Laughing with MEDUSA : Classical Myth and Feminist Thought

36 r a ch e l bo w l b y

mythology (‘it was only through the knowledge of infantile sexual-
ity that it became possible to understand mythology’); here, it is the
other way round: ‘mythology may give you the courage to believe
psychoanalysis’.

There follow two further hypotheses about the reader’s accredit-
ation of psychoanalysis, the second of which is the one presented as
preferable. Here is the first:

If you have felt inclined to suppose that all that psychoanalysis reports
about the early sexuality of children is derived from the disordered imagin-
ation [der wu¨ sten Phantasie] of the analysts, you must at least admit that
their imagination has created the same product as the imaginative activities
of primitive man, of which myths and fairy tales are the precipitate.

Here analytic knowledge is identified with the ‘primitive’; it does
not explain it but is ‘the same’. It is wild and chaotic (wu¨ st) but it is
given its low-level validation by the irrefutable identity between the
two. Psychoanalytic theory is itself, on this theory, a wild story—
a fairy tale or myth.

The second hypothesis then raises the stakes by once
again situating the analyst of both mythology and infantile sexuality
at a distance from the object of study:

The alternative friendlier, and probably also the more pertinent view would
be that in the mental life of children today we can still detect the same
archaic features which were once dominant generally in the primeval days
of human civilization. In his mental development the child would be repeat-
ing the history of the race in an abbreviated form, just as embryology has
long since recognized was the case with somatic development.27

The translation does not speak of ‘recapitulation’ here, though on
other occasions where the combination of repetition (wiederholen)
and abbreviation (abku¨ rzender) appears, that is the word that is
used.28 The last clause leaves no doubt that this is a reference to the

27 Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, 212; Die Frage der Laienana-
lyse, 302–3.

28 See e.g. Freud’s ‘ ‘‘A Child is Being Beaten’’ ’ (1919), SE, xvii. 188;
‘ ‘‘Ein Kind wird geschlagen’’ ’, Studienausgabe, vii. 240: in the phrase
‘recapitulate from the history of mankind’, ‘recapitulate’ translates ‘wieder-
holen’ (‘repeat’); Freud, Introductory Lectures, SE, xv. 199; Vorlesungen

the cronus complex 37

contemporary scientific theory, and that Freud is endorsing the
idea—‘long since recognized’—that ontogeny repeats phylogeny.29
As elsewhere (notably at the end of the ‘Wolf Man’ case history),
Freud transfers this theory to psychological development, positing
that the child necessarily passes through a series of incommensur-
able modes of apprehending its world, each with its own character-
istic attached stories or basic outlines; chief among these are the
‘primal phantasies’, offering and imposing answers to the child’s
questions about sexuality and the origin of babies.

In recapitulation theory proper, each stage of a recapitulation is
superseded by the new form that takes its place. In Freud, on the
other hand, no ‘stage’ of development is ever fully or finally sur-
passed. There is always the possibility of a detrimental ‘return’ to a
previous one; or, putting this from the other direction, previous
dispositions may ‘survive’ in the present as part of a heteroge-
neously composed psychical entity. But when Freud directly appeals
to recapitulation theory, as in the passage cited, this interference
inherent to his own model tends to be unstated. Instead, the stress
falls on the succession of stages leading towards adulthood, with the
earlier ones associated with a ‘primitive’ world that the adult will
long since have left behind. Thus in this second hypothesis, the adult
is not on a par with the mythologizing child or its phylogenetic
analogue, the ‘primeval days (Urzeiten) of human civilization’. This
‘friendlier’ (freundlichere) hypothesis rescues the theorist from the
ancient world of the first one; it is also, for good measure, probably
‘more accurate’ (zutreffendere) as well as (in the translation) ‘more
pertinent’.

The several interlocking hypotheses that Freud puts forward here
offer a spectrum of possibilities about the relation between myth-
ology and knowledge for various classes of thinker who are expli-
citly or implicitly compared. There is the child as opposed to the

zur Einfu¨ hrung in der Psychoanalyse, Studienausgabe, i. 204, where ‘ab-
breviated recapitulation’ translates ‘abgeku¨ rtzt wiederholt’.

29 On recapitulation theory and its use in Freud, see Frank J. Sulloway,
Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (1979;
London, 1980), passim; Lucille B. Ritvo. Darwin’s Influence on Freud:
A Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven, 1990), 74–98.

38 r a ch e l bo w l b y

adult; primitive as opposed to civilized human beings; and psycho-
analysts as opposed to other people. The discussion comes immedi-
ately before a passage in which Freud raises the question of sexual
difference specifically in relation to the castration complex, but
without naming it as such, despite the proximity of the Cronus
myth of Entmannung and the reference to boys’ ‘fear of being
robbed of their sexual organ by their father’: ‘Another characteristic
of early infantile sexuality is that . . . [s]tress falls entirely on the
male organ, all the child’s interest is directed towards the question
of whether it is present or not.’30 Thus the issues raised are bound to
suggest some further considerations in relation to the asymmetrical
‘stories’ that attach to the different developments of each sex.

It is the Cronus myth that Freud refers to, in The Question of Lay
Analysis, as implicitly ‘disordered’ and chaotic: ‘wu¨ st’. Bodies and
body parts are indiscriminately ingested or removed within a car-
icaturally destructive ‘family’. ‘How strange [sonderbar] this must
have sounded to you when you first heard it!’ Freud said, referring
to the schoolboy understanding of the story that Cronus swallowed
his children. Strange, peculiar, weird—but not shocking or shaking.
Not a source of disturbance or curiosity then—‘But I suppose none
of us thought about it at the time’. And easily assimilated now,
intellectually, to an available schema: ‘Today. . . we shall recognize
it as a disguise of the father.’ The Titan stories of the old gods are
about extreme acts executed without meditation or delay. There is
no narrative suspense, no impending fate: no time of delay in which
an oracular promise or threat makes its mark on the characters. The
response to them, on the part of both children and adults, is not
represented by Freud as resembling the fearful effect produced by
the tragedy of Oedipus: ‘There must be something which makes a
voice within us ready to recognize [anzuerkennen] the compelling
force of destiny in the Oedipus.’31 These myths are outside the
complex human time where the present is always steeped in its
imaginary futures, whether feared or wished for.

30 Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, 212; Die Frage der Laienana-
lyse, 303.

31 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE, iv. 262; Die Traum-
deutung (Frankfurt am Main, 1942), 223.

the cronus complex 39

cronus’s last appearance

There is one occasion in Freud’s writing when the Cronus story is
given a full symbolic weight. In a brief, incomplete paper written at
the very end of his life, ‘The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of
Defence’, the mechanism of disavowal is described in similar terms
to those that Freud had used in 1927 in his essay ‘Fetishism’. In most
cases—‘the usual result of the fright of castration’ (Kastrationss-
chrecks)—the boy’s response is to ‘obey the prohibition’ (of mas-
turbation) as he ‘gives way to the threat’; this is the trade-off that
will lead to his incorporation into the social world. But in other
instances recognition both does and does not take place and the boy
finds a means of having it both ways. He acknowledges, but also
fails to acknowledge, the ‘castration’ he sees in the girl, by creating a
fetish or substitute for the missing penis; in relation to her (it does
not affect his perception of his own penis) he has then ‘transferred
the importance of the penis to another part of the body’. This
‘ingenious’ (geschickte) or ‘artful’ (kniffig)32 solution to the prob-
lem leaves the boy with a double orientation: on the one hand, the
‘apparent boldness and indifference’ that defies and ignores the
threat, but on the other, ‘a symptom which showed that he never-
theless did recognize [anerkennt] the danger’.33 At this juncture the
following passage appears:

[H]e developed an intense fear of his father punishing him, which required
the whole force of his masculinity to master and overcompensate. This fear
of his father, too, was silent on the subject of castration: by the help of
regression to an oral phase, it assumed the form of a fear of being eaten by
his father. At this point it is impossible to forget a primitive fragment of
Greek mythology which tells how Kronos, the old Father God, swallowed
his children and sought to swallow his youngest son Zeus like the rest, and
how Zeus was saved by the craft [List] of his mother and later on castrated
his father.34

32 Freud, ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ (1940), SE,
xxiii. 275, 277; ‘Die Ichspaltung im Abwehrvorgang’, Studienausgabe, iii.
391, 393.

33 Freud, ‘Splitting’, 277; ‘Die Ichspaltung’, 393.
34 Freud, ‘Splitting’, 277–8; ‘Die Ichspaltung’, 393–4.

40 r a ch e l bo w l b y

First castration is named as what is either elided or out of the picture
here: ‘silent on the subject’. Then, in connection with this silence,
there enters none other than the arch-castrator, Cronus, here only in
connection with his other violent deed, the eating of his children.
Zeus, on the other hand, whom Freud had long ago sought to
exempt, at least probably, from his father’s crime, now appears as
the first and only father-castrator.

The example concerns a blurring of the usual psychical develop-
ments in relation to the negotiation of the castration complex, and
the mixture of myth and theory, Cronus and castrastion, echoes that
same confusion. Cronus, even though he is its primary mythological
agent, is dissociated from castration. But then Zeus, who may not
have done the deed at all, comes in as if to compensate for the silence.
There and not there, recognized and not recognized: the passage
moves back and forth in precisely the same way as in the structure
of splitting which it is describing. And almost immediately after this
passage, the essay fades away (it was unfinished at the time of Freud’s
death), mentioning another small symptom, this time the boy’s
aversion to his toes being touched—‘as though’, says Freud, ‘in all
the to and fro between disavowal and acknowledgement, it was
nevertheless castration that found the clearer expression . . . ’.35

This oscillating exposition in the ‘Splitting’ essay echoes the
ambiguities in Freud’s theory of castration as that which for boys
enables the surpassing of myth. The ‘castration complex’ is made to
play a decisive explanatory role in the psychoanalytic theory of
children’s development. It traumatically divides boys from girls
and launches each sex, now in their respectively wanting or threa-
tened states, on the path of a particular orientation towards the
future. For the boy, castration postdates and ideally draws a line
under the mythical familial involvements of the Oedipus complex.
He is able to make the move denied to the girl, from family to
culture—or from myth to logos. From this perspective, ‘castration’
is part of Freud’s own theoretical myth of human development.

But castration, as much as Oedipus, has Greek mythological
sources, sometimes evoked by Freud, which form the underside
of its structuring, humanizing role through the recognition of

35 Freud, ‘Splitting’, 278; ‘Die Ichspaltung’, 394; ellipsis in original.

the cronus complex 41

unpleasant but necessary sexual fact. Uranus and Cronus belong to
a different age and world from that of Oedipus and Laius, who are
themselves superseded in the movement initiated by the castration
complex. Far from being to do with clarification or with an admis-
sion into sexual and social maturity, the Cronus-related myths are
pre-pre-social. There is no narrative or temporal complexity; deeds
are done without thought for a future, hoped or feared; progenitors
and progeny are destroyed without any sense of generation on the
part of the solely self-assertive perpetrator, free of all relations.
Castration is embroiled in ur-myths of confusion; what it threatens
is the collapse of all ‘generational’, historical human distinctions.

