Erotic
Fetishism in the Short Prose of Almas y
cerebros (1898)
by Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873-1927)
University of
Oklahoma
Una
instintiva voluptuosidad hacíame de antemano grato el manejo de
los
atavíos femeninos. Lo que luego he sentido con un goce casi
enfermizo en
mis visitas frecuentes á [sic] los paraísos mujeriles, lo
experimenté desde el primer día en aquella tienda
americana.
An instinctive
voluptuousness predisposed me to the handling of
feminine accessories. What I later felt as an almost sickly pleasure in
my
frequent visits to those womanly paradises [women’s boutiques], I
experienced from the first day in that American shop.
Enrique
Gómez Carrillo, Treinta
años de mi vida. Vol. I (83)
Enrique Gómez Carrillo
(Guatemala
1873-1927)
uses
fetishism in his short fiction to criticize restrictive bourgeois
sexual mores
and legitimize alternative notions of gender and desire. The Guatemalan
modernista, one of the most popular cronistas
of his day and the author of
an essay titled “El fetichismo,” employs fetish in some of his
short stories, for example “La cabellera de Cleopatra,”
(Cleopatra’s Mane) to question the social salubriousness of marriage
and
family life and suggest conjugal life as a source of social decline. In
his
short story “Amor ideal” (Ideal Love) fetish serves to highlight
the outdated nature of older generations vis
à vis the diverse erotic tastes of modern women. In both
stories the
desire for the fetish object reroutes traditional, heterosexual,
reproductive
urges and thus breaks down traditional notions of the masculine and
feminine by
displacing and complicating desire. These literary gestures call into
question
the injunction, endorsed by Judeo-Christian dogma and the mores of the
ruling
classes of Latin America and beyond, that sexuality and intercourse
exist
solely for procreation, a phenomenon the historian George Mosse
investigates in
his classic 1985 study Nationalism and
Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. The study at hand considers aspects of
Gómez Carrillo’s autobiography that influenced fetishism in his
later work, offers a brief overview of contemporary views on fetishism,
and
provides analyses of several of his short stories. Fetish is privileged
rather
than pathologized in Gómez Carrillo’s fiction as a way of
rewriting the sexual status quo.
The public conservatism of
bourgeois sexual mores in late nineteenth-century Latin American
society has
been well documented (Barceló Miller, Salessi, Suárez
Findlay).
For men from families of means, sexual intercourse could begin with the
onset
of puberty with a prostitute or woman of a lower social class, so that
the
individual might avoid the scandal of deflowering a “decent” woman
out of wedlock. Honorable women were to be virgins (or at least have
the public
reputation thereof) until they married. Homosexuality or other sexual
“aberrations” were not viable options for respectable members of
the bourgeoisie. The medical and ruling
communities viewed homosexuality, transvestitism, and female (but not
male)
promiscuity as threats to the health and integrity of society. Prescribed gender traits also fell into
neat dichotomies. Members of the middle and upper classes expected
their women
to be domestic, maternal, and passive while men could be professionally
aggressive, public, intellectual, and idealistic.(1) Gómez Carrillo was part of the
group of modernista writers
identified with European decadence who disturbed the sexual status quo
and
gender norms by including erotically charged material in his short
prose.
I. Fetish in
Gómez
Carrillo’s Autobiography
Gómez
Carrillo is among the most prolific Latin American writers of his time,
yet his
name is rarely mentioned as a major contributor to the modernista
movement in Latin America, as the literary critic
José Ismael Gutiérrez notes (423).(2)
Gómez Carrillo is considered decadente
owing to his bold use of erotic, sadomasochistic, exotic, and
orientalist
themes. The journalist, novelist,
essayist and diplomat spent most of his life in Paris and published
more than
eighty books and approximately three thousand crónicas
that kept Latin American readers up to date
regarding the latest Parisian trends in the arts and culture. According
to the
Guatemalan literary scholar Juan Carlos Escobedo Mendoza, Gómez
Carrillo’s crónicas from
Paris and his travel narratives from Europe and Asia made him the most
read
journalist in Guatemala. His prose
fiction was also widely read in Spain and Latin America.
Gómez Carrillo’s journalism
and fiction influenced his readers’ notions of culture and
cosmopolitanism in an age defined by its push toward progress and
internationalism in the city centers.
