Few subjects seem to have intrigued Guy de Maupassant as much as monsters. His short stories are replete with deformed and disfigured beings whose presence conditions the trajectory of the narrative as well as the relationship between the narrator and the reader. It is perhaps not surprising that Maupassant would so heavily populate his tales with monsters. As he suggests in his chronicles, the male author himself is “un monstre autant par ses qualités que par ses défauts, car, en lui, aucun sentiment simple n'existe plus” (“La Femme de lettres.” II, 430), and thus, Maupassant's very identity as an homme de lettres is entwined in the plight of the monster. Nor is it incidental that Maupassant links monstrousness to the male experience. Monstrousness, as Barbara Johnson remarks in her study of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, has always been much more consonant with masculinity than with femininity (151). Maupassant's seemingly inordinate interest in monsters might best be attributed, then, to the specific esthetic and representational problems posed by the (male) monster's body. One of the monster's most salient features is, of course, its peculiar relationship to beauty: it is a being defined by ugliness; it compels viewing, but is hideous to behold. Maupassant's strategic deployment of the monster thus highlights an unusual aporia in the history of Western cognitive development: the “normative” male experience which has given shape to the history of Western culture has, at the same time, imbued masculinity with monsterism.

CREATING MONSTERS

“La mère aux monstres,” one of Maupassant's best-known tales of monsterism, links the cognitive enigmas posed by the monster to the act of storytelling itself. The tale begins when the narrator encounters a beautiful Parisian woman as he strolls along a beach frequented by the social elite. The encounter evokes the memory of a story which had been told to the narrator long before. The tale, which involves a country girl who gives birth to a series of hideously deformed children, highlights the strange concomitance between monsterism and reproduction, whether biological or artistic. As the narrator indicates in his introduction to the framed narrative, the initial account of the country girl's “misdeeds” took place as he was being conducted on a tour of the most prominent art and architectural features of a friend's hometown:

J'avais été invité par un ami à demeurer quelque temps chez lui dans une petite ville de province. Pour me faire les honneurs du pays, il me promena de tous les cōtés, me fit voir les paysages vantés, les chàteaux, les industries, les ruines; il me montra les monuments, les églises, les vieilles portes sculptées, des arbes de taille énorme ou de forme étrange, le chêne de saint André et l'if de Roqueboise.

(I, 842)

Having exhausted the region's resources in natural and artistic beauty, the narrator's friend, “navré qu'il n'y avait plus rien à visiter” (I, 842), suddenly remembers one of the regions most notable phenomena; he decides to introduce the narrator to la mère aux monstres. The narrative thus engages on a curious quest in which the act of narration, a metaphorical birthing process, is linked to a literal birthing of the monster. The narrator will aid the reader, presumably bored by a paucity of beauty in her or his environment, by giving birth to a monster, just as his friend supplemented his hometown's lack of beauty by (re)producing a monstrous tale for the narrator.

The narrative contract is, in fact, based on a paradox: I will show you further beauty by revealing to you the source of ugliness/monstrousness. This is, in effect, the same paradoxical arrangement that the narrator proposes to the tale's readers in the outermost frame of the tale by implying that he will reveal “cette horrible histoire et cette horrible femme” in the unfolding of his story. The act of storytelling itself, presented as an innocent diversion, elicits the reader's or listener's desire to read or hear a story by dramatizing a perversion inherent to that desire; and as a result, the reader's motives in reading the tale are surreptitiously transformed into a study of this perversion: Why are you telling me this horrible story? And more importantly, why am I choosing to read it?

The tale investigates this eccentric narrative situation through its numerous embedded narratives which reposition the aforementioned questions, shifting but always maintaining their focus. First, it is the reader who is seduced into hearing the monstrous tale. This proves to be a mere restaging of the narrator's own exposure to the tale. Each successive framing brings the reader's drive to understand this desire into closer proximity with bodily desire, replicating a sexual mise à nu by stripping away layers of narrative meaning to reveal the nexus of desire. The opening (non-)image of the desirable and known female body—“une Parisienne connue, jeune, élégante, charmante, adorée et respectée de tous” (I, 842, my italics)—seems to compel a textual denuding of this sort. The utter absence of physical description of the beautiful body which the narrator views on the beach signals his unfulfilled desire to understand what others already seem to know. Indeed, the narrator's own motives for telling seem to arise from a lingering doubt: he still does not know the meaning of what has already been told to him. The new account then is not merely a conscious trick on the narrator's part to lure unsuspecting readers into a trap; it arises rather from his continued inability to comprehend his own desire, whether epistemic or bodily. The tale of what he supposedly knows—that is, the tale of the mère aux monstres—must take the place of the reader's and narrator's lack of this obvious knowledge in order to preserve the coherence of the narrative.

THE MOTHER IN THE MIRROR

If the narrator privileges the site of the mother's body as a locus of narrative coherence in which desire—or at least masculine desire—will at some point become clear, his modus operandi is supported by much of the history of Western cognitive development. Of course, Freud's role in linking bodily (primarily sexual) difference to the discourse of intersubjective relation cannot be discounted here. As Toril Moi remarks, “Freudian theory posits the drive for knowledge (epistemophilia) as crucially bound to the body and sexuality” (203), and the critical significance of the “difference” of the female body has been expounded in numerous manners since Freud's time. However, the epistemic connotations of sexual difference were already taking form centuries earlier. Peter Brooks has shown that the preference for the female rather than the male nude dates to the Renaissance, and that “[b]y the time of the modern […] the female nude is well established as the erotic object of specifically gendered spectatorship” (18). Indeed, “phallocentric” thought is predicated upon the belief that the passage from seeing to knowing is culturally, historically, and epistemically enacted in the (male) viewing of the (female) body. Ironically, it is precisely this drive to know through seeing the female body that initiates the thematics of monsterism in Maupassant's tale. The narrator's friend does not simply tell the narrator about this curious woman; rather, he insists that the narrative emanate from a viewing: “Allons voir cette femme. Je te dirai ensuite comment elle est devenue une fabrique de monstres” (I, 843).