The possible exception to the pre-Zeus order is the figure of
Zeus’s rescuing mother, whom Freud twice alludes to, both times
to mention her List (the same word translating both ‘craft’ and
‘cunning’ in the English) in outwitting Cronus’s son-swallowing
enterprise. No further details are given, either by Freud or in
reported versions of the myth. Rhea doesn’t save her other off-
spring. From this it could possibly be argued, ex post facto, that
her forethought and attachment apply appropriately to the one who
is destined for a post-Titanic future in a newer mythic world where
the gods intervene in human matters of justice and fate; she would
thus be in the vanguard of a civilizing process, her ‘cunning’ stand-
ing out against the gross destructiveness of her Titan husband. But it
could also be argued that she is simply a mother, Freudian or
otherwise, devoted to her baby son as a part of her self, and over
and above her devotion to her husband. Her maternal instincts are
useful and even indispensable to the move into culture and gener-
ation represented by Zeus, but culture is not her invention. Here the
woman/mother is ambiguously placed, on the threshold between
old and new orders, and identified with neither.

the man and woman of thirty

In another late essay, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, the
refusal to accept castration becomes the ultimate impasse, for both
sexes; Freud speaks of ‘the paramount importance of these two
themes—in females the wish for a penis and in males the struggle

42 r a ch e l bo w l b y

against passivity’, also described as the masculine protest (following
Adler) and (Freud’s expression) the repudiation of femininity.36
They may be immutable: ‘We often have the impression that with
the wish for a penis and the masculine protest we have penetrated
through all the psychological strata and have reached bedrock [zum
‘gewachsenen Fels’ durchgedrungen], and that thus our activities
are at an end.’37

Prior to this, at the end of the ‘Femininity’ lecture of 1933, the
contrast of men’s and women’s futures that the castration complex
installs had been vividly evoked in a picture of modern types. Freud
appeals to the same ‘impression’ as in ‘Analysis Terminable and
Interminable’ as being a commonplace therapeutic perception:

I cannot help mentioning an impression that we are constantly receiving
during analytic practice. A man of about thirty strikes us as a youthful,
somewhat unformed individual, whom we expect to make powerful use of
the possibilities for development opened up to him by analysis. A woman of
the same age, however, often frightens [erschreckt] us by her psychical
rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up final positions and
seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to
further development; it is as though the whole process had already run
its course and remains thenceforward insusceptible to influence—as
though, indeed, the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the
possibilities of the person concerned. As therapists we lament this state
of things.38

At first sight, this passage seems to lend support to the view that the
masculine bias of psychoanalytic theory is simply misogynistic.
‘Frightens us’ recalls the use of the same word in the context of
fetishism for the alarmed reaction of the male to the sight of the

36 On the relationship of repudiation and femininity, see Rachel Bowlby,
‘Still Crazy after All These Years: Travels in Feminism and Psychoanalysis’,
in Still Crazy after All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis
(London, 1992), 131–56.

37 Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937), SE, xxiii. 251,
252; ‘Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse’, Studienausgabe, Erga¨n-
zungsband, 391, 392. The English translation removes the quotation marks
that make gewachsenen Fels (literally, ‘evolved rock’) a conspicuous meta-
phor in the German.

38 Freud, ‘Femininity’, 134–5; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, 564.

the cronus complex 43

female genitals.39 In both cases, a shortcoming seen in the woman is
a source of alarm to the man. At the same time, in this passage, the
woman’s inflexibility—her stiffness (Starrheit) and unchangeability
(Unvera¨ nderlichkeit)—is set alongside the patently appealing and
attractive figure of the blooming young man, ‘youthful, somewhat
unformed’, who is going to make vigorous (kra¨ ftig) use of the
‘possibilities of development’ that analysis ‘opens up [ero¨ ffnet]’ to
him through therapy; for the woman, in contrast, ‘Paths for wider
development do not arise [Wege zu weiterer Entwicklung ergeben
sich nicht]’, or ‘paths for wider development are there none’: in the
German, the emphasis falls on the concluding negative, the nicht
that immediately cancels the ways forward that the sentence has
postulated. Here, in real life, as a kind of sad professional secret
(‘I cannot help mentioning . . . ’) we are presented with the no-hope
women of the theoretical account.

But this is not all that is suggested. The spectacular, stark contrast
also prompts regret that the path to femininity has been so draining
as to have left the woman in this undesirable state. For the passage
clearly deploys a notion of personal development linked in its
positive form to change, openness, movement. Freud assumes that
change is desirable for persons of either sex; persons are individuals
who may or may not be able to go in new directions, to take up
different ‘possibilities’. From a historical point of view, the surpris-
ing assumption in this connection may be that it is regrettable for a
woman of 30 to be settled, to have found a final character. Would
that the woman, too, he implies, could have the freedom to go on
developing—that the woman, too, could be open to change.

Freud granted women one possible sphere of perfect happiness, in
mothering a son: ‘A mother can transfer to her son the ambition
[Ehrgeiz] which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she
can expect [erwarten] from him the satisfaction of all that has been
left over in her of her masculinity complex.’40 For once, the hope or

39 Freud, ‘Splitting’, 277; ‘Die Ichspaltung’, 393, quoted above. Cf.
‘Probably no man is spared the fright of castration [Kastrationsschreck] at
the sight of a female genital’, ‘Fetishism’ (1927), SE, xxi. 154; ‘Fetischis-
mus’, Studienausgabe, iii. 385.

40 Freud, ‘Femininity’, 133; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, 563.

44 r a ch e l bo w l b y

expectation is not unreasonable even though it is compromised by
its vicariousness and its dependence on a lost and recovered mascu-
linity. But still the reference to ‘the ambition which she has been
obliged to suppress in herself’ carries the same recognition as noted
in the passage about the man and woman of 30. The ambition was
rightfully there; it is regrettable that she ‘had to suppress it [bei sich
unterdru¨ cken mu¨ sste]’. As before, and even though the ending is a
happier one here, there is an assumption of female potential that is
undeveloped or thwarted, both psychically and socially.

Since Freud’s lifetime, paths of development that were previously
closed have been opened up to women in social life, in principle and
in practice. This may not have made any difference to the relative
states of psychic flexibility or rigidity affecting either sex, as indi-
viduals or collectively. Both sexes, though not necessarily in identi-
cal ways, are subject to the limitations as well as the opportunities
of their place in the ‘cultural community’, including the obligation
to identify as one of two sexes, but not the other; this is what the
recognition of ‘castration’ implies. But given the obsolescence of the
social correlates of the Freudian complex—there is no longer so
sharp a distinction between the paths available to men and
women—it seems anachronistic and needlessly hopeless now to
cling to a myth in which women’s most fundamental conflicts are
determined by the realization that they can never be men. Castra-
tion and Cronus are ancient history.

2

‘Who are we when we read?’:
Keats, Klein, Cixous, and
Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles

V an da Zajko

But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us
what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we
experience a great pleasure, and one which probably arises
from the confluence of many sources. How the writer accom-
plishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies
in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us
which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise
between each single ego and the others.

(Freud: Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming)
I began to take an interest in the sort of figure I thought I should
cut in life . . . there was one book in which I believed I had
caught a glimpse of my future self: Little Women, by Louisa
M. Alcott . . . I identified myself with Jo, the intellectual.
Brusque and bony, Jo clambered up into trees when she wanted
to read; she was much more tomboyish and daring than I was,
but I shared her horror of sewing and housekeeping and her

I would like to thank the following for their help with this piece: Andrew
Bennett, Miriam Leonard, Charles Martindale, Pantelis Michelakis.

46 v a n d a za j ko

love of books. She wrote: in order to imitate her more com-
pletely, I composed two or three short stories.

(Simone de Beauvoir: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)

The concept popularly known as ‘identification’ is under-theorized
in contemporary critical debates. It is, however, relied upon in a
wide variety of contexts to help account for the mysterious way in
which readers may sometimes experience themselves as being trans-
formed by their intimacy with a literary text. The relationship
between a reader and a character which develops in such circum-
stances is the subject of this essay: How might this relationship
contribute to an explanation for the persistent way in which certain
texts continue to give pleasure to very different readers across the
ages? How might an account of the reception of classical texts and
images benefit from an investigation of the dynamics of such famil-
iar encounters? What kinds of vocabularies are available to us for
both describing and analysing these experiences? And, in particular,
what part does identification play in specifically feminist engage-
ments with texts and how has it enabled mythical characters to
provide such a potent resource for women?

The importance of ‘role models’ has long been recognized as
central to both feminist theory and practice. Without the exemplars
offered by their predecessors those concerned to propagate feminist
ideas would be bereft of an important source of inspiration,1 and
many feminist projects have involved the development of a lineage
that lends them the authority of a tradition. Lillian Doherty de-
scribes the process of revisionist myth-making as follows:

In the late twentieth century, women writers have self-consciously sought to
remedy the gap in the classical tradition by retelling myths from the points
of view of the female characters. The range of genres and styles in which
these retellings have appeared—from the poetry of Margaret Atwood and
Carol Ann Duffy to the stories of Marina Warner, the novels of Marion
Zimmer Bradley, and the television serial Xena, Warrior Princess—suggests
that the effort to reclaim a distinctive ‘women’s classical tradition’ appeals
to many women and at least some men at the turn of the millenium.2

1 In this they are like their own ancient predecessors for whom the
‘exemplum’ was an important source of inspiration.

2 L. Doherty, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth (London,
2002) 21.

k e a t s , k l e i n , ci x o u s , a n d co o k ’ s achi lles 47

The process of ‘reclaiming’ a tradition here might alternatively be
described as the process of creating literary role models which
enable contemporary women to forge empathetic links with the
women of the ancient world. In some instances—for example if
we consider Medea’s famous speech comparing the travails of child-
birth with the ordeals of the warrior in war3—it might seem that
the imaginative leap this requires is not huge, since, arguably, the
experience of childbirth is one which women of different time
periods share.4 However, it is not the case that modern women
writers restrict themselves to retelling myths in which the potential
grounds for connection are so clear. And, as Doherty observes, there
are plenty of instances where modern men have chosen to offer their
own version of a story in which the main protagonist is a woman.
The literary reception of myth shows us that gender is not the only
basis for the kind of identification which makes possible intriguing
and potent revisions of the tradition. If we consider the processes
involved in cross-gender identification within the wider frame of
theories of reception, will they become in any way more explicable?
Or is it the case that confronting issues of creativity inevitably leads
us to mystified aporia?

I shall work through these questions with specific reference to one
mythological character, the Homeric hero Achilles, and three very
different texts. The first of these, Elizabeth Cook’s poetic novel
Achilles, might be described as a feminist reworking of ‘the Achilles
myth’ in the spirit of the revisionism described above by Doherty.5
But, rather than retelling the myth from the point of view of a single
female character, Cook moves through a variety of subject positions
while focusing her story on the figure of Achilles himself. In so doing

3 Euripides, Medea 214–66.
4 It is certainly the case, however, that an argument can be made that any
such assimilation of an experience from one historical period to another,
however bodily or ‘essential’ that experience is deemed to be, fails to take
sufficient account of the role of history in the construction of experience. So
a twentieth-century woman’s experience of childbirth will be very different
to that of a fifth-century Athenian woman’s because she has different
conceptions of pain, her body, her social role, the role of her child, etc.
5 The tendency to create such ‘a myth’ out of the myriad sources pertain-
ing to a mythological figure is typical of works of revisionist myth-making
both inside and outside the academy.