The epigraph to this study is
from Gómez Carrillo’s autobiography Treinta
años de mi vida in which he speaks of his fetish
experience in the women’s department as a shopkeeper in Guatemala at
the
age of fifteen, a career choice that vexed his impoverished but
“aristocratic” parents, to use Gómez Carrillo’s term.
His arousal while handling articles of women’s clothing is one of
several
types of sexual fetish experiences in Treinta
años. Before venturing
further into this text it is important to note that the veracity of the
work
must be viewed with some degree of skepticism. In this entertainingly
narrated
life history, a Gómez Carrillo in his late forties recounts many
specific dialogues and recalls in detail scenes that took place more
than
thirty years prior to the time of writing. Whether he tells of true
events or
whether these tales are somewhat embellished is not as important as the
role
that Gómez Carrillo assigns to erotic fetishism in his memoir. A critical counterpoint between
fetishistic desire, highlighted in Gómez Carrillo’s
autobiographical
writing, and the representation of such desire in his fiction, signals
the
centrality and impact of the topic in question, not just for
Gómez
Carrillo but also in the broader context of modernismo’s
ambiguous, highly stylized transgressions of the mores and taboos of
the
period.
Gómez Carrillo as
autobiographer tells the story of his sexual initiation at the hand of
a
cultivated married woman of status in her mid thirties, Edda
Christensen, the
French wife of a Spanish foreign minister living in Guatemala. The
future
novelist and journalist meets Edda when she enters his place of work.
Gómez Carrillo’s physical descriptions of her focus in a
fetishistic manner on the artificiality and mask-like aspect of her
person.
Decked out in the latest fashion, the woman is ghostly pale, heavily
made up
with powder and lips as red as blood, with dark circles under huge
shining
green eyes (95-6). The shop owner comments on her ugliness, an attitude
Gómez Carrillo attributes to the proprietor’s simplistic taste
for
“la hermosura morena y sana” (healthy, brunette beauty). This comment
reveals the future writer’s own unapologetic awareness of his
attraction
to the unnatural, “morbid,” haunting beauty of artifice. When Edda
returns to the shop under the pretext of buying a multitude of
frivolous items,
she has the handsome young man box and, most importantly, deliver the
items
personally to her home. The beginnings of their relationship, then, is
marked
by the acquisition of objects and, subsequently, Edda’s gifts of rare
jewelry to Gómez Carrillo’s mother and sister as a way of
(unsuccessfully)
attempting to earn their affection and acceptance. Gómez
Carrillo’s entrancing lust for Edda in the early stages of their
courtship is inextricably linked to the exchange of fetishistic gifts
and the
ambiance of luxurious adornment in the lady’s well-appointed home.(3)
The diverse emotional and
physical sensations of pleasure and pain the adolescent Gómez
Carrillo
experiences with Edda resurface later in his fiction. Moreover, the
seeds of
the writer’s interests in French literature, sadomasochism, and fetish
may be found in his narration of this early sexual relationship, whose
fire was
so heightened by his introduction to French novels and poetry, and the
silks,
ribbons, rouge, and gems in Christensen’s midst. The golden statue of
Buddha
in her boudoir is mentioned most frequently and becomes a symbol of the
young
man’s spiritual and almost religious reverence for the sexual act,
which
reminds us of fetish’s original
use to denote amulets and other objects revered in certain cultures as
sacred,
magical, or spiritual talismans.
Significantly,
gender roles are inverted in Gómez Carrillo’s affair with Edda.
Throughout the narrative the Frenchwoman simply refers to Gómez
Carrillo
as “petit” (little one). Says the
autobiographer of his lover: “Disponiendo de mí
á su antojo, tratábame cual yo me figuraba entonces que
los
amantes verdaderos debían tratar á sus queridas. Todas
las iniciativas voluptuosas partían de ella. Ella solía
llamarme: « mi novia… mi mujercita… »” (Using me at her
will, she treated
me as I thought, back then, true [male] lovers must treat their
sweethearts.