The invocation of monsterism is already apparent in the voyeuristic seduction: I will show you a woman with a difference; then you will truly understand, and only then may your understanding assume a verbal form. The illusions of phallocentric mythology enrich the possibilities of this “difference.” At a constative level, it is the offspring, the eleven monsters to which the woman is believed to have given birth, which incarnate the difference in question and motivate the viewing. Yet the performative conditions of the storytelling, by requiring a viewing of the mother rather than the children, place the mother's body itself in what Jacques Lacan might call a phallic position; that is, it becomes a signifier of difference in general, and more specifically, of the narrator's inability to reconcile the known (the woman's body) with the unknown (the veiled, taboo male body). In this respect, the narrator's desire to understand the narrative is intrinsically linked to an ineffable desire to understand his own body, to expose its esthetic value and represent it to himself as the woman's body has been exposed and represented to him. It is therefore significant that the narrator's body, like that of the Parisian woman, remains undisclosed to the reader, undocumented by the narrative, and inexorably hidden from view: not only sexual difference, but the entire panoply of his masculine traits—his age, height, weight, hair color, facial features, etc.—are concealed rather than illustrated by the narrative.¹ The site of his own difference has been suppressed by the politics of phallocentrism: his body, like his gender, is unmarked; and consequently, his story is necessarily the story of conformity rather than particularity. Barbara Johnson quite correctly points out that this is a universal characteristic of men's efforts to verbally recount their own existence: “any man's […] autobiography consists in the story of the difficulty of conforming to the standard of what a man should be” (154, Johnson's italics). By decathecting man's body as an object of erotic, esthetic, or epistemophilic curiosity, phallocentrism inscribes monstrousness—an otherness which cannot be—into his quest to know the masculine self: it is always already known. The friend's invitation surreptitiously rhetoricizes this ruse that phallocentrism has performed on the masculine; that is, it can aptly be read as an invitation to the narrator to see and know himself: I will show you a woman with a difference, and from her exposed, visible, and knowable body you will see beauty in yourself and understand your own unspeakable difference.

The reader's problematized position in the narrative contract—why am I reading about monsterism when I have been promised beauty?—coincides, in effect, with the unconscious need to understand this perversion of gendered desire: why must I see the mother when I really want to understand the masculine? Yet the mother alone can and must be seen, for it is only she who has a physical presence in the tale; and therefore, it is only she who can impart meaning to the erotic interplay between the narrator's gaze and the Parisian woman's body. The reader is informed of the mother's age, her size, and the quality of her features: “Elle avait quarante ans environ. C'était une grande personne aux traits durs, mais bien faite, vigoureuse et saine, le vrai type de la paysanne robuste, demi-brute et demi-femme” (I, 843). Her physicality is the central focal point which ensures the readability of all the tale's figures and proposes the gamut of taxonomic schemas their bodies may assume. Judith Butler's observations on the classical association of materiality with maternity—matter and mater—thus seem to have special pertinence here. As Butler remarks, “[t]he classical configuration of matter as a site of generation or origination becomes especially significant when the account of what an object is and means requires recourse to its originating principle. When not explicitly associated with reproduction, matter is generalized as a principle of origination and causality” (31, Butler's italics). What the narrator “is and means,” what is his “matter,” and what's the “matter with him” are all evoked in his recourse to a visual inspection of an original or originating body; and consequently, the narrator's need to understand his own corporality requires him to participate in a perverse and incestuous fantasy where his body will correspond to hers. His body attests, rather, to a monstrous “transgression”: it evidences a taxonomic category that refuses to conform to those proposed by the mother. He has, unconsciously and involuntarily, violated the mother's body simply by being male. In effect, his desire to see his esthetic and epistemic value in the mother is transformed into a need to realize his own monstrousness, to account for his transgressiveness.

The germ of the promised narrative preconditions an alignment of masculinity with monstrousness by overdetermining the manner in which the narrator coordinates his epistemophilic quest with its scopophilic underpinnings. More simply stated, the narrator is motivated by what he does not know—that is, whether or not the woman is, in fact, a “fabrique de monstres”—to transform the elements of the visit into an allegorical rape, and thereby impose meaning on his incomprehensible monstrousness. If the story that he anticipates is to make sense, he must discern in advance the elements of the masculine's violent impression on and in her body. To satisfy this need, the scene accumulates indices of what Georges Bataille has described as a universal “horreur première” embodied in the prohibition of incest: “Il s'agit toujours essentiellement d'une incompatibilité de la sphère où domine l'action calme et raisonnable avec la violence de l'impulsion sexuelle” (61). The mother's house is a quite literal façade which metaphorizes this polarization. It presents an image of tranquillity and beauty which harmonizes the masculine with the feminine, and which must be “penetrated” to be understood: “Elle habitait une jolie petite maison sur le bord de la route. C'était gentil et bien entretenu. Le jardin plein de fleurs sentait bon. On eût dit la demeure d'un notaire retiré d'affaires” (I, 843). Yet the mother's appearance itself is inconsistent with this idyllic, pretty image: she is half-beast and half-woman (“demi-brute et demi-femme”), and thus only allows a semi-identification which the narrator must supplement. He has seen and already failed to understand the female half of this curious algorithm; the male half must be revealed somehow if the friend's promise is to have any value. As in the case of Dora, the woman's body is the key to this forbidden knowledge: she must know the story of her “brutalization”—her partial transformation into a brute; it must be marked on her body somewhere. Her private knowledge of male sexuality is cathected onto the narrator's need to enact a scene of “primal horror” where the narrative's problematic questions will be normalized: Why am I reading about monsters when I have been promised beauty? In order to know the precise moment in which beauty was corrupted, to (re)create the scene of the crime.