48 v a n d a za j ko

she opens up new spaces for exploration of his relationships with
the central figures of his legend, his family members and lovers, and
his fellow combatants at Troy. Within her work the consciousness
of both male and female characters is scrutinized and the feminist
‘edge’ arises at least in part from the sensual focus on concerns of
embodiment that may be said to have characterized many a feminist
endeavour.6

The second text is one referred to directly by Cook, a letter of the
poet John Keats in which he explains to his brother and sister-and-
law why he hopes he will never marry. He tells them that he never
experiences a feeling of loneliness because his imagination is popu-
lated by numerous literary and mythological personages, one of
whom is Achilles. There is nothing ‘spleenical’ in his decision to
remain alone, rather it expresses his overwhelming sense of the
‘Sublimity’ which is there to welcome him home:

I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not
live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds—No sooner am I alone
than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my Spirit
the office of which is equivalent to a king’s body guard—then ‘Tragedy, with
scepter’d pall, comes sweeping by’. According to my state of mind I am with
Achilles shouting in the Trenches or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily.7

For Keats, the mythological landscape satisfies and comforts in
comparison with ‘the commerce of the world’. His imaginative
relationships are sufficiently vibrant to provide him with company
and more fascinating than the ‘divided and minute domestic happi-
ness’ that he declares would not satisfy his needs.

6 A mesmerizing and highly erotic example in Achilles is the transform-
ation of the rape of Thetis into a sensual celebration of mutual sexual
struggle and orgasm (pp. 13–19). However the claim that this work is
‘feminist’ is by no means uncontroversial and it is interesting to compare
the strategies employed by Cook with those of the women poets discussed
by Fowler in her contribution to this volume. It could be argued that Cook
is working within the tradition of ‘filling in the gaps’ in Homer, a tradition
which originates in the ancient world. There is a kind of provocation, for
example, in the way that the description of Achilles’ shield, that most
famous of Homeric ekphrases, is given in simply one line.

7 This letter to Keats’s brother and sister-in-law is included in the edition
of Keats’s poems and letters edited by Cook herself (Oxford, 1990) 420–9.

k e a t s , k l e i n , ci x o u s , a n d co o k ’ s achi lles 49

Cook’s reference to this letter comes at the beginning of the final
section of her book, entitled ‘Relay’, which is concerned, inter alia,
with the ways in which the story of Achilles has demonstrated an
enduring power across centuries and cultures. The section is densely
allusive, in contrast to the more straightforward story-telling of the
first two chapters, and it moves the reader away from Troy to
Georgian London where Keats is reading Chapman’s Homer and
musing upon the relationship of his own body to the bodies of the
heroes who people the mythological past. Keats is depicted as for-
ging a connection with Achilles on the basis of a heightened sense of
their shared corporeality. He emphasizes the similarity between
Achilles’ physical sensations and his own, and regards ‘the continu-
ity between cell and cell’ as the grounds for an identification which
brings to life the Iliad. The relation of this final section to the rest of
the novel raises important issues about access to the past. Cook’s
reading of Keats provides her with a way of comprehending a vital
Homer, and her juxtaposition of the two authors locates both the
imagination and the body as prospective sites of empathy.

The French feminist theorist He´le`ne Cixous also distinguishes
Achilles as a figure with whom she has identified in her meditation
upon empathy, fantasy, and history in the ‘Sorties’ section of The
Newly Born Woman. She makes the claim that as a young woman
her identification with Achilles, along with other mythological char-
acters, fortified her against isolation and provided her with an ally:
‘Indeed, in Homeric times I was Achilles. I know why. I was the
antiking. And I was passion. I had fits of rage that made History
difficult.’8 For Cixous, reading provides an escape route from present
injustice, and books function as the signs or maps which show the way
to a place ‘which is not economically or politically indebted to all the
vileness and compromise’. But her conception of the role of myth and
literature is broader than this. In a vivid and poignant autobiograph-
ical passage she describes how in her reading she sought out people
with whom she could identify, not simply because a sense of kinship
made her feel less alone, but because the process of locating them
showed her who she could be and therefore who she was:

8 H. Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in H. Cixous and C. Cle´ment The Newly Born
Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London, 1986), 73.

50 v a n d a za j ko

And that is where I go. I take books; I leave the real, colonial space; I go
away. Often I go read in a tree. Far from the ground and the shit. I don’t
go and read just to read, to forget—No! Not to shut myself up in some
imaginary paradise. I am searching: somewhere there must be people who
are like me in their rebellion and in their hope. Because I don’t despair: if
I myself shout in disgust, if I can’t be alive without being angry, there must
be others like me. I don’t know who, but when I am big, I’ll find them and
I’ll join them. I don’t yet know where.9

The individuals she encountered in such circumstances provided
Cixous with role models in relation to whom she could negotiate
her own subjectivity. For her, as for Keats, the fact that these
individuals were fictional did not diminish their power. The separ-
ation both writers make between the ‘real world’ and the world they
become acquainted with through literature is not a distinct one, and
there is no qualitative difference between the intimacy they experi-
ence with those who live and breathe around them and those who
live and breathe in their imagination. At first this lack of clear
distinction seems counter-intuitive—the inability to tell the differ-
ence between genuine and make-believe is surely something we
associate primarily with children—but only until we pause to con-
sider how hard it is to understand exactly what it is that happens
when we read. The American critic J. Hillis Miller has recently
written a book which investigates this subject. He explores his
first overwhelming response to a work of literature as follows:

When I was a child I did not want to know that The Swiss Family Robinson
had an author. To me it seemed a collection of words fallen from the sky and
into my hands. Those words allowed me magical access to a pre-existing
world of people and their adventures. The words transported me there. . . .
This other world I reached through reading The Swiss Family Robinson, it
seemed to me, did not depend for its existence on the words of the book, even
though those words were my only window on that virtual reality. The win-
dow, I would now say, no doubt shaped that reality through various rhetorical
devices. The window was not entirely colorless and transparent. I was, how-
ever, blissfully unaware of that. I saw through the words to what seemed to me
beyond them and not dependent on them, even though I could get there in no

9 Ibid. 72.

k e a t s , k l e i n , ci x o u s , a n d co o k ’ s achi lles 51

other way than by reading those words. I resented being told that the name on
the title page was that of the ‘author’ who had made it all up.

Whether many other people have had the same experience, I do not
know, but I confess to being curious to find out. It is not too much to say
that this whole book has been written to account for this experience.10

Hillis Miller initially associates his willingness to be carried away by
a story with the lack of cynicism that is typical of a child, but he goes
on to argue that the power to transport the reader is in itself an
essential quality of literature. The interpretative strategies of the
more sophisticated adult may appear to tell us something about the
way literary language works, but they are also a way of domesti-
cating literature, diminishing its capacity to reveal or create new
worlds. This kind of argument might seem to pander to the com-
plaint of many a student that to be asked to think about a text is to
spoil or diminish it. But the vocabulary Hillis Miller uses is itself
quite demanding, and the challenge he throws out is potentially
huge. The overarching claim, that literature may be defined as ‘a
strange use of words to refer to things, people, and events about
which it is impossible ever to know whether or not somewhere they
have a latent existence’,11 has metaphysical connotations that do
not sit comfortably with contemporary ideas.12 But the suggestion
that there are vocabularies available to us from other periods and
fields which might help us to articulate differently our experience of
reading leads us away from a narrowly historicist or discipline-
specific perspective that can make some formulations appear to be
out of bounds.

Both Hillis Miller and Cixous emphasize the importance of read-
ing in terms of their self-development. They both attempt to recreate
originary moments when their imaginative experience of another
resulted in their rejection of, or embrace of, an image of themselves.
Whether or not such moments are ‘true’ in any straightforward

10 J. Hillis Miller On Literature (London and New York, 2002), 14–15.
11 Ibid. 45.
12 ‘Who is to say that it is not the case, that all those alternative worlds
have not been waiting somewhere for some author to find fit words for
them? If so, they would go on existing there, waiting, even if their recording
author were never to appear.’ Ibid. 44.

52 v a n d a za j ko

sense, they represent an attempt to put into words an experience of
an internal process which is at once very personal and yet seems to
have the capacity to be shared. We cannot know if Hillis Miller,
Cixous, and Keats are discussing ‘the same’ process when they talk
about their transformative relationships with a variety of literary
characters,13 but what is striking is that they all insist on the con-
tinuing role of these characters in the non-literary world. There is a
sense in which they perceive the boundary between the literary and
the non-literary to be a permeable one, and as readers they move
between the two or, sometimes, inhabit them simultaneously.
Another way of putting it is that the literary world becomes part of
their non-literary world so that the two become inseparable.

Such representations of mental process inevitably rely heavily
upon metaphors of space and boundary and can only approximate
to the experiences which inspire them. There is no single authority
on which to rely for clarification and indeed any discourse which
might be said to be explanatory would itself be grounded in simi-
larly figurative language. One example of such a discourse is psy-
choanalysis which, throughout its history, has linked the effects of
literature with the early experiences of childhood. Within object-
relations theory, the branch of psychoanalysis that focuses in par-
ticular on the individual’s very first bodily and psychic encounters,
there is an emphasis on the way in which infantile mental life is
conducted as a continual relationship between the self and the
world. The processes of incorporation and expulsion, first of bodily
fluids, and then of the images of the earliest love objects, are seen to
provide the basis for later human interactions. In the words of
Melanie Klein:

My analytic experience has shown me that processes of introjection and
projection in later life repeat in some measure the pattern of the earliest
introjections and projections; the external world is again and again taken in
and put out—re-introjected and re-projected.14

13 The question of what constitutes ‘the same’ is, as we shall see, one that
Cook obsessively returns to in the final section of her novel.

14 M. Klein [1955] in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963
(London, 1997), 155.

k e a t s , k l e i n , ci x o u s , a n d co o k ’ s achi lles 53

A comparison of this kind of account of the processes of ego
formation with accounts of the reading process such as that offered
by Hillis Miller raises the question of whether the one might be used
to cast light on the other.15 The notion that as children we learn to
incorporate desirable ‘objects’,16 either wholly or partially, into our
sense of ourselves and to split off and expel those that we perceive to
be hostile does suggest that the earliest kind of identifications might
form the prototype for our later interactions as adults along the
lines Klein proposes. The psychoanalytic insistence that psychical
reality should not be confused with material reality is also import-
ant here because it substantially diminishes the importance of the
distinction between fictional characters and known individuals in
terms of their potential impact on our internal worlds. In order to
pursue the implications of this comparison, we must think further
about the role of phantasy in the development of subjectivity as
explored by Freud and subsequently developed by Klein.17

As so often with Freud, phantasy is not a stable concept but one
that is elaborated gradually and emphasized differently in different
essays. At times it refers, somewhat confusingly, to both uncon-
scious and conscious activity, and one of Freud’s principal concerns
is to establish the continuity between these two aspects of mental
life. In the 1908 paper ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ he sets

15 And indeed it raises the question of whether in some cases they may be
‘the same’.

16 This is a curiously impersonal word to describe what is in effect the
origin of relationship. However, as it is the word used by Klein and by a
whole tradition of psychoanalytic writing, from now on I shall use it
without inverted commas.

17 ‘Phantasy’ is a translation of the German ‘Phantasie’ which is the
word used by Freud. Within the English psychoanalytic tradition ‘phantasy’
has been preferred to ‘fantasy’ as the latter is deemed to have connotations
of triviality that are unhelpful in psychoanalytic contexts. However, Ameri-
can psychoanalytic writers have on the whole retained ‘fantasy’ so that both
spellings are in fact found in the commentaries on Freud. A close colleague
of Klein’s, Susan Isaacs, argued in a paper first published in 1943 that in
relation to her work the word should be spelt ‘phantasy’ in order to
highlight the particular Kleinian emphasis on its unconscious status. See
M. Likierman, Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context (London and New
York, 2001), 136–43.

