- 1 When referring to Sylvie’s Siamese twin, ‘Sue’ is placed between single quotes, but the name is lef (...)
1“Sylvie” is the story of a young woman who carries the lower half of her Siamese twin sister, ‘Sue,’1 as an appendage emerging from beneath her navel. Anatomically speaking, she is a “freak” in the most traditional cultural sense, and as such, is the object of horrified fascination, abuse, and medical interest. According to Elisabeth Grosz,
The freak is an object of simultaneous horror and fascination because . . . he or she is an ambiguous being, a being whose existence imperils categories and oppositions dominant in social life. . . . They imperil the very definitions we rely on to classify humans, identities, sexes—our most fundamental categories of self-definition. (57)
- 2 See Lerena for an in-depth exploration of the intersection between short story form, definitions of (...)
From Canadian writer Barbara Gowdy’s collection We So Seldom Look on Love (1997), “Sylvie” is a short story that leans into the conventions of both the gothic (the attractive but ultimately threatening male object of desire, the luring promise of an escape from poverty or exploitation, effects of doubling),2 and the grotesque (the distortion of bodily and social normalcy, marginalization, excess), including Sylvie’s decision to leave home to become a sideshow attraction in a carnival. To this extent, the reader is in familiar territory. This is particularly true of readers who know Gowdy’s novels, which include a
depiction of private domestic spaces where freaks—beauty queens, fat ladies, orphans, foreigners, gay men, lesbians, giants, savants, promiscuous women, exhibitionists, and others—live ordinary lives that are less sensational than presumed by the voyeuristic gaze from outside. (Lousley 134)
Indeed, the other stories in Gowdy’s collection also explore facets of the monstrous, such as another story about Siamese twins, this time featuring a two-headed man whose condition gives rise to violent rivalry between the conjoined twins, and the taboo, through a young woman who exploits her job at a mortuary to indulge in necrophilia, as well as narratives centered on female exhibitionism or the exploration of sex change.
- 3 Lacan suggests that a woman (someone who subjectively identifies as such) is not entirely bound by (...)
2“Sylvie” certainly belongs to this exploration of lives outside the norms, but it is also a story about love, one in which Sylvie/Sue is the object of maternal investment and later, romantic love. The metaphorical dimension of the excess that clings to her varies within the story, depending on the ways in which she is loved. Presenting a woman split between her social self, Sylvie, and her libidinal self, ‘Sue,’ the figure of female Siamese twins gives embodiment to the figure of excess as an expression of the doubling of sexual jouissance in a woman, for, according to Lacan, a woman may have access to the phallic (object-oriented) jouissance of sexuality, but also, to a feminine “Other” jouissance which is not entirely circumscribed by the symbolic order.3
- 4 Staels notes that, in her short stories, “Gowdy hyperbolizes deviance in portraying these circus fr (...)
- 5 This adjective is derived from Lacan’s term, “extimacy” which appears in Seminar VII: The Ethics of (...)
- 6 “Desirousness” is a term coined by Bruce Fink that speaks to the aliveness of the subject’s desire (...)
3These elements of reflection will guide my analysis of “Sylvie” as I explore, with the help of certain critical notions derived from Lacan’s work on feminine sexuality, how the Siamese body becomes the expression of an experience of otherness to the self by symbolically incarnating the border between self and other.4 It does so through the inclusion of an extimate5 object: an object outside of the subject but intimately related to the vivacity of the subject’s desirousness.6
4This exploration will commence within Sylvie’s childhood, where I will analyze the ways in which she is situated in relation to the parental voices, and how she is affected by her awakening to her status as different, freakish, in the eyes of others. Interestingly, this moment of subjective awakening to the fact of being seen, of being subjected to “the tyranny of the normative gaze” (Staels, “Deviance” 122), is concurrent with the emergence within Sylvie of a split/doubled functioning of her memory, inaugurating a multiplication of instances of the trope of doubling.
5I will then turn towards Sylvie’s sexual maturation and her encounter with the specifically male gaze in the persona of John Wilcox, whose heavily sexualized name holds the promise of a confrontation with male sexual desire, one that will lead to Sylvie’s subjective repositioning. Because of, but also beyond her connection with the phallic Wilcox, Sylvie will experience the fullness of her own sexual potential in a particular moment when she and her fiancé get “carried away” (66).
6The final part of my enquiry will focus on the dense imagery that precedes the amputation of Sue, when, lying prone in the operating theatre, Sylvie’s perception opens onto the world of the infinitely small, the infinitely vast, and the uncountable beauty of illumination. Through the back-referencing of the childhood gift of a microscope and its textual reworking in this moment, Sylvie is amazed by the boundless potential for being that belongs to her still—for a moment—doubled self.