SEE(TH)ING MOTHERS

If we are to have faith in the tale's premise, the mother does possess tangible evidence of her “brutalization”: her monstrous offspring. Yet the narrative requires the reader to work backward from this “knowledge” toward a viewing. Like the Parisian woman, many are presumed to have already seen and known these beasts; they have been sold to “montreurs de phénomènes” (I, 842) for this very purpose. The inscribed narrator's opening question is therefore somewhat curious; that is, he wants the mother to assure him that the youngest child is not monstrous, that he is as normal as everyone else: “On m'a dit que votre dernier enfant était fait comme tout le monde, qu'il ne ressemblait nullement à ses frères. J'ai voulu m'en assurer. Est-ce vrai?” (I, 843). The query is compelling in numerous ways. In the opening frame, the narrator's friend had not suggested that the monsters were all boys, prototypes of the monstrous male form; yet it is an accepted assumption here. Moreover, the question is contextualized in a rather overt investigation of masculine desire. Ironically, it is not the narrators, who have come specifically to investigate this situation, but the mother herself who initiates the examination: “Qu'est-ce que désirent ces messieurs?” (I, 843). The question is perhaps even more provocative than Freud's well-known (pseudo-) interrogation of feminine desire: What does a woman want? “What do men want?” is a question that should not be asked; it should be made unnecessary by the masculine's normative position in narrative and intersubjective relations. Yet the answer—“I want to be assured that the masculine is normal and not inherently monstrous”—calls into question the entire symbolic order of language. As Bataille has explained, the answer should be “I want to see your shame”; for it is the woman's, and ideally the prostitute's, shame in the erotic exchange that affirms at once the male's dominance and his transgression:

D'habitude un homme ne peut avoir le sentiment que la loi est violée sur lui-même, c'est pourquoi il attend, fût-elle jouée, la confusion d'une femme, sans laquelle il n'aurait pas la conscience d'une violation. C'est par la honte, jouée ou non, qu'une femme s'accorde à l'interdit qui fonde en elle l'humanité.

(148)

Shame, in this instance, has already been offered to the narrators to little effect: “Elle savait la réprobation qui la frappait et ne semblait recevoir les gens qu'avec une humilité haineuse” (I, 843). The narrators' epistemophilic yearning is sustained rather than extinguished in this exhibition, perhaps because the “confusion” that Bataille prescribes for such a situation is ultimately theirs rather than hers. The compelling need to explain the origins of a consciousness of masculine transgression becomes a quandary that the mother, having raised the question herself, must now resolve for the confused narrators.

The resolution reflects the gravity of the epistemic situation; it proves complicated, and requires multiple efforts. Is it possible to withdraw the question, to assure the narrators that masculine transgressive desire simply exists without origin, and is not, in fact, a subject which requires investigation? That it is only the woman's, the other's lamentable place in this scenario that may be considered? This is the first strategy employed:

Oh non! Oh non! mon pauv'e monsieur. Il est p't'ētre encore pu laid que l'saute. J'ai pas de chance, pas de chance. Tous comme ça, mon brave monsieur, tous comme ça, c'est une désolation ça s'peut-i que l'bon Dieu soit dur ainsi à une pauv'e femme toute seule au monde, ça s'peut-i?

(I, 843)

This invocation of “phallocentric” rhetoric seems to have been undermined by the incipient exploration of masculine desire which preceded it. It is no longer satisfying to simply assert that men are “tous comme ça,” each one “encore [plus] laid” than the preceding. These assertions now only heighten the need to know. What do men want? Why is their desire imbued with ugliness? The narrators want to “look into” the situation further; that is, they insist upon seeing the newest monster: “Nous voudrions voir votre petit” (I, 844). If the first failed attempt shows that the tenets of phallocentrism can no longer conceal its perversion of masculine desire, the second effort, which stems from the narrators' renewed request, more closely examines the components of erotic transgression. The woman's shame, the incontrovertible evidence of masculine transgression, is now, at least for the narrator, highly questionable. He suspects that some error or deception may have occurred: “Elle me parut rougir. Peut-être me suis-je trompé?” (I, 844).

