Abstract
The three flagstone texts of twentieth-century feminist scholarship that critically drive this study’s psychological vector are Karen Horney’s New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939), Juliet Mitchell’s “Women the Longest Revolution” (1966), and Kate Millett’s The Loony Bin Trip (1990). The mirroring of women’s familial and social positions in these works is highlighted in this chapter. Some of the critical concepts articulated by these theorists are used to study real-life instances of oppression of even exceptionally gifted women to demonstrate the power of patriarchal tendencies. The notions of undertow, recoil, and afterwardsness are explicated to understand the slow change in women’s position in society vis-à-vis men. The neurosis-inducing effect of insalubrious dependencies is examined to demonstrate that individual masochistic and narcissistic dependencies have generated a pathological social condition that is detrimental to changing patriarchal attitudes towards women. The psychological vector developed in this chapter is used to analyse the portrayal of the domestic space in selected short stories. The notion of the “Jocasta complex” is developed to describe the psychological response of women to their confinement in domestic spaces. The adopted approaches generate a binocular view of the domestic space as depicted in the stories, whereby it emerges as a masochistic space. The psychological vector exposes the oppressive underbelly of superficial stances of protectiveness towards the woman and reverence towards the mother-figure.
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Notes
- 1.
Karen Horney (1885–1932) was a medical practitioner and psychoanalyst. She strongly disagreed with the male biases in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. She contradicted Freud’s fundamental assertion that personality disorders were rooted in biological and instinctual impulses, arguing instead for environmental and social conditioning as the primary source of neurosis and other anxiety-related disorders.
Bernard J. Paris, Karen Horney: a Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
Kate Millet (1934–2017) was a literary critic, feminist writer, and a strong advocate of the anti-psychiatry movement in the USA. She is best known for her 1970 book of psychoanalytic literary criticism Sexual Politics.
Juliet Mitchell is an Emeritus Professor at Cambridge university where she taught psychoanalysis and founded the Centre for Gender Studies. https://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-juliet-c-w-mitchell.
- 2.
Mitchell analyses and rebuts the criticism of Freud by Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex), Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch), Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex), Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), Kate Millett (Sexual Politics), and Eva Figes (Patriarchal Grounds).
- 3.
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 401.
- 4.
Ibid., 115.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Ibid., xxxi.
- 7.
Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The Longest Revolution,” New Left Review, I/40 Nov/Dec (1966): 11.
- 8.
“Female Labour Participation in Chile: Taking leave of his Senses,” The Economist, April 16, 2011, https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2011/04/14/taking-leave-of-his-senses.
- 9.
Mitchell, “The Longest,” 29.
- 10.
Juliet Mitchell, “Psychoanalysis and Feminism Then and Now,” interview by Wendy Hollway and Julie Walsh, Psychoanalysis Culture & Society, Vol. 20 (2015): 123.
- 11.
Ibid., 113.
- 12.
Mitchell, Psychoanalysis, xix.
- 13.
Mitchell, “The Longest,” n.p.
- 14.
Mitchell, “Then and now,” 123.
- 15.
UNESCO data show that worldwide 53% of graduates are women. At the Ph.D. level, the proportion drops to 48%, and at the post-doctoral research level to 28%. https://en.unesco.org/unescosciencereport https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/usr2015_kakemonos_gender_en.pdf.
- 16.
Heather Murray, “‘My Place Was Set At The Terrible Feast’: The Meanings of the ‘Anti-Psychiatry’ Movement and Responses in the United States, 1970s–1990s,” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 37, no. 1 (2014): 86–87.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Kate Millett, The Loony Bin Trip (Champaign: UP Illinois, 1990), 86–87.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Karen Horney, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1939), 248.
- 21.
Ibid., 251.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1995), 188.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Ibid., 8.
- 26.
Angela M. Sells, Sabina Speilrien: The Woman and the Myth (New York: SUNY Press, 2017), 171.
- 27.
Swapan Kumar Bondyopadhyay, Annapurna Devi: An Unheard Melody (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2005), Kindle.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Joyce Maynard, “Was she J.D. Salinger’s predator or his prey?” September 5, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/books/review/joyce-maynard-at-home-in-the-world.html.
- 30.
Eren Orby, “Joyce Maynard’s Second Chances,” New Yorker, February 8, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/joyce-maynards-second-chances.
- 31.
Maureen Dowd, “Liberties; Leech Women in Love,” May 19, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/19/opinion/liberties-leech-women-in-love.html.
- 32.
Benjamin H. Ogden, Beyond Psychoanalytic Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 121.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Cristina Peri Rossi, “Yo Nunca estuve en el Armario.” Pagin12, August 21, 2009. www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/soy/1-935-2009-08-21.html.
- 35.
Cristina Peri Rossi, “Extrañas Circustancias,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 673.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ibid., 765.
- 38.
Ibid., 681.
- 39.
Ibid., 679.
- 40.
Mitchell, “The Longest,” 32.
- 41.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 8.
- 42.
Cristina Peri Rossi, “Todoiba bien,” in Los Amores Equivocados (Barcelona: Menoscuarto, 2015), 47.
- 43.
Cristina Peri Rossi, “Ulva Lactuca.” In Cuentos Reunidos, Barcelona: Lumen, 2007.
Michael Hirst, “Toxic Seaweed Clogs French Coast.” BBC, August 11, 2009, https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8195180.stm.
The title of the story refers to an aquatic plant commonly known as sea lettuce. It is harmless while living, but when it decays on land it forms a crust under which a deadly gas is released. If one walks into the crust, one makes a hole in a reservoir of hydrogen sulphide, a very toxic gas. It can impede respiration in animals and people, killing them in less than a minute.
- 44.
Peri Rossi, “Ulva,” 133.
- 45.
Ibid., 136.
- 46.
Ibid., 134.
- 47.
Ibid., 132.
- 48.
Robin Hard, The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Greek Mythology (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 54.
- 49.
Peri Rossi, “Ulva,” 136, emphasis mine.
- 50.
Cristina Peri Rossi, “Historia de amor,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 310.
- 51.
Ibid., 311.
- 52.
Ibid., 310.
- 53.
Heidi J. Nast and Audrey Kobayashi. “Re-corporealizing Vision,” in BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, edited by Nancy Duncan (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 86.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Ibid., 76.
- 56.
Ibid., 79.
- 57.
Peri Rossi, “Historia de,” 312.
- 58.
Peri Rossi, “Todo iba,” 53.
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Singh, J. (2022). The Psychological Vector. In: Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3_3
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