All of the voluptuous initiatives came from her. She would call me: “my
bride…my little woman”; Treinta
años 143). After his liaison with Edda comes to an end,
Gómez
Carrillo looks back and feels indignant about her treatment of him,
which burns
his “orgullo de machito ingenuo” (ingenuous young macho’s
pride). However in the moment he passively accepts his low status and
recognizes the huge gap in social class and experience between him and
Edda
(“A su lado… mi sumisión era absoluta”; At her
side…I was completely submissive; 144). There can be little doubt that
part of Gómez Carrillo’s retelling of this story as an adult is
influenced by the modernista
fascination with the femme fatale, the seductive woman who preys on the
weakness of male flesh. The personal nature of this story, nonetheless,
carries
it beyond types. The powerful break with traditional notions of
feminine
passivity and male aggression common in 1880s Guatemalan society (as
evidenced,
for example, by the traditional behaviors Gómez Carrillo
describes in
his mother, father, and acquaintances) is not a myth or symbol for the
writer,
but rather a reality that marks his fictional conceptions of gender and
sexuality.
Ten years later when
Gómez Carrillo is twenty-five years old, he has made a name for
himself
as a journalist and literary critic, and Guatemalan President Manuel
Estrada
Cabrera grants him a diplomatic post in Paris. The writer is free to
explore multiple
modes of sexuality in the relatively permissive ambiance of the City of
Lights.
The first year of his tenure in Paris yields the 1898 book-length
collection of
short stories and vignettes, Almas y
cerebros: historias sentimentales, intimidades parisienses, etc. (Souls
and
Brains: Sentimental Stories, Parisian Intimacies, etc.), in which the
author
considers, in his fictional narratives and essays, various aspects and
functions of sexual fetishism.
II. Definitions
of fetishism
at the turn of the nineteenth century
Gómez
Carrillo was savvy in regard to contemporary psycho-medical definitions
and
discussions of fetishism. In
his essay “El fetichismo,” he mentions the work of two theorists of
sexual “infirmities,” the Austro-German psychiatrist and medical
doctor Richard Freiherr von Kraft-Ebbing (1840-1902) and the German
psychiatrist Albert Moll (1862-1939).
Notably, the writer prefers the more inclusive (less
essentialist) view
of Moll and cites a case study by Moll of boot fetish. By the early
1880s
doctors had observed and described patients’ fetishistic perversions
without assigning them a name. The French psychiatrist Alfred Binet
(1857-1911)
is considered the first to use the term fetishism
to describe an erotic attachment to objects or body parts in his study
“Fetishism in Love,” which appeared in the widely circulated Revue philosophique in 1887 (Nye 20-21).
Historian Robert Nye notes that around this time fetishism emerges as a
pathological behavior, particularly in France. That is to say, that by
treating
fetishism sympathetically in his fiction, Gómez Carrillo’s view
of
sexuality is more progressive than the French medical opinions during
that
period.(4) We may note here that the
Francophilia of which
Gómez Carrillo has been so often accused is not present in his
use of
fetish, although a superficial evaluation of the topic may suggest the
contrary. In fact, his treatment of fetish is based more in his own
life
experiences than in any specific theory.
Two
of the most important scholars of the erotic fetish at the turn of the
century
are Krafft-Ebing, author of Psychopathia
Sexualis (1886), and the British psychologist Havelock Ellis
(1859-1839),
whose Studies in the Psychology of Sex
came out in sections between 1897 and 1910. An important difference
between
Krafft-Ebing’s work and that of Ellis is their categorization of
fetishism, “inversion” (homosexuality) and other
“abnormal” sexual behaviors as pathogolical (Krafft-Ebing) or as
suppressed desires that are part of normal human sexuality (Ellis).
Krafft-Ebing groups these behaviors as paraethesia
or “perversion of the sexual instinct” due to misplaced desire onto
objects, body parts other than the primary sexual organs, or members of
the
same sex (Krafft-Ebing xii). From the case studies he enumerates and
from
Binet’s findings, Krafft-Ebing proposes that fetishism often results
from
heredity of a nervous constitution, early masturbation associated with
the
fetish, shame associated with sexual experiences involving the fetish,
and engaging
in relationships of a sexual nature before or during puberty in which
the
fetish is present (although sometimes the fetishization is simply
“spontaneous”). For the Austro-German, these behaviors are
pathological when coitus cannot take place or is difficult without
evoking an
image of the fetish item or body part.
