Girlhood and the Plastic Image

Afterword

Afterword “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present— at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” “What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!” “I ca’n’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.” “I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar. “I’m afraid I ca’n’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied, very politely, “for I ca’n’t understand it myself, to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.” “It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar. “Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; “but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will someday, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, wo’n’t you?” —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland1 The positivists, the lovers of the closed corpus, derisively called this “flitting about.” One might say that Warburg never managed—or wanted—to cure himself of his images. Was not speaking to butterflies for hours on end the definitive way of questioning the image as such, the living image, the image-fluttering that a naturalist’s pin would only kill? Was it not to recover, through the survival of an ancient symbol for Psyche, the psychic knot of the nymph, her dance, her flight, her desire, her aura? And how not to recognize, in this fascination with butterflies, the complicity of the metaphoric insect with the notion of the image itself? —Georges Didi-Huberman, “Knowledge: Movement”2 Nabokov spent much of the 1940s dissecting a confusing group of species called Polyommatus blues. He developed forward-thinking ways to classifying [sic] the butterflies, based on differences in their genitalia. —Carl Zimmer, “Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated”3 Girls with hair braided demurely down their backs, and skirts just beginning to lengthen toward their ankles are buds that should not blossom for some time, but should be kept as long as possible in the green stage; or, to change from a floral 160 • afterword to a faunal trope, they are only squabs and not yet doves, maturing pupae and not yet butterflies, and this calf or filly stage should be prolonged by every artifice. —G. Stanley Hall, “The Budding Girl”4 The French word poupée, the German puppe, and the English “puppet” all come from the Latin pupa, meaning “little girl” or “doll.” From the IndoEuropean root pou, or “little,” “pupa thus seems to manifest at once a psychosexual expectation of gender behavior (little girls play with dolls) and a more general semantic impulse of diminution (the small made smaller).”5 “Pupa” also refers to the cocoon that protects holometabolous insects such as butterflies , moths, and flies. The pupa conceals the shape-shifting larva, a tiny body that appears strangely quiescent during the dramatic reconstruction of its form. Hemimetabolous insects such as dragonflies do not experience such spectacular changes, yet they do transform. They begin life as eggs, then become water-dwelling nymphs—an immature form that lasts most of their lives—and, last, enter into what’s evocatively called the imago stage, becoming the winged creatures most familiar to us. The small made smaller: dolls, girls, insects; the last two, at least when they’re cute, are icons of mutability and potentiality. Bellmer grants the doll the same powers of transformation possessed by adolescents and young insects, and Paprika features a horrific legion of dolls—dolls in pinafores and petticoats, dolls in kimonos, dolls with ball joints, dolls from Blade Runner—that are scalable, variable, and metamorphic. Iconography does not always make fine distinctions; while caterpillars, nymphs, and pupae should more frequently catch the eye of artists interested in allegories of transformation, it is their older and more beautiful selves that get most of the attention. The butterfly imago transmutes the metamorphic energy of its younger self into flight. Flitting about—and thus perpetually immature even if it is, literally and biologically, in an adult state—it performs its former morphological restlessness through kinetics. It is the nymph in a different dress, no longer a homebody. Of course, a nymph is also a young woman, a demigoddess, an attractive...