54 v a n d a za j ko

up a parallel between children’s play and the imaginative activity of
the poet:

Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in
childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his
play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a
creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges
the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong
to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his
play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The
opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the
emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it
quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and
situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking
is all that differentiates the child’s ‘play’ from ‘phantasying’.

The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world
of phantasy which he takes very seriously—that is, which he invests with
large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.18

Freud here positions the child at one end of a spectrum and the
creative writer at the other; the ordinary adult occupies a space
somewhere between the two in that when he ceases to play, without
necessarily writing down his phantasies so that they become access-
ible to others, he ‘builds castles in the air and creates what are called
day-dreams’.19 Day-dreams are, then, one sort of phantasy in which
the conscious element is strong and which constitute a surrogate
form of pleasure for the adult once he has left the things of child-
hood behind.20 The relation of day-dreams to the dreams that
we have at night can be explained, Freud suggests, by thinking
about the content of both phenomena. All forms of phantasy are

18 S. Freud [1908], in Penguin Freud Library, 14, On Art and Literature,
131–2.

19 Ibid. 133.
20 Ibid.: ‘As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to
give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever
understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a
man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we
can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What
appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or
surrogate.’

k e a t s , k l e i n , ci x o u s , a n d co o k ’ s achi lles 55

motivated by a sense of the unsatisfactory nature of reality and by
expressing the fulfilment of a wish they correct this reality, making it
more palatable to the one who has the phantasy. The unconscious
element of dreams derives from the repressed aspects of the phan-
tasy which are repressed because they express desires of which the
dreamer is ashamed. Again, we are working with a continuum, with
day-dreams at one end and night dreams at the other, rather than
with an account of sharply differentiated experiences.

Freud argues that the most popular but least critically acclaimed
kinds of fiction, in which the characters are sharply divided into
good and bad ‘in defiance of the variety of human characters that
are to be observed in real life’, are most like day-dreams in that in
these the wish-fulfilment operates at a crude and superficial level.
The writers of these stories wish that they could achieve success like
their heroes and in recounting their exploits they achieve satisfac-
tion. The popular fiction that has ‘the widest and most eager circle
of readers of both sexes’ would seem to offer to its readers a pretty
straightforward means of identifying with the heroes who overcome
sundry obstacles and achieve happy endings. Other kinds of fiction,
however, present more complex challenges. Freud does not linger
over these but he mentions in passing the ‘psychological’ novel, in
which the modern writer splits up his ego and, in consequence,
personifies ‘the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several
heroes’, and ‘eccentric’ novels in which ‘the person who is intro-
duced as the hero plays only a very small active part’. Although not
stated explicitly, it would seem fair to assume that if the fiction
which most obviously resembles day-dreaming is the least demand-
ing and satisfies most trivially, the fiction which is most demanding
and affords a more profound satisfaction might be expected to more
closely resemble night dreams; that is to say, it must contain a higher
degree of unconscious material.

Melanie Klein built on and expanded Freud’s concept of phan-
tasy, particularly as it relates to the unconscious. The activity she
observed while watching the play of her child patients led her to
believe that play, like dreams, is governed by the primary thought-
process and not the more rational secondary process which is bound
by the reality principle. Through spontaneous play the child exter-
nalizes his preoccupations and articulates his anxieties; the role of

56 v a n d a za j ko

the analyst is to offer an interpretation about the significance of the
material he expresses, in the same way as she does when listening to
an adult talk about the content of his dreams. Freud himself had
written about infant hallucinatory ‘thinking’ whereby the baby is
able to summon up an image of the satisfying object for a short
period if his immediate need for sustenance is not met. Klein went
further in suggesting that ‘unconscious phantasy’ involves both the
biological need for food and the mental representation of that need
in symbolic form:

Phantasy creates the earliest system of meaning in the psyche. It is the
element that gives blind human urges their direction, and so is an instinctual
mode of thinking based on the response to worldly impingements. Out of
this primordial mental activity, a more mature cognitive capacity later
develops.21

In order to make sense of the ways in which infants begin to form
and respond to symbols, Klein developed two terms, projection and
introjection, both of which are crucial for our current enquiry.22
Projection is the process by means of which the child displaces
wishes, feelings or objects which he refuses to own or acknowledge
in himself into another person or thing. Although this may sound
too sophisticated a process for a child,23 Klein argued that the initial
response to the acute sense of anxiety created by the birth experi-
ence is the rejection of frightening or hostile objects and the creation
of new ones which symbolize those that have been abandoned. In
this way the child’s relation to his parental figures is always phan-
tastical in that, although it is based on his actual interactions with
them, it also comprises his symbolic representations of them which
are fashioned by the primary, unconscious, thought process. Intro-
jection, the reverse procedure, is important here: the child also

21 Likierman, Klein, 139.
22 Klein did not invent these terms (see e.g. Freud’s essay ‘Instincts and
their Vicissitudes’) but it is her particular use of them that I am focusing on
here.
23 This indeed was one of the criticisms made by opponents of the
Kleinian position as it was articulated by Isaacs at the first of the Contro-
versial Discussions. See P. King and R. Steiner (eds.), The Freud–Klein
Controversies 1941–45 (London, 1991).

k e a t s , k l e i n , ci x o u s , a n d co o k ’ s achi lles 57

transposes the images of objects from the outside to the inside of
himself, some of which will have previously been formed via the
projection of his own hostile impulses. In this way, there is a
continual interplay between inner and outer worlds so that both
are experienced in the light of the other:

Super-ego development can be traced back to introjection in the earliest
stages of infancy; the primal internalized objects form the basis of complex
processes of identification; persecutory anxiety, arising from the experience
of birth, is the first form of anxiety, very soon followed by depressive
anxiety; introjection and projection operate from the beginning of post-
natal life and constantly interact. This interaction both builds up the
internal world and shapes the picture of external reality. The inner world
consists of objects, first of all the mother, internalized in various aspects and
emotional situations. The relationships between these internalized figures,
and between them and the ego, tend to be experienced—when persecutory
anxiety is dominant—as mainly hostile and dangerous; they are felt to
be loving and good when the infant is gratified and happy feelings
prevail. This inner world, which can be described in terms of internal
relations and happenings, is the product of the infant’s own impulses,
emotions, and phantasies. It is of course profoundly influenced by his
good and bad experiences from external sources. But at the same time the
inner world influences his perception of the external world in a way that is
no less decisive for his development.24

It is of course impossible to verify Klein’s account of the earliest
development of the child as there is nothing at our disposal that can
be considered empirical data. We can only infer backwards, as did
Klein, from the behaviour we observe in older children, and indeed in
adults, and put forward some kind of theory as to the roots and causes
of that behaviour. If we recall the descriptions of the reading process in
the texts we looked at earlier, are there then grounds for thinking that
for Cixous, Keats, and Hillis Miller the processes of projection and
introjection have been, and continue to be, operative in the formation
of their subjectivity? To paraphrase Meira Likierman, have the most
intense and disturbing parts of themselves only been accommodated
after they have journeyed through the minds of others?25 Is it plausible

24 Klein, Envy, 141–2.
25 Likierman, Klein, 160 is describing Klein’s particular take on the
development of identity.

58 v a n d a za j ko

that when readers assimilate and are transformed by particular as-
pects of literary or mythical figures they are tracing the patterns of
early object relationships?

Cixous’ identification with Achilles is certainly striking, and its
unexpectedness has led some critics to suspect that it is not to be
taken seriously. For example, Miriam Leonard argues as follows:

That Cixous can, on the same page, perform the writing of the self around
such incongruous figures as the Holocaust survivor and the psychopathic
hero of Homer’s martial epic raises questions about literary and historical
identification. For a classicist investigating the dangers of a conflation of
ancient and modern constructions of the self, it is hard to see Cixous’
formulations as anything other than parodic. That the spokeswoman of a
radical contemporary feminist outlook should come to imagine herself
in the figure of the aristos archaio¯ n [the best of the Achaeans] seems noth-
ing less than baffling. Cixous naturalizes the figures of an alien cultural
construction, making them the mere mirrors of a Cixousian political
investment.26

There are several points here worth commenting upon: it is of
course true that a self-representation can be read as rhetorically as
any other kind of representation, and Cixous’ identification with
Achilles can be interpreted with an emphasis on the problematics of
the construction of cultural difference. But the questions she raises
about ‘literary and historical identification’ may also be worth
considering in one of many possible wider contexts, that of the
possibilities of accessing the past, and of changing it. In another
passage from ‘Sorties’ Cixous is quite explicit about the transforma-
tive implications of her project:

What would happen to logocentrism, to the great philosophical systems, to
the order of the world in general if the rock upon which they founded this
church should crumble?

If some fine day it suddenly came out that the logocentric plan had
always, inadmissibly, been to create a foundation for (to found and fund)

26 M. Leonard, ‘Creating a Dawn: Writing through Antiquity in the
Work of He´le`ne Cixous’, Arethusa, 33.1 (2000), 133–4. It could, of course,
be argued that Leonard’s use of the term ‘psychopathic’ in this passage
deconstructs her argument about the historical particularity of construc-
tions of the self.

k e a t s , k l e i n , ci x o u s , a n d co o k ’ s achi lles 59

phallocentrism, to guarantee the masculine order a rationale equal to
history itself.

So all the history, all the stories would be there to retell differently; the
future would be incalculable; the historic forces would and will change
hands and change body—another thought which is yet unthinkable—will
transform the functioning of all society. We are living in an age where the
conceptual foundation of an ancient culture is in the process of being
undermined by millions of a species of mole (Topoi, ground mines) never
known before.27

Here it seems to be precisely the ‘dangerous’ aspect of the conflation
of ancient and modern versions of the self that she is exploiting and
manipulating. She suggests that the undermining of the conceptual
power of an ancient culture can be effected by the retelling of its
stories. The emotional power of a mythic text may be the means of
transforming our historical knowledge, and to appropriate the past
without deference to its alienness is properly to acknowledge the
role of subjectivity in the production of all our representations of it.

