Constructions of Childhood

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C o n stru ction s o f ch ild h ood
Dimock, George, Ph.D.

The University of Rochester, 1994
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University Microfilms International
Constructions o Childhood
by
George Dixnock
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Supervised by
Professor Mieke Bal
and
Professor Janet Wolff
Department of Art and Art History

College of Arts and Science
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York
1993
For Julie, Alexander and Gabriel
i i i
Curriculum Vitae
The author was born in New Haven, Connecticut on March 26,
1950. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard
University in 1972 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in
photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in
1976. He worked as Assistant Director and Curator of
Photography at the Krannert Art Museum, University of
Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) from 1985 to 1990.
He entered the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural
Studies (Department of Art and Art History) at the University
of Rochester in the Fall of 1990. He served as a Teaching
Assistant (1991-92) and as Adjunct Faculty (1993) in the
Department of Art and Art History. He received a Rush Rhees,
a Celeste Heughes Bishop and a Susan B. Anthony Travel
Fellowship in 1993. He pursued his research in Critical
Theory and Art History under the direction of Professors
Mieke Bal and Janet Wolff.
Acknowledgment s
Given a project of this scope and duration, I must first
acknowledge the impossibility of adequately citing those who
inspired, sustained and attended its coming into the world.
Mieke Bal supported, encouraged and guided my work from start
to finish. Janet Wolff presided with unfailing courtesy and
critical insight over many drafts and revisions. No graduate
student could have asked for finer teachers or more
responsive and enabling dissertation directors. Carl
Chiarenza provided a touchstone for the best of a
photographic tradition to which I remain indebted even as I
search for alternatives. David Rodowick serenely and
generously provided a safety net for my idiosyncratic forays
into film theory. Howard Singerman's arresting intellect,
bemused skepticism and generosity of spirit I count among the
treasures of my graduate career.
Behind the bare-bones listing which follows lies a
community to whose fellowship, generosity, goodwill and
intellectual integrity I remain deeply indebted. The
University of Rochester faculty members I wish to thank are:
Cristelle Baskins, Douglas Crimp, David Deitcher, Thomas
DiPiero, Eva Geulen, Michael Ann Holly, William McGrath,
Grace Seiberling, Kaja Silverman, David Walsh, Robert
Westbrook, and Sharon Willis.
My graduate student colleagues taught me at least as
much and constituted a remarkably supportive collective
within which to try out my ideas: Inge Boer, Ann-Marie
V
Braithwaite, Ondine Chavoya, Gina Dobrowski, Alla Efimova,
Michelle French, Philip Gentile, Brian Goldfarb, Natasha
Goldman, Grant Kester, Karen Kosasa, Lianne McTavish, Lev
Manovich, Laura Marks, Bethany Ogden, Walid Raad, Deborah
Weiner, Anna Williams, Teresa Winterhalter, and Charles
Wright.
The Art Library and Visual Resource Collection, by
virtue of those who directed and staffed them, provided
beyond all reasonable expectations an indispensable haven
comprised of professional assistance, timely wit and human
kindness: Heather Behnke, Becky Boutch, Stephanie Franz,
Katherine Kinsky, Kim Kopatz, and Lorry O'Leary.
My photographic researches were greatly aided by the
staff members of the George Eastman House: Janice Madhu,
Rebecca Simmons, Rachael Stuhlman, and David Wooters.
The staffs of the College Writing Center and the
Computing Library and Resources Center saved countless hours
and headaches by ministering cheerfully and non-
condescendingly to my word-processing needs, which, while
simplistic in computing terms, remained essential to the
writing, editing and production of this manuscript.
The following people who inhabit other and disparate
worlds have contributed to the successful completion of my
dissertation in crucial ways: Susan Cohen, Andrew Eskind,
Andrew Hemingway, William Johnson, Pieter Leroux, Herbert
Marder, Nancy Reale, Jeffrey Ravel, Jeffrey Rosen, Michael
Trout, Meir Wigoder, and Jeffrey Wolin.
v i
The extended hospitality of the Kenah family (William,
Vanesia Rojas, Peter and Ana-Marie) made my researches at the
Library of Congress both possible and immensely pleasurable.
My parents, George and Mary Dimock, have made my
graduate career possible, a gift for which I will always be
deeply grateful.
Peter Dimock's support has been critical in the most
generous, difficult and enabling sense of that word.
Finally, this document takes its inspiration from an
ongoing life with those to whom it is dedicated: Julie,
Alexander and Gabriel Dimock.
v ii
Abstract
This dissertation comprises six case studies that examine
particular constructions in word and image of the child. The
children it puts into play differ so radically as to
constitute incommensurate beings thereby revealing the
concept of childhood to be unstable, provisional, constructed
and changing.
Chapter one takes up the anti-abortion movement's
definition of the fetus as autonomous child. I argue that
this formulation violates the rights of the pregnant woman
from whose body and life the fetus cannot be divorced
physiologically or ethically. I interpret the history of
anatomical illustration and two Hollywood science-fiction
films as diverse aspects of a masculinist ideology which
serves to maintain "the right to life" as the prerogative of
the male despite the fact that women, not men, bear children.
My second chapter addresses the vexed issue of Lewis
Carroll's erotic relations with young girls in such a way as
to relate his literary achievement with the most troubling
aspects of his photographic practice. I interpret his texts,
drawings and photographs as creative productions which bear
the traces of child sexual abuse, both suffered and
inflicted.
My third chapter counters the prevailing interpretation
of Hine's child-labor photographs as enacting an exemplary,
exchange between a Progressive reform photographer and his
working-class subjects. I argue that this work constitutes
an ideological expression of a middle-class conception of the
child as an economically useless yet emotionally priceless
being.
Chapters four and five examine how Freud's case
histories of Dora and the Wolf-Man portray childhood as a
joint reconstruction of analyst and analysand. I reassert the
importance of an intersubjective family history which Freud
downplays in favor of a theoretically productive yet
narratologically oppressive explication of the individual
psyche.
My last chapter takes up the figure of the wild child,
who, without language, remains closer to animal than to human
nature. At stake in the effort to teach the wild child to
speak and write are competing theories about children,
language and pedagogy.
These children are all changelings and thus allow
childhood to be conceived in tension with whatever threatens
or promises to come into being in its place.
ix
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations x
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. The Disembodied Fetus 19
Chapter 2. Childhood's End: Lewis Carroll and the
Image of the Rat 75
Chapter 3. Children of the Mills: Re-Reading Lewis
Hine's Child-Labor Photographs 129
Chapter 4. Dora as Hysterical Narrative 186
Chapter 5. Writing the Wolf-Man 231
Chapter 6. The Wild Child and the Nature of Language 2 82
Conclusion 375
Works Cited 381
X
Illustrations
1. Lennart Nilsson, "Drama of Life Before Birth" 47
2. "The arrival of the soul in the body of the infant" 48
3. Reproduction of Hartsoeker's outline drawing of a

human spermatozoon containing a homunculus 49
4. Spermatozoa. Reproductions of Figures 2, 3, and 4 49

of Dalenpatius
5. Gauthier d'Agoty, "This embryo, which never dwelt

in any womb" 50
6. Filming the extraterrestrials 51
7. Still photograph on the set of Close Encounters 52
8. Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfus) with mashed potatoes 53
9. Roy Neary building a model of Devil's Tower

in his ranch house 54
10. Spaceship (UFO) 55
11. Leonardo, Anatomical drawing of male figure 56
12. Leonardo, Anatomical drawing of a woman 57
13. Leonardo, Anatomical drawing showing coition 58
14. Leonardo, Anatomical drawing showing the

infant in the womb 59
15. Leonardo, Anatomical drawing showing dissection

of the human foetus 60
16. Plate published in Spigelius, De Formato Foetu 61
17. Albrecht Durer, "The Fall of Man" 62
18. Cover of Life 63
19. "Drama of Life Before Birth" 64
20. "All the body systems formed and at work" 65
21. Lennart Nilsson, "Four months old and the center

of the world" 66
22. Lennart Nilsson, "First Visit to the Doctor" 67
x i
23. Lennart Nilsson, "The end of the story? No, only

the beginning." 68
24. Detail of title page of William Harvey's book on the

generation of animals 69
25. Advertisement for Alien 70
26. The alien as an indeterminate, undecidable being 71
27. "Bood and gore were the features of Alien" 72
28. "The Sublimely Affective 'Effect.'" 73
29. "The horrific creature in Alien ..." 74
30. Lewis Carrol, pen and ink drawing (9) 107
31. Lewis Carroll, pen and ink drawing (1) 108
33. J.H. Fuseli, "The Nightmare" 110
34. Francisco Goya, "The Sleep of Reason Produces

Monsters" 111
39. John Tenniel, engraving 116
42. Lewis Carroll, pen and ink text as drawing (28) 119
43. Lewis Carroll, text and photograph of Alice

Liddell(90) 120
44. Lewis Carroll, text and pen and ink drawing ofAlice
Liddell (90) 121
45. Lewis Carroll, Alice Murdoch 122
46. Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddell as "The Beggar-Maid" 123
x ii
47. Julia Margaret Cameron, Alice Liddell 124
48. Lewis Carroll, Irene Macdonald, "It Won't Come

Smooth" 125
49. Lewis Carroll, Irene Macdonald 126
50. O.G. Rejlander, Portrait of Lewis Carroll 127
51. Lewis Carroll, Portrait of Evelyn Maude Hatch 128
52. Lewis Hine, Carolina Spinner 169
53. Lewis Hine, Social Worker Visits Poor Home

(Defective Child) 170
54. Lewis Hine, East Side Mother with Sick Child 171
55. Clarence White, Miss Grace 172
56. Lewis Hine, The 'Toughest Kid' on the Street 173
57. Lewis Hine, Favorable Working Conditions,

Cheney Silk Mills 174
58. Lewis Hine, Lancaster, S.C. and Carolina Spinner 175
59. Thomas Robinson Dawley, A True Product of the

Cotton Mill 176
60. Lewis Hine, Doffer Family, Tifton, Georgia 177
6'1. Lewis Hine, The Dependent Widower, Meridian,

Mississippi 178
62. Lewis Hine, The Vicious Circle [Diagram] 179
63. Lewis Hine, Doffer Boy in a Cotton Mill 180
64. Lewis Hine, Ethical Culture School 181
65. Lewis Hine, NCLC Poster: "Making Human Junk'" 182
66. Lewis Hine, Composite Portrait 183
67. Lewis Hine, Some Adolescents in a Georgia Cotton Mill 184
68. Lewis Hine, Mother and Child of the Comfort Group

and Widow and Her Nine Children [Doffer Family] 185
69. Edmund Engelman, Photograph of Freud's consulting

room 227
70. Ernst Koener, The Rock-cut Temple at Abu Simbel 228
Reproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
x i i i
71. Maxime Du Camp, The Second Cataract 22 9
72. Engelman, Detail of the wall of Freud'sconsulting

room 227
73. Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx 23 0
74. The Wolf-Man and his sister Anna about 1894 27 6
75. The Wolf-Man and his sister Anna, about 1891 277
76. The Wolf -Mans drawing of the tree withthe wolves 278
77. A wolf hunt on the Pankejeff estate 279
78. A wolf hunt on the Pankejeff estate in White Russia

(dining with wolves) 280
79. The Wolf -Man 's Nanya 281
1
Introduction
Children are always episodes in someone else's

narrative, not their own people, but rather brought
into being for particular purposes.
-- Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman

(1 2 2 )
The concept of the child is at once self-evident, unstable,
shot through with affect and a touchstone of ideology. This
dissertation comprises six case studies, each of which
examines a particular construction in word and image of the
child variously represented as an object of political debate,
aesthetic delectation, sexual desire, social reform,
psychoanalytic case history and pedagogical rehabilitation.
The children put into play in the following pages differ
radically enough at times as to constitute incommensurace
beings. In so doing they go against the grain of the
commonsense presumption that the word "child" denotes a
stable, coherent entity upon which there is general
definitional agreement.
I have no doubts that "real" children exist or that they
struggle daily against lesser or greater odds to make their
way in the world. I do claim, however, that there is nothing
natural, self-evident or given about the ways in which
children are thought about and represented. Nor do I think
there is any way, finally, that "real" children can be
divorced from the web of signification by and through which
they become known. The chapters which follow do not add up
2
to form a unified picture or theory as to the nature of the
child. An emphasis on childhood as an unstable, provisional,
constructed and changing concept replaces any unified
argument concerning children and childhood, however defined.
William Kessen, among others, has made a strong case for this
position from the perspective of child psychology (Kessel and
Siegel).
While I do not claim any special virtue for
fragmentation, the structure of this dissertation does serve
to underscore a crucial aspect of the cultural analysis of
childhood, namely the impossibility of separating out
discussions on the topic from the frames within which they
take place. Yet the idea that children within the framework
of cultural studies might be subjected to a regime of
contingency, variability and instability may meet with
particular resistance for a number of reasons. Childhood is
something we have all experienced and so, presumably, feel
authorized to speak about. Within its domain lies a history
of origins which is often and easily mobilized to explain the
character and fate of the adult self, a process that often
unleashes tremendous amounts of psychic energy. The well
being of the next generation is a hackneyed topos of
political rhetoric. It serves as a site of projection, a
dumping ground for the failures and disappointments which the
present generation has experienced in the face of crises it
has proved unable to surmount. Children also remain within
the dominant ideology a powerful locus around which to
3
organize a sense of adult purpose and meaning. Given the
structure of the nuclear family in modern-day society, adults
often exercise more power and influence as parents than in
any other role. The stakes where children are involved are
inordinately high and the psychological and material
investments correspondingly large. Therefore, the prospect
that children and childhood are not stable concepts may pose
an unacceptable risk.
As I hope to demonstrate in the case studies which
follow, no child can be articulated apart from the matrix of
interests, concerns, agendas, politics and power relations
that are brought to bear. To take a particularly volatile
example, whether or not the fetus should be considered a
child is not a question of empirical fact. Rather to so
define the fetus most often reflects a Christian
fundamentalist world view in which the child may matter
relatively little except as an ideological marker. By the
same token, Freud's model of early childhood as the crucial
period in the formation of personality, one that continues to
operate in the unconscious of the adult, makes an entirely
different set of demands and assumptions about the forces
which shape the social world. In the present historical
moment, I do not think it is either possible or useful to
think about the fetal child constructed by the anti-abortion
movement within the same conceptual frame as Freud's theory
of the Oedipus complex. Yet both figure prominently in my
work since they formulate versions of children and childhood
4
that circulate widely in debates on abortion, health care,
education, civil rights, child abuse, child custody, family
policy and social welfare. In the heat of the battles being
waged in the name of the child, what tends to become lost to
view is the theoretical and definitional instability of the
object of contention.
In proclaiming a plurality of children and childhoods
however, I do not embrace a pseudo-deconstructive relativism
in which children proliferate in accordance with the free
play of the signifier. Children are constructed within
highly specific cultural contexts in response to particular
historical moments out of the available repertoire of images,
texts and social structures. My analyses take into account
the particular genres, media and intellectual settings which
inform a given representation even as I attempt to show how
images operate across time and discipline.
Chapter one begins at the start of human life with the
fetus conceived as a fully autonomous child by the anti
abortion movement. This tendentious cultural construction
illustrates the elasticity and instability of the term. It
also brings home the investments -- philosophical,
psychological, political -- entailed in whatever definition I
choose to work with. I attempt to show how formulating the
fetus as a being "in and for itself" (i.e. a person in the
common understanding of the term), necessarily violates the
rights, autonomy and freedom of choice of the woman from
whose body and life it cannot be divorced, physiologically or
ethically. But I also want to demonstrate how the image-
concept of the fetus as child comes to operate so effectively
as a rallying point around which the anti-abortion movement
mobilizes popular support. A history of anatomical
illustration and an analysis of two recent popular Hollywood
science-fiction films would seem at least as far removed from
the fetal child as they are from each other. Nevertheless,
it is my contention, that these disparate cultural phenomena
can be productively related as diverse aspects of a
masculinist ideology which serves to maintain "the right to
life" as the prerogative of the male in the teeth of the fact
that women, not men, bear children. It may be important to
point out here that my contention that the fetus and the
child should remain conceptually differentiated is no more or
less a matter of cultural construction than the anti-abortion
movement's demand that they be fused. No impartial,
empirical data can decide the issue in favor of one side or
the other. Rather, I wish to demonstrate that each way of
thinking necessarily entails an ethics and a politics with
respect to the inequalities of power in present day gender
relations.
My second chapter addresses the vexed issue of Lewis
Carroll's erotic relations with young girls in such a way as
to relate his literary achievement with the most troubling
aspects of his photographic practice. I read his texts,
drawings and photographs symptomatically through the lens of
psychoanalysis in an attempt to construct a dynamic of desire
which honors the originality of his creative gifts while
tracing the presence of child sexual abuse, both suffered and
inflicted, in his life and work. My analysis transgresses
the boundaries between literary fiction and biographical
fact, between Alice in Wonderland and her historical
counterpart, Alice Liddell, between Lewis Carroll, the
creator of a brilliant nonsense world and C.L. Dodgson, the
obsessive photographer of little girls. Photography's
divided status as creative artifice and indexical sign of the
historical past is relevant here in complex ways. I have
sought to trace in Carroll's fantastical productions as
writer, draughtman and photographer, an unconscious equation
in which the figure of the young pre-adolescent girl
forestalls adult sexuality and its intimations of mortality
while simultaneously constituting an object of erotic desire.
If the photographs of Lewis Carroll eroticize the young,
female child, those of Lewis Hine pathologize. My third
chapter seeks to counteract the prevailing photo-historical
interpretation of Hine's child-labor photographs as enacting
an exemplary, intersubjective exchange between a Progressive
reform photographer and his working-class subjects in a
manner that transcended class conflict. I argue that this
important body of documentary work is far better understood
as an ideologically invested and self-interested expression
by middle-class, professional social workers who sought to
impose a bourgeois conception of child labor that was at odds
in important respects with traditional working-class
7
definitions of child and family. At stake in the widespread
circulation of Hine's photographs and posters in the first
two decades of the twentieth century was not only the fight
to abolish industrial exploitation of the underaged worker
but also a struggle to re-define the child whose wage labor
traditionally contributed to the working-class family's
income. Child-labor reform entailed the re-making of the
working-class child in the image of the economically
dependent but emotionally priceless child of the ascendent
middle classes. Hine photographed the child worker as the
tragic obverse of the happy, leisured, domesticated middle-
class child. I argue that an adversarial dynamic rooted in
class conflict explains Hine's relations with his camera
subjects more persuasively than does a model of empathetic
intersubjectivity proposed by photographic historians.
Finally, I attempt to account for the ongoing appeal of
Hine's child-labor images despite the ideological shifts
within the discipline of photo-history by locating a paternal
impulse at work in those of us positioned to write the
history of photography.
Chapters four and five take up two of Freud's case
histories, examining how they re-construct childhood in the
process of a joint reconstruction of a patient's life story
as a therapeutic enterprise. I interpret "Fragment of an
Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" [Dora] and "From the History
of an Infantile Neurosis" [The Wolf-Man] as narratives which
contain evidence, both direct and indirect, for alternative
8
interpretations. If Dora is the patient who left too soon,
the Wolf-Man is the patient who could never leave. Both
premature termination and interminable analysis, while
representing opposite therapeutic outcomes, imply significant
resistance to Freud's project.
The writing of case histories remains by the very nature
of the genre a consumately one-sided affair in which the
doctor-patient hierarchy and the protocols of patient
anonymity insure that a single, authoritative, didactic
narrative renders up a life story in terms of problems,
treatments and outcomes. My chapters on Dora and the Wolf-
Man attempt in different ways to create a space in which the
subjects of these case histories can be seen to register
dissent, however disguised and inarticulate, from the
constraints of psychoanalytic theory. In Dora's case
history, I show how Freud's claims of narrative coherence
mirror various facets of the hysteria he diagnoses in his
patient. My point is not to denigrate Freud's insights or to
challenge the efficacy of psychoanalytic therapy, but rather
to implicate the blindnesses and resistances of analyst as
well as analysand in the process of anamnesis and its
translation into a formal narrative. In the case of the
Wolf-Man, I take advantage of the relatively rare presence of
the analysand's independent authorship. Even though the
Wolf-Man's voice is heard within a structure meant to confirm
the case history, I read in it a muted yet concerted attempt
9
to re-write a life against the grain of Freud's
interpretations.
Freud's achievements make my critique possible in the
sense that my re-interpretations remain as dependent as the
orthodox analyst's on the connections he forged between
infant development and adult psychic life. As an author,
Freud created narratives of sufficient richness and scope to
allow for the kind of re-working I have undertaken. With
respect to both case histories, I become an advocate on
behalf of an analysand who remains in important ways unheard
by Freud. I attempt to re-inscribe an intersubjective family
history which Freud either ignores or downplays in favor of a
brilliant, subtle, richly productive yet narratologically
oppressive explication of the individual psyche. My re
assertion of family history entails a reconsideration of
Freud's seduction theory as the aetiology of neurosis and
thereby re-engages an important if well-worn debate as to its
status in relation to his subsequent, canonical theory of the
Oedipus complex as the motor of psychic life and conflict.
I am aware throughout this section as in the
dissertation as a whole, that my interpretations carry within
them a series of displaced and unacknowledged
autobiographical circumstances and agendas, not the least of
which is the experience of being a patient within an analytic
setting. To even begin to adequately account for that aspect
of my studies within the parameters of the present
dissertation is manifestly impossible. I regard such psychic
"overdetermination" of my objects of study and their
interpretations as a concomitant of committed (invested)
scholarship. I can only suggest that they be acknowledged
both for better and for worse when they surface
symptomatically in the text. To admit to the play of the
personal and the unconscious within a scholarly endeavor,
however, is not to forsake the rules of logic or the
standards of research to which my arguments remain
accountable.
My last chapter is the longest, most speculative and
eclectic. The wild child, like the fetal "child," is a being
constructed at the margins of cultural consensus and exists
as a site of contestation rather than as an aspect of common
experience. The most salient feature of this chapter is the
manner in which, in the three very diverse cases presented,
the silence of the wild child calls forth passionate debate
from those authorized to speak on the child's behalf. Again,
like the fetal "child," the wild child is a liminal creature.
Without language s/he remains ambiguously and traumatically
bestial, closer to animal than to human nature. The wild
child's silence implicitly invokes the possibility of
abandonment as a consequence of the inherent powerlessness
and dispensability of the young child. (The Oedipus who
slept with his mother and killed his father was first
abandoned as a helpless infant upon a mountainside.)
The absence of language defines the wild child even as
it dictates the terms of rehabilitation for a being who
exists outside a structure of intersubjectivity upon which
the socialization process depends. At stake in the effort to
teach the wild child to communicate through words are
competing theories about the nature of the child and of
language. When the process of rehabilitation becomes caught
up in attempts to vindicate one linguistic or philosophical
system over another, the consequences for the child are apt
to be abysmal. Or so the evidence suggests in the case of
Victor, a pre-adolescent boy discovered roaming the French
countryside at the turn of the nineteenth-century. So too,
in the case of Genie, a "closet" child living in Los Angeles
in the 1970s who had been kept by her father in solitary
confinement thoughout childhood and consequently had never
learned to speak. The "miracle" of Helen Keller's
transformation from unreachable hellion to precocious author
provides a narrative and theoretical foil to the failure of
Victor and Genie to learn language in any adequate measure.
While the usage of the term "wild child" in Keller's case
becomes highly metaphorical, it remains the conceptual ground
against which her achievement is measured. That achievement,
in turn, poses questions and raises anxieties as to the
relationship of language to experience and authenticity.
These six chapters, however diverse, are united in their
presumption that children and childhood matter as objects of
study. While such a statement may seem embarrassingly self-
evident, it is worth noting that the seminal work in the
history of the child, Philippe Aries's Centuries of Childhood
(1962), argues cogently for the concept as a modern
invention:
In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist;

this is not to suggest that children were neglected,
forsaken, or despised. The idea of childhood is not to
be confused with affection for children: it corresponds
to an awareness of the particular nature of childhood,
that particular nature which distinguishes the child
from the adult, even the young adult. In medieval
society this awareness was lacking. That is why, as
soon as the child could live without the constant
solicitude of his mother, his nanny, or his cradle-
rocker, he belonged to adult society (128).
A number of statistical items in the historical record loom
large in suggesting an epistemological break separating a
contemporary pre-occupation with the child as a being of
crucial social and cultural significance from a pre-modern
period in which childhood did not exist as a coherent
conceptual entity. Infant mortality in pre-industrial
Europe existed at such a high level as to thoroughly confound
present-day assumptions and expectations concerning any given
child's chance's of survival:
Even after expressing doubt about the reliability of

public health data in the infancy of record-keeping, the
statistics available from the eighteenth century in
England and on the continent are terrifying in the
inevitability of the death of children. The century had
almost closed before children born in London had an even
break on surviving until their fifth birthday, and
before 1750 the odds were three-to-one against a child
completing five years of life (Kessen 7-8).
When these figures are combined with the various estimates
for the widespread practice of child abandonment (as high as
thirty or forty percent of all live births in some parts of
Western Europe before the nineteenth century) and with the
extremely high if uncertain mortality figures for foundlings,
13
the modern reader begins to discern, however opaquely, a
conceptual and moral universe in which Dr. Spock and Mr.
Rogers would have been completely unintelligible (Boswell).
As William Kessen observes, "One of the most exciting and
difficult tasks in a historical analysis of child study is to
chart the rise of the child from his older place as an ill-
formed adult at the edges of the society to his present
position as cultural hero" (5). The danger of such
historicization of the discourse of the child is that it
uncritically adopts a first-world perspective as the
universal norm in the present and thereby obscures such
continuing and intractable issues as infant mortality and
child labor in many third world countries.
But Aries's concept of the changing, historical child
co-exists uneasily with the empirical and universal child of
developmental psychology, a being who has its roots in
nineteenth-century Darwinism as a biological organism whose
growth unfolds according to the laws of natural science.
Erik Erikson's Childhood and Society (1950) sets out a basic
developmental sequence for human development consisting of
the "eight stages of man (sic)." His psychoanalytic model
aspires to universality by virtue of "the fact that the
history of humanity is a gigantic metabolism of individual
life cycles" (12).
A recent publication reports the results of an extended
collaborative project between psychologists and historians
"that would bring developmental studies and social history
14
together in the study of children" (Elder et a l . vii). In
the section of the book devoted to "cross-disciplinary
collaboration" an article entitled "The elusive historical
child: Ways of knowing the child of history and psychology"
notes the influence of the "linguistic turn" but then goes on
to discount discourse theory in relation to the study of the
child:
Perhaps that turn works well when the historian

reconstructs the symbolic universes of adults and their
relatively rich discourse, both verbal and nonverbal.
But the historian of children's lives cannot afford to
depend only on this linguistic turn. Children simply
are not located in society in a way that leaves much
evidence of their discourse. There is plenty of adult
discourse about the child, but the child often is too
silent for the historian's usual arsenal of methods.
The historian of childhood must be far more resourceful
than others, teasing evidence and meaning from unlikely
sources (Cahan et al. 194).
What is striking here is the conflicting role of post
structuralist theory as that which enables the disciplines of
psychology and history to draw "a new, shared research
agendum on the historical child" while it yet remains
inadequate "if our goals are to understand how children, as a
category of humans, come to construct and sustain a
consciousness or world view, to understand how historical
"events" (broadly defined) affect the world views of
children, and to understand how developmental processes
interact with social forces and historical events" (193-4) .
Basic to the philosophical and theoretical premises of
the linguistic turn is an acknowledgement of language as the
structure of meaning through which perception and experience
15
is mediated. It would therefore question the very existence
of discourse in a child's world, since one of the child's
most salient characteristics is the lack of fully developed
and self-conscious language skills. Poststructuralism would
not allow the move by which children's silences are filled,
however ingeniously, with the historian's construction of the
"real" child as somehow having escaped the determining grip
of the researcher's signifying practices. The world of
childhood is an elusive terrain accessible only and always
through a process of partial and inadequate translation. The
truths of childhood prove as unstable as Jacqueline Rose's
assessment of Freud's investigation of the primal scene:
[H]e discovered that there was no single event, that

possibly nothing had ever happened, but that the
multiple associations and images uncovered in the course
of the analysis belonged to the still continuing history
of his patient.
Within this paradigm, "neither childhood nor meaning can be
pinned down -- they shift, and our own identity with them"
(The Case of Peter Pan 17-18).
The various historical and developmental children that I
take up in the following pages pre-exist my interpretations
as embedded, mediated representations that yet remain
attached reciprocally to a domain of experience whose
influence upon feeling, thought and action ultimately escapes
discourse. For all their differences, these children share
an important attribute. As cultural texts, they are "'good
for reading' or 'good for thinking'" by virtue of the co
existence within them of "multilayered and conflicting levels
16
of meaning [that] demand critical engagement and dialogue"
(Toews 885). The literary, philosophical and art-historical
complexity of these children also marks them as highly
circumscribed productions by an elite, high culture founded
upon the assumptions and presumptions of post-Enlightenment
Western thought. While these limitations will fade from view
in the heat of the arguments which follow, with any luck they
will resurface at those points at which these children compel
a search for further understanding and interpretation.
Enough has been said, I hope, to provide a roadmap for
what follows and to justify the range of texts taken up. But
it may be helpful here to specify those more general
assumptions that emerge elsewhere in piecemeal fashion. The
following statements I take as axiomatic. They inform most
of the arguments about children and childhood which follow:
1) We were all children once and continue to carry that
experience with us in largely unconscious, symptomatic form.
Every formulation of the child bears the traces of a
passionately authorized autobiographical conviction on the
part of sender and receiver alike. 2) The figure of the
child puts into play a complex interaction of fragment and
whole, knowledge and forgetting, potential and loss,
privilege and powerlessness. Our childhoods are strongly yet
openendedly related to our subsequent identities, desires and
accomplishments. They also constitute the repository for all
our unrealized, fantasized selves. 3) Childhood will always
be produced after the fact in a mode which can never bridge
17
the gaps imposed by language and the unconscious. 4) The
child's sense of self is always already inhabited/seduced by
a parental unconscious. The child's condition of being
spoken by another is coincident with an initial and prolonged
dependency on an adult caregiver. Language and a sense of
self develop gradually over a prolonged period as a result of
a dialogical process of interaction between the infant and
the social world. The child's powerlessness is also an
aspect of his or her innocence, hope, capacity for play and
lack of responsibility. 5) The concept "adult" takes on its
various meanings only in relation to this opposite, outside
other.
The children who inhabit these pages always seem to be
straining to become something other: 1) the child as fetus
that will eventually (but not yet) become distinct from the
woman who produces new life; 2) the child as object of adult
sexual desire whose erotic pull both evades and conflates,
under the sign of repression, sexuality with death; 3) the
child as worker whose identity becomes antithetical to a
bourgeois family ideology predicated on a paternalistic
celebration of the economically dependent yet emotionally
priceless offspring; 4) the child as a retrospective
narrative held hostage to the vicissitudes of adult psychic
life; 5) and finally the speechless, unsocialized child as
liminal creature, closer to nature and hence not quite human.
These children are all changelings and this may prove to be
their most interesting feature in that they allow childhood
18
to be conceived in tension with whatever threatens or
promises to come into being in its place.
19
The Disembodied Fetus
I n troduction
The image of the fetus has been a crucial, organizing sign
around which the pro-life movement has been able to mobilize
its quite powerful and now pervasive discourse. [Fig. 1] Its
political utility has proven remarkably resistent to either
ideological deconstruction or counter-symbolization on the
part of pro-choice advocates. I will argue that its
"success" rests upon conceptual and rhetorical moves by which
the fetus becomes cut off from the body and subjectivity of
the pregnant woman so that we now accept and "understand" the
image of the fetus as a sign of an autonomous, sacralized
being floating freely somewhere "out there" in a
cosmic/celestial void. The space between fetus and woman is
opened up in two interrelated ways: 1) from the procreative
side, there is an ongoing history of representation across
genres and disciplines which posits the male, rather than the
female, as the true progenitor of life; 2) from the offspring
side, the fetus has become enframed in an anatomical
perspective, inherited from the Renaissance, which has
rendered it a discrete object of scientific study subject to
the law of the fathers.
The visual and conceptual isolation of the fetus
adversely affects our ability to think through a number of
crucial arguments at the heart of the abortion debates with
regard to the rights and interests of the pregnant woman.
20
The moral and legal status of the fetus cannot exist as an a
priori principle but must (and always does) exist within a
"prior, historically contingent human world of
interrelationships and interdependence." The suppression of
context fosters a metonymic slippage by which a fetus becomes
a baby, a person, a miniature-innocent-helpless you or me.
It allows for a powerful Kantian argument to assert its
claims whereby the fetus is conflated with the concept of a
person as an end rather than a means. In such an analysis,
the fetus becomes emotionally and conceptually allied with
those -- including women, children, slaves, and colonial
peoples who, historically, have been denied full
subjectivity by the dominant powers because they were judged
to be insufficiently "rational, motivated or civilized"
(Petchesky 343). This is the strand of the pro-life argument
which may be the most persuasive and appealing to an audience
sympathetic to cultural studies, given that discipline's
commitment to the "coming to voice" of marginalized groups.
This chapter offers a quite different analysis, locating the
anti-abortion ideology within a patriarchal culture that
defines the "right to life" as a fundamentally male
prerogative. It traces a history of representation that has
served to animate and fetishize the fetus in the absence of
and in opposition to the pregnant woman.
I will be presenting an iconography of anatomical and
embryological illustration which constructs a discourse of
male parthenogenesis as dominant, euphoric, and utopian,
21
while, in the process, dialectically coding the female
alternative as a dystopic nightmare. I will argue that, far
from being a quaint by-way in the annals of natural history
illustration, this dualistic, manichean fantasy-solution to
the question "where do babies come from?" lives on strongly
and is mobilized effectively by two of the most popular
science-fiction films of the recent past. Steven Spielberg's
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) articulates the
fantasy of male parthenogenesis as an escape from the ills
that beset patriarchy in the era of late capitalism and
dwindling U.S. empire. In psychoanalytic terms, it produces
a narrative of origin which evades the primary maternal bond
-- that original symbiosis from which we are doomed to be
expelled thereby triggering the endless machinations of
desire. Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) formulates and works
through the dark side of Spielbergs fantasy: the prospect of
unmonitored, unregulated, unilateral female generation as
ultimate horror. Taken together, these two films construct a
subliminal politics of reproduction in which all "good" life
originates with the male. Abortion becomes, in the final
analysis, a sin against the fathers.
The Spermist Utopia
Preformationism is a theory of origins which holds that life
develops from what already exists in miniature on the model
of those tiny toy sponge capsules that become elephants,
giraffes and the like when placed in water.1 This theory was
22
widely held and seemed quite plausible in the absence of
knowledge concerning the mechanisms by which a single,
undifferentiated cell develops into a complex organism
(epigenesis). In the 17th century, Van Leeuwenhoek first
viewed spermatozoa through the lens of his microscope. His
discovery split the preformationists into opposing camps: the
spermists, who believed that the animating principle was to
be found in (male) semen, and the ovists, who believed the
mini-adult was enshrined in the (female) egg. What is
interesting, ideologically speaking, about preformationism is
its absolute, binary opposition of male and female principles
when ascribing agency to the origins of life. For if living
beings always already exist in miniaturized form, then their
ontology must logically lie wholly with either one or the
other sex.
The science of male parthenogenesis finds one of its
most overt expressions in Paracelsus, an eminent German
physician and alchemist of the 16th-century, who set forth
the formula by which to create a human being in a laboratory
setting.
In order to accomplish it, you must proceed thus. 'Let

the semen of a man putrefy by itself in a cucurbite ...
for forty days, or until at last it begins to live, move
and be agitated. After this time it will be in some
degree like a human being, but, nevertheless,
transparent and without body. If now, after this, it be
every day nourished and fed cautiously and prudently
with the arcanum of human blood, and kept for forty
weeks in the perpetual and equal heat of a venter
equinus, it becomes, henceforth, a true and living
infant, having all the members of a child that is born
of a woman, but much smaller. This we call a
homunculus; and it should afterwards be educated with
23
the greatest care and zeal until it grows up and begins

to display intelligence. Now this is one of the greatest
secrets which God has revealed to mortal and fallible
man (Taylor 11).
As discussed by Gordon Rattray Taylor, this occult recipe for
cooking up a human being is a logical extension of
Aristotelian dogma "that the foetus developed from 'a
coagulum1 of menstrual blood, the coagulation being brought
about by the male semen" (103). Aristotle's physiology
aligned itself with the principles of sympathetic magic by
which "a man represents the warmer, more active element, a
woman the colder, more passive element (15) . Likewise,
Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, theorized that the
true parent was the male, while the mother "is only the nurse
of the young life that is sown within her" (111) . The
ascendancy of the spermist wing of the preformationist camp
made it possible for an English authority on the history of
medicine to write in 1805 of the scientific progress of the
past fifty years: "Every naturalist and indeed every man who
pretended to the smallest portion of medical science, was
convinced that his children were no more related, in point of
actual generation, to his own wife, than they were to his
neighbours" (111-12).
I would like to lay the groundwork for reading
Spielberg's extraterrestrials as spermist homunculi by way of
a medieval miniature which illustrates a vision of Hildegard
of Bingen in which "the arrival of the soul in the body of
the infant" was revealed to her.2 [Fig. 2] This 12th-century
version of a "close encounter of the third kind" is based
24
upon "the medieval theory of sperm dropping from the stars"
(Talylor 108) . Her Scivias (1180) is a collection of
visionary writings which includes an illustration depicting
the soul passing "into the infant's body while yet within the
mother's womb." The science historian, Charles Singer, goes
on to describe the left panel of this miniature in the
following terms.
The Wisdom of God is represented as a four-square

object.... From it a long tube-like process descends
into the mother's womb. Down this there passes into the
child a bright object, described variously as
"spherical" and as "shapeless," which "illumines the
whole body," and becomes or develops into the soul ....
Near the couch are ranged a group of ten figures who
carry vessels containing the various qualities of the
child. Above and to the left the Evil One may be seen
pouring some noxious substance into one of these
vessels, or perhaps abstracting some element of good
(From Magic to Science 226-7).
Hildegard's vision conflates conception, birth, and
ensoulment in such a way as to align the life-force on the
side of a heavenly father. It should not go unremarked,
however, that "ensoulment" is here envisioned as a process
that takes place only after the fetus has become fully
formed, i.e. at the moment of quickening or even as late as
the time of actual birth. In these terms, abortion in the
first trimester (which constitutes the vast majority of all
abortions) cannot be argued to involve a fully endowed soul
as conceived in the medieval Christian worldview.
This image complexly interweaves both the physiological
and metaphysical aspects of the word "vision." The celestial
rectangle is subdivided into a verticle column flanked on
25
either side by two identical triangles filled with a myriad
of disembodied eyes. The central column is filled with a
number of small circles and an anomalous cephalic shape
possessing what looks like teeth, hair, and an eye.
Hildegard's text explains what is going on:
And I saw that many circling eddies possessed the sphere

and brought it earthward, but with ever renewed force it
returned upward and with wailing asked, "I, wanderer
that I am, where am I?" "In death's shadow." "And where
go I?" "In the way of sinners." "And what is my hope?"
"That of all wanderers" (Taylor 228).
The process of ensoulment seems to involve a great deal of
resistance on the part of the animating principle. To trade
in its celestial rectangle for the ovoid domains of earth,
woman, womb, and fetus is to abandon secure, hard-edged,
geometical divinity for a wandering existence amidst the
curvillinear forms of sin, corruption, death, and femininity.
(I am reminded here of the inimitable scene in Everything You
Always Wanted to Know About Sex in which Woody Allen, in the
guise of a reluctant sperm facing the moment of ejaculation,
anxiously anticipates all the terrible things that could
happen to him out "there" in the cavernous, female unknown.)
The multitude of eyes which decorate the four-square
object representing the Wisdom of God would seem to suggest a
seamless continuum between vision as a physiological act and
as divine inspiration.3 Vision and ensoulment are closely
identified. In this regard, it is probably significant that
the unborn baby's eye remains closed, awaiting the descent of
the "fiery sphere" itself endowed with an open eye.
26
Quickening then becomes a process of spiritual awakening. In
more general terms, the image gives visual representation to
a mystical vision revealing a divine animating principle. It
renders a woman's body transparent in order that the child
within may be shown to be both visible and ensouled.
Visuality as a process of penetration and uncovering becomes
identified with a cosmic principle of paternal animation
originating in the star-studded heavens, from whence it
descends to pierce the passive, receptive body of the
pregnant woman.4
Spermist doctrine in conjunction with the invention of
the microscope in the 17th century encouraged the further
"discovery" within the spermatozoa of "homunculi," that is of
"intact but infinitesimally small men and women, complete
with adult physiological characteristics" (Fuller 97). A
Dutch essay on dioptics (1694) contains an outline drawing of
a human spermatozoon containing a homunculus.5 [Fig. 3] A
1702 Dutch edition of Van Leeuwenhoek's works include three
illustrations. The first represents a microscopically
visible human spermatozoon, the second and third depicting
the tiny beings contained within. [Fig. 4] A color print of
1750 by Gauthier d'Agoty claims to represent an embryo drawn
from life which "never dwelt in any womb" but rather
developed "in a glass of water into which semen had fallen"
(Taylor 113). [Fig. 5] (Note the umbilical chord which
persists despite lack of connection with a womb.) This
creature, with its large smiling head and spindly body, bears
27
a remarkably close resemblance to the extraterrestrials of
Close Encounters. [Fig. 6]
Spielberg's film ingeniously reworks both Hildegard of
Bingen's vision of conception-animation and Gauthier Agoty's
homunculus to produce a sci-fi fantasy of a "second coming"
in both religious and sexual terms. The "special edition"
version ends with a sequence showing Roy Neary (Richard
Dreyfus) inside the alien "mothership." Roy enters a vast,
cavernous, technologized yet cathedral-like space and
witnesses a phantasmagoric light-show culminating in a
shattering burst of crystaline light forms. His expression
remains blissfully hedonic throughout as if he were
experiencing a transcendental form of orgasm. The film would
have us believe that he has achieved a combination of
salvation, resurrection, and disembodied freedom through the
agency of technologically superior homunculi, beings who
remain unencumbered by the earthbound constraints of ovum,
womb, and maternal attachments.
The possibility that this ending figures a primal (wet)
dream of patriarchy -- male self-fulfillment as unisexual
propagation -- finds confirmation in a production photograph
that appears in the short documentary Making Close Encounters
(Voyager Company, 1990). [Fig. 7] A black and white
photograph shows in the lower-right foreground, the profile
of a young male figure in cowboy hat, looking off into the
distance. He is a direct descendent of the man from Marlboro
Country and while I cannot make out his features clearly
enough to positively identify him as the film's director, I
nevertheless read him as a stand-in for the male, creative
instigating force behind the film's production. In the
upper-left background of the image appear, in costume, the
group of young children (very thin dance students) who play
the part of the extraterrestrials (Making Close Encounters).
Over the children's heads, an anonymous wag has superimposed
a cartoon balloon indicating that all these little alien
munchkins are simultaneously crying out "Daddy!"
Close Encounters, like its acknowledged inspiration,
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), ends in a
rendezvous with the star-child a fetal being who closes
the gap between origin and destination, beginning and ending,
death and rebirth.6 Both Kubrick and Spielberg rehearse a
myth of origins in which unexplainable, other-worldly,
visitations initiate a quest which takes the male protagonist
beyond all known modes of experience. The hero's epiphany in
both films is symbolized by a myriad of special optical
effects that set new standards for the industry. As a
correlative to this primal voyage of origination, Close
Encounters inscribes a much more mundane and precise
historical return to the United States of 1945. The missing
pilots coming off the mothership, for whom Roy Neary, among
others, is exchanged, have not aged at all. Their future
stands all before them at the flood tide of Henry R. Luce's
American Century. This is also the time of Spielberg's own
birth and early childhood an era of nationalist self-
29
confidence and unprecedented economic growth, before May 1968
when consensus failed and the American dream retreated out of
reach.
Close Encounters is terminally escapist on at least two
levels. Diegetically, Roy Neary, whom Spielberg conceived as
the American common man, embodies all the anxieties and
failures of patriarchy as lived out within the space of late-
capitalist, marginally prosperous, white suburbia. [Fig. 8]
His wife nags and his children refuse to relive for him the
wonders of his own enchanted childhood as embodied in Walt
Disney's Pinocchio (1940). Roy's salvation takes the form of
a vision of Devil's Tower, a signifier whose meaning eludes
him. In his manic attempts to represent this phallic object,
Roy wreaks havoc on his carefully kept suburban house, lawn,
and shrubbery, thereby effectively ridding himself of wife
and children who take shelter from his madness within the
extended family network. [Fig. 9] Roy's fidelity to his
irrational, obsessive vision enables him to abandon a mundane
paternity for the narcissistic pleasures of endlessly
fathering himself in the regressive plenitude of masturbatory
self-(re)production.
At the level of the cinematic apparatus, Close
Encounters constitutes a self-reflexive meditation on the
pleasures and powers of film as an imaginary haven from the
conflicts and contradictions of U.S. social life. In this
reading, the mothership is an analogy for the film industry
itself: a structure comprised of sound and light occupied by
30
extraordinary beings illuminated and obscured by a brilliant
blue haze like that of the projector's glare. [Fig. 10] The
mothership, as a figure for Hollywood film making, offers us
compensation for the disappointments and vicissitudes of a
social life whose patriarchal structures have begun to crack.
But What Zf the Ovists Are Right?
How does patriarchy deal with the prospect that the female,
rather than the male, determines the reproductive process?
The answer is two-fold: it makes sure that female
procreativity is contained and subordinated to the law of the
fathers and it codes the absence of such control and
subjugation as dystopic nightmare. Anatomy disciplines the
maternal body even as science fiction traumatizes the
contemplation of alternatives to masculinist hegemony. The
anatomical gaze, by penetrating the various layers of skin
and tissue that prevent the fetus from being seen, renders
the unborn child an object of study and thereby subjects it
to the disciplinary regimes of patriarchy. Within this
schema, the fetus' protected invisibility is commensurate
with its status as a being both viable and inextricably a
part of the pregnant woman. Anatomical visibility, then, is
the structuring form of knowledge that acts to break down the
symbiosis of woman and her fetus, allowing them to become
progressively estranged one from the other. Until ultra
sound became a standard tool of obstetrics in the 1970s, the
fetus's visibility was co-extensive with its nonviability.
In addition, visual access to the fetus entailed the
dismemberment and eclipse of the woman's body within which it
was both hidden and sheltered.7
When a science fiction narrative codes fecundity,
generation, growth, and development as feminine, dangerous
and destructive, then a space is opened up in which to write
patriarchy's despotism as a requisite and essential order
embodying stability and morality in an otherwise cancerous,
anarchic universe. Ridley Scott's Alien links anatomical
vision with dystopic generativity in an horrific,
antagonistic relationship. The alien creature attacks the
spaceman, Kane (John Hurt), only after he has penetrated deep
within a cavernous womb-like structure. His vision becomes
horribly occluded by the monster's attaching itself to his
face in retaliation for his having probed with eye and hand
into its ovarian pod within which fetal life glows and
pulsates. Kane's fellow crew members attempt to remove the
alien without killing their patient, a task which proves
impossible. Kane's transgressive insight into the secret
recesses of generativity proves fatal. In what follows,
using both Alien and a selected history of anatomical
illustration, I want to trace a history of representation in
which the dominant culture has found ways to master and
vilify female reproductivity.
32
Leonardo's Notebooks
The exhibition catalogue, Leonardo da Vinci, Anatomical
Drawings from the Royal Collection, begins by juxtaposing an
early anatomical drawing of a male figure showing heart,
lungs and main arteries "which relates to the ancient and
medieval anatomical knowledge of Leonardo's predecessors"
with his subsequent drawing showing a "dissection of the
principal organs and arterial system of a woman" (22). [Figs.
11 & 12] This introductory comparison between an early and
late study is intended to demonstrate "an extraordinary
progress in anatomical knowledge as Leonardo moves from
traditional sources of learning ... to combine them with
knowledge acquired through dissection, thus giving vividness
and intensity to his vision of the human body as a machine"
(13). What is not remarked upon is the fact that Leonardo
endows his male drawing, medieval and backward though it may
be, with fully expressive features, while its anatomically
"improved" female counterpart gets severed at the neck. In
addition, the woman's reproductive organs appear monstrous,
resembling nothing so much as an animal's skull.
The staging of sexual difference in which the female
loses her head while the male gets to keep his is most
dramatically enacted in Leonardo's drawing of human coitus.
[Fig. 13] The bodies are laterally bisected to show the
inner workings of the procreative act. The male is endowed
with a full set of internal body parts and a head while the
woman is reduced to the internal workings of her reproductive
33
organs -- vagina, uterus, and breast -- with only enough
veterbrae and leg to keep these structures in place. A stream
of notation in Leonardo's inimitable hand appears to issue
forth from the male figure's mouth overwriting the space
where the woman's eyes, ears, nose and throat would otherwise
b e .8
In the bottom right-hand corner of the page containing
Leonardo's famous drawing of the fetus in its womb is a
small, inconspicuous sketch illustrating binocular vision.
[Fig. 14] Leonardo here links his interest in the physiology
of human vision with his investigations into human fetal
development. Dissection and vision are mutually implicated
in a Faustian bargain whereby knowledge of life's origins
entails, of necessity, direct confrontation with death. The
fetus the artist depicts with such consumate skill has
achieved its condition of representability as a part of the
corpse of a pregnant woman. The multi-layered coverings of
the uterus have been carved away and its amniotic fluid
drained.9 It lies tightly curled in upon itself as if seeking
protection from the violence of such lethal exposures. The
fetus shields its eyes from the gaze of the anatomist/viewer
who has penetrated so deeply to seek it out. As a subsequent
page of Leonardo's notebooks reveals, by the time he
completes his investigations, nothing of the fetus's outward
form will remain. [Fig. 15] His drawings constitute a record
of decomposition in the most literal sense.
34
At the same time, they represent a level of abstraction
which willfully divorces the object of knowledge and
representation from the lived experience of mortality and
subjectivity. Leonardo, himself, enumerates the resistances
-- and hence, the stakes -- which his enterprise entails:
But though possessed of an interest in the subject [of