Yet let us not be mistaken about appearance: being is its Siamese twin.
Colette Soler, What Lacan Said About Women
7Sylvie’s anatomical distinction is presented in detailed, flat, descriptive terms, on the first page of the story:
- 7 According to Staels, “The story about Sylvie/Sue is based on the life of Josephine Myrtle Corbin (1 (...)
Sylvie’s Siamese twin sister, Sue, is attached to her. Sue is nothing but a pair of legs, though. Perfect little legs with feet, knees, thighs, hips and a belly, the belly growing out of Sylvie’s own belly, just under her navel, and the feet hanging to a few inches below her own knees and facing away from her body, that is to say, facing in the same direction as her own feet. (43)7
- 8 Freud introduced this theory in his work on childhood sexuality.
- 9 This feeling of “not being there” in the presence of the mother whose interest is entirely focused (...)
Seen as “attached” and “hanging” from under Sylvie’s navel to somewhere below her knees, ‘Sue’ is situated convincingly (if disproportionately) in the place of the phallus, and it might be tempting, following the Freudian theory of penis envy, to see the extra legs as symbolically embodying a phallic substitute. The idea is that the imagined original castration of the girl, “deprived” of a penis, leads her to seek substitute objects8 which will confer on her some of the status and power that society attributes to the boy, by virtue of what distinguishes and defines him. Yet, if Siamese ‘Sue’ is a phallic substitute, she is not so for Sylvie, but rather, for her mother, who cherishes this partial object, who “squeezed Sue by her feet and massaged her calves and said, ‘How’s my baby? What kind of day did my sweet baby have?,’” all of this “as if Sylvie weren’t there.”9 But Sylvie is there, she “feels [the legs], the cramps they occasionally get, the twitches, anything touching them.” The undertone of light humor running through the preposterousness of the story contaminates the mother’s advice to Sylvie, converting it from the usual prohibition of masturbation to its incitement through the “habit drilled into her by her mother” who instructed her to “hold [the legs] by the feet and stretch them . . . off and on during the day.” The mother’s advice even parodies the threat of castration traditionally associated with masturbation, given here as a warning of what would happen should she fail to attend to her appendage: “otherwise they would rot and fall off” (44).
8The care and affection the mother shows for “her sweet baby” is somewhat discredited by the relatively neutral tone of the extradiegetic narrating instance in the paragraph cited above. The apparent objectivity of this voice describing the length and placement of the legs is mildly undercut through the inclusion of the qualifying phrase “nothing but” in “nothing but a pair of legs,” depriving this partial twin of her subjective history. This is not necessarily problematic for the reader, but it raises, early in the story, the question of what status these (also qualified as) “perfect” and lively legs have for their “autosite” host (61), Sylvie.
9In the period of her pre-school existence, of which Sylvie has no precise memories (43), only after-the-fact suppositions or deductions: “Maybe Sylvie went to town a few times before starting school, she doesn’t remember” (45), or “The school inspector must have visited” (45). During this unremembered childhood, Sylvie’s relationship to ‘Sue’ is entirely determined by her mother’s discourse to the extent that she defines herself in her mother’s terms, which is to say, as neither grotesque nor freakish: “Given her mother’s behaviour, the last thing Sylvie suspected was that the legs were alarming” (45). The mother’s discursive stance therefore determines Sylvie’s self-image, whereas her father, a man of Portuguese origin, “didn’t speak enough fluent English to say much” and was “hardly ever at home” (45). It is therefore not the father who gives Sylvie the symbolic coordinates of her place in society, and he cannot, for lack of appropriate signifiers, intervene effectively in the mother’s desire to control her daughter. Sylvie comes under her mother’s law, split between that part of herself the mother claims as her own object of jouissance in the form of her “obvious favouritism” for ‘Sue’ (45)—for whom alone she knits stockings and buys new shoes (44)—and the non-‘Sue’ part of Sylvie that she leaves, to some extent, to her own devices. Yet the child is not without resources to make her own way in the world.
10The entry into the world of the Other beyond the mOther takes place at school where the mother’s injunction—“You keep Sue under your skirt. Don’t show her to anybody. Don’t exercise her until you’re back at home” (46)—proves insufficient; the other children assail Sylvie and pin her down to have a look at her appended twin (paralleling Sylvie’s hobby of capturing insects to study them and then gluing them down on paper [50]). Sylvie quickly recognizes that a more pragmatic piece of advice comes from one of her tormentors: “You should have showed us when we asked nicely” (48). She is thus initiated rather brutally into the feminine position of being an object of the desire of others, the object of both the sexual, scopic drive that seeks to penetrate both her body and the mystery of her being.
- 10 See Staels’s research on the constitutive confusion in contemporary narratives of the grotesque, no (...)
