Perverse pleasure and fetishized text: the deathly erotics of Carter's "The Bloody Chamber." - Angela Carter

Style, Fall, 1995 by Becky McLaughlin

II. DIEGETIC PERVERSION: THE MARQUIS AND HIS WIFE

According to Jean Clavreul, author of "The Perverse Couple," a child first becomes a desiring subject (that is, first enters language) when it realizes that the mother has no penis. Formerly, the child has not known that there is a difference between mother and father, thinking incorrectly as it does that both are equipped with the same bodily accoutrements. The new discovery forces a reinterpretation that situates the child as the one who did not know. Its new knowledge is thus lodged in a previous not-knowing: to wit, there is a before and an after, a past, present, and future. The past involves not knowing; the present involves both a wish to know and the subsequent discovery; and the future entails a relationship between these events or positions with respect to knowledge. The child must learn that someone else knew more about the object of its desire (the mother) than it did. This place of non-knowledge with regard to sex and desire is the place at which the subject locates itself in the signifying chain, a place marked by the desire of the Other, the father.

In the perverse subject, however, this discovery is rejected or disavowed. The child refuses to be the one who did not know, refuses to acknowledge that someone else - namely, the father - had prior knowledge. And so the perverse subject's understanding of the human condition, conceived as the truth, becomes rigid and unmovable. He or she refuses to believe in the illusions or disillusions to which the "normal" subject submits, refuses to believe that the thing loved most was first unknown, then known and lost in one and the same moment. What this means in more concrete terms is that the perverse subject refuses to recognize that the mother does not have a penis. By refusing to recognize this absence or lack, the subject may then avow its existence elsewhere - in some other part of the body or in some external object. The material object that represents or initiates this disavowal is the fetish. The problem with perversion, however, is that it always hovers near the edge of psychosis, which entails an absolute knowledge outside of time and the field of illusion. Because the field of illusion is constitutive of the symbolic order, a knowledge that makes no place for it is a psychotic knowledge. For the psychotic, there is no field of illusion because nothing is thought to lie beneath the surface. Nothing is thought to be missing, nothing creates desire or curiosity. And without curiosity, there is no questioning spirit and little possibility of exchange within the symbolic community.

Although Parveen Adams argues in "Of Female Bondage" that the field of perversion is not a homogeneous one, pointing out differences not only among fetishism, masochism, and sadism but also among various sub-categories of masochism, she does mention a single characteristic from which all perversions derive: disavowal. While I think Adams is right to make a distinction between one form of perversion and another, I believe that all forms of perversion also include fantasy, the factor of suspense or deferral, and transgression of the Oedipal law. Because Carter's marquis is a virtual grab-bag of the perversions - fetishism, masochism, sadism, and voyeurism, to name a few - I will not spend time making the case that the marquis is one type of pervert or another. I will simply assert that he is a pervert par excellence, hovering as he does in that precarious border-land between the "normal" and the psychotic. For example, through the use of the fetish and the fantasy screen, the marquis reconstructs the missing field of illusion just long enough to consummate his marriage. But once the sexual act has been completed - a genital consummation that satisfies desire and restores the symbolic order of difference - the marquis's wife must be murdered. For it is she who threatens the entire structure of disavowal upon which the marquis's being rests. Once she is strangled, decapitated, or pierced by a hundred spikes, her dead body becomes the fetishized object that allows the drive to continue its circuit.