SOURCE: Ballaster, Ros. “Wild Nights and Buried Letters: The Gothic ‘Unconscious’ of Feminist Criticism.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 58-70. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

“As dream or nightmare, or both at once, [sexuality] reigns in our lives as an anarchic force, refusing to be chastened and tamed by sense or conscience to a sentence in a revolutionary manifesto.”¹ Cora Kaplan here announces the “agenda” of feminism in its “second-wave” from 1970 onwards, the attempt to analyse the role of sexuality as the key to both the oppression and liberation of women. That her pursuit of the disturbing signs of sexuality in feminist writing lights upon Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is by no means coincidental, for feminist criticism has consistently found its own “unconscious” in what might be dubbed “female Romanticism”.

Two important articles of Anglo-American feminist criticism, Mary Jacobus's “The Buried Letter: Villette”, first published in 1979, and Cora Kaplan's “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism”, first published in 1983, locate the origin of the modern construction of “woman” as over-determined signifier of sexuality in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century culture, understanding Wollstonecraft's polemical writing as both symptom and analysis of that construction. For Kaplan and Jacobus, Wollstonecraft's Vindication dramatises the tension between desire and reason in terms of the return of a primal complex in the adult ego, figured through the discursive tactics of “sensibility”, that the text struggles imperfectly to repress. Jacobus concludes her analysis of Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) by locating it in the feminist tradition of Wollstonecraft's Vindication which though “directed against the infantilising Rousseauistic ideal of feminine ‘sensibility’”:

not only advocates the advantages for women of a rational (rather than sentimental) education, but attempts to insert the author herself into the predominantly male discourse of Enlightenment Reason, or “sense.” Yet, paradoxically, it is within this shaping Rousseauistic sensibility that Mary Wollstonecraft operates as both woman and writer—creating in her two highly autobiographical novels, Mary (1788) and ten years later, The Wrongs of Woman, fictions which, even as they anatomise the constitution of femininity within the confines of “sensibility,” cannot escape its informing preoccupations and literary influence.²

Kaplan, too, understands Wollstonecraft's writing as bedevilled by the inescapable language of sensibility (apparently coterminous with sexuality):

Woman's reason may be the psychic heroine of A Vindication, but its Gothic villain, a polymorphous perverse sexuality, creeping out of every paragraph and worming its way into every warm corner of the text, seems in the end to win out.

(45-6)

In these accounts, then, “sensibility” has an uncanny facility of reappearing at the point when its repression is most powerfully asserted; it functions as a form of childhood memory for the rational woman author, but, significantly, both Jacobus and Kaplan stress that this is not a prelinguistic feminine semiotic pressure on symbolic paternal language, but acknowledged as itself a construction of the symbolic which must be overcome by the woman writer as the origin of her oppression rather than source of her liberation.

Both Kaplan and Jacobus understand the problematic of this division between the passionate and the rational self in the female writing subject as symptomatic of modern feminist theory in general. Jacobus suggests that in attempting to trace the process of repression at work in fiction the feminist critic can find a mirror for her own sense of the tension between the “prevailing conventions of academic literary criticism” and the political urgency of her own “anger, rebellion and rage”, a process that Lucy Snowe's struggle to narrate her “self” in Villette vividly figures (60). Kaplan insists that the feminist project must forsake its pursuit of a “feminist humanism” that argues for the possibility of women being released into a “natural” sexuality outside the ideological distortions Wollstonecraft so effectively exposes. Locating Adrienne Rich in a continuum with Wollstonecraft in that her account of “compulsory heterosexuality”, like Wollstonecraft's of “sensibility”, is one of a complex and multivalent system of male power that alienates women from their true desire (for Rich the desire for other women, for Wollstonecraft the desire for rationality which she identifies as synonymous with power), Kaplan points out that Wollstonecraft's Enlightenment project for feminism “never had much going for it—not because an immanent and irrepressible sexuality broke through levels of female self-denial, but rather because the anti-erotic ethic itself foregrounded and constructed a sexualised subject” (50).

