The Iconography of
the Female Child
In Sexual Seduction
...continued

Within this framework, Rank studies myths, folktales and legends from around the world, citing similarities in the progression of each act of aggression toward female children. He notes the prevalence of the snake imagery in many tales (including, for example, the union of Zeus with his daughter, in the form of a snake); and the common theme of the daughter functioning as a "youthful replacement" for the older mother (as in the Appolonius and Cinderella legends). While the travails of men who seek to romance, rape, or marry their daughters is recounted in some detail, the focus on the psyche remains with the figure of the beautiful, seductive daughter.

Rank provides a schematic describing the general characteristics of "the fixation of the daughter on her father." Following Freud's lead, Rank lists six basic characteristics of such women; in short:

1. they are attracted to "older, established men" who fulfill, in some ways, the role of the father;

2. they desire "robust men who are their intellectual and social superiors, and who patronize, protect, and defend them";

3. they are either obsessively monogamous, or are unfaithful women who love many men in search of the father;

4. they steal the husbands of other women, in an attempt to satisfy the original "jealous rivalry with the mother";

5. they either wish to remain barren, or wish for a child from a sexless union, an "immaculate conception" representing the forbidden love of the father;

6. or the woman may become a prostitute who "seeks to realize her incest fantasy in another form of 'censured' intercourse" -- here, the father-fixated woman may also play the role of the mother whom both male and female offspring are said to consider a whore, as part of their infantile psychosexual development (310).

As a result of her plight as a seductress before the father, the daughter figure in myth and legend who refuses paternal advances, or who experiences shame after the act, may be mutilated (as in the severance of body parts, particularly the hands); she may be incarcerated or exiled; or she may go mad. Several of the tales, including many throughout the Middle Ages, according to Rank, follow the basic formula of the Appolonius legend.

There is, for example, "The Russian King's Daughter," in which a girl pursued by her father for her great beauty "cuts off her hair, throws off her bridal gown, puts on a gray shirt, and scratches her face so that it is bloody" (314). The girl struggles, in effect, to ward off the impending marriage to her father, by taking responsibility for the compelling nature of her beauty, and the seemingly uncontrollable passions it evinces. In consequence, the girl's father has her set in a barrel at sea.(3)

In tales corresponding to what Rank terms "the Cinderella genre," a widower king wishes to wed only a woman who will fit into the clothes of his deceased wife; in keeping with this genre, only the king's daughter fits the clothing. To escape her father's intentions, the girl flees across the sea in wooden chest, and eschews her former privilege (and, one assumes, any leisurely beauty) in becoming a kitchen maid. She is later recognized by, and marries, a prince who finds her lost shoe; by contrast, the shoes of "her evil competitors," the sisters, are severed at the heels.(4)

In a similar vein, "The Story of Patient Helena" describes another king who pursues his daughter; she escapes being raped by him through pirate abduction, but not before one of her hands is severed.(5) Rank finds evidence of this theme in German, Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, Dutch and Norman-English legends (316). A modern corollary for this obsessive pursuit and physical brutality, though not directly incestuous, may be studied in Jennifer Lynch's controversial 1993 film, Boxing Helena.

The compulsion of men to possess the object of desire remains unquestioned in Rank's study; indeed, it is reified as a natural course of human nature. The female figures, whether they be mothers or daughters, are ravaged for psychoanalytic schema in great detail. In the case of girl children who are raped by their fathers (or step-fathers), Rank provides considerable detail about the manner in which these young women are scripted as behaving: from the Biblical story of Salome, Rank considers Oscar Wilde's version, "which places the theme in the steamy sensuality of the Orient," as well as Hermann Sudermann's Johannes, in which Rank finds that "the dance of Salome before her stepfather becomes a voluptuous striptease" (323-24). As the reader will recall, Otto Rank does allow that these tales are told "from the standpoint of the father" and that there is an attempt to justify such "shocking desires" (vide supra). We have been forewarned, however, that the interpretations of these myths and legends should not be "one-sided": the daughter's desire for the father figure is key to understanding Freudian dramas.

Still, oddly, Rank concludes his chapter on "The Relationship Between Father and Daughter" with a series of 13 case studies of actual child sexual abuse, in an effort to demonstrate "how often such relationships between a father and daughter must occur, given that they become known with such comparative frequency" (332). Unlike his literary study, however, the cases Rank cites here "cast an interesting light on the psychology of murders and attempted suicides" (333). In four of these cases, the daughters who were raped by their fathers bore children, and these infants were murdered by the young women who bore them (333-34). In one case, a Munich paper reported that a man had repeated sexual relations with his two stepdaughters, who were six times impregnated by him. The stepfather commanded that all of the offspring be killed by drowning, and his legal wife did not object. The infants' bodies were discovered buried in the cellar, but the paper was pleased to report that one sister was again pregnant, thus "it will still be possible to save one doomed child from the hands of the depraved" (334).

Rank further recounts one attempted suicide by a 13 year old who had been raped by her father; and five cases in which fathers or stepfathers attempted or enacted the murder of their daughters, after accusations of sexual abuse had been made (334-35). These are considered for their value in demonstrating "how the libidinous impulse, when direct expression is inhibited, can be transformed into a criminal act -- often the murder of the sexual object" (334).

It is this ubiquitous imagery of female children as "sexual objects" or participants in "sexual seduction" that underpins this study. From the early iconography of the eroticized child of the Victorian period, to the modern figures developed in Nabokov's Lolita or the daily presses' pronouncement of Amy Fischer as the "Long Island Lolita," female children are developed, most especially, as noted by Rank, in the writings of men, as coquettish "teases," seductresses. But what does child sexual activity represent from the perspective of the child?