anatomy] you may perhaps be deterred by natural
repugnance, or if this does not restrain you then
perhaps by the fear of passing the night hours in the
company of these corpses, quartered and flayed, and
horrible to behold. And if this does not deter you then
perhaps you may lack the skill in drawing essential for
such representation and even if you possess this skill
it may not be combined with a knowledge of perspective,
while if it is so combined you may not be versed in the
methods of geometrical demonstration, or the methods of
estimating the forces and power of the muscles; or you
may perhaps be found wanting in patience so that you
will not be diligent (21).
Leonardo here obsessively delineates his own practices as a
heroic conquest mounted against considerable misgivings and
weaknesses ascribed to the "you" whom he addresses in this
passage. His imagined interlocutor possesses all the
failings patriarchy assigns to woman and children:
squeamishness, timidity, lack of skill, knowledge, diligence
and patience. His embattled rhetoric betrays a displaced
recognition of the transgressiveness entailed in his
anatomical investigations into the origins of human life.
Ultimately, and by a typical projection of subject onto
object of vision, this inner resistance to the violence of
dissection is embodied in the figure of the fetus's self-
protective shielding of the eyes.
35
Life's "Living" Fetus
Leonardo's capacity to abstract and delineate from direct
observation has never been surpassed and has long been held
as an epitome of Western art and science. But those
processes remained in touch (in the full sense of that term)
with the necessary violence practiced upon human bodies in
the course of dissection. Leonardo's anatomical narrative is
ruthlessly and exhilaratingly complete. All the way down to
the internal working of the unborn fetus, it transforms
specific material beings into a series of generalized
drawings and verbal annotations, destroying their form and
structure in the very process of analyzing and delineating
them. A survey of the subsequent genealogy of the
representation of the fetus suggests a progressive
occultation of the fact that the conditions which
traditionally have allowed us to see the fetus are synonymous
with those that sever it from its nexus of viability.
An engraving prepared by Casserius and first published
in Adrian Spigelius' De Formatu Foetu (Padua, 1626) presents
an image of the human fetus as an intact, living and
idealized being subsisting outside its mother's body. [Fig.
16] Superimposed over a highly conventionalized icon of the
classical female nude is a scientific drawing of the fetus in
utero. The female figure represents the mother in only the
most dissociated way. She functions far more strongly as an
abstract allegory a Renaissance Eve holding a plucked
apple in her hand as depicted, for instance, in Durer's
36
famous engraving. [Fig. 17.] She becomes, quite literally,
the backdrop upon which is inscribed a carefully labeled
medical diagram of a fetus with placenta and umbilical chord
intact. The uterus has become an exfoliating cabbage-leaf.10
The overlapping of allegorical and anatomical modes of
representation neatly defines and valorizes a field of study
-- the formation of the fetus -- in such a way as to retain
the maternal principle as an abstract and "natural" ideal
within the discourse of scientific humanism while doing away
with the physicality and interiority of the biological
mother.
The complete dissociation of the fetal image from its
lethal conditions of representability is achieved in a famous
series of photographs by Lennart Nilsson representing the
disembodied fetus published in Life magazine (April 30,
1965). The cover bears a striking image labeled
"Unprecedented photographic feat in color; drama of life
before birth; living 18-week-old fetus inside its amniotic
sac -- placenta is seen at right." [Fig. 18] What we see is
the image of a fully formed fetus, glowingly back-lit,
encased within a translucent, silky envelope, floating free
in a vast expanse of extraterrestrial darkness. The
adjective "living" is crucial here, mirroring as it does the
journal's name and raison d'etre. It serves to align this
irridescent being on the side of all that is vital, positive,
dynamic, and forward-looking in mainstream, middle America
just at the moment when Luce's American century began to be
37
seriously troubled by internal dissent touched off by the
Vietnam War. In this same issue a Life editorial advocates
support for involvement in Vietnam while also including an
early article on the student protest movement. The anti-war
movement, in turn, along with the civil rights movement
provided the historical and political context for the rise of
feminism and the Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in
jRoe vs. Wade (1973) .
Turning to the article itself, we come to understand
belatedly the radical falsity of the presentation of the
fetus depicted on the cover as "living." Yet our
disabusement comes about only within the context of a second,
equally striking image, an extreme close-up of a fetal eye,
nose and forehead presented as "the first portrait ever made
of a living embryo inside its mother's womb" (54). [Fig. 19]
This scientific-photographic "first" compensates for and
occludes the fact that all the other fetuses, including the
one on the cover have been "surgically removed for a variety
of medical reasons." These photographs represent, with one
highly disingenuous exception, aborted rather than living
fetuses. Yet the editors do everything they can to
rhetorically dissimulate this inconvenient, if
incontrovertible, aspect of Nilsson's project.
A double-page layout shows the fetus at eleven weeks.
It juxtaposes a photograph of an opaque "blood-rich placental
mass" with a second image showing the placenta "peeled away"
and the amnion supplied with interior illumination. [Fig. 20]
38
The photograph reveals a two-and-a-half-inch-long fetus that
"floats buoyantly in the amniotic fluid." The anatomical
intrusiveness is as violent and annihilating as in the case
of Leonardo. The fetus must surrender all protective
covering in the interests of photographic representation. At
this point, the editors explain the illusion of
extraterrestrialism first encountered on the magazine's
cover: "The starlike spots around the amnion are merely
bubbles in a fluid the photographer has used to support, the
amnion." Yet the relentless, developmental present-tense of
the accompanying text counteracts any recognition of the
gruesome theatricality and artificiality of the image-making
process. The narrative recounts the organic growth of a
viable fetus safely ensconced within the womb on the
threshhold of quickening:
Though totally immersed, the fetus keeps inhaling and

exhaling just enough to send the salty fluid into and
out of its lungs. But it does not drown because it gets
oxygen in the blood brought in by the umbilical cord,
not from air. Bones, including the ribs, are now
rapidly forming. The body wall has grown from the spine
forward and is joined at the front -- like a coat being
buttoned. All the body systems are now working. Nerves
and muscles are synchronizing with the young bones so
that the arms and legs can make their first movements.
Soon, as the fetus' living quarters get more cramped and
as it gains steadily in strength, the mother will begin
to feel the sharp kick and thrust of foot, knee and
elbow.
What the photographs show, in fact, is the exact opposite --
a fetus that has been aborted. The ability of these images
to disguise the lethal conditions of their own possibility is
at one with an abstracted, paternalistic, scientific/medical
39
discourse which presumes to know and speak for an experience
-- the coming to life in incremental, developmental stages of
a fetal being which has remained, at least until recently,
the domain of the pregnant woman.11 (Ultrasound makes
possible fetal surveillance in utero on the part of doctors
thereby dramatically enhancing their ability to by-pass the
woman in assessing and treating the fetus whose status
becomes that of a second "patient".) The age of the fetus
here represented matters since ninety-two to ninty-six
percent of all abortions take place within the first
trimester, that is before quickening signals a more
physiologically advanced and ethically complex stage of fetal
development (Petchesky 347).
Soon after their appearance in Life, Lennart Nilsson's
fetal photographs were published as part of a book entitled,
A Child is Born: The Drama of Life Before Birth in
Unprecedented Photographs. It subtitle, A Practical Guide
for the Expectant Mother, guarantees that this will be a
story with a happy ending and once again effectively
forecloses our understanding that abortion rather than birth
constitutes the essential conditions of representability for
these images. The fetal imagery is framed and contextualized
by the traditional narrative of a young, middle-class,
happily-married couple's first pregnancy that is successfully
and untraumatically brought to term. The pregnancy's
successful culmination in a live birth is, of course, only
the beginning of an infinitely precious new being. The
40
book's frontispiece shows the product of this experience -- a
healthy white, male child at the age of four months "sitting
on Daddy's knee" while his mother beams proudly in the
background. [Fig. 21] The accompanying caption rehearses
sexual difference in stereotypical and anodyne fashion:
Four months old and the center of the world. Sitting on

Daddy's knee, he looks around with intense curiosity.
The very image of his father, says Grandfather. But
with his mother's eyes, says Grandmother. A little more
than a year ago he didn't exist at all (Frontispiece).
The text's coy references to a contestation as to which
parent predominates in the child's make-up bears traces of
preformationism. The degree to which text and image minimize
the mother's role is also quite remarkable. A benign
paternal order, signaled most overtly in the image of the
doctor, has overseen the process from start to finish. [Fig.
22] We are left with a final image of the reproductively
successful, nuclear family taking their place within the
social order -- as symbolized in a visit, with baby carriage
to the zoo. [Fig. 23]
Ovist Dystopia
A recurring aspect of the anatomical discourse is the
strategic containment of the ovist possibility. To dissect,
penetrate, and examine the womb and its contents is to gain
mastery over the reproductive process. The illustrated title
page of William Harvey's The Generation of Animals concisely
represents this conceit. [Fig. 24] The ovist motto, "ex ovo
omnia," ("all things come from the egg") is inscribed upon an
41
egg represented as a pandora's box of female generativity
which spews forth all kinds of creatures from insect to
mammal to man. Yet in the grand, paternal scheme of things,
such prodigality counts for relatively little, being visually
and ideologically subordinated to the image of Zeus in whose
capable hands the ovist principle becomes a mere plaything.
The image serves to embellish a male author and his text
which, like Zeus, will elucidate and supervise "the
generation of animals."
Inherent in the idea of containment is the spectre of
that power which threatens to break free. Life's cosmic
fetus, encased in its ovoid amnion, has its dystopic
counterpart in the logo used to identify and market the
science-fiction-horror-film Alien. [Fig. 25] A cosmic egg is
presented in a dramatic sidelight that reveals a granulated
surface reminiscent of traditional lunar mysteries. A
vaginal crack cleaves the surface of this "dark side of the
moon". From this sexualized "wound" there streams a smokey
and ominous light. The image serves as a sign of an
interior, organic life that represents some ultimate,
unimaginable, traumatic and destructive horror. Here is the
ovist conception of life's origins coded as a nightmare, for
the egg harbors within it a protean changeling that remains
ultimately indeterminate and indescribable. Of unilaterally
female origin, the alien creature answers to our worst fears
of predatory voracity of being eaten alive, both from
without and from within. Its associations are all primal and
42
organic. The range and complexity of critical interpretation
surrounding this creature bespeaks its power to signify in
the realm of the unconscious. Thus for Slavoj Zizek it "has
the status of the pre-symbolic thing -- that is, of the
maternal body, of the living substance of enjoyment" (78-9) .
For Hugh Ruppersberg it "insistently registers psychosexually
as a threatening phallus" (76), while for Barbara Creed it
becomes "a complex representation of the monstrous-feminine"
(128) . Creed further associates the alien with "mythological
narratives of the generative, parthenogenetic mother -- that
ancient archaic figure who gives birth to all living things"
(131). The creature's enigmatic and unpredictable mutability
gives rise to a psychic indeterminacy as to its meanings --
an undecidability mirrored by the film director's decision to
represent the monster in any given sequence so briefly and
ambiguously "that a coherent gestalt can never be
constructed" (Greenberg 94). [Fig. 26] The alien embodies a
complex melange of primal scene and spectral mother to be
connected almost at will with the particular traumas of our
infancies and early childhoods. The monster symbolizes the
principle of female generativity as a compound of
unmitigatied animosity, rapacity, and aggression. As the
antithesis of humanist values, it is championed by Ash (Ian
Holm), the film's undercover, nihilistic android: "I admire
its purity ... a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse
or delusions of morality."
43
Alien reverses the polarities of birth and abortion
implicit in the Life article. Its most original and
disturbing sequence enacts a horrific perversion of the birth
process in which a man is ripped apart from within as a
hideous creature literally explodes into life from out of his
entrails. [Fig. 27] By the same token, the film's cathartic
resolution -- the process by which the "monstrous feminine"
is finally confronted, dispatched and thereby allayed in our
unconscious -- takes the form of a life-saving abortion as
Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) "expels the creature from the body
of her spacepod, having it sucked out by the vacuum of space"
(Cobbs 201). If Alien carries within it an abortion
narrative, that narrative is organized by a dominant
partriarchal discourse which abhors the prospect of female
autonomy in all matters concerning ovulation and its
aftermath. What is finally being aborted by the heroine, who
is coded overtly as feminist, are the monstrous consequences
of reproduction uninstigated, uncontrolled, and unsanctioned
by the male.
The Moral of the Story
The two films, Alien and Close Encounters, rehearse
complementary patriarchal dogmas. Close Encounters provides
a besieged dominant order with a fantasy of procreation in
which the female is entirely absent. Alien enacts a
nightmare of reproduction in which only the female figures.
The "close encounter" as it transpires in Spielberg's film is
44
devoid of consequence. It is a perfect (because perfectly
contentless) reconciliation between humankind and an
extraterrestrial "other" effected aesthetically in the mode
of the popular sublime.12 [Fig. 28] In Alien as well, no
encounter ever really takes place, if by that we mean some
good-faith endeavor to negotiate the "otherness" of a foreign
life form recognized as a Kantian "being in and for itself"
apart from ourselves. [Fig. 29] With regard to the politics
of reproduction, Alien effects an ideological closure no less
complete than Close Encounters. Both valorize a masculinist
disavowal of the rights and well-being of the pregnant woman.
That disavowal lies at the ideological heart of the right to
life movement. Both films make it harder rather than easier
to think through the obvious: though we may not know,
ultimately, where babies come from, we do know that women,
not men, bear them.
^This theory was advocated by Marcello Malphighi whose book on chick
embryo development (1632) earned him the honorific of "father of
embryology" (Taylor 110).
2For biographical treatments of Hildegard of Bingen see Newman and
Flanagan, For a medieval theory of conception see Hewson.
Ân intriguing 19th-century parallel may be found in Fechner's literary
mediations on vision in which the eye is conceived as "a creature of the
sun on earth":
"But the sun's creatures, the higher beings I call angels, are
eyes which have become autonomous, eyes of the highest inner
development which retain nevertheless, the structure of the ideal
eye" (Crary 142).
^For a related analysis of the iconography of the Virgin Mary see
McTavish.
^Dioptics is "that branch of optics which treats of the refraction of
light, especially by lenses (as distinguished from catoptics). The
subject is now generally treated in textbooks under the heading
refraction; similarly reflection replaces the term catoptrics" (Websters
New Internatinal Dictionary. 1959),
^For a brilliant reading of 2001 in relation to both the abortion and
nuclear debates see Sophia.
7The widespread use of ultrasound to monitor pregnancies fundamentally
altered the politics of viewing and representing the human fetus. See
Oakly 155-86.
For other readings of this image see Rose, Sexuality in the Field of
V i s i o n . 225-233; and Gilman.
46
^The center right drawing, although hard to make out clearly, shows an
early embryo with its multiple coverings chorion, allantois, amnion,
and uterus -- represented in section and carefully labeled.
*-For anatomical representations of the various layers of the womb --
uterus, amnion, placenta, etc. -- which enclose and protect the fetus,
see Fabricius.
H-For discussions of the cultural and ethical implications of ultrasound
in relation to thinking through the issues of pregnancy, maternity and
abortion, see Petchesky, "Fetal Images" and Williams.
12Meaghan Morris speaks of the "popular sublime" as that aspect of
Romanticism conventionally discussed within the "high" culture of
English literature and critical theory that gets re-worked and
circulated to a mass audience by the commercial film industry.
P LE ASE NOTE
C o p y r i g h t e d m a t e r i a l s in this d o c u m e n t have
not been f il me d at the request of the author.
Th ey are a v a i l a b l e for consultation, however,
in the a u t h o r s u n i ve rs it y library.
I l l u s t r a t i o n s on pages
47-74
107-128
169-185
227-230
276-281
U n i v e r s i t y M ic r o f i l m s International
75
Childhood's End:
Lewis Carroll and the Image of the Rat
Alice and the Rat
Alice's Adventures under Ground, the original manuscript
version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, contains thirty-
seven pen and ink drawings by Lewis Carroll, one of which
radically breaks with the strict denotative relationship
between word and image which governs the remaining thirty-six
illustrations. The drawing in question shows a small,
rather schematic Alice who sits weeping and covers her face
with her hands. [Fig. 30] A curious rat-like creature
confronts her. It has a long spiky tail, whiskers, and
bird's feet. It stands on its hind legs, looking at Alice in
mute, enigmatic, wide-eyed appeal. The adjoining text reads
as follows:
"Come! There's no use in crying!" said Alice to herself

rather sharply, "I advise you to leave off this
minute!" (She generally gave herself very good advice,
and sometimes scolded herself so severely as to bring
tears into her eyes, and once she remembered boxing her
own ears for having been unkind to herself... (9)
No textual motivation exists for the appearance of this
creature at this juncture. Whimsy seems inadequate as an
explanation given the strict consistency governing all other
text-image correspondences. For example, Carroll's first
drawing rather simply and naively introduces Alice sitting
with her sister in a space contiguous with the opening lines:
"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her
sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do." [Fig. 31]
76
Alice's boredom stems from the fact that her sister's book,
unlike the one we have just begun, has "no pictures or
conversations" (1) . The close correspondence between
Carroll's text and drawings holds all the way through to the
final illustration depicting the Queen of Hearts in
confrontation with a rebellious Alice. [Fig. 32] The text
frames the image on three sides. Together they constitute
the book's climactic picture-conversation -- that moment of
anger, fear, excitement, and rebellion which causes Alice to
awake from her dream-nightmare:
"Now for the evidence," said the King, "and then the
sentence."
"No!" said the Queen, "first the sentence, and then the
evidence!" "Nonsense!" cried Alice, so loudly that
everybody jumped, "the idea of having the sentence
first!
"Hold your tongue!" said the Queen.
"I won't!" said Alice, "you're nothing but a pack of
cards! Who cares for you?" (88)
Carroll depicts here the final confrontation between the
Queen's mindless, annihilating fury and Alice's refusal to
submit. At some deep level, the stakes are high: madness
opposed to nonsense, hysterical rage opposed to a highly
contained and controlled verbal order.
Elizabeth Sewell defines Carroll's nonsense as a game
which "gives delight while limiting emotion to that generated
by the game itself , resists intrusion and affords the mind a
clearly defined field in which to carry on the activity
proper to the game in hand "(26). She interprets Carroll's
nonsense as a game played for a reason:
77
The game of Nonsense may, then, consist in the mind's

employing its tendency towards order to engage its
contrary towards disorder, keeping the latter
perpetually in play and so in check. The apparent
disorder in the nonsense world may be the result of such
an encounter (48) .
She cites the passage in which the self-divided Alice
castigates herself for crying ("boxing her own ears for
having been unkind to herself") as a description of the
mind's struggle to keep order against itself. It is
precisely here, however, that Carroll's drawing betrays the
logic of the nonsense game which stipulates that words and
images remain discrete, concrete, and as unambiguous as
possible as to their meanings and relationships to one
another. In the text Alice is crying and talking to herself.
In the drawing, she covers her face with her hands while a
large-eyed, long-tailed, rat-like creature confronts her
enigmatically. The words simply do not match the image.
By covering her face with her hands, Alice obeys a
pictorial convention which stipulates that closed and/or
shielded eyes be read as introspection, thereby allowing the
viewer to interpret those forms which cohabit the picture
frame as products of the subject's interior psychic realm.
Two canonical works -- Fuseli's "The Nightmare" and Goya's
"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" serve as
precedents in that they both feature dreaming protagonists
confronted by inner demons. Fuseli's image depicts a woman's
disturbed, unconscious state in which the instinctual forces
of wild irrationality are embodied in animal form. [Fig. 33]
In Goya's etching, bats and owls hover menacingly over the
78
slumped figure of the sleeping artist while a recumbent
feline looks on with a predatory, enigmatic gaze. [Fig. 34]
The image eerily resonates with a passage in Alice's
Adventures under Ground in which Alice somnolently muses to
herself concerning the possibility that cats eat bats and
vice versa (4-5).
While Goya and Fuseli may inform our reading of Alice
and rat-like companion, they do not account for the
drawings1s anomalous status as the one image that cannot be
read within the framework of straightforward illustration.
Against the grain of those critics who deplore the intrusions
of psychoanalysis into Alice's garden, I will argue that a
Freudian hermeneutics best accounts for a rat that comes out
of left field --- an illustration become metaphor, become
parapraxis. Here, as with the confrontation between Alice
and the Red Queen, the stakes are high. For, beginning with
Freud's "Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis" (1909)
his celebrated case history of a patient subsequently known
as the Rat Man -- psychoanalysis has linked the image of the
rat with the severe psychic trauma suffered by young children
who have been subjected to sexual overstimulation by an
adult. Leonard Shengold suggests that rats serve
particularly well as embodiments of those intolerable
thoughts and feelings that can result from "the presence of
too-muchness (having had to bear the unbearable)" (86). He
notes that their capacity for reproduction is so great that,
if left unchecked, they can overwhelm other species. They
79
thrive on refuse, cohabiting clandestinely wherever humans
dwell and therefore can become metonymically linked with
dirt, darkness, disease, and death. They are known for their
continuously growing teeth, their omnivorous destructiveness,
and their propensity for murdering and devouring members of
their own species (90-4).
I shall return to Freud's case history later in this
essay and relate it to Carroll's photographing of little
girls. At present it serves as a catalyst for returning to
Carroll's text with the following hypothesis in mind. A rat
like creature appears for no rational reason at a moment when
his protagonist, a little girl, is split against herself.
With Freud as a precedent and guide, it becomes possible to
consider this image as a sign of profound psychological
disturbance.
Such a reading carries weight given the fact that
Alice's underground world turns out to be haunted by the rat.
As numerous critics have pointed out, questions of eating and
being eaten recur throughout the text. Nina Auerbach, for
example, cites a number of passages in which Alice exhibits
signs of "subtlely cannibalistic hunger" towards many of
Wonderland's lugubrious creatures (137). Alice's relations
to the creatures she encounters are mostly predatory. As has
already been noted in relation to Goya's etching, one of her
musings as she first falls down the rabbit hole concerns her
cat, Dinah, and whether, if she were present, there would be
mice for her to eat. This thought is followed by her
80
soporific incantation: "'do cats eat bats? do cats eat bats?'
and sometimes, 'do bats eat cats?'" (4-5). These lines
appear four pages before the "rat" illustration and prepare
the way in terms of paradigmatic verbal play. Dinah's
predator/prey relationship with bats also resonates with the
voraciousness of rats and the alternating reversals of eating
and being eaten that continue throughout the text. The rat's
presence in Alice's underground world is felt, if only
implicitly, in the "small passage, not larger than a rat-
hole" that leads "into the loveliest garden you ever saw"
(6 ) .
Later in the narrative, Alice meets the Gryphon and the
Mock Turtle. As Carroll draws them, they constitute rat-like
creatures closely akin to Alice's enigmatic companion. His
Gryphon departs radically from the dictionary definition, a
mythical beast with the body and hind legs of a lion and the
head and wings of an eagle. Carroll's creature has a parrot
like beak, mouse-like ears, and a bird's front legs. Wings
are conspicuously lacking. For the rest, it resembles a
scraggly hybrid, something between a rat, a weasel, and a
squirrel. [Fig. 35] Its appearance varies greatly from one
illustration to the next. On page seventy-eight it lies
sleeping as just described. Four pages later its powers
greatly increase as it cavorts in manic jubilation. [Fig.
36] It sports a greatly elongated tail, pointed ears and
tongue, and copious, needle-sharp teeth. On page eighty-
four it metamorphosizes once again into its most rodent-like
81
incarnation as it confronts Alice in much the same pose as
Alice's rat. [Fig. 37] Such figurative instability makes
Carroll's injunction, "if you don't know what a Gryphon is,
look at the picture," quite problematic (78). Carroll's Mock
Turtle is a beaver-like creature, armor plated with endearing
mystic eye. [Fig. 38] In its manic dance with the Gryphon
it too sprouts predatory tongue and teeth while its webbed,
mammalian paws become distinctly avian. It too then reverts
to a much more rat-like appearance on page eighty-four.
The illustrations by John Tenniel which accompanied the
first published version of Alice's adventures are far more
rational and consistent.1 His Gryphon fits the accepted
classical conception -- an identifiable mix of eagle and lion
conceived along traditional illustrative lines.2 [Fig. 39]
His Mock Turtle likewise reads comfortably as a hybrid meta-
zoological specimen: the head, hooves, and tail of a calf
conjoined with the shell and front flippers of a sea turtle.
These naturalistic renditions accord well with his
traditional handling of perspectival space. Tenniel's
creatures, no matter how fancifully conceived in Carroll's
prose, inhabit a conventional pictorial landscape.
Carroll's drawings construct a visual domain that is
manifestly more irrational. The referents are equivocal and
unstable. Perspectival space and naturalistic settings do
not exist. Alice and the creatures she encounters are
figured against a minimalist ground and blank horizon.
Carroll's drawings often exceed without contradicting the
82
descriptive and narrative work of the verbal text. For
example, a wonderful Darwinian monkey appears on page twenty-
three amidst the carnival of animals that Alice leads to
shore. [Fig. 40] A similarly unmotivated and serendipitous
fish swims between the mouse and Alice on page eighteen.
[Fig. 41]
The image of the Gryphon and Mock Turtle manically
dancing their Lobster Quadrille is the most psychologically
suggestive of all Carroll's drawings. [Fig. 36] No
corresponding illustration exists in the Tenniel version.
Wide-eyed and open mouthed, they flail their limbs in ectasy.
The two beasts copulate in mid-air in wild abandon. The
Gryphon's tail slips unobtrusively under the plated scales of
his partner, skewering him in mid-section.3 Both possess
dagger-like tongues and rows of sharply pointed teeth. A
tiny Alice stands in the background all but overwhelmed by
the scene. A circle of darkness opens up at her feet. A
vision of rodent, cannibalistic, self-immolating fornication
hovers over her. It is a daring, radically unconventional,
truly disturbing image.4 Carroll's drawing of Alice shielding
her eyes in the presence of her rat-like companion aligns
itself more powerfully with profound psychic disturbance once
it is read in conjunction with this later illustration.
The Mouse 1s Tale
Although no rat, as such, figures as an illustrated character
in Alice's Adventures under Ground, a mouse certainly does.
83
[Fig. 41] (The Greeks and Hebrews used the same word to
designate both rat and mouse.) The mouse, in turn, has a
tale to tell in the form of a tail [Fig. 42], the phallic
connotations of which Carroll will illustrate in his drawing
of the Lobster Quadrill. The tale/tail's ending connects up
in its turn with the end of the larger narrative, which
itself turns out to be no ending at all, but rather a
photograph of Alice which signifies a perpetual deferral of
termination of any kind. The logic is torturous, but
rigorous and revealing. Narratives in general in Alice's
Adventures under Ground prove highly problematic. The Mock
Turtle's attempt to tell Alice its history results in a
silence marked by "constant heavy sobbing." When Alice
wants to know "What is its sorrow?" The Grypon replies that
"it's all its fancy, that: it hasn't got no sorrow, you know"
(79). Strictly speaking and taking the double negative
literally, the Mock Turtle's inability to tell its story can
be read as the repression of an unspeakable sadness of the
imagination.
This episode parallels Alice's earlier, story-telling
encounter with a mouse who swims beside her in the pool of
tears. At first she thinks it is a walrus or hippopotamus
but then remembers how small she is and recognizes the
creature for what it is. Their conversation begins shakily.
Alice keeps mentioning cats and dogs and their propensity for
killing mice and rats. The mouse turns pale "with passion"
and tells a history designed to make Alice understand "why it
84
is I hate cats and dogs" (22). What follows is "a long and
sad tale": a word-picture in the figure of a mouse's tail.
Using Peircean semiotic terminology, the mouse's tail/tale
ends in death (symbolic) and disappearance (indexical and
iconic) as the text progressively diminishes in size as it
approaches its end. Semiosis is thoroughly overdetermined
with respect to a story of mice and rats being hunted and
killed.5
Alice, that eminently and ambiguously "curious" child,
often privileges visuality. At the approach of the White
Rabbit, she dries her tears in order to see what is coming.
At her smallest, she worries about disappearing and tries to
visualize what it might look like:
"For it might end you know," said Alice to herself, "in

my going out altogether, like a candle, and what should
I be like then, I wonder?" and she tried to fancy what
the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown
out, for she could not remember having ever seen one (8-
9)
Seeing the end of the tail/tale conjures up death and
dissolution. The tale of Alice's adventures ends in a
photograph taken in 1859 of the seven-year-old Alice Liddell.
[Fig. 43] It concludes a manuscript sent to Alice at the age
of twelve, on November 26, 1864, as "A Christmas Gift ... in
Memory of a Summer Day" (dedication page). Her image, an
oval portrait cropped from a larger picture, physically
intrudes upon and interrupts the last line of the text:
"happy summer days." Carroll has further framed his mirror
shaped portrait by drawing a pair of flanking serpentine
85
brackets. Photograph and brackets constitute the terminal
mark of punctuation that signals the end of the text.
Together they function as iconic sign for a portrait-mirror:
at the end of her story, the twelve-year-old Alice, poised on
the verge of adolescence and adult sexuality, will be looking
at herself as she was at seven.
In 1886 Carroll published a facsimile of the original
manuscript. Both he and Alice (now grown) agreed that the
final photograph should be omitted (Clark 198-204). The
final page was therefore changed. Carroll rewrote the last
line ("happy summer days") after which he added "THE END" on
a separate sheet which was superimposed over the portrait
(Gernsheim 48). Carroll's photograph of Alice thus became
literally synonymous with (as well as being effaced by) "THE
END."
Carroll's photograph terminates an above ground epilogue
which frames the dream narrative of Alice's underground
adventures within the parameters of the narrator's (and
reader's) "real" world. This ending complexly and self-
reflexively recapitulates the origins of the story and
resists coming to "THE END." After Alice has awakened and
run off, her older sister is left alone with a vision of the
original summer day, July 4, 1862, when the thirty-year-old
Carroll first recounted Alice's adventures to the three small
daughters of Dean Liddell on an excursion up the Thames from
Oxford to Godstow:
86
She saw an ancient city, and a quiet river winding near

it along the plain, and up the stream went slowly
gliding a boat with a merry party of children on board
and among them was another little Alice, who sat
listening with bright eager eyes to a tale that was
being told, and she listened for the words of the tale
and lo! it was the dream of her own little sister (89-
90)
The boat traces the same serpentine diminution and gradual
disappearance that we have seen enacted previously in Alice's
attempt to visualize self-dissolution in the form of a
flickering candle and in the progress of the mouse's
tail/tale:
So the boat wound slowly along, beneath the bright

summer-day, with its merry crew and its music of voices
and laughter, till it passed round one of the many
turnings of the stream, and she saw it no more (90).6
Carroll adds a final twist to the older sister's already
multi-leveled consciousness with a final dream within a
dream. (Alice is now the object of the dream rather than the
subject doing the dreaming.) Her sister envisions Alice as a
grown woman who "would keep, through her riper years, the
simple and loving heart of her childhood" by retelling and
thereby remembering her story as contained in the book. This
complexly recapitulates the status of the narration within
the story proper as that which Alice has told her older
sister upon waking from her dream: "'Oh, I've had such a
curious dream!' said Alice, and she told her sister all her
Adventure's Under Ground, as you have read them ... " (89).
Alice now occupies all possible semiotic and
narratological positions: sign and referent; sender and
receiver; narrator, reader, and the subject of her own
87
narration. It is interesting to note in this regard that the
Carroll/Dodgson name does not appear anywhere in the
manuscript. Such effacement further suggests that this is
Alice's book in all senses of the word. By erasing himself
and inscribing Alice in his place, Carroll becomes Alice and
vice versa. Alice's Adventure's under Ground is a text so
dedicated to preserving an image of childhood in the face of
death and dissolution that it literally refuses to come to an
end. One dream supplants another in an endless recycling to
the fixated moment embodied in (and terminally punctuated by)
the final photograph -- a magic mirror of a seven-year-old
child that protects against the dying of the light.7
Yet we are still not finished with the ending. Another
level of signification remains. Beneath the photograph of
the seven-year-old Alice is Carroll's "only surviving drawing
... of the real Alice" (Clark 200) . [Fig. 44] (The drawing
closely resembles the photograph which probably served as its
model.) Carroll has superimposed one kind of sign upon
another while the referent remains the same. What might it
mean to paste a photograph over a drawing in this instance?
Rosalind Krauss gives a good description of the
difference between a photograph and other forms of
representation from a semiotic perspective.
Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint

transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive
surface. The photograph is thus a type of icon, or
visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship
to its object. Its separation from true icons is felt
through the absoluteness of this physical genesis, one
that seems to short-circuit or disallow those processes
88
of schematization or symbolic intervention that operate

within the graphic representations of most paintings
[and drawings] (203).
All Carroll's drawings, except for the suppressed
portrait of Alice, represent fictive beings having no
existence outside a nonsense world made up exclusively of
words and pictures. As a referent, however, Alice is
situated both inside and outside the text. She is variously
positioned as muse, model, protagonist, narrator, reader, and
addressee. To have ended Alice's Adventures under Ground
with a portrait drawing would have been to conflate external
narrative frame (the epilogue) with internal narrative,
underground with above ground, dream thought with wakeful
consciousness. The fictive, nonsense Alice would have been
elided with the Alice as inspiration and point of reception.
The indexicality of the photograph secures for Alice a
place inside the text but outside the dream. It also signals
her place outside the text altogether. The book's last
gesture then is to reach out beyond itself to embrace its
inspiration as imbricated in "the real." But as Roland
Barthes points out in a somewhat different context, the
photograph evokes "in effect, not a perception of the being-
there of an object ... but a perception of its having-been-
there." Alice is realized "as a kind of precious miracle, a
reality from which we are ourselves sheltered" ("Rhetorique
de 1'image" in Krauss 218).
Alice is both the object of Carroll's fascination and
safely (photographically) realized at one remove. The Alice
89
of the photograph -- the seven-year-old child -- is secured
as the originary source: the child who traveled with Carroll
up the Thames from Oxford to Godstow who will perpetuate "her
own child-life, and the happy summer days" in the act of
reading Alice's Adventures under Ground. At another level,
the photograph, by virtue of its indexical relations to an
extra-textual Alice, signals an end to nonsense as the
internal play of word and image within the mind while still
foreclosing any possibility of an adult realm interposing
itself between childhood and death.
Carroll's Photographic Practice
Complexly interwoven with her various roles as friend, muse,
traveling companion, model, and interlocutor, the child Alice
functioned for Carroll as an object of sexual desire. The
workings of this complex and controversial dynamic can best
be seen in a constellation of texts and images relating to
Carroll's photographic practices. These, in turn, relate
suggestively to Freud's case history of the Rat Man. One of
Carroll's earliest photographs (1856) is a 3" x 4" oval
portrait of another young girl named Alice. [Fig. 45]
Carroll pasted this image into his first photographic album
opposite the following verses:
Alice, daughter of C. Murdoch. Esq.
0 child! 0 new-born denizen

Of life's great city! on thy head
The glory of the morn is shed,
Like a celestial benison!
90
Here at the portal thou dost stand,

And with thy little hand
Thou openest the mysterious gate
Into the future's undiscovered land
I see its valves expand,
As at the touch of Fate!
Into those realms of love and hate,
Into that darkness blank and drear,

By some prophetic feeling taught,
I launch the bold, adventurous thought,
Freighted with hope and fear;
As upon subterranean streams,
In caverns unexplored and dark,
Men sometimes launch a fragile bark
Laden with flickering fire,
And watch its swift-receding beams,
Until at length they disappear,
And in the distant dark expire (Gernsheim 38)
Text and photograph enact together a matrix of desire
centered on the image of a young girl who is associated with
loss, diminution, and the dying of the light. The poem
contains the same tropes found in Alice's Adventures under
Ground: the lethal demise of the mouse's tail/tale, the
receding vision of the originary boating party, a flickering
candle giving way to darkness. In the first stanza, a
Wordsworthian child is poised before a threshhold which opens
out onto love, hate, darkness and death. The second stanza
abruptly shifts agency. No longer is it the child, but
rather the poet who faces the darkness and projects into it
"the bold, adventurous thought" which becomes by way of
simile a burning ship receding into oblivion. The photograph
elicits a Viking funeral of desire. The text enacts at an
unconscious level the poet's sexual arousal and his
terrorized conflation of adult sexuality with death and
dissolution. Some eight years later, Carroll was to launch
91
his "bold, adventurous thought" into the world in the form of
his two most famous children's books -- complex literary
constructions caught up in an erotic fixation on a little
girl named Alice. Through the Looking Glass ends in an
acrostic poem spelling out "Alice Pleasance Liddell" and
contains the following lines:
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes (245).
Returning to Alice's Adventures under Ground, it becomes
possible to read its ending as a reworking of the Alice
Murdoch picture/poem. Both conflate a happy childhood with
"THE END" thereby bracketing out what comes between, i.e.
adult sexuality.
Carroll's foreclosing of adult sexuality -- a central
repression in both his life and work -- is surely related to
the highly charged eroticism of many of his child
photographs. The problem can be framed by juxtaposing
Carroll's "Alice Liddell as 'The Beggar-Maid'" [Fig. 46] with
Julia Margaret Cameron's portrait of Alice Liddell as
"Pomona." [Fig. 47] The first was made when Liddell was
about the same age as the portrait which ends Alice's
Adventure's under Ground. The second was made thirteen years
later when Alice was twenty. The similarities of background,
pose and expression are striking. It comes as a relief to
see that Carroll's project to immolate and petrify the child-
Alice has failed. Cameron's image bears witness to a life
and a sexuality beyond the nursery and prior to the grave.
92
It underscores what is so disturbing about Carroll's
photograph. The child enacts for the camera a sexuality that
cannot be hers physiologically or psychically. An adult,
male fantasy is projected upon her -- that of the available,
seductive and seducing, socially degraded, and powerless
woman open for inspection and actively engaged in responding
to the heterosexual male viewer's solicitation. Yet she is
only seven, so how can any of this hold? Does not the
transparent theatricality of a child feigning poverty and
carnal knowledge merely celebrate the charm of innocence?
Such a reading cannot be sustained. Carroll's
aggressively erotic engagement with powerless female children
by means of photography is simply too insistent. It is there
in Carroll's diary entry for March 25, 1863 which contains a
list (by Christian name with age often noted) of one-hundred-
seven girls "photographed or be be photographed" (Gernsheim
50). It is there in the elaborate rituals of social
propriety surrounding his photographic practice and in the
overanxious concern he displayed for the sensibilities of the
children and parents alike.8 It is there in the two
photographs of Irene Macdonald which inscribe the body of a
six-year-old girl within pictorial traditions of male
heterosexual desire -- that of the "toilette" and the
"odalisque" respectively. [Figs. 48 & 49]
At least once in the historical record we stumble across
a disturbing break in the imposing wall of moral rectitude
surrounding Carroll's attentions to his child subjects.
93
Interestingly, the father of a young child is implicated
along with Carroll. A diary entry of July 8, 1866 records
Carroll's photographing the daughter of Professor and Mrs.
Monier Williams in circumstances that are transparently
erotic via the pictorial conventions of orientalism and the
odalisque.
I did several pictures of their little Ella with no

other dress than a cloth tied round her, savage-fashion.
I also borrowed some New Zealand articles from the
Ashmolean, and took a picture of her asleep, covered
with a native cloak, and with anklet, etc.
As an adult, this same subject recollected another
photographic session that went unrecorded in Carroll's
diaries:
On one occasion he was anxious to obtain a photograph of

me as a child sitting up in bed in a fright, with her
hair standing on end as if she had seen a ghost. He
tried to get this effect with the aid of my father's
electrical machine, but it failed, chiefly I fear
because I was too young quite to appreciate the current
of electricity that had to be passed through me
(Gernsheim 62).
Carroll's first explicit reference to photographing a
little girl in the nude (May 21, 1867) betrays both anxiety
and the sexual nature of that anxiety by couching the crucial
issue in French, the traditional language of eroticism: "Mrs.
Latham brought Beatrice and I took a photograph of the two,
and several of Beatrice done, sans habilement." Beatrice was
six years old. Her name appears in Carroll's diaries as a
recipient of an inscribed copy of Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland (Cohen 7).
94
While the relative guilt or innocence of Carroll's
photographic involvement with young girls remains a subject
of controversy, a relatively unknown text by Carroll --
"Photography Extraordinary" -- connects with Freud's case
history of the Rat Man in such a way as to suggest the
possibility of interpreting his photographic practices within
a psychoanalytic context of clinical perversity. In the
analysis, Freud's patient organized his psychic anguish
around a complex constellation of imagery and narrative
centering upon the rat. The rat, in turn, was crucially
identified with children of whom the patient was
"extraordinarily fond" (349) . His associations included the
Pied Piper of Hamelin, the legendary figure who enticed away
the town's rats, and then, its children. Freud makes the
following interpretation:
The notion of a rat is inseparably bound up with the

fact that it has sharp teeth with which it gnaws and
bites. But rats cannot be sharp-toothed, greedy and
dirty with impunity: they are cruelly persecuted and
mercilessly put to death by man, as the patient had
often observed with horror. He had often pitied the
poor creatures. But he himself had been just such a
nasty, dirty little wretch, who was apt to bite people
when he was in a rage, and had been fearfully punished
for doing so. He could truly be said to find "a living
likeness of himself" in the rat (352) .
The Rat Man's early sexual history included an erotic
encounter with his governess at the age of four or five. She
allowed him to crawl under her skirt and finger her genitals.
This experience left him "with a burning and tormenting
curiosity to see the female body" (298) . An optical device -
- a pair of eye glasses -- plays a crucial role in a
95
traumatized erotics of vision which compels the Rat Man to
seek Freud's help. The glasses connect with a fantasmatic
scene of torture involving rats which has the patient's
beloved -- in his case, an adult woman as its victim.
Freud connects the Rat Man's cripling fixation on this scene
to an obsession related specifically to vision:
The child, as we have seen, was under the domination of

a component of the sexual instinct, scopophilia (the
instinct of looking), as a result of which there was a
constant recurrence in him of a very intense wish
connected with persons of the female sex who pleased him
-- the wish, that is, to see them naked (300-1).
In a well-known photograph of 0. G. Rejlander, Carroll
holds a large camera lens at a suggestive angle across his
thigh. [Fig. 50] Carroll is depicted in the act of cleaning
(polishing, caressing) the instrument through which he will
obtain visual acess to the eroticized and, at times, naked
bodies of young girls. As such, the portrait possesses
certain masturbatory implications. Carroll does not look at
the lens he is supposedly in the act of polishing. Rather,
he enacts the role of fantasist even as he signifies himself
as a master of outward photographic vision.
At six, the Rat Man "suffered from erections."
Wanting to confide in his mother, he became conscious of "a
morbid idea" that his parents knew his thoughts:
T explained this to myself by supposing that I had

spoken them out loud, without having heard myself do it.
I look on this as the beginning of my illness. There
were certain girls, who pleased me very much, and I had
a very strong wish to see them naked. [Emphases in the
original] (300).
96
Freud interprets this symptom as a child's intuition of the
unconscious:
Indeed, something more is present, namely, a kind of

delusional formation or delirium with the strange
content that his parents knew his thoughts because he
spoke them, out loud without his hearing himself do it.
We shall not go far astray if we suppose that in making
this attempt at an explanation the child had some
inkling of those remarkable mental processes which we
describe as unconscious and which we cannot dispense
with if we are to throw any scientific light upon this
obscure subject. "I speak my thoughts out loud, without
hearing them" sounds like a projection into the outer
world of our own hypothesis that he had thoughts without
knowing anything about them; it sounds like an
endopsychic perception of the repressed (302).
In a short, humorous prose piece entitled "Photography
Extraordinary," Carroll formulates, albeit nonsensically, a
kindred psychic structure, a pre-psychoanalytic unconscious
brought to light by means of the camera. Published in 1855,
four months before Carroll himself took up the medium, his
text nominally spoofs three popular literary genres by way of
photography (Gernsheim 106-9). His conceit however works
allegorically to enlist photography as the medium of the
repressed unconscious. (This is, of course, directly opposite
to prevailing myths of the camera as an objective recorder of
observed fact.)
Carroll's essay postulates a photographic apparatus
which produces novel writing as the "merest mechanical
labour." To demonstrate its effects, a young man "of the
weakest possible physical and mental powers" is placed before
the camera and "a mesmeric rapport established between the
mind of the patient and the object glass." An exposure is
97
made only after it has been determined that the sitter has
nothing he wishes to say. The result is a faintly
discernible text of the "milk-and-water School of Novels."
It tells the story in mild mannered fashion of an unrequited
lover returning home from an unsuccessful tryst who laments
his fate, falls from his horse, and sustains an unspecified
minor injury. The text is then subjected to photographic
development to become an example of "the strong-minded or
Matter-of-fact School." In this enhanced version, the jilted
lover becomes a bourgeois gentleman riding a horse worth
forty pounds. The weather has worsened somewhat and the
rider now sustains several bruises and two fractured ribs as
a result of his fall. This version then undergoes further
photographic development "to the highest possible degree"
resulting in a text of "the Spasmodic or German School." A
hurricane rages as a despairing, suicidal lover "armed to the
teeth" gallops headlong "down a precipitous mountain gorge."
An image of masturbatory ecstasy follows:
The rider's knotted brows -- rolling eyeballs -- and

clenched teeth expressed the intense agony of his
mind -- weird visions loomed upon his burning brain
while with a mad yell he poured forth the torrent of his
boiling passion.
When the young man sitting before the camera is recalled to
consciousness and "shown the result of the workings of his
mind," he instantly faints.
Carroll1s imaginary photographic apparatus pierces a
blank facade to reveal an erotic fantasy which, at its
fullest development, is both hysterical and intolerable to
98
consciousness. We are back in the domain of the rat -- a
world of too-muchness in which psychic intensities brought on
by sexual stimulation threaten to overwhelm the mind. Of
course, parody, like nonsense, provides a means of utterance
which disavows that which is being spoken.
Epilogue (In Place of a Conclusion)
Carroll's most overtly sexual photograph depicts a young,
pre-pubescent girl by the name of Evelyn Hatch reclining
naked on a hand-painted river bank. [Fig. 51] Composed and
presented according to the conventions of the female nude,
the photograph presents a young child as the object of our
gaze.
Nina Auerbach, an astute and sensitive critic of
Carroll's oeuvre, seeks to recover the erotic implications of
the Evelyn Hatch photograph within a feminist paradigm of
female sexual power:
Some embarrassed viewers have tried to see no sexuality