11On this point, the grotesquerie of the story contributes to a certain indecisiveness.10 If ‘Sue’ is returned to her function as a metaphor for Sylvie’s libido, the question that arises is whether or not the mother’s preoccupation with keeping ‘Sue’ hidden is a protective gesture intended to allow Sylvie to safeguard the part of herself that is precious and intimately personal as something she should treasure and veil. Indeed, Sylvie initially imagines her mother’s advice to hide ‘Sue’ to signify “don’t be immodest, don’t show off” (46). Or is it a protective gesture, trying to keep Sylvie and ‘Sue’ safe from the curiosity and horror others will express? From another perspective, in keeping with the mother’s over-tending to the legs, is it an intrusive attempt to keep her daughter from any experience of an otherness outside of her control?
12The impenetrability of the question finds its response in a further splitting of Sylvie. From the time she enters adolescence (51) and gains access to new ways of seeing, events from the past impose themselves on her in memory spells that create a double inner discourse, complete with precise sense impressions: “‘It’s like dreaming when you know it’s a dream . . . You’ve got two lives going on at once’” (43). This statement, placed in the first paragraph of the story, announces its foundational structure. These memory spells allow Sylvie to be absently present to herself—there and not there—“always when she was nervous or upset” (51), often in relation to her mother:
Her mother would be yelling at her, and Sylvie would hear every word her mother said, and she’d see her mother there, banging a pot down, but why she squinted was from late-afternoon sun glancing off the barn roof, and why she felt an urge to lift her hand was that her hand was lifting, to pluck an aphid from the rose trellis. She heard her mother in the kitchen and heard her mother two years ago, calling from the barn door. (51)
It is as this doubly divided subject—split in her body, and in her perception of herself in time and space—that Sylvie walks off to join a new family: the members of the traveling side-show. The need to distance herself from her mother is not stated explicitly, and this walking away is something Sylvie “hadn’t planned to do” (53); it is an unconscious decision expressed through Sylvie’s body as she just keeps going when the carnival is not found where it was expected. However, the context of neglect and her mother’s frequent words of disparagement—“She called Sylvie a dirty dish rag” (48)—make of this act a meaningful gesture of emancipation from the realm of the mother. Once Sylvie locates the side-show, she immediately denies her parents—“My mother’s dead. . . . So is my father” (54) and finds a symbolic substitute father figure in Mr. Bean, the show director who can tell her what her place in the family is: she will be the boy-girl, with ‘Sue’ disguised as a male twin to accentuate the paradoxes and practical complications of her self-division. She also finds a new maternal figure in Merry Mary, “the fat lady” (43), who is also a figure of excess. Doubly “Mary” through the homophony of her names, she will “miraculously” give birth (in the sense that she did not know she was pregnant until the moment of birthing) to a “perfect” child whom she names Sue in honour of Sylvie’s twin (55).
13Only a few lines separate the arrival of new baby Sue from the announcement of her death, as she “turned blue and died.” The arrival and sudden death of baby Sue provoke a flood of tears, not from Mary, but from Sylvie: “It took weeks for [her] to stop crying.” The doubling of ‘Sue’ through this baby allows for a comparison between the mother figures: unlike Sylvie’s mother who was obsessively preoccupied with Sylvie’s ‘Sue’ who, remember, was “nothing but a pair of legs,” Mary is able to let go of “perfect” baby Sue upon her death, to accept that she, the mother, Mary, does not, cannot, “have” the child, and does not make of her baby a child-object. Merry Mary helps dedramatize this loss: “Easy come, easy go” she says, “to comfort Sylvie, who was crying into a pile of laundered diapers and having a memory spell about gluing down a gypsy moth” (55).
14This moment of bereavement over Merry Mary’s baby marks the end of Sylvie’s unsexed existence as an object of her mother’s disregard and of the fascination of the freak-show crowd. As a result, it ends the existence that keeps her in a place of multiple self-divisions: between Sylvie and Sue, between boy and girl, and between fullness of being in the present and being dominated by memory-spells of the past. Born from the same embryo, Sylvie/Sue is not the result of a collision of two separate entities, as the girl-boy masquerade suggests, but an incomplete division of a single one. To heal her self-division, Sylvie needs to reclaim ‘Sue’ for herself, or even, as herself. Once again, Mary will assist Sylvie in her subjective growth, pushing her back out into the world. She “badgers [her] to visit whatever town they happen to be in” (56), partly for the vicarious pleasure of hearing what it feels like to “pass” as normal—to escape the curious, horrified, and fascinated gaze that pins the ‘freak’ down. Sylvie can manage this reasonably well, aided by an ample skirt.