One significant aspect of Cixous’ intellectual position is that she
writes both within and against a post-Freudian, psychoanalytically
informed tradition which is highly aware of the dynamics of the
formation of the self in the reception of literary texts.28 Her
accounts of readerly identification necessarily take cognisance both
of conscious and unconscious factors: while in some ways the
connections between her and Achilles are relatively straightforward
and explicitly articulated (both perceive themselves to be outsiders,
rebellious, unfairly treated, and vehemently opposed to the unjust
use of power),29 in other ways they are only partly known or

27 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 65.
28 Cixous seems to want to combine historically located notions of the
self with a concept of the literary Imaginary and it is this combination
which leads her to reject any simplistic description of her model of literary
identification as a form of naı¨ve escapism. For Cixous there is a necessity of
writing from History which she is also trying to escape and it is this tension
which leads to her creative and combative engagement with the psycho-
analytic tradition in ‘Sorties’.
29 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 73: ‘I fought the Trojan war my own way: on neither
one side nor the other. I loathed the chiefs’ stupid, petty, and sanctifying
mentality. What did they serve? A narcissistic glory. What did they love?
Their royal image. The masculine code, squared: not only the masculine

60 v a n d a za j ko

knowable, arising as they do from the unconscious. The Cixousian
Imaginary, which is the locus of the unconscious, is conceptualized
as occupying a space prior to gender differentiation, and so Achilles’
masculinity is not an obstacle to a feminine reader’s identification
with him. Cixous’ theorization of e´criture feminine is driven by a
desire to circumvent the hierarchical oppositions that currently or-
ganize our thought, including the opposition between mind and
body. Just as the Kleinian processes of projection and identification
elide the distinction between instinct and representation, so Cixous’
descriptions of masculine and feminine positions are neither wholly
grounded in bodily differences nor ‘simply’ metaphors. Morag
Shiach summarizes the position as follows:

This interest in the material nature of language is related to Cixous’ con-
viction that writing is produced, and understood, in relation to the body. By
this she does not mean that there is any simple equivalence between the
writing body and the written text, but rather that it is impossible to sustain
the complete dichotomy between mind and body which offers the illusion
of intellectual control at the cost of erasing, censoring, and hystericising the
body. This interest in the relation between language and the body leads her
to an engagement with the unconscious, as the locus of that which has been
repressed by the brutal severing of the corporeal and the linguistic, and by
the processes of sexual differentiation. Thus both myth and dream are used
in her texts as ways of exploring the archaic and the repressed, and as ways
of unsettling the illusion of subjective autonomy and conscious control.30

Cixous figures her identification with Achilles as belonging to a time
and place that both precedes the Symbolic and exceeds it, in as
much as it belongs to the utopian realm of desire. In this extract
from ‘Sorties’ which follows the lines quoted earlier, Cixous shifts
between tenses and subject positions and shows how within the
Imaginary gender is as much a mode of relationship as anything
else. We are reminded of Freud’s characterization of the ‘psycho-
logical’ novel in ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ where the

value but the essence of virility as well, that is undisputed power. Now onto
the stage comes the species of men-kings. Vile patterns. Villainous bosses.
Wily. Guilty consciences. The Agamemnon type. I despised the species.’

30 M. Shiach, He´le`ne Cixous: A Politics of Writing (London, 1991), 70.

k e a t s , k l e i n , ci x o u s , a n d co o k ’ s achi lles 61

writer is said to split up her ego and, in consequence, personifies the
conflicting currents of her mental life in several heroes:

I didn’t give a damn for hierarchy, for command, and I know how to love.
I greatly loved women and men. I knew the value of a unique person, the
beauty, the sweetness. I didn’t ask myself any petty questions, I was un-
aware of limits, I enjoyed my bisexuality without anxiety: that both kinds
harmonized within me seemed perfectly natural to me. I never even thought
it could be otherwise. Had I not lived among women for a long time? And
among men I gave up nothing of the tender, feminine intensities. Prohibition
didn’t come near me. I was far above stupid superstitions, sterile divisions.
And I always loved wholly: I adored Patroclus with all my might; as a
woman I was his sister, his lover, his mother; as a man, his brother, his
husband and himself. And I knew better than any man how to love women
because of having been their companion and their sister for so long. I loved
and I loved love. I never went back on love.31

The passage re-enacts a whole range of phantastical subject posi-
tions and perhaps this accounts for the disquieting effect it has on
some of its readers. Although Cixous herself emphasizes the poten-
tial of writing to destabilize and unsettle, from the point of view of
the reader the kinds of identification the writing makes possible may
also have this effect. The retrospective narrativization of potent
object relations may trigger in us a disturbing sense of nostalgia
for capacities we have lost.

In the final section of her book Cook is preoccupied with similar
questions of belatedness and identification. The Keats she depicts is
someone who worries away at the question of how he is both like
and unlike other people, both real and imaginary, and how he is
both like and unlike himself.32 As he stares down at the corpse of a
criminal he is helping to dissect—Keats studied to be a doctor and
such dissections were part of his training—he muses on the rela-
tionship between that body and his own:

31 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 73–4.
32 In psychoanalytic terms the unconscious is that part of us which is
concealed from ourselves. Cook shows us Keats’s unconscious at work
when, in a fine example of ‘dream-work’, the ‘sella Turcica’, the name for
a part of the bone that Keats has been involved in excavating, becomes the
‘Turkish saddle’ he sits in when in a dream he rides a stallion outside the
walls of Troy. E. Cook, Achilles (London, 2001), 97.

62 v a n d a za j ko

The cold sac of coiled, dampish tissue was once a brain very like his own. In
structure at least. His own warm hand—with which he writes, eats, ties his
cravat, clasps other hands, pleasures himself etc.—is like the hand of him
there, the cadaver whose right upper limb they’d seen displayed: nerve,
muscle, tendon and bone. There are differences of course—variations in
thicknesses, curves, placements—there was the man whose stomach had
sagged right down into his pelvis. Differences in size. But even that great
fellow who had gone to such lengths to ensure he wouldn’t be made an
anatomy of when they hung him—even his huge bones were of the same
number, the same design, the same function as his own.
. . . the same and not the same.
‘It is very unlike you my dear Keats to be so peevish.’ How can I be unlike
myself?

I was not myself at the time.

The theme reoccurs in different forms,33 and via the personage of
the poet Cook shows us the variety of ways in which human beings
grapple with their fluctuating sense of who and what they are.
Keats’s literary sensibility adds a powerful dimension, and his press-
ing awareness of his own materiality is combined with a respon-
siveness to his mythical forebears:

The large Achilles (on his prest-bed lolling)
From his deepe Chest, laughes out a lowd applause34

As Keats reads these lines he feels a little flood of satisfaction. He strokes
them appreciatively with his thumb. The way the accents fall, on ‘large’, on
‘prest-bed’—you can feel the weight of the man sinking into his bed, the
words pressing, like the printer’s ink, into the page. He takes his pencil to
underline, to double underline this place. His chest eases, as if it were his
own deep chest freeing itself.

‘Ah,’ he breathes in a low voice, ‘that’s nice’.
He triple scores the margin too, making this place, this book, his own.

33 For example, when Keats thinks about a self-portrait of Rembrandt
that his friends say looks like him, when he thinks about the way language
operates to reinforce verisimilitude, and when he thinks about the body’s
continuing mutation after death, a semblance of life ‘independent of any
controlling consciousness’. Cook, Achilles, 98–9, 103.

34 These lines are taken from another of Cook’s inter-texts—Shake-
speare’s Troilus and Cressida Act I Scene iii.

k e a t s , k l e i n , ci x o u s , a n d co o k ’ s achi lles 63

Keat’s sensations on reading Chapman’s Homer demonstrate the
inter-penetrability of the literary and real worlds:

Reading is an incarnated as well as a spiritual act. The reader sits in his or her
chair and turns material pages with bodily hands. Though literature refers to
the real world, however, and though reading is a material act, literature uses
such physical embedment to create or reveal alternative realities. These then
enter back into the ordinary ‘real’ world by way of readers whose beliefs and
behaviour are changed by reading - sometimes for the better, perhaps some-
times not. We see the world through the literature we read, or, rather, those
who still have what Simon During calls ‘literary subjectivity’ do that.35 We
then act in the real world on the basis of that seeing. Such action is a
performative rather than a constative or referential effect of language.
Literature is a use of words that makes things happen by way of its readers.36

They also remind us of Keat’s famous poem describing those sensa-
tions in conventional literary form:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.37

35 Keats’s contemporary and interlocutor, Hazlitt, also attempted to
describe this phenomenon when he described people ‘who are in the habit
of reading novels and romances, are compelled to take a deep interest in,
and to have their affections strongly excited by, fictitious characters and
imaginary situations; their thoughts and feelings are constantly carried out
of themselves, to persons they never saw, and things that never existed’.
Complete Works, xix. 23.

36 Hillis Miller, On Literature, 20.
37 The edition used is Cook’s (Oxford, 1990). Cook’s engagement with
the poet in her role as editor as well as writer adds an interesting dimension

64 v a n d a za j ko

In this poem the speaker describes an experience of discovery that
equates the impact of reading a translation of Homer to that of
sighting a previously unknown planet or ocean. Like the natural
phenomena which existed before they were observed by astronomer
or explorer, the poems of Homer existed before Chapman’s transla-
tion (indeed the speaker acknowledges that he had heard about
them),38 but it is this particular translation that imparts to the speaker
the ‘pure serene’ - the experience of Homer that captivates him. In an
often cited discussion Marjorie Levinson has argued that the sonnet
expresses the deliberate distancing of the poet from the tradition of
high culture that is represented by being able to read Homer in Greek:

he advertises his corrupt access to the literary system and to those social
institutions which inscribe that system systematically in the hearts and
minds of young men. To read Homer in translation and after having read
Spenser, Coleridge, Cary, and whoever else is included in Keats’s travelogue,
is to read Homer badly (in a heterodox and alienated way), and to subvert
the system which installs Homer in a particular and originary place.39

Keats’s relation to Homer is, on this reading, an edgy and defiant
one which challenges the hierarchy of established canons both in
terms of particular works and of the legacy of Greece.

Martin Aske reads the poem as a statement about Keats’s sense of
his own belatedness. He suggests that the mythological presence of
Greece is produced by the act of reading the sonnet and that Keats,
like contemporary readers and writers, has no option but to access
the past via a complex series of encounters with literary texts and
individuals. His descriptions of Keats’s encounters with Greek
mythology, with Chapman, and with Homer, draw attention to
the ways in which each of them is mediated by a number of others:

to her identification with him and clearly shows the densely mediated
nature of the process. She reads Keats reading Chapman reading Homer’s
Achilles. The question must then be posed of whether Cook’s Achilles is
Homer’s.

38 Keats was familiar with Pope’s translation and edition of Homer.
Strikingly, in the words of Marjorie Levinson: ‘Keats’s acquaintance with
Pope’s translation is suppressed by the sonnet.’ M. Levinson, Keats’s Life of
Allegory (Oxford, 1988), 12.

39 Ibid.

k e a t s , k l e i n , ci x o u s , a n d co o k ’ s achi lles 65

The name ‘Homer’ represents the most privileged site of the beautiful
mythology of Greece—the ‘pure serene’ of an origin—but no sooner is the
name spoken than it is displaced by another name, ‘Chapman’. And it is,
I think, precisely this displacement which signifies, for the modern poet, the
impossibility of a pure, unmediated return to origins . . . .40

Both these interpretations call attention to the gap that Keats opens
up between himself and his illustrious predecessor, the one empha-
sizing his political stance, the other his self-positioning within the
literary tradition. But what they underplay is the sense of intimacy
that the poem expresses. The word ‘breathe’ in the seventh line is
unexpectedly visceral and implies the taking of the text into the
body of the speaker and its subsequent expulsion. The crossing of
his body’s boundaries leaves the speaker transfigured: he is not the
same person he was before and is able to forge identifications with
the nameless astronomer and Cortez that were hitherto unimagin-
able to him.41 For the reader this sonnet both describes and enacts
the transformative potential of literary identification—a potential
that at the time of Keats’s writing was expressed using the language
of the sublime;42 and, just like Keats’s introjection of the Achilles

40 M. Aske, Keats and Hellenism (Cambridge, 1985), 42.
41 There is a substantial debate in Keats studies surrounding the identity
of the explorer referred to here as in fact it was Balboa and not Corte´s who
discovered the Pacific. C. Rzepka ‘ ‘‘Cortez—or Balboa, or Somebody Like
That’’: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats’s ‘‘Chapman’s Homer’’ Sonnet’,
Keats–Shelley Journal, 51 (2002), 35–75, summarizes the various positions
and makes a strong case for the deliberateness of Keats’s choice, arguing
that it adds to the poem’s implicit comment on the effect of poetry : ‘By
transporting Cortez to a peak in Darien, Keats represents the contagious
effects of his own sublime ‘‘transport,’’ collapsing Cortez’s and Balboa’s
separate encounters with the Pacific into a spatially identical but diachron-
ically laminated point of exalted awareness, and investing a scene of belated
discovery with the uncanny aura of a first discoverer whose achievement his
successor would both supplant and appropriate. This desire can be realized
only through the successor’s opening himself up to being possessed, ‘‘in-
spired’’ or ‘‘breathed into,’’ by his predecessor’s ghostly presence.’ pp. 73–4.
42 J. Hecht, ‘Scarcity and Poetic Election in Two Sonnets of John Keats’,
ELH 61 (1994), 104: ‘ ‘‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’’ does the
work of establishing the legitimacy of a certain kind of learning. It uses an
accumulative, tripartite simile whose explosive poetic effect is adequate to
the sublimity it describes. When the sonnet makes the reader feel he is in the