in these photographs, but it seems to me needlessly
apologetic to deny the eroticism of this beautiful
little odalisque. ... Evelyn Hatch is allowed to be at
one with her own implied powers. ... Carroll as camera
eye does perfect justice to the self-transforming
mobility of his model. The eroticism, along with the
passionate and seditious powers this had come to imply,
belongs to the child; the artist merely understands it.
... As an infallibly courteous Victorian gentleman, he
granted Alice and the rest of his child friends the
powers that were theirs (168).
The over-anxiousness of the phrase "infallibly courteous
Victorian gentleman" implicitly confirms the very issue --
99
Carroll's sexual preoccupation with little girls -- it seeks
to foreclose. Auerbach's reading is troubling in that it
relies on a thoroughly problematic acceptance of the
photograph as an unmediated stand-in for the real. Whose
sexuality is it that invests this image? Does Carroll depict
a child's spontaneous, self-integrated sexuality or does he
project a clinically disturbed fantasy upon the body of a
child? It matters greatly in terms of a recognition of where
the power lies. Did Carroll grant his child friends "the
powers that were theirs?" Or did he rather use those children
for the sexual gratification of his own perverse desires?
Here, at the end, I confront the image that first led me
to take up the problems of Lewis Carroll's photography in
relation to his creation of Alice. My text, like the one I
explicate, mightily resists an ending. It is filled with
intuitions and close readings related to sexuality through
the image of the rat. The strands hang loosely, without
identifiable summary pattern.
I began with Carroll's problematic drawing which shows
Alice in conjunction with a rat-like creature. The
illustration breaks the rules of a nonsense game in which the
relationship between word and image must resist the play of
metaphor if it is to fulfill its function, that of
maintaining order in a mind threatened with disorder, perhaps
madness. The rat constitutes, then, in Freudian terms, an
illustrative parapraxis -- a "mistake" which speaks of
inconscious psychic realities in such a way (non-sensically)
100
that they need not (cannot) be taken seriously. What is
being spoken is a constellation of thoughts, feelings,
memories, fears, and desires which psychoanalysis has learned
to interpret as evidence of childhood sexual trauma. Carroll
gives the fullest expression to this complex dynamic in his
illustration of the Lobster Quadrille, in which a miniscule
Alice stands at the brink of a pool of darkness while above
her two rat-like creatures copulate in wide-eyed, toothsome
abandon.
A detailed analysis then followed of how Carroll
articulates the trauma of the rat throughout Alice Adventures
under Ground in words, drawings, and a concluding photograph.
I presented fragments of Freud's case history of the Rat Man
in order to align Carroll with a specific clinical pathology
without apology for the many difficulties that arise from the
retrospective application of psychoanalysis to a prior
historical and cultural moment. I infer the possibility that
Carrolls photographic practices perpetuated a constellation
of psycho-sexual abuse that he himself had suffered as a
young child. I claim that by projecting an adult male
fantasy onto the bodies of powerless female children, his
photographs interfere at the level of high culture with the
basic right and need of children to grow into and inhabit a
sexuality that is appropriate to their age, gender, and
sensibility.
What makes conclusions so difficult is the recognition
that Carroll's sustained and deeply rooted eroticization of
101
little girls cannot be divorced from a.body of creative work
centering on a little girl -- Alice Liddell -- that is, in
Edmund Wilson's phrase, "somehow both sound, and bold."9 A
further and not unrelated difficulty lies in the hermeneutic
pitfalls of operating both inside and outside the text,
interweaving the author Carroll with both the historical
subject (Carroll/Dodgson) and the creations of his literary,
photographic, and artistic imagination. More complexly
still, his most enduring creation, Alice, exists as an
independent historical subject. The meaning of the rat
remains unresolved. It is an aspect of Alice who is an aspect
of Carroll who is an aspect of C.L Dodgson, all of whom
figure "intertextually" across the divide of three mediums
writing, drawing, and photography. The intertextuality of
Freud's case history, itself the product of a highly mediated
set of hermeneutic procedures, contributes yet another set of
interpretive difficulties.
This essay ramifies and suggests rather than analyzes
and deduces because it wants to resist answering "yes" or
"no" to a number of questions which have been continually
deferred in the name of an implicit and more comfortable
nexus of undecidability and indeterminacy. Was Carroll
sexually and/or emotionally abused as a young boy? It is my
conviction that a clinical hypothesis which postulates for
Carroll an early family history entailing sexual abuse
leading to severe psychological trauma best explains the
tradition that has come down to us through his life and
102
letters which portrays him as a man deeply at odds with his
sexuality. Yet all attempts at post-mortem psychoanalysis
are bound to be crude and reductive. What lives on both
culturally and inter-psychically are Carroll's texts,
drawings and photographs. In all these places, the effects
of a deeply traumatic childhood experience can be deduced,
the expression of which is accompanied by a haunting,
crippling disavowal. That disavowal, in turn, may fuel the
ongoing, seemingly inexhaustible, desire to explicate the
Carroll/Alice relationship.
Did Carroll sexually abuse little girls in an overt
physical way? I would speculate rather than argue that,
almost certainly, he did not. His overt sexual expression
most probably took the form of "self-abuse," i.e.
masturbation, in which little girls played a central role as
the objects of Carroll's fantasmatic desire. This practice,
unmentionable both within Carroll's historical moment and
within the confines of honorific Carroll criticism, is, I
again speculate, the physiological and psychic source for the
self-chastising prayers to be found in Carroll's diaries.10
Does Carroll's photographing of little girls in erotic
postures, both clothed and naked, constitute child sexual
abuse, as the term is understood today? I think the answer
is complexly and disturbingly "yes," in the sense that
Carroll projected an incommensurable, adult male, sexuality
onto the bodies of young girls without their knowledge,
understanding, or permission. What then, am I to make of the
103
fact that Carroll's portrait of Evelyn Hatch currently
circulates as part of a scholarly discourse which valorizes
Carroll as "the most outstanding photographer of children in
the nineteenth century" (Gernsheim 28; quoted in Cohen 4)?
Clearly the present cultural moment is torn with
contradictions. To complicate matters further, the issue of
child sexual abuse has become an important, highly visible
social issue at a time when artistic expression has come
under sustained and debilitating attack.11 At the present
moment, any interpretation of Carroll's photographs of little
girls must negotiate this tension between an important social
issue and the highly suspect political uses to which it has
been put. I am prepared to name Carroll's photographs as an
abusive practice, but only within a complex dynamic which
includes recognition of Carroll's Alice books as exemplary
articulations of that same constellation of abuse from a
victim's point of view. Nor should these same photographs
be censored in the name of an ascendant, right-wing agenda
which seeks to foreclose the possibilities and complexities
of human sexuality. A split runs through the critical
discourse on Carroll. We officially delight in his
playfulness - - a stand-in for the joys and pleasures of human
creativity under duress -- while also knowing in much less
public ways that he had "a thing" for little girls. As a
challenge to interpretation, Carroll's imbrication of Alice
with the figure of the rat suggests the need to connect these
disparate knowledges.
104
'John Tenniel (1820-1914) , artist, illustrator, and political-
cartoonist, produced 42 engravings for the first published edition of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. These have become the illustrations
most strongly associated with Carroll's text.
^For an extended discussion of Tenniel's illustrations see Hancher.
Âlternatively, a determined reader/viewer bent on rescuing Carroll in
the name of childhood innocence will see this tail as simply passing
behind his companion. Given Carroll's subsequent development of the
tail/tale motif (see below) and the location at which the Gryphons tail
intersects the Mock Turtle's body, such a reading remains unconvincing.
^The staring eyes and open, teeth-filled mouths of these two creatures
connect visually with Carroll's last drawing depicting the mad Queen of
Hearts railing at Alice. [Fig. 3] The bared teeth within the gaping
mouth of the Red Queen are unique to Carroll -- a predatory detail
found neither in Tenniel nor in the various playing card designs
suggested as sources for the Queen's dress and the flower she holds in
her left hand (Hancher, fig. 6.17, 67).
5In the Wonderland version this tail/tale ends in the word "death." The
theme of predation continues in Alice's subsequent encounter with a
terrier-like puppy who "might be hungry, in which case it would probably
devour her in spite of all her coaxing" (47). Alice's shifting
positions with respect to "cat" and "rat," predator and prey,
underscores the instability and multiplicity of her projections and
identifications. When the mouse leaves in a huff, Alice wishes her cat
were around to fetch it back (30).
105
This same farewell trope is enacted in Through the Looking-Glass as the
White Knight takes leave of Alice just before she becomes Queen. The
scene is often interpreted as Carroll's valediction to his child love:
"But you'll stay and see me off first?" he added as Alice turned
with an eager look in the direction to which he pointed. "I
sha'n't be long. You'll wait and wave your
handkercheif when I get to that turn in the road! I think it'll
encourage me, you see."...
So they shook hands, and then the knight rode slowly away into the
forest. ... After the fourth or fifth tumble he reached the turn, and
then she waved her handkerchief to him, and waited till he was out of
sight (222) .
^Christian Metz's essay, "Photography and Fetish," illuminates this
reading of the final Alice photograph:
Photography is linked with death in many different ways. The most

immediate and explicit is the social practice of keeping
photographs in memory of loved beings who are no longer alive.
But there [is] another real death which each of us undergoes every
day, as each day we draw nearer our own death. Even when the
person photographed is still living, that moment when she or he
was has forever vanished. Strictly speaking, the person who has
been photographed not the total person, who is an effect of
time -- is dead: "dead for having been seen," as Dubois says in
another context. Photography is the mirror, more faithful than
any actual mirror, in which we witness at every age, our own
aging. The actual mirror accompanies us through time,
thoughtfully and treacherously; it changes with us, so that we
appear not to change....
The photographic take is immediate and definitive, like death
and like the constitution of the fetish in the unconscious, fixed
by a glance in childhood, unchanged and always active later.
Photography is a cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of
it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no
return. Dubois remarks that with each photograph, a tiny piece of
time brutally and forever escapes its ordinary fate, and thus is
protected against its own loss (158).
For example, Carroll wrote Miss Gertrude Thomson, one of his
illustrators: "If I had the loveliest child in the world, to draw or
photograph, and found she had a modest shrinking (however slight, and
106
however easily overcome) from being taken nude, I should feel it was a
solemn duty owed to God to drop the request altogether" (Gernsheim 21).
^The appraisal comes from Wilson's "C.L. Dodgson: The Poet Logician:"
Under the crust of the pious professor was a mind both rebellious and
skeptical. The mathematician who invented Alice was one of those
semimonastic types like Walter Pater and A.E. Houseman -- that the
English universities breed: vowed to an academic discipline but
cherishing an intense originality, painfully repressed and incomplete
but in the narrow field of their art somehow both sound and bold (199).
Apparently, many of these have been edited out of the published
version. At least one contemporary critic refuses to draw "harmful
conclusions" from Carroll's self-chastisements preferring to locate a
probable "corruptness" in the minds of his post-Freudian audience rather
than in the writer of the diaries (Stern 171).
U p o r helpful discussions of child abuse and the politics of censorship
see Ager, Hacking, Marks, Moore, Renshaw, Stanley, and Vance.
129
Children of the Mills

Re-Reading Lewis Hina's Child-Labor Photographs
There is then, in Hine's early work, an implicit

counterstatement to the Progressive reformist ideology
he embraced -- a subtle but nonetheless distinct
resistance to the tendency of reformers to make objects
of their underclass 'cases' (Trachtenberg, Reading
American Photographs 206).
Reform Photography as Dominant Ideology
Alan Trachtenberg and Maren Stange have presented
theoretically informed, historical arguments for Lewis Hine's
child-labor photographs as manifestations of "a shared social
consciousness" between the photographer and his subjects
(Stange 96). These readings appeal greatly in that they
locate in the work a self-reflexive critique of the
Progressives' tendency to regard those they sought to help as
inferior. Against the current critical consensus that Hine's
pictures do justice to their subjects, I will argue that they
depict working children and their parents as aberrant in
relation to a valorized middle-class norm. The fight over
child labor was not exclusively about bringing an end to an
egregious aspect of capitalist exploitation. It also
entailed far-reaching struggles over who children were, what
their roles in the family were to be, how they were to be
valued and cared for, and who had the power to regulate them.
As a body of work, the child-labor photographs constitute a
seminally influential instance of social documentary. My
intent is not to castigate Hine for not conforming to the
class consciousness of the present cultural moment. But I do
130
wish to counter the notion that this work fulfills the
contemporary critical desire for a photographic practice that
bridges class conflict. The fact that Hine worked to
represent and to oppose the economic exploitation of children
does not support the claim that his photographic practice was
exemplary with respect to his working-class subjects.1
Lewis Hine photographed for the National Child Labor
Committee (NCLC) between 1906 and 1918. This remains his
best known and most celebrated work. Within a social history
of the Progressive Reform Movement which rose to prominence
in the first decade of the twentieth century, the child-labor
photographs served as visual, empirical evidence of the
widespread employment of children in a variety of industrial
and commercial enterprises in the United States: textile
mills, coal mines, glass-works, commercial agriculture and
the street trades. At the same time that Hine's work helped
define the values, interests and agendas of Progresssive
reform, it was largely determined by them. The movement
comprised a flexible and changing set of alliances at the
local, state and national levels, among teachers,
suffragists, health-care workers, civil servants, city
planners, social workers, labor leaders, journalists and

reform politicians. These members of an emergent,
professional-managerial class advocated a new style of
reform.2 They sought to minister scientifically and
bureaucratically to the body politic in response to the
131
systemic ills wrought by corporate capitalism, including
child labor.
Progressivism reached floodtide around 1912 before
losing ground to the more entrenched forces of the dominant
social order. Its failure to take deeper root can be
ascribed, at least in part, to the distance between the
Progressives' professional elitism and the low class status
of those whose lives they sought to change. By the time of
the First World War, the reformers had lost initiative in a
transformed pro-business environment. Those who remained
committed to the Progressive program fought to hold onto the
gains of the preceding decade. While Progressive reform
significantly influenced the political and social landscape
of the United States at the turn of the century, its
limitations were also profound. Robert Wiebe summarized the
central failing of the reformers in the following terms:
They had carried an approach rather than a solution to

their labors, and in the end they constructed just an
approach to reform, mistaking it for a finished product
(223) .
The tendency has been to read Hine1s chiId-labor
photographs as transcending the shortcomings of Progressive
reform's political program and affiliations. I shall be
contesting that view by interpreting, in some detail, several
of his photographs of children working in the textile
industry as sites of class conflict. Along the way, I will
be re-reading two turn-of-the-century photographic genres,
pictorialism and social documentary, as contemporary,
132
mutually re-inforcing cultural codes aligned together on the
privileged side of the social divide separating an ascendent
middle class from a growing and increasingly problematic,
industrial proletariat.
In drawing distinctions between pictorialism and
documentary photography, photographic historians have tended
to ignore the extent to which Hine1s early career
unselfconsciously operated on both sides of the line
separating high art from social reform.3 In June 1909, Hine
delivered a talk to a national conference of social workers.
Entitled "Social Photography, How the Camera May Help in the
Social Uplift," it contains, in embryonic form, all the
problems, possibilities and confusions connected with his
project of documenting working-class children both as a mode
of artistic expression and as part of a political reform
movement to abolish child labor.4 In the course of his
presentation, Hine projected, in the form of a stereopticon
slide, his photograph representing a young girl tending a row
of spinning machines in the Lancaster Cotton Mills in South
Carolina on November 30, 1908. [Fig. 52] Hine1s
presentation attempts to persuade his colleagues that this
picture constitutes a complex sign in no way limited to its
most obvious function as empirical evidence for the existence
of child labor:
Take the photograph of a tiny spinner in a Carolina

cotton-mill. As it is, it makes an appeal. Reinforce
it with one of those social pen-pictures of [Victor]
Hugo's in which he says, "The ideal of oppression was
realized by this dismal servitude. When they find
133
themselves in such condition at the dawn of existence --

so young, so feeble, struggling among men -- what passes
in these souls fresh from God?" [...] With a picture
thus sympathetically interpreted, what a lever we have
for the social uplift ("Social Photography" 356).
In aligning Carolina Spinner with Victor Hugo, Hine trades on
a well-established literary tradition wherein the mill child
functions as a symbol of the iniquity of industrial
capitalism. On the last page of Madame Bovary, for example,
Flaubert signals the devastation left in the wake of his
heroine's suicide in the fate of her only child, Berthe, who
is sent "to a cotton-mill to earn a living" (361) .
Hine's talk entertains a striking number of
contradictory rationales for his photographic practice. He
begins by discussing his photographs of children in the
street trades as examples of "publicity in our appeal for
public sympathy." He proceeds by endorsing photography in
relation to commercial advertising as a way to promote the
visibility, influence, and reputation of the social worker.
He demonstrates his awareness of Carolina Spinner's semiotic
status as a sign distinct from its referent when he
acknowleges that the photograph "is often more effective than
the reality would have been, because, in the picture, the
non-essential and conflicting interests have been
eliminated." Hine endorses the child-labor photograph as
legally compelling evidence even as he acknowledges
photographic transparency as a powerful myth capable of
ideological manipulation: "Of course, you and I know that
this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is
134
often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie,
liars may photograph."
Hine suggests using photographs to make his audience "so
sick and tired of the whole business that when the time for
action comes, child-labor pictures will be records of the
past." Here the relations between photography and social
reform become incoherent at the level of both temporality and
causality. If Hine means to say that child-labor photographs
will prove so distressing that they will galvanize the body
politic into changing the existing conditions of industrial
employment and thereby render the images obsolete, he,
nevertheless, articulates a much more complex position which
includes a break between "the time for action" and the time
of representation, the latter seeming to both anticipate and
post-date the moment of reform proper. Hine's lack of
clarity may have something to do with the psychic
contradictions entailed in invoking a utopian moment which
constitutes both the goal and demise of Hine's child-labor
project.
Hine's talk also makes grandiose claims for the efficacy
of "social photography" by way of Hugo and Genesis:
[T]he stand taken by Hugo [is] that the great social

peril is darkness and ignorance. "What then ... is
required? Light! Light in floods!" The dictum, then of
the social worker is "Let there be light;" and in this
campaign for light we have for our advance agent the
light writer -- the photograph (358) .
Hine concludes his remarks by advocating the use of
photography in the service of "the intelligent interpretation
135
of the world's workers, not only for the people of today, but
for future ages." With hindsight, his remarks become a
prescient anticipation of his own career which moved from a
photographic practice rooted in activist reform to a later,
rather unsuccessful and naive celebration of the dignity of
labor within the corporate mainstream. As Peter Seixas
convincingly argues, Hine's subordinate and economically
dependent position throughout his career left his
photographic practice vulnerable to the ideological
constraints of those who paid the bills. Hine never saw the
"historical significance of worker's control," a position
which might have afforded him some conceptual leverage with
which to problematize the gap between the workers he
photographed and his own professional, middle-class
identifications (Seixas 393) . Even here, at the start of a
decade of involvement in child-labor reform, Hine quotes a
passage from George Eliot in order to reconcile social
realism with a formalist aesthetic by way of a mystical
reverence for the commonplace:
"[T]herefore, let us always have men ... who see beauty

in the commonplace things, and delight in showing how
kindly the light of heaven falls on them" (359).
Interpreting Carolina Spinner in light of Hine's
manifesto leads to a series of contradictory, seemingly
incompatible readings: the child worker as empirical fact,
romantic symbol, sociological type, moral indictment and
aesthetic transfiguration. As given in the title of his
talk, however, Hine's intent was to demonstrate to his peers
136
"how the camera may help in the social uplift." The various,
conflicting interpretations of Carolina Spinner cohere when
we come to understand the image as an adaptable, rhetorical
device to be deployed in the interests of Progressive reform.
One particularly striking instance of Hine's willingness
to commingle styles in the interests of rhetorical persuasion
comes in the form of his fashioning from the same negative
two radically different pictures whose styles separate out on
opposite sides of the fine art/social documentary divide. A
photograph captioned "social worker visits poor home
(defective child)" shows a young, impoverished, immigrant
mother seated in her tenement kitchen holding a small child
on her lap. [Fig. 53] A well-dressed, middle-class social
worker stands over- her in what appears to be an uncomfortably
close, artificially posed attitude. The two women exchange
gazes. The needy mother looks up as if appealing for help
and guidance. The social worker benignly dominates the scene
from her superior, supervisory position. The little boy
stares off to the left, lost in a world of his own. This
staged interior tableau, starkly illuminated by the
photographer's flash, reveals the homely details of tenement
life: a fragment of a wall calendar, the lace trim bordering
the underside of the kitchen cabinet, a sweater lying on the
table. The image promotes social work as a professionalized,
authoritative, ameliorative intervention by a middle-class
reform movement on behalf of the lowest strata of the working
class. Hine used it in a poster he prepared for the NCLC's
137
exhibition at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco
in 1915. The poster asks, "What are we going to do about
[child labor]?" and answers with a series of reform measures
which include the care of "needy parents and children" which
this photograph ostensibly illustrates ("The High Cost of
Child Labor" 37).
But Hine also produced a second, cropped version of this
image. [Fig. 54] Captioned "East Side mother with sick
child," it isolates the mother and son against a blank, white
wall. The social worker has vanished and with her all traces
of a specific tenement life. Destitute mother and defective
child are transformed into a Christian icon of Madonna and
Child. The radical surgery required to effect this move from
social reform to familial sentiment a move repeated
linguistically in the slide from "defective child" to "sick
child" in the two titles -- leaves its traces in the
divergent gazes of mother and son whose awkward intensities
do not conform to the gentle lyricism typical of the genre.5
The fashioning of two such divergent scenes from a
single negative suggests the existence of some third term
which renders them interpenetrable. The dominant photo-
historical narrative positions Lewis Hine's social activism
as a foil to Alfred Stieglitz's struggle to have his
pictorialist brand of photography accepted as a fine art
(Trachtenberg, "Camera work/Social Work" and Jussim). In
this dichotomy, Hine's child-labor photographs become
identified with a working-class consciousness, an attribution
138
which belies their far more cogent alignment with an ideology
of reform imposed from above. Hine's class position becomes
the unifying term that allows him to appropriate the images
of the working-class poor in the services of both social
documentary and high art. Social documentary aims to carry
"(old) information about a group of powerless people to
another group addressed as socially powerful" (Rosier 306).
High art redeems a privileged elite from the materialist
taint of the profit motive.
A comparison of Hine's child-labor images with
pictorialist representations of children in bourgeois,
domestic settings suggests a "before and after" scenario in
the liberal subject's social imaginary with regard to
"saving" the child. Implicit in the construction of Hine's
child laborers as victims of the industrial-corporate Moloch
is a project of social transformation which conceives of a
utopian space for children in the pictorialist mode. Compare
Hine's Carolina Spinner with Miss Grace, a pictorialist
portrait of a young girl of comparable age by Clarence White.
[Fig. 55] While the former stands laboring before a phalanx
of machinery which stunts her development, the latter
reclines gracefully on an elegant sofa reading a book. She
is safe at home, ensconced in an exquisitely appointed
interior light-years away from the harsh exigencies of wage
labor. Hine's composition is a matter of straight lines, the
child trapped between a row of factory windows on one side
and a row of spinning machines on the other. In contrast,
139
White's picture self-consciously counterbalances the
curvilinear forms of the sofa and reclining figure against
the hard-edged rectangles of picture frames and Persian rug.
The elegant formal patterning of the child's white dress
against the plush velvet darkness of the upholstery
constitutes an interplay of tonal values characteristic of
Symbolist-inspired aestheticism.6
The polarities generated by the juxtapositon of these
two images (e.g. lower working class vs. prosperous
bourgeoisie, industrial wage labor vs. domestic leisure,
social documentary in the service of political reform vs.
pictorialism as high culture) correspond suggestively with a
turn-of-the-century, ideological struggle over the ways
children, fourteen years of age or younger, were
conceptualized and represented. As Viviana Zelizer has
convincingly argued, from a pre-nineteenth-century tradition
of being regarded as useful workers, children gradually
became transformed, against a concerted, mostly working-class
resistance, into "priceless" beings whose value was
incommensurate with the economic order. Within this
framework, the Carolina spinner becomes both tragic and
unseemly. Her redemption lies in Progressive reform which
will remake her in the image of Miss Grace. These two
photographs can be seen then to act in concert. As
representations produced by the dominant culture, they
construct an image of the child worker as the pathologized
victim of an outmoded social and industrial order. Within
140
the new regime, Carolina Spinner and Miss Grace represent
opposite sides of the same conceptual coin, the idea that all
children have as their birthright the privilege of being
cherished and nurtured as economically useless but
intrinsically invaluable beings.
An obvious yet telling distinction between the two girls
lies in the fact that one gets named (in an extremely apt
manner) while the other remains, for the most part, nameless.
However immersed White's portrait is in a formalist
aesthetic, it is, nevertheless, still a portrait at least
nominally concerned with the "personality of the subject"
(Caffin 15-17). In contrast, the child who works in the
Lancaster Cotton Mills of South Carolina remains anonymous
except in Hine's field note transcribed onto the back of a
print in the archives of the George Eastman House. There it
appears in typescript as "Sadie Pfeifer." But there also it
is crossed out and accompanied by a handwritten injunction:
"Do not use names." While the withholding of the child's
name may have protected her privacy, that need is telling in
relation to the unproblematic circulation of "Miss Grace."
The differences in identity between the two girls are
structurally embedded in their relative class positions.
Miss Grace is endowed with an aura of familial intimacy and
psychological investment nowhere in evidence in the child-
labor photographs. She is represented as a valued member of
a privileged class as seen by one of its own. Sadie Pfeifer
does not signify in and for herself as a subjective being but
matters sociologically and typologically as a child laborer.
She is defined as a victim by reformers who, while
"concerned," are not personally affected by her fate. She
does not merit, in other words, the psychological
consideration implicit in the term "portrait."
The pictorialist school of picture making to which White
belonged recorded the domestic settings of the bourgeois
milieu for which Freud produced his narrative of psychic
life. In this sense Miss Grace has a story (even if, as in
this case, it remains untold) in a way that Sadie Pfeifer
does not. Carolyn Kay Steedman has pointed to the complex
ways in which working-class subjectivity is largely defined
by lack in relation to the emotional and material plenitude
of the middle classes.7 Clarence White photographed a
cherished member of his social circle and celebrated her as
such. In photographing the working-class 'other,' Hine
produced an image of a child who existed on the margins, a
being as yet incoherent and unvalued except in relation to
what Progressives expected her to become.8
At least once in the historical record, one of Hine's
child-laborers contested the narrative of Progressive reform
which conscripted him. (Given that relations of power are
structured along lines of gender and age as well as class, it
is perhaps not surprising that the child was male or that he
registered his resistance only after he attained adulthood.)
An undated and unidentified newspaper clipping in the
archives of the George Eastman House gives an account of how
142
William McCue brought a lawsuit against the Russell Sage
Foundation for a photograph of him made by Hine. The
photograph was reproduced in a book about juvenile
delinquency entitled Boyhood and Lawlessness. [Fig. 56] A
New York Supreme Court awarded McCue $3500 damages on the
basis of the book's presentation of him as "the toughest kid
on the street." McCue's picture appears on the same page as
that of a similarly framed youth labeled as "An Embryo
Gangster." The caption appearing below both photographs
reads, "These eleven-year-old delinquents are a challenge to
the community" (122). At the time McCue had been an altar
boy in St. Ambrose's Church and had never been arrested or
charged with delinquincy in any form. The plaintiff's suit
set forth that in 1914 a photographer appeared in the "Hell's
Kitchen district where he lived and took his picture on the
ground that he wanted 'Boy Scout Pictures.'" The news
clipping quotes Justice Ford's tirade against those who
engaged in such practices in the name of Progressive reform:
"That is the great trouble with these movements....

These people from their height of self-conscious
righteousness and superior excellence peer down on and
discuss these humble beings as though they were so many
cobblestones in the street, without any regard at all
for their feelings or their rights in the community."
Following the war, Hine's role changed from social
reformer to corporate apologist. His photographs of female
textile workers taken at the Cheney Silk Mills in 1924 reveal
a dramatic reversal in ideological orientation.9 No longer
representing children in need of protective labor laws, they
143
become flattering portraits illustrating "favorable working
conditions." Unlike the earlier negatives made
surreptitiously or under false pretences in the face of
management opposition, these later, larger, 5" x 7" images
are formally posed and could not have been made without the
employer's cooperation. A typical example shows an
attractive female worker to be young but clearly not under
aged. [Fig. 57] She is well-dressed and exists in harmony
with her machine. Technical competence, health, prosperity
and contentment are the order of the day. Hine's portrayal
of the dignity of the worker becomes indistinguishable from
an apologia for the corporate status quo.
The photographs of the workers at the Cheney Silk Mills
suggest that the social critique informing the earlier child-
labor photographs had no independent existence outside the
frame of Progressive reform. The paradigm of Hine as
political and artistic dissident undermining the mainstream
codes of representation simply doesn't work. It cannot and
should not be used to enlist his photographs
unproblematically on the side of an alternative, working-
class history of child labor. Hine's child-labor photographs
must be read carefully and with circumspection given their
complicity in the construction of the working-class "other."
The following discussions of particular images are not part
of that much-needed reading. Rather they contribute to a
story that is more easily told: of the many ways these
pictures have served a middle-class audience by constructing
144
and confirming the marginality of the working-class child
throughout.
Carolina Spinner
Beaumont Newhall included Carolina Spinner in his 1949
History of Photography. His accompanying text divests it of
its politics by valorizing a dehistoricized individualism at
the expense of the social context, newly defined as
transparently self-evident and irrelevant to the true meaning
of the picture:
These photographs were taken primarily as records. They

are direct and simple. The presence in them of an
extraordinary emotional quality raises them to works of
art. Hine1s training enables him to comprehend
instantly and without effort the background and its
social implications; unbothered by unnecessary details,
his sympathies concentrate on the individual before him;
throughout his pictures this harmony is felt (171).
Newhall's analysis posits the child laborer as the pretext
for a circuit of meanings connecting a sensitive artist with
a sensitive viewer trained in the codes of high culture. His
commentary first appeared, together with a reproduction of
Carolina Spinner, in the Magazine of Art a decade before its
incorporation into The History of Photography. It prepares
the ideological ground for the inclusion of Hine's work in
the modernist museum, a venue that would have been
unthinkable in an earlier era.
My re-reading of this photograph seeks to hold onto the
mill child as a site of class-specific, social contestation.
The photograph was first reproduced in a 1909 article by A.J.
145
McKelway entitled "Child Labor in the Carolinas." It
appeared in Charities and the Commons, a journal whose name
was soon changed to The Survey in keeping with the re
orientation of social work away from the fragmented, private
endeavors of a civic-minded elite toward a middle-class
professionalism based on the social sciences. This journal
constituted a principal outlet for the work Hine did under
the auspices of the NCLC. McKelway's article denounced the
exploitation of young children in the cotton mills of the New
South. The half-tone reproduction of Carolina Spinner
appeared above a caption which detailed the specifics of her
working existence. She had been employed for the past six
months, was forty-eight inches tall, and could work legally
during the summer months no matter how young she was as long
as she had attended school four months out of the year and
could read and write. McKelway's text never acknowledges the
photograph's status as a contingent, mediated image. As a
window on "the real," the picture has no consciously
articulated aesthetics. What matters is the child as an
embodiment of sociological data: her age, height, place of
work, duration of labor, and juridical status. She is "one
of many," a synecdoche for child-labor as social evil.
In an editorial introduction to McKelway's article,
Florence Kelley, Secretary of the National Consumer's League,
extols photographic empiricism as an antidote to the
obscurantism of those who would deny or cover up the
exploitation of children in the Southern cotton mills:
146
In South Carolina from whatever official source we seek

illumination we find only Stygian darkness. There is no
state census, no department of labor statistics, no
factory inspector, no truant officer, no joint
legislative commission of investigation....
The Department of Labor, the Department of Education,
the census leave us to the ingenuity of a young
photographer for current knowledge of the sad lot of the
most unfortunate of our little fellow citizens, -- the
white, English speaking, native children of the Southern
cotton states (742).
Kelley welcomes Hine's photography as a means of gathering
information whose truth-value is self-evident. She presents
it as the precursor and catalyst for a more centralized,
federally sponsored system of surveillance which will
enlighten the nation and thereby "save the children" without
challenging, it should be noted, the ideology of Southern
racism. The article shapes our reading of this photograph as
an illustration of the Progressive reform agenda: working-
class children of a certain age should go to school rather
than work as unskilled laborers. The fact that these
children's race goes unmarked in McKelway's article specifies
them as "white, English speaking, [and] native," to use
Kelly's terms. Employment in the Southern textile industry
was highly segregated. African Americans were employed
rarely and only in the most arduous and low-paying jobs such
as the initial processing of the raw cotton upon delivery to
the mill (Hall and McHugh).
McKelway's article juxtaposes Carolina Spinner with
another Hine photograph of a second young girl working in the
same mill. [Fig. 58] The article's layout presents them as
mirror images of one another thereby visually underscoring
147
the idea that behind any given representation of the
exploited mill child there stands a multitude of others
subjected to the same deplorable conditions. This second
Carolina Spinner was enlisted in a vigorous pro-management
defense of child labor in the Southern textile industry
mounted by a disaffected federal investigator bythe name of
Thomas Robinson Dawley. In 1912 he published The ChildThat
Toileth Not: The Story of a Government Investigation That Was
Supressed in which he argues that the mills constituted the
child's best protection against the physical, moral and
social degradation brought about by the decay of the Southern
agrarian economy. One of Dawley's strategies is to
reproduce and re-contextualize a number of Hine photographs
of mill children. The Survey's caption for the second
Carolina spinner details the long work day and the lack of
enforcement of whatever minimal state regulations existed.
Dawley re-prints Hine's image but replaces it with a caption
designed to make her out as a negligible exception:
A child spinner. Such as is represented as marching in

daily procession into the mills, but I find that the
employment of such a child is exceptional, and then she
is only employed as a 'learner,' and not because of any
adequate returns to the mill corporation (19).
Dawley attributes the sorry condition of the mill children
not to the ruinous effects of wage labor but rather to the
poverty, ignorance, malnutrition, and disease endemic to a
prior rural life from which the mills provide escape. His
own photograph, entitled A True Product of the Cotton Mill,
constitutes a visual rebuttal to Hine's Carolina spinners.
[Fig. 59] Its caption conveys a symmetrically opposite
meaning:
She is a spinner at the Graniteville Mills. Note her

robust form, strong limbs and bright and smiling
countenance. The cotton-mill has done for her and her
generation what it has done for hundreds of others from
the poor farms of the sterile sections (439).
To think that one has to choose between Hine and Dawley,
however, or to come up with some composite, intermediary
truth, either in relation to A True Product of the Cotton
Mill or to Carolina Spinner is to become mired within the
confines of a debate between Southern capitalists and
Northern reformers, both of whom treat the mill children as
the objects of ideological contention. Historical judgements
concerning the suffering and injustices stemming from child-
labor practices at the turn of the century need to be framed
within a moral and epistemological framework attuned to the
instrumental nature of the images deployed by both sides.
Only then can the analysis attend to the silence of these
children whose voices do not appear, at least directly, in
the historical record. They remain, like all children,
always spoken for by others.10 Both sides of the debate trade
heavily on the ideology of the child as undeserving victim of
a deplorable present and sanguine hope for a better future.
As Richard de Lone and Kenneth Keniston have pointed out,
children have long been assigned a key role in coping with
the deepest tensions of American life, including the conflict
between economic and political liberalism: "the irony of
liberal reform [is that it] has always counted on children to
149
solve in the next generation the problems their parents could
not solve in their own" (ix). Neither argument admits the
possibility that mill children might be depicted other than
as pathologized objects in need of intervention and
rehabilitation at the hands of those occupying superior class
positions.
Doffer Family
Like Carolina Spinner, Hine's child-labor photograph, Doffer
Family, first received wide circulation as an illustration
for a Survey article by A.J. McKelway, this one entitled
"Child Labor in Georgia" (1910).11 [Fig. 60] "Doffer" is a
technical term used in the textile industry to designate the
worker, most often a small child, whose job it was to replace
full bobbins with empty ones on the huge spinning machines
used to twist cotton fibers into thread. A vintage print of
Doffer Family in the archives of the George Eastman House
includes Hine's detailed, if cryptic, field note on its
verso:
A family working in the Ga. cotton mill. Mrs. A. J.

Young works in mill and at home. Nell (oldest girl)
alternates in mill with mother. Mammy (next girl) runs
2 sides [spinning machines]. Mary (next) runs 1 1/2
sides. Elie (oldest boy) works regularly. Eddie (next
girl) helps in mill. Sticks on bobbins. 4 smallest
children not working yet. The mother said she earns
$4.50 a wk. and all the children earn $4.50 a wk.
Husband died and left her with 11 children. 2 of them
went off and got married. The family left the farm 2
yrs. ago to work in mill. Jan. 22, 1909. L.W.H. [Lewis
Wickes Hine] [Emphasis in the original].
Hine's text, like the caption accompanying Carolina Spinner,
is oppressively statistical. Field note and photograph work
together to prove that child labor exists: here are the
children and their mother; this is what they do, how little
they make, where they come from. Just as the text presents
the facts from the mother on down through her children, so
Hine deploys his subjects in the visual field, arranging them
in formal, frontal poses in order of their age and height.
Yet only the mother (Mrs. A.J. Young) and those children who
work (Nell, Mammy, Mary, Elie, Eddie) are relevant and
therefore named. The four smallest remain anonymous since
they do not yet work and consequently do not signify as
economic statistics. This family is presented as an
atomized, regulated, wage-earning unit devoid of personal
interrelations. (The mother's gently monitoring and
protective gestures with regard to her two youngest children
mitigate somewhat the slide toward reification.)
Hine's field note, quoted above, provides the basis for
the caption that accompanies the image when it appears in
McKelway's "Child Labor in Georgia," an article that makes
explicit the reform agenda of the National Child Labor
Committee. Text and image construct a three-part argument:
1) before the advent of cotton mills and wage labor for
children, this family would have been provided for in more
adequate ways by a rural community as yet uncorrupted by the
New South's emergent industrial capitalism; 2) if one or both
of the two older children had stayed behind and worked rather
151
than going off to start families of their own, the remaining
nine children would have had a chance to go to school and
thereby escape their present conditions of poverty and
ignorance; 3) if adequate regulations prohibited child-labor,
this widow and her family would nevertheless be provided for
through the agency of "humane and kind-hearted people" who
remain otherwise unspecified (13). McKelway specifically
contests the provision in Georgia law that allows a child
under twelve to work in support of a widowed mother or
disabled father rather than attending school. Doffer Family
both illustrates this exemption in existing child-labor
legislation and constitutes an indictment against it. The
article assigns fixed and clear roles to all parties
involved. Parents, mill owners, state legislators, and
grown-up siblings actively conspire against the interests of
the children who figure only passively as the objects of
concern. The "we" whom the author continually addresses in
the pamphlet constitute the producers and intended consumers
of the text at hand. As enfranchised members of the middle
class entitled to effect social change, "we" are accorded the
moral prerogative to judge and act on behalf of the child
worker. What does not get considered within this framework
is the possibility that the family's presence in the mills
represents a rational choice admitting of no better
alternative given the structural realities of their
historical circumstances. While the lack of alternatives
itself could be said to constitute the system of exploitation
152
facing the family, it would be hard to argue that the NCLC
offered any solutions apart from the long-term prospect of
educating the next generation.
Recent labor histories of the Southern cotton mills
provide complex and nuanced accounts of just how important
the concept of the family was in structuring the lived
experiences and world views of owners and workers alike.12 To
fill the demand for unskilled labor brought about by the
rapid mechanization of the textile industry (of which doffing
was a part), Southern mill owners hired families rather than
individual workers. Within this system, adults could be paid
less than a living wage since their children's labor was
expected to make up the difference. The construction of
company villages in conjunction with the new mills allowed
the corporation to preside over the well-being of poor-white,
working families "rescued" from backwoods poverty. Upon this
materialist base grew an ethic and ideology of paternalism.
But an alternative, working-class understanding of family
could provide, albeit within a patriarchal framework, a sense
of continuity and mutual support easing the transition from
rural to industrial life.
Doffer Family, like Carolina Spinner, becomes a site of
contestation in Thomas Robinson Dawley's book decrying the
reform efforts of the NCLC. Dawley discusses the image but
does not reproduce it. I quote at some length in order to
indicate the historical specificity with which Dawley
153
implicates Hine's photograph in the workings of Progressive
reform:
One of the stock photographs of the interests that live

by these misrepresentations represents a woman and nine
children, taken at Tifton, Georgia .... The photograph,
although taken several years ago, has been published and
re-published, and is still being published, and lantern
slides of it are exhibited, with varying statements that
diverge from the truth ... The last time I saw the
picture published, it was by that "Progressive," La
Follette, in his weekly, in which he declared that the
Commissioner's Report on child labor was a "Black
Record"....
I subsequently saw the same picture exhibited by that
learned Doctor McKelway ... under the auspices of a
suffragette organization, and he told another story
about it.
The facts in this case are that the family was a
tramp family or a family of semi-nomads, such as I have
described elsewhere as having been quite common in the
South before there were any industries that gave them
employment and taught them how to work. The family
lived around in the pine woods of Southern Georgia,
abiding from time to time in abandoned shacks or
wherever they could find shelter. The mother and father
continued to bring children into the world at the rate
of about one a year until they had eleven, when they
found their way to the cotton-mill. There they were
given a house to live in, and they were supplied with
food and clothing, for they were destitute, and four of
the children, ranging in years from twelve up, were
given employment. Employment was offered to both the
father and the mother, but they would not or could not
work with any degree of efficiency. However, the
improvement in this family, after their arrival at the
mill and the older children went to work, was most
marked. After a while they went to another mill, where
the father died of tuberculosis. The mother then
returned with her brood to Tifton, where the two eldest
girls married, leaving the mother with her nine
remaining children dependent for support on the two that
were old enough to work. The manager of the cotton-mill
thereupon used his influence to get the seven younger
children into a Methodist orphan asylum, and he took
them there himself.
In the meantime the photograph of the mother and nine
children was taken by a representative of the special
interests that lie by misrepresentations, and this is
the photograph that is published and exhibited
throughout the country before Sunday School classes and
suffragette meetings, depicting the evils of child
labor, when the fact is that the little children
represented as working in the cotton-mill were in an
orphan asylum, and never had worked a day in their lives
(479-80).
While anecdotal and uncorroborated, Dawley's counter
narrative is more sustained and complex than Hine's field
note. Both, however, are equally instrumental.
Although Hine labored long and hard in the interests of
mill children, it cannot be assumed that his attitude toward
the mother represented in Doffer Family was empathetic or
understanding. His writings often aligned parents with
employers as co-conspirators against their own children whose
true interests were best represented by the agents of reform.
One photograph by Hine purports to show a father loafing on
the front steps of a country store while his two young sons
are sent to work in the mills. [Fig. 61] The note on the
back castigates him as a "dependent widower" who lacks
"backbone" and whose "sanctimonious disquisition on his 'love
for the family' was nauseating." In his article on child
labor in the oyster and shrimp canneries, Hine wrote with
regard to a mother's pride in her daughter's devotion to hard
work: "Can we call that motherhood? Compared with real
maternity, it is a distorted perversion, a travesty" (Hine,
"Baltimore to Biloxi and Back" 70).
In 1914, Hine wrote an article toaccompany a NCLC
exhibition of his posters shown at the Panama-Pacific
Exposition in San Francisco. Entitled "The High Cost of
Child Labor," it contains a diagram which illustrates a
concept of social pathology labelled "The Vicious Circle."
155
[Fig. 62] This diagram gives visual form to the rationale
informing Hine's negative attitude toward the parents of
child laborers. It shows a cycle composed of "child labor,
illiteracy, industrial inefficiency, low wages, long hours,
low standards of living, bad housing, poor food,
unemployment, intemperance, disease, poverty, child labor."
The crucial point is that it is a closed system: "If you put
an American citizen at any point in this circle, it is likely
to lead him to all the rest." What follows from this is a
remarkably explicit proclamation of social triage:
We cannot abolish poverty today; we cannot abolish

intemperance today; we cannot provide all the people
with decent housing conditions today; we cannot raise
wages and the standard of living today. But this is my
argument: child labor is the one link in this vicious
circle that the American people can cut right out and
thereby make the circle smaller, thereby reduce the
number of contributing causes (34-6).
What stands out in Hine's formulation is the ideological
imperative of excising child labor from a working-class
history formulated as a litany of social pathology openly
acknowledged as existing beyond the pale of imminent reform.
Maren Stange, who discusses Doffer Family at great
length, interprets Hine's field note as evidence that the
photographer was sympathetically engaged in enlisting the
Young family's "enacted consent" in the picture making
process. She notes that Hine restores the familys proper
name and, citing Foucault, posits this as a necessary first
step in transforming an "object of information" into a
"subject of communication" (93-7) . This image serves as a
156
test case for her valorization of Hine's photographic
practice as the articulation of "a social consciousness
restored and shared" (96) . Such a reading is influenced by a
modern understanding of the exchange of gazes between camera
and subject as an enlightened acknowledgement of
intersubjectivity. The interpretive stakes are high given
that the frontally posed figure staring back at the camera
constitutes a dominant motif of the child-labor photographs,
one that critics and historians have construed as evidence of
Hine's sensitivity toward and respect for those whom he
photographed.
However, I find it more plausible to interpret this
motif as a sign of the photographer's class dominance vis-a-
vis his subjects. Precisely because the mother and children
depicted in Doffer Family are lower working-class, Hine is
free to pose them as he pleases, positioning them frontally
as objectifications of his political project, the fight
against child labor. The family members look back at the
camera because they have been told to do so. Their gazes
remain unproblematic because they do not have the power to
contest the authority and presuppositions of the man behind
the camera.
Doffer Boy
As exemplified in Doffer Boy in a Cotton Mill, child laborers
in Hine's representations often stand as isolated, fragile
figures, framed against a harsh, dangerous, or impersonal
157
industrial setting. [Fig. 63] In looking out toward the
middle-class spectator, addressed as an agent of social
reform, the child laborer embodies the inherent inadequacy of
his all-too-interruptable life. By way of contrast, in
Hine's image of three students attending the Ethical Culture
School, where Hine once taught, the children are represented
as self-sufficiently engaged within the picture frame. [Fig.
64] It is one in a series representing a wide range of
progressive educational activities. The students depicted do
not acknowledge the camera precisely because they have better
things to do. As full, inviolate subjects, they create
meanings and relationships to which the photographer bears
witness.13 As far as I have been able to determine, the motif
of the isolated child or group of children standing at
attention and looking out at the camera is never employed by
Hine when photographing these students or their counterparts
attending the Walden School.14
As an image of a young, vulnerable, attractive child who
confronts the viewer directly, Doffer Boy lends itself to a
humanist reading. This interpretation sets up a circuit of
empathetic engagement traveling from the boy via the camera
and photographer to us, the present-day audience. (In the
canonical Looking at Photographs, John Szarkowski discusses
Hine's 1909 photograph of seven doffer boys in a Georgia
cotton mill in just such terms (60) .) Yet in a poster
prepared for the NCLC, Hine transposes this figure into an
image of "human junk." [Fig. 65] The doffer boy is
158
conflated metonymically with a photograph of industrial waste
and presented as, quite literally, worthless. Hine's
violation of the subjectivity of this child has gone largely
unnoticed. Perhaps the fact that children's lives seem to be
at stake has something to do with our ability to overlook the
violence of the rhetoric employed. On the one hand, given
this boy's status as a precious innocent, all claims of
advocacy become acceptable and self-justifying. On the
other, given his status as a dependent child, we sanction
Hine's right as an authorized adult to frame him in this
fashion.
Most disturbing of all, however, is a Hine photograph in
the Library of Congress that completes the erasure of this
doffer boy as subject by superimposing his image onto that of
the young woman, cropped from a different negative, who
stands directly to his left in the "Making Human Junk"
poster. [Fig. 66] This composite portrait constitutes a
rather crude attempt to combine visual and statistical
representation in the service of a positivist social
science.15 The female figure with whom the doffer boy is
conjoined has been lifted from a Hine photograph representing
six adolescent girls in a Georgia cotton mill. [Fig. 67]
This representation of a group of ostensibly defective,
female, adolescent mill workers was deployed in complex ways
within the ideological field created by the child-labor
debates. In the original photograph, the young woman with
slumped shoulders and dull expression constituted the central
159
figure in a line of five female workers. The photograph was
published in 1909 as part of a child-labor reform article in
The Survey entitled "Southerners of Tomorrow." There the
caption reads:
Some adolescents in a Georgia cotton mill. The faces

indicate the need for medical inspection of school
children, and the consequences entailed upon the health
of the future, if sub-normal girls are put to work which
serves only further to blunt their development.
Dawley reproduces a cropped version in which the most
engaging, normal-looking woman on the far right has been
eliminated (Dawley 438). He specifically contests the
narrative constructed by Hine's "Making Human Junk" poster,
in which this image reappears once again, this time cropped
still further and flipped, so that only three figures on the
left remain (in reverse order). In Hine's version, children,
before they enter the Southern textile mills, are "good
material" subsequently turned into "human junk" in a dystopic
analogue to the mechanized processes of industrial
production. Dawley's caption reverses this scenario. The
degraded, sub-normal, defective appearance of these young
women is attributable to the poverty and disease of their
rural existences before they found their way to the mills.
In reversing and superimposing a "defective" female
worker onto Doffer Boy, Hine constructs a reified image of
pathology from a photograph that, once again, Dawley
interprets in opposite fashion. He uses it to document the
ravages of hook-worm, a disease endemic to her rural
existence before she came to work in the mills. Dawley
160
recaptions the photograph "Hook-worm suspects such as Dr.
Stiles found." Dr. Charles W. Stiles of the Rockefeller
Hookworm Commission became an unexpected ally against the
NCLC when he discovered that "many of the cotton mill
operatives, fresh from the farms brought the [hook-worm]
infection with them," a disease that was decimating the
children of the South's sandy soil regions. Dr. Stiles
advocated "an end to all child-labor legislation for several
years so as to encourage the movement of the poor farmer to
the mill towns where it would be easier to treat cases of
hookworm" (Trattner 103). Hine's poster and composite
portrait come as something of a shock, since they force upon
us the realization that the child-labor photographs are used
here to devalue rather than sacralize the child worker. To
represent the child laborer as "human junk" cannot be
reconciled with a politics or an aesthetics based on
observing and preserving the integrity of the subject.
Paternalism and the Absent Father
In 1925, a slightly cropped version of Doffer Family was
reproduced in Rexford Tugwell's American Economic Life where
it was captioned "widow and her nine children" and served to
illustrate "poverty self-perpetuating" (Tugwell et al. 35).16
Tugwell pairs it with a second Hine photograph purporting to
represent a "mother and child of the comfort group." [Fig.
68] In this latter image, a single, charming toddler sits
comfortably on his mother's lap, enjoying her undivided and
161
loving attention. Mother and child serve as the model of a
well-regulated, economically secure, emotionally rewarding
family life to which Doffer Family provides a foil. Stange
astutely discerns the oppositions involved between the "self-
contained indifference" of the middle-class mother and child
with respect to the photographer as opposed to the
"vulnerability of the widow and her family who ... are lined
up as if for investigation or display" (95) . Somewhat
surprisingly, in light of reform photography's avowed
commitment to the objective portrayal of sociological truths,
the subjects represented as "mother and child of the comfort
group," although never named, can be identified as the
photographer's wife and son, Sarah and Corydon Hine.17 Hine
worked with Roy Stryker in providing the illustrations for
American Economic Life, so, presumably, must have sanctioned
its inclusion. The deployment of the photographer's own wife
and child as prototypes of the middle-class family in this
context undermines the argument that Hine identified with the
subjects represented in Doffer Family.
For all the oppositions put into play in this contrast
between proletarian poverty and nuclear, bourgeois
prosperity, Hine, as photographer and literal husband/father,
assumes the paternal function in both. Stange's
interpretation of Doffer Family falls prey to this surfeit of
paternity. In a telling interpretive move, she conceives of
her restoration of Hine's field note to his image as
compensation for the missing husband/father whose absence
162
renders this family so vulnerable. She does so, moreover, in
precisely, those terms I have been contesting. Hine's
photograph makes the family whole by replacing the dead
father with "a social consciousness restored and shared":
With Hine's text and caption restored, we can realize