The gaze, too, becomes a highly suspect element in the drive to know where the tromperie, the epistemic trick, may lie. Its utility, as the mother implies in her response to the narrators, has been corrupted: “A quoi qu'ça vous servirait?” (I, 844). The question—What good is seeing?—casts doubt on the conventions of cognition that Western culture holds dear: seeing is believing; voir, c'est croire. The insinuation that seeing is useless proves inapprehensible to the narrators: “Pourquoi ne voulez-vous pas nous le faire voir? Il y a bien des gens à qui vous le montrez. Vous savez de qui je parle!” (I, 844). Seeing is, of course, the common bond that has defined masculinity, and bound it to law in modern Western culture: seeing the evidence of a crime is the most convincing manner of attaining justice; and often when evidence has disappeared, justice cannot be rendered. But the mother's need to “hide the evidence” seems to indicate a fallibility in this supposed syntagm. It is perhaps appropriate for the mother to voice this objection. Traditionally, as Luce Irigaray reminds us, the “phallic gaze” has produced subjugation rather than justice for women:

La femme, dans cet imaginaire sexuel, n'est que support plus ou moins complaisant, à la mise en acte des fantasmes de l'homme. Qu'elle y trouve, par procuration, de la jouissance, c'est possible et même certain. Mais celle-ci est avant tout prostitution masochiste de son corps à un désir qui n'est pas le sien.

(25)

Yet this scenario does not fully explain what transpires here. That “masculine” desire is not woman's own, as Irigaray illustrates, is perhaps somewhat obvious; the more compelling question in which Maupassant engages seems to be whether or not masculine desire is man's own. The mother has succeeded in withdrawing herself from what Irigaray has called “l'économie phallique dominante” (24); that is, she has prevented a complete visual inspection from taking place: “Vous ne le verrez pas, non, non, vous ne le verrez pas; allez-vous-en, allez-vous-en” (I, 844); but her abnegation of the visual “phallic” field of desire merely produces ugliness in herself, and especially, in her own gaze.

It is, in fact, the initial reference to a possible viewing that triggers the transformation of the mother's demeanor: “Elle jeta sur nous un regard sournois et furieux” (I, 843); and the animalistic impulses are still apparent following the second request: “Et elle avait relevé la tête, nous dévisageant par coups d'oeil brusques avec du feu dans le regard” (I, 844). Such indices of a growing scopic violence preparing to erupt are multiplied throughout the passage, and coordinated with the mother's search for a voice:

Elle parlait vite, les yeux baissés, d'un air hypocrite, pareille à une bête féroce qui a peur. Elle adoucissait le ton âpre de sa voix, et on s'étonnait que ces paroles larmoyantes et filées en fausset sortissent de ce grand corps osseux, trop fort, aux angles grossiers, qui semblait fait pour les gestes véhéments et pour hurler à la façon des loups.

(I, 843)

The proliferation of animalistic images in Maupassant's language would probably not surprise Bataille, who perceives animal impulses in all forms of erotic tension: “C'est un mouvement animal en nous qui est l'origine de la crise” (116). More surprising, however, is the manner in which the narrative reconciles the mother's troubling question—what good is seeing?—with her need to verbalize the masculine's otherness. The mother demonstrates the origins of masculine transgressive desire by dramatizing the monstrous for the narrators: a coming to language of the interdiction of the male body and of masculine desire. The transformation of this “mouvement animal” into an avisual telling is acted out in the mother's further “brutalization.” Her body assumes both the proportions—“ce grand corps osseux, trop fort, aux angles grossiers”—and the promise of violence—“Elle se mit à trembler de fureur, agitant ses poings […] Elle allait nous sauter au visage” (I, 844)—necessary to convince the narrators that they have “seen enough” to understand masculinity, to construct an image of the male body from her pantomime.

The episode modifies the sense of what is required to constitute an “eyewitness account” of masculine identity. The “mouvement animal” suggested in the mother's aggression is sublimated into audible rather than visual information: “Elle marchait vers nous, les mains sur les hanches. Au son brutal de sa voix, une sorte de gémissement ou plutôt un miaulement, un cri lamentable d'idiot partit de la pièce voisine” (I, 844). This confusion of an unintelligible, profoundly other utterance with the visual information they were seeking resolves the mother's perplexing questions—What do men want? How will seeing clarify what men want?—in a rather surprising way. The resolution involves a monstrous transformation of the male self into a form which is tellable yet not visible.

The “eyewitnessing” of the monster, an act of aural rather than visual perception, reflects a further dimension of the patent irony suggested in the narrative contract. The tale's recourse to a perversion of narrative desire—why am I enticed into reading about monsters in my search for beauty?—tantalizes its readers precisely because of the absence of monsters in their empirical study of their surroundings. The monster, which has no referent and exists solely as a conceptual figure, can only be brought into being through a confusion of the reader's relationship with the world. The monster represents, then, a peculiar will to pervert our cognitive processing of the world around us: the confusion of hearing for seeing for knowing, etc. Storytelling strangely relies upon the same type of confusion: I, the storyteller, will construct a cognitive dimension for you to which you do not otherwise have access; I will tell you, and you will see. This, of course, is the converse of the inscribed narrator's promise to the narrator—you will see, then I will tell you. Yet the cultural construction of the masculine seems to parallel the tale's outcome. The semiotization of the male self has been dissociated from the male body. It is not necessary or useful to see the male body; it has always already been replaced by a semiotic construct which forces visual evidence to conform to its preexisting model. And thus any act of storytelling necessarily involves seeing one thing and telling something else.² Maupassant illustrates this in the aftermath of the narrators' visit to the mother's home:

Quand nous fûmes devant la porte, mon ami me demanda:

“Eh bien! Tu l'as vue? Qu'en dis-tu?”

Je répondis:

“Apprends-moi donc l'histoire de cette brute.”