66 v a n d a za j ko

who is ‘fighting in the Trenches’, it demonstrates that the mediated
nature of our relationship with the texts of the past does not prevent
their ‘transhistorical intelligibility’.43 Indeed it is the constant inter-
play between our sense of ourselves and our sense of what is not
ourselves, between, we might say, projection and introjection, that
enables any kind of relationship to develop.44 In the words of
Lavinia Gomez: ‘Relationship arises through experiencing what is
inside and what is outside as in some way the same: in other words,
identification.’45 This applies as much to relationship with literary
and mythological figures as it does to relationship with those who
inhabit our more prosaic worlds.

presence of something new and great, it occurs to the reader that this feeling
is itself the very subject of the sonnet. Thus the poem poses the question,
whether its own poetic spell is of the same order as that spell which it
discovers in the reading of Chapman’s Homer and in the two commensurate
moments which share the simile.’ For a sustained attempt to synthesize the
poetic discourse of the sublime (of which Homer was of course a corner-
stone) and a psychoanalytic criticism derived ‘from Freud’s work on the
ego’s relation to outer reality’ see S. Ende, Keats and the Sublime (New
Haven and London, 1976), p. xv.

43 Hecht, ‘Scarcity’, 104.
44 The dynamic sense of relationship between a text and reader is beau-
tifully articulated by Ende, Keats, pp. xi–xii: ‘We approach texts for relief,
or delight, or perhaps as Yeats says, for the forgiveness of sin, and so we
tend to idealize them, at least at first, and grant them a certain power. This is
a power over us, as well as over the ‘‘reality’’ they comprehend, and the
reader who would describe his vision necessarily puts off that power and
clears a space within which to find his own voice. Such an effort at control
need not be wilful, but it does seem necessary, for without a mild exercise of
power, the text retains its ambivalent aspect of otherness; control, on the
other hand, leads to possession. These two opposed movements, which we
usefully may think of as intellectual and emotional in their respective
extremes of yielding and retaining self-possession, seem always operative
in textual encounters, and their ratio is one description of a reader’s
approach. We can formulate an ideal approach, which would consist in
striking a balance, in which the reader does not cease to need or love the
text yet retains some of his power to define, to see properly, and to report.
Whatever name we choose for this relationship will necessarily be paradox-
ical or oxymoronic, for it will need to comprehend outer and inner, expan-
sion and contraction, contact and withdrawal.’
45 L. Gomez, An Introduction to Object Relations (London, 1997), 53.

3

Beyond Oedipus: Feminist Thought,
Psychoanalysis, and Mythical
Figurations of the Feminine

G r i s e l d a Pollock

modernity and femininity: a leap in
knowledge

Thinking about classical myth and feminist thought found me re-
reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, first published in
1928. Her reflection on trying to write a lecture on women and
fiction opens with a vividly imagined scene. The author is in Cam-
bridge, epitomizing the privileged classical university education
from which, as a woman of her moment and class, Woolf felt
excluded. As a ‘daughter of educated men’, deprived of the intellec-
tual sustenance her father and brothers automatically acquired by
gender, class, and nation in the university, her own thought would
have to forge less formal means for its elaboration, seeking
resources that would challenge the patriarchal establishment at
every level.1 Her trip to Cambridge exposed Virginia Woolf to a
hurtful experience of exclusion as she ‘trespassed’ on a College

1 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas [1938] (Harmondsworth, 1977), 55.

68 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

Fellows’ lawn only to be shooed off by an officious Beadle not
merely as not belonging to the College, but completely out of
place as a woman in a masculine enclave. Instead of dining in
style at one of the rich men’s colleges, Virginia Woolf takes her
homely and plain dinner of gravy soup, tough beef followed by
prunes and custard, at one of the poorer, women’s colleges. Here,
however, as she approaches the dining hall across the lawns, the
author looks up and sees a ghost that can offer some compensation
in her intellectual exile:

Somebody was in a hammock, some-body, but in this light they were
phantoms only, half guessed, half seen, raced across the grass—would no
one stop her?—and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air,
to glance at the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her
great forehead and her shabby dress—could it be the famous scholar, could
it be J—— H——herself? All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which
the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by a star or sword—
the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the
spring.2

We know this fascinating passage to be a curiously guarded
invocation of the ideas as well as an image of the renowned and
pioneering classical scholar Jane Harrison (Fig. 3.1) who is thus
significantly embedded in the modernist Woolf’s arch-feminist text
as both a revered image of learning ‘in the feminine’ that counters
the exclusive masculinity of the university, and as the icon of a
feminist interpretation of classical culture that validated a feminine
principle signalled by a bounding movement: running. Harrison’s
distinctive interpretations of the spring rituals of the daimon are
invoked by Woolf’s ‘a flash of some terrible reality leaping . . . out of
the heart of the spring’.3

If Virginia Woolf is icon of and legend for later twentieth-century
feminist theory, Jane Harrison is not.4 Known to classical scholars,
this important and innovative feminist thinker of the early twentieth

2 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1928] (Harmondsworth,
1974), 19.

3 Martha C. Carpentier, Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text: The Influ-
ence of Jane Harrison on Joyce, Eliot and Woolf (Amsterdam, 1998), 67.

4 See Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf: Icon (Chicago, 1999).

beyond oedipus 69

Fig. 3.1. Augustus John, Jane Harrison, oil on carvas 1909.
(Newnham College, Cambridge).

century emerges as a counter-phantom to that other deadly ghost
Virginia Woolf avowed she had to kill in order to become a writer at
all. The Angel in the House was the dulcet voice of domesticated
and self-sacrificial bourgeois femininity policed by internalized mas-
culine censorship that, had she been allowed to survive, ‘would have
plucked the heart out of my writing’. Woolf bravely declared in
another text:

Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it
took much time that had better be spent upon learning Greek grammar; or
in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience
that was found to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in
the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.5

5 Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’ [1931], in Michelle Barrett,
(ed.), Women and Writing (London, 1979), 60.

70 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

In this conceit of a murderous battle against a menacing phantom
of bourgeois femininity subordinated to the patriarchal authority,
Virginia Woolf invokes a mythic struggle for the emergence of the
independent, and self-defining, voice of the modern woman as
writer, thinker, creator. The battle against the Angel, however,
bears equal and painful witness to an unconscious form of matricide
that dramatically heightens the stakes for modern women as intel-
lectuals. Their coming of age and finding a voice appears to involve
a negation of a femininity they receive through the genealogy of
mother—daughter relations, that is, precisely the psycho-symbolic
domain screened by the exclusivity of the Oedipus legend in
‘classical’ accounts of subjectivity and sexuality.6 It is, however,

6 I need to clarify terminology here as the vocabulary of classical studies
and psychoanalysis overlap but diverge. I shall use the term archaic psy-
choanalytically to refer to the deepest strata of the human psyche and the
earliest of the events and experiences of the becoming human subject. This
does not make the archaic level prehistoric in contrast to the classic period
of Oedipus complex. Freud compared his discovery of the pre-Oedipal
phases of femininity to the recently discovered Minoan and Mycaenaean
cultures that had lain undiscovered behind the knowledge of the classical
world. Their priority historically did not make them any less culturally
developed or significant. Rather knowledge of them had been screened;
excavation was needed to bring them back into our understanding and
interpretation of the whole of human history. So it would be a mistake
to superimpose classicist historians’ chronology Archaic–Classical onto
psychoanalytical notions of archaic moments in the psyche since (i) the
latter remain active, embedded in the structures of the psyche and (ii) later
turns in Lacanian theory for instance and much feminist work have re-
evaluated and are researching the hitherto overlooked dimensions of psy-
chic life that stretch between what Lacan named ‘trauma to fantasy’—
between the Real and the Imaginary. Lacan’s initial stress on the Symbolic
loosened in his later work as he came to appreciate that the archaic dimen-
sions of subjectivity needed theorization and acknowledgement. So my
argument does not compound the idea of the feminine or the maternal as
archaic only to be imagined as operative in pre-Oedipal formations, to be
overlaid or overwritten by the ‘classical’ Oedipal structures. Such play with
transvaluation of the early versus to the later, does nothing to shift the
Oedipal paradigm’s exclusive determination of subjectivity, as I shall go on
to show. If we want to think beyond Oedipus, we will have to rewrite these
pseudo-chronological habits that hide their ideological agenda and progres-
sivist telos within chronology—in art and cultural history as much as in

beyond oedipus 71

only the legacy of the Oedipal kinship model that leads the feminine
subject either to a part-killing of herself or a melancholic refusal of
maternal detachment, resulting in a holding of the entombed
mother within a perpetually mourning psyche.7

In another essay, entitled ‘The Intellectual Status of Women’,
defending women’s intellectual achievements against the critic Des-
mond McCarthy, Woolf openly named Jane Harrison as an example
of the historical ‘advance in intellectual power’ of women over the
centuries. As major scholar within not only the university but in its
privileged discipline, classics, Jane Harrison’s symbolic importance is
surely connected to her intellectual intervention in that domain of
cultural memory. Harrison challenged the patriarchal interpretations
of classical culture and supplied writers like Woolf the resource for
another vision of the feminine and of the aesthetic that would
sustain the ambition of Woolf’s own modernist literature as a rad-
ically different form and psychic economy.

Feminist scholars, identifying the profound influence of Jane
Harrison’s work on modernist writers such as James Joyce and
T. S. Eliot, as well as Virginia Woolf, reveal the ways in which the
novels of the latter can be read for their literary internalization and
creative transformation/domestication of Harrison’s feminist iden-
tification of matrilinear and collectively oriented mythic structures,
notably in the novel To the Lighthouse (1927). According to femi-
nist literary scholars such as Jane Marcus and Martha Carpentier,
therefore, Jane Harrison’s work installed a place for the feminine in
the classical and pre-classical cultures that ‘leapt’ across historical

non-feminist psychoanalysis. The feminine is not archaic, although re-
searching what art history calls the ‘archaic’ periods of culture may yield
other structures of meaning and mythic representations. What is psycho-
logically archaic operates, however, according to sub-symbolic systems, not
yet fully integrated into articulation and symbolization. Yet through inten-
sities and affect, they deliver through their translations and linings of later
image and word systems, what we can still name meaning.

7 This is the proposition of Julia Kristeva drawing on the work of Andre´
Green in her Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S.
Roudiez (New York, 1989), 227–30 and it is explicated further in Kaja
Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and
Cinema, (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), esp. ch. 4, pp. 101–40.