the intersection of industry and family life that the
image actually represents. The image gains, if not the
absent father, at least a social consciousness restored
and shared; the Youngs' composure and their smiles,
signify a kind of imaginative participation in the
image-making -- which participation ... reveals the
workings of Hine's photographic art [Emphasis added]
(96) .
Stange's commitment to "a shared social consciousness"
as a means of mitigating the "unjust and undeserved damage
done to an unlucky family by a criminally irresponsible
system" may explain, at least in part, her reference to
smiles, which, upon closer examination, do not exist. Only
one of Hine's subjects, the third child from the right, turns
out to be actually smiling. Mrs. Young and her eight other
children remain tight-lipped and enigmatic before the camera
lens. Here I wish to make a case for Stange's mis-reading, a
combination of partial blindness and projection, as
symptomatic of the critical tradition of which this chapter
is also a part. I surmise that the imagined yet non-existent
smiles in Hine's photograph have been summoned into being in
unconscious response to the intense pleasure that I, too,
along with Stange, Trachtenberg and many others, have taken
in Hine's child-labor photographs. This pleasure may be
grounded in the class position of those of us who write the
163
history of photography as heirs to the traditon of
Progressive reform.
The meanings invested from 1909 to the present in Hine's
child-labor photographs can be shown to be produced
discursively by complex, contingent forces. The child-labor
photographs originate as adjuncts to Progressive social
reform (1909-1918), are re-discovered as prototypes and
precursors to Depression era photo-documentary (1930s),
become canonized as formal works of art under the aegis of
the Museum of Modern Art's modernist hegemony (1970s),
finally to be re-enlisted by advocates of a "new social
documentary" as examples of an exemplary photographic
practice capable of contesting dominant ideology (1980s).
Whatever conceptual clarity such a schema may have, it hardly
does justice to the complexities involved in the various
shifts between the domains of the aesthetic and the social.
Nor does it address the impulse toward valorization that
remains constant. For the most part, photo-history has
generally subscribed to the history of child labor written in
the narrative form of a romance. In this story, Hine's
photographs illustrate a shining moment in an iniquitous, by
gone era of industrialization in which the child worker was
"saved" once and for all from the debilitating and dangerous
exploitations of corporate capitalism.18 But the pleasure we
take in the work and the projections it elicits from us may
also be inseparable from class privilege. Paternalism runs
deep. Hine's child-labor photographs may have a powerful, if
164
unacknowledged, set of coordinates: what it means to have
been sacralized children subject to the unconscious
investments of our own parents; what it means to be
enfranchised, adult viewers situated in imaginary relations
of dominance vis-a-vis these "victims" of industrial
capitalism. Our experience of these images may include,
perhaps, the fantasy that we can "save" (or have "saved")
those children.
165
'The work of John Tagg and Allan Sekula informs my thinking concerning
photography's relations to history and power.
^See Barbara and John Ehrenreich.
3To take but one example, in 1908 Hine published an article in The
Photographic Times entitled "Photography in the School." Following
standard photographic pedagogy, he advocates the study of Old Master
paintings and reproduces his own A Tenement Madonna: A Study in
Compostion as an example which consciously emulates Raphael's Madonna of
the Chair.
^For a related discussion of Hine's talk see Trachtenberg (Reading
American Photographs (206-9) .
^The IMP/GEH Archives contain a number of images of mothers and children
from both the Ellis Island and tenement series whose titles mobilize the
religious archetype: Ellis Island Madonna (77:177:128), Modern Madonna
(78:1056:4), Tenement Madonna (78:1056:32).
For a related discussion of symmetrical, working-class frontality in
contrast with the poised asymmetry of the aristocratic pose, see Tagg
(193-4) .
"^Carolyn Kay Steedman brilliantly juxtaposes Henry Mayhew's watercress
girl with Sigmund Freud's Dora within a class analysis which postulates
the former's marginality as the structuring force which maintains the
latters centrality:
But there is no story for the little watercress girl. The things
she spoke to Mayhew about (pieces of fur, the bunches of cress,
the scrubbed floor) still startle after 130 years, not because
they are strange things in themselves, but because in our
conventional reading, they are not held together in figurative
relationship to each other. According to some authorities, both
166
narrative and metaphor work by bringing together things that at

first seem separate and distant, but which then, moved towards
each other through logical space, make a new and pertinent sense.
But this shift through space depends on our ability as listeners
and readers to accept the new ordering of events and entities
which have been made by the plot of a story, or by the use of a
metaphor. Where there is not the vision that permits the
understanding of these new connections, then a story cannot be
told (138).
Among the most arresting visual expressions of the intense
introspection informing the pictorialist family are Gertrude Kasebier's
Clarence H. White and Family (1908), and Edward Steichen's 1904 series
Alfred Stieglitz and His Daughter Katherine. Along with White's
portrait of his son clutching an issue of Camera Work, and Stieglitz's
premonitory portrait of his daughter threatened by the figure of a
little Dutch girl wielding a knife, these images are burdened with a
psychological suffering that is underscored by the murky claustrophobia
of their interior settings.
^See Library of Congress, MCLC Microfilm, lot 7479, nos. 4966-5008. A
second case in point is a series of images of textile workers Hine
produced in 1933 to illustrate "Through the Threads: An Interpretation
of the Creation of Beautiful Fabrics by the Shelton Looms," a public
relations brochure to be found in the IMP/GEH Archives.
lÎn what ways children might be said to speak in their own voices
remains thoroughly problematic given that all discourse is a function of
(adult) language (Rose, The Case of Peter Pan 17-18).
^The image became known to a contemporary art audience through its
reproduction in America and Lewis Hine: Photographs 1904-1940. an
Aperture monograph published in 1977 in conjunction with a major
retrospective exhibition. The photograph was reproduced in typical '70s
167
formalist style: a beautiful, full-framed, one-to-a-page duotone
accompanied by a minimal title without further specific commentary.
^See Hareven and Lagenback; Dowd et a l .; Tulles; McHugh; Hareven;
Leiter et al.
^See the following photographs: IMP/GEH 78:1016: 1-28.
^Hine's photographs of students attending the Ethical Culture School
and similarly progressive educational institutions were published in
three issues of The Craftsman b etween 1906 and 1908. See Anon.; Dykema;
and Hine. The IMP/GEH Archives contain a large number of prints from
Hine's series on the Walden School and Ethical Culture School.
15in "The Body and the Archive," Allan Sekula has established the work
of Francis Galton, English scientist and pioneer in eugenics, as the
model Hine was following.
^Tugwell went on to become the head of Roosevelt's Farm Security
Admininstration. He hired Roy Stryker, who had collected the many Hine
photographs used in American Economic Life, to head its photographic
division. Stryker became legendary as the guiding force of social
documentary photography in its heyday during the Great Depression
(Stange 92).
-*-7The IMP/GEH collection includes a number of images of what looks to be
the same child as appears in the "comfort group" photograph, two of
which are inscribed on the verso with the name "Cordy" (IMP/GEH:
78:1057: 43, 48, 91,182, 195). Photographic historian, Naomi Rosenblum,
has confirmed the identities of mother and child as Sarah and Corydon
Hine as has Kitty Hobson, Curator of the Oshkosh Public Museum,
repository of Hine's personal papers (personal correspondence).
168
18por the English version of this phenomenon see Cunningham.
186
Dora as Hysterical Narrative
Introduction
Freud writes his "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of
Hysteria" in the space between his abandonment of the
"seduction" theory and his affirmation of the Oedipus complex
as the touchstone of psychoanalysis.1 Tensions,
inconsistencies and distortions within the narrative result
from the contradictory pulls exerted by the two powerfully
antithetical forces: 1) an initial aetiology which locates
the origins of hysteria in a sexual trauma experienced by a
child at the hands of an adult (most often a member of the
child's intimate household and, within that circle, most
often, the father); 2) the first formulations of what was
subsequently to become an elaborate theoretical structure
which located the origins of hysteria within a universal
dynamic wherein psychic disturbance originates in a child's
fantasy of seduction based upon sexual desire for the parent
of opposite sex. This conflict generates a force-field of
undecidability and indeterminacy which comes to inhabit the
logic and rhetoric of Dora.2
Hysteria and the Archaeological Metaphor
In Dora the archaeological metaphor comes to stand for the
many complex ways in which his case history constitutes both
fragment and whole:
187
In the face of the incompleteness of my analytic

results, I had no choice but to follow the example of
those discoverers whose good fortune it is to bring to
the light of day after their long burial the priceless
though mutilated relics of antiquity. I have restored
what is missing, taking the best models known to me from
other analyses; but like a conscientious archaeologist I
have not omitted to mention in each case where the
authentic parts end and my constructions begin (27).
Of the numerous oppositions operating here, I want to begin
where, in a sense, Freud's case history does, that is with
the supplementation of "authentic parts" with Freud's
"constructions." An archaeologist can only restore what is
missing based upon prior knowledge, upon a theory of how any
given fragmentary artifact relates to a prior, original
whole. Freud's first paragraph proposes just such a role for
Dora, an "authentic" case history which will make whole (fill
in the gaps, the missing pieces) left in his explanation of
hysteria. It is being written "to substantiate" his writings
of 1895 and 1896. These include Studies on Hysteria and "The
Aetiology of Hysteria" (wherein the "seduction" theory is set
forth in its most unequivocal form) both of which are
subsequently referred to explicitly in the text. But even as
Freud presents his "case history" as a fulfillment and
completion of his earlier work, he is hard at work
proleptically "justifying" it on a host of other grounds
which presume an audience hostile to his project of
substantiation. At the same time he proclaims his intent "of
diminishing the expectations to which [Dora] will give rise"
(2 1 ) .
188
At stake thoughout is the issue of coherence. Freud
resembles the archaeologist in "the incompleteness of [his]
analytic results." He too is faced with a "fragment" which
yet holds the key to the lost civilization of his patient's
psyche. Only when that fragment is supplemented with "the
best models known ... from other analyses" will the
"mutilated relic" be restored to a sculptural-narrative
whole. The archaeologist, like Freud, is in possession of a
picture-story of which the broken fragment is both a known
part to be incorporated (subsumed) and a new addition that
will alter and enlarge the corpus. Given the epistemological
problems of this dynamic, it may serve the reader well to ask
whether the narrative goals Freud announces in his first
paragraph are compatible. Is it possible for Freud to
substantiate his views on hysteria by means of a case history
which needs defending against a putatively hostile readership
while, at the same time, he diminishes our expectations as to
what his narrative can accomplish?
There are at least three ways in which Freud's text
further destabilizes relations between a fragment and its
archaeological restoration. Freud's original title for Dora
was "Dreams and Hysteria: Fragment of an Analysis" (24-5) .3
His "fragment" for all its partiality yet combined the
subjects of his first two books, Studies on Hysteria and The
Interpretation of Dreams. "Fragment," while manifestly in
need of filling in, itself completes (supplements) Freud's
dream book by "showing how dream-interpretation is woven into
189
the history of a treatment." That weave consists precisely
in "filling in amnesias and elucidating symptoms." And yet
within this matrix of mise en abyme wherein part and whole
interpenetrate and exchange places endlessly there still
remains room for conflict and distinction:
It was not without good reasons that in the year 1900 I

gave precedence to a laborious and thorough study of
dreams over the publications upon the psychology of
neuroses which I had in view (25).
Freud's "good reasons" for preferring dreams, it has been
surmised, were intimately bound up with his doubts and
ambivalences concerning the role of fathers (including his
own) in his two contrasting theories regarding the aetiology
of neurosis: 1) originally as active seducer of the small
child; 2) and later as the unoffending, inevitable and
universal object of the child's Oedipal desire.4 Dreams
remained by far the safer and more neutral ground.
Nevertheless, Freud enlists them in the services of
explicating hysteria. Indeed, he "insist[s]" that his dream
book is "an indispensable pre-requisite for any comprehension
of the mental processes in hysteria ... and that no one who
wishes to shirk that preparatory labour has the smallest
prospect of advancing even a few steps into this region of
knowlege."
The reader who has not read The Interpretation of Dreams
"will find only bewilderment" in the case history.
Presumably then enlightenment comes by bringing Freud's prior
publication to bear upon his first case history. In the very
190
next sentence, however, we learn that the problem "attaches
to the phenomena of the neurosis itself" (25). The
Interpretation of Dreams would presumably get us some little
way toward enlightenment yet without any sense of arrival,
since "everything tends to show that, on the contrary, we
shall be driven by the study of neuroses to assume the
existence of many new things which will later gradually
become the subject of more certain knowledge" (25-6) . We are
back then within the archaeological model in which we know
the "fragment" (case history) by virtue of prior theoretical
knowledge (Freud's dream book) while, at the same time, there
is a foreign, new, unfamiliar aspect to our object of study
which causes bewilderment and resistance and which forces us
to revise our theories about it.
Just as Interpretation of Dreams is an essential yet
finally inadequate pre-text to Dora, so Studies On Hysteria
constitutes that which Dora both confirms and goes beyond.
Once again the issue centers on a complex interaction between
the clarity produced by former (theoretical) knowledge and
the bewildering complexity of what is new and different. The
debate here is over psychoanalytic technique, a subject that
Freud claims not to discuss since it comprises one of the
three forms of the case history's alleged incompleteness.
(The two other forms of incompleteness are: 1) Dora's
premature termination; 2) the inability of a single case
history to resolve all the theoretical problems posed by
hysteria.) For whereas formerly at the time of Studies, "the
191
work of analysis started out from the symptoms, and aimed at
clearing them up one after the other," Freud, in treating
Dora has adopted an analytic method which begins "from
whatever surface [her] unconscious happens to be presenting
to [her] notice at the moment." The effect is that
"everything that has to do with the clearing-up of a
particular symptom emerges piecemeal, woven into various
contexts, and distributed over widely separated periods of
time" (27). Part and whole, symptom and patient, case
history and life story have become thoroughly enmeshed.
Where does the "fragment" end and the "construction" begin?
Does not the analytic method itself preclude the possibility
that Freud can ever be "a conscientious archaeologist" since
his method makes its impossible to distinguish between the
two?
Under the old regime of Studies, the patient's symptoms
were taken up "one after the other," converted into the
memories from which they arose, and thereby "decathected" or
"abreacted" (i.e. rendered conscious and thereby harmless
since they thereby became immune to further hysterical
conversion). Freud sacrifices the familiar and comforting
clarity of this procedure wherein relations of part to whole
are clearly discernible in order to take on "the finer
structure of a neurosis" now redefined as inextricably bound
up with and indistinguishable from the patient's life story.
Within this new paradigm, a tell-tale sign of hysteria
becomes the patient's inability to tell her story:
192'
The patients' inability to give an ordered history of

their life in so far as it coincides with the history of
their illness is not merely characteristic of the
neurosis. It also possesses great theoretical
significance (31).
Freud defines a successful analysis as the process by which
he enables his patient to remember, interpret, and narrate
her life.
Whereas the practical aim of the treatment is to remove

all possible symptoms and to replace them by conscious
thoughts, we may regard it as a second and theoretical
aim to repair all the damages to the patient's memory.
These two aims are coincident. When one is reached, so
is the other; and the same path leads to them both (32).
Yet the demonstration of this theoretical truth proceeds on
the basis of a fragment whose narration depends upon the
patient's premature departure after only three months.
Narrative coherence in presenting the case history depends
upon the failure of the analysis as therapy since Freud had
"not yet succeeded in solving the problem of how to record
for publication the history of a treatment of long duration"
(24). At the same time, Freud's knowledge, derived from
other cases, allows for theoretical conviction and a complete
picture:
It is only because the analysis was prematurely broken

off that we have been obliged in Dora's case to resort
to framing conjectures and filling in deficiencies. What
I have brought forward for filling up the gaps is
invariably supported by other cases which have been more
thoroughly analysed (104).
Freuds hubristic certainty as to his ability to uncover
Dora's secrets contrasts markedly with his condescension
toward those other medical "authorities" who can produce
193
"such smooth and exact histories in cases of hysteria" in the
face of the fact that "the patients are incapable of giving
such reports about themselves" (30). And yet, at another
level, Freud's narrative also knows itself to be manifestly
fragmentary and productively self-undermining, as in the case
of its announced intentions to variously complete and
fracture his previous works on dreams and hysteria.
Freud's metaphor of the "unnavigable river," when taken
in conjunction with the archaeological metaphor that precedes
it, allows for a more extended meditation on the cross
currents produced by reading Freud's Dora as a case history
of hysteria against an interpretation of its narrative
difficulties as symptomatically hysterical. Reading Freud as
patient as well as analyst finds at least partial
justification if we extend the idea that Dora continues and
completes The Interpretation of Dreams to encompass the
possibility that embedded in his "Fragment" are bits and
pieces of a self-analysis that remain complexly unresolved.
At the beginning, then, of the analysis and of the case
history, we are confronted with narrative incoherence, a
partial and confused "fabula" which resists translation,
chronological or otherwise, into a readable-scriptable
"story."5
I begin the treatment, indeed, by asking the patient to

give me the whole story of his life and illness, but
even so the information I receive is never enough to let
me see my way about the case. The first account may be
compared to an unnavigable river whose stream is at one
moment choked by masses of rock and at another divided
and lost among shallows and sandbanks (30).
194
Above his analytic couch, Freud hung a large color print
of the colossal Egyptian temple of Ramesses II, The Rock-cut
Temple at Abu Simbel.6 [Fig. 69 & 70] Located at river's
edge, it is the last ancient monument before the Second
Cataract which marked the end of the traditional Nile tour.
A few intrepid travelers went on past it, but the trip

beyond the Second Cataract left the realm of tourism for
exploration. The rapids of the Second Cataract ran for
about five miles; for the next hundred miles the bed of
the Nile was sunken rocks (Bull and Lorimer 130).
The above quotation is taken from a recent book devoted to
nineteenth-century photographs of Egypt which rehearses the
Western traveler's excursion up the Nile. The book ends
where the 19th-century tourist did, with an image of the
Second Cataract as presented in an 1850 photograph by Maxime
Du Camp. [Fig. 71] Here is an English traveler's account
published in 1889 in her book, A Thousand Miles up the Nile:
It is hard, now that we are actually here, to realise

that this is the end of our journey. The Cataract -- an
immense multitude of black and shining islets, among
which the river, divided into hundreds of separate
channels, spreads far and wide for a distance, it is
said, of more than sixteen miles, -- foams at our feet
(Edwards 318).
Here "the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity"
exist in close metonymic relationship with perhaps the most
powerfully overdetermined image of exploration in the Western
cultural imaginary, namely the search for the source of the
Nile.7
Dora's anamnesis begins then at the last outpost of
civilization. Freud starts out along with her, also not
195
being able to "see [his] way about." The journey may go both
ways, towards Alexandria and the river's mouth where the
stories are well-known and of ancient lineage; but also
towards what is new, impenetrable and undiscovered: the
still-undetermined source of hysteria whether that be the
father's historically specific sexual abuse of the child or
the child's Oedipal desire for the parent. Figured in
Freud's image, of course, is the possibility that the
journey-narration will end, not in a single unified and
comprehensive source-explanation, but rather will branch
endlessly into a ramifying complexity where such clear
alternatives are no longer discernible. Nevertheless, Freud
writes from the position of the conquistador-explorer-
archaeologist. By his own account, his heroes included
Hanibal, Schliemann, Winkelmann and Moses. Implicit in the
image of the unnavigable river are a host of English
explorers including Burton, Speke, Stanley, Livingstone and
Kitchener, all of whom made it their business to penetrate,
illuminate and colonize that "heart of darkness" into which
the Nile disappeared and from which it originated. The major
thrust of Freud's case history is toward getting beyond a
landscape of "choking" rocks and divided streams since such
unnavigability in relation to "the history of the illness" is
"a necessary correlate of the symptoms and one which is
theoretically requisite." Freud clearly has "the end of the
treatment" in view in which symptoms dissipate and "we have
196
before us an intelligible, consistent, and unbroken case
history."
And yet, the case history we are reading is a fragment,
an analysis which terminates abruptly and unexpectedly before
coming to its proper, expected, anticipated end. Dora's
ultimate destination remains both troubled and in doubt. We
cannot be sure despite the archaeologist's assurances of
compensating constructionism and narrative fit, that we will
arrive at a source that we will be able to recognize as such.
Amelia B. Edwards, author of the 1889 travelogue previously
cited, writes of the Second Cataract in a way that fits the
requirements of such indeterminacy and undecidability:
It has an interest, however, beyond and apart from that

of beauty. It rouses one's imagination to a sense of
the greatness of the Nile. We look across a world of
desert, and see the river still coming from afar. We
have reached a point at which all that is habitable and
familiar comes abruptly to an end .... But for the
telegraphic wires stalking ghost-like, across the
desert, it would seem as if we had touched the limit of
civilization, and were standing on the threshold of a
land unexplored.
Yet for all this, we feel as if we were at only the
beginning of the mighty river. We have journeyed well-
nigh a thousand miles against the stream; but what is
that to the distance which still lies between us and the
great Lakes? And how far beyond the great Lakes must we
seek for the Source that is even yet undiscovered? (320)
At the foot of the analytic couch, lower down and
considerably smaller in size, Freud placed a reproduction of
Ingre's Oedipus and the Sphinx. [Fig. 72 & 73] Freud's
identification with Oedipus as he "who knew the famous riddle
and was a man most mighty," is thus well represented as part
of the "original scene" of analysis (Spitz 159-60). Though
197
much less explicit, the "seduction" theory too has its place
over Freud's couch. Both the iconography of The Rock-cut
Temple at Abu Simbel and Freud's metaphor of the unnavigable
river connect up with a crucial passage in "The Aetiology of
Hysteria" in which Freud presents his most forceful,
succinct, and uncompromising formulation of infantile
"seduction" as "the discovery of a caput Nili in
neuropathology":
You will no doubt have guessed, Gentlemen, that I should

not have carried this last line of thought so far if I
had not wanted to prepare you for the idea that it is
this line alone which, after so many delays, will lead
us to our goal. For now we are really at the end of our
wearisome and laborious analytic work, and here we find
the fulfillment of all the claims and expectations upon
which we have so far insisted. If we have the
perseverance to press on with analysis into early
childhood, as far back as a human memory is capable of
reaching, we invariably bring the patient to reproduce
experiences which, on account both of their peculiar
features and of their relations to the symptoms of his
later illness, must be regarded as the aetiology of his
neurosis for which we have been looking. These infantile
experiences are once more sexual in content, but they
are of a far more uniform kind than the scenes at
puberty that had been discovered earlier. It is now no
longer a question of sexual topics having been aroused
by some sense impression or other, but of sexual
experiences affecting the subject's own body of
sexual intercourse (in the wider sense). You will admit
that the importance of such scenes needs no further
proof; to this may now be added that, in every instance,
you will be able to discover in the details of the
scenes the determining factors which you may have found
lacking in the other scenes -- the scenes which occurred
later and were reproduced earlier.
I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom
of every case of hysteria there are one or more
occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences
which belong to the earliest years of childhood but
which can be reproduced through the work of psycho
analysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe
that this is an important finding, the discovery of a
caput Nili in neuropathology... (263-4)
198
The archaeological metaphor found in Dora can be re-read
through "The Aetiology of Hysteria" as a truncated fragment
of the more elaborated version that appears there as "an
analogy" for the process "of penetrating from the symptoms
[of hysteria] to a knowledge of their causes":
Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known

region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of
ruins, with remains of wall, fragments of columns, and
tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions.
He may content himself with inspecting what lies
exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants --
perhaps semi-barbaric people who live in the
vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history
and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with
noting down what they tell him -- and he may then
proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He
may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and
he may set the inhabitants to work with these
implements. Together with them he may start upon the
ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the
visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is
crowned with success, the discoveries are self-
explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts
of a palace or a treasure-house; the fragments of
columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous
inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual,
reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have
been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of
information about the events of the remote past, to
commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa
loquunturl (252-3)8
In Freud's print of Abu Simbel, small "native" figures
appear standing on the sands that partly obscure the
monument. In keeping with an entire genre of expeditionary
prints and photographs, the diminutive size of the human
figures creates a sense of scale in which the glories of a
partially buried but monumental past loom large against the
historical realities of a degenerate, colonialist present.
199
In the same letter to Wilhelm Fliess (May 28, 1899) in which
Freud writes of his dream book "suddenly taking shape" as "a
nova species mihi," he testifies to his passionate interest
in archaeology's founding figure:
I gave myself a present, Schliemann's Ilios, and greatly

enjoyed the account of his childhood. The man was happy
when he found Priam's treasure, because happiness comes
only with the fulfillment of a childhood wish (353).
Freud's identification with Heinrich Schliemann in
"Aetiology" is very strong. Having begun life, like Freud,
in relatively humble circumstances, he achieved world fame by
refusing to "content himself with inspecting what lies
exposed to view." Rather he put the present-day inhabitants
to work with "picks, shovels and spades" to "clear away the
rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover[ed]
what [was] buried." Schliemann's autobiographical account in
Ilios literalizes Freud's image:
Nevertheless, I wished to investigate so important a

matter [as the location of Troy] by actual excavations
and took a number of workmen to sink pits in hundreds of
different places (19).9
A number of important feminist critiques of Dora have made it
possible to see the relevance of the vastly unequal power
relations implicit in this metaphor. While the inhabitant-
analysand must stoop to do the necessary day to day "dirty
work," the instigating force, directorial expertise, and
glory of discovery all belong on the side of the hero-
explorer-doctor figure.
From the very start, Dora, like "Aetiology," is caught
up in the archaeological metaphor. Freud's letter to Fliess
announcing her entry onto the scene of analysis (October 14,
1900) contains a passage which again points to Schliemann as
a figure embodying Freud's ambitions and fantasies of
greatness:10
It has been a lively time and has brought a new patient,

an eighteen-year-old girl, a case that has smoothly
opened to the existing collection of picklocks....
Otherwise I am reading Greek archaeology and reveling in
journeys I shall never make and treasures I shall never
possess (427) .
Extending the metaphor only slightly, there is a sense in
which Freud and Dora, starting at Abu Simbel and the Second
Cataract, may be traveling in opposite directions: Dora
upstream toward the great, traumatic unknown of infantile
seduction (either "real" or imagined); Freud downstream, past
the towering ruins of ancient Egypt -- Luxor, Karnak, the
Great Pyramids and Sphinx at Gizeh -- toward the crowning
cultural achievements to be found in Alexandria and the other
great cities of the Mediterranean Basin. This hypothetical
journey would presumably include Freud's traumatic encounter
with fifth-century Athens as recounted in "A Disturbance of
Memory on the Acropolis" (1936).
Schliemann's journey parallels Dora's in reverse. Rather
than setting out in search of obscure, early, buried
childhood traumas, he undertakes as an adult to fulfill in
the present tense of adult lived experience the fantasies of
childhood:
At length, on the 27th of September [1871], I made my

way to the Dardanelles, together with my wife, Sophia
Schliemann, who is a native of Athens and a warm admirer
of Homer, and who, with glad enthusiasm joined me in
201
executing the great work which, nearly a century ago, my

childish simplicity had agreed upon with my
father...(21)
Schliemann's autobiography may constitute for Freud a "family
romance" of sorts given Freud's crucial difficulties with his
own father and the radical cleavage that seemed to exist for
him between work and family. For what is perhaps most
striking in the passage cited above is the archaeologist's
success in integrating his childhood dreams, his marriage and
his paternal relations into a harmonious alliance and then to
enlist them all in a great discovery to which the world, for
once, paid ample homage. Schliemann recounts his life as a
voyage of discovery, success, and happiness with neither
Oedipus nor "seduction" anywhere on the horizon.
Schliemann's account stands in stark contrast to Freud's "A
Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis" in which the eighty-
year-old Freud recounts an attack of derealization
experienced in the prime of his life while visiting Athens.
He ascribes it to repressed Oedipal guilt at having "come so
far" from his origins as to acquire a cultural capital beyond
the reach or understanding of his father. William McGrath
points to Freud's awareness of the special dangers attending
the lives of those whose dreams become active forces in the
shaping of history. Freud counseled the son of Theodor Herzl
(founder of Zionism) against following in his father's
footsteps:
He then went on to describe the elder Herzl in a way

which illuminates Freud's own complex views on the
interrelationship between phantasy, reality, and the
world of politics. 'Your father is one of those people
202
who have turned dreams into reality. This is a very

rare and dangerous breed. It includes the Garibaldis,
... the Herzls ... I would simply call them the sharpest
opponents of my scientific work.1 .... What Freud meant
in calling the men of this rare breed opponents was that
they did the mirror opposite of what he did: 'It is my
modest profession to simplify dreams, to make them clear
and ordinary. They on the contrary, confuse the issue,
turn it upside down, command the world while they
themselves remain on the other side of the psychic
mirror. It is a group specializing in the realization
of dreams. I deal in psychoanalysis; they deal in
psychosynthesis (314) .
Narration, Authority, Sexuality
As Dora and "Aetiology" employ the archaeological metaphor,
so too they both take up signs of venereal disease as a means
of conjoining while differentiating the psychic origins of
hysteria from an organic model of sexual pathology. In the
earlier paper delivered to his medical peers in Vienna, the
figure of the "luetic sore" immediately precedes the
archaeological analogy and provides a model for an
alternative method of diagnosis given the manifest
insufficiencies of traditional anamnesis:
You will readily admit that it would be a good thing to

have a second method of arriving at the aetiology of
hysteria, one in which we should feel less dependent on
the assertions of the patients themselves. A
dermatologist, for instance is able to recognize a sore
as luetic [syphilitic] from the character of its
margins, of the crust on it and of its shape, without
being misled by the protestations of his patient, who
denies any source of infection for it .... In hysteria,
too, there exists a similar possibility of penetrating
from the symptoms to a knowledge of their causes (252).
The attitude shown toward the patient here is both superior
and adversarial. The patient lies and the doctor knows
better. In Dora relations between sexually transmitted
203
disease and hysteria become more nuanced. Faulty anamnesis
has come to possess "great theoretical significance" as a
tool in diagnosing hysteria as opposed to syphilis or
gonorrhea, the distinction being marked by the patient's
relative ability or inability to tell her story. Freud thus
adds a footnote to distinguish Dora's authentic case from
that of another patient showing similar symptoms:
Another physician once sent his sister to me for

psychotherapeutic treatment, telling me that she had for
years been treated without success for hysteria (pains
and defective gait). The short account which he gave me
seemed quite consistent with the diagnosis. In my first
hour with the patient I got her to tell me her history
herself. When the story came out perfectly clearly and
connectedly in spite of the remarkable events it dealt
with, I told myself that the case could not be one of
hysteria, and immediately instituted a careful physical
examination. This led to the diagnosis of a fairly
advanced stage of tabes [syphilis] which was later on
treated with Hg injections (01. Cinereum) by Professor
Lang with markedly beneficial results (31).11
The opposition between the narrative competence of those
suffering from sexually transmitted diseases and the
hysterical untrustworthiness of Dora's testimony operates
powerfully throughout "Fragment" as a sign of whose stories
are allowed to stand and whose are not. Dora's case revolves
around sexuality withheld as manifested in her multiple
refusals to become sexually active or to countenance the
sexual desires of those who inhabit her highly promiscuous
family circle. The woman described in the countervailing
footnote suffers precisely as a consequence of sexual
activity. Narrative competence and overt heterosexual sex
are aligned with the organic over against a psychologically
204
derived illness based on narrative incompetence and a refusal
of sexuality.
Freud's footnoted "test-case" for an a-hysterical,
sexually active, competent narrator doubles nicely the
originating circumstances of Freud's treatment of Dora. For
initially it was Herr K . , Dora's much contested seducer-
attacker-admirer-betrayer, who brought Dora's father to be
treated by Freud. And although the father's illness "took
the form of a confusional attack, followed by symptoms of
paralysis and slight mental disturbances," Freud's diagnosis
is exclusively, unilaterally organic ("a diffuse vascular
affection") for which he successfully "prescribed an
energetic course of anti-luetic treatment." Several related
speculations come to mind. If Dora's father traveled to
Vienna "with his physician" to seek advice from Freud, we may
presume that the consultation was aimed at testing the
possibility that the ailment was psychological (i.e.
hysterical) in origin. In which case, Freud's findings must
have been the same as in the case of his colleague's sister
mentioned in the footnote, namely that the father's lucid
account of his illness pointed toward an organic origin
relating to "a specific [venereal] infection before his
marriage" (33-4) . Pushing still further, we may entertain
the possibility that Herr K's prior acquaintance with Freud
was likewise medical in nature involving a specific sexual
history in need of treatment.
205
The general point to be reiterated here is that Freud
treats the father's illness in a way that never questions his
story whereas, at the father's behest and with his money,
Freud treats Dora's illness, precisely by questioning hers.
Nor should the contrast be forgotten between a father who
consults Freud of his own free will and a daughter who is
"handed over" to Freud by that same father with an injunction
that he (Freud) get her "to see reason" in the matter of his
extra-marital affair with Frau K. Although Freud supports
Dora in this specific matter by confirming her version of her
father's sex life, he nevertheless does so within a structure
which upholds narrative coherence of the father's actions and
world view over against the putative inadequacy and pathology
of Dora's account of both her own sexuality and of the erotic
demands made upon her by Herr K. Perhaps no story told by a
father in opposition to his daughter's can be considered
hysterical within the cultural constructions of patriarchy
which Foucault has taught us produce coherence as a
knowledge-power nexus.
Enuna Eckstein
The false hysteric mentioned in the Dora footnote appears in
Freud's March 4, 1885 letter to Wilhelm Fliess in conjunction
with an important crisis in Freud's personal and professional
life. The letter refers to this patient with obvious pride
as a source of pleasure to be shared jointly with his best
friend, fellow doctor, and nose specialist: "Our case of
206
tabes (nose!) has received recognition by Professor Lang and
is now considered a feat of diagnostic acumen (115). 1,12 Yet
the letter couples their mutual success with news of a second
patient, Emma Eckstein, also held in common, whose medical
condition is far less gratifying following a nose operation
performed by Fliess under Freud's auspices:
Eckstein's condition is still unsatisfactory: persistent

swelling, going up and down "like an avalanche"; pain,
so that morphine cannot be dispensed with; bad nights.
The purulent secretion has been decreasing since
yesterday; the day before yesterday (Saturday) she had a
massive hemorrhage, probably as a result of expelling a
bone chip the size of a heller; there were two bowls
full of pus. Today we encountered resistance on
irrigation; and since the pain and the visible edema had
increased, I let myself be persuaded to call in Gersuny
[a medical colleague and well-known plastic surgeon who
served as consultant in this case] .... He explained
that the access was considerably narrowed and
insufficient for drainage, inserted a drainage tube, and
threatened to break it [the bone?] open if that did not
stay in. To judge by the smell, all this is most likely
correct. Please send me your authoritative advice. I
am not looking forward to new surgery on this girl (113-
114) .
This is the first mention of the patient on whom much of the
debate over Freud's abandonment of the "seduction" theory has
centered in recent years. The issues and circumstances are
complex and inevitably become embroiled with whatever
position one takes with regard to psychoanalysis. I will
limit the present discussion as much as possible to a
consideration of the structural and narratological
implications of Eckstein's presence (both implied and
repressed) in "Fragment" and related texts.
Enclosed in Freud's letter carrying news of Eckstein's
sufferings was a separate sheet bearing the heading "Case
207
History" which related Freud's own parallel difficulties in
the aftermath of a nose operation also performed by Fliess:
On the last day you were here, I suddenly discharged

several scabs from the right side, the one not operated
on. As early as the next day there appeared thick, old
pus in large clots, at first on the right side only and
soon thereafter also on the left. Since then the nose
has again been flooded; only today has the purulent
secretion become somewhat less dense. Light but regular
symptoms: in the morning a stuffed nose, vile head, not
better until large amounts have been discharged; in the
interval occasionally migraine; everything, by the way
not very severe. During the first of these days, I
noticed with pride that I can climb stairs without
dyspnea; for the last three days pain in the heart
region, atactic pulse, and beautiful insufficiency.
Today, for example, I arrived someplace, found the
carriage of the [other] consultant already waiting at
the door, ran up the stairs and, once upstairs, was
unable to talk for five minutes and had to admit that I
was ill, and so forth. Three days ago, after having
been massaged, the whole business repeated itself, as in
the old days; this morning I once again wanted to die
(relatively) young.
Though not designed to make one feel at ease, this
information affords some pleasure because it emphasizes
once again that the condition of the heart depends upon
the condition of the nose. I cannot regard the latter
as a new infection; I have the impression that I really
still have, as you surmised, a local pus accumulation
(right sphenoid bone), which now happens to feel
inclined to produce eruptions like a private Etna, as it
were.
But that is no reason for you to come. I shall
instead report to you faithfully (115-16).
I have quoted at length in order to suggest the presence in
Freud's life and writings of a constellation of organic and
neurotic symptoms connected through the nose to a series of
overdetermined identifications circulating among Freud,
Fliess, and Eckstein.
This communication immediately precedes the now infamous
letter of March 8, 1895 in which Freud reveals to Fliess the
true extent and nature of his botched operation on Eckstein
208
while simultaneously beginning the process of distancing
himself and his friend from recognition or acceptance of
their mutual culpability. What follows is an excerpt from
Freud's letter detailing the crucial scene and Freud's
subsequent reaction:
There still was moderate bleeding from [Eckstein's] nose

and mouth; the fetid odor was very bad. Rosanes
[another colleague called in because Gersuny was not
immediately available] cleaned the area surrounding the
opening, removed some sticky blood clots, and suddenly
pulled at something like a thread, kept on pulling.
Before either of us had time to think, at least half a
meter of gauze had been removed from the cavity. The
next moment came a flood of blood. The patient turned
white, her eyes bulged, and she had no pulse.
Immediately thereafter, however, he again packed the
cavity with fresh iodoform gauze and the hemorrhage
stopped. It lasted about half a minute, but this was
enough to make the poor creature, whom by then we had
lying flat, unrecognizable. In the meantime -- that is,
afterward something else happened. At the moment the
foreign body came out and everything became clear to me
-- and I immediately afterward was confronted by the
sight of the patient -- I felt sick. After she had been
packed, I fled to the next room, drank a bottle of
water, and felt miserable. The brave Frau Doktor
[reference uncertain] then brought me a small glass of
cognac and I became myself again. [...] [Eckstein] had
not lost consciousness during the massive hemorrhage;
when I returned to the room somewhat shaky, she greeted
me with the condescending remark, "So this is the strong
sex."
I do not believe it was the blood that overwhelmed me
-- at that moment strong emotions were welling up in me.
So we had done her an injustice; she was not at all
abnormal, rather, a piece of iodoform gauze had gotten
torn off as you were removing it and stayed in for
fourteen days, preventing healing; at the end it tore
off and provoked the bleeding. That this mishap should
have happened to you; how you will react to it when you
hear about it; what others could make of it; how wrong I
was to urge you to operate in a foreign city where you
could not follow through on the case; how my intention
to do my best for this poor girl was insidiously
thwarted and resulted in endangering her life -- all
this came over me simultaneously. I have worked it
through by now (116-17).
In the lines that follow, Freud blames Rosanes for the
"mishap." As Max Schur was the first to point out, this was
only the first in a series of "desperate attempts" Freud
makes in subsequent letters "to deny any realization of the
fact that Fliess would have been convicted of malpractice in
any court for this nearly fatal error" (Masson, Complete
Letters 121).
Emma Eckstein, however, was not only a surgical patient,
but also the subject of Freud's earlier case study of a young
hysteric (Masson, Assault on Truth 87-9) . She has been
identified as patient "E" of Section 4 of Freud's 1895
"Project for a Scientific Psychology" which presents, for the
first time, the phenomenon of repression as the result of
"deferred action." Two "scenes" are involved, the first at
age eight, the second at age twelve, puberty having
intervened between. As a child, Emma had been sexually
attacked by a shopkeeper. As an adolescent, she became
hysterically frightened upon entering a store and witnessing
a seemingly innocuous, jocular interchange between two male
shop-assistants. In Freud's theoretical construction,
neither scene alone is capable of producing trauma. Rather
the two must operate together through the agency of memory,
each one in itself being always already too early or too
late. Jean Laplanche cites the relevant passage, inserting a
commentary of his own which doubles provocatively the
indeterminacy surrounding Dora:
Here we have an instance of a memory exciting an affect
which it had not excited as an experience, because in
the meantime the changes produced by puberty had made
possible a new understanding of what was remembered.
Now this case is typical of repression in hysteria. We
invariably find that a memory is repressed which has
only become a trauma after the event [here is the heart
of the argument: we try to track down the trauma, but
the traumatic memory was only secondarily traumatic: we
never manage to fix the traumatic event historically.
This fact might be illustrated by the image of a
Heisenberg-like "relation of indeterminacy": in
situating the trauma, one cannot appreciate its
traumatic impact, and vice versa.] The reason for this
state of things is the retardation of puberty as
compared with the remainder of the individual's
development (Life and Death 41).
The emphasis on uncertainty, however productive
theoretically, may be rooted in the specific historical
circumstances in which it was both psychically necessary and
in Freud's material interests to tell a story to himself, to
Fliess and to the world in which a patient's acute sufferings
were ascribed to her own hysterical agency rather than to the
actions and omissions of her doctors.
Dream of Irma's Injection
There is yet another way in which the scene of Emma and her
operation connects through Dora with the themes of ancient
origins and buried pasts. Didier Anzieu interprets the dream
of "Irma's injection" as a re-enactment of the Emma episode
as does Max Schur in "Some Additional 'Day Residues' of the
Specimen Dream of Psychoanalysis" (Masson, Assault on Truth
205-6). This is the first dream analyzed in The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud's most self-revealing and
theoretically important book. Five years later, while
211
vacationing in the same house in which he had dreamt of
"Irma," Freud wrote Fliess:
Do you suppose that someday one will read on a marble

tablet on this house: "Here, on July 24, 1895,
the secret of the dream revealed itself to Dr. Sigm.
Freud" (417).
Commemoration of a hard-won success in the ancient manner co
exists in complex and uneasy relations to a founding (and
itself complexly partial) repression of an original traumatic
scene involving Freud's relationship to a patient. The
conflations and confusions of analyst and patient,
"seduction" and Oedipus that are present in the circuit of
associations running from Freud to Eckstein to tabes patient
to Dora undergo yet one more permutation in Masson's account
of Eckstein as being not only surgical patient and analysand
but analyst as well an analyst, moreover, who "confirms"
Freud's "seduction" theory with a case history of her own
after he had supposedly abandoned it.13
Emma and Dora share a common bond as catalysts inspiring
Freud to write out a theory of hysteria in the face of
apparent failure. In the March 8, 1895 letter, Freud relates
the horror of Emma's hemorrhage to his ability to work well:
"Strangely enough it is far easier for me to be productive
when I have mild troubles of this kind. So now I am writing
page after page of "The Theory of Hysteria." Five days later
when Emma is out of danger and reportedly still holds her
doctors in high esteem, Freud writes:
The only thing I remember of last week is that I have

written fifty-two printed pages on the psychotherapy of
212
hysteria; I shall give you the galley proofs to read