Female Romanticism, then, finds itself relocating women as subjects only in terms of their relation to the sexuality/sensibility it seeks to deny. Sexuality here might be seen as structurally equivalent to Freud's understanding of the role of the unconscious in the construction of subjectivity. Though it exists only in relation to the ego it is ultimately determining. The critic's or analyst's task is to pursue the traces of its presence in the symptomatic text, a presence which is manifested in repression rather than expression. This essay seeks to evaluate and question the role of sexuality as the determining “unconscious” of feminist criticism which is most powerfully felt in the centrality of the Gothic to Anglo-American critical appropriations of a psychoanalytic and post-structuralist feminist tradition from France. If, in feminist psychoanalytic literary theory, the Freudian “hysteric” emerges as a proto-feminist (writer), struggling to bring into expression through displaced bodily (or textual) signs her experience of the denial of female agency in a patriarchal culture, then it is the Gothic heroine who most powerfully and explicitly “represents” this hysterical condition to the feminist reader. This version of the Gothic “heroine” profoundly restricts the possibilities of a feminist account of the representational architectonics of women's oppression.

Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novels importantly distinguish between material oppression and psychic confusion; her heroines are explicitly criticised for seizing on “supernatural” explanations which prove easier for them to accept than the realities of male power and material exploitation in the adult world they are being forced to enter. Emily St. Aubert, the heroine of Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), not only learns that seemingly supernatural phenomena have rational material explanations but also that it is not sexual desire that motivates her male oppressor, Montoni, but material gain and political power in which he views women simply as a means rather than an end. Emily's dangerous lack of knowledge is not solely sexual innocence but political ignorance. Imprisoned in Montoni's castle in Italy she comes to realise that he is the head of a group of banditti and assumes he “meant to retrieve his broken fortunes by the plunder of travellers”.³ Radcliffe adds that this supposition “however natural, was in part erroneous, for she was a stranger to the state of this country and to the circumstances, under which its frequent wars were partly conducted” (358). Montoni's ambition goes beyond the acquisition of wealth to the acquisition of political power, in which his marriage to Emily's aunt and his pursuit of control of Emily's person is only a small part itself. The spectre, then, that haunts Mysteries of Udolpho is the possibility that the Gothic sense of female terror may be a recognition that in the pursuit of politico-material power women are no more than exchange tokens between men; the “hidden” supernatural and sexual causes which the text puts into play may be nothing more than displacements or smokescreens which provide the Gothic heroine with an illusory sense of the possibility of a political agency or significance from which she is, in reality, excluded. Feminist literary critics have tended to repeat this movement of wilful “misprision” on the part of the Gothic heroine, finding it easier to explore questions of psychic division and sexual repression in women's writing than material social and political oppression. The article concludes by offering a consideration of one of Isak Dinesen's most complex and disturbing Seven Gothic Tales (1934), “The Monkey”, to highlight the ways in which Gothic fiction inscribes its own understanding of the dangers of reading a repressed desire as determining origin rather than symptom of women's alienation from social agency.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests in her 1986 preface to the reprint of her 1980 The Coherence of Gothic Conventions that psychoanalysis appears to “make sense” of the Gothic because, like the Gothic, it too is engaged in a distinctively Romantic “propagation of a … problematics of individual ‘character’”.⁴ Sedgwick posits that Gothic fiction of the late eighteenth century falls into a gender division that can be equated with Freud's gendered distinction between the paranoid and the hysteric:

Call for convenience's sake, the heroine of the Gothic a classic hysteric, its hero a classic paranoid. The immobilising and costly struggle, in the hysteric, to express graphically through her bodily hieroglyphic what cannot come into existence as narrative, resembles in this the labor of the paranoid subject to forestall being overtaken by the feared/desired other, by himself mimetically reproducing the perceived or projected desire/threat of the other in a temporarily paralysed form.