The symptom is an element sticking on as a kind of parasite and ‘spoiling the game,’ but if we annihilate it, things get even worse.
Slavoj Žižek, “The Truth Arises from Misrecognition”
- 11 Vivien Leigh notably played Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire; Blanche, too, had visits fr (...)
15The consequence of Sylvie’s forays out into the social world is that she encounters the possibility of being loved as a woman in the person of the phallically named Dr. John Wilcox. He is not the first man to look at her sexually, and yet, there is the impression that Sylvie, until she meets Wilcox, is not “sexed.” Her violation by a boy at school who “stuck his finger up between both pairs of her legs, her little ones and then her own” inspires mainly the fear that her mother will see the resulting blood on her underpants (49). It is an act of aggression that is not experienced as specifically sexual to Sylvie; it does not engage her jouissance or her desire, even if the traumatic aspect of the event is registered: “the boy’s finger stabbing her and Sue became the darkness before the dawn” (50). Later encounters with the boys from a nearby army base arouse in her some awareness of her sexuality, so that she finds she has a “soft spot for the cadets who brought her chocolates and told her she looked like the movie star Vivien Leigh” (52).11 Still, these are mild experiences compared to the experience of meeting Dr. John Wilcox. Sylvie’s perception of him immediately situates him in the realm of the heavenly: he has “a beautiful mouth, a rosebud, a cherub’s mouth” (57), his love for her “is a miracle too big to question” (59), and his intuition of her answers to his questions makes her sense “a holiness in him” (60). Her desire for him is like an inescapable force: she feels “[t]rapped by his man’s body, his adoring eyes, and all his questions”; in his presence, she feels “melted to her chair. Between her little legs there’s a soft ache” (57).
16The first stirrings of desire are notably between her “little legs,” or in other words, in ‘Sue.’ ‘Sue’ responds bodily to the desire of the phallic Wilcox, while Sylvie is in love and idealizes the man. Her love is nourished by the arousal of ‘Sue,’ which Sylvie feels within herself, but the first project that the solicitous doctor has for Sylvie is to relieve her of her appendage. Only recently unburdened of the weight of too much mother through her mourning over the by-now-buried baby Sue (an idealized double of her twin), Sylvie has only just begun to appropriate ‘Sue’ for herself—as the expression of her own sexual arousal and as the inheritance of jouissance, that “something of the good” that comes from the mother—when she is told that she will be divested of her extra legs, for her own “good.” In her work on this “good,” as something close to the core of our being, Juliet MacCannell writes that it is “nothing other than Das Ding, the unapproachable and unfathomable and unmovable entity around which our unconscious moves and against which it defends itself” (79). In adoration, the idealized imaginary other (the lover) “has the power to deprive us of the good” (Lacan, qtd. in MacCannell 79), or in other words, of what sustains our active desire. And with one’s loving consent, one gives away one’s good for another’s version of it.
- 12 There are echoes here of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” where the narrator’s hu (...)
- 13 Symbolic castration refers here to the moment when, the symbolic effect of the “nom-du-père” which, (...)
- 14 The boy’s “castration” is of his ambition to omnipotence; it is a form of disempowerment which has (...)
17When perceiving herself as the “loved one” implied in her incredulous declaration: “Dr. John Wilcox loves me” (59), she becomes redefined by the surgeon Wilcox takes her to: he declares her an “autosite-parasite” and ‘Sue’ is her “parasite.”12 Surprisingly, this clinical qualification finds its echo in the theoretical elaboration of feminine sexuality by Joan Copjec who affirms that a woman “lives herself—enjoys her body—as if it were not her own but another’s, as if she were the double of another.” This becomes an axiom in the following statement: “To be a woman is . . . to be parasitized by an object that continually unglues her from her own body, not by defining her as something other than her body, but by making her jouissance a disruption of self-identity” (102, 103). In her very being, therefore, a woman is “parasite” by her jouissance in the shape of an object that is both her and not her, that disrupts her and defines her, in the Lacanian sense, as “not-all” in the symbolic/phallic order, also to be read as “not all-in”: something of a woman remains at a distance from the symbolic (language-defined, social) order. This is related, as Copjec explains, to the moment of symbolic castration13 which severs the child from the mother: unlike the situation for the boy, whose oedipal distancing from the mother is accompanied by an idealization of the father and the desire to take his place, for the girl, this separation from the mother “is not accompanied by an idealization” (101).14 When he “gives up” the mother, she is cast outside of the set he inhabits to become a forbidden, idealized other.
- 15 This uncanny residue of the mother that clings to the girl is expressed in the form of a weight tha (...)
