Fear of the Other Woman

BOOK REVIEWS poetics of Freud implicates the psychoanalytic reading of literature, deauthorizing any methodological or theoretical priority whUe disclosing the precise rhetorical and structural features that constitute the specifically psychoanalytic discourse(s)"—and at worst reads like a parody of lit-crit jargon: "[H-D-'8] crypto-cinemato-otobiography occults [Freud's] technique of recalling memory in transference so that she can re-enter the strange camera obscura or womb/tomb of the animistic mind, whose hieroglyphic projections give birth to charismatic vision" (163). Parenthetical puns like "(m)other," "mat(t)er," "c(h)ord," and "(w)rite of passage" occur with tedious predictabUity, as do other equally distracting affectations, such as Chisholm's frequent placement of quotation marks around Freud's and H.D.'s names, presumably to distinguish the identities projected upon them by others (as though H.D.'s own truncated literary moniker did not already signal such a projection) from their "real" identities, whatever those may be. Such quibbles aside, H.D.'s Freudian Poetics does succeed in offering a sophisticated and often suggestive reading of an intriguing intertextual relationship, a meeting of two highly original minds. H.D.'s remarkable Tribute to Freud, once familiar only to a small circle of H.D. scholars and Freud aficionados, has recently begun to interest an ever widening range of readers, from the eminent historian Carl E. Schorske, who caUs H.D.'s memoir "brUliant" (7XS, 27 May 1993,35), to the German cultural critic Klaus Theweleit, who pronounces it to be "one of the most enigmatic and beautiful books that I know" {Orpheus (und) Euridike, Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1988,1098; translation mine). Chisholm's book, then, can be regarded—along with Friedman's Psyche Reborn and Claire Buck's more recent H.D. and Freud: Bisexuality and a Feminine Discourse (St. Martin's, 1991)—as a thought-provoking preliminary engagement with a topic that wül no doubt attract continued attention and commentary for many years to come. Helen Sword ____________ Indiana University Fear of the Other Woman Helena Michie. Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 216 pp. $29.95 SOROROPHOBIA, the provocative title of Helena Michie's often brilliant but problematic study of women and difference, aptly links a quasi-psychoanalytical neologism with the sensationalism of a grade B 109 ELT 37 : 1 1994 horror movie. The academic subtitle establishes what is to follow: the fissuring and fusing, doubling and mirroring, exchanging and substituting , replicating and eradicating of women in both literature and culture. Like the subtitle, the cover design foreshadows the argument. The image is an enigmatic portrait from the Royal Photographic Society, Bath, of The Princesses Helena and Louise," c. 1857. The (white) princesses, identically clad in stiffly billowing plaid skirts, are located beside an overturned rustic stool and look anxiously, even sullenly, at the camera. One of them, probably Louise, is slightly blurred—a visual ratification of the difference within sameness that wül dominate the book. Sororophobia is an intricate and intellectually playful post-modern text, a hybrid construct, partly historical analysis of the control of women in the Victorian legal system and literature, partly brave but risky venture into the politics of difference feminism, partly an experiment in feminist cultural studies. As Michie points out in her introduction , feminism not only must resist male domination; it must struggle with its own internal contradictions, contradictions which are manifested as differences among women. She argues that although feminism rejects the model of the nuclear famUy, feminist discourse is rife with famUial metaphors (e.g., patriarchy, sisterhood). Michie contends that "the maternal lexicon has been opened up to the specter of difference" but "[s]isterhood... remains a distressingly Utopian term" (8). Justifying her coinage of the term "sororophobia" as a necessary defamUiarization of female relations, an "Otherness'" which "like the clitoris in the work of Jane GaUop, 'sticks out' of [the] text and of its reproductive economy" (11), she defines the term as "[an] attempt to describe the negotiation of sameness and difference, identity and separation, between women of the same generation." The term "is meant to encompass both the desire for and the recoU from...