The Garden of Scopic Perversion from Monet to Mirbeau

Abstract

In his attempt to give ocular disorders a psychoanalytical interpretation Freud cited the tale of Lady Godiva. This beautiful legend, he wrote, tells how all the town's inhabitants hid behind their shuttered windows, so as to make easier the lady's task of riding naked through the streets in broad daylight, and how the only man who peeped through the shutters at her revealed loveliness was punished by going blind.1 For Freud, the fate of the renegade voyeur illustrated how scoptoor scopophilia (the love of looking) is punished by the ego with blindness or, in the term popularized by his teacher Jean-Martin Charcot, with scotomization (from the Greek skotos, meaning groove or cut; signifying partial, distorted, or peripheral vision within the field of ophthalmology). Moving beyond the studies of hysterical vision made by Charcot and Pierre Janet between 1887 and 1889 that merely identified characteristic symptoms such as color blindness, dilated pupils, strabismus, or the twisting of the orb to reveal the whites of the eye, Freud inferred the law of lex talionis (Urteilverwerfung), literally, retaliation, in the condemnation of a visual representation deemed sexually culpable by the faculty ofjudgment. This verdict of guilty, strangely recalling the old wives' tale that masturbation leads to blindness, also evokes as its corollary the equally proverbial notion of turning a blind eye. For Freud, however, these sayings were the folkloric expressions of a malady that was not only individual, but also collective. If in the private world of the self the punishments for Schaulust imposed by the ego assumed the form of hysteria, in the public realm they signaled a crisis of judgment, an imbalance in the careful treaty made by civilization between sexual drives and their institutional sublimation. Charcot's scotome scintillant, characterized as an eblouissement de te'nbres (dazzle of shadow) clouding the eyes of his female hysterics, became a privi-