18For the girl, there is no closed set of femininity under a corresponding the Name-of-the-Mother and the jouissance inscribed in the child by the mother’s attention and speech sticks to the girl, haunting her (in the gothic, uncanny mode) or accompanying her as a set of extra legs (in the grotesque mode). Thus, “what gives body to the split” in a woman “is a part object that detaches itself from [the mother]” and “haunts” the girl as a “surplus, empty object . . . that forms as a result of her definitive . . . giving up of the mother” (Copjec 102).15 ‘Sue’ embodies this part object, Sylvie’s jouissance, the gift of being that remains after the “radical” renouncement of being the mother’s object. In the same way that, for a man, the mother’s breast had been present all along but “the breast” takes on its value as part object only after symbolic castration, so too has ‘Sue’ been there all along, but “she” is now Sylvie’s extimate other: her, and not entirely her, parasitizing her, situating her as a woman.
19On what grounds does Dr. John Wilcox decide that Sylvie will have ‘Sue’ removed? Not on the grounds of revulsion at her freakishness: “he loves her. The minute he saw her he knew, and he only loves her more now”; not on the basis of a discussion—he simply informs Sylvie, in the course of proposing to her that he “will consult with surgeons about an operation, he will take her anywhere in the world for an operation” (59). The implicit value in the proposed operation is conformity to a norm. Sylvie accepts this as part and parcel of his love and neither opposes argument nor offers assent: it simply is. She tells herself that the consequence will be normality, but “she can’t grasp what being a normal means” (61). Interestingly, “normal” is preceded here by the article “a,” which suggests indeterminacy between “normal” and “a-normal”: earlier, before meeting John, she had commented that “the feeling of being like everybody else [was equivalent to feeling] like nobody in particular” (56). Why should she, who has never once complained of her existence as a Siamese twin, prefer the anonymity of being “nobody in particular,” or as Mr. Bean, the carnival director and half-hearted substitute father, asks: “‘Why would a four-leaf clover want to be an ordinary three-leaf?’” (62). She does not in fact prefer or want it, but she accepts it, for love. In the name of the belief that the One who loves her wants what is good for their shared love. For the sake of his love, she will sacrifice ‘Sue,’ and, unbeknownst to her conscious self, her very being.
20Certain warning signals are nevertheless given:
“I’m so happy,” she tells Mary.
Mary fans herself with the hem of her skirt. “So what happens to Sue?” she asks.
“What do you mean?” Sylvie says.
“After the operation. What’s the doc going to do with her?”
Sylvie feels light-headed. (63)
- 16 Elsewhere in Canadian literature, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing also presents a woman’s assent to a m (...)
As Mary goes on to offer Sylvie the extra cemetery plot next to the baby’s—“Sue’s welcome to it” (63)—, Sylvie slips into a memory spell in which Mary’s words are overlaid by those of the surgeon who, while examining her, recounted a case where he “excised an abdominal tumour that turned out to contain teeth, hair and an undeveloped spine” (63). The multiplication of deaths of partial objects, of undeveloped babies, and Mary referring to Sylvie’s extra legs as “her,” bring Sylvie’s knowledge of the offence against herself to which she is willingly going to submit, dangerously close to the surface, resulting in guilt: “Sylvie cannot look at Mary” (64).16
21A more positive experience might also have forewarned Sylvie against giving up ‘Sue’ in order to please Wilcox: her first experience of sexual orgasm passes through ‘Sue.’ Before the operation, Dr. John wines and dines his future bride and takes her to bed, penetrating ‘Sue’ in order to leave ‘Sylvie’ a virgin. Yet everything Sylvie experiences is doubled: penetration of ‘Sue’ is followed by “a second sharp pain at what she imagined was the point of entry into her own vagina,” and the doubled vagina only increases her pleasure as “she felt him as a lightning rod conducting heat and pleasure from Sue to herself.” Similarly, when John “began to ejaculate . . . bringing on her first orgasm,” the “waves” of the orgasm “rolled up his lightning-rod penis into her own vagina and along to her own clitoris, where she had another, more luxurious orgasm” (66). Neta Gordon notes that “the little legs represent the sacredness of Sylvia’s sexual vitality—a vitality that will be lost once she and Sue are surgically separated.” If Gordon usefully points to a form of non-religious sacredness that runs through Gowdy’s work, the framing of the term in this chapter sees only violence in the act of intercourse and qualifies Sylvie’s orgasm as something “like an afterthought” to “Sue’s orgasm” (77). This interpretation shuts down the questioning of what sustains the relationship of vitality between Sylvie and ‘Sue’; it denies the “twoness within herself” of Sylvie, which is patent, to the extent that she appropriates the whole of the orgasmic experience concerning her body and that of ‘Sue,’ for herself:
“Two” she said quietly. “I had two, I think. I mean, I know I did.”
“Two?”
