Notes on Castration Anxiety with Reference to the Case of Oliver Mellors

Walk-Marcus: 04 Castration Anxiety

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I. Kastrationsangst

Castration anxiety is one of Freud's earliest psychoanalytic theories.

In brief, it's the conscious or unconscious - often overwhelming - fear of emasculation in both the literal and metaphorical sense, that originates between the ages of three and five years old (i.e. the so-called phallic stage of psychosexual development in the child), frequently continuing long into adulthood. 

Freud suggests it's a universal male fear, tied to the Oedipus complex, though one rather suspects it's rooted in his own time and culture (parents in 19th century Europe would often threaten to punish their misbehaving sons by chopping it off - particularly if caught masturbating).  

In a metaphorical sense, castration anxiety refers more to a feeling of being insignificant or powerless - socially and/or sexually - and which expands into an existential fear of death, conceived from the perspective of the ego as the ultimate act of emasculation resulting in a total loss of self. 

II. The Case Of Oliver Mellors

Oliver Mellors - aka Lady Chatterley's Lover - clearly suffers from a form castration anxiety, as revealed, for example, in his astonishing rant to Connie about the shortcomings of his ex-wife Bertha. According to Mellors, Bertha would never simultaneously achieve orgasm with him, no matter how long he delayed his own climax:

"If I kept back half and hour, she'd keep back longer. And when I'd come and really finished, then she'd start on her own account, and I had to stop inside her till she brought herself off, wriggling and shouting ..."

If this was bad enough, gradually things got worse:

"She sort of got harder and harder to bring off, and she's sort of tear at me down there, as if it were a beak tearing at me. By God, you think a woman's soft down there, like a fig. But I tell you the old rampers have beaks between their legs, and they tear at you with it till you're sick."

Mellors is offering a variant of the classic vagina dentata myth in which a woman's cunt is said to be lined with sharp teeth - the implication being that coition was inherently dangerous to the male, as it might result in injury or emasculation (originally such tales were meant to be cautionary in nature and perhaps intended to discourage rape).

Camille Paglia argues that we should take these stories seriously and not consider them simply to be the product of sexist hallucination or misogynistic male fantasy. Like Simone de Beauvoir, she insists that the cunt is a dangerous place where insects and philosophers might easily lose their way.

The fact is, men enter the vagina in a state of phallic triumph, but invariably leave in a much diminished state. So maybe they are to some degree justified in their castration anxiety.   

Mellors, however, isn't just concerned about being nipped and torn by a vaginal beak - he's also worried that modern industrial civilisation, built upon the power of capital, wants to castrate working-class men like himself, robbing them of their spunk and making mincemeat of the Old Adam. 

Indeed, Mellors tells Connie that there's a global conspiracy on behalf of those in sexless authority to "cut off the world's cock" and they offer a cash incentive to those who help them achieve this: "a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls."   

Little wonder then, believing this as he does, that Mellors feels so threatened in his manhood and subscribes to a defianty phallocentric viewpoint.     

See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

It All Comes Down to Artifice in the End (Notes Towards a Decadent Floraphilia)

A rebours by Ink-Yami (2017-18)

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I.

For me, Rupert Birkin is literature's greatest floraphile: a man who loves plants with a vital and perverse passion; a man for whom nothing satisfies like the subtle and responsive touch of cool vegetation upon his naked flesh - not even the love of a good woman. For whilst Birkin reluctantly returned to the human world and married Ursula, he always knew where he truly belonged and where he most wanted to deposit his sperm - in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves.

Click here for further details ...

II.

Just as perverse is the floraphilia of the aristocratic anti-hero of À Rebours: "Des Esseintes had always been excessively fond of flowers", writes Huysmans. However, unlike Birkin, he doesn't put his fondness into ecosexual practice and go rolling around wet hillsides, masturbating amidst a clump of young fir trees. Rather, Des Esseintes expresses his love of plants in a far more sophisticated and refined manner.

Des Esseintes is also discriminating amongst plants and doesn't embrace all flowers "without distinction of species or genus". In fact, he despises the "common, everyday varieties" that blossom in pots for sale at the local florist; "poor, vulgar slum-flowers [...] that are really at home only on the window-sill of a garret, with their roots squeezed into milk-cans or old earthenware pots".

Des Esseintes isn't too keen either on what he calls stupid flowers, such as the convential rose; flowers "whose proper place is in pots concealed inside porcelain vases painted by nice young ladies". In fact, whilst he can't help feeling "a certain pity for the lower-class flowers, wilting in the slums under the foul breath of sewers and sinks", he loathed the bourgeois blooms that one finds in "cream-and-gold drawing-rooms". Ultimately, Des Esseintes kept his admiration exclusively for the "rare and aristocratic plants from distant lands, kept alive with cunning attention in artificial tropics created by carefully regulated stoves".

But, best of all to his mind, are artificial hothouse flowers made from rubber, paper, or synthetic material: "As a result, he possessed a wonderful collection of tropical plants, fashioned by the hands of true artists ..." But of course, a Decadent is easily bored. And so, whilst enthralled by the admirable artistry displayed in his collection of künstliche Blumen, Des Esseintes begins to dream of another kind of flora: "tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes."

