'Insane passions': Psychosis and female same-sex desire in psychoanalysis and literary modernism (Hilda Doolittle, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Andre Breton, France)

This dissertation reads the early writings of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in tandem with novels by André Breton (Nadja ), Djuna Barnes (Nightwood), and H.D. ( HERmione and Asphodel). Specifically, it traces out the way in which early twentieth-century literary and psychoanalytic discourses on “narcissism” and “the feminine” at times intersect in the politically charged figure of the “psychotic lesbian.” This figure is most famously exemplified by Christine and Léa Papin, two sisters presumed to be lovers whose 1933 murder of the bourgeois mother-daughter pair who employed them as maids scandalized the French public. Lacan's fascination with the “Papin Affair” is the subject of critique in my first chapter. The female psychotic was to Lacan in the nineteen thirties what the hysteric was to Sigmund Freud in the eighteen-nineties: the privileged object of fascination for a clinician eager to derive a revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental illness. Lacan claims that the Papin sisters' ostensibly “paranoid” crime was fueled by a perilously narcissistic, homosexual dialectic that culminated in their sadistic assault on their employers. Lacan's mystifying rhetoric, however, provides less support for the truth of his claims than it does illustrate the way in which psychoanalysis conflates lesbianism with psychosis and positions them both as threats to the “civilized” human community.; While others have noted the similarities between modernist figurations of human consciousness and the alienated mental states of schizophrenics, the frequent rhetorical link between psychosis and femininity in early twentieth-century literary texts has been little discussed. In subsequent chapters, I argue that the psychotic woman that fascinates Lacan also occupies a key position in the history of modernist literature. Her actions are so enigmatic to others that they often are attributed to homosexual “perversion” and explained away as evidence of her “primitive” psyche (Lacan, Barnes) or of demonic possession (Breton, H.D.). By embodying perceived threats to “civilization,” the “psychotic woman” marks the limit of linguistic and social intelligibility in early twentieth-century psychoanalytic and literary discourse.