“One in each place.” (67)
“I.” Not “we” or “she,” and “each place,” not “each of us.”
22The aftermath of the double orgasm is played out through a focus on the image of ‘Sue’ whose “legs have been clasp[ing] his thighs and kick[ing] out, clasp[ing] and kick[ing] out,” and then, “For a few seconds longer, her little legs went on kicking. He seemed to wait them out” (66). The couple has had intensely satisfying intercourse, but a certain confusion over what has exactly occurred is registered: John is surprised at ‘Sue’/Sylvie’s double orgasm, and suggests that it presents “a whole new angle,” “New territory,” “new data” (66), but only from a scientific standpoint: where Sylvie’s future is concerned, he confirms that “[n]othing has changed” (67).
23Yet there is challenge to John’s pronouncement: for Sylvie too, there are “new angles” to consider; manifestly, the place that ‘Sue’ occupies is that of the surplus inherited jouissance that allows for the structuring of her desire as a woman. Lacan notes: “When you have the usufruct of an inheritance, you can enjoy the inheritance as long as you don’t use up too much of it” (Encore 3). Sylvie has enjoyed her inheritance of jouissance in her lovemaking by allowing herself to be overwhelmed within herself. Still, in permitting John to organize the “amputation” (67) of ‘Sue,’ she is “using it up”: there will not be anything left of the part-object, that “good” inherited from the first maternal valorization of her libidinal self. This is not something that Sylvie intuits at the time; consequently, she remains under the force of her desire to be John’s wife.
24The meaning of her orgasm only comes to her, obliquely, at the end of the story when she is on the operating table. It manifests itself in a flash of condensed images that allow the reader to understand what Sylvie is giving up—the part of her jouissance that comes from her otherness-to-herself, her Other jouissance. One of the difficulties in writing about Other jouissance as a form of jouissance specifically related to the feminine is that it is not locatable: it has neither to do with a bodily part, nor with the drive in its object-pursuit. Rather, something of the enjoying substance of the body responds in the feminine to the looseness of her place in the Symbolic order and by consequence, to the “surplus empty object” that shadows her being. Or more exactly, as a manifestation of being itself, it shadows her appearance. In the sequence of images that invade Sylvie, this looseness of the symbolic order and of its signifying structure come sharply into focus. In the following part, I will clarify the context framing and informing this final flash of imagery—one involving a gift from the father, another from the mother, and fireflies.
I had a dream about you last night. It was a beautiful strange dream. You were holding my hair in your hands and saying, this is all too heavy for you, you’ll have to cut it off, it will sap your strength. And the way you said it was so lovely, so sympathetic, as if you meant something else not just my hair.
Alice Munro, “Tell Me Yes or No”
25On the operating table, at “the centre of what seems like a stage” (70-71), Sylvie looks up to where the witnessing doctors sit behind a glass in the observation area and see her in her place, illuminated below the glass that separates them. This image of her being looked at as she lies under a glass barrier reactivates a motif related to Sylvie’s childhood, to her relationship to her father. As noted earlier, Sylvie’s father is an ineffectual bearer of the symbolic phallus, to the extent that the mother gives no credit to his words or opinions. On the contrary, in Sylvie’s memory spells, the mother is either shouting at the father (65) or symbolically destroying him, “burning the picture of her father’s mother in its filigreed frame . . . [and Sylvie remembers] burns on her father’s hand,” and she also remembers, “her mother burning her scrapbooks” (68). Sylvie’s scrapbooks are the testimony of the one gift the father managed to give his daughter: a microscope. This instrument of close observation allows Sylvie to see things previously hidden from her understanding, notably about the way her mother had attempted to prevent the father from giving her this present. Indeed, the gift given to Sylvie “on her birthday” (50) implicitly structures the undercurrent of the entire story: from the opening page when the mother is remembered “wait[ing] for her father to answer” (43), to the father’s “confession” in another memory spell that he had in fact (against any possibility of the mother’s agreement) paid ten dollars for the microscope (50), to the final pages of the story when Sylvie’s tragic understanding comes into focus, as she lies under the surgical lights.
26The mother, unintentionally, also contributes to this gift. Notwithstanding her unsuccessful attempts to sell off the microscope, she brings Sylvie her first object of scrutiny, a bit of grace in the form of a “dead praying mantis,” “the unaccountable blessing” that arrives to counterbalance the “darkness” of the schoolboy’s sexual aggression. In this instance, the mother is a transmitter, the lifeless insect actually having been found beside a dead man at the funeral parlor where she works: “‘Found it beside Mr. Arnett on the slab,’ she said, unwrapping the napkin to reveal a dead praying mantis. ‘Right beside his ear, like it was praying for his old skin-flint soul and then keeled over from the formaldehyde’” (50). The mother will not give her backing to a gift from the living father, whom she symbolically castrates, but will transmit a gift from the “skin-flint dead man” who is beyond the effect of her words.