(vi)

Two distinct traditions, male and female, might then be understood to co-exist in the Gothic most strongly marked perhaps in the distinction between Matthew Lewis' tormented Faustian hero, Ambrosius in The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe's dutiful sensibility-sated Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Mary Jacobus's essay, “The Buried Letter”, points to the “hysterical” structure of Charlotte Brontë's mid-nineteenth-century novel which “mirrors” the hysteria of its heroine, Lucy Snowe. The representational “order” of the Victorian realist text is repeatedly punctured by a spectral Romanticism which cannot be put into narrative except in the shape of a disturbance of linear historicised courtship to marriage plot. It is the “ghost” of the nun of the Rue Rossette which “triggers” in the narrative the pressure of hysterical desire in Lucy's narrative. The nun, Jacobus argues, can be only understood as “the alien, ex-centric self which no image can mirror—only the structure of language” (52). Similarly, Kaplan's account of Wollstonecraft's Vindication understands the hidden presence of sexuality (bearing in mind Freud's gloss to the term “unheimlich” drawn from Schelling that it is “what ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light”⁵) as visible only in terms of disturbance of the rational structure of argument in the text.

Disturbances of language are, then, a register of the struggle of repressed desire to signify just as the hysteric's physical disturbances (failures of physical function in particular) indicate a repressed childhood trauma which cannot be directly “spoken”. In the case of both hysteric and paranoiac, internal psychic contradiction is mirrored in narrative through the use of techniques that point to duality. In the paranoid text the figure of the double serves as a projection outward of self-division (most often in the case of the Gothic “monster” or “villain” who “acts out” the hero's repressed desires); in the hysterical text the narrative itself takes on the features of the internal split within the heroine (the puncturing of narrative realism with dream sequences or the explosion of an excessive Romantic rhetoric in the linear progress of the tale). However, the double is, I would argue, not exclusive to the male Gothic nor is the hysterical disturbance of language exclusive to the female Gothic.

In what follows I argue that Isak Dinesen's short story “The Monkey” selfconsciously deploys the use of the device of the double in a narrative that might be understood otherwise to follow the hysterical conventions of the female Gothic.⁶ In so doing, she begins to construct a version of a female “uncanny” that is expressed through paranoid projection rather than hysterical introjection and leads her reader back to a recognition of the material social and economic grounds of women's oppression rather than the psychosexual contradictions that in the Romantic period of the Gothic had served to displace or conceal those grounds.

Isak Dinesen's “The Monkey” powerfully dramatises the complexity of the position of women in Gothic fiction. In this story, set in the first half of the nineteenth century, a young guardsman named Boris comes to visit his aunt, the Prioress of Closter Seven (a secular convent in Northern Europe for widowed and unmarried mature women), to request her aid in arranging a marriage for him that will serve to dispel the rumours circulating at court of his involvement, along with others in his regiment, in crimes connected “with those romantic and sacred shores of ancient Greece” (77). His aunt suggests Athena Hopbehallus, the daughter of a Polish Count, whose estates border the convent, and Boris duly visits to make his offer. He finds the Count celebrating his success in a lengthy law-suit over his lands in Poland and delighted to propose the match to Athena “a strong young woman of eighteen, six feet high and broad in proportion, with a pair of shoulders which could lift and carry a sack of wheat” (92). The following day, however, the Count writes to both Boris and the Prioress to express his regret that Athena will not comply. The Prioress plans to compromise Athena, inviting her to dinner at the convent, plying her with drink and then sending Boris to the state rooms where she is sleeping. Boris is to seduce her inspired by a mysterious draught the Prioress administers to him. However, the seduction becomes a violent physical struggle which ends when Boris forces Athena into a kiss that causes her to faint. The next morning the Prioress summons both to her office and persuades the innocent Athena that she has been so compromised that she must marry Boris, but Athena swears to kill him as soon as the knot has been tied. At this point, the Prioress's pet monkey returns from one of its regular and mysterious absences, appearing at the window and finally breaking the glass. The Prioress struggles to escape but after a brief scuffle:

The old woman with whom they had been talking was, writhing and dishevelled, forced to the floor; she was scrunched and changed. Where she had been, a monkey was now crouching and whining, altogether beaten, trying to take refuge in a corner of the room. And where the monkey had been jumping about, rose, a little out of breath from the effort, her face still a deep rose, the true Prioress of Closter Seven.