This comically perverse acceleration of Decadent philosophy's anti-natural aesthetic all the way to its absurd conclusion - thereby reversing, as Patrick McGuinness points out, the relationship between nature and artifice, copy and original - is one of the most admirable aspects of À Rebours.       

Having soon assembled his astonishing collection of real fake flowers, including some remarkably sinister looking specimens that suggested disease and deformity rather than health and vital beauty, Des Esseintes is beside himself with joy:

"Yes, his object had been achieved: not one of them looked real; it was as if cloth, paper, porcelain and metal had been lent by man to Nature to enable her to create these monstrosities. Where she had not found it possible  to imitate the work of human hands, she been reduced to copying the membranes of animals' organs, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, the hideous splendours of their gangrened skin."

Fatigued by his horticultural handiwork and hothouse philosophizing, Des Esseintes goes to lie down on his bed. He soon falls asleep, but, alas, his sleep is disturbed "by the sombre fantasies of a nightmare", which concludes with an erotic encounter with an ashen-faced plant-woman, "naked but for a pair of green silk stockings". Her eyes gleamed ecstatically. Her lips had the crimson colour of an anthurium. And her nipples "shone as brightly as two red peppers".

As the dream intensifies, the plant-woman enfolds Des Esseintes in her tendril-like arms:

"He made a superhuman effort to free himself from her embrace, but with an irresistible movement she clutched him and held him, and pale with horror, he saw the savage Nidularium blossoming between her uplifted thighs, with its sword-blades gaping open to expose the bloody depths.
      His body almost touching the hideous flesh-wound of this plant, he felt life ebbing away from him - and awoke with a start, choking, frozen, crazy with fear."

I suspect that Birkin, in contrast to Des Esseintes with his eurotophobia and castration anxiety, would have been far more receptive to such a dream and would have awoken with blissful joy rather than a cold sweat.     

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-07.

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (À Rebours), trans. Robert Baldick, introduction and notes by Patrick McGuinness, (Penguin Books, 2003), Ch. 8, pp. 82-92. 

For a related post to this one on Des Esseintes (and his bejewelled tortoise), click here.

Loving the Octopus

Image taken from PZ Myers' blog Pharyngula 

The strangely beautiful and beautifully strange octopus has many attractive features and erotic properties; the silky softness of its flesh, the muscular elasticity of its body, the slimy, probing tentacles that insinuate their way into every orifice (more an exotic combination of tongue and finger rather than a phallic analogue, as the biologist PZ Myers rightly points out).

But they also have a razor sharp beak in the midst of all their soft beauty and for those men in whom the fear of castration - in either a literal or a figurative sense - is a primary concern, this abruptly brings thoughts of loving the octopus to a close.

The fiction of D. H. Lawrence, however, provides us with some interesting case material by which we might further discuss this topic ...

Always highly anxious about perceived threats to his manhood - particularly the threat posed by women - Oliver Mellors tells Connie of his past sexual experiences, including with his wife, Bertha, whom he not only found difficult to pleasure, but who would mutilate his penis with her beak-like genitalia:

"'She sort of got harder and harder to bring off, and she'd sort of tear at me down there, as if it were a beak tearing at me. By God, you think a woman's soft down there ... But I tell you the old rampers have beaks between their legs, and they tear at you with it till you're sick.'"

This male fear of emasculation and the beak-like vulva (or what we might term octopussy), is also central to Lawrence's short story 'None of That!' - a rather ugly rape fantasy that (amongst other things) badly misreads Nietzsche.

Ethel Cane is a rich, white American woman with a powerful will and a pageboy haircut, who subscribes to a philosophy based upon the idea of an imaginative transcendence of physical reality and material events:

"'She said the imagination could master everything; so long, of course, as one was not shot in the head, or had an eye put out. Talking of the Mexican atrocities, and of the famous case of the raped nuns, she said it was all nonsense that a woman was broken because she had been raped. She could rise above it.'"      

Of course, Lawrence soon has Ethel disabused of this belief by staging her violent gang rape at the instigation of a nasty-sounding, fat little bull-fighter called Cuesta, with whom she's fascinated and over whom she is determined to exert her influence and thereby prove she is stronger than he.

Cuesta, however, isn't at all interested in her - apart from her money. In fact, he despises poor Ethel: "'She is an octopus, all arms and eyes ... and a lump of jelly'". He explicitly compares her cunt to a cephalopod's rostrum and asks: "'What man would put his finger into that beak? She is all soft with cruelty towards a man's member.'"
   
It's disappointing that someone who risks his life in the bull-ring should be so cowardly when confronted by an independent woman and her deep-sea sex. If he'd been more of a man, then Cuesta would have accepted her challenge and confronted his own castration complex. Instead, he can subject her only to violence at the hands of others and find contentment with beakless native girls; docile, unimaginative, and non-threatening.        


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). Lines quoted are on p. 202. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'None of That!', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Lines quoted pp. 220 and 227.