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The
Iconography Of The Female Child
In Sexual Seduction
I
was a good little girl.
I loved my mother without complication.
I never lusted after my father's nakedness.
Yet I'm on a rut on a long dusty road
so spread your cloak
or step over lightly. For I am
the keloid healing of an unclean break
moving forward on knitted bone.
A broken sky.
A patchwork.
One thing or another is always missing.
--Frances Brown, from "Gaps"
Not so long ago, we watched Amy
Fisher covered by the media as "the Long Island Lolita."
Before that, of course, we endured Nabokov's salacious version
of the nubile temptress. And, perhaps most stunningly, we now
have the flood of attention to the high-profile JonBenét
Ramsey murder case, in which photographs and videotape of
the heavily made-up "young beauty queen" have been
consistently linked with the 5-year-old's rape and slaughter.
Does the figure of the sexualized female child inevitably lead
to betrayal?
Historically, yes. While the conquest
of women has long been coded as "romantic," within
Western cultures, there is a similarly extensive, though less
often investigated, presentation of the female child as an emblem
of sexual "seduction." In either case, the figure of
the female, in much of this nation's arts and literatures, is
developed as culturally-specific agents of betrayal.
To measure the recent pop culture representations
against the earlier models upon which they are based, let us
consider the nascent interest in young women of color as they
appear in animated films. Despite the wild success of the recent
Disney film Pocahontas, for example, it should be recalled
that the actual Pocahontas, according to historical accounts
of the period in which she lived, was not a "young woman,"
as she is often characterized, but only about 10 years old, when
John Smith claimed she "delivered" him. One historian
of the period (1) maintained
that the name "Pocahontas" translated to "Little
Wanton," and described the child as "a well featured
by wanton young girle," who, at the age of 10 or 11, would
"gett the boyes forth with her into the markett place and
make them wheele, falling on their handes turning their heeles
vpwardes, whome she would follow, and wheele so her self naked
as she was all the Fort over. . ." (72). From such accounts
come the popular myth of romantic attachment between Pocahontas
and Smith -- a myth that codes the child as an enchantress who
betrays her tribe for the "wanton" love of a conquering
white man.
In a similar vein, Mechicano cultures
have been embellished by the Malinche/Malintzin legends; arts
and lore regarding Asian women are populated with the appearance
of the "Lotus Blossom" emblem; and derivations of this
iconography for Black women bring the figures of "Sapphire"
and "Jezebel" to the fore. And yes: now cultural studies
scholars can add Princess Jasmine, of Disney's Aladdin,
to the score -- although in this case, as in others, it is the
caste system, rather than national or tribal unity that is transgressed.
This construction of female children as budding
sexual vixens is unlike the general representations of the male
child, in arts and litertature: inherent in the depiction of
female children, there is a displacement of the boundaries of
culpability and victimization, of innocence and agency. The besot
adult male is rarely rendered as as a perpetrator or, heaven
forbid, a pedophile. Rather, the seductive girl child carries
the burden of transgression. Given the history of medico-legal
response to child sexual abuse in which, throughout the last
two centuries, female children have told their stories of abuse
against shifting perspectives of reification and blame, it is
perhaps inevitable that some of the earliest works in literary
criticism on this subject are framed within psychoanalytic models.
These models have been interrogated
by recent works in cultural scholarship, but the predominance
of Freudian codes and paradigms remains fixed -- thus, Otto Rank's
1912 The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend is examined
here, as one of the earliest applications of psychoanalytic theory
to literature. This clinical analysis is then compared with a
model of contemporary literary criticism, in an examination of
cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo's work on literary examples
of sexuality and danger.
A focus on the phallus, whether
that of the male child or of the Freudian "greater"
version belonging to the father, predominates Rank's detailed
study of dramatic works, in which incest, from the perspective
of infantile sexual development, "is regarded only as another
form of forbidden genital play" (ibid.).
The foregrounding of the taboos
and activities related to the penis is an essential paradigm,
too, in the study of the iconography of the female child in sexual
seduction. Rank does allow that,
Just as the fantasy of creations
of the mother complex are presented from the son's perspective,
only later being inhibited or dampened by the father. . .the
fantasy substitutes created by the father-daughter complex are
not presented from the perspective of the young child, the daughter,
as one would expect from analogy, but are instead dealt with
mainly from the standpoint of the father. Just as the man is
the active partner in wooing and procreation, so too the development
of myths and religions, as well as artistic activity, is intended
to gratify and justify male sexual fantasies. Even in the few
mythological passages in which the loving passion seems to be
presented from the view point of the daughter, one has the impression
that this is only a justification of the father's shocking desires;
an attempt is made to shift the blame for the seduction onto
her. (300; emphasis added)
As this reversal of the boundaries
of innocence and agency is a signal element of the efforts at
dominion over difference -- and the resulting trauma -- it would
almost seem to be the task of the clinical critic to champion
this obvious, and self-proclaimed, travesty. Yet, while admitting
to the devices by which these male-derived fantasies are engineered,
Rank hastens to affix a warning: "it should be noted,"
he intones,
that this attraction is by no means
one-sided. On the contrary, psychoanalysts first became aware
of these matters when in the treatment of neurotic women they
recognized repressed childhood attraction to the father, with
a corresponding jealousy toward the mother, as an etiologically
significant factor. In this fact, though, we find valuable evidence
for our framework. Whereas the man (father) is able to live out
his repressed incestuous impulses toward his daughter in violent
and satisfying fantasies, in the woman (daughter), for whom such
a solution is not available, the repression of attraction to
the father, objectionable in our culture, frequently leads to
neurosis. (301)
Situating his analysis within the
rubric of Freud's "drive theory," while ignoring entirely
the debate over the "seduction theory" is one of the
central means by which Rank, and other Freudian scholars or critics,
collude in the fabrication of the "father fixation."
So impressed was Freud himself with Rank's book, he wrote, in
On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914)
that "among the strictly scientific applications of analysis
to literature, Rank's exhaustive work on the theme of incest
easily takes the first place" (37).[2]
Within the "strictly scientific"
realm of Rank's literary criticism, the question of why fantasies
that are both "violent" and "satisfying"
should pose some sort of "solution" to neurosis is
not fully addressed. Instead, Rank turns his critical attention
to differences between mother-son and father-daughter incest,
which seem, in the main, to be mostly due to perceived physiological
differences: the "internal, physical blood relationship
that unites mother and son" is presented as dissimilar from
the union between father and daughter; further, the "significant
age difference" between mother and son necessarily "impedes
the realization of the fantasy, whereas the man, sexually potent
for a longer time [than the similarly aging woman] draws new
sexual powers from his blossoming daughter." Finally, the
authority of the father is seen as "lending more force to
whatever impulses and wishes he may have," and this power
of dominion leads Rank to consider that "it should not surprise
us that incest between fathers and daughters (often stepdaughters),
especially the rape of the daughter,
is among the most frequent of sexual crimes" (301).
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