Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

paragraphs parallel to one another which suggest a melancholic incorporation of the lost father, a postponement of the anger of abandonment through the structural instatement of that negativity into her identity and desire. Before she tells us that she herself was abandoned by her mother quickly and without advance notices he tells us that for reasons unstated she spent a few years in a house for abandoned and orphaned children. She refers to the poor creatures,
deprived from their cradle of a mother’s love In the next sentences he refers to this institution as a refuge [asile] of suffering and affliction and in the following sentence refers to her father whom a sudden death tore away . . . from the tender affection of my mother. Although her own abandonment is twice deflected here through the pity for others who are suddenly rendered motherless, she establishes an identification through that deflection, one that later reappears as the joint plight of father and daughter cutoff from the maternal caress. The deflections of desire are semantically compounded, as it were, as Herculine proceeds to fall in love with mother after mother and then falls in love with various mothers daughters which scandalizes all manner of mother. Indeed, she vacillates between being the object of everyone’s adoration and excitement and an object of scorn and abandonment, the split consequence of a melancholic structure left to feed on itself without intervention. If melancholy involves self-recrimination, as Freud argues, and if that recrimination is a kind of negative narcissism (attending to the self, even if only in the mode of berating that self, then Herculine can be understood to be constantly falling into the opposition between negative and positive narcissism, at once avowing herself as the most abandoned and neglected creature on earth but also as the one who casts a spell of enchantment on everyone who comes near her, indeed, one who is better for all women than any man (She refers to the hospital for orphaned children as that early
“refuge of suffering an abode that she figuratively reencounters at the close of the narrative as the refuge of the tomb Just as that early
Subversive Bodily Acts
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refuge provides a magical communion and identification with the phantom father, so the tomb of death is already occupied by the very father whom she hopes death will let her meet The sight of the tomb reconciles me to life she writes. It makes me feel an indefinable tenderness for the one whose bones are lying there beneath my feet [là à mes pieds]” (109). But this love, formulated as a kind of solidarity against the abandoning mother, is itself in noway purified of the anger of abandonment The father beneath her feet is earlier enlarged to become the totality of men over whom she soars, and whom she claims to dominate (107), and toward whom she directs her laugh of disdain. Earlier she remarks about the doctor who discovered her anomalous condition, I wished he were a hundred feet underground (69).
Herculine’s ambivalence here implies the limits of Foucault’s theory of the happy limbo of a non-identity.” Almost prefiguring the place
Herculine will assume for Foucault, she wonders whether she is not
“the plaything of an impossible dream (79). Herculine’s sexual disposition is one of ambivalence from the outset, and, as argued earlier,
h/er sexuality recapitulates the ambivalent structure of its production,
construed in part as the institutional injunction to pursue the love of the various sisters and mothers of the extended convent family and the absolute prohibition against carrying that love too far. Her sexuality is not outside the law, but is the ambivalent production of the law,
one in which the very notion of prohibition spans the psychoanalytic and institutional terrains. Her confessions, as well ash er desires, are subjection and defiance at once. In other words, the love prohibited by death or abandonment, or both, is a love that takes prohibition to be its condition and its aim.
After submitting to the law, Herculine becomes a juridically sanctioned subject as a man and yet the gender category proves less fluid than her own references to Ovid’s Metamorphoses suggest. Her het- eroglossic discourse challenges the viability of the notion of a “person”
who might be said to preexist gender or exchange one gender for the

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