Et voici ce qu'il me conta en revenant à pas lents sur la grand-route blanche, bordée de récoltes déjà mûres, qu'un vent léger, passant par souffles, faisait onduler comme une mer calme.

(I, 844)

The search for a model of the male self yields to a curious story of transgression which re-enacts the visit in narrative form: seeing (“tu l'as vue?”) engenders a voice (“qu'en dis-tu?”) which echoes the unearthly voice of the imagined monster. What the voice desires is not material evidence (we haven't yet seen the body. Why don't we go to the freak show for proof? etc.), but further confabulation: “Apprends-moi donc l'histoire de cette brute.” And thus the resulting voice, which probes the formation of this brute, negotiates the return of the mer/mêre calme by extricating brutality from her material being and depositing it in a clearly demarcated narrative/monstrous space which will be the space of the narrativized male self.³

MONSTROUS MODELS

The central drama of Maupassant's tale is striking if only by its stark contrast to standard accounts of monstrousness. As a number of scholars have argued. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the monolithic tale of monstrous origins which has come to define the genre, seems to explain the relationship between the birth of the monster and the drive to account for one's self in terms of the woman author's otherness. Barbara Johnson has astutely observed that Shelley envisions herself as an appendage to her text, unlike the novel's narrators, who speak into mirrors of their own transgression (146-47). Similarly, Peter Brooks remarks the absence of female models as a driving motivation for the narrative: “He [the monster] radicalizes the situation of Eve, who also has no ‘model’—Adam is created in God's image, God is male; thus in whose image is Eve created?” (217). Maupassant's situation, as a male author writing about a mother of monsters rather than a female author writing about a father of monsters, is, of course, somewhat different than Shelley's. His tale reflects the specific problems of having a model, or at least the illusion thereof. Adam, the prototype of manliness created from earth by a male God, presents an insoluble dilemma for the narrator of Maupassant's tale: he is refigured in the tale's conclusion as the beautiful woman's deformed children hidden in the sand: “trois enfants roulés dans le sable” (I, 847). Yet the narrator, having reflected on the very question which is conventionally believed to motivate the Frankenstein monster's story, is offered anything but a clear and precise model on which to base his knowledge. The children's father, like the unknowable God in whose image Adam was created, has no image himself:

Je demandai:

“Qui donc est le père?”

Il répondit:

“On ne sait pas. Il ou ils ont une certaine pudeur. Il ou ils se cachent. Peut-être partagent-ils les bénéfices.”

(I, 847)

Whereas Roland Barthes asserts that every narrative's promise of truth is contingent upon the staging of an absent Father (20), Maupassant seems to suggest that every narrative's promise of truth is, in fact, a promise to confuse the Father's absence with metaphoric or metonymic models of man which the narrative itself will construct. The narrator's friend, in promising to narrate “la vérité, l'exacte vérité” (I, 843), thus follows cultural edicts by assigning no importance whatsoever to the physical male model which spawned these monsters. His image and his identity are evacuated from the meaning of the monster's body for both the friend and the narrator himself, who, after arduously seeking out the female model, does not reflect for even a moment on the possible identity of the father: “Je ne songeais plus à cette lointaine aventure” (I, 847).

The monster's body originates in the union of the invisible “model” male body and its troping as the model of phallocentric culture. As in the case of Maupassant's more famous “Le Horla,” the mirror itself is treacherous; that is, it is complicitous in the passage of the male self from an anatomical being, which must be seen to have referential function, to a semiotic construct, whose operation as a signifier precludes it from being clearly visible. Consequently, the “mirror of transgression” into which Maupassant's narrators speak constantly confronts them with missing reflections that they must supplement in order for the masculine to make sense. The unseen, unknown father—“On ne lui connaissait point d'amoureux” (I, 845)—is thus at once the product and the harbinger of the unseen, unknown infant which appears at the outset of the frame and whose body is compressed in the mother's womb to match, as closely as possible, the father's dimensions:

Voulant à tout prix cacher son malheur, elle se serrait le ventre violemment avec un système qu'elle avait inventé, corset de force, fait de planchettes et de cordes. Plus son flanc s'enflait sous l'effort de l'enfant grandissant, plus elle serrait l'instrument de torture, souffrant le martyre, mais courageuse à la douleur, toujours souriante et souple, sans laisser rien voir ou soupçonner.

(I, 845)

The primal fantasy imagery that any monster tale seems to compel is similarly “crushed.” It is problematized by the transformation of the male image from a visible reflection to a phallologic construct; and as a result, the interpretive quests that the monster's origins would normally elicit for narrator and reader alike are subverted. The “deeply hidden search for the mother” (Brooks 216) which Marc A. Rubenstein determines to be at the heart of Frankenstein is impossible here: the mother is not only ever present, but also unchanging, even during her pregnancy. Her prior defiance—“vous ne le verrez pas”—assumes new connotations in this context, and conditions an analeptic re-reading of its import: you will not see it, the signifier of phallic transgression, on my body. The arcana of her body are unsuitable as objects of epistemophilic curiosity: “On ne lui connaissait point d'amoureux, on ne lui soupçonnait point de faiblesse” (I, 845). They do not explain intersubjective relations, for they do not bear the mark of phallologism in which their mystery is rooted. Rather, the marks of phallologism themselves, which form a composite of male identity, are revealed as a foil to the mother's constancy. The rhetorical indicator of the difference which the tale's design equates with a denuding of the female body, the conventional site of scopophilic concern, correspondingly shifts to the denuding of the phallologicized male body. Unlike the mother's body, which, though clearly visible, allows nothing to be seen or suspected (“sans laisser rien voir ou soupçonner”), the male infant is exposed and presented to the readers for full visual inspection:

Son crâne pressé s'allongea, jaillit en pointe avec deux gros yeux en dehors tout sortis du front. Les membres opprimés contre le corps poussèrent, tortus comme le bois des vignes, s'allongèrent démesurément, terminés par des doigts pareils à des pattes d'araignée.

