The Lake of Seduction: Body, Acting, and Voice in Helene Cixous's Portrait de Dora

Abstract

In Portrait de Dora (1976), Helene Cixous explores the possibility of feminine theater by rewriting Freud 's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria for stage performance. Anticipating her Nom d' Oedipe (1978), Portrait takes as a pretext the myth of Oedipus, which underlies Freud's analysis of the case history, as central to both psychoanalysis and classical drama. Indeed, Portrait de Dora along with her Nom d' Oedipe are innovative attempts to define feminist performance by placing psychoanalysis and classical drama under the scrutiny of the theatrical. By locating Freud's case-history within theater,' Cixous underscores the theatricality of psychoanalytical discourse as the "talking cure," using voice, gestures, staging, ritual, and myth, in order to scrutinize the relationship between the semiotics of symptoms as the "acting out" of the hysteric body and the Symbolic order that authorizes its meaning. Moreover, as Sharon Willis observes, Cixous's Portrait puts into question the theatrical frame itself, and the body staged within it, thereby becoming "exemplary of the critical operations of certain feminist performance practice[s]." Cixous, who takes hysteria as a key to both feminine sexuality and performance, stages Freud's failure with Dora as a disfunctional dramatic operation by depicting his insistence on reading his paternal Oedipal model into Dora's hysteria as ineffective in regard to the real performative throbbing of the hysteric stage. By confronting thereupon the symbolic order of the Oedipal stage with the imaginary theater of pain and seduction that the hysteric's body displays, Cixous challenges the phallocratic origins and prejudices of both classical theater and psychoanalysis. Indeed, if, as Jacqueline Rose observes, Dora's case opens "a dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism," then Cixous's Portrait not only places this dialogue within a theatrical space, it enlarges the dialogical frame by introducing also the question of the relationship between feminism and theater.