(119) .
As related in The Interpretation of Dreams, the manifest "day
residue" to Freud's dream of Irma's injection included the
repression of his defensive annoyance at his junior
colleague's implied criticisms concerning his treatment of a
patient which "had ended in a partial success" at a time when
Freud "was not yet quite clear ... as to the criteria
indicating that a hysterical case history was finally
closed." Freud had "proposed a solution to the patient which
she seemed unwilling to accept. While [they] were at
variance, [they] had broken off the treatment for the summer
vacation" (138). His conscious response to these
circumstances about which he was not "clear" and in response
to which he "gave no outward sign" immediately precedes an
account of the dream itself:
The same evening I wrote out Irma's case history, with

the idea of giving it to Dr. M. [Josef Breuer] (a common
friend who was at that time the leading figure in our
circle) in order to justify myself (139).
Freud's writing of his "Irma" dream situates the origins of
psychoanalysis in contiguous relations to a case history
written as a self-justification in response to the breaking
off of treatment in a case of hysteria following the
patient's refusal to accept Freud's proposed interpretations.
These are also the circumstances of Dora. A patient has
left him in unsettled and unsettling circumstances. The
analysis included the interpretation that Dora's departure
represented an act of dismissal of a subordinate hireling by
213
a person in power. Dora gave Freud, like her governess
before him, his two weeks notice (Gallop 210). Freud
recuperates his position and retaliates by writing "Fragment"
"during the two weeks immediately following [Dora's
departure]" (28) . He writes to Fliess in the white heat of
its aftermath:
I finished "Dreams and Hysteria" yesterday, and today I

already miss a narcotic. It is a fragment of an
analysis of a case of hysteria in which the explanations
are grouped around two dreams; so it is really a
continuation of the dream book. In addition, it
contains resolutions of hysterical symptoms and glimpses
of the sexual-organic foundation of the whole. It is
the subtlest thing I have written so far and will put
people off even more than usual. Still, one does one's
duty and does not write for the day alone (433) .
Dora, like the dream of Irma's injection, is a narrative that
remains standing regardless of the therapeutic outcome of the
particular case. "Fragment" constitutes a case history in
which the doctor's narrative constructs the life it seeks to
attend therapeutically. So, too, the figure of Irma-Emma both
conceals and confesses a second patient whom Freud interprets
through a theoretical schema informed by the psychic and
practical exigencies of his personal, partially-neurotic
life.
Seduction Revisited
Dora re-enacts Emma's case in yet one more way, for there is
a powerful narrative logic within which the former remains a
fragment of the latter. Freud premises "Fragment's"
condition of representability on its short duration. Its
214
premature termination does more, however, than solve the
problem of the superabundance of analytic material which
results in cases of normal length. It allows Freud to
maintain a discrete and indeterminate silence concerning
Dora's childhood. "Fragment" contains two scenes of
"seduction", both at the hands of Herr K: one when Dora was
sixteen in some woods by an alpine lake and a second, earlier
episode at fourteen when Herr K. accosted Dora while they
were alone together at his place of business. Both episodes
take place after puberty, and therefore, in accordance with
Freud's theory of deferred action, are in themselves
incapable of inducing hysterical trauma. What is missing is
some equivalent to the scene of the shop-keeper's sexual
attack upon Emma at age eight or before.14 This is precisely
what Freud is spared as a result of Dora's early departure.
He need not go in search of a "primal scene" of adult
seduction at the hands of any of the adults including the
father.15 A family circle remains tacitly confirmed and
supported in which household relations are inflected with a
high degree of eroticism, where promiscuity and venereal
disease co-exist, and where children's needs and experiences
are, without exception, subordinated to desires and demands
of the adults. Dora's final, post-analytic confrontation
with Herr and Frau K. (in which she establishes her story) is
perhaps symptomatic in this regard in that it takes place
during a condolence call precipitated by the death of one of
the K.s' two children. Freud interprets Dora's profound
215
hostility to her family situation as manifestations of
internal resistances, fantasies and self-reproaches. The
dynamic and productive indeterminacy of "too early" and "too
late" as the inherent structure of hysteria gives way to
murky confusion as to Dora's stage of development, for Freud
cannot decide whether she is child or adult, girl or young
woman (Marcus 78).
Haunting this structure may be a certain refusal to know
on the part of Freud of the kind which allows for a
convincing re-interpretation of another one of his case
histories. Abraham and Torok re-read From the History of an
Infantile Neurosis in such a way that the Wolf Man's crucial
"primal scene" shifts from the child's observation of
parental coitus a tergo to his witnessing of the father's
sexual "seduction" of his beloved sister.16 In none of these
cases (Dora, Emma, the Wolf-Man, or Freud's own self-
analysis) can the origins of psychological illness be reduced
to a binary choice between exclusive alternatives: either
interpsychic "seduction" or intrapsychic fantasy. Freud
always points to both. Rather it is a question of the
preponderant hermeneutic and theoretical weight Freud places
on the side of internal psychic structures, an emphasis so
dazzling, original and astute that it is easy to lose sight
of the sacrifices that Freud makes on its behalf.
216
Elisabeth von R.
A consideration of the archaeological metaphor in relation to
Freud's exploration into the origins of hysteria leads back
along another path (as so often in Freud) to a second series
of patients beginning with Fraulein Elisabeth von R. as
presented in Studies On Hysteria. In the passage which
follows, the figure of archaeological excavation appears for
the first time in Freud's published writings. Here too it is
accompanied by references to origins and to the problems of
anamnesis, memory and narrative coherence:
Thus it came about that in this, the first full-length

analysis of a hysteria undertaken by me, I arrived at a
procedure which I later developed into a regular method
and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of
clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by
layer, and we like to compare it with the technique of
excavating a buried city. I would begin by getting the
patient to tell me what was known to her and I would
carefully note the points at which some train of thought
remained obscure or some link in the causal chain seemed
to be missing. And afterwards I would penetrate into
deeper layers of her memories at these points by
carrying out an investigation under hypnosis or by the
use of some similar technique. The whole work was, of
course, based on the expectation that it would be
possible to establish a completely adequate set of
determinants for the events concerned (139).
A series of "first's" -- the first full-length analysis
of a case of hysteria, the first use of free-association, the
first mention of resistance as an intrinsic element of the
analytic situation, the first consideration of narrative
difficulty as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool -- is coupled
with the rhetoric of intrepid perseverance in the face of
adversity. In "Aetiology" Freud posited memories that
related simultaneously to the symptom in terms of "traumatic
217
force" and "suitability as a determinant." Initially he
encountered only disappointment since "[t]he chain of
associations always has more than two links; and the
traumatic scenes do not form a simple row, like a string of
pearls, but ramify and are interconnected like genealogical
trees, so that in any new experience two or more earlier ones
come into operation as memories." The task of narrating this
structure of imbrication is so formidable that "giving an
account of the resolution of a single symptom would in fact
amount to the task of relating an entire case history" (257).
Yet beyond this seemingly impossible morass lies the caput
nili of paternal "seduction".
So too, Elisabeth von R.'s anamnesis in Studies on
Hysteria poses problems and resistences which promise only
failure: "Her confession seemed to offer even less help
towards the cure of her illness than it did towards its
explanation" (144) . But Freud, like Schliemann is determined
to overcome all obstacles:
But I continued my analysis because I firmly expected

that deeper levels of her consciousness would yield an
understanding both of the causes and the specific
determinants of the hysterical symptoms (145).
Finally he is rewarded with his patient's realization that
her beloved sister's tragic death in childbirth had
precipitated in her the unconscionable thought regarding her
brother-in-law, "Now he is free again and I can be his wife."
Everything was now clear. The analyst's labours were

richly rewarded. The concepts of the "fending off" of
an incompatible idea, of the genesis of hysterical
symptoms through the conversion of psychical excitations
218
into something physical and the formation of a separate

psychical group through the act of will which led to the
fending-off -- all these things were, in that moment,
brought before my eyes in concrete form. Thus and in no
other way had things come about in the present case
(156).
The note of exultation and triumph cannot be missed. Yet
here Freud's pleasure in arriving, of penetrating to the
deepest layer, of coming at last upon a priceless treasure,
has to do with the discovery of resistance as a psychical
force rather than in locating the origins of hysteria in the
traumatic sexual experiences of early childhood.
Once again, the ending is equivocal. Elisabeth von R.
meets Freud's interpretation with considerable resistance.
Whether such opposition can be fully explained as a
theoretically requisite aspect of the analytic process
remains in question. As with "Irma," summer intervenes
bringing with it the prospect of a termination in which the
cure is both successful and incomplete since the symptoms
have disappeared while the narrative whose coherence would
guarantee their permanent dissolution remains open-ended and
unresolved (159). Like Dora who listened to Freud's final
interpretations "without any of her usual contradictions" and
then "came no more," Elisabeth von R. does not dispute
Freud's prognosis of a complete cure yet becomes "indignant"
and states to her mother that she will "have nothing more to
do with [him]." Freud remains unperturbed and sanguine,
ascribing his patient's reactions to a final demonstration of
his new-found theory of resistance: "It stood to reason that
Elisabeth after leaving my care would make one more attempt
to reject her mother's intervention and once more take refuge
in isolation." Yet a shadow of a doubt remains in the "news"
Freud receives of his patient from a colleague (as in the
case of Irma) "that Elisabeth felt perfectly well and was
behaving as though there was nothing wrong with her, though
she still suffered occasionally from slight pains."
Freud's reference, much celebrated in literary circles,
to the resemblance of his case histories to short stories
follows directly upon the conclusion of his account of
Elisabeth von R. While ostensibly referring to the intimate
connection in hysteria "between the story of the patient's
sufferings and the symptoms of [her] illness", it applies
even more dramatically to the last glimpse Freud provides his
readers of his last glimpse of the young patient:
In the spring of 1894 I heard that she was going to a

private ball for which I was able to get an invitation,
and I did not allow the opportunity to escape me of
seeing my former patient whirl past in a lively dance
(160).
This final scene, given its strikingly visual and fantasmatic
character, strikes the contemporary reader, however
anachronistically, as quintessential Hollywood: the still-
young and soon-to-be great doctor, having renounced all
claims upon her, restores a beautiful and beloved patient to
the world. (Strains of a Viennese waltz are heard as the
screen fades to black and the credits roll.)
My parody is not entirely gratuitous since it emphasizes
the euphoric side of Freud's investments, both erotic and
professional, in his young female patients, highlighting a
220
pleasure and self-confidence which co-exists in productive
tension with the vicissitudes of the analytic work itself.
Dora is a failed analysis that yet produces his first case
history, "the subtlest thing I have written so far," a
"fragment" that yet "contains resolutions of hysterical
symptoms and glimpses of the sexual-organic foundation of the
whole" (Masson, Complete Letters 433). Both Dora and
Elizabeth von R. may refuse to have anything more to do with
him, but Freud will treasure them nonetheless, albeit after
his own literary and theoretical fashion. Yet it has been
argued persuasively with respect to Dora that Freud's
countertransference is based upon an identification with Herr
K. which positions his patient as the object of desire
(Lacan).
Dora
Freud's use of the name Dora has been interpreted in two
principle ways.17 By Freud's own account, Dora was the name
taken by a nursemaid, Rosa, employed by Freud's younger
sister, also named Rosa, to avoid confusion in the household.
The name is thus emblematic of the complex roles that
mistress-servant relations play in the case history. Most
pointedly, "Dora," serves as the sign of a woman so powerless
and subserviant as to lose control over her own name. As
such, it was Freud's revenge upon the patient who in her
turn, had terminated the analytic relationship by giving him
221
"two-weeks notice." "Dora" is also the name of the invalid
"child-wife" in Dickens' David Copperfield, Freud's favorite
novel. The former derivation suggests that antipathies arise
from the mutual dependencies of doctor and patient which are
inextricably tied to the question of who gets to tell the
patient's story. Freud writes his "theory" of hysteria as
faulty anamnesis against Dora's insistence that her version
of the scene by the lake was the correct one and that the
affair between her father and Frau K. was both as sexual and
as sordid as she maintained. The association with Dickens'
novel suggests a structure of fantasmatic desire in which the
erotic investments that men (including both Herr K. and
Freud) make in Dora are misplaced. Only with the timely
death of Dickens' Dora, could the quasi-autobiographical
novel secure its happy ending in the form of the
protagonist's marriage to a mature, "good" woman. Iwould
like to suggest yet a third derivation, one that hinges on
its status as a fragment of a longer name, "Theodora", and on
its original Greek meaning, "gift."
Carl E. Schorske draws attention to "the theater, and
especially its women" as a significant influence operating
during Freud's youthful sojourn in Paris.
Freud devoted one of the longest of his long letters to

a scene-by-scene account of Sarah Bernhardt's
performance in Victorien Sardou's melodrama, Theodora.
He was utterly betwitched by her portrayal of the
Byzantine heroine, a prostitute become Empress: "... Her
caressing and pleading, the postures she assumes, the
way she wraps herself around a man, the way she acts
with every limb, every joint -- it's incredible. A
222
remarkable creature, and I can imagine she is no

different in life from what she is on the stage."
"For the sake of historical truth," Freud continues,
"let us add that I again had to pay for my pleasure with
an attack of migraine" (15).18
I propose this supple, pliant, promiscuous, degraded yet
exalted figure as the ideal anti-Dora, the perfectly a-
hysterical female culturally constructed as an archetype of
male heterosexual desire under patriarchy. And while Freud
cannot entertain such a highly charged figure without
exhibiting symptoms of neurotic guilt, it may be important to
point out that in Freud's presentation, "Theodora" straddles
the line between fantasy and reality given his observation
concerning Sarah Bernhardt's propensity to blur the
distinctions between art and life.
The eponymous gift plays a crucial role, both material
and symbolic, in Dora's case history. In a footnote added in
1923, Freud gets the date wrong by a year as to when Dora's
treatment "was broken off." The Freud-Fliess correspondence
clearly indicates that the actual date was December 31st,
1900 rather than 1899. We may, of course, fall back upon a
reasonable if distinctly un-Freudian explanation for the
error by noting the interval of more than two decades that
elapses between event and record. But we can also interpret
it in accordance with Freud's emphasis on confused
chronologies as symptomatic of hysteria. In the Freudian
mode, we may then inquire into the "motive" underlying his
error.19 We find it in Freud's letter to Fliess dated
December 21, 1899 in which he writes not of Dora's
223
problematic termination but rather of its wish-fulfilling,
dream-like counterpart -- an ideal ending to the patient-
analyst relationship:
Dear Wilhelm,
One more cordial greeting before Christmas, usually
one of our times for a congress. I am not without one
happy prospect. You are familiar with my dream which
obstinately promises the end of E.'s treatment (among
the absurd dreams), and you can imagine how important
this one persistent patient has become to me. It now
appears that the dream will be fulfilled. I cautiously
say "appears," but I am really quite certain. Buried
deep beneath all his fantasies, we found a scene from
his primal period (before twenty-two months) which meets
all the requirements and in which all the remaining
puzzles converge. It is everything at the same time --
sexual, innocent, natural, and the rest. I scarcely
dare believe it yet. It is as if Schliemann had once
more excavated Troy, which had hitherto been deemed a
fable. At the same time the fellow is doing
outrageously well. He demonstrated the reality of my
theory in my own case, providing me in a surprising
reversal with the solution, which I had overlooked, to
my former railroad phobia. For this piece of work I
even made him the present of a picture of Oedipus and
the Sphinx (391-2).
This letter fulfills the dream of the present chapter in
at least three ways: by linking Schliemann, Troy and the
archaeological metaphor with a "primal scene," by confounding
Freud's self-analysis with his analytic work with patients,
and by confirming his advocacy of Oedipus while leaving the
door open to "seduction." Here is an account of a
termination which ends with Freud giving his patient a
picture of Oedipus and the Sphinx. What does it mean that
this gesture can be read retrospectively as a sign of Freud's
hysteria in the face of Dora's story?
224
'"Seduction" appears throughout this chapter in quotation marks as a
sign of dissent from the term's implication that a child may be
partially culpable in submitting to the sexual advances of an adult.
Seduction, in its commonly understood sense, implies a certain balance
of power between sexual partners which does not obtain in the case of
young children in relation to their elders.
^For an influential discussion of Dora as narative see Marcus.
*See Freud's letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Jan. 10, 1901 (Masson, Complete
Letters 432) .
^The relevant texts in the complex debate surrounding the place of
"seduction" in the Freudian corpus include: Masson, The Assault on
T r u t h Malcolm; Krull; Balmary; La Planche, New Foundations; and
Sprengnether.
^For the distinction between "fabula" and "story" see B a l .
^The print was published in 1907 and thus post-dates the period of
Dora's treatment and the writing of her case history. Chronology
dictates against the attribution of literary influence to this
particular picture in Freud's writing of Dora. My aim rather is to
point to a word-image constellation deeply ingrained within the culture
which Freud took up and adapted to his own inimitable purposes. See
Gamwell and Wells 26.
^See Moorehead 1-5.
For an extended discussion of the Latin phrase "the stones speak" see
Balmary 95-8.
225
few pages later, Schliemann is "working with an average number of
eighty labourers" and then, in subsequent months, with 100, 13 0 and 150
men (21,24-5).
^The other great archaeological figure who haunts Freud's imagination
is Johann Winckelmann. For discussion of his complex role in Freud's
psychic life see McGrath 206, 209-10, 213, 228-29; and Schorske 20-1.
1 1 "Tabes" is the abbreviated form of "tabes dorsalis," defined by
Webster's New World Dictionary as "a chronic disease of the nervous
system, usually caused by syphilis and characterized by disturbances of
sensations, loss of reflexes and of muscular coordination, functional
disorder of organs, etc."
12Masson names this as the case cited in Dora and identifies Eduard Lang
as "a professor of dermatology in Vienna and specialist in syphilis"
(Complete Letters 115).
l2Masson cites the following passage from Freud's letter to Fliess dated
December 12, 1897:
My confidence in the father-etiology has risen greatly. Eckstein

treated her patient deliberately in such a manner as not to give her the
slightest hint of what will emerge from the unconscious, and in the
process obtained, among other things, the identical scenes with the
father. By the way, the young girl is doing beautifully (Assault on
Truth 114).
*-În "Aetiology" Freud marks the age of eight (the completion of second
dentition) as the period before which the traumas which give rise to
hysteria must occur.
^There is also a need to consider Dora's older brother as a possible
agent of a sexual assault, although by Freud's logic "seduction" by an
older sibling (as in the case of the Wolf-Man) would necessarily
implicate the adult responsible for the older child's prior seduction as
also responsible, at one remove, for the younger sibling's trauma.
^See Abraham and Torok. A related aetiology is posited by Masson who
claims that the process notes of the Wolf-Man's subsequent analysis with
Ruth Mack-Brunswick reveal that "as a child he had been anally seduced
by a member of his family" (Assault on Truth x i x ) .
^For an extended discussion of Dora's name that parallels my own but
also differs in important respects see Decker 131-147.
18Schorskes excerpts are from a letter from Freud to his fiancee,
Martha Bernays, November 8, 1885 (Ernst L. Freud 178-82).
În the first chapter of The Psvchopatholocrv of Everyday L i f e , written
concurrently with "Fragment", Freud states: "I can no longer conceive
the forgetting of the name Signorelli as an accidental occurrence. I
must recognize in this process the influence of a motive" [Emphasis in
the original] (7).
231
Writing the Wolf-Man
Introduction
The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man is a remarkable book promising
narrative coherence while enacting its opposite: a life
history shot through with indeterminacy and contradiction.
Edited by Muriel Gardiner, the book consists of disparate
texts dating from 1919 to 1970 by five different authors all
devoted to interpreting the life of Freud's most celebrated
patient. The founding text is Freud's "From the History of
an Infantile Neurosis" (1914) based on an analysis (1910-14)
of a young, Russian aristocrat of immense wealth, Sergius
Constantinovich Pankejeff. James Strachey termed it "the
most elaborate and no doubt the most important of all Freud's
case histories" (Gardiner vii).1
A series of memoirs written sporadically over nineteen
years at the end of the patient's long life provides an
alternative vantage point from which to speculate upon this
enigmatic figure. The book also includes a write-up of the
supplementary analysis conducted by Ruth Mack Brunswick to
whom Freud referred the Wolf-Man in 1926 in consequence of
his suffering "from a hypochondriacal idee fixe" concerning a
scar on his nose (Gardiner 264). Gardiner, herself a
psychoanalyst who trained under Brunswick, writes an account
of her longterm friendship (1935-1970) with this special
patient who remained throughout his life a "ward of
232
psychoanalysis" (Blum 351) . Finally, a foreword by Anna
Freud underwrites the book's claims to narrative unity when
she promotes it as "the unique opportunity to see an analytic
patient's inner as well as outer life unfold before our eyes"
(xii).
Against the grain of the book's presumption of narrative
coherence, I will exploit the myriad ways in whch the many
different voices in these texts fail to produce a coherent
life story. More particularly, I want to suggest a reading
of the Wolf-Man's memoirs as a muted, compromised,
elliptical, naive, awkward, clandestine yet remarkably
resilient protest against Freud's case history. At stake
most centrally in the contest of narratives is the figure of
Anna, the Wolf-Man's older sister. The memoirs seek to re
instate her within the fabric of an intersubjective family
history which Freud's case history minimizes in favor of an
intra-psychic theory of childhood development that was the
basis of early psychoanalysis.
In The Policing of Families, Jacques Donzelot tells the
following parable:
At Easter time in 197 6, an obscure inmate of a

provincial prison dies as the result of a long hunger
strike that he had embarked upon because, in his
judicial dossier, only his faults, his deviations from
the norm, his unhappy childhood, his marital
instability, had been noted down, but not his endeavors,
his searchings, the aleatory train of his life. It
seems that this was the first time a prison hunger
strike had ended in a death, the first time too that one
had been undertaken for so bizarre a motive (234) .
233
The Wolf-Man did nothing so drastic. Yet it is possible that
what he accomplished was, narratologically speaking, more
difficult and subtle if less lethal: to construct an
alternative, dissident version of his life under the guise of
docile collaboration with Freud's master narrative upon which
rested his claim to a significant life.
The model I have in mind in thinking about this
analysand's protean, borderline subversiveness is some
melange of anti-colonial resistance by accommodation combined
with an almost parodic passive-aggressiveness towards those
who sought to help him therapeutically and to explain him
theoretically.2 It is no exaggeration to say that the Wolf-
Man made a life for himself as an interminable patient of
psychoanalysis.3 Even as the Wolf-Man1s sense of self hinged
on his history as an important patient, he remained in life
long need of propping up both financially and psychologically
by those committed to guarding Freuds legacy.
The helping hands were many, beginning with Freud
himself.4 In reciprocal fashion, Freudian psychoanalysis, as
an institution, was committed to safeguarding the therapeutic
efficacy of the Wolf-Man's treatment as a cornerstone of
orthodox theory. Within this vice-grip of co-dependency, the
Wolf-Man continued throughout the remainder of his life to
make himself available for therapeutic intervention. In this
regard the following interchange between the Wolf-Man and
Karin Obholzer, a young journalist who conducted a series of
interviews with him in his last years, is significant:
234
W [Wolf-Man]: And I receive free treatment. A whole

number of dependencies arise, and that's harmful, of
course. It harms the ego, I'd say.
0 [Oberholzer]: The motive is incomprehensible to me.
What interest would they have in keeping you dependent?
W: That's easy to understand. E wants to keep track of
the case that has become so famous -- Freud's most
famous case -- and see how it ends (Obholzer 126).
But the Wolf-Man collaborated within such a web of
vacillation and contradictory opinions (tirelessly solicited
from all analytic quarters) as to make a mockery of the
traditional therapeutic relationship. In interpreting the
patient's endless difficulties, indecisiveness and self-doubt
(most often concerning ambivalent erotic entanglements), it
becomes impossible finally to distinguish between the
patient's struggle for mental health and a mode of existence
organized subtly yet effectively around exploiting his place
in the early history of psychoanalysis as an exemplary test
case whose outcome remained forever in doubt.
A Contrast of Narrative Modes
In "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" Freud takes
one-hundred-ten densely argued pages to unravel the
psychoanalytic dynamics of the first eight years of the Wolf-
Man' s life. In his memoirs, the Wolf-Man takes approximately
the same space to sketch in superficial, episodic fashion a
life story spanning fifty-two years (1886-1938) . These two
ways of treating the same human subject are so different as
to inhabit different universes. Freud's essay is both a case
history and a polemical argument against the heretical
235
theories of Jung and Adler, which contested Freud's emphasis
on pathogenic sexual experience in early childhood as the
primary aetiology of adult neurosis. Freud's writing is
erudite, self-reflexive, densely layered, brilliantly
deductive, stylistically sophisticated, daringly speculative,
and profoundly original. By way of contrast, the Wolf-Man
writes naively, using a straightforward chronology to string
together a set of recollections in seemingly haphazard or
intuitive fashion with little effort at interpretation or
integration. These two narratives, brought together under
the guise of complementarity, do not mesh.
"From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" constitutes
Freud's impassioned defense of early psychoanalytic theory in
the guise of a case history. It seeks to corroborate his
theories regarding the Oedipus complex, infantile sexuality,
and the origins of neurosis in childhood. It also
demonstrates the central importance of dream interpretation
in the practice of psychoanalysis. Freud presents his case
to his reader as before a tribunal convened to adjudicate his
disputes with Jung and Adler. The case history is his
argument, the density and complexity of which frustrates
narrative analysis. Everything connects to everything else
but in ways that are never fully explicated. The status of
the primal scene itself (in which a pre-verbal infant
witnesses his parents making love a tergo), whether "real"
event or erotic fantasy, is left unresolved. Freud's web of
signification is dependent upon an exclusive and
236
unreproducible psychoanalytic experience. "Conviction" is a
product of analysis itself a conviction which in strict
logic, then, only Freud himself could possess. Those "whose
attitude has hitherto been recusant and sceptical" are by
definition excluded from the debate (159). Those with
clinical experience will believe. The rest are not qualified
to dissent.
Freud's argument for the determining psychic influence
of a primal scene of parental copulation (witnessed or
fantasized) on the Wolf-Man's life and character depends on
his interpretation of a single dream in which the four-year-
old child sees six or seven wolves sitting on the branches of
a big walnut tree outside his bedroom window at night. As
Patrick Mohony comments, "Even a cursory reading of the case
makes one aware of its logical fragility (103).5 The
connections linking the dream imagery with the particulars of
the parent's coitus are never given. Freud notes the leap of
faith required from his reader and requests "a provisional
belief in the reality of the scene" which takes place at the
age of one and a half during a bout of malaria when the Wolf-
Man was put to bed in his parents' room:
He had been sleeping in his cot, then, in his parents'

bedroom, and woke up, perhaps because of his rising
fever, in the afternoon, possibly at five o'clock, the
hour which was later marked out by depression. It
harmonizes with our assumption that it was a hot
summer's day, if we suppose that his parents had
retired, half undressed, for an afternoon siesta. When
he woke up, he witnessed a coitus a tergo, three times
repeated; he was able to see his mother's genitals as
well as his father's organ; and he understood the
process as well as its significance. [Footnote] I mean
that he understood it at the time of the dream when he
was four years old, not at the time of the observation.
He received the impressions when he was one and a half;
his understanding of them was deferred, but became
possible at the time of the dream owing to his
development, his sexual excitations, and his sexual
researches (181-3).
Only after having "exhaustively explained" the wolf
dream in terms of the four year old boy's "longing for sexual
satisfaction from his father" does Freud undertake in a
footnote "a comprehensive account of the relations between
the manifest content of the dream and the latent dream-
thoughts" (186-7). The whole becomes persuasive by virtue of
the sheer weight and mass of details which connect and
interweave. Yet it must be said that the compelling linkages
made between manifest and latent content only make sense in
light of a primal scene whose existence has been given to the
reader a priori (i.e. not logically deduced from the dream --
a procedure Freud claims to have carried out but does not
reproduce). Freud then makes explicit his motivation for
such a detailed explication:
The diffuseness and elaboration of this commentary have

been forced on me by the effort to present the reader
with some sort of equivalent for the convincing power of
an analysis carried through by oneself; perhaps they may
also serve to discourage him from asking for the
publication of analyses which have stretched over
several years (188) .
Diffuseness and elaboration are part and parcel of the
psychoanalytic discourse in which an intricate web of cross
references become synonymous with the structure of the
psyche. To elaborate this play within the mind is all
238
consuming. It is also demonstrably self-limiting given the
time, space and energy such analysis requires. Freud here
alludes to the impossiblity of narrating in these terms a
complete case history, a project the Wolf-Man requested Freud
to carry out. With respect to the full range of human
experience, a single dream at four years of age and its
referent, a primal scene at one and a half, cannot be
presented as inexhaustibly rich in signification without
becoming narratologically oppressive by virtue of what they
exclude from consideration. Freud's psychoanalytic drama
precludes other narratives, leaving no room for, among other
things, intersubjectivity in the form of family history. The
Wolf-Man's writings address the casualties of this exclusion.
Anna
The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man includes a haunting photograph
captioned "The Wolf-Man and his sister, Anna, about 1894, at
the ages of seven and nine." [Fig. 74] Brother and sister
present themselves before the camera as indissoluably linked.
The older sister stands while her younger brother sits on a
raised support so that their bodies occupy the same plane,
joined together at the head and torso like Siamese twins.
Anna's right hand protectively encloses her brother's left,
while her left arm encircles him. Their festive attire
matches the ceremonial nature of the pose. The self-enclosed
inwardness of their gazes corroborates their mutual
solidarity. (To what extent this sibling solidarity can be
239
attributed to standard conventions of studio portraiture
remains open to question. The Pankejeff Collection at the
Library of Congress includes a second double portrait of Anna
and Sergius, again with heads touching, taken some three
years earlier to judge by the children's appearance.) [Fig.
75]
Freud's case study and the Wolf-Man's memoirs clash most
radically in their treatments of Anna. With respect to the
photograph, it is as if Freud's text pries sister and brother
apart while the Wolf-Man strives on both a conscious and
unconscious level to bring them back together again. Freud
writes of Anna as an important but nevertheless secondary and
almost entirely negative influence on his patient's psychic
development. She is the "lively, gifted, and precociously
naughty" five-year-old who "seduced" her brother at the age
of three and a quarter (159, 164). Freud first describes the
seduction as follows:
[T]he patient suddenly called to mind the fact that,

when he was still very small, "on the first estate," his
sister had seduced him into sexual practices. First
came a recollection that in the lavatory, which the
children used frequently to visit together, she had made
this proposal: "let's show our bottoms," and had
proceeded from words to deeds. Subsequently the more
essential part of the seduction came to light, with full
particulars as to time and place. It was in spring, at
a time when his father was away; the children were in
one room playing on the floor, while their mother was
working in the next. His sister had taken hold of his
penis and played with it, at the same time telling him
incomprehensible stories about his Nanya, as though by
way of explanation. His Nanya, she said, used to do the
same thing with all kinds of people -- for instance,
with the gardener; she used to stand him on his head,
and then take hold of his genitals (164).
240
Anna is also portrayed as her brother's tormentor who
delights in terrorizing him with an image found in a
children's picture book of a wolf "standing upright and
striding along" (161). Freud never doubts the reality of the
sister's "seduction" of her younger brother:
But his seduction by his sister was certainly not a

phantasy. Its credibility was increased by some
information which had never been forgotten and which
dated from a later part of his life, when he was grown
up. A cousin who was more than ten years his elder told
him in a conversation about his sister that he very well
remembered what a forward and sensual little thing she
had been: once, when she was a child of four or five,
she had sat on his lap and opened his trousers to take
hold of his penis (165) .
Freud traces briefly Anna's subsequent fate: a "brilliant
intellectual development" followed by suicide at age twenty-
one while traveling far from home. He assigns "dementia
praecox" [schizophrenia] and a "conspicuously neuropathic
heredity in her family" as precipitating causes (165-6).
Freud's discussion of Anna betrays a striking
disinterest in family dynamics. For the author of the
"seduction" theory, which postulated sexual abuse of children
by adults as the origin of subsequent mental disturbances,
not to explore further the circumstances in which a five year
old girl engages in such overt sexual activity requires
explanation. The omission is glaring in light of Freud's
characterization of the father as suffering "repeated attacks
of depression" and being unable "to conceal pathological
features of his character" (162).6
241
Freud's diagnosis of psychosis within a nineteenth-
century psychiatric model of family heredity as an
explanation for Anna's suicide effectively excludes her from
consideration in terms of psychoanalysis, since Freud, at
that time, considered his new science applicable only to the
less severe mental disorders classified as neuroses. Freud's
all-consuming focus on his patient's interior psychic
development prevents him from positing Anna's "seduction" as
part of a more systemic family dynamic of which both siblings
were a part. A profound imbalance exists when one compares
the explanatory power Freud assigns to his patient's wolf
dream with his lack of interest in analyzing Anna except as a
rival for their father's affection.
In the context of The Wolf-Man hy the Wolf-Man, the
patient must work against the grain of Freud's case history
if he is to reassert a family history. He can do so only
obliquely if he is to remain the dutiful child and favorite
son of psychoanalysis. The Wolf-Man, in analysis with Freud,
illustrated his primal dream with a drawing of a tree. [Fig.
76] Fifty-five years later he managed to surreptitiously
insert Anna into the famous wolf dream though she does not
appear there in Freud's interpretation:
My sister and I both liked to draw. At first we used to

draw trees, and I found Anna's way of drawing the little
round leaves particularly attractive and interesting.
But not wanting to imitate her, I soon gave up tree-
drawing. I began trying to draw horses true to nature,
but unfortunately every horse I drew looked more like a
dog or a wolf than like a real horse (9-10).
242
Placed in relation to this retrospective narrative, his wolf
dream illustration takes on new meaning: the Wolf-Man, as
part of his analysis, again draws a tree as he once did with
his sister and has solved the problem of imitation by
substituting for her inimitable "little round leaves" barren
winter branches on which sit his own composite dog-wolves in
lieu of horses. The memoirs do not so much contest Freud's
interpretations as they surreptitiously rework the analytic
material and shape it to a new end -- a reconstitution of a
beloved sister at the core of his psychic history.
According to Freud's account, Anna's suicide caused her
brother "hardly a trace of grief" (167) whereas the Wolf-Man
places it at the center of his suffering:
After the death of Anna, with whom I had had a very

deep, personal, inner relationship, and whom I had
always considered as my only comrade, I fell into a
state of deepest depression. The mental agony I now
suffered would often increase to the intensity of
physical pain. In this condition I could not interest
myself in anything. Everything repelled me and thoughts
of suicide went around in my mind the whole time
without, however, my having the courage to carry them
out (25-6) .
It is worth asking in what ways Freud and the Wolf-Man's
apparently contradictory narratives might both be true.
Freud himself does not accept his patient's apparent
callousness at face value. He accepts the repression of such
grief motivated by forces of jealousy and incestuous love but
only feels confirmed in his "diagnostic judgement of the
case" when that repression has been confirmed by "some
substitute for the missing outbursts of grief" (167) . Freud
243
badly needed a sign of emotion if he was to maintain his
diagnosis of the Wolf-Man as neurotic rather than psychotic,
thereby preserving him as a suitable patient for
psychoanalysis (Halpert 388). This he finds in his patient's
otherwise inexplicable pilgrimage to the grave of Lermontov
(killed in a suicidal duel) whose poetry had been linked to
Anna's by their father.
In the case history, Freud's concerns are intra-psychic,
his energies devoted to unravelling the complex logic of a
single mind. The Wolf-Man, in contrast, proclaims that what
he writes is "something like a short family novel" which
favors the "epic" over the "sentimental or the theatrical"
(342-3) . Whatever else these terms may signify, they point
away from introspection and toward the interpersonal, away
from psychoanalysis and toward family history. What matters
in retrospect in the memoirs are not the psychodynamics by
which a brother's grief for his dead sister has been
repressed, but rather the grief itself as testimony to the
force of Anna's presence in his life.
In a perceptive and original essay, "Freud, the Wolf-
Man, and the Werewolves," Carlo Ginzburg draws attention to
an important substratum of Slavic custom and folklore
underlying both the crucial wolf dream and the primal scene
that Freud and his patient jointly constructed from it in the
course of their analytic work. He brings to the foreground
problems of cultural translation in noting that Freud's
interpretations overlook a constellation of Russian meanings
and associations originating in his patient's childhood and
youth. Freud with regard to the Wolf-Man's dream, was not
(as was the case with his own dreams and those of his
Viennese patients) "in full command of the everyday context,
capable of deciphering literary and other allusions, some of
a hidden, innermost nature" (149).
The Wolf-Man's memoirs, when read in conjunction with a
series of his family photographs in the Library of Congress,
provide evidence of a second, more historical and less
occult, frame of reference in which to understand wolves as a
signifier within the patient's psychic economy. When the
figure of the wolf is examined at the level of family
history, a space opens up in which Anna and her brother come
together rather than split apart. The Wolf-Man's memoirs
point to the highly traditional, nationalistic and
ritualistic institution of the Russian wolf hunt as an
important part of his aristocratic heritage:
A few years later my father purchased a second estate in

White Russia of about 130,000 acres .... Although White
Russia lay in the western part of Russia bordering on
Poland and Lithuania, it was at that time, especially in
comparison with southern Russia, a very backward region.
Primeval forests, ponds, lakes large and small, and many
bogs impressed one as a remnant of nature still
untouched by man. There were wolves in the forests.
Several times every summer a wolf-hunt was organized by
the peasants of adjacent villages. These hunts always
ended with a festive evening, for which my father paid
the bill. The village musicians appeared, and the boys
and girls danced their native dances. During my high
school years, I spent part of my summer holidays on this
estate in White Russia and felt myself transposed into
the past of hundreds of years ago. This was the perfect
place to recover from what Freud called "civilization
and its discontents." My father sold this estate in
1905 (12) .
245
Among the family photographs in the Pankejeff Collection
are a series of now badly faded albumen prints documenting
one such hunt. An outdoor, rustic ceremonial group portrait
shows Anna, her mother and the adolescent Wolf-Man at the far
left of a large hunting party. [Fig. 77] The photograph
includes some seventy or more figures including gentry,
huntsmen and serfs. They are posed informally in three rows
against a backdrop of poplars. In the foreground as the
central focal point around which the group has been arranged
lie the carcases of three wolves. The turn-of-the-century
print has deteriorated to the point that the viewer must look
carefully to make them out. In a closely related image, the
three dead wolves lie prostrate on the ground in front of a
low table covered by a white tablecloth. [Fig. 78] Anna, her
brother and mother (together with two friends or family
members) sit around the table on which an elaborate picnic
has been spread. The hunting party stands for the camera in
a long double row behind the table while a large samovar
appears off to the right.
I want to do more, however, than establish the
historical background for the Wolf-Man1s symbolic deployment
of wolves. These photographs can be used to align the
memoirs with perhaps the most famous of all Russian texts,
one that far more effectively portrays the love of a brother
and sister in close proximity to wolves. I have in mind Leo
Tolstoi's War and Peace. During the time of his adolescense
when the Wolf-Man was spending his summers on the estate on
246
which these wolf hunts took place, he also became deeply
enamored of literature:
Perhaps I transferred some of my earlier religious

feelings to the realm of literature, because I now
began, at about thirteen years of age, to read the
novels of Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev with
passionate interest (20).
Freud and others attest to this patient's engaging
cosmopolitanism and literary cultivation, qualities that
helped make him such a satisfying patient and fascinating
interlocutor. His writings make repeated use of the great
works of European literature as the vehicle for personal
reflection and insight, as when he cites Don Quixote as a
hero whose self-delusions deeply disturbed him as a child or
when in later life a Russian army officer unexpectedly
discussed literature with him instead of conducting an
anxiously anticipated interrogation. But perhaps the most
convincing sign of the importance of literature to the Wolf-
Ma n 1s psychic make-up comes in Brunswick's follow-up analysis
where the ability to "read and enjoy novels" becomes a sign
of "his final restoration" in the aftermath of his
transference neurosis (296) . Within this context, I propose
Tolstoy's depiction of a Russian wolf hunt as an additional
signifying element put into play by the Wolf-Man's writings.
It may function for Freud's patient as an alternative primal
scene -- however clandestine, tangential, ineffectual and
evanescent its presence -- one that accommodates the love
between a brother and sister.
247
In Book Seven of War and Peace, Nicholas Rostov returns
home on leave from the army at the urgent request of his
mother to attend to the affairs of the family estate that
have been badly mismanaged by his father. He has become
somewhat estranged from his sister, Natasha, as a result of
her engagement to Prince Andrew. In response to the unwonted
strain produced by these circumstances, "Nicholas decides to
go hunting" (542). There ensues a detailed and highly
naturalistic account of a Russian wolf hunt which corresponds
closely in procedure and format to the following description
given by Barry Lopez:
Wolf hunting in Europe and Russia with hounds was an

aristocratic amusement, popular around the turn of the
century. While nobility and its guests dined and
relaxed in the hunting lodge, the head huntsman and his
helpers scoured the countryside for wolf sign or learned
from local peasants where the wolves were. On the day
of the hunt the gentlemen arrayed themselves in a line
at the edge of a promising wood and the head huntsman
tried to howl up a wolf. If an answering howl was heard
-- "commingling the lament of a dying dog with the
wailing of an Irish Banshee" the dogs began driving
the woods from the far side. A beater might have as
many as six dogs on leashes as he moved through the
woods. Deerhounds, staghouds, and Siberian wolfhounds,
the slender white borzoi, as well as small greyhounds
and foxhounds. When he saw a wolf, he would shout:
"Loup! Loup! Loup!" and slip the dogs. The idea was to
trap the wolf between pursuing dogs and the hunters
sitting astride their horses at the edge of the wood.
Bursting from cover, the wolf would either be shot or
pinned by the dogs and then speared or clubbed.
Sometimes the dogs, especially the larger mastiff
crossbreeds and hounds, would kill the wolf (154).
The climax of Tolstoy's hunting scene comes when the
exhausted she wolf, cut off from escape, confronts Nicholas's
favorite hunting dog, a borzoi name Karay:
248
[T]he borzoi was suddenly on the wolf, and they rolled

together down into a gully just in front of them.
That instant, when Nicholas saw the wolf struggling
in the gully with the dogs, while from under them could
be seen her gray hair and outstretched hind leg and her
frightened choking head, with her ears laid back (Karay
was pinning her by the throat), was the happiest moment
of his life (552).
The spectacle of a dog and a wolf locked in lethal embrace
constitutes an ecstatic moment for one of the best known
characters in Russian literature. As such it may well have a
part to play in the constellation of feelings and meanings
attached to the witnessing of parental coitus a tergo as
expressed in a dream in which wolves and dogs become visually
intertwined.
The aftermath of the hunt in Tolstoy's novel is no less
significant for the way in which it dissolves the distance
that has opened up between Nicholas and Natasha. Brother and
sister are spending the night among the local villagers since
evening has set in and the hunting party is far from home:
Natasha, Nicholas, and Petya [their little brother] took

off their wraps and sat down on the sofa. Petya,
leaning on his elbow, fell asleep at once. Natasha and
Nicholas were silent. Their faces glowed, they were
hungry and very cheerful. They looked at one another
(now that the hunt was over and they were in the house,
Nicholas no longer considered it necessary to show his
manly superiority over his sister), Natasha gave him a
wink, and neither refrained long from bursting into a
peal of ringing laughter even before they had a pretext
ready to account for it (560) .
The Wolf-Man1s memory of "a festive evening" in which boys
and girls danced their native dances" has its far more vivid
counterpart in Tolstoy's subsequent chapter entitled
"Natasha's Russian Dance." Again Tolstoy makes explicit a
249
specifically Russian heritage embodied in the spontaneous
intuitive actions of his young, Western-educated heroine:
Where, how, and when had this young countess, educated

by an emigree French governess, imbibed from the Russian
air she breathed that spirit and obtained that manner
which the pas de chale would, one would have supposed,
long ago have effaced?7 But the spirit and the
movements were those inimitable and unteachable Russian
ones that "Uncle" [Natasha's peasant host] had expected
of her. As soon as she had struck her pose, and smiled
triumphantly, proudly, and with sly merriment, the fear
that had at first seized Nicholas and the others that
she might not do the right thing was at an end, and they
were already admiring her (564).
This passage resonates with a subsequent, highly symbolic
action on the part of the Wolf-Man: on the anniversary of his
sister's suicide he, a Russian emigre living in Vienna,
"trespassed" into the Russian Zone of a city partitioned at
the end of World War II by the Allied powers as an inaugural
move in the cold-war. Anna, through Natasha, embodies in the
Wolf-Man1s bifurcated symbolic universe a Russian family
history that remained at odds with his analytic identity and
experience.
In Freud's case history, Anna functions principally as
the Wolf-Man's competitor and adversary. She seduces and
humiliates him while constituting his successful rival for
their father's affections. The Wolf-Man's memoirs stand no
chance against the persuasive force of Freud's prose, even
supposing he had a clear field in which to present an
opposing view of his relationship to Anna. But it is at
least possible that within the lacunae and interstices of the
Wolf-Man's inept writing, Tolstoy's powerful rendition of the
R eprod u ced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
250
solidarity between a brother and a sister, reaffirmed in the
aftermath of a Russian wolf hunt, shimmers faintly in the
background.
In Freud's case history, analysis of the wolf dream
includes the patient1s recollection of being terrorized by
his sister who showed him "the picture of a wolf in a book of
fairy tales" (174). In this interpretation, the wolf phobia
arose from his fear of his father which Freud characterized
as "the strongest motive for his falling ill" (176). Thus
what matters is the picture of the wolf. The Wolf-Man's
memoirs, however, contest Freud's emphasis by re-telling the
story not as an Oedipal trauma centering upon the father but
rather as a falling out between brother and sister:
Once she told me she would show me a nice picture of a

pretty little girl. I was eager to see this picture,
but Anna covered it with a piece of paper. When she
finally took the piece of paper away, I saw, instead of
a pretty little girl, a wolf standing on his hind legs
with his jaws wide open, about to swallow Little Red
Riding Hood. I began to scream and had a real temper
tantrum. Probably the cause of this outburst of rage
was not so much my fear of the wolf as my disappointment
and anger at Anna for teasing me (7).
In the analysis, Freud demonstrates to his patient that the
picture of the striding wolf could not have illustrated
"Little Red Riding Hood" as the Wolf-Man thought, but, given
the necessity of accommodating all the data relating to
castration and to the wolf dream, must instead have
illustrated "The Wolf and the Seven Billy Goats" (175).
Freud's hypothesis is satisfyingly confirmed when, after
assiduous research during the period of his analysis, the
251
patient tracks down the offending image in a second-hand book
store. The fact that the writer of the memoirs reverts back
to "Little Red Riding Hood" in direct contradiction of his
analytic experience may be emblematic of an unconscious
intent to tell a different, conflicting story, one that holds
onto his sister's promise of "a nice picture of a pretty
little girl."
The Problem of the Name
A striking feature of Gardiner's book is the fact that the
real name of the Wolf-Man, Sergius Constantinovitch
Pankejeff, never appears.8 The book's tautological title, The
Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man, promises an authentic
autobiographical account, yet the name is doubly not his own.
It is a pseudonym arising from the exigencies of Freud's text
and is also the product of a more general psychoanalytic-
medical discourse designed to bracket out a subject's
historical identity. The pseudonym "Wolf-Man" does not
appear in Freud's original paper. When and how and under
whose aupices it arose remain obscure. Gardiner does not
address the issue, nor do her co-authors. Paul Roazen
suggests that the name reflects Freud's desire to shock:
"Although the name may evoke the image of a person turning
into a wolf, the man in question merely had suffered as a
small child from an excessive fear of wolves" (183). I would
rather emphasize the way it misleads, since it endows, by way
252
of lycanthropy, a commonplace of early experience with an
aura of the occult and supernatural and creates an identity
for an adult by way of his childhood phobia. This is fitting
for the patient who "initiated the first hour of treatment
with the offer to have rectal intercourse with Freud and then
to defecate on his head" (Jones 294). The patient's
sobriquet captures something of the borderline, mercurial
nature of an analysand who persevered so long in such an
apparently helpless and dependent mode while yet providing an
unparalleled example of the free reign of instinctual forces
within the unconscious.9
Freud himself raises the problem of anonymity in an
earlier case history, "Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional
Neurosis" [The Rat Man], where he points to the two
interrelated narrative paradoxes of the genre (293) . In
order to insure the patients privacy, the analyst is tempted
to disguise the specific analytic material under discussion.
Yet disguise is tantamount to falsification. Since
psychoanalysis aims at a truth that does not belong primarily
to literature, the facts matter (Mannoni 3). Freud decries
the fictionalization of a patient's life. His solution is to
omit the circumstantial specificities of the private life in
favor of the deep structure of the psyche. External history
is vague and impoverished, inner history immensely rich. At
one level we do not know the first thing about this man (even
his name); at another, his innermost feelings, thoughts, and
253
habits of mind are laid before us. Psychological depth
eclipses historical identity.
Freud's ambitions to know and to explain the Wolf-Man
are shot through with logical contradiction. On one level
his object of study is limited to a specific infantile
neurosis:
In spite of the patient's direct request, I have

abstained from writing a complete history of his
illness, of his treatment, and of his recovery, because
I recognized that such a task was technically
impracticable and socially impermissible (154).
At another level, the Wolf-Man holds the key to the workings
of the mind in general:
Naturally a single case does not give us all the

information that we should like to have. Or, to put it
more correctly, it might teach us everything, if we were
only in a position to make everything out and if we were
not compelled by the inexperience of our own perception
to content ourselves with a little.
As regards these fertile difficulties the case I am
about to discuss left nothing to be desired (156).
The object of study shifts constantly between the specifics
of the Wolf-Man's history and a theoretical demonstration of
the universal validity of the science of psychoanalysis.10 To
the extent that the specific life of the patient is used to
corroborate the efficacy of the psychoanalytic project as a
whole, anonymity becomes very problematic from the point of
view of accountability and verification. The Wolf-Man by the
Wolf-Man explicitly undertakes this latter mission as
Gardiner's comments make clear:
Our records from so many sources, thorough, detailed,

profound, make it possible for the lay person as well as
the scientist to judge the extent to which
psychoanalysis can help the seriously disturbed person.
254
Thanks to his analysis, the Wolf-Man was able to survive

shock after shock and stress after stress -- with
suffering, it is true, but with more strength and
resilience than one might expect. The Wolf-Man himself
is convinced that without psychoanalysis he would have
been condemned to lifelong misery (vii).
The Wolf-Man's memoirs implicitly corroborate his case
history. Overtly, he subordinates his life story to the
meanings assigned to it by Freud. Yet according to "From the
History of an Infantile Neurosis," the patient wanted a
complete case history, a task Freud was either unwilling or
unable to take up. Anonymity protects the patient's privacy
but it also guarantees his silence. The Wolf-Man by the
Wolf-Man both breaks that silence and keeps it intact. The
patient speaks, not as a historically autonomous subject, but
rather as the pseudonymous supplement to a case history that
has already been written by others.
The Wolf-Man's real name (sign of a historically specific
subjectivity) surfaces in Freud's text in the form of his
initials. The Wolf-Man dreams of a man who tears the wings
off a wasp. The patient misspeaks, substituting "Espe" for
the German "Wespe" (wasp). Freud interprets the patient's
difficulty with a foreign language symptomatically: "Espe" is
S.P.,Sergius Pankejeff. "The 'Espe' was of course a mutilated
'Wespe.'" The dream confirms for Freud a connection between
his patient's early childhood memory of a sexually charged
encounter with a beloved servant (Grusha) and the threat of
castration: "The dream said clearly that he was avenging
himself on Grusha for her threat of castration" (235-6).
Freud links Grusha with the figure of the wasp through her
prior incarnation in the Wolf-Man's psychic constellation as
a swallow-tail butterfly (231). But the dream suggests a far
more obvious and literal interpretation: the mutilated wasp
is the patient himself who signed many of his paintings
"S.P. and it is Freud who tears off his wings. Castration is
effected at the level of the name.
A second allusion to the patient's historical identity
occurs in the section of the memoirs entitled "Recollections
of My Childhood." He quotes his French governess: "Serge a
le jugement juste" (Sergei's judgement is to be trusted.)
Yet Pankejeff's exercise of that judgement has been
drastically curtailed in favor of Freud's case study. The
childhood memory of his governess's words then points to a
compromised, clandestine, "mutilated," autobiographical voice
which desires to tell the story of the Wolf-Man differently.
The Russian Zone
The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man contains a highly complex
account of an episode in which the Wolf-Man, while engaged in
landscape painting, wandered into the Russian Zone of post
war Vienna and as a result was detained and interrogated by
Russian military authorities. The anxiety this episode
evoked, the vagaries of its narration, and the felt need for
interpretation suggest its highly symbolic import for the
Wolf-Man.
It is possible to read the story of the Russian Zone as
a disguised attempt to represent a conflict inadmissible to
256
consciousness that had yet to find resolution in the
patient's later years. The various layers of narration,
editing, correcting, and retelling that frame this story are
symptomatic of the conflicts it stages. Muriel Gardiner met
with Pankejeff in Vienna in March 1956. During this meeting,
the Wolf-Man "wanted most to talk about ... an incident with
the Russian military authorities" which had occurred four and
a half years earlier during the summer of 1951. Gardiner's
account, drafted in 1956, includes the notes she made the
evening she heard the story. Gardiner prepared her account
for publication in 1959 but the Wolf-Man refused permission.
Eight years later he lifted his ban and Gardiner delivered
"Another Meeting with the Wolf-Man" to the Philadelphia
Association for Psychoanalysis (October 1967). Gardiner paid
Pankejeff an "honorarium" for this lecture. She further
suggested that the Wolf-Man write his own separate account of
the incident and that their two versions then be compared.
The Wolf-Man at first enthusiastically agreed but
subsequently expressed his wish not to be named as author
"even under the pseudonym 'Wolf-Man'". He ruled out
publication of his version since "two articles about the same
event would certainly arouse doubt in the mind of the reader
as to which one really described the affair accurately"
(321) .
In fact, the Wolf-Man never produced an independent
version but wrote a gloss on Gardiner's article. The result
is curious, however, since Pankejeff's additions and
257
corrections transform several key elements of the story
without acknowledging the contradictions involved or
attempting to reconcile them. There is an arbitrary,
evanescent, dreamlike structure to the narrative which again
suggests that the logic of its interpretation is to be found
in the realm of the psyche rather than in post-war European
realpolitik. Given the interval between the two accounts
Gardiner's notes were written in 1956, Pankejeff's
corrections in 1968 -- it is impossible to know whether the
discrepancies are a function of Gardiner's misinterpretations
of the Wolf-Man's orginal version or changes in his memory
over time. As historical accounts the two versions are
filled with conflicting details. As alternate versions of
manifest psychological content susceptible to psychoanalytic
decoding they remain inaccessible given the absence of an
analytic setting.
Nevertheless, certain features cry out for analysis
within the inter-textual framework of The Wolf-Man by the
Wolf-Man. Pankejeff sets out in Vienna to paint a picture.
A particular landscape in the vicinity of a canal fills him
with nostalgia for the Russia of his childhood: "I was quite
swept away ... I was in such a mood of the past, so
enthralled by memories of my youth" (326) . As a result, he
wanders heedlessly into the Russian Zone where he is taken
into custody for two-and-a-half days. He is overwhelmed with
a sense of guilt that he, a Russian, "went into the Russian
Zone to paint." Only "much later" does he realize that all
258
this takes place on the anniversary of his sister's suicide.
He is interrogated, suffers a "dreadful burden of moral
guilt" and comes to identify with victims of Soviet show
trials who can be made to give false testimony "because one
has lost hope of ever being listened to at all" (330). He
identifies his action as a "moral deformity" aligned with the
"physical deformity" that led him to seek treatment with
Brunswick -- an analysis necessitated by his continuing,
unconscious attachment to and rage against Freud. His self-
reproaches center on the thought that Freud would have
interpreted his wandering into the Russian Zone as a loss of
self-control and a retreat from reality. His mother names it
as an "act of madness that no one can understand." In
retrospect the episode turns out to be "a tempest in a
teapot." The denoument is Kafkaesque. The Russian
authorities dismiss Pankejeff telling him to "go home and
continue to live as you have been living." Yet they also
issue him an enigmatic injunction to return twenty-one days
later with paintings and documents in hand, which, when acted
upon with great anxiety and trepidation, turns out to have
been entirely unexpected and unnecessary since there is no
one there to receive him. (True to his ambivalent nature,
however, the Wolf-Man insists on going back yet one more time
to show his paintings to a sympathetic military officer who
also paints, as does the officer's son.)
Pankejeff is haunted by the question "of how much his
fears of the Russian secret police were realistic and to what
259
extent they were caused by his neurosis" (32 8-9) . In a
letter to Gardiner Pankejeff wrote:
Is one not at times somehow forced to act contrary to