(I, 845)

The infant's naked body resonates the metaphorical shifting which pervades poststructuralist assessments of eroticism; that is, it gives a material signified to the “cri lamentable d'idiot,” the very story that the narrators are telling. Having replaced the woman as object of desire, it is, nonetheless, fundamentally undesirable. Its features give a material account of the corruption of desire. The monster is a sort of amalgam of nature, from plant life (“le bois des vignes”) to insect life (“des pattes d'araignée”). Like Adam himself, the infant constitutes the culmination of a broadly encompassing model of the Earth's types. Yet the most prominent of all its characteristics are its two large eyes, which protrude to such an extent that they are separate entities outside of its body: “deux gros yeux en dehors tout sortis du front.” Unlike the monster's other traits, which have some basis in nature—that is, they can be compared to some categorical schema with which the reader and narrators are familiar—the eyes are the site of an uncharacterizable deformity: they are merely large and protruding; they do not resemble anything in nature. It is, in fact, only the infant's eyes which instruct the narrators as to its gender. The boy's torso remains “tout petit et rond comme une noix” (I, 845); it can still be identified with the undifferentiated ovule innate to the female body. However, the eyes, rather than another more obvious site of male anatomy,⁴ are disturbingly inconsistent with the insubstantiality of the female sex, what Luce Irigaray has so famously called “the horror of nothing to see.” The masculine body in narrative constitutes something which might more aptly be called “the horror of something which sees.”⁵

The narrators have, in fact, passed through the looking glass. Their initial quest for a mirror of their natural bodies—“I want to be assured that the male body is normal”—has yielded a body which does not have an intrinsic image, but rather, only looks or looks like … It is, in effect, a model only of itself; and as such, it is not constant, but can be varied to further concretize man's relationship to and dominion over nature. Subsequent models, as the narrator later tells us, will be adapted to more fully represent nature's categories: “Elle en eut de longs et de courts, les uns pareils à des crabes, les autres semblables à des lézards” (I, 846). The monster is meaningful, then, only to the extent in which it is translatable into something else, a figuration—like the Lacanian phallus itself—of the en dehors, a symbolizable realm which would not be possible without it. It does not have its own story; indeed, it makes no noise at all. Its body, from the moment of birth, is already a figure of transformation and exchange. Perhaps appropriately, the first transformation comes in the form of storytelling:

“Quand les sarcleuses, accourues à son aide, virent la bête qui lui sortait du corps, elles s'enfuirent en poussant des cris. Et le bruit se répandit dans la contrée qu'elle avait mis au monde un démon,” (I, 845).

The monster's narrative value effects a further cathexis which oddly reflects on the infant's abnegated corporality. The infant is ironically recathected to his own body and made desirable through a further abnegation of his physicality; that is, as a model of only itself, the infant can act as an interchangeable signifier of either men's bodies or money: “Or, un jour, des montreurs de phénomènes qui passaient entendirent parler de l'avorton effrayant et demandèrent à le voir pour l'emmener s'il leur plaisait. Il leur plut, et ils versèrent à la mère cinq cents francs comptant,” (I, 846).

The tale's paradoxical alignment of the quest for beauty with the quest for monsters is clarified in this strange conversion. If money, as Vespasian is famously believed to have proclaimed, has no odor, it is because it, like the phallicized male body, has no place in nature; or to borrow the terms of Michel Serres, “[l]'argent efface toute marque, tout obstacle qui ferait contradiction” (87). The male body, extricated from nature, has assumed the same connotations. The avorton effrayant cannot be distinguished from a “normal” male body; its ugliness cannot be contradicted. Its sole attribute, whether beautiful or ugly, is to be “handsome.” And it is thus appropriate, as Lawrence Schehr remarks, that the character of the male esthetic is indistinguishable from that of money: “the English language gets it right: a man is handsome just as a sum of money can be handsome” (79).

The sense of justice that the narrators, and perhaps the readers, are seeking is posited on the difficult task of bounding the conversion of male corporality to law—a statute of habeas corpus which will recover the male body. The body has been dispersed in storytelling—“le bruit se répandit dans la contrée,” “des montreurs de phénomènes entendirent parler de l'avorton effrayant,” etc.—and in the abstract symbolic value of money; it regains its material form in a (re)union of these two aspects of the masculine. The stories circulating about the newborn monster are thus “retold” as discussions of the newfound wealth into which he can be converted: “elle se mit à marchander, à discuter sou par sou” (I, 846). The body which re-emerges from this process is not the boy's natural, physical body, but a new textual body which will guarantee the equation between the male self and money: “Pour n'être pas volée, elle fit un papier avec eux. Et ils s'engagèrent à lui compter en outre quatre cents francs par an, comme s'ils eussent pris cette bête à leur service” (I, 846, my italics). And accordingly, the absent unknown biological father is supplanted in the signifying process by the montreurs de phénomènes, the very incarnations of “the horror of something which sees” whose union with the woman produces a new sort of offspring: a masculine self which has meaning only in and for the law.

