Abstract
Barthes has compared the literary text to an onion with no core, no ultimate secret, but an infinite number of layers.1 Now, if ‘The Fox’2 has already been peeled like an onion, the skin of this animal remains rather puzzling. The heroine refuses to wear it. There is a gap here and this is where ‘the pleasure of the text’, however unwholesome it may be, is to be sought.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) p. 259.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Fox’, Three Novellas (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1982). All references in the text are to the Penguin edition of the works of D. H. Lawrence.
‘L’endroit le plus érotique d’un corps n’est-il pas ld oi2 le v@tement bdille?’ [Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973) p. 191.
Judith G. Ruderman, “The Fox” and the “Devouring Mother”’, DHL Review. x (1977) no. 251–69
H. M. Daleski, ‘Aphrodite of the Foam and The Ladybird Tales’, in D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Study of the Major Novels and Other Writings, ed. A. H. Gomme (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978) p. 154.
Lawrence Jones, ‘Physiognomy and the Sensual Will in “The Ladybird” and “The Fox’. DHL Review. xii (19801 pp. 1–29.
John B. Vickery, ‘Myth and Ritual in the Shorter Fiction of D. H. Lawrence’, Modern Fiction Studies,v (1959) pp. 80–2.
5 December 1918 Letters, iii, D. 302.
Judith Ruderman (“The Fox” and the “Devouring Mother”’, pp. 258–9), refutes Vickery’s arguments using the references to Frazer to support the phallic interpretation. Another source for the fox’s burning tail and the corn might be the Old Testament: Samson, after being betrayed by Delilah, punishes the Philistines by setting fire to the foxes’ tails in order to burn their corn (Judges xv, 4–5).
Emile Delavenay, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Sacher-Masoch’, DHL Review, VI (1973) pp. 119–48; Gilles Deleuze, Prisentation de Sacher-Masoch - Le Froid et le Cruel; avec le texte integral de La V6nus a la Fourrure (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), trans. by Jean McNeil as Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty (New York: George Braziller, 1971).
Delavenay, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Sacher-Masoch’, p. 121.
Edmund Bergler, The Basic Neurosis: Oral Regression and Psychic Maso-chism (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1949).
Edmund Bergler, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s “The Fox” and the Psychoanalytic Theory on Lesbianism’, in A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, ed. H. T. Moore (London: Heinemann, 1961) pp. 47–53. Hereafter cited as Miscellany.
Bergler, Basic Neurosis, pp. 4–5.
Ibid., vv. 237–42, esveciallv D. 239.
CompletePoems, p. 63.
Lawrence, ‘The Fox’, p. 116; Sons and Lovers (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1962) p. 457.
The shoe being ‘a symbol for the female genitals’ [Daniel A. Weiss, CEdipus in Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 1962) p. 64]. See also Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, p. 152: ‘Mrs Morel was one of those naturally exquisite people who can walk in mud without dirtying their shoes. ... He ... thought them the most dainty boots in the world, and he cleaned them with as much reverence as if they had been flowers.’
Bergler, Basic Neurosis, p. 19.
Ibid., p. 19 and p. 13.
Ibid., P. 187.
The ‘ffve-layer structure’ in Bergler’s article on ‘The Fox’ (Miscellany, pp. 51–2) includes the two superego vetoes. The basic lesbian structure has in fact three layers only. Cf. Bergler, Basic Neurosis, pp. 237–8: ‘The peculiar nature of the cllnical Lesbian conflict consists of the fact that a three-story structure is unconsciously erected: masochistic injustice collecting, warded off by pseudo-hatred, secondarily warded off by exaggerated pseudo-love towards a representative of the infantile image of the mother. ... Lesbians use the man-wife (father-mother) disguise as a covering defensive cloak.’
‘In later years, the reproach of “starvation” is modified into that of being refused’ (Bergler, Basic Neurosis, p. 20). Bergler dispels a common misunderstanding by distinguishing sharply between the clinical pic-ture and the genetic picture of psychic masochism. The genesis of masochism is explained thus: the child wants to get, then he is refused or fancies that he is refused; he becomes all the more aggressive as his fantasy of omnipotence is challenged; then, if he is to become a masochist, because of his guilt he eventually turns his aggression against himself and derives masochistic pleasure from it (‘libidinisation’ of guilt). It is at this moment that the clinical picture starts: the superego ‘objects to this peculiar type of infantile pleasure’. As a result the ego creates ‘secondary defenses’ which constitute the ‘mechanism of orality’ (pp. 3–4). Injustice collectors ‘create or misuse’ situations in which somebody representing the oral mother refuses their wishes (p. 5). They themselves provoke ‘a situation of being refused’ (p. 12). Originally, every baby wants to get, not to be refused: ‘Nobody denies that oral neurotics were, once upon a time, babies who wanted to get. As adult neurotics they reproduce the situation ‘Bad mother refuses’. What they repress deeply is their masochistic enjoyment of that refusal’ (p. 8).
