"Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis" by Juliet Mitchell

 Introduction:

Feminism means “the belief and aim that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men” and “the struggle to achieve this aim.” Feminism as a movement became popular in 1960s. it aimed at liberating women from various manifestation of gender based discrimination and exploitation. John Start Mill (1806-1873) in his book The Subjection of Women (1869) and Mary Wolstone Craft (1750-1797) in A Vindication of Rights to Women (1792) were the pioneers of the Feminist Movements or Feminism.  They frankly exposed the inhuman and injustice done to women and the hypocrisy.  

With the passage of time, Feminism became an important ideological-political force. The feminist writers of the 1960s exposed the marginalization of women under  male hegemony. A large number of women writers – Helena Cixous, Elaine Showalter, Lisa Tuttle, Alison Juggar, Toril Moi, Susan Gubar, Kate Millet, Juliet Mitchell, Julia Kristeva, Alice Jardine and many others stood firmly for women’s emancipation and empowerment. They challenged the unjust and exploitative gender based social constructions and radically changed the general perception of women’s place in society.

Juliet Mitchell’s “Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis”

About the author:

Juliet Mitchell who began her career as a lecturer in the universities of Leeds and Reading, became a freelancer with leftist leanings. Her famous essay, “Women:  The Longest Revolution” contributed to New Left Review (1966) heralded the emergence of a politically radical feminism.” She was the fiery advocate of Women’s Liberation Movement. She published Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974). She worked as a psychoanalyst in London. “Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis” is her famous lecture delivered at a conference held on “Narrative” in Australia in 1972.

Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis:

In this essay, Juliet Mitchell establishes correlation between feminists, narrative and psychoanalysis by giving suitable illustrations from a novel, Wuthering Heights.

Psychoanalysis depends on conversation between the psychoanalyst and the patient. It is immaterial whether the analyst or the patient is male or female. Psychoanalyst hears the patient’s histories and retells them. The patient narrates his or her story. The analyst listens and when he or she retells them, something from the analyst intrudes or disrupts and “the anarchist carnival” is offered. “Something form the analyst’s own association disrupts, erupts, into that narrative – the analyst asks a question from a new perspective and the history starts all over again.”

During the seventeenth century the novel, preeminently written by women novelists was the main literary form. Mitchell remarks that “the novel starts with autobiographies written by women in the seventeenth century.” These women novelists were trying to establish “the subject in process.” They were trying to “create a history from a state of flux.” – a flux which they themselves were experiencing in “the process of becoming women within a new bourgeois society.” They wrote novels to describe the changing condition of women under capitalism. Mitchell comments: “The novel is that creation by the woman of the woman or by the subject who is in the process of becoming woman, of woman under capitalism.” However, the feminist novel is not a “homogeneous construction.” There are points of disruption and autocriticism within it.

Economic base and artefacts are also recreated in changing social structure. New literary forms emerge in which changing subjects recreate themselves within a new social context. “The Novel” writes Juliet Mitchell, “is the prime example of the way women start to create themselves as social subjects under bourgeois capitalism, create themselves as a category; women … we have to know where women are, why women have to write the novel, the story of their own domesticity, the story of their own seclusion within the home and the possibilities and impossibilities provided by that.”

Julia Kristeva attacks this tradition as “the discourse of the hysteric.” Mitchell positively accepts this attack: “The Woman novelist must be hysteric. Hysteria is the woman’s simultaneous acceptance and refusal of the organization of sexuality under patriarchal capitalism.” She thinks that there is nothing like female writing, expressing woman’s voice. To her it is “the hysteric’s voice which is the woman’s masculine language talking about feminine experience. It is both simultaneously the woman novelist’s refusal of the woman’s world – she is after all, a novelist – and her construction from within masculine world of the woman’s world. it touches on both. It touches, therefore, on the importance of bi-sexuality.”

Mitchell expresses her views on the psychoanalysis theories behind the position of women novelists. “at the point in which the phallus is found to be missing in the mother, masculinity is set up as the norm and femininity is set up as what masculinity is not. What is not there in the mother is what is relevant here, that is what provides the context for the language. The expression which fills gap is, perforce ‘phallocentric.’

Lacan calls it symbolic, which is the point of organization. Here sexuality is constructed as meaning. All heterogeneity disappears. It becomes organized and created round masculine and feminine poles. What has already been discussed can be called “pre-oedipal, the semiotic, the carnivalesque, the disruptive.”

Mitchell illustrates her viewpoint from “Wuthering Heights” . Emily Bronte does not write for the patriarchal order but she works within the terms of language which is known as phallocentric.” She ironically questions the justification of the patriarchal organization. Emile Bronte’s script, stolen from her, was presented to the publishers, by her sister, Charlotte and was published under a male pseudonym Eills Bell. It is a private novel, concerned with two narrators – a man, Lockwood and a woman, the nurse, Nelly Dean. Lockwood parodies the romantic male lover. He is a fop who thinks that he loves all things romantic. This is criticized within the novel itself by Isabella who thinks that dark complexioned Heathcliff , the romantic Gothic hero will prove to be the true gentleman beneath all his cruelty.

The story of Catherine and Heathcliff “is a story of bisexuality, the story of the hysteric.” Instead of giving a whip to Catherine, her father gives her a fatherless gypsy child, named Heathcliff, which was the name of her brother who died in childhood. She finds a broken whip inside her father’s pocket. Instead of this whip she gets a brother/ lover, Heathcliff.

Catherine marries Edgar Linton. She dies in child birth. She dies but haunts Heathcliff who she wanted to marry, for twenty years. Heathcliff also wants to be one with her in the moment of death. In this imagined sexual union between Catherine and Heathcliff the incest taboo is ignored. Mitchell observes: “The choices of the woman within the novel, within fiction, are either to survive by making the hysteric’s ambiguous choice into femininity which does not work (marrying Edgar, or go for oneness and unity, by suffering death.) walking the moors as a ghost with Heathcliff.

In the seventeenth century novel, “women had to construct themselves as women within new social structure. The woman novelist hysterically rejects, the symbolic definition of sexual difference under patriarchal law, unable to do so because without madness we are unable to do so.” So type of writing is either conformist (the novels of Mills and Boon) or critical (The Wuthering Heights).

Conclusion:

Thus Mitchell positively treats the hysteric condition of women writers in this speech. Mitchell advocates that only in the hysteric condition women are able to question the male hegemony in male language and this  enables them to emancipate and create a place for them .