(119-20)

Athena's glance at Boris affirms that what they have seen means that “an insurmountable line would be for ever drawn” (120) between them and the rest of the world.

‘The Monkey”, in terms of both plot and narrative structure, makes visible much that conventionally remains hidden in Gothic fiction. Plot, narrative voice, and symbolic language alike all point to the “disappearance” of women just when they seem to be most visible. The reasons for Athena's resistance to marriage to Boris are obscure. The possibility that hers is a hysterical refusal of sexual feeling is aired by the Prioress/Monkey who describes her rejection of Boris's proposal as that of “a fanatical virgin” (99). Her response to Boris's kiss is excessive: “[a]s if he had run a rapier straight through her, the blood sank from her face, her body stiffened in his arms like that of a slow-worm when you hit it” (113). Dinesen's use of a third person “personal” narration from Boris's perspective makes it impossible to determine whether Athena's response here is that of orgasm or rape victim. Athena is only ever seen and interpreted, most often by analogy with animals: the slow-worm here, earlier as having the eyes of “a young lioness or eagle” (92), “a young she-bear” in her conflict with Boris (113). Boris's interpretation of Athena is also, however, the key to her rejection of him and symbolically of the function of exchange object of which his proposal makes her aware. This is Athena's loss of innocence, her coming-to-knowledge, that, despite being brought up in “an atmosphere of incense burnt to woman's loveliness” (93), ultimately she is for her prospective husband nothing other than the “exquisitely beautiful skeleton” he fantasises she may become after death:

Less frivolous than the traditional old libertine who in his thoughts undresses the women with whom he sups, Boris liberated the maiden of her strong and fresh flesh together with her clothes, and imagined that he might be very happy with her, that he might even fall in love with her, could he have her in her beautiful bones alone … Many human relations, he thought, would be infinitely easier if they could be carried out in the bones alone.

(107)

The “bones” of the relationship between Athena and Boris is, of course, an exchange in which sexuality is precisely a “cover” or “flesh”, which conceals the reality that Boris's desire is not for a woman at all.

This is made clear in an inset narrative rendered as Boris rides to Hopballehus to make his proposal. He recalls travelling with a friend and a doll theatre six months previously. On Walpurgis night, when the two young men are lodging in a farmhouse, three girls enter their room and strip naked in front of a mirror in accordance with the tradition that they will catch a glimpse of future husbands. Boris, we are told, in response to this memory:

thought with deep sadness of all the young men who had been, through the ages, perfect in beauty and vigour—young Pharoahs with clean-cut faces hunting in chariots along the Nile, young Chinese sages, silk-clad, reading within the live shade of willows—who had been changed, against their wishes, into supporters of society, fathers-in-law, authorities on food and morals.

(86)

Boris understands relations between men and women as purely functional, indeed destructive of the romance, poetry, and beauty that exist between men. The reduction of women to nothing more than a function is not, the story makes clear, a product of a homosocial/heterosexual exchange system that Boris seeks to enter in order to conceal his homosexuality. Homosexuality, in Luce Irigaray's terms, acts out visibly the law of a homosocial order (desire for relations between men), not attempting to veil the mediating function of women between men behind “romantic” or “sensual” displays of feeling:

