Cultures of Fetishism (12 page)

• A year or so after I had tried to let my feet out, the government printed specific instructions for letting out the feet.
  *
  These instructions were circu- lated to every household and posted in prominent places on public buildings. The instructions said that it was essential to begin the letting out by making a shorter and looser binding cloth. By no means should a woman suddenly eliminate use of binding cloth. This would only succeed in causing the blood to flow so violently that pain and swelling would be the inevitable result. This disastrous outcome, of course, I had discovered on my own. The next directive said to wash the foot nightly in hot water, adding a little vinegar to the water. And here how mistaken my own judgment had been. I, like so many women I knew, had been using cold water. When retiring to bed, we were supposed to remove binding cloth and stockings to allow the blood to circulate. We were to stuff cotton between our four toes, thus encouraging them to gradually expand outward.
  

  I tried following these steps. Using hot water with vinegar did help to ease the pain. My toes did begin to expand outward from the cotton between them. But these measures achieved just a tiny bit of expansion, barely noticeable. I followed the instructions with half a will. In my heart of hearts, I knew all too well that the extreme bowed bone structure that had been created by the bindings of my childhood could never be restored to anything vaguely resembling a natural shape. The flesh on my feet eventually
  

• The instructions for letting out were printed in 1927, long after A-Hsui would have let her feet out. Nevertheless I am assuming that similar instructions would have been available to her.
  

did expand somewhat. But my feet expanded into bulky and shapeless lumps. I bought the larger shoes that were recommended in the foot emancipation direc- tives and put cotton in the toe region so that the shoes wouldn’t fall off my feet when I walked. Of course, I couldn’t really walk. All I could do was stumble along like a beast. A few times I fell down and couldn’t even stand up again until my youngest son came home from school and helped me. He had a contemp- tuous grin on his face. But I was his mother and he helped me to get up.

Compared to the way I became when I started to let out my feet, I had been relatively spry and vigorous with my Lotuses. I missed my Lotuses, which still seemed very beautiful to me. I loved the red embroidered slippers that had adorned them. I hated the new natural shoes I was forced to wear. My husband’s mistress had natural feet that she could fit into delicate shoes with high heels and thin straps across her instep. When she and my husband went to banquets together, she wore these fashionable high-heeled shoes. In her office at the Bureau of Intelligence she wore plain but stylish flat shoes. With my shapeless lumps I could never wear a beautiful shoe again. I could not feel com- fortable in the natural flat shoe, either. Now that I had lost my Lotuses, I didn’t know what to do with the exquisite embroidered slippers that lined the shelves of the cupboard that had been built to house and cherish them.

Throughout the land the tiny-footed woman was looked down upon and made to feel ashamed. In my cousin’s city the tiny-footed woman was for- bidden to appear in public places. In some towns they were prohibited from walking in the streets. Police were sent to search out the hidden tiny-footed and strip off their bindings. In Changehow, the local citizens were encour- aged to whip the feet of any tiny-footed woman seen in public. I heard that some women committed suicide rather than face the shame of exposure.
29

It wasn’t until my cousin, who had also suffered the shame and dishonor of her Lotuses, encouraged me to write about the injustices that had befallen me as a child, as a young bride, and as a grown woman, that I began to grasp the fuller implications of what had been done to me. After I started to write my memoir, I gained back some sense of who I had been and realized how different that was from the person I was now. My writing of words brought me back into existence. I will leave these pages as a legacy to my daughter, who has strong and capable natural feet.
Maybe
other women will read my tale.
Maybe
throughout the ages to come women will resist those forces that encourage them to mold their daughters into objects of desire.
Maybe
women will become subjects in their own right.
Maybe
even the natural-footed woman, who wears sensible work shoes by day but then, like my husband’s mistress, cripples her own feet by squeezing them into high-heeled alluring shoes in the evening, might question if she is any freer than her shameful sisters who had their feet bound as children, and now sit at home in mourning.
Maybe
. Or
maybe
the image of the bound foot is irresistible, endlessly compelling newer and more extravagent versions of the Lotus.