BODIES OF LAW

That the lawmaking process conditions the reading and writing of gendered desire comes, of course, as no surprise to any active reader of Western culture. In one especially compelling reflection on this scenario, Bataille cites the interdiction which separates human beings from sexual liberty as a universal characteristic of the human condition. Yet perhaps the most well-known formulation on the laws of sex as they apply to gender was voiced by Freud, whose Totem and Taboo (1912-13) speculates on the origins of patriarchal culture. At least since this time, critical discourse has generally accepted the primacy of the male body in the enactment and implementation of law, and in many instances adopted Freud's typology as the model to be deconstructed.⁶ This situation has had numerous interesting repercussions for literary criticism. Most notably, the hermeneutics of desire, in accordance with patriarchal thought, have been activated to elicit an understanding of the law through the danger and scandal enshrouded in the female body and feminine desire.⁷ Another question—How do men come to an understanding of the law?—poses a problem which has proven more difficult to address. This is, perhaps, because the danger posed by masculine desire consists in revealing the scandal of the male body's normalcy, a concept which must be continually repressed and hidden from view in order for the law to have meaning.

For the narrators of “La Mère aux monstres,” the laws governing masculine desire are confronted with storytelling's failure to produce—or more precisely, its requirement to conceal—the male body. The mirror into which they gaze merely confirms the menace of the masculine; it is initially invisible, and subsequently deformed and effrayant. Accepting the law which is consubstantial to their own bodies thus requires them to adopt a misoviristic attitude: that is, they must reconceive the prototypical male body as something which, due to its transformable nature, has no specific form, and therefore cannot be properly human. Adam's body, encrusted in dirt, is only made visible through a recognition of God's law as its only prototype. His counterparts in Maupassant's tale, the children covered in sand, are similarly brought into view through the framed story of the monstrous child's curious origins. The narrator, having learned the law, is “rewarded” with startling visual acuity in the tale's conclusion: unlike his frustrating efforts to see the monstrous child in the earlier frame, he is now able to see these children's monstrous bodies through the mounds of sand which cover them: “Je m'aperçus alors que ces trois petits êtres étaient difformes, bossus et crochus, hideux” (I, 847). In effect, the narrator of the framed story has himself become a montreur de phénomènes. He has elicited in his friend, the tale's primary narrator, this “horror of something which sees,” the monstrous eyes which evidenced the prototypical monster's maleness, his uncharacterizable divergence from nature.

If man's coming to an acceptance of the law secretly requires a mistrust of or disdain for the male body, the condition seems to have serious consequences for the way in which his desire manifests itself. His desire for justice must somehow be brought into accordance with sexual desire. In this case, the primary narrator's desire to understand the beautiful Parisian woman's body must coincide with his understanding of the male body as a figuration of the law of exchange. The erotic exchange thus reprises several elements of the initial transformation which help the narrator to understand the nature of eroticism. In the original (framed) tale, patriarchal justice endorses the conversion of the male body into a monster. Religious authority cites la justice as a means of preventing the mother from doing away with the monster: “Elle éleva son monstre qu'elle haïssait d'ailleurs d'une haine sauvage et qu'elle eût étranglé peut-être, si le curé, prévoyant le crime, ne l'avait épouvantée par la menace de la justice” (I, 846). The horror produced in the woman by the male body-law syntagm is coordinated with the religious “father's” acute ability to foresee—“prévoyant le crime.” Yet in the subsequent invocation of justice, there is nothing to see: “La justice essaya d'intervenir, mais on ne put rien prouver. On la laissa donc en paix fabriquer ses phénomènes” (I, 846). The mother has learned in this intervening period to sustain desire through the taint of monsterism. In fact, it is the monstrous nature of the male body which now elicits and accounts for her desire: “Ce gain inespéré affola la mère, et le désir ne la quitta plus d'enfanter un autre phénomène” (I, 846). Her desire, like the male body, has been monsterized.

Misogyny, like misoviry, is, in this respect, a strange byproduct of the “rewriting” of the male body. The young woman, who was “torturée de honte” (I, 845) at the prospect of giving birth to a normal child, has had her desire legitimized and normalized in the law's implicit endorsement of monsterism. The shame elicited through contact with the male body is reversed by the conversion of the masculine: “Elle, honteuse d'abord, refusait de laisser voir cette sorte d'animal” (I, 846); her shame disappears, and the male body is made suitable as an object of spectatorship when she learns its exchange value. Female heterosexual desire is, then, scandalous to the extent that it is sustained in a challenge to the sorts of semiotization of the body that govern Western societies; that is, it is predicated on the normalcy of the male body, and on the return of the very male body that the law has replaced. In its primitive state, it is fundamentally “shameful”; for it is only woman, who is outside of the phallologic field, that can instruct man on the normalcy of his own body. And the threat that this poses can only be construed as a faute, an epistemic blunder forever transmitted through the dynamics of desire: “Elle commit une faute, comme elles font toutes, un soir de récolte, au milieu des gerbes fauchées, sous un ciel d'orage, alors que l'air immobile et pesant semble plein d'une chaleur de four, et trempe de sueur les corps bruns des gars et des filles” (I, 845).