The “other” homosexual relations, masculine ones, are … forbidden. Because they openly interpret the law according to which society operates, they threaten in fact to shift the horizon of that law. Besides, they challenge the nature, status, and “exogamic” necessity of the product of exchange. By short-circuiting the mechanisms of commerce, might they also expose what is really at stake? Furthermore, they might lower the sublime value of the standard, the yard-stick. Once the penis itself becomes merely a means to pleasure, pleasure among men, the phallus loses its power. Sexual pleasure, we are told, is best left to those creatures who are ill-suited for the seriousness of symbolic rules, namely, women.⁷

Athena's father, a worshipper of women, who, it is hinted, conducted a romance with Boris's mother in his past, also understands marriage as a contract which allows the continuation of male property and power through the bodies of women. His letter to Boris complains:

She has been to me both son and daughter, and I have in my mind seen her wearing the old coats of armour of Hopballehus. Too late I realise that she is wearing it, not as the young St. George fighting dragons, but as Azrael, the angel of death, of our house.

(98)

The association of Athena with death is here explicitly connected with her refusal to enter into reproductive relations with a man. Boris's desire for Athena as skeleton is made into a reality on the morning after her “seduction” when we are told “[s]he had in reality a death's-head upon her strong shoulders” (115).

Both homosexual and heterosexual men associate women who refuse to enter the exchange relations of marriage with death. And yet, Athena's response makes it clear that it is these very relations that are death-bringing for her as social agent. It is her conviction that she has been compromised into marriage which makes her appear to be a death's-head. The fear of “disappearance” in marriage which Athena's fierce determination to follow the lesson of the Great Bear that she and Boris admire on the evening of his visit to Hopballehus to “keep your individuality in the crowd” (94) indicates, is mirrored by the ambiguous transfer of identity between the Prioress and the monkey. The monkey is a profoundly overdetermined signifier in Dinesen's tale, associated with primitive culture (through its origins in Zanzibar), with sexual lust, and social cunning (in its machinations to bring about an alliance between Athena and Boris). Its associations and the difficulty of interpreting its function in the tale are further expanded in the rendering of the evening conversation at Hopballehus. The Count's solicitor in Poland (who has just secured his inheritance for him) also owns a pet monkey we are informed and in the Count's country of origin there are “Wendish idols … of which the goddess of love had the face and façade of a beautiful woman, while, if you turned her around, she presented at the back the image of a monkey” (93). Significantly, it is Athena who asks “how … did they know, in the case of that goddess of love, which was the front and which the back?” (94). Like most Gothic “monsters”, of which Frankenstein's monster is the archetype, the monkey is a double which troubles the notion of secure autonomous identity.

The double, as Sedgwick notes, is a significant feature of the “masculine” paranoid Gothic narrative, functioning as a dangerous projection of the masculine psyche and enabling the displacement of homosocial desire into a homophobic construction of “otherness”. However, the monkey's doubleness is not easily explicable within this model and does not seem to be particularly “uncanny” for the male hero of the tale; Athena is its target. “The presence of some unknown danger”, Boris meditates over dinner, “was impressed upon the girl by the Prioress's manner toward her” (103). That the monkey doubles for the Prioress also suggests that “uncanniness” is specific to women. Dinesen's tale, I would suggest, offers the prospect of reading its heroine as a hysteric, only to put in its place a feminised version of the traditionally “masculine” plot of paranoia. The monkey literalises Athena's fear, not of her own sexual desire, but of her own status as “doll” in a narrative scripted by mysterious forces beyond her control.

