realm of consciousness that could help mankind evolve past his primal

instincts (Leitch 812).

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Works Cited

Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton

& Co, 2010. Print.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the

Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Leitch 1927-9.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Leitch 2084-5, 2087, 2094.

Rich, Adrienne. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Leitch 1606, 1608.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Leitch 2471, 2474-5.