Though the writing of A-Hsui’s memoir did not cure her sufferings, it offered me a “cure” for my fixation on Freud’s “Fetishism.” It was, as all such

cures inevitably turn out to be, a passing flight into health and therefore only temporary. Every now and then, thoughts of A-Hsui’s silver Lotus crept into my mind as if to warn me that my focus on her dramatic plight had been a diversion that enabled me to avoid some of the more complicated aspects of the fetishism strategy. I sensed that the vivid images of bound feet were preoccupying the foreground of my mind. I suspected that those images remained so insistently in the foreground in order to obscure something more threatening that hovered in the margins and background. In other words, these images were a device modeled on the foreground-background principle of the fetishism strategy, and not far removed, in their unconscious motivations, from the standard lists of fetish objects that sexologists and other medical experts parade before our eyes in order to banish the trauma- tizing social forces that breed these fetishes. The object of such fetishistic devices is to keep hidden and silent the traumas that keep trying to press their way out of the background and into the foreground of our minds. For the moment, at least, my symptomatic clinging to the spectacular images of A-Hsui’s tortured feet was allaying my anxieties about what I might discover if I tried to look more deeply into the “cultures” that sponsored A-Hsui’s affliction.

I started thinking about something else—another way in which women’s bodies are exploited. I turned my attention to the film medium and the vari- ous ways that film writers and directors exploit the body of a woman as a dis- traction from the traumatic elements that hover in the backgrounds of their films. This tactic, I reasoned, would bring me halfway to where I needed to go. Or, at the least, a bit closer to confronting the traumatic elements that hide in the shadows of our cultures of fetishism.

In order to get started on this uncertain journey, I decided to use a psychoanalytic method on myself. I let my mind roam freely from one seem- ingly irrelevant thought to another. Every now and then I thought about the images of skin-cutting that appeared in the 1997 film
Female Perversions
. However, for the moment at least, these images of women cutting into their own bodies did not seem to express what I was trying to explain about the cultures that breed and nurture the fetishism strategy. At last I came to an image that replaced my preoccupation with A-Hsui’s plight with a “healthier” occupation.

I decided to write about the way women’s bodies are exploited in films. However, the initial image that caught my mind seemed to have very little to do with films. Since I was then, as always and still, disturbed by the fetishistic structure of the medical profession and the insidious infiltration of the medical approach into psychoanalysis, I decided to introduce my ideas about women’s bodies in films with some sort of medical representation of the body of a woman.

It was not exactly a bolt from the blue that encouraged my mind to revisit and review a famous painting that depicted the body of a woman bent over backwards, collapsing onto the arm of a doctor whose medical specialty was hysteria. Although, presumably, I had forgotten all about that dramatic

image, it was only lying dormant, ready to come to life when I needed it. It was not an image from childhood or adolescence. Nor did it come to me directly from my psychology internship, where very likely I might first have seen it, but not yet been ready to take in its fetishistic significance. I was ready to receive and register that broken-backed figuration of a woman’s body when a photograph of it was used as an illustration for a paper I had edited for
American Imago
, “What’s love got to do with it? Woman as the Glitch in the Postmodern Record.”

As the thoughts I wanted to express began to take shape in my mind, the photograph I had seen several years earlier, sprang back into life and I realized at once that if I simply wrote down my thoughts about this photograph, it would turn out to be exactly the right image to introduce my ideas on how the fetishism strategy is employed in the making of films.

F
o u r

T
he
B
ody of a
W
oman

M
aking
F
ilms

I
n Andre Broulliet’s 1887 painting of Jean Martin Charcot giving a clinical lecture at The Saltpetriere, the brightly lit foreground is dominated by the figure of Charcot and his hysterical patient, Blanche Wittman.
1
Charcot’s left hand supports his patient. His right hand supports his lesson in hysteria. Wittman’s body is compliantly collapsed across Charcot’s left forearm in the characteristic back-arched posture of the hysterical fit. The hysteric’s eyes are shut, her head and neck are twisted to the side, her bosom and shoulder are partially bared. The doctor’s right hand is posed in the fist of authority, the index finger extended in emphasis.

