|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The prominence of phallic imagery in the Suppliants would seem to invite analysis by the phallocentric theories of Jacques Lacan, but here we confront an apparent problem of Lacanian theory. The problem how can Lacan's masculinist notion of the oedipus complex be applied to the female oedipus complex? restates, in a way, a central problem in attempting to analyze the psychology of the Suppliants: what can we know of female psychology in a culture reported to us almost entirely by men? The answer to the second problem is clear if not entirely satisfactory: as Winkler says, knowledge of "Greek women's representations of their own experience . . . is possible in two ways, individually through a female author [this means Sappho] and collectively via the religious rites conducted exclusively by women" (1990: 12). We will return to the latter possibility at the end of this essay. As for the question of applying Lacan's phallocentric ideas to the situation of the Danaids, the real question is not how we could do this but rather why we would want to do it. Nevertheless, for those readers interested in Lacanian perspectives, the psychological situation of the Danaids could be interpreted as follows. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
For Lacan the primary symbol of the (male) child's oedipal desire is the phallus: "ce qui resurgit dans l'inconscient du sujet c'est le désir de l'Autre, soit le phallus désiré par la Mère" (1966c: 733). The moment when desire is signified by the phallus, however, is also the moment when a new mediator appears, the symbolic Father, since "la signification du phallus, avons-nous dit, doit être evoquée dans l'imaginaire du sujet par la métaphore paternelle" (1966a: 557). Since desire is the Other's desire, and since the child now learns (and represses) that only the father can satisfy the mother's desire for the phallus, desire becomes the repressed desire to be what the father is and to have what the father has. The symbolic Father now appears as promulgator of the law of prohibition, and the child, by repressing the phallus as signifier of his desire, acquires both an unconscious (in which the phallic signifier suffers continual displacement along signifying chains) and a superego (the internalization of paternal prohibition). Thereby the child inherits the law of prohibition and takes his place in what Lacan calls the symbolic order: he will someday be a father himself and, although he may never be the phallus for his mother, he will someday be the phallus for a woman who represents the mother, the woman who "dans la dialectique phallocentrique . . . représente l'Autre absolu" (1966c: 732). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We do not need Lacan's mystifying references to Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary registers to see how the Danaids might fit into a "phallocentric dialectic." If we assume, with Lacan, that the originary desire is the mother's desire to have the phallus, then the female child's desire, formed by identification with the mother (Io), is also to have the phallus of the father (Danaos). Because it must be repressed, this desire is displaced along |
|
|
|
|
|