Madonna: Like a Virgin; or, Freud, Kristeva, and the Case of the Missing Mother

Abstract

For those without access to pre-teen culture, my title refers to the hit album by Like a Virgin. The cover shows, on one side, a waif arising from her rumpled bed, and on the other, a femme fatale in her 'boy-toy belt' [fig.1 ]. Freud's Dora was famously diagnosed by Lacan as unable to accept herself as 'an object of desire for the man' — as man-toy; her solution to this 'subjective impasse,' Lacan tells us, was provided by Christianity, where 'woman [becomes] the object of a divine desire, or else, a transcendant object of desire. Dora's silent vigil before the Sistine Madonna in the Dresden Art Gallery allows her to represent herself as the sexual innocent which her hysteria simultaneously acted out and betrayed [fig.2]. But her silence also hystericises the Madonna's muting by Christian motherhood and the innocence of carnal knowledge which makes hers a Virgin Birth. Unlike the Madonna, Dora herself had read up on sexual reproduction — conception, pregnancy, and childbirth — and she had the information at her fingertips. One of the accusations made against her was her preoccupation with sexual matters; Freud's tactic was to get her not only to admit her sexual knowledge, but to give up her role of hysterical ingenue — to admit to desire which he started by assuming to be oedipal, but which he subsequently discovered to be (his term) 'gynaecophilic,' or homosexual. As Moustapha Safouan writes ('In Praise of Hysteria'), Dora's problem lay in 'knowing too much about maternity,' and it is this 'too much'—this excess of knowledge without understanding — which for Safouan constitutes hysteria, making the body of the hysteric 'a body