the reality principle, so as to escape from the
overwhelming pressure of the unconscious? I mean, one
says to oneself, it is better to transform an inner
conflict into an outer one, since it is sometimes easier
to master a difficult real situation than to keep
repressing certain unconscious complexes (334) .
In his memoirs, the Wolf-Man thinks of himself as acting "as
no halfway normal person would have done" (330) . In
abandoning Freud's Vienna in favor of the Russian Zone,
Pankejeff unconsciously defects to the world of his Russian
childhood and his bond with his sister. The solidarity
expressed in their double portrait finds quasi-suicidal
expression within a matrix of cold-war politics. He situates
himself between two conflicting regimes -- analyst versus
sister, Democratic West versus Communist East, psychological
autonomy versus family history -- and seeks punishment in
both camps. The Russians (Anna) will not believe that he
paints "for pleasure" rather than as a betrayal of his
homeland (family of origin). The Viennese will not condone
his abandonment of self-control, the reality principle, and
the benefits of psychoanalysis. The Wolf-Man enacts his
predicament with high anxiety and brilliant narrative
economy.
The web of signification linking narrative elements of
Pankejeff's defection to the Russian Zone to psychoanalytic
truths are there to be taken up. Pankejeff's practice of
painting originates in a landscape done in "unconscious
260
mourning" for his sister while on a pilgrimage to the
Caucasus, site of her suicide. It figures throughout the
memoirs as a sign of autonomy and integrity, an alternate
domain outside the realms of paternal and therapeutic
dependence. Pankejeff's first recollected creative act at
the age of four was to improvise on the accordian a musical
equivalent of "a lonely winter landscape with a sleigh drawn
by a horse through the snow" (10). This landscape can be
related to the primal scene by noting that when the addition
is made of the "six or seven wolves" of his famous dream, the
scene becomes a staple of Russian folk tale and adventure
story.
Traumatized by his father's overbearing interest, the
boy diverted his musical talents to art. The memoirs
specifically relate his landscape painting to freedom from
his father:
When after my fathers death in the summer of 1908 I

began to paint on my own, I soon succeeded in finding my
own style of painting. I have mentioned my childhood
attempts at musical composition. Perhaps, through
painting, something that had been buried in my childhood
again came to life. One could say that it was only the
medium that had changed, and that music had now become
landscape painting. It may have been of importance that
landscape had formed part of my childhood improvising
(67) .
His career as an amateur painter operates contrapuntally with
his identity as a pioneering patient of psychoanalysis. In
the aftermath of his father's death (probably a suicide),
Pankejeff attests to finding his own style as a painter which
brought him "unexpected success." Yet in the same year this
261
dutiful son forsakes his painting "to follow my father's
earlier advice" to seek psychiatric help. He thereby
initiates a protracted series of medical consultations and
treatments leading to Vienna, Freud and psychoanalysis. In
the memoirs, the ability to paint is repeatedly identified
with the lifting of depression and a return to psychological
health (128-9, 317, 320, 334).
Brunswick's "Supplement" records a dream of
psychological recovery which, upon interpretation, turns out
to be "a clarified wolf-dream" in the form of a landscape
painting:
The patient stands looking out of his window at a

meadow, beyond which is a wood. The sun shines through
the trees, dappling the grass; the stones in the meadow
are of a curious mauve shade. The patient regards
particularly the branches of a certain tree, admiring
the way in which they are intertwined. He cannot
understand why he has not yet painted this landscape
(291) .
Night has given way to sunshine. Ominous wolves no longer
occupy the branches of the tree which instead create a
visually pleasing form. Did a similar constellation of
psychically charged landscape elements inspire the Wolf-Man's
unconscious defection to the Russian Zone?
Pankejeff uses the phrase "tempest in a teapot" to
characterize both the episode of the Russian Zone and a
memory from early childhood concerning a French governess,
Mademoiselle. He and Anna together rush to comfort their
outraged companion who has taken terrible offense at their
father for allowing Anna to dress in male attire for a
262
costume party. Mademoiselle contributes an enigmatic,
sibylline voice to the memoirs. She is the one who utters
the remark, "Serge a le jugement juste" thereby both naming
the otherwise pseudonymous author and affirming the
credibility of his tale. She is credited with influencing
his "romantic turn of mind" which "later found expression
also in my landscape painting" (17). She also read him a
children's version of Don Quixote:
This book made a tremendous impression on me, but gave

me more pain than joy, as I could not accept the idea
that this Don Quixote, so dear to my heart, was a fool.
I felt I could only reconcile myself to this if Don
Quixote, at least before his death, recognized his
folly. When I was assured of this and shown the
picture, on the last page of the book, of a Catholic
priest receiving confession from Don Quixote, I was
pacified, for I told myself a priest could not receive
confession from a fool (16).
The passage occurs in "Recollections of My Childhood"
which was the last section of the memoirs to be completed.
They were written in 1970 at the behest of Muriel Gardiner as
The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man was going to press. Gardiner
points out that for a second time the Wolf-Man had been faced
with a "time-limit" and that "this time, too, as with the
incomparably more important time-limit in his analysis with
Freud, he rose to the occasion." This second deadline had
arisen due to an "especially obstinate" depression which had
prevented the Wolf-Man from completing this section earlier
(357) .
It is possible that within the recollection of a small
boy's despair over the plight of Don Quixote lies concealed
263
an urgent, complex plea. Brunswick records that her
patient's recovery from his "transference" breakdown involved
delusions of "physical deformity" which he subsequently
associated with the "moral deformity" of his trespass into
the Russian Zone. As mentioned above, the Wolf-Man's
recovery from this secondary neurosis manifested itself
"suddenly and in an apparently trivial manner" involving
literary fiction:
All at once he found that he could read and enjoy

novels. He stated that up to now two factors had held
him back from what once had been his chief source of
pleasure; on the one hand, he had refused to identify
himself with the hero of a book, because that hero,
created by the author, was wholly in the power of his
creator; on the other hand, his sense of creative
inhibition had made it impossible for him to identify
himself with the author. Thus he fell between two stools
-- as in his psychosis (296) .1X
The Wolf-Man is caught between his dread of being written by
another and his fear of writing himself. The Wolf-Man by the
Wolf-Man enacts this double bind even as its title melds hero
and author into an incoherent and undifferentiated entity.
Pankejeff both tells and does not tell his own story.
Brunswick represents his cure as a return to a self that is
curiously more Freud's than his own: "He was once more the
man one had learned to know in Freud's story -- a keen,
scrupulous and attractive personality, with a variety of
interests and attainments, and a depth of analytic
understanding and accuracy which was a constant source of
pleasure" (296). As Freud's disciple, Brunswick succeeded in
rescuing the Wolf-Man's first analysis with the founder of
psychoanalysis from the ravages of transference thereby
preserving him as an exemplary patient, a task subsequently
taken up by Gardiner and other members of the psychoanalytic
community.
Writing at the age of eighty-four, Pankejeff seems to
question in anguish and ambivalence whether he too like Don
Quixote might die a fool. What would it mean for the Wolf-
Man to "recognize his folly?" "Recollections of My
Childhood" was to be his last chance to set the record
straight, to voice his own "jugement juste" in the face of a
case history that had eradicated all trace of family name but
that was also his greatest claim to having lived a meaningful
life. As with Don Quixote, the Wolf-Man's delusional
thinking is precisely that which renders him worthy of our
attention. Both exist as characters created by great
authors. But the cost is unacceptably high: the pain of
dying as a fool. The analogy with Donzelot1s prisoner who
undertakes a fatal hunger strike to protest the state's
conflation of identity with pathology may not be so far
removed after all. Pankejeff's memoirs attempt the
impossible: to write between the lines as an author of his
own life story who yet remains faithful to a self created by
another's more powerful and persuasive narrative. His task
is to re-inscribe the Russian Zone -- Anna and family history
within a psychoanalytic matrix devoted to the individual
psyche. The result is far from being a "complete and
adequate" case history -- Anna Freud's implicit hopes for The
265
Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man (ix.). It is rather the muted
struggle of a compromised voice to articulate an autonomous
narrative against the grain of a coercive psychoanalytic
construct to which it clings for dear life.
Epilogue
The papers of Muriel Gardiner are now part of the Sigmund
Freud Collection at the Library of Congress. They include
photocopies of Brunswick's unpublished notes and writings
based on analytic sessions dating from the early 1930s.12
Brunswick's manuscripts contain material which underscores
the fundamental sense of attachment felt by the Wolf-Man
towards his sister. Her interpretations do not contradict
directly Freud's presentation of Anna as her brother's
seducer and rival. Rather they go behind it to assert a
family history in which the siblings' mutual connectedness
counts for much more than Freud's case history allowed.
Brunswick's "Research material" dated February 2, 1930
concerns the Wolf-Man's ambivalent attachment to a Russian
woman in Vienna, one of a series of erotic liaisons about
which the Wolf-Man agonized in the course of a long amorous
career. Brunswick noted that, "There could be not the
slightest doubt that what the Wolf-Man was now suffering
under was a new version of his old attachment to his sister"
(Brunswick, unpublished manuscript). Far more important,
however, is a second typescript manuscript reporting the
results of a brief analysis conducted in 1932. There
266
Brunswick sets forth as "the most important element that came
to light in our sixteen hours of the most concentrated
analytic work" a memory fragment regarding the "earliest,
and, in its origins, most passive of all relations, that of
the child to the mother or mother substitute." This new,
early memory dates from a period when the patient was less
than three, perhaps less than two-and-a-half, that is between
the witnessing of the primal scene when the child was one and
his "seduction" by Anna at three-and-a-quarter. In the
sequence of early childhood memories produced in the analysis
with Freud, it roughly corresponds with the scene, just
before two-and-a- half, involving the nursery-maid Grusha.13
During the sessions with Brunswick, the Wolf-Man
recalled a scene in which he had gone to the toilet with his
Nanya. This toilet had two seats and both child and nurse
had defecated. But since the patient was constipated, his
Nanya helped him by pressing her finger "in a certain way" in
his anus. Brunswick notes, "We should call this anal
masturbation of the little boy by his nurse." Using this new
analytic evidence, Brunswick re-evaluates the later seduction
by Anna as "also a cover memory for an earlier, far more
prolonged and more generalized seduction by his nurse":
From these facts we may deduce how strongly seductive

this primitive old nurse, who later became insane, was
in her influence upon both children particularly in the
anal field (5/8).14
Within this new traumatic framework, Brunswick interprets
what Freud had termed the five-year-old sister's "remarkable
267
calumny against his good old nurse [during her play with her
brother's penis], to the effect that she stood all kinds of
people on their heads and then took hold of them by their
genitals" (200). Within the pre-Oedipal triangle of Sergius,
Anna and Nanya, the older sister is expressing her jealousy
over the old nurse's affection for her brother.15 The new
memory also gives an added dimension to Freud's
interpretation of the psychic forces underlying the small
boy's reactions in the wake of his seduction by his sister,
namely his "refusal of person not thing" in subsequently
masturbating in his Nanya's presence after having rejected
his domineering sibling as a sexual object (168). (In
Freud's reconstruction, the old nurse responded, like Grusha,
with a threat of castration.)
Brunswick quotes from Freud's case history concerning a
hypothesis that stems directly from a consideration of Anna's
erotic behavior:
We cannot fail to be struck by the idea that perhaps the

sister, at a similar tender age, also witnessed the same
scene as was observed by her brother later on, and that
it was this that had suggested to her her notion about
"standing people on their heads" during the sexual act.
This hypothesis would also give us a hint of the reason
for her own sexual precocity (200) .
This remarkable doubling of a hypothetical primal scene whose
construction with regard to the Wolf-Man already goes well
beyond the boundaries of common credulity, becomes even more
far-fetched as a conjecture regarding the older sister as
well. It does, however, serve to re-align the two siblings
on the same (rather than opposed) sides of the line dividing
268
seducer from seduced. Brunswick uses the new clinical
material to do just that:
What seems likely, in view of all the facts, is that

both children witnessed, at a very early age -- under
two years in both cases -- a coitus on the part of the
parents: that both children, at this very early age,
were being cared for by a particularly devoted nurse,
who was very anally-erotic in character; and that the
children interpreted the coitus of their parents in
terms of their own experience with their Nanya (6/9).
Among the implications of this re-reading is the shift
away from the father and toward the nurse as the earliest
agent of sexual trauma in the lives of both the Wolf-Man and
his sister. [Fig. 79] When the case history is considered
as the joint construction of patient and analyst within the
analytic setting, Brunswick's new material suggests the
possibility that strong currents of transference and counter
transference were operating between Freud and his patient
with respect to the early, pre-Oedipal influences of the
nanny, for the figure of the old nurse as mother substitute
played a crucial and highly eroticized role in Freud's early
childhood as well.16 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White
observe that "in the weeks that led up to the concept-
formation of the Oedipus complex in the summer and autumn of
1897, [Freud] dreamed not of his mother but of the Czech,
Roman Catholic maid who looked after him in the first two-
and-a-half years of his life." He reported his dream in a
letter to Fliess in which he characterized his "ugly but
clever" nurse as the "prime originator" of his problems:
She was my teacher in sexual matters and scolded me for

being clumsy and not being able to do anything. (This
269
is always how neurotic impotence comes about; it is thus

that fear of incapacity at school obtains its sexual
substratum.) .... The whole dream was full of the most
mortifying allusions to my present powerlessness as a
therapist. Perhaps this is where an inclination to
believe that hysteria is incurable has its start (Freud
in Stallybrass and White 156-7).17
Ginzburg points out the crucial transformation that took
place in the concept of the "primal scene" (Urszene) between
its first appearance in print in the Wolf-Man's case history
(1917), where it refers to a scene of parental sex witnessed
by the small child, and its prior usage (in its plural form,
Urszenen) by Freud in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess
some seventeen years earlier (May 2, 1897):
In 1897, in fact, the "primal scenes" referred not. to

coitus between parents but to acts of seduction
perpetrated on children by adults ... A decisive
aetiological role in the formation of neuroses,
especially hysteria, was attributed to these acts (150) .
Ginzburg suggests that the reappearance of the term cannot
have been "an insignificant coincidence" but rather "meant a
reflowering of the seduction theory within which it had been
originally formulated" (152) . Full weight should be given to
Freud's crucial insight that all experience, including
seduction in early childhood, is always worked over in
unconscious fantasy in the process of becoming a determinant
of psychic life. Nevertheless, the earlier seduction theory
possesses an advantage over the subsequent Oedipus complex in
that it emphasizes a structure of accountability among adults
regarding their interpersonal exchanges with children rather
than locating the causative factors within the child's
individual psyche. What matters finally is the possibility
270
that Freud's agenda in writing his case history of the Wolf-
Man as a polemic against Jung and Adler sacrificed a
particular family history on the altar of a general theory of
the intra-psychic origin of neurosis in early childhood. The
Wolf-Man's memoirs provide a basis for reading the patient's
resistance to this analytic approach as well as intimating
the difficulties it posed for his recovery.
271
*-As the object of narratological study Freud's case history has served
as a paradigm for the conflicting presence within a single text of two
mutually exclusive yet interdependent logics: 1) the primacy of events
in determining narrative; 2) the primacy of structures of signification
in determining events. The patient's pseudonym, "the Wolf-Man," derives
from his most famous dream, itself the principal signifier of a crucial
primal scene whose contested status ("real" event or subjective fantasy)
enacts the profound undecidability residing at the heart of Freud's case
history and, by extension, his theory of the primal scene in general.
The deferral of closure produced by the perpetual oscillation between
two mutually incompatible modes of coherence (narrative truth vs.
historical truth) has in turn generated the hope that if only we knew
more, we might find the missing key that could explain the enigma of
this man's story. "Narrative truth" and "historical truth" (Spence),
"fabula" and "sjuzhet" (Brooks), and "story" and "discourse" (Culler)
constitute varying terms used to distinguish an event proper from the
way that event gets told. The fact that no event is knowable apart from
its narration and that every event can be told in more than one way
generates epistemological complexities which Bal, Chase and Lukacher
also address.
2For a sophisticated analysis of non-Western habits of thought that do
not depend on first-world, rational, binary logic as the framework
defining the terms of resistence, see Nandy.
3See "Chronology of Therapeutic Support Given to the Wolf Man" in Mahony
17-18.
4At the end of 1919, the Wolf-Man returned from Russia having been
stripped completely of his immense wealth by the revolution. Freud
treated him for a few months without fee and "then collected a sum of
money [from the circle of psychoanalysts in Vienna], for this former
patient, who had served the theoretical ends of analysis so well, and
repeated this collection every spring for six years" (Gardiner 266).
Not surprisingly, these circumstances emerged in Brunswick's analysis as
significant elements in the patient's unresolved transference to Freud.
In 1938, following the suicide of his wife, extraordinary measures were
taken by Gardiner, Brunswick and a number of others in the international
psychoanalytic community to make possible the Wolf-Man's war-time travel
from Vienna to Paris and London for crisis therapy with Brunswick
(Gardiner 311). From the mid-1950s until 1979, Kurt Eissler, Director
of the Freud Archives, "spent several weeks nearly every summer in
Vienna, daily engaged the Wolf Man in 'analytically directed
conversations,' and prescribed medication" (Mahony 17). Gardiner paid
the patient an "honorarium" for her paper, "Another Meeting with the
Wolf-Man," delivered to the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis
in October 1967. At that meeting she also acted as the broker for the
sale of the Wolf-Man's paintings which she had put on display, six of
which were acquired by her fellow analysts (Gardiner 320, 352-3). At an
analyst's request, the Wolf-Man reproduced his famous drawing of the
wolf dream in oils, which Gardiner liked so much that she ordered a
duplicate for herself (Gardiner 353).
5For a detailed discussion of the problem of conviction with regard to
Freud's construction of the primal scene from the wolf dream, see Mahony
99-134.
6Abraham and Torok go quite far along these lines, postulating a prior
"seduction" of Anna by the father, which the child then re-enacts with
her younger brother. They further note that for sex games such as those
taking place between Anna and her brother "to take on the magnitude we
know they can, an adult must be implicated (4,20).
7An editor's note discribes the pas de chale as "a French dance, the
style of which contrasts with the Russian folk dances" (564).
ill u s i o n s to the Wolf-Man's real name occur three times without the
name itself ever being fully given (17, 86, 235-6). In two cases his
first name occurs in the memoirs as quotations of direct speech or
direct epistolary address (by his childhood governess and fiancee,
respectively). In the third instance, the initials S.P. emerge in the
course of a dream analysis by Freud.
9In Freud's words: "Such were his tenacity of fixation ... his
extraordinary propensity to ambivalence, and (as a third trait in a
constitution which deserves the name of archaic) his power of
maintaining simultaneously the most various and contradictory libidinal
cathexes, all of them capable of functioning side by side" (259).
10A good example can be found in Freud's use of the fairy tale, Little
Red Riding Hood. It figures prominently as a source for his patient's
famous wolf dream and is related specifically to the Wolf-Man's fear of
his father. Without pausing for breath, Freud then extrapolates his
finding into a universal cultural truth: "If in my patient's case the
274
wolf was merely a first father-surrogate, the question arises whether
the hidden content in the fairy tales of the wolf that ate up the little
goats and of "Little Red Riding-Hood" may not simply be infantile fear
of the father." [Footnote] "Compare the similarity between these two
fairy tales and the myth of Kronos, which has been pointed out by Rank"
(176-7).
1:1Brunswick was alone among analysts in suggesting psychosis as part of
the Wolf Man's clinical picture.
12Following the analysis of four months (October 1926-February 1927)
reported on in "Supplement to Freud's 'History of an Infantile
Neurosis,'" Brunswick conducted "an irregular analysis extending over
several years" starting in 192 9 (Mahony 17).
13In Freud's reconstruction, the little boy had been sexually aroused by
the spectacle of this woman seen from behind on her knees scrubbing the
floor -- the mother's position in the scene of parental coitus -- and
had responded by peeing on the floor. The maid had responded with a
threat of castration (230) .
14Two page numbering systems apply: the author's and the archivist's.)
This is probably the material referred to in Masson, The Assault on
Truth xix.
15Blum states that "There is insufficient attention in the case reports
to the Wolf Man sharing a bedroom first with his old nurse (Nanya) and
sister, and then with his N a n y a . .. The developmental implications of
the intimacy and voyerism-exhibitionism of this sleeping arrangement are
not explored (351) . He also takes note of the possibility that the
275
nurse may have looked upon the Wolf-Man, born on Christmas Eve "as a
replacement for [her] dead baby, born at Christmas" (353).
16For an ingenious account of the Wolf-Mans drawing of the dream of the
wolves as an "intersubjective object" mediating the libidinal forces
binding Freud to his patient, see Davis.
17Stallybrass and White cite Swan's seminal treatment of the subject
("Mater and Nannie").
282
The Wild Child and the Nature of Language
Introduction
Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli and Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan are
perhaps the best-known fictional incarnations of that
culturally constructed figure known as the wild child.1
Both traveled as small children beyond the boundaries of
parental nurturance to take up a life in nature. There they
found safe haven within the animal kingdom which afforded
them unique strengths, both physical and moral with which to
rejuvenate, at the level of fantasy, the cultures from which
they were originally cast adrift. Both narratives are
thoroughly implicated in the history of colonial domination
in which "native" and "animal" served as useful foils to
white supremacy in the unquestioned, if conflicted, ideology
legitimating Western imperialism.2
Yet what stands out in these narratives is the capacity
of language and maternity to transcend the species barrier.
As defenceless babes, Mowgli and Tarzan simply trade in one
(conventional, human) family for another (energized, exotic,
interesting, animal) one. Indian wolves and African apes
make for much more exciting parents in what can be read, on
the psychoanalytic level, as a fairly straightforward example
of Freud's theory of the family romance. What makes the
transposition from human to animal realm so unproblematic is
the projection of a language-culture system onto nature, an
283
operation which belies the conceptual and philosophical
oppositions which structure the human-animal dichotemy.
Nevertheless, traces remain, no matter how quickly
covered over by the urge to anthropomorphize, of an original,
fearful recognition of alterity not encompassed by language.3
The figures of Mowgli and Tarzan reassure us by foreclosing
the possibility that their childhoods trespass upon a realm
of unknowable difference located just beyond the shadows cast
by the camp fire.4 From time to time another kind of wild
child surfaces whose strangeness is not merely a pretext for
a romantic critique and recuperation of the existing social
order, but rather a child who scandalizes by virtue of the
fact that s/he survives outside of language and socialization
in violation of the most deeply held assumptions about human
nurturance and communal life.
Francois Truffaut's 1970 film The Wild Child, in telling
the story of a boy captured by huntsmen in a French forest in
the summer of 1798, conveys cinematically the enigmatic,
transgressive quality of this being who defies the
conventional oppositions at work in the juxtaposition of
human and animal worlds. In the opening sequences of the
film we see a naked, speechless, dirty, long-haired boy
running on all fours through dense woods pursued by peasant
hunters and their dogs. Our sympathies are with the child.
We fear for his well-being and pity his vulnerability
especially when one of the pursuing dogs catches him by the
284
wrist. The scene which follows, however, throws our
expectations and identifications into disarray:
The child has just freed his hand; he holds the black
dog's jaw upward. Then, ferociously, he bites his
adversary's throat. Both the wild child and the dog
roll to the ground once more, but the black dog now
seems overcome and is moaning. The hunters come running
up. The child flees on all fours. We hear the black
dog's deathlike moaning .... The black dog is stretched
on the ground, his throat bloody (Truffaut and Gruault
32) .
Without warning the child's animal assailant has become
transformed into a "man's best friend" brought down by a more
brutal and efficient beast. The agent of such lethal
savagery is subsequently subdued in the manner of a dangerous
animal. The wild child, then, as denizen of the woods, is at
home on the wrong side of the nature-nurture divide. For
that very reason he compels fascination even as he requires
capture and rehabilitation. In striving to change the wild
child's condition (conceived as a rescue mission), the social
order will act out its founding opposition between animal
existence and the "higher" life of human consciousness and
culture for which language becomes the critical marker.
Michael Taussig's semiotic definition of wildness
suggests at least one compelling explanation for why the
figure of the wild child continues to haunt the Western
imagination:
Wildness also raises the specter of the death of the

symbolic function itself. It is the spirit of the
unknown and the disorderly, loose in the forest
encircling the city and the sown land, disrupting the
conventions upon which meaning and the shaping function
of images rest. Wildness challenges the unity of the
symbol, the transcendent totalization binding the image
285
to that which it represents. Wildness pries open this

unity and in its place creates slippage and a grinding
articulation between signifier and signified. Wildness
makes of these connections spaces of darkness and light
in which objects stare out in their mottled nakedness
while signifiers float by. Wildness is the death space
of signification (Taussig, Shamanism 219; Young 41)
Myth, fiction, journalism, film, philosophy, psychology,
linguistics and medicine have all sought to interpret (and
thereby construct) the figure of the young child whose
radical difference stems from having made her or his way in
the world without benefit of familial or societal care.5 This
child, having subsisted alone in a wilderness setting,
subsequently re-emerges within the dominant social order as a
traumatically aberrant being, a liminal creature poised
between nature and nurture without language and untamed with
respect to the prevailing codes of social behavior. The wild
child troubles the modern Western imagination because as an
outcast, unclaimed, dispensable offspring s/he survives the
abrogation of a founding social contract originating in the
prolonged dependency of the human infant. Questions of the
child's status, rights, history and prospects become caught
up with the possibility and problem of language acquisition.
As the primary mode of rehabilitation, teaching the wild
child language becomes inseparable from the social re
integration of a transgressive being whose fate gives rise to
intense scientific interest, philosophical speculation,
ethical doubt and emotional anguish.
This chapter takes up three texts in which the figure of
the wild child becomes the locus for debate involving
286
questions of language, pedagogy and abandonment. The
Truffaut film, already mentioned, is based on the reports
concerning Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, an eleven or
twelve-year-old boy who emerged from the forests of south-
central France at the turn of the nineteenth century. His
care and education were undertaken for a period of four years
by a young Parisian doctor, Jean Itard, whose accounts (1801
and 1806) were subsequently translated and published together
under the title, The Wild Boy of Aveyron. The second text is
a Ph.D. dissertation in neurolinguistics and
psycholinguistics by Susan Curtiss entitled, Genie: A
Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child."
Published in 1977, it recounts research done on a thirteen-
year-old girl who came into the custody of Los Angeles child
protection agencies in 1970. When "discovered" she was
without language and almost totally unsocialized as a result
of having been kept, from the age of twenty months on, in
near total isolation by a psychotic father.
Both Victor and Genie were overtly defined as wild
children and as such became the focus of study and
rehabilitation in public and controversial fashion. Neither
acquired language in such a way as to fulfill the
expectations held out for their sucessful re-assimilation
into the cultures from which they had become exiled.
Moreover, both children were subsequently re-abandoned by
those who had undertaken the task of supervising their care
and education. They thus constitute parallel cases whose
287
affinities span a wide cultural and historical gap. The
third text is better known and contrasts sharply with the
first two. The Story of My Life (1902) by Helen Keller gives
a first-person account of a deaf-blind child's legendary
redemption through the acquisition of language. In the
autobiography, Keller's writings are supplemented by a number
of other texts including the letters of her teacher, Anne
Sullivan. Taken together, these texts describe the uniquely
composite, symbiotic life shared by this much celebrated
couple. Here the figures of wildness and abandonment are
much more complexly distributed between adult-pedagogue and
child-pupil. Helen Keller comes to grasp the principle of
linguistic reference in Tuscumbia, Alabama on April 5, 1887
when her teacher spells the word, "water" into one hand while
with the other she feels the liquid flowing from the well-
house pump. This famous scene constitutes the most dramatic
and widely shared cultural icon we have of the entry into
language as the salvational moment of socialization. Reading
the failures of Victor and Genie against the success of Helen
Keller foregrounds the uniqueness and complexity of language
as the defining activity of human beings.
Victor: The Wild Boy of Aveyron
Jean Itard, an Enlightenment physician, founded his
pedagogical approach to the Wild Boy of Aveyron on the
philosophical premise that social life defines what is
distinctive and pre-eminent about human beings within the
288
natural order. He interpreted Victor's animal-like behaviour
in terms of Linnaeus's eighteenth-century classification,
homus ferus, a distinct species of humanity characterized by
a solitary life in the wild devoid of all social contact
(Burke 266-7). Siding with Locke and Condillac against
Descartes, Itard held that the prevailing doctrine of innate
ideas hindered efforts to educate a child such as Victor.
Whereas Philippe Pinel, Itard's teacher and France's foremost
authority on mental illness, diagnosed the boy as an
incurable idiot "not capable of any kind of sociability or
instruction," Itard looked upon him as a natural experiment
of great philosophical importance (6-7) .6 Prolonged
isolation, not congenital deformity, explained the child's
profound a-sociability and his lack of speech.
Itard believed that the boy had been abandoned at the
age of four or five and had survived until his twelth year on
his own in the forests, having forgotten in the interval all
words and memories from his infancy and early childhood. The
doctor estimated the child to be, in terms of his mental-
emotional-cognitive being, "much less an adolescent imbecile
than a child of ten or twelve months" and set out to
demonstrate that environmental deficit was within the powers
of Enlightenment medicine and pedagogy to remedy (10).
Through education, Victor was to be restored to a fully human
condition within the social order.
The debate between Itard and Pinel concerning the
etiology of Victor's mutism and the prognosis for his future
289
reflects the wild child's status as an exemplary, emblematic
figure. Victor became a test case used by the leading
cultural authorities to contest crucial points of ideology.
The boy's fate becomes caught up in polarized, overarching
theories regarding nature and nurture. The enigma of a child
bereft of speech and socialization who yet is perceived to
have made a life for himself in the wild elicits a series of
contradictory narratives, none of which adequately account
for all the data. Pinel's diagnosis of congenital imbecility
is hard-pressed to explain Victor's prolonged self-
sufficiency alone in the woods and the many manifestations of
the boy's non-linguistic intelligence observed while under
the care of Itard. On the other hand, Itard's sanguine faith
in Enlightenment rationality and pedagogical perseverence
remains unfulfilled since Victor, for all his initial
progress, never learns language in any adequate fashion.
The case, to this day, remains unresolved. Its
undecidability is what makes it fruitful as a site of
contention over questions of language, childhood and the
socialization process. A crucial piece of evidence around
which debate turns is the "very extended scar" visible on the
boy's throat. Both Itard and Pinel interpreted this sign as
evidence that an adult parent or caretaker had made "an
attempt on the life of this child" who had then been "left
for dead in the woods." However, the assailant, having only
"the will rather than the habit of crime," had not cut deeply
enough, thereby allowing the child to recover (29) . The
290
crucial difference in their reconstructions of Victor's
abandonment is that of motivation. For Pinel, the child was
gotten rid of because he was mentally defective. Itard, for
his part, discusses the knife wound only within the context
of its superficial nature in order to argue for the
intactness of Victor's vocal chords and his physiological
ability to produce speech. For him the child's outcast state
says nothing about his innate endowments.7
Pinel's logic is normative if cruel. It leaves nothing
further to be explained except the moral and psychological
frameworks within which idiot children face destruction at
the hands of those in charge of their care. His proposed
response is to consign Victor to the Paris asylum for
incurable mental defectives. Itard's version of Victor's
life and status implies a vastly greater commitment and
responsibility on the part of society. His conception of the
child's life in the woods is both principled and romantic in
that he recognizes an obligation to provide Victor with
something better than an asylum:
[A]s if a society had the right to tear a child away

from a free and innocent life, and send him to die of
boredom in an institution, there to expiate the
misfortune of having disappointed public curiosity (11).
However, Itard shows little or no interest in Victor's past.
It is, in fact, the wild child's complete absence of memory
and language that inspires Itard's remarkable pedagogical
zeal. Victor constitutes the ideal tabula rasa, the
equivalent of "a child of ten or twelve months" upon whom
291
Itard can demonstrate that civilized life is an artificial,
rational, beneficent construct. Itard's model of human
knowledge and behavior operates without an unconscious. The
wild child's earlier life before abandonment and attempted
murder is permanently erased. It has left no trace apart
from the scar on his neck. While Itard must contend with
"anti-social habits, a stubborn inattention, organs lacking
in flexibility and a sensibility accidentally dulled" (10),
these are the acquired characteristics of a life in the
forest. If and when these ill-effects are counteracted, he
assumes that the learning of language and culture will
proceed without impediment.
As one of a number of philosophers, linguists and
clinicians who seek to define their approaches vis a vis the
figure of the wild child, Bruno Bettelheim in The Empty
Fortress radically re-interprets Victor as a case of autism.
In contrast with Itard, his diagnosis makes the Wild Boy of
Aveyron's early, pre-verbal history paramount. At stake is a
fundamentally different, if no less comprehensive, conception
of human nature as manifested in a psychoanalytic theory of
child development. Bettelheim postulates an integrated,
active infant subjectivity from the moment of birth or even
before (14, 39).8 The infant pays deliberate attention to the
world from the first and experiences relatedness, mutuality
and some measure of control, particularly in relation to
feeding at the breast.
292
Bettelheim's theory of autism attributes the initial
cause of the infant's pathological withdrawal to "the child's
correct interpretation of the negative emotions with which
the most significant figures in his environment approach him"
(66). When unrelieved by some other counterveiling, more
benign experiences, the world comes to be experienced by the
autistic child as wholly destructive. The autistic children
treated by Bettelheim "shared one thing in common: an
unremitting fear for their lives." Their anxiety "is similar
to that to which imminent death gives rise" and causes them
to concentrate their energies on the maintenance of a
defensive system "to blot out all stimuli, inner and outer,
in order to avoid further pain or the impulse to act" (63).
The autistic child's mutism is a defense against extreme
emotional anguish. Language becomes dangerous in that, as
speech develops in the child destined to become autistic, his
psychic reality becomes much more painful and leads him to
turn "destructively on his capacity for verbal thought" (59).
In Bettelheim's view autism entails the repression of an
intense hatred behind which lies an immense longing for
relatedness, the awareness of which would result in
"unbearable pain" (90).
Bettelheim reverses the terms of the wild child
phenomenon as formulated by Itard. He understands the
stories of Victor and of a pair of Indian children
purportedly raised by wolves (Amala and Kamala) as the
fictions adults tell themselves to safeguard their own
293
narcissism in the face of children's pathological behaviors
stemming from extreme abuse and neglect (349) . He likens
wild-child stories to his and his staff's speculations in
trying to explain the bizarre actions of their autistic
patients:
In each instance, as soon as we had established a

child's history, it turned out to be one of extreme
emotional deprivation, often one of unusually severe
traumatization, but most critical of all ... of a
parent's wish that the child should not live (350).
He concludes "that while there are no feral-children there
are some very rare examples of feral mothers -- of human
beings who become feral to one of their children" (Young 33).
Into the gap separating adult authorial voice from speechless
wild child, Bettelheim projects anguished subjectivity
produced by lethal parenting. For this disciple of Freud,
Victor's original abandonment is formative and tragically
determining of subsequent pathology. For Itard, the disciple
of Condillac and the French Enlightenment, that same pre
history remains a blank slate of permanent forgetting upon
which a progressive pedagogy can write a civilized being.
Itard interprets Victor's mercurial responses to natural
events (wind gusts, the sun emerging from behind clouds,
rain, snow, moonlit nights) as signs of his attachment to his
life in the wild. Victor's "loud bursts of laughter" are
synonymous with "an almost convulsive joy." His teacher
takes an "inexpressible delight" in the sight of the boy
sitting peacefully at the edge of the garden pond in the rain
that has driven everyone else indoors (12-13) . However when
294
the romanticism that subtends the writer's pleasure is
replaced with Bettelheim's clinical eye, Itard's description
lends itself to a radically altered picture in which autistic
suffering and alienation take the place of spontaneous
ecstasy:
I noticed how all these spasmodic movements and this

continual swaying of [Victor's] whole body diminished,
subsiding by degrees and giving place to a more tranquil
attitude. By what imperceptible stages his face, vacant
or grimacing took on a very decided expression of
sadness or of melancholy reverie, as his eyes clung
fixedly to the surface of the water, while from time to
time he threw in some debris or dried leaves! (13)
Despite the apparent contradictions involved, Itard's
romantic endorsement of Victor's life in the wild did not
interfere with his commitment to overcome and supercede it.
The cleavage between nature and culture was marked out
topographically in Itard's removal of the child from all
contact with a rural setting in favor of an urban, formal
garden. Early on Itard had experimented with taking Victor
to a country house in the wooded valley of Montmorency where
his charge was "irresistibly attracted by still recent habit
and perhaps even by the memory of an independent life, happy
and regretted." Itard therefore resolved "never again to
submit him to similar tests" but rather to substitute the
Observatory gardens in Paris as the destination of the
child's daily excursions since their "straight and regular
arrangement had nothing in common with the great landscapes
of which wild nature is composed, and which so strongly
attach primitive man to the place of his childhood" (24).
295
Itard was an inspired, dedicated, innovative teacher.
What makes his reports such fascinating reading is their
combination of blindness and insight when viewed from the
vantage of present-day developmental and pedagogical theory.
He clearly perceived the one-year interim between Victor's
independent life in the woods and his coming to live with
Itard and Itard1s housekeeper, Madame Guerin, as a period of
ill-treatment responsible for the child's regression into
"dull apathy." The first step towards rehabilitation
consisted then in the principled application of "a more
humane method, namely, to treat him kindly and to exercise
great consideration for his tastes and inclinations" (11).
Yet even here a crucial splitting occurred which may have
severely compromised Itard's project from the start, for the
task of nurturance was placed in different hands from those
destined to teach language. Madame Guerin tended to the
daily needs of the child "with all the patience of a mother
and the intelligence of an enlightened teacher," while Itard
held sway in the classroom as the place of disciplined,
formalized learning (12) . It was Madame Guerin who took
Victor almost every day to the Observatory gardens where he
received "a lunch of milk." This was the beginning "of the
intense affection which he has acquired for his governess and
which he sometimes expresses in a most touching manner" (24).
The passage quoted below immediately precedes the
section of Itard's report devoted to the difficulties
encountered in teaching the wild child language. Here Itard
296
pays tribute to the importance of early parental relations in
child development even as he segregates the affective aspect
of Victor's existence from the task of language acquisition:
The friendship which he had for me was much less strong,

and justifiably so. The care which Madame Guerin takes
of him is of a kind which is immediately appreciated,
and what I give him is of no obvious use to him. That
this difference is unquestionably due to the cause
indicated is shown by the fact that there are times when
he welcomes me and they are the times which I have never
used for his instruction. For example, when I go to the
house in the evening just after he has gone to bed, his
first movement is to sit up for me to embrace him, then
to draw me to him by seizing my arm and making me sit
upon his bed, after which he usually takes my hand,
carries it to his eyes, his forehead, the back of his
head, and holds it with his upon these parts for a very
long time. At other times he gets up with bursts of
laughter and comes beside me to caress my knees in his
own way which consists of feeling them, rubbing them
firmly in all directions for some minutes, and then
sometimes in laying his lips to them two or three times.
People may say what they like, but I will confess that I
lend myself without ceremony to all this childish play.
I shall perhaps be understood if my readers will
remember the paramount influence exerted upon a child's
mind by the inexhaustible delights and the maternal
triflings that nature has put into the heart of a mother
and which make the first smiles flower and bring to
birth life's earliest joys (25).
Itard appears blinded by a highly gendered devaluation of
affective relations as contributing to the linguistic
competence of the young child. For all the obvious
sensitivity of his description of his emotional relations
with Victor, they are relegated, albeit with sentimental
encomiums, to the status of "maternal triflings" and as such
are never brought to bear upon the serious, rational,
masculine enterprise of education. The hierarchical divorce
of affect from reason insured that the process of learning
language would become an adversarial proceeding between
297
student and teacher and may perhaps explain Itard's
subsequent life-long disregard for his former pupil.
In Child's Talk: Learning to Use Language, Jerome Bruner
presents a theory of language acquisition in which
"communicative interaction" between primary caretaker and
child is crucial (39) . In contrast with those theories which
focus on the child's monadic encounters with the environment
(Piaget) or on innate neurological structures specific to
language (Chomsky), Bruner emphasizes the necessity of a
"transactional format ... initially under the control of the
adult" to frame and organize the small child's language-
learning capacities.9 He posits a Language Acquisition
Support System as a social counterpart to Chomsky's Language
Acquisition Device, the term given to that hypothetical,
biologically-based, presently indecipherable, neurolinguistic
"black box" housing the mechanisms of human language
acquisition.
For Bruner the learning of language is inseparable from
the parent-child matrix. The child enters "the linguistic
community and, at the same time, the culture to which the
language gives access" by being talked to and responded to as
a social and communicative being from early infancy onwards
(19). Itard recognizes "the powerful influence exerted on
the first development of thought by the games of childhood"
(22) and traces the origins of speech to the babbling of
infancy (30). He also notes how much more difficult his task
of teaching Victor language becomes in the absence of these
298
factors. Nevertheless, he believes, in keeping with
Enlightenment rationality, "that Nature is prolific enough to
create new means of education when accidental causes
intervene to deprive her of those that she had primitively
arranged." His optimism is based, at least in part, on the
supposition that he can teach speech "by inducing the
exercise of imitation through the imperious law of necessity"
[Itard's emphasis] (31).
To this end, Itard sought to capitalize on Victor's
receptivity to the sound "oh" and its use in French as the
word for water ("eau") by attempting to teach his pupil to
produce the sound as a means of procuring a drink:
When his thirst was most intense, it was in vain that I

held before him a glass of water, crying frequently
"eau" "eau." Then I gave the glass to someone else who
pronounced the same word beside him, asking for it back
in the same way. But the unfortunate creature,
tormented on all sides, waved his arms about the glass
almost convulsively, producing a kind of hiss but not
articulating any sound. It would have been inhuman to
insist further (31) .
While Victor's failure cannot help but recall by way of
contrast the "miracle" of Helen Keller's epiphany at the
water pump, Bruner's researches provide perhaps the more
illuminating comparison. Child's Talk correlates language
acquisiton not with necessity and desire but rather with the
far less imperious space of games and play which "often
provide the first occasion for the child's systematic use of
language with an adult" (45). Both Saussure and Wittgenstein
have made powerful use of the analogy between games and
language as self-contained systems of meaning (Harris). The
299
crucial point in relation to Itard's work with Victor may be
Bruner's thesis that a child learns language by playing with
words in situations where he "can explore without serious
consequences for himself, can do so in a limited arena for
combinatorial activity that also allows him to dissociate
means and ends in the sense that there are various ways of
getting to his goals" (46).
The pleasure implicit in Bruner's descriptions of the
language-learning games played together by mother and child
("the peekaboo variants, Ride-a-Cock-Horse, This-is-the-Way-
the-Ladies-Ride, and the rest") provides a plausible
motivation for the child's progression towards ever greater
linguistic complexity and mastery (45) . No such incentive
existed within Victor's learning situation. In his case, the
forward drive was all on the side of the teacher. Itard's
brilliantly innovative series of pedagogical exercises
finally provoked a crisis in a student for whom, as Itard
himself readily admitted, they had no discernible point:
His fits of anger became more frequent, more violent,

and were like the fits of madness of which I have
already spoken but with this striking difference, that
their effect was less directed towards persons than
towards things. On such occasions he ran away and in a
destructive mood bit the sheets, the blankets, and the
mantelpiece, scattered the andirons, ashes and blazing
embers, and ended by falling into convulsions which like
those of epilepsy, involved a complete suspension of the
sensorial functions. I was obliged to give up when
things reached this frightful pitch; but my acquiescence
only increased the evil. The paroxysms became more
frequent, and apt to be renewed at the slightest
opposition, often, even, without any determining cause
(42-3) .
300
Itard perceived Victor's tantrums as a dire threat to
his entire project and responded with shock treatment.
Taking advantage of Victor's extreme fear of heights, he
disciplined him at a moment of rebellion by holding him "by
the haunches" head down out of his fourth-story bedroom
window overlooking a stone courtyard. In the aftermath of
this experience, Victor, sweating and trembling with fear,
picked up the lesson materials he had previously flung away
in anger:
Afterwards he went and threw himself on his bed and wept

copiously. This was the first time, at least to my
knowledge, that he shed tears (44).
Itard made the learning of language a matter, quite
literally, of life and death for his pupil. Furthermore,
from a psychodynamic point of view, he may have re-enacted
the murderous violence originally experienced by the child at
the time of his initial abandonment. In defense of Itard, he
conceived his terrorism as a measure of last resort designed
to prevent a rapidly deteriorating situation from becoming
hopeless.
Bruner's theorization of how a small child acquires
language could not be more antithetical to Itard's
disciplinary regime. In locating the origins of speech in
infant games played between mother and child, Bruner discerns
an operating system whereby the adult "sets the game,
provides a scaffold to assure that the child's ineptitudes
can be rescued or rectified by appropriate intervention, and
then removes the scaffold part by part as the reciprocal
301
structure can stand on its own" (60). Mutuality, trust and
lack of punitive sanctions are all prerequisites for the
playing of such games. Likewise Bruner derives the child's
mastery of linguistic reference, for all the philosophical
and linguistic complexities of that topic, not from imitation
spurred on by discipline but rather from the habits of
spontaneous, pre-linguistic communication between parent and
child. These include "the management of joint attention,"
the child's use of "ostensive referential gestures" and "non
standard but interpretable sound patterns" and, perhaps most
crucially, highly reciprocal interactions "over the better
part of a year to reach agreement (be it only a ... partial
overlap agreement) about what a thing shall be called" (67-
88) .
While Itard's method succeeded to the extent that
Victor's tantrums ceased, allowing Itard to resume his
instruction, the incident dramatizes to what extent the child
was forced to conform to the requirements of the experiment
in the absence of any motive or pleasure that he could
comprehend (45) . The one-sidedness of the pedogogic exchange
is dramatized most fully toward the end of Itard's second
report. Resolved to test the moral development of his young
charge, Itard deliberately subjected him to an act of
arbitrary injustice. Characterized as "this really painful
experience ... as odious as it was revolting," Itard first
upbraided Victor in a wholly inappropriate and unexpected
manner in response to the boy's obedient and successful
302
accomplishment of the lessons set out for him (94). Finding
himself dragged "violently towards a dark closet which had
sometimes been used as his prison," Victor began to resist
strongly. Upon Itard's continued insistence that he be
incarcerated and in the face of his mentor's superior
physical strength, the child finally "flew at [Itard's] hand,
leaving there the deep trace of his teeth" (95). The
pleasure Itard takes from Victor's reactions is highly
revealing:
It would have been sweet to me at that moment could I

have spoken to my pupil to make him understand how the
pain of his bite filled my heart with satisfaction and
made amends for all my labor. How could I be other than
delighted? It was a very legitimate act of vengeance;
it was an incontestable proof that the feeling of
justice and injustice, that eternal basis of the social
order, was no longer foreign to the heart of my pupil.
In giving him this feeling, or rather in provoking its
development, I had succeeded in raising primitive man to
the full stature of moral man by means of the most
pronounced of his characteristics and the most noble of
his attributes (95-6) .
The wild child's ascension "to the full stature of moral man"
takes place without his conscious knowledge or participation.
Itard alone possesses the power and the language to impose
meaning upon his artificial experiment in crime and
punishment. Victor remains thoroughly estranged and in the
dark while Itard acts inhumanely in the name of civilization.
For all the limitations and even cruelties of Itard's
pedagogy, it contains elements of brilliant semiotic insight.
Itard also demonstrates a remarkable patience and flexibility
in adapting to the unique cognitive and physiological
endowments, imaginatively conceived, of his pupil. His
303
graduated teaching method reveals the structures of
linguistic reference to be, in light of Victor's
difficulties, anything but natural and self-evident. Itard's
teaching of Victor inspired many of the techniques
subsequently developed for teaching the deaf, the retarded
and the very young by such pioneering pedagogues as Edouard
Seguin and Maria Montessori (Lane 5).10
Itard's gifts as a teacher operate in exemplary fashion
with respect to Victor's encounter with the word "lait"
(milk), the first "word" the boy succeeds in uttering in the
presence of the referent. The teacher's "intense
satisfaction" soon gives way to profound disappointment,
however, for Victor fails to grasp the concept of linguistic
reference as manifested by the fact that his utterance comes
after rather than before Itard's pouring of the liquid. At
stake is nothing less than the presence or absence of
language as an entire system of communication constitutive of
the human subject:
The word pronounced instead of being the sign of his

need was, relative to the time when it had been
articulated, merely an exclamation of pleasure. If this
word had been uttered before the thing which he desired
had been granted, success was ours, the real use of
speech was grasped by Victor, a point of communication
established between him and me, and the most rapid
progress would spring from this first triumph. Instead
of all this, I had just obtained a mere expression,
insignificant to him and useless to us, of the pleasure
which he felt. Strictly speaking, it was certainly a
vocal sign, the sign of possession. But this sign, I
repeat, did not establish any relation between us (32).
Despite this failure Itard refused to accept imbecility
as the obvious answer to the question, "If he is not deaf,
304
why does he not speak?" (26). Rather, he embarked on another
arduous and extended semiotic path, one that bypassed sound
production and comprehension in favor of the visual sign. He
drew on a blackboard the iconic likenesses of a series of
common implements (key, scissors, hammer) and placed them in
contiguous relationship to the objects themselves. Victor's
steadfast refusal to connect sign with referent manifested
itself in the boy's repeated failure to fetch the correct
object when Itard pointed to its corresponding picture.
Interpreting this as evidence of a "calculated laziness"
rather than feeble-mindedness, Itard proceeded by enlisting
his pupil's "taste for order." He arranged the objects on
the wall below their corresponding drawings and left them
there "for some time." When Itard gave them to Victor "they
were immediately replaced in their proper order" but as a
feat of memory rather than association as proven by Victor's
perseverence in arranging the objects in their original order
despite Itard's transposition of the pictures beneath them
(39). Itard's comment points up the wild child's persistent
and enigmatic resistance to semiotics as a means of
accomplishing the task of fetching the items now re-arranged
along with their corresponding drawings on the wall:
As a matter of fact, nothing was easier than for him to

learn the new classification necessitated by this
change, but nothing more difficult than to make him
reason it out (40).
Only by increasing the number of objects and the frequency of
transpositions on the wall, did Itard defeat his pupil's
powers of memory thereby inducing him to make the mental
connection between image and object.
The achievement of this "difficult step" inspired Itard
with "the most brilliant hopes" (40). His optimism however
was short-lived. Itard had modeled his procedure on the
celebrated method of teaching language to deaf-mutes
introduced by Roche-Ambroise Sicard.11 With the deaf, a
second "much more difficult" stage of sign-interpretation
followed. Drawings were replaced with letters which
"continue[d] to be ... the sign of the object." Victor could
never make this progression from picture to word. Itard
attributed the different results not to Victor's innate
inadequacy but rather to an inherent complexity of signs and
to the privileged place of vision in the deaf child's
experience of the world.
From the picture of an object to its alphabetical

representation, the distance is immense and it is so
much the greater for the pupil because he is faced with
it during the first stages of his instruction. If deaf
mutes are not held back at this point the reason is
that, of all children, they are the most attentive and
most observing (41).
Once again, rather than throwing in the towel, Itard
backed up, slowed down and began the laborious process of
introducing by minute, incremental steps the idea of the
alphabet as a system of visual communication. Beginning with
a red circle, a blue triangle and a black square, Itard
repeated the object-image correlations previously conducted
with hammer, scissors and key. Subsequent exercises forced
Victor to discriminate among configurations which varied
306
according to shape but not color and visa versa. Gradually
Itard introduced intermediate shapes and colors (e.g. a
parallelogram and a pale blue). With arduous practice,
Victor's powers of observation, comparison and discrimination
developed sufficiently to allow him to make the correct
correspondences. (The mounting complexity of these seemingly
pointless exercises was what provoked the crisis of Victor's
convulsive tantrums.)
Only after these lengthy preliminaries had been mastered
did Itard introduce a three-part alphabet consisting of 1)
twenty-four letters printed on pieces of 2" x 2" square
cardboard, 2) a series of equivalent spaces cut in a plank
into which the letters could be inserted, 3) and the same
letters made of metal to be compared with the printed
letters. Victor's resistance this time took the form of an
inventive "ruse". By extracting the letters from their
squares in the same order that he returned them, he was able
to successfully match metal and cardboard without the use of
"memory, comparison and judgment." Only temporarily
outwitted, Itard insisted that Victor master the necessary
distinctions.
Victor's manipulation of this manual alphabet marked the
highpoint of his education. Itard re-introduced the earlier
scenario in which the requesting and receiving of milk became
an exercise in visual semiosis. One morning at the breakfast
table, Itard presented Madame Guerin with the alphabet board
containing the four letters, L.A.I.T., arranged in their
307
proper order. In return for Itard's manipulation of the
letters, the housekeeper poured him a bowl of milk. Itard
then handed his pupil the four letters, pointing to the board
with one hand while holding the pitcher containing milk in
the other. Victor replaced the letters "in inverted order so
that they showed T.I.A.L. instead of L.A.I.T." When Itard
had indicated the changes necessary to produce the proper
sign, the boy "was allowed to have his milk" (47). Itard
affirms Victor's grasp of "the idea of the connection between
the word and the thing [as a] justifiable inference from what
happened a week later:"
One evening when he was ready to set out for the

