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4  fathering daughters Oedipal Rage and Aggression in Women’s Writing 81 The desire for male recognition is often at odds with a female writer’s desire for literary primacy. Indeed, a female writer need not capitulate to the patriarchal demand that she stay subordinate. When permitted access to the imagery of the unconscious, a writer may well surface with demons instead of angels. When female writers find a vehicle for expressing their long withheld anger and rage at the Oedipal father in literary fantasy, the effect is both cathartic and therapeutic. Lacan has stated that the goal of psychoanalysis is to allow the patient to come to terms with the inner dead, especially the dead father. The dead need not be really dead; rather, they are the ones who left deposits of affect-laden signifiers in the unconscious and then went away. A dead father may do no visible harm, although he can be destructive. And a daughter can fantasize about harming a father, whether he is alive or dead. A father who has not been adequately mourned may, in all likelihood, refuse to stay dead, posing even more problems for a female writer in forming social attachments. In the following pages, I reveal how female writers deliver themselves to a canon from which they have often been excluded. Detailed recollections and narratives in which the damaged or weakened self is mobilized by expression, seek not only therapeutic outlets but also social accountability. This chapter will expand on the previous chapter by focusing on how psychoanalytic criticism can identify specific textual strategies female writers have adopted to dismantle patriarchal structures that have obstructed their writing. Due to the encouragement of critical readers who have deemed self-analysis a respectable goal for literary inquiry, women are remaking literary history by rewriting it. By acting out fantasies of revenge or aggression against the Oedipal father, female writers seek to imaginatively sever the social “contract” that they comply with a standard of man’s control, man as “law,” whether that man be judge, father, psychiatrist, or rejecting love object. Positioning themselves as victims of misogyny, these female poets transgress boundaries and 82 venture into enclosed circles of supercharged images and symbols not yet authorized by men. They understand their rage at the Oedipal father as a species of love, as well as the result of not being adequately loved. An early fixation with the father and what he signifies may well keep these literary daughters emotionally bound to the original object of their cathexis and exclusively identified with him. Although there is obvious indebtedness to the paternal figure, these “fathering daughters” have adopted various discursive maneuvers for recouping the father’s authorial post and reinventing his language. In her well-known essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision,”1 Adrienne Rich elaborates on the problem female writers have in speaking within the rhetorical codes and structures of patriarchal culture . Rich calls for the reawakening of sleeping or “core” consciousness as a means of transforming political realities inside and outside the home. Until, she argues, we can understand the patriarchal assumptions (and images) to which women have always been subjected, women can have no real knowledge of themselves. For Rich, the drive toward self-knowledge is both personal and cultural, the two being enmeshed. Freudian psychoanalysis consists mainly of encouraging the patient to recall the past to isolate traumatic events of childhood. Believing that anxieties in the here and now are repetitions of ancient childhood injuries, analysts have tried to retrieve memories to delve deeper into this “core” consciousness.2 Analysis leads a patient back to repressed Oedipal and pre-Oedipal material. Just as one memory is retrieved, another floats intriguingly past her, encouraging more pursuit of, and probing into, the past. Only by finding the essential quality of representation of a woman’s symptoms can she be awakened from the darkness that Rich maintains has crippled her life and her art. Although Freud’s theories of individual development helped people better comprehend their personal histories from the perspective of their present suffering, psychoanalysis itself has been under direct attack by critics who have challenged the notion of a causative relationship between developmental stages in the individual to the present psychopathological phenomena.3 Without a direct linkage between childhood experiences that have been repressed and adult psychopathology, Freudian theory loses much of its efficacy and power. If memory cannot be trusted to construct an accurate description of the self, then of what...

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