Women, Writing, and Fetishism, 1890-1950: Female Cross-Gendering (review)

In his 1927 essay "Fetishism" Freud posited the disavowal of the mother's castration as the motivation behind fetishistic substitution. So if, as Freud assumed, women believe in their own genital castration, then women cannot be fetishists. In her study, Women, Writing, and Fetishism, 1890-1950, Taylor rejects this basic model. Following theorists such as Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen (Female Fetishism: A New Look, 1994), Sarah Kofman (The Enigma of Woman in Freud's Writing, 1985), and Teresa de Lauretis (The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire, 1994), she explores the fetishistic possibilities and pleasures of female cross-gendering in a range of texts by women from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. This project is quite ambitious, attempting as it does to establish an historically specific theoretical model for the fetishism Taylor discovers in the "cross-gendering" fiction of Sarah Grand, Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Djuna Barnes, and Anaïs Nin. It is a model that enables her literary analyses to encompass also the autobiographical intersections of the texts with psychoanalytic and sexological debates about cross-dressing and lesbianism.

The vocabulary and theoretical trajectory of Taylor's study are crucial to its success. She works very hard to define her terminology, choosing the term cross-gendering, in particular, to carry "specific reference to a form of female masculinity, transvestism, and cross-dressing" (2) but also to cover historically located practices and identities, notably the concept of "inversion" postulated by the late-nineteenth-century sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis. This "fusion of clinical terminology and cultural usage" (3) is intended to encompass the range of identities, desires, identifications, and classifications that Grand, Hall, H.D., Barnes, and Nin elaborate in their texts.

Taylor is also interested in the "literariness of fetishism," and it is here that she most clearly addresses some of the core ideas about women's writing and modernism. The fetish, as a mark and signifier of undecidability and the synecdochal instigator of erotic pleasure, can also, as Taylor suggests, be seen as the figure for the texts she considers in this study. Whether considering lesbian desire (the "unsaid" of patriarchal culture), or the contradictions and instabilities of modernist texts, or the semi-autobiographical facet of women's fiction writing, it seems that Grand, Hall, H.D., Barnes, and Nin are writing (of) fetishism. Thus, Taylor argues that these women writers challenge both sexological and psychoanalytic theory in their textual encoding of cross-dressing and lesbian desire and that their texts inhabit and explore the undecidability of gender, sexuality, identity, and the text.

Women, Writing, and Fetishism, 1890-1950, which is in the Oxford English Monographs series, has a clear and thoroughly researched thesis that is established in the introductory chapter and then applied in detail and elaborated upon in subsequent chapters, each focusing on a specific woman writer or text. The introduction is thus very dense and occasionally inaccessible, covering a huge range of theoretical ground as the thesis is delineated against surrounding and preceding material. It certainly requires a high level of engagement with psychoanalytic ideas and is clearly directed at an audience of academics or postgraduate researchers in the field. Taylor's writing is not obtuse in any way, but as her ideas are so specifically articulated (and they need to be to serve the purpose she lays out), the theoretical framing and interpretations of this study can appear sophistic and unwieldy at times.

After the introductory chapter the study moves from Sarah Grand's late-nineteenth-century Heavenly Twins to Hall's The Well of Loneliness, H.D.'s HER and Tribute to Freud, and Barnes's Nightwood and culminates with Anaïs Nin's fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. In each case various facets of the central thesis are expanded; for example, the chapter on The Well of Loneliness reads this text closely alongside the sexological ideas of the time and emerging psychoanalytic models...