72 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

time to infuse Virginia Woolf’s modernism with the mytho-poetical
resources. These other readings countered the menace of Victorian
ideals of feminine vacuity and passivity to challenge the masculine
privilege of an exclusive access to a classical hence universal know-
ledge. Precisely in hypothesizing a feminine counter-principle
within the classical archive and at the foundations of Western art
itself, notably through her book Themis (1912 and 1927), Harrison
thus transformed a phallic lack into a feminist legacy.

return and persistence: a generation

of thinkers

As art historian rather than classicist, I came across Jane Harrison
serendipitously. I was researching the American abstract painter Lee
Krasner (1908–82). In the late 1950s, Lee Krasner read and refer-
enced Harrison’s important book Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), as
part of her search for an understanding of the ritual and mythic
dimension of modernist painting that was typical of modernism’s
search for structural origins of its practices.8 In her struggle with the
real rather than phantom giants of her own artistic moment, Jack-
son Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose both abstract and
figurative post-surrealist paintings generated modernist mythic im-
ages of a monstrous, dangerous, and utterly Other femininity—
terrifying sphinx-creatures and murdered mothers—Lee Krasner
found support in Harrison’s mytho-poetics of the Dionysian rituals
for a more beneficent figuration of the feminine principle of liveli-
ness and renewal in communal action in a series of paintings that
invoked notions of rebirth Spring Memory (1959, Norfolk Southern
Corporation), Re-Echo (1957, Denver, Collection of Michael Wil-
liams), and indeed The Bull (1959, Mr and Mrs Meredith J. Long).9

8 Robert Hobbs, Lee Krasner (New York, 1999), 150–2. A copy of
Harrison’s book is in the Pollock–Krasner Library at East Hampton.

9 For a typology of de Kooning’s work as massacred women see Julia
Kristeva, ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’ [1977] in Toril Moi
(ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford, 1987), 297–8. For my own analysis of
this process, see Griselda Pollock, ‘Killing Men and Dying Women’, in Fred

beyond oedipus 73

At the same time as I was led to Jane Harrison through L.K. (the
gender-disguising signature of the artist married to Jackson Pol-
lock), I was working on the radical rereadings of pagan antiquity
as foundations for the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud and
the art historical work of the Hamburg art historian Aby War-
burg.10 Like Harrison, both thinkers are significant for their atten-
tion to the psychological, emotional, and affective sources of human
culture in its archaic becomings and for imagining culture as the
trace or memory-bearer of the profound psychic conflicts inside
humanity, forever split between archaic drives and impulses and
their managed sublimation and transformation into social forms
and intellectual postures that are undone, however, in constant
ambivalence and returns of the repressed. Jane Harrison, born in
1850, died in 1928, just six months before Virginia Woolf hallucin-
ated her spectre on the terrace of Newnham College. Freud was
born in 1856; Warburg in 1866; he died in 1929. Harrison was part
of this generation.

I want, however, to use this curious conjunction of Virginia
Woolf, the feminist modernist, and Jane Harrison, a woman clas-
sical scholar whom she clearly knew, admired, and invoked, like the
ghost of Hamlet’s father, as a benign spirit signified by her great
forehead, yet like all of women’s claims on education, poorly
resourced and badly rewarded, hence her shabby clothes. Whatever
the current scholarly status of ritualism as an account of the origins
of Greek drama and by extension art itself, its historical value here
is that, in advancing its theses, Jane Harrison challenged both an
academic and a political orthodoxy. Jane Peacock writes:

Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Man-
chester, 1996), 220–94.

10 Although known as the founder of the Warburg Library and Institute,
now part of the University of London, Aby Warburg’s work itself has
remained less widely known because of the lack of translations of more
than two of his key essays. In 2001 Kurt Forster edited a comprehensive
translation, Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles,
2001). See also Michael Steinberg’s translation and insightful commentary
on the essay on the Serpent Ritual in Aby Warburg, Images form the Region
of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. and intro. Michael P.
Steinberg (Ithaca, NY, 1995).

74 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

Rather than internalizing Victorian scholarly views of classical Greece as
the model for nineteenth-century Britain, she explored the archaic period in
order to understand the intense emotional experience that underlay both
cultures. She looked not to classical Greece to glorify the achievements of
Victorian Britain, but to the archaic period to explain its failures.11

Independent of Freudian discourse, Harrison’s attentiveness to
both the emotional intensities and the ritual management of life
and death anxieties and energies of the chronologically archaic
period of Western culture parallel in structure and effect the work
of Sigmund Freud. Influenced by newly extended archaeological
periodizations that revealed an archaic culture beyond the classical
Greek world, Freud would develop his ideas about the archaic
domains and strata of the psyche surrounded by the antique remains
of ancient cultures that he began to collect so ardently in the later
1890s.12 Challenging the boundaries of a closed intellectual system
that polices its participants and services a delusive masculinist na-
tional identity, and desiring to produce new knowledges drawn from
emergent disciplines inspired by marginalized thinkers, is precisely
the hallmark of feminist interventions. If we can parallel Harrison,
Woolf, and Freud—it was, after all, the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press that
published the English translations of Freud’s writings in the 1920s—
does psychoanalysis itself allow for, and even demand, its own
feminist interventions in its, canonically Freudian, rereading of clas-
sical myth and Archaic precedents, especially of the myth most
deeply identified with Freudian legends of subjectivity: Oedipus?

Where else should we turn thus to reconsider femininity and
classical myth but to Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis, itself
a modernist revision to dominant conceptions of classical myth?
Edmund Engelman’s hugely significant photographs of Freud’s
study and consulting room taken in 1938 hold a profound interest
for us today that goes beyond historical documentation (Fig. 3.2).13

11 Sandra J. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self (New
Haven and London, 1988), 3. See also Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane
Harrison (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).

12 See Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells, Sigmund Freud and Art: His
Personal Collection of Antiquities (New York, 1989)

13 Edmund Engelman (ed.), Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and
Offices, Vienna 1938 (New York, 1972).

ig. 3.2. Edmund Engelman, Freud’s Vienna consulting room, 1938; photograph reproduced b
permission of Todd Engelman; photo supplied by Freud Museum, London.

76 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

Both workspaces are cluttered with Freud’s collections of classical
antiquities: Egyptian, Chinese, Jewish and Greek. The almost over-
whelming presence of figurines and sculptural fragments from many
antiquities, on all possible surfaces, walls, and spaces of his work-
place, invite us to ask: why did the atheist neuro-psychologist
promoting his work as a new science of the mind live intellectually,
and affectively, in a world populated by these fragmentary bearers
of its antithesis: mytho-poetical, cultic, and pagan image-thought?
Why is so much ancient art in the space of medical science? Not for
Freud, Gauguin’s Oceania nor Picasso’s Africa, but the classical
worlds of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and China spoke to his desire,
and of his dreams formed in a European-Jewish heritage framed
by a Germano-Christian world.14

As George Dimock has argued, this collection is a kind of meto-
nym for Freud himself, the multi-disciplinary scholar, reading more
books on archaeology, art history, and anthropology than on psych-
ology and, from 1896 onwards, passionately collecting antiquities
whose presence, Rita Ranshoff argues, provided him with ‘a sense
of the ages’ within which to frame his excavations of the layered
depths of the human mind: or psyche, the Greek word for soul that
would be stripped by his work of its spiritual dimension to become
synonymous with the workings of human fantasy, thought and an
unconscious that psychoanalysis would set as its object to theorize.15

14 The specific significance of and repression of Egyptian mythology and
its material remnants in the formulation of psychoanalysis despite its omni-
presence within the analytical theatre is brilliantly analysed by Joan
Raphael-Leff, ‘If Oedipus was an Egyptian: Freud and Egyptology’, Inter-
national Review of Psychoanalysis, 17 (1990), 309–35. A further research
paper, ‘If Freud was an Egyptian’, was given at a seminar, Out of Africa:
Egypt in the West, Leeds: AHRBCentreCATH, 5–6 December 2003, whose
proceedings are being edited for publication by Abigail Harrison Moore
and Martin McQuillan. This is a very rich line of thought posing the
psychological implications of the Egyptian myth of Isis and Horus as an
alternative to that of the Greek Oedipus.

15 George Dimock, ‘The Pictures over Freud’s Couch’, Mieke Bal and
Inge Boer (eds.), in The Point of Theory; Practices of Cultural Analysis
(Amsterdam, 1994), 239–50. Rita Ransohoff, ‘Captions to Photographs, in
Engelman, Berggasse 19, 58.

beyond oedipus 77

Fig. 3.3. Edmund Engelman, Freud’s Vienna consulting room:
detail of the wall at the foot of the analytical couch. photo, as Fig. 3.2.

Close examination of the layout of the scene of analytical encoun-
ter (Fig. 3.3) reveals three items of relevance to this argument. First,
as we would expect, we find a prominent and strategically placed
visual reference to the classical legend of Oedipus. A reproduction
of a painting of 1808 by French neo-classicist Jean Dominique
Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx (Fig. 3.4) is hung at the foot of the
analytic couch. A print of the fully excavated Egyptian Great Sphinx
of Giza gazed down upon the reclining analysand: or rather, the
analysand gazed onto its petrified and hybrid face. Being almost
too predictable because of the centrality to psychoanalysis of Freud’s
theory of the Oedipus complex, in Ingres’s painting, however, a

78 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

Fig. 3.4. Jean-Dominique Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx,
1808. Oil on canvas, 189 Â 144 cm. (Paris: Muse´e du Louvre.)
complex mythic narrative is held before us in a condensed, static
visualization. If Freud only slowly and painfully discerned, resisting
all along, as its outlines appeared before him through auto- and allo-
analysis, the potency of infantile desire addressed to the Mother,

beyond oedipus 79

with concomitant desire for/rivalry with the Father and hostility to
both parental figures as rivals for the child’s bisexual ‘eros’, how
could any single image so blatantly appear to contain ‘the
repressed’? Inspired by Warburg’s notion of pathosformel—the
way images retain in gestural language a memory trace of psychic
dramas long lost to cultural consciousness—we might ask: What do
images remember for us in this paradox of retaining and disguising?16

As George Dimock has pointed out, Freud’s project transformed
into a tragic narrative of incomplete desire the single moment
condensed in Ingres’ painting: the asking of a riddle whose answer
narratively plotted a progression that is also a stratification, namely,
the formation of human subjectivity over the material moments of
birth and infantile dependency, adult sexual maturity, and then
physical decline to death. The riddle asked: what starts on four
legs, then walks on two and ends on three? We read it now as an
allegory of the ages of the human being, with the moment of
upright, adult rational self-possession as the apex of this triangular
trajectory. But Ingres’ painting does not narrate a progression from
the childish to adult and decline into decrepitude. In the dramatic
stillness of a neo-classical tableau, the painting represents not
chronological development but the stratified layering of subjectivity
in which no stage of becoming is lost. Each in fact becomes the
buried—repressed—substrate of the next only to return in uncanny
hallucination for which art finds measured forms. Let me explain.

Ingres’ painting centres itself on the classically inspired nudity of
Apollonian man, po(i)sed to signify reflection and thought. The edges
of the painting, the world by/against which this luminously centred
self is framed, imagines for the viewer, on the other hand, the men-
acing darkness over which presides a shadowy, monstrous hybrid, a
semi-human, female creature, only partially separated from the ani-
malistic, inhuman world. Those who fail to answer the enigma this

16 First posed in Warburg’s 1893 dissertation on Botticelli, the phrase
‘pathos formula’ as a ‘passionate gesture language’ appears in 1905 as part
of Warburg’s search for a psychology of human expression in which ‘image-
expression forms are saved in, or re-issue from the archive of memory.’
See Sigrid Schade, ‘Charcot and the Spectacle of the Hysterical Body: The
‘‘Pathos Formula’’ as an Aesthetic Staging of Psychiatric Discourse—a Blind
Spot in the Reception of Warburg’, Art History, 18.4 (1995), 499–517.