Speculation about the possibility of a specifically female “uncanny” has only recently begun to surface in discussion of the Gothic.⁸ Helene Cixous in her essay “Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche” is a significant, if oblique, contribution to that speculation.⁹ Cixous draws out attention to Freud's refusal to countenance the importance of the figure of the doll Olympia in the uncanny effects of Hoffmann's story, “The Sandman”, which he takes as his example.¹⁰ Freud asserts: “I cannot think—and I hope most readers of the story will agree with me—that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important element of uncanniness evoked by the story” (348). Uncertainty over whether a figure is living or inanimate is, according to Freud, far less “uncanny” than the hero, Nathaniel's, fear of losing his eyes at the hands of the Sandman, itself a displaced fear of castration, which is the punishment he fantasises will be the result of his jealousy of his father. If she stands for anything, Freud concludes, “[t]his automatic doll can be nothing less than a materialisation of Nathaniel's feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy” (354). Cixous teases out her own understanding of Freud's text as necessarily repressing the image of the doll through a process of “inverted repetition” (533), because the process of his own writing is that of “a kind of puppet theatre in which real dolls or fake dolls, real and simulated life, are manipulated by a sovereign but capricious stage-setter” (525). Cixous supports her argument by nothing Freud's tactical exclusions of the involved narrative structure and heterogeneous points of view of Hoffmann's tale in order to manipulate it into the linear Oedipal account of the construction of masculine paranoia he seeks. It is, then, Cixous concludes, precisely the fictionality of Hoffmann's tale that Freud seeks to repress, a fictionality associated with the figure of the doll, which is in turn associated with death: “Neither real nor fictitious, ‘fiction’ is a secretion of death, an anticipation of nonrepresentation, a doll, a hybrid body composed of language and silence that, in the movement which turns it and which it turns, invents doubles, and death” (548).

This long detour through Freud and Cixous returns us to Dinesen's “The Monkey” and its preoccupations with theatricality, death, and the double, at first associated with femininity but gradually revealed to be a construction of male homosociality which, far from threatening masculine identity, uncannily poses the problem to women that they may be dispensable, that what appears to be the front (the female form, sexuality, love) may be the back (the monkey, trickery, statecraft). The monkey, then, rather than doubling for the repressed desire of the unmarried woman (the Prioress/Athena), may be doubling for the pursuit of male power in the form of statecraft (with which the monkey is most often symbolically associated in the tale). Dinesen's refusal to give us access to the perspectives of the Prioress/Monkey or Athena only serves to reinforce the text's dramatisation of the reduction of women to exchange function in patriarchal culture which Boris's attempt to conceal his homosexuality through heterosexual marriage only makes more visible because he does not seek to conceal the property relations behind a rhetoric of desire or idealisation. The nuns of Closter Seven, we are told, are disturbed by the rumour of Boris's Greek sins because:

To all of them it had been a fundamental article of faith that woman's loveliness and charm, which they themselves represented in their own sphere and according to their gifts, must constitute the highest inspiration and prize of life. In their own individual cases the world might have spread snares in order to capture this prize of their being at less cost than they meant it to, or there might have been a strange misunderstanding, a lack of appreciation, on the part of the world, but still the dogma held good.

(77-8)

Dinesen's deployment of a paranoid Gothic narrative of the double to extrapolate the conventionally “hysterical” Gothic text of the unmarried heroine's fear of enclosure/live burial allows her to make explicit what Jacobus and Kaplan suggest has to remain hidden in the tradition of post-Romantic feminist versions of the Gothic originating in Wollstonecraft—that it may not be female sexuality that requires correction, control, or release in the new bourgeois order but the masculine desire for power. “Villette”, Jacobus comments, “can only be silent about the true nature and origin of Lucy's oppression” (46) because it continues to enshrine marriage as a form of spiritual resolution of division and doubleness of the human psyche. Similarly, Kaplan complains that Wollstonecraft finds herself unable to pursue her argument in the Vindication to its logical conclusion because the polemical trajectory of the Vindication is to an assertion of women's right to claim a different construction of subjectivity, that of bourgeois “masculine” reason, for themselves:

What the argument moves towards, but never quite arrives at, is the conclusion that it is male desire that must be controlled and contained if women are to be free and rational. This conclusion cannot be reached because an idealised bourgeois male is the standard towards which women are groping, as well as the reason they are on their knees.