Observatory, he was seen to provide himself on his own
initiative with the four letters in question, and to put
them in his pocket; he had scarcely arrived at Citizen
Lemeri's house, where as I previously said he goes every
day for some milk, when he produced them and placed them
on a table in such a way as to form the word LAIT (48).
It becomes significant in light of Bruner's work that
Victor's only recorded spontaneous speech act takes place not
in Itard's classroom but as part of a daily structured
activity in the company of Madame Guerin. As a summary to
his first report, Itard allows "the weight of this last
achievement" to stand for all that he had accomplished in the
first nine months. It was, in addition the physician's most
forceful argument for Victor's capacity for continued
progress toward language acquisiton and socialization (49).
This optimism, not incidentally, was addressed to those who
were to vote on the continued state funding of Itard's
project of rehabilitation.
308
While Itard's 1801 report leaves Victor poised on the
threshhold of language, the promise of educability goes
unfulfilled. His follow-up report written five years later
is completely different in tone. It begins:
To speak of the Wild Boy of Averyron is to revive a name

which now no longer arouses any kind of interest; it is
to recall a creature forgotten by those who merely saw
him and disdained by those who have thought to pass
judgment on him.
Itard now writes not to secure additional funding but rather
in response to governmental command without which he "might
have enveloped in a profound silence and condemned to an
eternal oblivion, certain labors of which the result shows
the failure of the instructor, rather than the progress of
the pupil" (52).
By the time of the second report, it had become clear
that Victor would not or could not learn language.
Consequently his progress, while impressive when contrasted
with his initial savage state, left him in comparison with
his normal age-mates "only an ill-favored creature, an
outcast of nature as he was of society" [53]. The end of the
story as succinctly recounted by Harlan Lane is sad:
Nevertheless, Victor's education was abandoned. The

ministry allocated 150 francs a year to Madame Guerin
for her efforts and care, and the young man went to live
with her in a nearby house belonging to the institute
[for deaf mutes] .... When the naturalist Virey visited
him there nearly a decade later, he found him "fearful,
half-wild, and unable to learn to speak, despite all the
efforts that were made." Victor of Aveyron died in that
house, in his forties, in the year 1828 (167) .
In the more than twenty years that elapsed between the end of
the experiment and Victor's death, despite the fact that the
309
former pupil lived close by to the National Institute for
Deaf-Mutes where Itard worked daily, the teacher never
visited or sought to maintain contact.
The case of the Wild Boy of Aveyron remains enigmatic
and undecidable. Diagnoses of autism and imbecility fail to
account for the many evidences of Victor's survival skills
and his capacity for non-verbal thought and communication.
Conversely, however, the various shortcomings of Itard's
educational methods are not sufficient to explain Victor's
profound inability to acquire language.12 If finally we
decide with Harlan Lane that Itard's original premise remains
the most plausible, that Victor's condition resulted from a
period of prolonged isolation in the wilds during early
maturational phases critical for the development of language,
then Susan Curtiss's interpretation of the thirteen-year-old
Genie as "a modern-day 'wild child'" becomes relevant for
understanding both case histories.
Genie
Curtiss's doctoral thesis, a psycholinguistic study, has
become a standard reference in the field.13 Its preface
quotes Itard in order to frame Genie as a latter day wild
child "who affords us equally rich opportunities for study."
Scientific discovery is the governing paradigm by which "an
inhuman childhood [that] had prevented [Genie] from learning
language" becomes an opportunity "to answer questions of
interest to linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and
310
others." In keeping with social science protocol, the
pseudonym "Genie" was given to protect the child's privacy.
But it was also "chosen because it captures, to a small
measure, the fact that she emerged into human society past
childhood, having existed previously as something other than
fully human" [xii]. The case history is so aberrant and
disturbing that it cannot be assimilated to the language of
scientific progressivism employed in the preface. It is
also, in several crucial respects, so diametrically at odds
with the story of Victor as to constitute a reversal of
terms.
For Itard, Victor's wildness was no metaphor but a
direct consequence of his life in a "pure state of nature ...
in which the individual, deprived of the characteristic
faculties of his kind, drags on without intelligence or
without feelings, a precarious life reduced to bare animal
functions" (49-50) . This bleak assessment co-exists uneasily
with those passages quoted earlier in which Itard projects a
romantic sensibility onto Victor as a child of nature. And
while Itard takes aim against Rousseau in decrying the fact
that this "state of nullity and barbarism ... has been
falsely painted in the most seductive colors," he
nevertheless credits Victor with an independent, autonomous
state of being, the loss of which requires compensation by
the state. Curtiss's account reveals no corresponding space
of nature in Genie's past. Her aberrant wildness is produced
311
from within the heart of late 1950s, U.S., patriarchal
culture.
Curtiss's account of the circumstances of Genie's life
makes for horrific, if fascinating reading. Her father
emerges as the principal agent of the family's history and of
Genie's suffering. A pattern of unmitigated paternal
violence showed itself long before Genie was born. Her
father repeatedly beat and threatened her mother beginning
early in their marriage. During the last stages of her
mother's first pregnancy he tried to strangle her. Although
the first baby was born healthy and thriving, the father "had
his new daughter put into the garage so that he would not
have to listen to her. At the age of two-and-a-half months
this child died of pneumonia and overexposure." A second boy
was born the following year, who "died when he was two days
old, allegedly from choking on his own mucous." A third
child born three years later was subjected to a disciplinary
regime based on the father's "very rigid ideas about
obedience and discipline." The resulting developmental
problems were offset by the intervention of the paternal
grandmother who took the boy to live with her for a time and
returned him to his parents "in much better developmental
condition" (3-4) .
Genie came next. A full-term, healthy baby, her weight
on the Iowa Growth Chart (measured by percentile in relation
to an aggregate norm) fell drastically within the first year.
Early developmental problems included "reluctance to chew,
312
resistance to most foods, lateness in walking." Her father
during this early period "disliked his daughter and did not
allow his wife to devote too much time or attention to her."
An acute illness (pneumonitis) was treated by a different
pediatrician who stated that Genie "showed signs of possible
retardation" although an immediate assessment could not be
made because of her fever. "Genie's father, who was already
intensely jealous of the attention the mother paid to Genie,
used this statement as justification for the subsequent
isolation and abuse Genie suffered" (3-4).
The last three pages of Curtiss's account of Genie's
early childhood are painful to read and difficult to
paraphrase. It details a childhood of incarceration, extreme
deprivation and methodical terrorization based on testimony
of Genie's mother and the physical evidence of Genie's living
conditions at the time of her "discovery." The father
committed suicide on the day he was scheduled to be arraigned
in court on charges of child abuse. Curtiss documents a
pathology so extreme that a gap opens up between the
description of the actions carried out by a particular human
being and a conceptual framework in which his motivations
become intelligible. To the extent that the story of Genie's
incarceration at the hands of her father is both true and
unbearable, both unbelievable and documented, there is a felt
need for a structure of telling which will maintain faith in
the norms of child rearing in the face of such extreme,
313
premeditated and gratuitous suffering on the part of a
defenseless child.
Behind Curtiss's description of Genie's solitude lies
the weight of a silence which the child both possesses and is
possessed by. It carries the burden of her identity as a
wild child even as it constitutes the condition of her
suffering. Her wildness has become radically re-defined, not
as the savagery imputed to the world of nature, but rather as
an inarticulate realm, a heart of darkness residing within
the dominant culture. Curtiss, by virtue of her scientific
researches, personal interactions and published writings,
acquires an authority which subsequent accounts relie upon to
mediate the father's crimes. Curtiss's clipped,
dispassionate, matter-of-fact, realist prose convinces us of
the objective reality of the circumstances she describes.
She constructs an excruciatingly detailed image of the world
Genie grew up; in from the outside. The question will become
whether Genie, through language, will be able to find the
means to break out of it, to bear witness to her own
suffering as a means of survival in an other, more
recognizable and humane world.
The silence that envelopes Genie results from a
horrifying and annihilating interdiction against
communicative interaction:
Hungry and forgotten, Genie would sometimes attempt to

attract attention by making noise. Angered, her father
would often beat her for doing so. In fact, there was a
large piece of wood left in the corner of Genie's room
which her father used solely to beat her whenever she
314
made any sound. Genie learned to keep silent and to

suppress all vocalization; but sometimes, desperate for
attention or food, Genie would use her body or some
object to make noise. Her father would not tolerate
this either, and he often beat her with his wooden stick
on these occasions as well. During these times, and on
all other occasions that her father dealt with Genie, he
never spoke to her. Instead, he acted like a wild dog.
He made barking sounds, he growled at her, he let his
nails grow long and scratched her, he bared his teeth at
her; and if he wished to merely threaten her with his
presence, he stood outside the door and made his dog
like noises -- to warn her that he was there and that if
she persisted in whatever she was doing, he would come
in and beat her. That terrible noise, the sound of her
father standing outside her door growling or barking or
both, was almost the only sound Genie heard during those
years she was imprisoned in her room (5-6).
The father's impersonation of a wild dog literalizes in
the most extreme fashion Bettelheim's notion of feral
parenting as the aetiology of autism. Savagery and wildness
abide in the father not the child. And yet his conduct
consists of a set of organized, methodical, highly motivated,
pre-meditated, pathologically coherent and consistent
behaviors unique to human culture. He embodies the powers
and presumptions of patriarchy run amuck. His wifeand his
child become pawns in the psychotic acting out of a paranoid
version of the world. His torture and abuse of Genie cohere
around the fantasy-delusion that he is protecting his child
in the guise of a guard dog (Rymer 130).
While the determining influence of the father on Genie's
condition hardly needs pointing out, his significance for
Curtiss's psycholinguistic study remains thoroughly
problematic. Her research does not examine the effects of
extreme parental abuse on the language acquisition of the
child, but rather the possibilities (or lack thereof) of
315
language acquisiton after puberty. Curtiss's rhetoric of
"discovery" is two edged. While it points to the possibility
of rehabilitation, it also constructs Genie as an ideal
informant and precious object of experimentation to test a
particular thesis in psycholinguistics, namely that a first
language cannot be acquired after puberty.14
The circumstances of Genie's childhood figure only as
background material explaining why it is that Genie does not
possess language. Her value for Curtiss, like Victor's for
Itard, lies in her credentials as a tabula rasa, a
representative stand-in for her species on which to test
various hypotheses concerning the developmental, neurological
and psychological effects of language on the human organism.
Genie's re-education, like Victor's, becomes co-extensive
with an ambitious program of general research directed toward
ends quite other than the particular fate of the individual
child. The paradigm of the wild child configures Genie as a
test case to be extrapolated into human universals. The
promise she seemed to offer within this schema proved strong
enough to override the conceptual aporia of conferring
wildness upon a child of the 1970s incarcerated in a suburb
of Los Angeles. The adjectives Curtiss uses to describe
Genie upon "discovery" -- "pitiful ... unsocialized,
primitive, hardly human" (9) belie the obvious. Rather
than being a product of nature, however defined, Genie's
condition stemmed from a highly organized, if pathological,
system of socialization, a lethal regime of anti-nurturance
316
and anti-development of which only the genus homo sapiens is
capable.
Yet after her initial presentation of the case history
in a manner that "does not follow the normal canons of
scientific writing" (xii), Curtiss's research methods as well
as her prose take on empirical detachment within the frame of
a psycholinguistics which refuses to interpret Genie's
present in relation to her past. This refusal is enacted
most dramatically early on in Curtiss's discussion of Genie's
initial vocabulary. Although the child has no grasp of
syntax, she is perceived to understand a small number of
single words while "her spontaneous productive vocabulary
included stopit and nomore", each conceived as a single
verbal unit (13). Curtiss's research has nothing to say
about the meanings these two expressions might have had in
Genie's world.
Unlike Victor, Genie's physical and psychological
progress is accompanied by linguistic development as
manifested in the growth of her vocabulary:
When she wanted to learn the word for something, she

would take the hand of someone nearby and place it on
the object or point it toward the object of her
attention as best she could. Hungry to learn the words
for all the new items filling her senses, she would at
times point to the whole outdoors and become frustrated
and angry when someone failed to immediately identify
the particular object she was focused on. The number of
words she recognized grew sizably, probably totaling
hundreds of words by June, 1971 (15).
Genie, again unlike Victor, could grasp the connection
between word and thing. A telling instance, cited by
317
Curtiss, illustrates how Genie's language system related to
her unique experience of the world. On a visit to
Woolworth's, Genie displayed a marked preference for the
aisle containing plastic containers:
She longingly fondled every item on the shelves -- from

wastebaskets to freezer storage containers. While she
was so totally focused on the array before her, Dr. K
pointed out that Genie made a distinction between pails
and buckets on the basis of some classification which he
had not yet figured out. As there were plenty of
plastic pails before us, Dr. K said he'd demonstrate
this to me. Pointing to a pail, he asked Genie what it
was. She replied, Pail. Then pointing to what he
assumed was another pail, he asked, What's this? Genie
answered, Bucket. I couldn't see the difference; Dr. K.
couldnt see the difference. But Genie could (22).
While Curtiss does not elaborate, her colleague in charge of
Genie's case, David Rigler, did (Rymer 80). He connected
Genie's discriminating love of plastic to the visual
stimulation afforded by the two plastic raincoats hanging on
the outside of her closet door opposite the potty seat where
she remained confined for the duration of her childhood.
What took on an unbearable poignancy for Rigler was the
dearth of stimulation implicit in her attachment to these
commonplaces of normal daily life.
Genie's difficulties lay not with words but with
grammar. The human being's ability to do things with words
(command, request, question, predict, negate, affirm, etc.)
depends upon a mastery of syntax, a process as complex and
enigmatic as thought itself. Utilizing the sophisticated
analytic categories of post-Chomskian linguistics, Curtiss
analyzes in great detail the nature and extent of Genie's
318
problems with language. The findings are mixed and defy easy
summary. Unless prompted, Genie spoke only rarely and with
great reluctance. There was an "abnormal" lag between her
language competence (what she understood) and language
performance (what she spontaneously said). She never learned
to formulate WH-questions (Who? What? Where? When?)
correctly, an ability which requires transposition between
the interrogative to declarative patterns of sentence
constuction (152,164). Nor did she master the correct use of
first and second person pronouns (173-4).
In following a Chomskian paradigm of language as a
biologically-based black box encoded in the human genome,
Curtiss has no means of adequately addressing the full
measure and nature of Genie's difficulties. Emile Benveniste
distinguishes between language as an immaterial structure and
a speech act defined as the actualization of language in the
process of communication (729) . The implications are
profound when Genie's failure to grasp the meaning and use of
pronouns is read against Benveniste's structuralist
definition of language as that which "provides the very
definition of man" (728) :
It is in and through language that man constitutes

himself as a subject, because language alone establishes
the concept of "ego" in reality, in its reality which is
that of the being.
The "subjectivity" we are discussing here is the
capacity of the speaker to posit himself as "subject."
Consciousness of self is only possible if it is

experienced by contrast. I use I only when I am
speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It
is this condition of dialogue that is constitutive of
319
person, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes you

in the address of the one who in his turn designates
himself as I .... Language is possible only because each
speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to
himself as I in his discourse. Because of this, I
posits another person, the one, who, being, as he is,
completely exterior to "me," becomes my echo to whom I
say you and who says you to me. This polarity of
persons is the fundamental condition in language, of
which the process of communication, in which we share,
is only a mere pragmatic consequence (729) .
Using these terms in conduction with Bruner's insistence on
language acquisition as a dyadic enterprise between mother
and child, a case can be made that the extreme damage done to
Genie from infancy on drastically interfered with an
establishment of a core self as a pre-requisite for relating
to others based upon a mutual exchange of first and second
person positionalities. Genie's mastery of reference, then,
no matter how crucial to the logic of language as a system of
signs, is insufficient. Curtiss's model of language remains
divorced from Benveniste's concept of the speech act as that
which produces subjectivity and consequently cannot
conceptualize the full extent of Genie's silence.
Curtiss found a basis of optimism in those test results
that showed that "lack of motivation or laziness mask[ed]
Genie's true abilities" (170). Her surface syntax was
habitually so truncated as to earn her the sobriquet of the
Great Abbreviator. In the case of a sentence such as the one
she produced on December 6, 1972 "tell door lock" -- the
context allowed for the recognition of an underlying "deep
structure" governing her utterance that could be translated
into "Tell M. the door was locked" (158) . Curtiss cites such
320
sentence formation as "the first evidence that Genie had
acquired the potential for generating sentences with no upper
bound" (159) . Curtiss cites one instance in which Genie
produced a "verbal string" refering to "memories which took
place long before Genie had language." This sequence of
short phrases included "I like potty chair," "Father angry,"
and "Cut nail hurt father" (185-6).
The study's conclusion remains ackwardly undecided on
the question of Genie's relation to language. She cites
Chomsky on the necessity to "distinguish between the grammar
and a system of information processing perhaps not specific
to language, and to account, for actual behavior in terms of
the interaction of these systems" (203) . In roundabout,
prolix fashion, Curtiss acknowledges the profound inadequacy
of her methodology to do justice to the subject of her study:
[T]he great disparity between competence and performance

in Genie's language behavior indicates more serious and
detrimental (abnormal?) intervention of coding and
decoding processes not specific to language processes
not simply related to the extent of her linguistic
knowledge (203-4).
This ungainly sentence has no access to an adequate theory of
the subject and is as close as Curtiss will come to
acknowledging the role of a deeply traumatized psyche in
evaluating Genie's condition and prospects for recovery.
As Itard's formal lessons with Victor divorced learning
from play and from everyday social life, so Curtiss's text
displays a split between her science and her affective,
interpersonal relations with the object of her study.
321
Curtiss dedicated her book "To Genie" and acknowledges her as
someone who "has enriched my life beyond measure" [xvi]. The
account of Curtiss's initial encounter with the 14-year-old
Genie in June 1971 is moving. Although initially
apprehensive and "instinctively" aware of Genie's profound
abnormality, Curtiss, against all expectation, found her
pretty. Softness is the word she uses over and over to
describe a visually attractive being:
There was a softness about Genie, a softness in her

expression, a softness in her manner, a softness in the
way she looked at everything, and despite her stiffness
and jerkiness, a softness in the way she carried herself
and moved. Perhaps it was really timidity. Whatever
the reason, despite her peculiarity, she projected an
appealing softness (19).
Curtiss's description of this first encounter employs one of
the most familiar tropes inherited from Renaissance humanism:
Most of all, though, her beauty lay in her eyes -- big,

gray, deep. The whole story of her past, all of the
neglect, abuse, pain, and misery, seemed to lie within
(19) .
While the passage is open to the critique of projection, that
would seem to have been inevitable, different only in degree
from all intersubjective encounters. More disturbing is the
uneasy co-existence of this language of psychic relatedness
with the empiricist aims and methods of the research she
conducts.
Embedded within the last section of the case history are
selections from Curtiss's journal intended to "attest to
[Genie's] emotional and social development":
6/19/72. Today I took Genie into the city. We browsed

through shops for about an hour. We sang and marched
and carried on in our own nutty, special way as we
walked. Genie seemed elated and delighted by everything
I did. She commented, Genie happy. So was I. Our
relationship had developed into something special.
The final entry (2/19/75) records a breakthrough in language
as an instrument of communication used by Curtiss to
forestall a tantrum. Genie's rebellious reaction to her
learning situation parallels that of Victor's, although the
outcome is quite different:
Snacktime had gone smoothly; Genie did not seem

particularly agitated or upset. Yet as soon as we sat
down to work, a tantrum began to brew. After a few
minutes, Genie was stamping and rocking and exhibiting a
great deal of agitation and typical tantrum behavior.
Normally I would simply have told her it was time to go
outside, where she could not destroy anything, and where
she would have room to flail out and run or whatever.
This is what the foster mother had shown me to do
whenever Genie had a tantrum. Today, however, I just
sat there and began to talk to her. I still fully
expected to have to take her outside, but I was stalling
for time, since getting her outside when she's agitated
is such an ordeal. To my amazement, Genie really began
to listen to what I was saying and, to my further
amazement, began to respond to me and actually to look
me directly in the face as we talked. She still
exhibited tantrum behavior, but our talking about what
was upsetting her seemed to calm her down and ease her
anger. She paid close attention to what I said,
repeated my statements after me, reflected on them
aloud, and let their import help her deal with her
feelings. In addition to talking about the situation
which had upset her, I told her that when she was
unhappy, I felt unhappy for her, and that when she felt
good, I felt good. I went on and on about my feelings
for her, and how I felt when something upset her
terribly and I could see her unhappiness on her face,
and so forth. After her tantrum had subsided, she came
over to me, very close, and said, Love Curtiss. I don't
think I've ever felt closer to Genie (42).
Curtiss here describes a successful verbal interchange that
serves the same narrative function as Itard1s account of
Victor's spontaneous spelling of LAIT as a request for milk
in the Observatory gardens. It is meant to summarize current
achievements and to point optimistically toward a future of
open-ended progess.
The concluding paragraph of the section entitled "Case
History" comprises Curtiss's valedictory address to her
reader in the vernacular. (The second two-thirds of the
book, "Linguistic Development" and "Neurolinguistic Aspects,"
employs the specialized language of her profession.)
Curtiss's hopes for Genie make for painful reading in light
of Russ Rymers subsequent, detailed account of how this much
studied, much tested child came to grief at the hands of
scientific and social agencies:
My work with Genie continues, and Genie continues to

change, becoming a fuller person, realizing more of her
human potential. By the time this work is read, she may
have developed far beyond what is described here. That
is my hope that I will not be able to keep up with
her, that she will have the last word (42).
Subsequent developments proved very different. Rymer's book
details a tangled history of professional rivalries,
bureaucratic wrangling, legal battles and funding cuts which
produced a falling-out among the various parties, especially
between Genie's mother and the researchers. The end result
was a series of abysmal placements for Genie in abusive
foster homes under state auspices in which she regressed to a
very low level of functioning. Now in her mid-thirties,
obese and withdrawn, she lives in a state institution for
retarded adults. The story is difficult to unravel in such a
way as to assess responsibility or to construct with
324
hindsight a treatment program that might have resulted in a
better outcome.15
The split between empathy and empiricism that fissures
Curtiss's text can be implicated in the social order's dismal
failure to do more for Genie. The bulk of the energies
directed toward her were motivated and informed by a
conception of her as a "modern-day wild child." She, like
Victor, warranted attention as a natural experiment and
representative test case capable of answering crucial
questions about the nature of language and its role in human
development. What dropped out of the picture was the
specificity and uniqueness of Genie's life history. If that
had been attended to, then the problem of Genie's "re-
emergence" into the world following prolonged, debilitating
and extreme isolation might have dictated a rehabilitative
strategy focusing on problems of intersubjectivity rather
than language acquisition. In Rymer's account, this was the
position articulated by Jay Shurley, the one scientist
intimately involved with Genie who accepted responsibility
for his part in not attending more adequately to the
psychological dimensions of her situation (216). The abysmal
aftermath of Genie's rehabilitation continues to be a life of
dependency and minimal functioning within a special-care
facility for the severely retarded. This outcome contrasts
sharply with the "miracle" of Helen Keller.
325
Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan
To designate Helen Keller as a wild child may seem at first
unwarranted since her reputation rests upon her assimilation
to the cultural mainstream despite being both deaf and blind
from infancy. Nevertheless, as I will argue, her entry into
language was widely interpreted as her liberation from a
tempestuous, incoherent, ungovernable, a-social self often
defined as sub-human and animal-like. She carried with her,
then, throughout her life, the aura of a saved wild child.
The spectacle of Helen as wild child was acted out
memorably for both Broadway theater and Hollywood film
audiences in William Gibson's The Miracle Worker which staged
a prolonged and violent battle between Helen (Patty Duke) and
her teacher (Anne Bancroft) over the issue of Helen's table
manners. A contemporary review of the play in Newsweek
described this "free-for-all [in which] the child kicks,
bites, and claws her way to escape, only to be slammed
relentlessly back in her chair by her indomitable teacher
[as] one of the current theater's most brilliant tours de
force in staging and acting" (Klages 244). However, the term
"wild child" here becomes wholly metaphorical. This is
particularly the case with respect to my argument that part
of the efficacy of Keller's relationship with Anne Sullivan
rests upon the complex ways in which the pupil's wildness
mirrored crucial aspects of her teacher's childhood. This
mirroring, in turn, is but one aspect of an intimacy and co
dependency that transgressed the ordinary limits imposed on
326
human relations by such concepts as individuality and
autonomy.
In response to the publication of Helen Keller's The
Story of My Life in 1903, Mark Twain congratulated its
author:
You are a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the

world you and your other half together -- Miss
Sullivan, I mean, for it took the pair of you to make a
complete and perfect whole (Braddy 199).
The subtitle of Keller's final book, a memoir published in
1955 devoted to her life with her beloved teacher, is
subtitled A Tribute by the Foster-Child of Her Mind. In its
introduction, Nella Braddy, Sullivan's autobiographer, wrote:
As long as Annie Sullivan lived, and she died in 193 6, a

question remained as to how much of what was called
Helen Keller was in reality Annie Sullivan. The answer
is not simple. During the creative years neither could
have done without the other (Keller, Teacher 12-13; Lash
3 ) .16
The idea of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan as a
singular, composite being is commensurate with an
autobiography in which the teacher's letters and reports
about her pupil supplement the first person narrative.
Binding them together is the conception of language as a
salvational gift bestowed upon "the Phantom Helen" by her
teacher.17 Before the epiphany at the water pump, Helen was
considered (at least in retrospect) as something less than
human, a being without consciousness or soul, a creature
subject to ungovernable fits of temper who remained alienated
from her family and her culture. The Story of My Life,
however, puts wildness into play on the side of student and
teacher alike. In so doing, it presents a far more
integrated and intersubjective model of pedagogy and
rehabilitation than those reflected in the writings of Itard
and Curtiss.
Helen's entry into language at the water pump has become
inscribed in popular culture by way of The Miracle Worker.
But the epithet "miracle" refers in Sullivan's letters not to
the moment when the child conceptually joins signified with
signifier but rather to a transformation that had taken place
some sixteen days earlier:
My heart is singing for joy this morning. A miracle has

happened! The light of understanding has shone upon my
little pupil's mind, and behold, all things are changed!
The wild little creature of two weeks ago has been
transformed into a gentle child..... The great step --
the step that counts -- has been taken. The little
savage has learned her first lesson in obedience, and
finds the yoke easy. It now remains my pleasant task to
direct and mould the beautiful intelligence that is
beginning to stir in the child-soul (252).18
As manifested in the "battle royal" at the dining room
table, Helen's wildness, her ungovernable tantrums coupled
with an intransigent resistance to the codes of socialized
behavior, alienate her radically from her surroundings in a
manner comparable with Victor and Genie. Savagery and
animality are the conditions to be transcended in her passage
from "wild little creature" to soulful, "gentle child." The
scene at the water pump can only take place after her teacher
has forcibly imposed her adult will upon the child's
rebellious nature in the name of "obedience and love" (248).
328
Nevertheless, Helen's circumstances differ radically
from Victor's and Genie's. Her wildness stems not from
parental abuse and abandonment but rather from physical
handicaps and emotional needs that have gone unmet due to
objective circumstances rather than pathological enmity or
indifference. However crucial Anne Sullivan may have been in
breaking down the barriers between Helen and language, the
tempestuous, frustrated being who was thereby released may
well have owed her vibrant intactness to an early, mostly
pre-verbal history of normal hearing and vision coupled with
a mother and father who remained resolutely committed to the
well-being of their afflicted first-born child. The problem
confronting Sullivan was the reverse of that faced by Itard
and Curtiss. She found herself "cut off from all usual
approaches to the child's heart" not because Helen had lost
the ability to connect emotionally, but rather because the
child, by virtue of her special circumstances, commanded the
attention and the pity of her family to an excessive degree
(249-50). While Sullivan's disciplinary intervention
forcefully demonstrates Bettelheim's conviction that "love is
not enough" with regard to treating afflicted children,
Helen's family situation also supports his emphasis on early
emotional ties as crucial for human development.
The degree of otherness attached to Victor and Genie's
wildness constituted for their teachers the principal
motivation for the care, testing and pedagogy they received.
In contrast, a strong case can be made that the wildness
329
Sullivan encountered in the seven-year-old blind and deaf
child living in Tuscumbia, Alabama was all too familiar as a
reprise of her own childhood. At stake in their pedagogical
enterprise was not only the rehabilitation of a desperately
alienated child by means of language but also the re-
encountering on the part of her teacher of a deeply traumatic
childhood history entailing blindness, poverty, abuse,
abandonment, rage, rebeliousness and alienation. This
insight, while never explicitly stated, structures Gibson's
play and gives it much of its emotional power. The
torturously long, drawn-out confrontation at the dining room
table works dramatically because both lives are at stake.
The fact that the wildness which surfaces there derives from
both childhoods makes the twenty-year-old teachers linkage
of obedience with love an ethically meaningful and
therapeutically effective discipline. Whereas Victor and
Genie were expected to travel from the outer margins toward a
cultural center their teachers had always inhabited, Helen's
steps were ones that her teacher had previously traced from
deprivation and isolation toward some measure of autonomy and
cultural authority. Sullivan's identity as teacher was
forged in her encounter with Helen. The "miracle" worked
both ways and also suggests a structure of self
rehabilitation in Sullivan which allowed her to counteract
rather than perpetuate a family legacy of abuse and neglect
in her relations with Helen.
330
Nella Braddy's biography, Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story
Behind Hellen Keller, supplies the data with which to make
this argument. The introduction begins by presenting
Sullivan's commitment to Helen Keller as a surrogate and
alternative to the enterpise of writing and remembering her
own childhood:
[Sullivan] has spent her life since the age of fourteen

trying to forget what happened up to that time ....
When people have come asking for the story of her life
... she has pointed to Helen.
At the age of thirty-seven, Helen Keller wrote her teacher in
relation to the prospect that Anne Sullivan might one day
tell her own life story:
I feel sure that, if you write this book, I shall know

you deeply for the first time. That seems a strange
thing for me to say, does it not, when we have lived so
close to each other during thirty years. Yet so it is.
I have always realized that there are chapters in the
book of your personality which remain sealed to me (xi).
Sullivan's life and work with Keller rather than
unilaterally securing the passage of a wild child from
darkness into light by way of language, negotiated a much
more complex two-way exchange. As Helen learned language,
obedience and civility, Sullivan grew into the role of
"Teacher", thereby transcending her own past as a "blindly
and passionately rebellious ... child" growing up in a
household of dire poverty, disease, alcoholism and abuse (6).
The experience of dispensability, ill-treatment and
abandonment that stands behind the figure of the wild child
was lived out far more explicitly in Sullivan's childhood
than in Helen's.
331
Born in Massachusetts, the first child of Irish parents
fleeing the Great Famine of 1847, Sullivan grew up within a
working-class, poverty-stricken, immigrant culture. Her
earliest childhood memory consisted of the words, "She would
be so pretty if it were not for her eyes." Afflicted with
trachoma in early infancy, she experienced this judgment as a
general pronouncement upon her fate. All her life she was to
have trouble with her sight, undergoing many operations,
always living at the margins of blindness.19 Blindness and
beauty intertwine themselves at the moment when the young
teacher meets her first and only pupil. Braddy comments: "If
Helen had been deformed or repulsive, this story would have
had the same beginning but it is unlikely that it would have
had the same ending" (119).
Sullivan's mother, suffering from tuberculosis and
crippled by a household accident, diedin 1874 when her
oldest daughter was almost eight. Her death followed by only
a matter of months the deaths of Anne's younger sister Ellen,
age five, and a baby brother, age two months. Braddy
comments:
[Anne] never had an emotion connected with her mother,

only pictures, and all of the pictures, except the final
one, were to her, even as a little girl, very disturbing
(1 1 ) .
Braddy powerfully recounts a traumatic experience dating from
"the first Christmas she remembered" (10). Sullivan's
recollection has the vividness and lack of specificity
characteristic of a screen memory belonging to a child who is
332
old enough to grasp intuitively the affective side of family
dynamics without as yet a conceptual framework with which to
name them. There was "a house with long flights of steps," a
mother lying sick in a room while next door "four men, one of
them her father, sat under a lamp gambling for a turkey
hanging on the wall." The small child "reached out an
inquisitive hand for one of the cards. Someone slapped it;
someone else patted it. She went back to her mother."
Sometime later in the depths of the night "the sick woman
begged the child to ask the men to leave." The father, very
drunk, "struck her sharply on the cheek." The party breaks
up. A man stumbles and falls. "The child, her face
smarting, hoped passionately that he would die, but he rose
unsteadily to his feet, took the turkey, and went away ....
The lamp guttered out." Escape lies beyond "the open doorway
through which an icy wind was blowing .... For a frantic
moment the little girl thought she would take it," but the
imposing figure of her father bars the way (9-10).20
This scene can be read as the trauma Sullivan exorcises
in celebrating her first Christmas with the Keller family, a
moment of rejoicing and recognition for her work with Helen.
On New Years Day, 1888, Sullivan wrote her friend and
confidante, Sophia Hopkins, some nine months after arriving
in Tuscumbia Alabama:
It is a great thing to feel that you are of some use in

the world, that you are necessary to somebody. Helen's
dependence on me for almost everything makes me strong
and glad .... It was evident that every one, especially
Captain and Mrs. Keller, was deeply moved at the thought
333
of the difference between this bright Christmas and the

last, when their little girl had no conscious part in
the Christmas festivities. As we came downstairs, Mrs.
Keller said to me with tears in her eyes, "Miss Annie, I
thank God every day of my life for sending you to us;
but I never realized until this morning what a blessing
you have been to us." Captain Keller took my hand, but
could not speak. But his silence was more eloquent than
words. My heart, too, was full of gratitude and solemn
joy (283-5).
In a follow-up letter nine days later, Sullivan puts the lie
to the self-aggrandizing attempt on the part of her mentor,
Michael Anagnos, Director of Perkins School for the Blind, to
sacralize her work within the tradition of Boston Brahmin
philanthropy:
How ridiculous it is to say I had drunk so copiously of

the noble spirit of Dr. Howe that I was fired with the
desire to rescue from darkness and obscurity the little
Alabamian! I came here simply because circumstances
made it necessary for me to earn my living, and I seized
upon the first opportunity that offered itself, although
I did not suspect, nor did he, that I had any special
fitness for die work (286).
Nevertheless, in teaching Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan
gained a life in which self-respect, the respect of others
and the cultural refinements of middle-class life went hand
in hand with emotional commitment and a measure of financial
security. Helen was at least as dependent upon her mentor as
were Victor and Genie. But only in her case did the
teacher's reciprocal investment constitute a form of
intimate, lifelong co-existence characteristic of familial
rather than classroom or clinical relationships.
Sullivan's intuitions as a small child concerning the
icy winds that blew outside her father's door proved
prophetic. Upon the death of her mother and the subsequent
334
break-up of the family, the ten-year-old was sent, together
with her tubercular, five-year-old brother, Jimmy, to the
Tewksbury Almshouse, "the place where all the people nobody
wanted were sent" (15). As recounted in Braddy, this is the
place of ultimate abandonment where foundlings almost never
survive, and where brother and sister were left to make a
life for themselves amidst the crippled, the insane and the
dying. There Sullivan's brother also died. Braddy links
Jimmy and Helen in enigmatic fashion within Sullivan's
emotional economy:
She loved Jimmie. Loved him deeply, passionately,

tragically, so that it seems sometimes to her to-day,
after almost a lifetime of devotion to Helen Keller,
that she has never loved anyone since (18).
A long, detailed, vivid account written by Sullivan herself
marks her brothers death at Tewskbury as the nadir of her
childhood:
I sat down between my bed and his empty bed, and I

longed desperately to die. I believe very few children
have ever been so completely left alone as I was. I
felt that I was the only thing that was alive in the
world. The others meant nothing to me. Not a ray of
light shone in the great darkness which covered me that
day (28).
To the extent that the wildness of the wild child stems from
the absence of nurturing social and familial structures, that
state of being was lived out by the teacher rather than her
pupil. Helen comes to replace Jimmy as the person for whom
Sullivan lives, yet there is also the suggestion that the
replacement only patches over an emptiness that can never be
remedied. If Sullivan, in conventional terms, gives up her
335
life for her pupil in a manner unthinkable in the cases of
Curtiss and Itard, that sacrifice may be understandable
within the context of an early childhood experience of her
life as not worth living. Sullivan's profound alienation is
conveyed in her more general and impersonal statement quoted
by Braddy:
"The essence of poverty ... is shame. Shame to have

been overwhelmed by ugliness, shame to be the hole in
the perfect pattern of the universe" (62).
The expectations which Itard and Curtiss hold regarding
their students' acquisition of language go unfulfilled.
After nine months of arduous, painstaking work, Victor
spontaneously spells LAIT in wooden letters as a request for
a drink within the highly organized and predictable structure
of his daily excursion to the Observatory gardens. Although
Itard uses this incident to summarize the boys's
accomplishments, to prove his educability and powers of
reason, his pedagogical experiment ultimately fails. Victor
dies a frightened, confused, unsocialized and speechless
being. Curtiss, too, presents Genie as a child who has
attained the fundamentals of language, who possesses the
requisite tools to generate a theoretically unlimited number
of statements from her knowledge of words and syntactic
structures. Yet having attained the two-word stage of
sentence construction, the point at which the two-year-old
normally "takes off" in a rapidly accelerating mastery of
ever more complex and extended uses of language, Genie
retreats into a silence and unresponsiveness characteristic
336
of profound retardation or autism. Their failures both
generate and render unanswerable questions of cause and
effect. Are Victor and Genie normal children whom tragic
circumstances rendered wild, who, with better methods in
better settings, could have been re-assimilated within their
respective cultures? Or, conversely, does their failure to
learn language constitute evidence of disabilites beyond the
powers of pedagogy to significantly alter?
No such frustrating indeterminacy and undecidability
presides over the scene of Helen at the water pump. There,
having "learned her first lesson in obedience" (252), the
seven-year-old child "learned that everything has a name, and
that the manual alphabet is the key to everything she wants
to know" [Sullivan's emphasis] (256). As an an exemplary,
highly charged story the dominant culture tells about itself,
her awakening rapidly took on the status of popular myth. On
the literal level, the "miracle" involves language as "a
naming process only," to use Saussure's disparaging
characterization of the common-sense view of language (65).
As her teacher spells the letters "w-a-t-e-r" into one hand,
she experiences "the sensation of cold water rushing over"
the other (257) . The two sensations combine to produce the
concept of linguistic reference. Yet, in Helen's case, along
with the concept of naming comes the full flowering of
syntax, meaning, identity and love the sum total, in other
words of precisely those terms conventionally used to
distinguish human from animal. Helen magnificently succeeds
337
where Victor and Genie failed. Once she grasps the working
of words as acts of reference in which the relationships
between signifiers and signifieds are arbitrary and
conventional (rule governed), she proceeds to assimilate to
herself the dominant culture. She accepts fully the powers
and pleasures of language as the instruments of her salvation
and dedicates her life to inspiring others by her example.
It need not detract from the magnitude of Sullivan and
Keller's accomplishments to note that their story repeats a
prior narrative in which an inspired teacher reaches a young
deaf and blind girl through language. Fifty years earlier,
in 1837, Samuel Gridley Howe had become interested in the
case of Laura Bridgman, a child of seven left deaf and blind
by scarlet fever contracted at the age of two (Lash 15-18).
Against the medical and educational assumptions of his time,
he set out to teach her language along the same lines as
those used by Itard.
The double handicap of deafness and blindness poses in
extreme fashion the problem of communication but also
dramatizes the ability of language as a system of arbitrary
signs to overcome them. Beginning with a spoon and a key,
Howe attached the words spoon and key in raised letters to
these objects and encouraged his pupil to experience their
difference by way of touch. Next, the same words on separate
pieces of paper were placed in her hand. After a time she
grasped their connection to the labels on the spoon and key,
so that she could correctly join word and referent. After
338
many familiar objects had been tagged in this way, the words
were broken down into their component letters which she then
learned to re-arrange into their proper configuration.
Howe indicates that this method of instruction continued
"day after day, week after week" in the same painstaking,
disciplined fashion as Itard's work with Victor. But as with
Helen and unlike the Wild Boy of Aveyron, a dramatic
breakthrough occurs in which the concept of reference makes
itself felt as the opening up of the world of language. In
keeping with Enlightenment philosophy, Howe understands Laura
Bridgman's awakening as her passage from a natural, bestial
condition into a fully human status in touch with ultimate
values. As with Helen's subsequent epiphany at the water
pump, he emphasizes a single moment of revelation which
clears the way and assures the ultimate success of the
pedagogical project. Language as a naming process brings
into existence the full range of cognitive, emotional and
spiritual being:
[T]he truth began to flash upon her. Her intellect

began to work. She perceived that there was a way by
which she could herself make a sign of anything that was
in the mind, and show it to another mind, and at once
her countenance lighted up with a human expression; it
was no longer a dog or a parrot -- it was an immortal
spirit seizing upon a new link of union with other
spirits! I could almost fix upon the moment when this
truth dawned upon her mind, and spread its light to her
countenance. I saw that the great obstacle was
overcome, and that henceforward nothing but patient and
persevering, though plain and straightforward efforts
were to be used (Schwartz 71; Lash 17) .
Throughout his long life, Howe engaged in a wide range of
social reforms, from Greek liberation to abolitionism to
339
advocacy for the mentally retarded. Yet his reputation both
now and in his own day chiefly rests on "what he had
accomplished at the instant Laura Bridgman understood that by
learning the strange symbols before her she could gain
contact with humanity (Schwartz 71).
The ties connecting Bridgman and Howe with Keller and
Sullivan are many and close. In 1842 Charles Dickens
published in American Notes an account of his visit to the
Perkins Institution for the Blind which Howe headed and where
Laura resided. He pays tribute to Bridgman as the heroine of
a story already well known to his readers:
There she was before me, built up, as it were, in a

marble cell, impervious to any ray of light or particle
of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a
chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help,
that an immortal soul might be awakened.
Long before I looked upon her, the help had come
(Dickens 26-7; Lash 18).
Dickens's book, which included lengthy excerpts from Howe's
reports, inspired Helen's mother to seek help for her
daughter through Alexander Graham Bell who, having examined
the child, referred her case to Michael Anagnos, Howe's
successor as director of Perkins. Anagnos recommended Anne
Sullivan, a recent graduate. In his correspondence with
Keller's father, he referred directly to the founding legacy
of Howe and Bridgman:
The case of your little daughter is of exceeding

interest to me. Your brief description of her mental
activity reminds me possibly of Laura Bridgman, and I
would certainly go and see her if the distance which
separates us were not so great (Lash 48).
340
Unable to cope with the outside world, Bridgman had
returned to Perkins at the age of 50 where, for a time, she
lived in the same cottage as the adolescent Anne Sullivan who
had arrived from Tewksbury almshouse at age fourteen,
partially blind, illiterate and estranged from her family.
Like the other blind girls, Sullivan learned the manual
alphabet in order to converse with their school's most famous
graduate. This system, invented by Spanish monks to
communicate while maintaining their vow of silence, had been
used in France since the early eighteenth century in teaching
deaf children language. Howe had adopted it as the mode of
communication most suited to Bridgman's condition.
In preparing to take up her position as Helen's teacher,
Sullivan returned to Perkins to study the records Howe had
kept of his work with Bridgman. She thus came to Alabama
equipped with a mode of teaching based on the manual alphabet
and a model of success which proved remarkably apt. Sullivan
recognized early on that, like Howe's work with Laura, hers
with Helen was to be "the distinguishing event of [her] life"
(Keller, Story 262) . But if the Howe-Bridgman collaboration
supplied the precedent, it also constituted a limit which
Sullivan knew, early on, she and Helen were destined to
surpass. This knowledge carried with it an acute realization
of the difficulties and pressures attendant upon their joint
venture, which, whether they liked it or not, constituted a
redemption narrative of immense popular appeal.
341
The locus classicus for Helen Keller's entry into
language is Sullivan's letter of April 5, 1887 to Sophia
Hopkins, her former dormitory head at Perkins. Keller's
autobiography refers to it in a footnote by way of
corroboration (36). Yet the two stories are not the same.
Their differences are important in signaling the
contradictions that beset the enterprise of narrating the
coming into language. By definition no wild child can tell
her own story. The seemingly inexhaustible attraction of the
scene of Helen at the pump lies in the spectacle of a being
coming to consciousness through language -- becoming, as it
were, one of us. That this event should be open to different
interpretations should come as no surprise given the stakes
involved.
In Sullivan's account, written on the day of the events
described, the immediate motivating factor is Helen's
inability to distinguish mug from milk. She cannot
differentiate among container, the thing contained and the
verb "drink," a word she did not know but rather expressed
"through the pantomine of drinking whenever she spelled mug
or milk" (256). On the morning of April 5, 1887, Helen had
indicated by pointing and patting her teacher's hand her
desire to have her teacher spell the name for water. It
occurred to Sullivan that "with the help of the new word I
might succeed in straightening out the 'mug-milk'
difficulty." The epiphany then follows:
342
We went out to the pump-house, and I made Helen hold her