80 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

creature poses as the ancient and once worshipped but now abjected
feminine/animal source of life, the riddle this breasted, thus maternal
‘she’ poses to the middle term of human life, the adult Man, fresh from
the murder of his own father, are eaten, consumed, reincorporated:
reversing the separation that is birth, reversing the child’s milky
cannibalism at her breast, so prominent in the painting. In this hor-
rible death, this Woman-Other-Monster takes back into herself what
is born from her, undoing the act of mothering that, lying at the
foundations of human sociality, is also the unacknowledged substrate,
the signifying plane against whose repression the phallically consti-
tuted Subject is established.17 To stay that horrific, abjecting reclam-
ation and regression from the human to the beastly and beyond to the
annihilated, Oedipus must see only his own self-image in the mirror of
her difference, even while Ingres has cannily composed his Oedipus
figure so that he simultaneously stands and crouches, is upright and
yet leans upon his spears. All three moments are visually condensed
into this complete figure of the new Man, the figure of becoming
Reason that the legend narrates while containing so many contradict-
ory traces of its internal contestants and undoing desire.18 Behind
Oedipus in the counter-pictorial scheme of a flowing curve of drapery,
and the broken outline of an art historical citation of a famous pose of
masculine energy from Pollaiuolo’s Hercules Slaying the Hydra, a
man embodies anxiety and dread, wishing to flee this dangerous

17 I am rehearsing a basically Lacanian theorization that places Woman
with Other and Thing, elements of an unsignifiable real on whose foreclosed
exclusion from the Symbolic, the possibility of the phallocentric subject is
erected since that subject is defined structurally by the solitariness of the
phallus as signifier of a Symbolic defined by the logic of the cut, separation
that isolates the One from what then is retrospectively defined as a primor-
dial Other–Thing. This is the logic by which (i) the exclusive definition of
subjectivity accessed by castration (presence/absence) is established and
(ii) the indefinite location of Woman as the unthinkable, unrepresentable,
and non-symbolizable Other/Thing is produced. The point is to see that this
is a model of subjectivity, a particular legend with specific cultural as well as
psychological effects—one of which is to make the feminine a radical but
necessarily foreclosed Otherness for both masculine and feminine subjects.

18 Harrison, for instance, reads this myth as containing traces of the shift
from the older order of the ritual murder of the Mother–Queen’s consort by
a stranger, to the newer patriarchal dynastic system of the son’s inheritance
from his King–Father—marked by the innovative strategy of prophecy.

beyond oedipus 81

cave for the safety of the man-made, geometric architecture of the city
that signifies the antithesis of the uncanny evocation of our earliest
dwelling, the maternal body, typically evoked by the natural forma-
tion of a cave.19

But let our journey around this painting pause at the lower left,
beyond the signature and date, painted above the sun-dried skeleton
and skull, the memento mori, where a single horrific, still fleshy foot
rises from the darkness, detached from the unseen corpse. It belongs
to a recent victim, we assume. The sole of this foot, this fragment,
not dried, or bony, so recently living yet already unnaturally pale,
calls out visually and unconsciously traces a link to the larger image
that Freud placed to its right: that is the second image that needs to
detain us. It is a copy of the cast of a Roman copy of a Greek original
from the second half of the fourth century bce that Freud had
encountered in the Chiaramonti Museum in Rome on a visit there
in September 1907. Sigmund Freud reported in a letter to his wife,
written from Rome, that he had just come across a ‘dear, familiar
face’. But it was not her face that made this image part of Freud’s
psychoanalytical archive. It was her foot, or rather the name, Gra-
diva, to which this posture of the rising foot gave rise, a signifier in
Latin that held the many threads of an enigma the unravelling of
which had launched Freud’s metapsychological study of aesthetics
and creativity. This famous isolated bas relief of a walking woman
(Fig. 3.5) that hung beside Freud’s analytical couch was considered
to be a fragment of a three-figured relief of the Graces (in an
imaginative and feminist reinterpretation of those figures Jane
Harrison linked the Graces with the spring rituals of renewal
and the Dithyramb).20 The sculpture was dear to Freud because it

19 We might recall Pier Paulo Pasolini’s contrasting of the mythic world
of Medea, set amongst natural formations of caves and agriculture, with
that of the exile at Corinth to which Jason takes her only to abandon her, a
city starkly signified by linearity and geometry.

20 For fuller discussion of the impact of Harrison’s theses on the Graces on
Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse see Carpentier, Ritual, Myth, 180–8.
The re-assembly of this relief with two other fragments from Florence and
Munich was proposed by German archaeologist Dr Hausner, and a postcard
of this combination was sent to Freud by Emmanuel Lo¨ wy after the publica-
tion of Freud’s text on the sculpture. See Harald Leupold-Lo¨ wenthal et al.,
Sigmund Freud Museum, Wien IIX, Berggasse 19 (Vienna, 1994), 59–60.

82 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

Fig. 3.5. ‘‘Gradiva,’’ copy of a Roman bas-relief copy of a Hellenistic relief
of the fourth century bce in collection of Sigmund Freud. (Freud Museum,

London.)

beyond oedipus 83

had occasioned a novella by minor German author Wilhelm Jensen
(1837–1911), entitled Gradiva, that was sent to Freud in 1906 by
his new colleague and follower Jung because of its themes: delusion
and dreams. Freud’s intrigued study of Jensen’s novel about a young
archaeologist haunted by the running step of a Pompeiian maiden
becomes his first foray into psychoanalytical aesthetics.21

The light novella tells the tale of Norbert Hanold, a German
archaeologist and his fatal fascination with this relief which he
names Gradiva, meaning in Latin, the light-gaited, and which he
then fantasized represented a young woman who had died in the
catastrophe that overtook Pompeii in 72 ce. This delusion screened
his unresolved erotic feelings for a young neighbour in his German
hometown, Zoe¨, whose surname, Bertgang, also means a light gait
or springing step. Between Latin and German the unconscious
exchange takes place, screening another linguistic link: Zoe¨ also
means life and thus again the light and springing step of a feminine
life principle is inscribed within this text as well.

In her study of Freudian aesthetics, Sarah Kofman positions
Freud’s analysis of Jensen’s novella Gradiva as the pivotal text in a
psychoanalytical aesthetic theory. In plotting out what he does in his
essay on Jensen’s text, Kofman shows how Freud’s text moves
through identifications with three different figures in turn: the
archaeologist, the author, and finally Zoe¨ Bertgang.22 The first
identification is between psychoanalysis and the archaeologist in
the fiction, since, as so many have commented, archaeology func-
tioned as a ‘mighty metaphor’ for Freud.23 According to Freud,

21 Sigmund Freud, ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’ [1907],
Penguin Freud Library, 14, On Art and Literature (Harmondsworth, 1990),
27–118.

22 Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: Freud’s Aesthetics, trans. Wini-
fred Woodhull (New York, 1988), 175–200.

23 See Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, ‘Freud and Archaeology’, American
Imago, in Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells, (eds.), 8:2 (1951), 107–28;
Donald Kuspit, ‘A Mighty Metaphor: The Analogy of Archaeology and
Psychoanalysis’, Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of An-
tiquities, (New York, 1989), 133–52. There is a chapter in my forthcoming
book, Time, Space and the Archive: Towards a Virtual Feminist Museum,
where I undertake an extended re-examination of the many threads of
meaning of the archaeological metaphor for Freud.

84 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

however, Hanold fails to recognize the Pompeii within, that is, the
buried/repressed past that, none the less, determines unconsciously
his current delusive actions. Thus Freud moves on to identify with
the novelist who, creating and developing this character, dissects and
exposes the fictional archaeologist’s delusion that leads him, when
he unwittingly is drawn to Pompeii itself, to mistake the living Zoe¨
whom he re-encounters by chance at the antique site, for a reincar-
nation of the woman from the classical relief onto which he had
projected fantasies banished from his actual sexual life. Freud, how-
ever, works to reveal that the author, too, is blind to his own uncon-
scious that patterns his text, a text so interesting because it takes
psychological delusion and dream as its own topic. While anatomiz-
ing the structure of delusion in a way the psychoanalyst admires for
its perspicacity, the author, according to Freud, cannot, however,
recognize the working of his own unconscious: what within him
drives his novel, and others he writes, to repeat the image of denied
sexuality, and to recreate scenarios of lost girls, dead in the mid-day
sun, tropes which recur across the oeuvre of Jensen, marking the
pressure of his own repressions. It is only psychoanalysis that offers
us a way beyond both aporias. Kofman, therefore, concludes:

All that is needed to possess the truth is to convert poetic language, the
language of disguise, into metapsychological language. . . . Myth is the
childhood of philosophy for Aristotle, just as for Freud, art is the childhood
of psychoanalysis. Art occupies an intermediate position between the pleas-
ure principle and the reality principle and reconciles them to one another.24

In the novel there is, however, an analyst-figure who forms a third
point of identification for Freud. This is a woman: Zoe¨ Bertgang
herself, to whom Freud turns in his final chapter. Freud names her a
physician and notes that she is like an analyst in that she performs
three critical tasks. She raises buried unconscious thoughts to the
surface; she makes the explanation—interpretation—coincide with
the cure; she awakens feelings, restoring affect and desire. Thus Zoe¨
Bertgang becomes, in a sense in which we can also speak of Freud, a
psychological archaeologist with a difference.25 That difference is

24 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 198
25 Mary Bergstein, ‘Gradiva Medica: Freud’s Model Female Analyst as
Lizard Slayer,’ American Imago, 60:3 (2003), 259–84.

beyond oedipus 85

her acknowledgement of the circle of hermeneutics, precisely what
psychoanalysis offers and which her name embodies, the principle
of life working over the deathly impulses. Zoe¨ unravels the web of
delusion. Freud thus sets up a parallel between dreams, delusions,
and poetic texts: same metaphors, same terms describe them as
riddles to be deciphered because they both carry and disguise mean-
ing. Kofman writes:

The continuous character of text, the coherence of the web functions as a
lure; it hides the holes in the text, the missing links. Both truth and delusion
are inscribed in one text—veiling and speaking its own desire. Thus all are
both memory bearers and memory holes in one dialectical moment.26

In Freud’s reading of the novella Gradiva, the dead, lost object,
the revenant screens and is ultimately displaced by the intellectually
acute and empathetically alive Zoe¨ Bertgang, a feminine site of a
deeper, embodied, and affective knowledge necessary to release
Norbert back into an erotic rapport. At the end of the story, how-
ever, when the lovers are reconciled and have become engaged,
Norbert asks Zoe¨ one last time to trip across the paving stones of
Pompeii, her springing step revealing that rising sole, no longer
stony fetish and petrified icon but the dancing foot of life, invoking
the springing reality Virginia Woolf embedded in her vision of Jane
Harrison at Cambridge.

Zoe¨ Bertgang, Jane Harrison, and Virginia Woolf come together
here only to find a closing of the psychoanalytical door against their
conjugation of intellect, affectivity, poetics, knowledge, and a sense
of its undoing by different elements of the human psyche. With the
following infamous words, Sigmund Freud signed off on his long but
fruitless inquiry into femininity in the New Introductory Lectures
written in 1932, revised for publication in 1933 but never delivered,
notorious for their address to the men in the audience over the heads
of the women, who as femininity itself remain the riddle.

That is all I had to say to you about femininity. It is certainly incomplete and
fragmentary and does not always sound friendly. But do not forget that
I have only been describing women in so far as their nature is determined by

26 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 178.