- 17 Fireflies are also present in a similarly symbolic way in Gowdy’s novel, The Romantic, as an appari (...)
27Sylvie takes the gifts of the living and the dead “fathers” and spends three or four years filling scrapbooks with insects preserved between wax paper. What stands out from the experience of collecting the series of insects (a phallic object-pursuit that she grows tired of “a few weeks after her fourteenth birthday” [51]) is her wonder at why she cannot see the light of the fireflies pasted in her scrapbook. Her mother illuminates her: “They have to be alive, stupid.” The memory of this moment intrudes on Sylvie when she and John are in the car, just before the episode of their pre-nuptial sex; with ‘Sue’ twitching in arousal, Sylvie exclaims “‘Oh, look!’ at the ovations of fireflies glittering along her side of the road.” Ovations—applause and living light—accompany ‘Sue’/Sylvie’s “languid” (64) feeling in the presence of John.17
- 18 An interesting analogy may be made with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark.” Therein, the lovely (...)
28However, in the interval between their sexual intercourse and the operation, Sylvie’s nights are filled with misgiving. Whereas in her own body, “there is nothing,” “her little legs kick and fret,” they are restless, lusty and “licentious,” and Sylvie has a terrible thought: “They know, she thinks, horrified. They know.” What they “know,” since they are a part of Sylvie, is twofold; they know about sexual desire, since they are “licentious” and their “urge for [John] is almost past bearing,” but they also “know” that they will soon be removed, amputated, discarded, dead.18 Sylvie’s thought-associations lead her to focus on the other Sue, Mary’s perfect baby, lost to death, over whom she wept so profusely, and she wonders what else she will lose by losing her own ‘Sue’: “Will she forget baby Sue’s face? What if her freak memory is connected with her freak legs? What if she becomes somebody else for whom nothing that happened to the person she was will be worth preserving?” (68). The prospect of having an “insignificant parasitic bodily excess” removed is suddenly transformed into anxiety about the disappearance of her very being, of everything that she was and is, since that someone has always been Siamese, doubled in her body, her memory, and her family structure. Yet Sylvie’s nighttime doubts dissipate in the light of day, and no changes are made to the plans.
29When the inevitable operation is about to take place, Sylvie finds herself center stage, illuminated and under glass, recalling numerous previous experiences: at school, being “pinned” down and gaped at in revulsion (47); in the carnival side-show, having people stare at her with “a blend of repulsion and attraction” and where she came to know the “exchange of her watching them watching her” (58); and herself observing bugs under a microscope. She is now being scrutinized as the object of interest to the gazing eyes of “rows of doctors seated behind glass in the encircling tiers” (71). Being gazed at by a crowd whose eyes are structured as curious rather than empathetic and are rendered invisible by the bright light shining in Sylvie’s eyes, is destabilizing, since the look cannot be returned—the person seen cannot enter into the exchange. A slight moment of inexpressible misgiving is hinted at as Sylvie says, “‘John?’” but then “can’t remember what she was going to say” (71). This eruption and suppression of a doubt is both the emergence of repressed anxiety, and the internalized imperative force of the symbolic order immediately shutting down the expression of this doubt.
30The references to the scopic drive, characterized by a desire for mastery and control, continue as “John’s eyes bore into her” (70), penetrating her being with his connection to the symbolic sphere of “big names” in the world of medicine (71), a world dominated by masculine authority. And as she goes under anaesthesia (situating her in a position evocative of the praying mantis that succumbed to formaldehyde), she has a revelation:
Light hits glass and magnifies something. A polyphemus moth! she thinks excitedly. The light and the magnification grow stronger and stronger until she realizes that what she is looking at is even more infinitesimal than the moth’s atoms.
It resembles a vast pine forest. A needle on one of the trees is magnified and becomes a million exotic fish, then one of the fish’s scales is magnified and becomes a galaxy of fireflies. (71)
The perspective here is double: she is both the seer and the seen. She is seen by the doctors in a place analogous to that of the bugs she had glued down and observed so closely for years before deciding that she “didn’t have the heart to flatten another insect” (51). Still, she too sees, not the observers, but herself, doubled through the image of the moth as the portal to the infinite. Through her vision of a polyphemus moth (the word Polyphemus having “much spoken of” as one of its possible interpretations, is also associated with the Cyclops in Greek mythology, suggesting limited sight or understanding), Sylvie approaches the mystery of existence. As the magnified moth’s atoms become a forest, in which a single pine needle transforms into “a million exotic fish” and metamorphoses into “a galaxy of fireflies,” the infinitesimally small opens onto the vast ungirded and elemental world. Trees, fish and fireflies—creatures belonging to earth, water and air. The fourth element, fire is also included through the name of the flying insects.
