The Lake of Seduction: Body, Acting, and Voice in Hélène Cixous's Portrait de Dora

The Lake of Seduction: Body, Acting, and Voice in Helene Cixous's Portrait de Dora ERELLA BROWN There's no greater sorrow tban to remember love. And Freud knew that (p. 36). And after that? (p. I) (Portrait of Dora) In Portrait de Dora (1976), Helene Cixous explores the possibility of feminine theater by rewriting Freud's Dora: An Analysis ofa Case ofHysteria for stage performance. Anticipating her Nom d' Oedipe (1978), Portrait takes as a pretext the myth of Oedipus, which underlies Freud's analysis of the case history , as central to both psychoanalysis and classical drama.' Indeed, Portrait de Dora along with her Nom d' Oedipe are innovative attempts to define feminist performance by placing psychoanalysis and classical drama under the scrutiny of the theatrical. By locating Freud's case-history within theater,' Cixous underscores the theatricality of psychoanalytical discourse as the "talking cure," using voice, gesture.s, staging, ritual, and myth, in order to scrutinize the relationship between the semiotics of symptoms as the "acting out" of the hysteric body and the Symbolic order that authorizes its meaning. Moreover, as Sharon Willis observes, Cixous's Portrait puts into question the theatrical frame itself, and the body staged within it, thereby becoming "exemplary of the critical operations of certain feminist performance practice [s].'" Cixous, who takes hysteria as a key to both feminine sexuality and performance, stages Freud's failure with Dora as a disfunctional dramatic operation by depicting his insistence on reading his paternal Oedipal model into Dora's hysteria as ineffective in regard to the real performative throbbing of the hysteric stage. By confronting thereupon the symbolic order of the Oedipal stage with the imaginary theater of pain and seduction that the hysteric 's body displays, Cixous challenges the phallocratic origins and prejudices of both classical theater and psychoanalysis. Indeed, ·if, as Jacqueline Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 626 The Lake of Seduction Rose observes, Dora's case opens "a dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism,'" then Cixous's Portrait not only places this dialogue within a theatrical space, it enlarges the dialogical frame by introducing also the question of the relationship between feminism and theater. In line with Barbara Freedman's comprehensive analysis of the relationship between feminism, psychoanalysis, and theater, this study offers a close reading of Cixous's Portrait of Dora in order to assess further the measure and extent to which a feminist, anoedipal theater can take (a) place and affect a cultural space.' As Freedman is acutely aware, the question comes down to that of the possibility of going beyond the general debt of feminism to deconstruction through revisions of traditional theater by feminist performance practices, and whether feminist theater has a unique angle to offer that distinguishes its practice from those already taken by feminists in writing, criticism, and cinema. Cixous's play is so far the most ambitious attempt to confront these issues by re-framing them within a theatrical space. I argue that Cixous approaches the feminine within theater not by distinguishing theater as a privileged domain in relation to other feminine performative practices such as writing, criticism, and cinema, but by taking theater as a metaphor for the feminine position in our culture. That"is, by taking theater as an inclusive space·for various performalive artS and practices. Cixous brings her skill as writer of theoretical fiction to the theater and uses both writing and cinema on her stage. While capitalizing on the analogous relationship between these systems of representation, she amplifies the unique theatrical angle, which is its performative presence, to better negotiate the Real in its relationship to the Symbolic and Imaginary. Yet, as Timothy Scheie upholds "[Ilive performance clearly does not imply a subversive perfonnativity," unless it radically troubles the spectator's sense of reality and subverts fixed gender categories· This study demonstrates that Cixous produces a radical rethinking of the psychological presuppositions of gender and identity by using writing and film to inscribe Freud's text within a performative space. Rather than representing Freud's text and thus reproducing its symbolic Oedipal perspective. Cixous inscribes Freud's conscious and unconscious positions in the reality of performance by using Brechtian strategies to interrupt continuity and to...