Bergler, Basic Neurosis, p. 3.
Ibid.. pp. 9. 19–20.
Ibid., vv. 12, 216.
Weiss, CEdipus in Nottingham, p. 40.
Ibid p 62
Ibid., pp. 48–9.
Anecdote told by Cecily Lambert Minchin, the ‘original’ of Banford, in D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, ed. Edward Nehls, vol. c (Madison. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. 1957) n. 465.
beleuze, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch, p. 59(58). Page references to the American edition will be given in brackets after the references to the French edition.
Ibid., pp. 57–8(57): ‘It would therefore be thoroughly misleading to confuse the phantasy that comes into play in the symbolic order and the hallucination that represents the return of reality as experienced in the order of the real. Theodor Reik quotes a case where all the “magic” vanishes from the masochistic scene because the subject thinks he recognizes in the woman about to strike him a trait that ren,indc him nf the father’ [Translation modified]
Ibid., p. 56(55). Translation modified.
Ibid., p. 49(49). Translation modified. Quoted by Delavenay, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Sacher-Masoch’. p. 138.
Deleuze, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch, p. 59(58).
Ibid PP 45(45) 50(49)
• •,, 37. Ibid.. o. 55(54).
ibid n 47/4.91
Ibid.. v. 84(84). Translation modified.
Ibid. Translation modified.
Ibid., p. 87(86–7). Through a process of disavowal, ‘sexual pleasure ... is interrupted, deprived of its genitality and transformed into the pleasure of being reborn’ (ibid.). We shall see later that in masochism there is a twofold process of desexualisation and resexualisation. Without the latter the masochist would not experience any pleasure. But this resexualisation in the narcissistic ego has nothing to do with genital sexuality which is abjured. See ibid., p. 112(113).
II Corinthians xiz, 7. As in the story ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’, the i.awrentian hern finds his strength in his weakness
Deleuze, PrEsentation de Sacher-Masoch, p. 109(110). See also pp. 28–9 for a good study of the process of disavowal in fetishism.
One finds in Masoch the Lawrentian myth of the North and the South, respectively associated with Christianity and paganism (ibid., 11 48(47))
Ibid. p. 110(111).
Ibid., p. 109(110).
Ibid., p. 110(111). Translation modified.
Ibid.. o. 112(1131.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 47(46–7). My translation. J. J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (Stuttgart: Krais & Hoffmann, 1861).
Delavenay, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Sacher-Masoch’, p. 148, n.53; Martin Green, The von Richthofen Sisters (London, 1974) pp. 81–4; James F. Scott, ‘Thimble into Ladybird: Nietzsche, Frobenius, and Bachofen in the Later Work of D. H. Lawrence’, Arcadia, xm (1978) pp. 161–76.
Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings ofJ. J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967) D. 97.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Ladybird’, passim; Women in Love, esp. the passage about the ‘dark river of dissolution’, pp. 192–3; the passage about the swan in ‘The Crown’. Phoenix u, D. 403.
‘Aphrodite, the queen of the senses, she, born of the sea-foam, is the luminousness of the gleaming senses, the phosphorescence of the sea, the senses become a conscious aim unto themselves. ... But also there is the Aphrodite-worship. The flesh, the senses, are now self-conscious’ [D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy (London: Heinemann, 1956) p. 35].
‘She realized, almost with wonder, the death in her of the Aphrodite of the foam: the seething, frictional, ecstatic Aphrodite. . And there was no such thing as conscious “satisfaction”. What happened was dark and untellable. So different from the beak-like friction of Aphrodite of the foam, the friction which flares out in circles of phosphorescent ecstasy, to the last wild spasm which utters the involuntary cry, like a death-cry, the final love-cry’ [D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1961) p. 439].
Daleski, ‘Aphrodite of the Foam’, pp. 155–6.
Lawrence, ‘The Ladybird’, p. 44, and the missing two pages of manuscript reproduced by Brian H. Finney in Review of English Studies, xxiv (1973) pp. 191–2.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1989 Claude Sinzelle
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sinzelle, C. (1989). Skinning the Fox: a Masochist’s Delight. In: Preston, P., Hoare, P. (eds) D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09848-4_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09848-4_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-09850-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-09848-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)