Katherine Mosca
ENG 495-EA
Summary #3
In the article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey discusses the relationships amongst psychoanalysis (primarily Freudian theory), cinema (as she observed it in the mid 1970s), and the symbolism of the female body. Taking some of her statements and ideas slightly out of their context, it is interesting to compare her thoughts to the continuum of oral-print-image cultures we have discussed this semester.
A great deal of this interesting comparison is encouraged by the introductory sections of Mulvey’s essay. She writes, “the paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (198). If phallocentrism depends on an image, is it inherently part of a modern, image-based culture? Long before Freud and psychoanalysis, phallocentrism certainly existed in oral and written texts (though without this specific term to identify it). Can the “image” that Mulvey refers to include an image described with words, or is she writing exclusively of a visual, dimensional image?
Mulvey continues:
The function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and, second, thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end; it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack.” (198-9, my italics)
So, in Mulvey’s “patriarchal unconscious,” which is presumably centered on phallocentrism, the woman’s role is only symbolic, only in images and thoughts and representations. But can’t these representations, these symbols, carry over into language and literature, into stories and fables? It is difficult to understand the divide Mulvey is recognizing between image and non-image existence. Does she mean to exclude literature from the breadth of places where women are objectified, symbolized, or generalized? She explicitly excludes “language” from the places where women can have meaning (whether positive or negative), and she explicitly includes “memory.” To me, the conscious use of these two terms implies a sort of contradiction. Woman cannot have meaning in language or literature, but she can in memory; but how is memory maintained? It is maintained best through language and writing, and before written language, in oral cultures, it was passed on via speech and spoken language.
Mulvey goes on to refer to a patriarchal “linguistic command” and the “language of patriarchy.” If men have meaning in language, women must as well. Even if represented as passive or weak, women are represented; at very least, they must be represented, even in a patriarchal language or a patriarchal age, as a function of the patriarchy.
A second, and separate, issue in Mulvey’s article arises out of the beginning of her discussion of the cinema and its attributes. “Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world” (Mulvey 201). This idea brings to mind our discussions of an Internet culture as well as our thinking about reality television programming. The atmosphere of the theater, as Mulvey suggests, “isolates the spectators from another” in quite the same way as all occupants of a chat room or all viewers of a particular program are viewing the same, exact thing at the same, exact time, yet they are physically separated. In a chat room, occupants are under the illusion of being involved in, welcomed into, every other person’s private world; in reality, occupants type or show what they want to be viewed. This reality parallels Mulvey’s description of the cinema.
Though this discussion is not directly in line with the goals of Mulvey’s article, it surfaces a useful idea. Many theoretical discussions can be usefully evaluated according to their views on, or division according to, ideas of oral, print, and image culture as it has progressed and circularized through time.