The Case of the Dangling Signifier: Phallic Imagery in Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake"

Abstract

How should we read phallic imagery when it is incorporated within women's texts? If the phallus is, as Lacan suggests, the central signifier of patriarchal culture, is the woman writer who gives phallic imagery a prominent place in her fictions reinstating our culture's patriarchal orientations? In this essay I will argue that the phallus can function as a misplaced signifier in women's writings. It becomes, that is, a signifier which is clearly out of place, which dominates and speaks out of turn, and yet by its very displacement, controls and disturbs those patterns of culture which women themselves have begun to initiate. In Moon Lake, a story from The Golden Apples, Eudora Welty explores the ways in which the dominant sex/gender system' erases woman's past and endangers her future. Ostensibly a story about a group of young girls on their first camping expedition and a boy scout who saves one of them from drowning, on a more primary level Moon Lake describes the ways in which these young women, barely aware of their own sexuality, begin to adjust to even before they can react against a maledominated world. Welty's use of phallic imagery keeps us continually aware of the tensions between the young girls' desires and the society which tries to shape their desires. Before examining the use of phallic imagery in Moon Lake, however, I wish, for contrast, to examine its use in a familiar, patriarchal text: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. In Moby-Dick it is the donning of the hassock or skin from the whale's penis which defines the human dimensions of the demonic and helps to give the men aboard the Pequod an illusion of power over the