31The fireflies are the destination that Sylvie has been moving towards in her ether-real vision. Upon seeing them, she notes: “The fireflies are lit” and thinks, “‘They must be alive’” (71). Recalling her mother’s words on the matter, Sylvie deduces that the fireflies of her vision are most certainly alive, since they are “lit.” Yet the meaning now shifts implicitly to ‘Sue,’ to the little legs which are the locus of Sylvie’s sexual desire: “They must be alive” shifts from a deductive modal (they are probably alive), to an imperative—they must, they have to, be alive for her sexual desire to find its expression. This thought imposes itself on Sylvie in the instant before she loses consciousness and all control: ‘Sue’ is amputated from her. While Sylvie’s thoughts disappear from the text at this point, the narrative reminds us of Sylvie’s bereavement at the loss of “such perfection” (55) after baby Sue’s death, and the way that death is associated at the time with the death of a “gypsy moth” for which she was responsible through a memory spell. These past losses become fused with the loss of her own “Sue,” suggesting her sense of responsibility for it, and constructing the impossibility of mourning by fading Sylvie out of the story in its final lines.
32Sacrificed to John’s versions of the “good”—his view of “her own good,” the good of medical achievement, and the good of normality—Sylvie’s own good, ‘Sue,’ is dead. The doubled woman is now single, with nothing excessive, left-over, or sticking to her. A normalized woman, she is no longer a desiring woman: her otherness-to-herself, her feminine jouissance, is gone. John’s attempts, “later, weeks later . . . to cheer her up” (71) are doomed to fail and the story ends with this grim extinction of the light of desire.
*
33The disappearance of Sylvie at the end of the story is dismal and deflationary, almost anti-climactic in its brief, indirect evocation. Exiting from the narrative under the laughter of “the doctors seated in the gallery” (71), Sylvie’s vanishing leaves the reader, who has empathized with her struggle for self-knowledge, bereft, grieving for her aphanasis and the tragedy of her own unaware complicity in this outcome. Sylvie’s sacrifice of her good to the good of another is that of women throughout Western literature abandoning the source or expression of their creative force to a significant idealized other, most often the male lover.
34This is frequently the case in short stories. Lerena comments on the nature of the short story form and its resonance with the idea, developed in this analysis, of a feminine surplus, haunting, object:
There is an implicit denial of notions of progress and continuance [in the short story genre] and an alliance with the way in which the past is attached to our memory, “glued to it” as little bits of residue: a small part will grow out of proportion, it will displace life’s other tides. (722)
The past that is glued to the present may be seen as analogous to the something defining about a woman that comes from the mother, that shapes the jouissance specific to women, escapes the symbolic order’s dominion and which attracts, but cannot be tolerated by, the significant male other. This is the case in the stories I have footnoted—Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” and Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”—, examples of stories wherein the female character, to her own detriment, is constituted by, but gives up, something essential, something that defines her, in deference to her husband. In both, what defines the female character, Georgiana’s birthmark in the first case, and the desire to write and express herself, in the second, is excised or repressed. In “Sylvie,” the structure is similar: she idealizes her husband-doctor-John, and her idealization includes an acceptance of his authority to decide things on her behalf. The result is that she forfeits her own desire and becomes a remote, fading, nearly extinguished figure, whose inner thoughts and feelings are no longer present.
35In the relinquishing of her something-in-excess that takes place in “Sylvie,” the something given up is not a sacrifice at the social level (one’s work opportunities for example, or one’s social standing in society); it is of something that is constitutive, that comes from the past: a form of freedom to say no to the desire of the other. If Lacan’s famous statement that “Desire is the desire of the Other” (Lacan, Book XI 38) is true, it does not mean that it is good. The good is personal, extimate, non-negotiable, and the abandonment of one’s good for another’s version of it, is self-betrayal. ‘Sue’ embodies the good that makes of Sylvie a desiring woman; in losing ‘Sue,’ Sylvie loses her own presence, her voice, her desire, her self. Not the first nor the last story to deal with this theme, the modernity of “Sylvie” is expressed in Gowdy’s choice to deal with the theme of a woman’s loss of self, not by idealizing her beauty or character, but by figuring her excess on the outside of the body, aligning her with the category of the freak. The loss is thereby visible on the outside, emphasizing and making visible what is in fact a loss in Sylvie’s inner subjectivity. In the process, the attribute of freakishness retroactively falls away from the dynamic duality of ‘Sue’/Sylvie and now becomes ‘glued’ to the image of Sylvie, divested of ‘Sue,’ mourning herself.