mug under the spout while I pumped. As the cold water
gushed forth, filling the mug, I spelled "w-a-t-e-r" in
Helen's free hand. The word coming so close upon the
sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to
startle her. She dropped the mug and stood as one
transfixed. A new light came into her face. She
spelled "water" several times. Then she dropped on the
ground and asked for its name and pointed to the pump
and the trellis, and suddenly turning round she asked
for my name. I spelled "Teacher." Just then the nurse
brought Helen's little sister into the pump-house, and
Helen spelled "baby" and pointed to the nurse. All the
way back to the house she was highly excited, and
learned the name of every object she touched, so that in
a few hours she had added thirty new words to her
vocabulary. Here are some of them: Door, open, shut,
give, go, come, and a great many more (257]).
Keller's version in The Story of My Life, written some
fifteen years after the events described, differs markedly
from Sullivan's in both tone and content. Difficulties of
reference include the word "doll" and the deaf-blind child's
frustrated inability to grasp the word's joint application to
both her older "big rag doll" and to the "new doll" her
teacher had given her as a gift from Laura Bridgman and "the
little blind children at the Perkins Institution" (35).
"Milk" drops out in Helen's later account as a site of
struggle leaving "mug" and "water" as the conceptual
differentiation waiting to be made as well as that between
new doll and old.
Keller's account has an unnamed third party actually
working the pump to draw the water as her teacher places one
of her hands under the spout while spelling water into the
other. The revelation which follows is given in the language
of religious conversion:
Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something
forgotten -- a thrill of returning thought; and somehow
the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then
that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that
was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my
soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were
barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in
time be swept away (36).
What needs theorizing is the simultaneous co-presence of
certainty and instability at the scene where "the mystery of
language was revealed." Words suddenly and completely create
a world, but in ways that can never be told the same way
twice, even within the pages of a single book.
While Sullivan's letter describes Helen's accession into
language in conceptual terms, the autobiographical narrative
makes it a matter of moral redemption played out symbolically
through dolls. In Keller's narrative, just before her walk
to the pump house, the pre-linguistic child rebels against
the efforts of her teacher to make her understand "that 'm-u-
g' is mug and that 'w-a-t-e-r' is water" by dashing her new
china doll to pieces on the floor. The gesture is described
in terms of an anarchic freedom and hedonistic joy resembling
nothing so much as the holding sway of the pleasure principle
within the Freudian unconscious:
I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the

broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret
followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the
doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there
was no strong sentiment or tenderness. I felt my
teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth,
and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my
discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I
knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This
thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a
thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure (36).
344
The absence of "strong sentiment" and "tenderness" does
not translate into the absence of forceful or even
pleasurable experience, per se, but rather connotes a space
cut off from moral accountability. "Doll" is the first gift
exchanged between teacher and pupil as well as the first word
Sullivan spells into Keller's hand. Helen deeply resented
the advent of her infant sister who replaced her as the
central object of her mother's attentions. Sometime before
Sullivan's arrival, Helen had discovered her infant sister
asleep in the doll's cradle and had responded by dumping her
out onto the floor as a result of which she "might have been
killed had [her] mother not caught her as she fell" (32). As
presented in The Miracle Worker, Helen's passionate violence
against her baby sister, had it continued, would have
necessitated her institutionalization. Sullivan was hired as
a last attempt to forestall this eventuality.
After Helen experiences "w-a-t-e-r" as a "living word"
she returns from the well-house to her own house transformed
by the "new sight that had come to [her]." There on the
threshhold she remembers the doll she has broken:
I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I

tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled
with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the
first time I felt repentance and sorrow (36-7).
The excitement of a cognitive breakthrough in Sullivan's
account becomes in Keller's the birth of moral consciousness.
Just what it is that Helen is vainly trying to put back
together remains open to interpretation.21 With language may
come the knowledge of her own aberrency and the commencement
of her struggles to assimilate to a hearing, sighted world
from which she will remain forever cut off except in
language.
The words she remembers learning in the aftermath of her
re-awakening are not those listed by her teacher. Sullivan
sets down words of transition, movement and liminality:
"Door, open, shut, give, go, come" (Swan 351). Helen cites
words that hold things in their proper place within the
conventional, family-centered, patriarchal, Judeo-Christian
order: "mother, father, sister, teacher." These words, she
continues "were to make the world blossom for me, 'like
Aaron's rod, with flowers'" (Keller, Story 37). The two
contrasting verbal sets may reflect the terms of the contract
binding Keller and Sullivan together. The teacher endows the
child with the tools necessary to negotiate a dominant order
in return for which she receives the secure "family" she
never had.
Keller's emphasis on dolls has its corollary in
Sullivan's life story as told by Braddy. The parallels are
such that it becomes possible to read dolls as a medium of
symbolic exchange by which teacher and child negotiate their
joint merger. Having been taken in by more prosperous
relatives, Anne, as a young girl, heard talk for the first
time of Christmas presents sequestered in the front room
awaiting their ritual moment of unveiling. Breaking the
adults' ban on premature entry, "she found a doll with blue
346
eyes and golden hair which her starved heart petted and loved
and claimed for its own." When the doll was handed over to
one of the legitimate daughters of the house, Anne felt
"outraged and defrauded [and] was never able to get over a
feeling that the doll was hers" (14) . Subsequently her
mother's sister was to give a permanent home to Anne's "sound
and healthy and lovable" younger sister while the "more than
half-blind ... proud, defiant, and unmanageable" older sister
and her tubercular brother were consigned to Tewksbury (15).
In Braddy's biography, the childhood memory of the doll that
was never to be hers is sandwiched between vivid descriptions
of Anne's bitter enmity and contempt for her incompetent,
intemperate and illiterate father.
Braddy's text reverts to Sullivan's love of dolls in the
context of reporting the contents of a coy letter sent to the
twenty-one year old teacher by her mentor, Michael Anagnos.
The director of Perkins is sure that Sullivan's work with
Keller will be a success "provided the citadel of her heart
could resist the bombardments of some physician, for which
profession she seemed to have an incurable weakness."
Braddy's refutation of this possibility situates Sullivan's
commitment to her pupil within a scene of infantile
regression:
He need not have worried about Annie's heart. She was

singularly free from distractions. She was with Helen
all day, and in the evening she used to sit in her
bedroom (a great old-fashioned high-ceilinged bedroom)
crooning to one of Helen's dolls ("All of my life I have
played with dolls," she confesses) and yearning for
someone to read to her (129) .
347
When not performing the role of teacher, Sullivan retires to
her own room and re-enacts her own early blindness and
isolation but with an important difference. This time around
she has Helen's dolls to keep her company.
We come back then to the symbolic breakage and
reparation centering on the Perkins doll. In Helen's acount,
April 5, 1887 ends with the picture of a happy child lying
alone in her crib longing "for the first time ... for a new
day to come" (37). Sullivan's letter ends with a morning-
after postscript which makes the epiphany at the well-house
the prelude to a consumation of relations between teacher and
pupil:
Last night when I got in bed, she stole into my arms of her
own accord and kissed me for the first time, and I thought my
heart would burst, so full was it of joy (257).
While a structure of interdependency based on reciprocal
needs arising out of difficult childhoods has been posited,
some concept of language must also have been operative in
Sullivan's singular ability to develop Helen's aptitude for
linguistic communication. Although the young, first-time
teacher was not an articulate, self-identified intellectual
in the same way as Itard and Curtiss, she did express a
theory of pedagogy in her confidential correspondence with
Sophia Hopkins. It might be argued that Sullivan's
achievements with Helen up to this point were based as much
on the precedent of Howe's work with Bridgman as they were on
any innovations of her own. But what follows bears the stamp
of original and pioneering teaching:
348
I have decided not to try to have regular lessons for

the present. I am going to treat Helen exactly like a
two-year-old child. It occurred to me the other day
that it is absurd to require a child to come to a
certain place at a certain time and recite certain
lessons, when he has not yet acquired a working
vocabulary .... But long before [a normal child] utters
his first word, he understands what is said to him. I
have been observing Helen's little cousin lately. She
is about fifteen months old, and already understands a
great deal .... These observations have given me a clue
to the method to be followed in teaching Helen language.
I shall talk into her hand as we talk into the baby's
ears. I shall assume that she has the normal child's
capacity of assimilation and imitation. I shall use
complete sentences in talking to her, and fill out the
meaning with gestures and her descriptive signs when
necessity requires it; but I shall not try to keep her
mind fixed on any one thing. I shall do all I can to
interest and stimulate it, and wait for results
[Sullivan's emphasis] (258).
Translated into practical terms, this theory of language
acquisition dictated that Sullivan talk constantly into
Helen's hand without pausing for extended explanations and
without demanding particular responses in the form of
testing. It also allowed for silence as a positive value,
affirming language as a spontaneous mode of communication
with cognitive and affective content related to daily life
rather than exclusively a rule-governed system to be learned
by rote at the behest of an adult. Finally, the child's
interest in the world, especially as manifested in "why?"
questions was allowed to take a central place in the learning
process as "the door through which [s]he enters the world of
reason and reflection" (271). This "natural method" of
teaching language aligns closely with the empirical model
proposed by Bruner of how normal children lean to talk (320).
Language emerges from the interaction of a child with an
349
adult whose job it is to establish, long before words are
spoken, a predictable format for communicating a shared
reality. Language is not something to be implanted within or
extracted from a passive, discretely separate organism but
rather an affective, dialogistic enterprise grounded in
mutuality and interdependency.
When Sullivan visited a school for the deaf with Helen,
she found their classroom methods deadly: "Nothing, I think,
crushes the child's impulse to talk naturally more
effectually than these blackboard exercises" (293). In
merging her roles of companion, caretaker and teacher,
Sullivan refused to enact the split between nurture and
pedagogy found in Victor's life with Madame Guerin and Itard.
In this she was aided by a presentiment that her work with
Helen would be "the distinguishing event of [her] life"
(263). While voiced within the context of her recognition
that Helen's education would surpass Howe's achievement with
Bridgman, it also suggests the intensity of the affective
bonds linking her with her pupil. Unlike Curtiss and Itard,
Sullivan's commitment to Keller was, in the manner of both
parent and lover, primary and life-long.
A mother confers subjectivity upon her child long before
the infant can herself enact it. She does so by engaging the
child in conversations in which she regulates the frequent
exchange of "I" and "you" by giving verbal expression to what
the child is thinking, feeling and doing. She plays both
parts, as it were, in a two-way conversation with the child
350
placed in the role of understudy. Sullivan's methods went
unhampered by the advice of experts or the need to conform to
an overarching philosophical or scientific system. She seems
to have been guided by a fierce independence of spirit and a
strong intuitive grasp of what Helen needed at any given
moment in her development. The result was a pedagogy
remarkably attuned to a dialogistic, intersubjective approach
to language as theorized by Bruner and Benveniste. While
well aware of the "deep interest" the world would soon take
in her pupil who was "no ordinary child," her protectiveness
was proprietary and parental without particular concern for
professional and scientific advancement: "My beautiful Helen
shall not be transformed into a prodigy if I can help it"
(2 6 6 ) .
But what is it that a deaf-blind child sees and hears
through the acquisiton of language? The structure of Helen
Keller's autobiography seems dictated by a high degree of
anxiety in response to this question. The story of Helen at
the water pump is recounted no less than four times as if the
moment must always be repeated and yet can never be
adequately told.22 A recurring sense of doubt, insufficiency
and incompletion hovers in the wake of language as epiphany.
Although the autobiography's title claims a singularly
possessive and unitary authority as The Story of My Life, the
protagonist's words take up only a quarter of the three
hundred and seventy-four pages. The remaining space is
devoted to an elaborate and intricate supplementation called
351
forth by Keller's narrative. If the wild child represents
the scandal of a human being without language, and Helen
Keller the most conspicuous avatar of a child "saved" by
means of language, she nevertheless gives rise to the
opposite and correlative fear of radical inauthenticity: the
prospect that she is wholly and exclusively the product of
language as a self-enclosed system cut adrift from reference
and experience.
If her experience at the well-house gives her a
"strange, new sight" and awakens her soul, that
transformation remains a matter of language connected to a
tactile, kinaesthetic experience categorically different from
what the sighted-hearing world perceives and thereby knows.
To accept Keller as author is to radically destabilize
traditional assumptions binding sign and referent. For her
the experiences of sight and sound are exclusively
linguistic. She, like the post-modern subject, can be seen
to be spoken through language since she is less able than
other authors to sustain the illusion that she possesses
mastery over her own authentic and unique experience of the
world.
This is why the episode of the "Frost King" mattered so
much to all concerned and why the final section of The Story
of My Life centers on the question of "literary style." In
1891 at the age of eleven, Helen sent Anagnos a story she had
written for him as a birthday gift. The Director of Perkins
allowed it to be published as a sign of the child's
352
precocity. But with publication came the wholly unexpected
and unwelcome news that Helen's story was a close rewriting
of a story to be found in a children's book by Margaret T.
Canby entitled Birdie and His Fairy Friends. A tribunal to
investigate Helen's "plagiarism" was set up and the child
forced to undergo questioning in the absence of her teacher.
The traumatic loss of innocence forced upon teacher and
pupil alike by this affair centered on language as
treacherously inauthentic.23 If Keller could write a
fictional story as her own without memory of its origins as
the creation of another, how could she ever know what
experience was truly hers? The autobiography, by way,
perhaps, of expiation, exorcism or astute public relations,
prints the two stories side by side in double columns (349-
3 55). What makes the juxtaposition especially poignant is
the centrality of color in a narrative which coyly explains
the dramatic changes in fall foliage as the work of careless
fairies who fail to carry out Jack Frost's instructions.
The accusations of duplicity and plagiarism had "a
deadening effect" on Keller and Sullivan and put an end to
all further attempts at writing fiction. John Macy, the
editor of Helen's autobiography, takes "this little story" as
emblematic of "all the questions of language and the
philosophy of style" and from it draws the following
conclusion: "Whoever makes a sentence of words utters not his
wisdom, but the wisdom of the race whose life is in the
words, though they have never been so grouped before" (360-
353
1). Nevertheless, Keller's sentimental and idealist
conception of literature leaves no room for contemplating the
inauthenticity of language as anything but the devil's work:
It made us feel so bad to think that people thought we

had been untrue and wicked. My heart was full of tears,
for I love the beautiful truth with my whole heart and
mind (356) .
Mark Twain was among those who, in a letter to Helen,
responded passionately to the injustice of the "Frost King"
episode as presented in The Story of My Life:
"Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic

and grotesque was that 'plagiarism' farce! As if there
was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or
written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul -- let
us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the
actual and valuable material of all human utterances --
is plagiarism" (Lash 146).
A comparison between Keller's writing and Twain's
suggests that the vehemence of Twain's outrage may be related
to the most interesting and difficult questions of
autobiography, identity and authorship. Twain met Keller as
a school girl in New York City and recounted the origins of
his famous pen name, how it derived from the call of the
leadsman on the Mississippi riverboats signifying a depth of
twelve feet, i.e. water safe for navigation. Twain had
himself appropriated it upon the death of another newspaper
writer, an old riverboat captain whose portentious authority
the young cub pilot had seen fit to lampoon in print (Paine
219). Helen had interrupted the nation's most celebrated man
of letters to comment on his nom de plume, "And you made it
famous" (Lash 193). Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's
354
biographer, describes how important the pen name was in
consolidating and disseminating the newspaper writings of the
young western adventurer whose unsigned letters to the editor
"copied and quoted all along the Coast .., were easily
identified with one another, but not with a personality"
(2 2 1 ) .
Twain's passionate defense of Keller against charges of
plagiarism may stem, in part, from his recognition of Helen
as a fellow traveler. She, like him, was a practitioner of
the art of translating life into literature. More
specifically, the paragraph that immediately precedes her
description of her walk to the well-house describes her pre-
linguistic existence in terms that may well have been
borrowed, at least in part, from Twain's Life on the
Mississippi:
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed

as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the
great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the
shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited
with beating heart for something to happen? I was like
that ship before my education began, only I was without
compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how
near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the
wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on
me in that very hour (35).
The relevant passage in Twain's youthful autobiography embeds
"Mark Twain" as a sign of authorship within a scene which
might vividly convey to a sighted-hearing person the terrors
involved for the deaf-blind person in making her way in the
world. It is with shock and horror that the young Samuel
Clemens comes to understand that, if he is to successfully
355
master his chosen profession of riverboat pilot, he must
learn the landmarks of the river in minute detail both coming
and going. But what causes him to express a desire to give
up on the enterprise altogether is the impossible expectation
that he should come to know the river without benefit of
sight:
" [A]nd more than that, I must actually know where these
[landmarks] are in the dark, unless these guests are
gifted with eyes that can pierce through two miles of
solid blackness. I wish the piloting business was in
Jericho and I had never thought of it" (39).
The leadsman takes his bearings by calling out "Mark Twain"
at night in the course of a narrative of heroic navigation.
Mr. Bixby, the riverboat pilot, risks "a quarter of a million
dollars worth of steamboat and cargo ... and maybe a hundred
and fifty human lives into the bargain" in running a
particularly shallow and treacherous portion of the
Mississippi in complete darkness. For his exploits a fellow
pilot confers upon the daring Bixby the following homeric
epithet: "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning
pilot!" (42-3) .
When Twain does come to know the river fully, he
experiences a fall from grace along Lacanian lines:
Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and

had come to know every trifling feature that bordered
the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of
the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I
had lost something, too. I had lost something which
could never be restored to me while I lived. All the
grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the
majestic river! (53-4) .
356
Here, once again, for all the necessity and glory of language
as the distinguishing feature of human subjectivity, its
exercise inaugurates the nostalgic loss of pre-verbal
plenitude unencumbered by the demands of culture. The wild
child who roams the forest or shatters dolls on a whim
without thought of consequences is at one with the untrained
boy who must trade in the majesty of his beloved river for
the identity and livelihood of a steamboat pilot.
Helen's image of a ship lost in the fog as a metaphor
for her pre-linguistic condition invokes, at least
indirectly, Twain's writings. Whatever actual experience her
readers may have with imminent shipwreck, their knowledge of
it is hopelessly embedded in Twain and a long literary
tradition of seafaring tales. The reader likewise hears
echoes in this paragraph of Maeterlink, Hugo and Southern
Christian oratory. The rhetorical element stands out
because, for this particular author, the referent cannot be
posited outside the tissue of texts which she puts into play.
Through language Keller presumes to share with us a common
experience, one which by virtue of her disabilities, she
could not possibly have except in words. In acceding to her
presumption, we become aware, to lesser or greater extent,
that our processing of her metaphor is inauthentically and
derivatively linguistic, that we too are products of other
people's language.
Amidst the general critical acclaim which greeted The
Story of My Life, a dissenting review published in The Nation
stands out. It charged the book with lacking "literary
veracity" since the author's presumption to be like other
people "could be attained only by the sacrifice of truth."
The anonymous reviewer held out for the moral primacy and
unproblematic independence of experience as that which
constitutes identity and pre-exists verbal formulation:
[I]f she could only realise that it is better to be

one's self, however limited and afflicted, than the best
imitation of somebody else that could be achieved.
Keller responded with a metaphor of herself as a shipwrecked
sailor on a strange island where the language and customs
were unknown:
I was one, they were many, there was no chance of

compromise. I must learn to see with their eyes, to
hear with their ears, to think in their language, and I
bent all my energies to the task (Lash 293).
As an author, Keller faced a life-long dilemma. The world
wanted to listen only when she spoke and wrote about herself
as a heroic victim struggling to overcome immense
difficulties. It disavowed her socialist, pacifist and
feminist polemics as orchestrated productions of Sullivan and
Macy. Paradoxically, she was limited to a single subject,
herself, by virtue of that attribute she sought to overcome,
namely her profound difference from the mainstream. Keller
recognized that she was trapped in circumstances that spelled
her economic death as an author:
It was a heavy blow, for it meant that she had to give

up hope of supporting herself with her pen. She was
written out on the exasperating subject of herself and
she had no audience for anything else (Braddy:
Introduction to Keller, Teacher 15)
358
A more devastating critique of Keller's relationship to
language appeared in 1933 in Thomas D. Cutsforth's The Blind
in School and Society, an important revisionist account of
blindness and its cognitive and developmental consequences
for the child. Rather than regarding blindness as a single
sense whose absence can be compensated for in the process of
attaining normality, he argued that blind children organized
their worlds qualitatively differently from their sighted
peers. His most radical critical move was to credit Helen's
pre-linguistic world before the advent of Anne Sullivan as
more authentic than the transformation which followed. He
saw her trading in her "experiential reality and situational
insight" for an "education in visual verbal concepts." Worse
still, he saw her as the victim of a formal, literary mode of
expression imposed by her teacher at the expense of her own
experience. He interprets relations between teacher and
pupil as nothing less than a process of subjugation and
engulfment:
In order for one to comprehend this situation, in which

one personality capitulated completely to a system of
education or another person's values, it is necessary to
understand the entire life history of the process. In
this case the process was a lifetime, and the
capitulation took place on an infantile level, when the
personal affection and confidence of the child Helen
were given completely to her teacher. From that time
on, Helen's world contracted by expanding into that of
her teacher. Her teacher's ideals became her ideals,
her teacher's likes became her likes, and whatever
emotional activity her teacher experienced she
experienced.
John Macy had defended Keller's autobiography against The
Nation by pointing out that had Helen not acceded to language
359
in the dominant mode "we should never have heard of her."
His presumption, of course, is that for us not to have heard
of Helen Keller equates with a condition of non-existence,
or, still worse, a life of perpetual, irredeemable suffering.
Cutsforth's reversal makes room for a re-evaluation of
language and experience such that the stakes are not so all
or nothing. There may be more than a single, universal,
hegemonic language in play and some languages may be more
tyrannical than others. Cutsforth compares Keller's pseudo
sighted, inauthentic prose unfavorably to the writings of
other deaf-blind authors who successfully convey their world
in terms of their own different yet whole and integrated
kinaesthetic experience. Cutsforth demands room on Helen's
strange island for negotiation on behalf of difference rather
than wholesale and unquestioning capitulation to the norm.
Cutsforth's critique enables a re-thinking of the famous
"battle-royal" at the family dining table as inscribed into
popular culture by The Miracle Worker. As presented there,
Helen's grabbing of food off the plates of her fellow family
members constitutes a sign of her wildness and initiates the
confrontation by which her teacher feels morally obligated to
bring her into conformity with common dining etiquette.
However, in the deaf-blind child's world where the sense of
touch is paramount and isolation a constant threat, her
actions may be interpreted quite differently, as an authentic
if unconventional mode of interaction. Far from being a
question of table manners, Helen, in resisting the demands of
360
her teacher, may be defending the only mode of being in the
world which to her "makes sense." Cutsforth's challenge to
the myth of the pre-linguistic Helen as a wild child
radically destabilizes the entire Helen Keller story.
Of course, The Story of My Life participates fully in
the dominant narrative which celebrates uncritically Keller's
entry into language as a direct consequence of her accession
to the manners and mores of the sighted, hearing world.
Walker Percy's view, fully in accord with that presented in
Gibson's play, prevails as the cultural icon which situates a
"before and after" on either side of her epiphany at the
water pump.
Before Helen had behaved like a good responding

organism. Afterward she acted like a rejoicing symbol-
mongering human. Before, she was little more than an
animal. Afterward, she became wholly human (38, Lash
585) .
Without language the deaf-blind child is wild. With language
comes salvation through culture as a universal, transcendent,
intrinsically beneficent enterprise. Yet the story gets told
so often and with such passionate variation as to suggest a
doubting itch concerning the "truth" of language which no
amount of scratching will appease.
Conclusion
According to Herodotus, Psamtik I, an Egyptian King of the
late seventh century B.C.E., set out to establish his
people's cultural pre-eminence over the Phrygians by way of
researching the origin of language.24 Relying on an ancient
361
version of the theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,
the ruler conducted perhaps the first experiment in
linguistics, one, interestingly enough, that could be said to
have produced, albeit unwittingly, the first wild children.
The king commanded that "two children of the common
sort" be taken from their mothers at birth and sequestered
with a herdsman in a remote location where they might be fed
on goats' milk and remain completely cut off from any
exposure to human language. "His object herein was to know,
after the indistinct babblings of infancy were over, what
word they would first articulate." The experiment proved
successful in that, at the age of two, the children said
"becos" which turned out to be the Phyrgian word for bread.
Whereupon "the Egyptians yielded their claims and admitted
the greater antiquity of the Phrygians." This experiment
posits language as co-extensive with cultural identity and
understands early childhood development as a recapitulation
of human cultural evolution. Psamtik's experiment forcibly
and artificially reconstructs a "natural" history for two
infants before language and culture as a means of reproducing
the first (original, primordial) language. It comes as close
as possible to abandoning infants to the wild while still
retaining the ability to monitor and observe.
In Herodotus's account, the ethics involved are never at
issue. While it may be presumed that the lives of the two
non-royal children were of no particular concern when weighed
against state interests, it should also be said that the
362
experiment employs procedures predicated upon an innatist
conception of human development in which no special harm to
the children is conceived to ensue. The two two-year-olds
say "bread" and presumably go on from there through the
normal course of development. But what will become
interesting in terms of Victor, Genie and Helen Keller is an
opposing theory of child development and language acquisition
based upon the conviction that the ability to speak and to
comprehend words spoken by others is acquired within a social
context rather than passively inherited by way of innate
endowment. Within the latter school of thought, Psamtik's
experiment becomes a perfect, if barbaric, model for
producing wild children whose relationship to language and to
normal development is thereby put profoundly and
traumatically at risk.
A trace element of this second point of view may be
present in Herodotus in the form of a Greek version of the
tale which the author includes but denigrates as "foolish."
This alternative narrative has the Egyptian king place the
children not in the care of a herdsman but rather with "women
whose tongues he had previously cut out." While cultural
chauvinism and fierce misogyny presumably underwrite the
Greek rendition, it may also express, in displaced form, an
intuition of the violence the experiment perpetrates upon the
two infants along with their female caregivers.
We here return to the realm of the unspeakable in its
complex double sense, both to a world without language and to
363
a zone of behavior and experience whose aberrance places it
beyond the scope of ordinary language. All cultures seek to
guarantee a structure of material and psychological support
enabling the infant to develop within certain parameters.
(This may be as close to a cultural universal as we can
come.) In certain instances, the violation of this inter-
generational covenant by way of abandonment, neglect and
abuse gives rise within the Western imagination to the figure
of the wild child whose radical alterity poses a challenge
and a threat in response to which the question of language
acquisition becomes central.
On the one hand, Victor, Genie and Helen become objects
of linguistic fascination on the order of Psamtik's infants.
As Roman Jakobson remarks in Studies on Child Language and
Aphasia speech pathology provides fertile ground for the
analysis of how normal language works (39). This chapter has
explored in some detail the various different ways in which
each childs difficulties provoked insight into the
structures and functions of language. On the other hand,
these explorations took place within a framework of radical
disavowal and reversal. Explanations of language as
constitutive of culture become caught up in barbarism as the
unique potential of human beings. Taussig writes of the
torture practiced upon the Putumayo Indians by the agents of
the Arana Brothers' Anglo-Peruvian rubber company in a manner
which may help clarify the difficulties inherent in coming to
terms with the actions of Genie's father:
364
Reading the reports of this barbaric situation ... one

senses that itis next to impossible to write or talk
about this, so monstrous it was, and is. But perhaps in
pointing to my usage of theterm "barbaric" you will get
the point you will see that my convenient term of
reference, barbarism, does double service, registering
horror and disgust at this application of power, while
at the same time ratifying one of that power's most
essential images, that of the barbaric the savage,
the brute, and so forth. In condemning violence as
savage, I endorse the very notion of the savage. In
other words, the imaginative range essential to the
execution of colonial violence in the Putumayo at the
turn of the century was an imagining drawn from that
which the civilized imputed to the Indians, to their
cannibalism especially, and then mimicked (Mimesis 65).
At the heart of researches into the wild child as the key to
language is both a terror of and pre-occupation with the
worst nightmares of infant suffering at the hands of those
adults responsible for their care and well-being. The case
of Helen Keller suggests that language as reparation and
recuperation functions most powerfully when the trauma of
abandonment circulates reciprocally and intersubjectively
within the experience of teacher and pupil alike. Likewise,
the pedagogical success of Anne Sullivan would seem to hinge
on a conception of language as a practice rather than a
structure, a performance of intersubjectivity rather than an
abstract system to be unilaterally imposed in the name of
civilization.
The figure of the wild child by virtue of its alterity,
its enigmatic silence beyond the pale of social life, calls
forth a reconsideration of language, what it is and how it
works. The insights gained through the passionate, patient
efforts of teachers, doctors and social scientists to make
365
words "mean" for children who have been cut off from the
normal course of development remain fragmented and ambiguous.
The accounts of Victor, Genie and Helen reflect three very
different relationships between the wild child and the
functioning of language, each one fraught with many
unanswered questions.
It is doubtful whether Victor's spontaneous production
of the wooden letters arranged to spell LAIT in order to
elicit his accustomed glass of milk at the Observatory
gardens demonstrates a grasp of language. Walker Percy
defines sign and symbol in such a way as to isolate and
clarify what makes (human) language categorically different
from all other (animal) behaviors.
A sign is something that directs our attention to

something else .... A symbol ... does not direct at
all. It "means" something else. It somehow comes to
contain within itself the thing it means. The word ball
is a sign to my dog and a symbol to you. If I say ball
to my dog, he will respond like a good Pavlovian
organism and look under the sofa and fetch it. But if I
say ball to you, you will simply look at me and, if you
are patient, finally say, "What about it?" The dog
responds to the word by looking for the thing; you
conceive the ball through the word ball (173).
In a subsequent essay, Percy will distinguish in similar
fashion between Helen Keller's earlier learned response to
her teacher's spelling the word cake into her hand -- she
will go in search of a piece of cake to eat -- and her
subsequent epiphany at the water pump. In the latter case,
"When Helen Keller learned that water was water, she then
wished to know what other things 'were' until the world
she knew was named" (173). Victor's sign usage remains tied
366
to a world of cause and effect. There is no indication in
the boy's gesture that a conceptual equivalency has been
established between the word LAIT and the object of his
desire whereby LAIT is milk within a system of reference
(substitution) which maps the world. As depicted in
Truffaut's film, Victor's use of the wooden letters is
indexical in the sense that he places them on the table in
place of the absent bowl of milk. Victor's letters take on
meaning not in relation to the set of arbitrary (symbolic)
relations between words and their referents, but rather by
way of contiguity and metonymy. The production of LAIT is
inseparable from a whole chain of sequential, familiar
actions, objects and events of which his new gesture becomes
a part.
For Peirce a word is a symbol defined as "something
which stands to somebody for something in some respect or
capacity" and thus demands in Percy's terms "a triadic theory
of meaning" (163-2). Meaning triangulates among sender,
receiver and the message that passes between them. The word
water spelled into Helen's hand stands to her (for the first
time) for the cold liquid flowing over her other hand in a
relation of substitutive equivalency as a particular instance
of a naming process that extends infinitely. The act of
denotation is generically different "from everything else
that we know about the universe" because the production of
meaning in a sentence "is not isomorphic with the world event
or relation the sentence is about" (154, 176). While the
367
blind and deaf child will experience water quite differently
from her sighted-hearing teacher, they will henceforth share
a common linguistic domain within which "water," "milk,"
"mug," "cup" and "drink" are all related but also
distinguished one from the others within a self-enclosed
system of differences.
Reference, however, is not enough. Genie uses words to
name objects, people and events in the world, yet remains
woefully limited in her grasp of language. Curtiss's
investigations, tests and analyses are based on a Chomskyan
conception of language as encoded at the level of the genes.
She therefore lacks a theoretical frame in which Genie's
problem's with language can be correllated meaningfully with
a childhood of brutally enforced silence. Benveniste's
distinction between language as a passive system and speech
as the mobilization of that system in the service of enacting
subjectivity within an exchange of subject-object ("I"-"you")
positions might have allowed for a more psychodynamically
oriented approach to the problem of Genie's rehabilitation.
And finally, by way of a countervailing optimism, Helen
Keller writes her life in a sentimental and idealist prose.
In her case, there is no question of language deficit, but
rather the fear of linguistic excess. The danger is that
Helen succeeds far too well in mastering language as a system
of internally related differences, thereby exposing "the
mythology of the real and of language as transparent"
(Taussig, Shamanism 35). Her literariness calls attention to
368
itself. Metaphor, in Roman Jacobsen's terms, is that which
allows for metalanguage, language about language. Determined
to live in a world organized around sight and sound, Keller's
life-long task was to effect a translation through language
of her own tactile, olfactory and kinaesthetic experience
into the two dominant modes of perception and communication,
hearing and sight. A necessity in such an enterprise is the
substitution of one set of terms for another by way of
metaphor.
In invoking the image of a ship "at sea in a dense fog"
as a metaphor for her condition, Keller connects language
(again metaphorically) with "plummet and sounding-line" and
thereby refers, at least implicitly, to the name and writings
of Mark Twain. There is a complex interchange here between
the worlds of sense perception and language. On one level
Cutsforth is right that Keller's writing is inauthentic since
she seeks to characterize herself by way of literary
convention in terms of an experience that she herself could
never have. Yet the critique of inauthenticity relies on the
naive assumption that language is not also a "source of
experience" (Taussig, Shamanism 35). The false corollary of
this position would be that the sighted-hearing world
understood the image-concept of being "at sea in fog" in some
more direct, non-literary mode. Peirce's theory of semiosis
presumes that the product of any particular instance of
language usage is not a truth founded in some more or less
exact correspondence with the world, but rather results in
369
another sign, an "interpretant" defined as the receiver's re-
creation/re-interpretation of the sender's message. Language
then can be thought about with the help of Benveniste and the
wild child as an open-ended signifying chain carrying
meanings which, while never identical, always overlap and
thereby bind together intersubjectively a species of animal
that has yet to come to terms with that which constitutes its
difference.
The dream of the wild child as a tabula rasa affording a
clean slate on which to write the origins and operations of
language would seem to be an Enlightenment chimera.
Language is in the nature of man, and he did not

fabricate it. We are always inclined to that naive
concept of a primordial period in which a complete man
discovered another one, equally complete, and between
the two of them language was worked out little by
little. This is pure fiction. We can never get back to
man separated from language and we shall never see him
inventing it. We shall never get back to man reduced to
himself and exercising his wits to conceive of the
existence of another. It is a speaking man whom we
find in the world, a man speaking to another man, and
language provides the very definition of man (Benveniste
728-9).
The consideration of language apart from a "thick"
description of the one who does or does not speak creates a
wasteland of bad science and human suffering. Context is
all, at once constitutive of and inseparable from the process
of making meaning through words. Victor, Genie and Keller
relate to language in such different ways as to dramatically
attenuate the usefulness of "wild child" as a unifying
concept. The history and usage of the term reflects ongoing
anxieties as to the relation of language to being (culture to
370
nature), anxieties which no particular image, paradigm or
narrative has yet been able to alleviate.
371
1For a comprehensive analysis of the wild child as "mute and terrifying
witness to the permeability of the species barrier," see Young (13).
For an important discussion of wildness as an idea see White.
2For a theoretically informed discussion of Tarzan of the Apes as a
colonialist text symptomatically enmeshed in problems of language and
translation see Cheyfitz.
3For a brilliant exegesis of alterity in relation to representation see
Taussig, Mimesis and Alteritv.
4A wonderfully playful and trenchant mobilization of this trope for a
theory of narrative can be found in Le Guin.
5The bibliography on the wild child is diverse and idiosyncratic. As a
locus of philosophical debate as to the origins and functions of
language see Brown and Langer. For the wild child's close affinity to
the figure of the wild man and wild woman see Bernheimer, and Dudley and
Novak. For conflicting accounts and diverse interpretations of
particular instances of wild children see Armen, Gesell, Maclean,
Malson, Shattuck, Singh and Zingg. Additional texts are cited below in
the course of my arguments.
6For a discussion of Pinel see Lane whose meticulous researches and
comprehensive treatment of Victor's case make him the single best modern
source on Victor.
7For a judicious, historical and non-moralistic account of the
phenomenon of child abandonment as a widespread social practice see
Boswell.
372
8For a persuasive recent formulation of the infant as an autonomous,
differentiated being see Daniel Stern.
9For an insightful analysis of the philosophical issues at stake in the
debates between Piaget, Chomsky and Bruner see Atkinson.
10For an important discussion of the history and politics of teaching
language to the deaf (and Itard's complex role therein) see Sacks.
1:LFor a discussion of the origins of deaf-mute intstruction see Lane
(163-182).
12The best summary of the opposing sides of the issue can be found in
Lane (163-182).
13More recently, both Curtiss and her book figure as primary sources in
a meticulously researched, revisionist account of the case (Rymer). I
am indebted to Rymer for a comprehensive overview of the issues involved
in Genie's case as well as for an account of Genie's subsequent fate.
14Lenneberg's "critical period" hypothesis postulates that a first
language cannot be learned either normally or at all after the onset of
adolescence (Curtiss 207).
15For a history of the controversy from conflicting points of view, see
Rymer, Angier, and Rigler.
16Lash remains the most comprehensive contemporary source for
interpreting the Sullivan-Keller relationship.
17The epithet is Braddy's and appears in her introduction to Keller's
Teacher (11).
18In contrast to Sullivan's account, Gibson's play links Helen's entry
into language directly with the earlier "battle royal" at the dinner
table in that it portrays the pumping of water into Helen's hand as part
373
of Sullivan's disciplinary regime: the willful, rebellious child had
again violated the decorum of the dining room by spilling a pitcher of
water; consequently Sullivan forces the miscreant outside to the water
pump to refill the empty vessel.
19For a compelling contemporary account of the experience of going blind
see Hull.
20A remarkably similar Christmas trauma rendered from a small girl's
point of view is given in Kaye Gibbons' novel, Ellen Foster. Its
epigraph, the inscription to Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance,"
constitutes a recipe of sorts for the making of a wild child:
Cast the bantling on the rocks,

Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
21For a suggestive, Winnicottean interpretation see Swan who makes
exemplary use of critical theory to analyze Keller's complex
relationship to language and authorship.
22The four narratives appear as follows in The Story of M y Life: 1)
Keller's autobiographical account (36-7); 2) Sullivan's letter of April
5, 1887 (257); 3) an excerpt from Sullivan's first report published in
the Perkins Annual Report for 1887 (278-9); 4) Keller's earlier version
quoted by the book's editor John Macy from Youth's Companion published
in 1892 (364). The event is partially retold a fifth time in the form
of a facsimile of a braille manuscript with verbal equivalents of the
famous passage which begins: "I left the well-house eager to learn"
(19) .
23Joseph Lash entitles his highly detailed account of this prolonged and
intricate controversy "Expulsion from Eden" (132). Swan analyzes the
incident from the perspective of postmodern literary theory.
24I am indebted to Rymer's discussion of this tale as the founding story
of linguistics.
Conclusion
Carolyn Kay Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of
Two Lives is a multi-layered narrative which interweaves
recollections of childhood with marxist history, feminist
theory, fairy tales, and psychoanalytic case history. In
telling her story, Steedman alternately makes use of and
critiques these various modes of thought and feeling
according to how they further or hinder expression of the
lived experiences of herself and her mother. She uses her
memories of a post-war, working-class, London childhood, to
reconstruct the geographical, psychological, social,
economic, political, and cultural forces which shaped the
lives of herself, her younger sister, her mother and father.
The book's structure defies synopsis, but works against
the grain of the dominant, commonly accepted conventions of
narrative. She uses her mother's life as a touchstone for
critiquing those schools of cultural criticism "that cannot
deal with everything there is to say about my mother's life"
(6). At the heart of her method is an insistence on a
determining, class-based marginality which condemns her
mother's story to a darkness of unintelligibility and
misrecognition even as it structures and confirms the
centrality and accessibility of the bourgeois family romance.
At the end when she has told as much as she can, having
brought all her available cultural resources -- historical,
literary, psychoanalytic to bear upon the task of
376
explaining her mother through herself (and herself through
her mother), she makes a complex, Prospero-like gesture of
renunciation:
Using devices like this, the story forms. I know that

the compulsions of narrative are almost irresistible:
having found a psychology where once there was only the
assumption of pathology or false consciousness to be
seen, the tendency is to celebrate this psychology, to
seek entry for it to a wider world of literary and
cultural reference; and the enterprise of working-class
autobiography was designed to make this at least a
feasible project. But to do this is to miss the
irreducible nature of all our lost childhoods: what has
been made has been made out on the borderlands. I must
make the final gesture of defiance, and refuse to let
this be absorbed by the central story; must ask for a
structure of political thought that will take all of
this, all these secret and impossible stories, recognize
what has been made out on the margins; and then,
recognizing it, refuse to celebrate it; a politics that
will, watching this past say "So what?" and consign it
to the dark (144).
It is unclear to me what is being relegated to oblivion.
Whether it is the injustices and inequalities of a
patriarchal, class society -- that which makes her mother's
story "impossible" -- or, in fact, the story itself. In the
latter case, why write at all? Must writing then always
collude with structures of power, thereby making a
complicitous "celebration" inevitable? Is the only
alternative a refusal of narrative resulting in a willed
darkness?
My questioning of Steedman's final refusal of narrative
aligns tellingly with her brilliant analysis of Sigmund Freud
and Henry Mayhew as two middle-age men who demand accounts
from a young woman and a young girl respectively (Dora and
the watercress seller) only to express dissatisfaction with
377
the forms their stories take. Steedman is conscious
throughout of the impossibility of telling her mother's
story. One of her primary concerns is to indict a social
landscape which denies her mother the right and ability to
have a story at all.
Landscape for a Good Woman is a daughter's narrative of
her mother's life. It is the story of a working-class
existence whose possibility of telling is contingent upon the
daughter's moving out of it into the professional, academic
realm of cultural studies. The multifarious, contradictory,
and finally unresolved interpretations which come to inflect
her use of the word "good" with regard to both mother and
daughter the "good" child, the "good" mother, the "good"
woman -- underscore the complexity of the motivations which
drive the narrative. It constitutes a daughter's homage to
her mother, an articulation of her origins, actions and
desires, all of which are made to seem illegitimate by a
dominant culture which would exclude her as a being of no
account. By the same token, the book provides a framework
within which a daughter can call her mother to account. As
an autobiographical record of a post-war childhood, it
delineates a structure in which the daughter suffered greatly
at the hands of a mother who treated her both as a "finely
balanced investment"(42) and as a child who had no right to
exist except as an extension of her mother's world:
It was two weeks before her death that I went to see her
that time, the last time: the first meeting in nine
years, except for the day of my father's funeral. The
378
letter announcing my visit lay unopened on the mat when

she opened the door; and an hour later I came away
believing that I admired a woman who could, in these
circumstances and in some pain, treat me as if I had
just stepped round the corner for a packet of tea ten
minutes before, and talk to me about this and that, and
nothing at all. But I was really a ghost who came to
call. That feeling, the sense of being absent in my
mother's presence, was nothing to do with the illness,
was what it had always been like. We were truly
illegitimate, outside any law of recognition: the mirror
broken, a lump of ice for a heart (142) .
Yet throughout there is a highly principled, politically
committed insistence that Steedman's account be "a story of
two lives," held in historical tension, one with the other,
and mutually revelatory. There is room in the narrative for
an understanding and acceptance of a woman who refuses to
enact the role of exemplary, self-sacrificing mother. The
accountability, too, is ultimately placed elsewhere,
transcending the personal failures and inadequacies of the
relations between mother and daughter to embrace the social
and historical circumstances which largely determined them.
Steedman succinctly and vividly particularizes the
shaping influence of extra-familiar forces upon her post-war
British childhood:
I think I would be a very different person now if orange

juice and milk and dinners at school hadn't told me, in
a covert way, that I had a right to exist, was worth
something. My inheritance from those years is the
belief (maintained always with some difficulty) that I
do have a right to the earth.
She then grounds her personal insight, infused with memory,
in history and in an approach to childhood that comprises the
epigraph to this dissertation's introduction:
I think that had I grown up with my parents only twenty

years before, I would not now believe this, for children
379
are always episodes in someone else's narrative, not

their own people, but rather brought into being for
particular purposes.
Finally, in a complex double movement both backward and
forward in time, she relates her experience of state
intervention to her mother's less fortunate life and to a
marxist vision of a better future:
What my mother lacked, I was given; and though vast

inequalities remained between me and others of my
generation, the sense that a benevolent state bestowed
on me, that of my own existence and the worth of that
existence -- attenuated, but still there -- demonstrates
in some degree what a fully material culture might offer
in terms of physical comfort and the structures of care
and affection that it symbolizes, to all its children
(122-3) .
I present Steedman's work here at the end as an
exemplary project that brings together at least four of the
themes that structure the present dissertation. 1) The
profound importance of childhood as a subject whose structure
and content are neither obvious nor clearly separable from a
host of related issues. An interweaving of history,
sociology, psychology and literary criticism only begins to
trace the lines of force that structure both the lived
experience and the narrative reconstruction of any given
childhood. Furthermore, the process of writing about
children and childhood entails a formidable set of pre
existing stories, myths, convictions and assumptions about
the nature of children and the ways in which they do and do
not register on the cultural landscape. 2) Childhood as an
unstable and destabilizing interaction between memory and
380
history. The narratives that result, however powerful and
empowering, cannot be grounded empirically:
Memory alone cannot resurrect past time, because it is

memory itself that shapes it, long after historical time
has passed (29).
Yet childhood is a kind of history, the continually

reworked and re-used personal history that lies at the
heart of each present. What is brought forward for
interpretation is structured by its own figurative
devices, arranged according to the earliest perceptions
of the entities in the real world that give us our
metaphors, and the social reality and meaning that
metaphor co-joins (12 8).
3) Childhood as a tale of at least two lives; a story of
dependency and power shaped by the interactions between a
child and one or more primary caregivers. To tell one life
at the expense of another's, while easier and more often
done, remains less interesting and compelling than a
narrative which conjoins adult and child, each held hostage
to the other in terms of retrospection and developmental
expectations. 4) Finally and perhaps most crucially,
childhood as a partial and incomplete construct that always
opens out onto social and cultural phenomena whose workings
can be neither conceived nor contained within the domestic
setting. The life of the child cannot be sheltered from the
winds that blow outside the family's door.
381
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C o n stru ction s o f ch ild h ood

Dimock, George, Ph.D.

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

Department of Art and Art History

The author was born in New Haven, Connecticut on March 26,

1950. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard

University in 1972 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in

photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in

1976. He worked as Assistant Director and Curator of

Photography at the Krannert Art Museum, University of

Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) from 1985 to 1990.

He entered the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural

Studies (Department of Art and Art History) at the University

of Rochester in the Fall of 1990. He served as a Teaching

Assistant (1991-92) and as Adjunct Faculty (1993) in the

Department of Art and Art History. He received a Rush Rhees,

a Celeste Heughes Bishop and a Susan B. Anthony Travel

Fellowship in 1993. He pursued his research in Critical

Theory and Art History under the direction of Professors

Mieke Bal and Janet Wolff.

Given a project of this scope and duration, I must first

acknowledge the impossibility of adequately citing those who

inspired, sustained and attended its coming into the world.

Mieke Bal supported, encouraged and guided my work from start

to finish. Janet Wolff presided with unfailing courtesy and

critical insight over many drafts and revisions. No graduate

student could have asked for finer teachers or more

responsive and enabling dissertation directors. Carl

Chiarenza provided a touchstone for the best of a

photographic tradition to which I remain indebted even as I

search for alternatives. David Rodowick serenely and

generously provided a safety net for my idiosyncratic forays

into film theory. Howard Singerman's arresting intellect,

bemused skepticism and generosity of spirit I count among the

treasures of my graduate career.

Behind the bare-bones listing which follows lies a

community to whose fellowship, generosity, goodwill and

intellectual integrity I remain deeply indebted. The

University of Rochester faculty members I wish to thank are:

Cristelle Baskins, Douglas Crimp, David Deitcher, Thomas

DiPiero, Eva Geulen, Michael Ann Holly, William McGrath,

Grace Seiberling, Kaja Silverman, David Walsh, Robert

Westbrook, and Sharon Willis.

My graduate student colleagues taught me at least as

much and constituted a remarkably supportive collective

within which to try out my ideas: Inge Boer, Ann-Marie

Braithwaite, Ondine Chavoya, Gina Dobrowski, Alla Efimova,

Michelle French, Philip Gentile, Brian Goldfarb, Natasha

Goldman, Grant Kester, Karen Kosasa, Lianne McTavish, Lev

Manovich, Laura Marks, Bethany Ogden, Walid Raad, Deborah

Weiner, Anna Williams, Teresa Winterhalter, and Charles

The Art Library and Visual Resource Collection, by

virtue of those who directed and staffed them, provided

beyond all reasonable expectations an indispensable haven

comprised of professional assistance, timely wit and human

kindness: Heather Behnke, Becky Boutch, Stephanie Franz,

Katherine Kinsky, Kim Kopatz, and Lorry O'Leary.

My photographic researches were greatly aided by the

staff members of the George Eastman House: Janice Madhu,