Fetish is particularly pathological in the case of theft of
fetish items
(most often handkerchiefs, but also ladies’ underwear, “live”
hair clippings, aprons, and other miscellaneous items); such pathology
is of
“forensic importance” (220). In sum, Krafft-Ebing views erotic
fetishism as a potential social problem because it: 1) hinders marriage
and
procreation (core elements of bourgeois Judeo-Christian social
modalities) or
2) inspires theft, robbery, and, more rarely, assault or murder.(5)
Ellis’s
work is well known for its sympathy toward individuals who take their
delight
in members of the same sex, a certain body part, or an inanimate fetish
object.
He was a pioneering advocate for “non-inverted” women’s
sexual freedom and the right of “inverts” of both sexes to erotic
pleasure and social acceptance. An exemplary case study of Ellis’s
tells
the story of an educated married woman of high social status who uses
her
fetish for applying a certain type of whip to her buttocks to discover,
well
into adult life, that she can finally achieve heightened pleasure,
albeit anal
rather than the prescribed reproductive vaginal variety.(6)
In
this case, Ellis “normalizes” the fetish by pointing out that an
otherwise
frigid woman’s exploration of desire allowed her to get closer to the
goal of deriving pleasure from coitus. While Ellis couches his
observations in
a discourse that appears to recognize happiness within marriage as its
aim, he
does not view non-heterogenital sexual acts as pathological. In fact,
he offers
numerous examples of each type of sexual conduct in order to show how
prevalent
these desires are in European society.
Gómez
Carrillo’s sympathy toward fetishistic desire (which predates most of
Ellis’s writings) is apparent in the definition he offers in “El
fetichismo”: “en el fondo el fetichismo no es sino: la
exaltación morbosa de las preferencias” (in the core fetishism
is
nothing but the morbid exaltation of preferences; Almas y
cerebros 373). This definition generalizes fetish to an
extreme form of preference without assigning pathological qualities to
it.
While his use of the adjective “morbosa” shows the influence of
contemporary psycho-scientific definitions, a closer look at
Gómez Carrillo’s
fiction reveals that fetish functions as a device to highlight desire
and
sexuality in the human psyche that is stifled by bourgeois codes of
behavior
and values. Characters’ fetishes reveal a constructionist (rather than
essentialist) view of gender, one in which typically masculine and
feminine
characteristics are combined or inverted in the fetish object. This
representation of the fetish suggests psychological sexual desires
beyond or
between the hetero- and homosexual.
III. Erotic
Fetishism in Almas y cerebros
Gómez
Carrillo’s choice of subject matter often made his more conservative
contemporaries uncomfortable. The perception was, perhaps, that he
included
risqué themes for their shock value or to titillate readers.
Further
research and analysis about the context of his works show that his use
of
fetish is sophisticated, critical, and timely. The well-known Spanish
journalist, novelist, and literary critic Leopoldo Alas (penname
Clarín;
1852-1901) composed a harsh prologue to Almas
y cerebros. The tone of his
comments reflects the emphasis on a cultural return to Spanish roots
typical of
the era of the Spanish American war and the Generation of ’98. Alas
praises Gómez Carrillo’s artistic potential, yet derogatorily
categorizes the collection as “cosmopolita”
and accuses the author of exhibiting “entusiasmo de snob.”
Alas vacillates between admonishing Carrillo for is
love affair with the new French fashions in literature and vigorously
encouraging him not to distance himself from his Spanish origins
(although
Gómez Carrillo was, of course, born in Guatemala), a critique
which
reminds the reader of Gómez Carrillo’s falling away from the
center, as suggested in the Latin root of decadence: de-cadere.
Specifically, Alas urges the young modernista not
to drag his readers into a moral decline hastened by
“exotic” European trends.
Alas’s fears regarding the content of Gómez
Carrillos’s prose is apparent, as he refers to the “peligro de su
cosmopolitismo literario para la juventud á [sic] quien
principalmente
se dirige” (the danger his literary cosmopolitanism represents for the
youth to whom it is primarily directed; xiv). Some
of the themes in Almas y cerebros that likely
disturbed
Alas are psychopathy, lesbianism, female pursuit of sexual
satisfaction, crimes
of passion, and, of course, fetishism.