The room is filled to capacity with bearded, black-suited medical students, and all of them, whether standing against the windows and walls or seated, are leaning forward as though captivated by the authority of Charcot’s words. Or, at second glance, perhaps they are transfixed by the spectacle of Miss Wittman’s artful fit? In the shadows, on the back wall of the lecture hall, behind the students, hangs a series of large medical illustrations. These illus- trations within the painting are of prostrate women, stretched out on wooden floors and slabs with their backs arched in the helpless ecstasy of a hysterical fit. In the late nineteenth century, there was a fondness for images of collapsing, broken-backed women. The technical name for this posture was
opisthotonus
, “a spasm of muscles of the neck, back and legs in which the body is bent backward.”
2
Sometimes, it was stressed that the posture represented the spasm of a hysterical fit. At other times, the posture was said to be the out- come of some spasmodic sexual excitement. But either way the emphasis went, the meaning was actually the same. The confusion between female sexual desires and hysterical fits is generic to the study of hysteria. The images in the Charcot painting convey the centuries-old gendered script where mentality and rationality were assigned to the doctor (typically a male), while bodily

spasms and irrationality were assigned to the patient (typically female).

Charcot’s students were told that mild hysterias were not a real illness, “but one of the varieties of female character. . . . One might even say that hysterics are more womanly than other women.”
3
And, like the most womanly of women, hysterics were said to be “impressionable, malleable, coquettish, seductive, lazy.”
4
At the same time, men were warned not to be taken in by the hysteric’s womanly arts, because the hysteric can be “unjust, violent, she recriminates with bitterness, gives herself over to scenes, tears and extravagance, makes a show of her passions”
5
And, obviously such a woman is in no way suited to “bring happiness and calm to the conjugal hearth.”
6

Charcot’s students were also taught how to make the diagnostic differen- tiation between epileptics and hysterics. “The hysterics were the ones who adorn their medical charts with artificial flowers, ribbons, pieces of mirrors, pictures with bright colors.”
7
Hysterics, unlike the epileptics, are untruthful, recalcitrant, and tricky. The helpless ecstasies of the hysterical fit very often turned around into displays of power, acts of rebellion and rampant sexuality.
8
Thus these most womanly of women with their stereotypical femininity could be almost virile in their masculinity. The students of Charcot, compassionate as they might have been as they found themselves entranced, perhaps seduced, by the dramatic spectacle of Blanche Wittman’s
opisthotonus
, were being taught that hysterics were tricky deceptive females, as enigmatic and elusive as the female herself.

Whether in medicine, art, psychology, politics, or religion, it has been a long- standing tradition to employ the enigmatic body of a woman with its mysteri- ous desires and perplexing, unpredictable movements as a fetishistic emblem. As I shall be demonstrating, the fetishism strategy displays with suspicious urgency a narrow or partial representation of the body’s experience, in order to mask or repress a fuller experience that might otherwise constitute a trauma. We must ask, “Are the images of broken-backed, hysterical women so flagrantly dramatic that they foreclose the possibility of the trauma of loss, per- haps specifically, the loss of childhood innocence?” If we look past the glitter- ing spectacle of the foreground image, we gain access to the images of loss that loom in the background. At the same time we do not banish the fore- ground but retain it, so that we may decipher the dynamic relationship between both images. It is crucial to the fetishism strategy that while it focuses the viewer on the foreground, it also allows that some expression be given to the potentially traumatic experience that lies in the background or margins. Like the fetish, which is both an item of concealment and an item of revela- tion, the images of women in films both mask the traumas and expose them.
9
In a film, what the female (and, of course, sometimes the male) performer does and says is, in part at least, a product of how the directors, writers, cameramen, editors, costumers, hair-dressers, and make-up and lighting artists decide to use her body. At a certain point, though, the performer is
the
artist, who must transmit an emotional experience to the audience. The body of the performer is the essential creative medium. In the films I will be discussing, the bodily presence of the film star—her posture, gestures, facial expressions