On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love 3 страница

The taboo of virginity and something of its motivation has been depicted most powerfully of all in a well-known dramatic character, that of Judith in Hebbel’s tragedy Judith und Holofernes. Judith is one of those women whose virginity is protected by a taboo. Her first husband was paralysed on the bridal night by a mysterious anxiety, and never again dared to touch her, ‘My beauty is like belladonna,’ she says. ‘Enjoyment of it brings madness and death.’ When the Assyrian general is besieging her city, she conceives the plan of seducing him by her beauty and of destroying him, thus employing a patriotic motive to conceal a sexual one. After she has been deflowered by this powerful man, who boasts of his strength and ruthlessness, she finds the strength in her fury to strike off his head, and thus becomes the liberator of her people. Beheading is well known to us as a symbolic substitute for castrating; Judith is accordingly the woman who castrates the man who has deflowered her, which was just the wish of the newly-married woman expressed in the dream I reported. It is clear that Hebbel has intentionally sexualized the patriotic narrative from the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, for there Judith is able to boast after her return that she has not been defiled, nor is there in the Biblical text any mention of her uncanny wedding night. But probably, with the fine perception of a poet, he sensed the ancient motive, which had been lost in the tendentious narrative, and has merely restored its earlier content to the material.

Sadger (1912) has shown in a penetrating analysis how Hebbel was determined in his choice of material by his own parental complex, and how he came to take the part of the woman so regularly in the struggle between the sexes, and to feel his way into the most hidden impulses of her mind. He also quotes the motives which the poet himself gives for the alteration he has made in the material, and he rightly finds them artificial and as though intended to justify outwardly something the poet himself is unconscious of, while at bottom concealing it. I will not dispute Sadger’s explanation of why Judith, who according to the Biblical narrative is a widow, has to become a virgin widow. He refers to the purpose found in childish phantasies of denying the sexual intercourse of the parents and of turning the mother into an untouched virgin. But I will add: after the poet has established his heroine’s virginity, his sensitive imagination dwells on the hostile reaction released by the violation of her maidenhood.

We may say, then, in conclusion that defloration has not only the one, civilized consequence of binding the woman lastingly to the man; it also unleashes an archaic reaction of hostility towards him, which can assume pathological forms that are frequently enough expressed in the appearance of inhibitions in the erotic side of married life, and to which we may ascribe the fact that second marriages so often turn out better than first. The taboo of virginity, which seems so strange to us, the horror with which, among primitive peoples, the husband avoids the act of defloration, are fully justified by this hostile reaction.

It is interesting that in one’s capacity as analyst one can meet with women in whom the opposed reactions of bondage and hostility both find expression and remain intimately associated with each other. There are women of this kind who seem to have fallen out with their husbands completely and who all the same can only make vain efforts to free themselves. As often as they try to direct their love towards some other man, the image of the first, although he is no longer loved, intervenes with inhibiting effect. Analysis then teaches us that these women, it is true, still cling to their first husbands in a state of bondage, but no longer through affection. They cannot get away from them, because they have not completed their revenge upon them, and in pronounced cases they have not even brought the impulses for vengeance to consciousness.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23