(46)

In the female Gothic, then, it seems to be the case that what cannot be said is what is remarkably obvious, that women in patriarchal culture are accorded only one function, that of mediating male power, to which their own sexual desires are immaterial. In this formulation, hysteria becomes not a mode of resistance but a means of concealing these relations of power and property by displacement into internalised struggle over the repression of sexual desire. Ellen Moers, whose influential work Literary Women placed the Gothic at the centre of feminist literary history, astutely recognises the ways in which the female Gothic facilitates the internalisation of struggle and contradiction within its hystericised heroines:

The savagery of girlhood accounts in part for the persistence of the Gothic mode into our own time; also the self-disgust, the self-hatred, and the impetus to self-destruction that have been increasingly prominent themes in the writing of women in the twentieth century. Despair is hardly the exclusive province of any one sex or class in our age, but to give visual form to the fear of self, to hold anxiety up to the Gothic mirror of the imagination, may well be more common in the writings of women than of men.¹¹

Dinesen's use of the figure of the double in “The Monkey” allows her to explore the possibility of women's externalisation of their fears, just as the “masculine” Gothic's paranoid structure privileges projection over introjection as a resolution of contradiction. Athena's “unlikeliness” as a Gothic heroine is her strength; she externalises rather than internalises her fear of being reduced to an exchange function, engaging in ferocious hand-to-hand combat with her suitor, literally “fighting off” his advances. Athena attempts to make herself visible as subject in a “plot” which is premised upon the absence or exclusion of women from the mechanisms of power (the monkey has substituted for its mistress).

Returning to Kaplan's and Jacobus's analogy between female Romanticism and feminist criticism, then, it might be argued that for both the urgent “unconscious” fear that haunts the writing process is that the construction of the possibility of female agency through an investigation into the specificity of a repressed female desire may be to reproduce rather than challenge the ideology of patriarchal power. As Michel Foucault points out in his History of Sexuality, the modern “hysterisation” of women's bodies “whereby the feminine body was analysed—qualified and disqualified—as being thoroughly saturated with sexuality” is one of a number of discursive techniques that serve to maintain control over and secure the consent of subjects to existing power relations.¹² Athena's “trial of strength” (115) in “The Monkey” is to resist the negation of her agency, to exceed the imposition of the status of pure function in an exchange; that her resistance is “read” (by the Monkey/Prioress and Boris) as a refusal of sexuality is a means of relocating women solely as sexual rather than political subjects. There can be no easy negotiation out of the complexity of the relation between sexual and political identity for women, as both the Gothic/Romantic texts and their critics that have been under discussion here make abundantly clear. To resort to the image of the hysteric as revolutionary sexual subject is, however, no solution precisely because by definition the hysteric signifies nothing beyond the suffusion of the female body with the displaced signs of sexual desire. What the hysteric signifies is the desire for political agency itself for which, as Dinesen's short story demonstrates, sexuality is itself a displacement or substitution. To be “free” for women is then not to be “sexual”, but to be free not to signify sexuality alone.

Notes

1. C. Kaplan, “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism”, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), p. 32.

2. M. Jacobus, “The Buried Letter: Villette” in her Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 59; Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979); Mary Wolletonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings (Oxford University Press, 1994).

3. A. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 358.

4. E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Preface, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1986), p. vii.

5. S. Freud, “Das Unheimliche”, Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson, vol. 14, Penguin Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 345.

6. Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963).

7. L. Irigaray, “Commodities Among Themselves”, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porterwith Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 193.

8. See, in particular, Claire Kahane, “The Gothic Mirror”, The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, eds. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 334-51.

9. H. Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”), New Literary History, vol. 7:3 (1976), pp. 525-48.

10. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann's short story “Der Sandmann” first appeared in his Nachstücke (1816-17). For a modern translation see Tales of Hoffmann, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale et al. (London: Penguin Books, 1982).

11. E. Moers, Literary Women (London: Women's Press, 1978), p. 107.

12. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 104.