Session 2: Erotic, Culture and the Self
Chair: Karen Boyle
Manipulative Romances or Bringing Women Back Home
Ovidiu Anicul?ese
Iasi University, Romania
Whether mainly sexual or sentimental, the erotic novel deals with sexual relationships, including family and friendship and therefore addresses readers with female psyche.
The narrative universe must seem truthful and be exotic at the same time. Consequently, it involves elements women are familiar with, but which are also physically striking.
Characters are the most appreciated narrative component here. The lead couple have striking qualities. Their occasional doubtful actions are carefully justified so that their portrait can remain spotless. The narrative dramatizes a period of traditionally acceptable freedom in the life of the heroine, but the latter strikes out as the only one who dutifully supports the values she inherits, thus remaining the most traditional figure in the book, while the most popular. The hero stands out through his particular masculinity, be it physical, emotional or social.
The ideas that characters carry are either meaningless or known to the majority of readers, therefore only acting as leveler.
The narrative as such is built on the element of human relation, used as fetish. Such relations are just as valuable for the popular experience whether they are positive or negative. Conflicts are always of sentimental nature and are artificially built to show no way out, to yield greater drama.
The erotic sensation is just an important a component as sentimentalism. The sexual initiation of the heroine carries conservative connotations, but saving her virginity for the hero serves even more to produce powerful sensation. The highest concentration of sexual descriptiveness is in the unique love-making scene between the two mainly because the whole novel is a sensation experience and there would be no other way in popular fiction to mark such an crucial moment in the plot. Yet, the use of pornography has no establishment defying implications. The larger plot follows the heroine from freedom through rebellion and insecurity to integration. The dialogue and the vocabulary used complement the general effect.
On the whole, the erotic novel gives women the strong illusion of human relationship only to cure them of that need in a society that has lost the means to provide it consistently.
Narcissism and Eroticism
Veronika Czapary
Budapest, Hungary
My aim is to examine the eroticism of women with the help of Lou Andreas Salomé’s theory of narcissism. My understanding is, that feminist theories of narcissism differ definitely from traditional psychoanalytic views on self and narcissism. According to Irigaray, the woman finds her own place by crossing (like Alice ) through the mirror, as she does not reflect the femininity-image projected by the patriarchal system. This kind of mirroring can be explained with the help of Salome’s Eroticism, where she suggested that eroticism was sexualized from the energies of early narcissism cathected by the ego. To prove this, I refer to the self-theories of Heinz Kohut, who calls the reworking of early narcissism in the analytical relationship a mirror-transfer where the self reconstructs itself in a mirrored representation. The mirror-stage concept of Lacan is understood as a phase of development, where the subject turns into a social-ego by the means of a paranoid alienation after the confrontation with its two-dimensional image reflected in the mirror. The mother-mirror mechanism originates from an early stage of narcissism. It is a question, where the subject and the mother are separated, that is, at what point narcissism is formed without a mother-connection. The eroticism of women differs definitely from that of the men’s. According to Freud, autoerotism is hidden behind of object-love, while Irigaray believes that it is hidden behind the narcissistic mirror of the feminine. This is a crucial difference, for the first places the libido outside, the second keeps it in itself. All this urge the separation of feminine and masculine history, the understanding of the textualization of feminine body, the definition of eroticism as a kind of writing.
Power, Pleasure and Performativity in Chick-Lit’s New Literary Heroines
Anna Kiernan
School of Humanities, Kingston University, London, United Kingdom
Within the framework of Chick-lit, the sub-genre which has proved most successful is the column-turned-novel. The two best-known in the sub-genre (or super-genre) are Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Sex and theCity (1997). Sohn’s novel Run Catch Kiss (1999) draws together some of the elements that have been integral to the success of Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’s Diary : Like Bridget Jones, Run Catch Kiss’s narrator, Ariel Steiner, is self deprecating and kooky; like Carrie Bradshaw, Ariel is a columnist whose reputation depends on how well she transcribes her sexual adventures. Its distinguishing feature is that Run Catch Kiss is both more sexually explicit and more ambiguous in its negotiations with feminine desires.
Sex in Sex and the City is like chocolate – it usually provides instant gratification (which soon passes) in the same way that a sugar hit does. In Bridget Jones’s Diary, sex provides pleasure but is always linked to the long-term romantic project – the desire for commitment and, ideally, marriage. In Run Catch Kiss negotiations with sex take several forms, including a recurrent concern with sex in terms of fantasy, pornography, and performativity.
This paper will explore the disparity between intention (here understood as how Steiner would like to behave and be understood sexually) and reception (the way that the men she sleeps with, her editor, and her readers respond to her sexuality). Considered within the emergent canon of sexually explicit women’s fiction – from Anais Nin to Belle de Jour – ‘Power, Pleasure, Performativity’ intends to revisit discourses of desire embedded in commercial women’s fiction, as a means of resisting contrived literary perspectives on the nature of feminine sexuality.
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