This primal moment in which “les corps bruns des gars et des filles” are indistinguishable to the storyteller sets the framed narrative's trajectory: it will correct this faute, bring female desire into accordance with the law by conditioning her desire for a body which is truly different. Perhaps, then, narrative's success can only be measured in the degree to which it polarizes gender difference, and makes its contours clear to the reader. The primary narrator would thus model an “appropriate” reaction by reprising the mother's initial hatred for the male body to which she has given birth—“Elle éleva son monstre qu'elle haïssait d'ailleurs d'une haine sauvage et qu'elle eût étranglé”—and announcing his own hatred for her: “Un dégoût profond me soulevait le coeur, et une colère tumultueuse, un regret de n'avoir pas étranglé cette brute quand je l'avais sous la main” (I, 846).

The confusion that has conventionally been centered around femininity and the female body in the history of Western cognition—perhaps most notably memorialized in Freud's allusion to “the riddle of femininity”—attests to the numerous “confusions” which are inherent to our notion of justice. We are reminded in the tale's closing section of the beautiful woman's numerous male admirers, testaments to the inscribed narrator's earlier remark that “tous les hommes n'ont pas peur de l'enfer” (I, 845). The scene paints a portrait of how humans, banished from the Garden of Eden, learn justice from their own bodies. Something strange has happened: the gardeners, originally intended to help in the search for justice—“les sarcleuses, accourues à son aide”—have left the garden. And so too has their role been reversed; they have spread the very seeds of injustice that they sought to control, participating in the mise au monde of both the law and monsterism through their storytelling. The children's bodies, as figuration of law, now serve as an indictment which wasn't possible earlier. Unlike the men drawn to the woman's beauty, the narrators prefer to “throw the book at her”: “Ne la plains pas, mon cher. Ce sont les pauvres petits qu'il faut plaindre” (I, 847). Her body is now an open book for them, a suitable mirror of the constancy of their own bodies in the law. Like their bodies' suppression under the law, hers is imagined to be bound into a fixed shape, the result of figures “restées lines jusqu'au dernier jour” (I, 847). Their optical prowess is operational here too, allowing them to visualize themselves in this scenario as the corset which maintains this constancy: “Ces monstres-là sont fabriqués au corset” (I, 847). The male body has been confirmed to be a monstrous contraption which unites with the female body to condition her unfaltering beauty and create new monsters.

Why does one read about monsters when promised beauty? Beauty, justice, and monsters have been brought together in a confused sense of “fairness.” As Elaine Scarry has pointed out, the ethical and esthetic principles evoked by “fairness” are etymologically linked (91). Perhaps, too, she is correct to direct us toward beauty to improve our sense of justice.⁸ Beauty, like narrative, is a contract which promises a fair exchange. In telling me a story, you have promised to teach me a lesson about fairness, to assist me in interacting justly with other members of my community. Yet how can such contracts be just when their lessons are inherently monstrous? Maupassant teaches us a rather contrasting lesson: the monster is a continual testimonial to beauty, a primordial measure of fairness in that his body, by virtue of its very ugliness, constantly reminds the reader of an unsymbolizable moment in which gendered perversions and narrative versions were conceived.

Notes

1. In his study of representations of men's bodies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, Lawrence Schehr has astutely shown that physical details concerning male traits are commonly suppressed. See Parts of an Andrology, p. 83.

2. Barbara Herrnstein Smith has excellently illustrated the peculiar relationship between modes of discourse and the construction of truths in Belief and Resistance. See her chapter entitled “Making (Up) the Truth,” pp. 23-36.

3. Maupassant seems to have taken special measures to clearly distinguish the second framed narrative, in which the narrator's friend recounts the origins of the mother's monster making, from the other sections of the tale. Unlike the first framed narrative, this one is set off by stars.

4. Although Maupassant does not specifically mention this “more obvious” site of male anatomy, his account of a long, slender cranium with two orbs dangling from one end is in itself almost explicitly descriptive.

5. The eyes are frequently the site of gender differentiation in Maupassant's short stories. See, for example, “Orphans and Others: Gender and Narrativity in Maupassant's Orphelin.”

6. See, for example, Luce Irigaray's rebuttal to Freudian typology: “Mais cet ordre [le patriarcat] est bien aujourd'hui celui qui fait la loi. Le méconnaitre serait aussi naif que de le laisser à sa domination, sans interroger les conditions de possibilité de celle-ci” (71).

7. Perhaps the most recent example of this sort of investigation can be found in Nathalie Buchet Rogers' Fictions du scandale.

   Le désir est masculin dans son essence, Freud l'a bien compris, qui ne distingue qu'un modele de libido: une libido masculine. Le désir doit done être réservē a l'homme, le desir feminin n'étant que le résultat d'une usurpation scandaleuse. Il s'agit done d'un desir contraire à la nature et par conséquent “autre” (43).

8. See On Beauty and Being Just, pp. 86-93.

Works Cited

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Brooks, Peter. Body Works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Hadlock, Philip. “The Semiotics of Maternity in Maupassant's Une vie.” In Buford Norman, ed., The Mother in/and French Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 93-113.

———. “Orphans and Others: Gender and Narrativity in Maupassant's Orphelin.” The French Review 73.1 (December 1999): 281-89.

Irigaray, Luce. Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un. Paris: Minuit, 1977.

Johnson, Barbara. A World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

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———. Contes et nouvelles. Ed. Louis Forestier. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard Bibliothèque de la Pleiade.

Moi, Toril. “Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge.” New Directions in Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Teresa Brennan, ed. New York: Routledge, 1989. 189-205.

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Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Schehr, Lawrence. Parts of an Andrology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Serres, Michel. L'Hermaphrodite. Paris: Flammarion, 1989.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Belief and Resistance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.