Further, the Guatemalan writer’s repetition of the historical,
biblical, and eminently decadent fin-de-siècle
figure Salome functions to present a pleasantly erotic version of
the
castration fantasy/fear and serves as the basis for questioning gender
norms.
“La
cabellera de Cleopatra” (Cleopatra’s Mane) may appear to be a story
about how a fetishistic obsession ruins a meek poet named Teodoro
Sylarus.
Rather, it is the story of the detrimental effects of prescribed
matrimony on a
man with complex desires. We learn in the first few lines of his
scopophilia:
one of the poet’s favorite distractions is to walk through the business
district and gaze, mesmerized, at the many objects for sale. He stares
longingly
at the tiny curvaceous Greek figurines of the female form, Tanagras,
which
might serve as muses. His eyes hungrily take in everything from the
antique
books, to diamonds, to his preferred object: a wig in the barber’s
window.
The
first part of the narrative reveals the impromptu nature of Teodoro’s
less-than-ideal marriage: “Se había casado, sin saber
cómo,
entre dos cantos de su poema, con una modista algo marchita cuyo perfil
le
pareció griego una tarde de primavera” (He had gotten married,
not
knowing how, between two cantos of his poem, with a slightly withered
dressmaker whose profile seemed Greek to him one spring afternoon” 21).
The reader may infer that Teodoro, interested primarily in an afternoon
fling,
acquiesced to marriage as the socially expected outcome of coitus with
an
unmarried woman. The financial burdens of the fruits of his union, two
children, lead him to take an undesirable job teaching grammar.
All
of the passion missing from Teodoro’s life after marriage is channeled
into his creative mind and work. His musings produce his masterpiece,
the
dithyramb Cleopatra Victrix (Cleopatra
the Victorious), which is the ultimate manifestation of these
suppressed
yearnings:
El
poeta no había querido hablar únicamente de la querida de
Antonio
y de César, sino de toda la belleza femenina.---Para realizar su
ideal
alegórico, atribuía á su Cleopatra vencedora las
gracias
crueles de Salomé y la divina majestad de la Venus griega. Fundidas en un solo cuerpo de carne
rubia, esas tres diosas de la voluptuosidad formaban un monstruo de
belleza
turbadora, lleno de hipocresía felina, de majestad perezosa y de
atractivo sanguinario.
---La Trinidad
del Amor—decía el poeta.
The poet had not
wanted to
speak only of the lover of Marc Anthony and Caesar, but rather of all
feminine
beauty.---In order to realize his allegorical ideal, he gave his
victorious
Cleopatra all of the cruel graces of Salome and the divine majesty of
the Greek
Venus. Fused in a single body of
golden flesh, those three goddesses of voluptuousness formed a
disturbing
monster of beauty, full of feline hypocrisy, of slothful majesty and of
sanguine attraction.
---The Trinity
of
Love—as the poet used to say.
18
Teodoro’s lack
of satisfaction within marriage combined with
years of suppressing his urges finds an outlet in his dreams of this
trio of
mythical and historical women (Cleopatra, Venus, and Salome); three is
the
number of the charm, the magical number that marks his release.
One
day Teodoro’s fortunes turn and he is faced with the decision about how
to spend the earnings. A former acquaintance offers to publish his
short prose
work of secondary importance, entitled La
evolución psicológica del beso (The Psychological
Evolution
of the Kiss). Teodoro marvels at the fact that his masterpiece Cleopatra Victrix languishes
unpublished, while this mediocre analysis of the kiss earns him two
hundred
francs. The editor’s acceptance of Teodoro’s second-rate manuscript
makes a critical statement about the market demand for a study that
categorizes
and renders ascetic a spontaneous human act, detaching it from its
instinctual
impulses. Gómez
Carrillo’s ironic treatment of bourgeois literary tastes brings to mind
Alas’s juxtaposition of Gómez Carrillo’s dangerous modernista
cosmopolitanism to “another
genre” of young intellectuals in America, who look toward
“novedades más serias,
más profundas y más compatibles con la
conservación del
carácter nacional” (more serious and profound new trends that
are
more compatible with the conservation of the national character; xv). These nationally salubrious “new
trends” are, for Alas, those in science and philosophy (viii, xv). One also finds an analogous connection
between Teodoro’s study of the kiss and Binet’s and
Krafft-Ebing’s “scientific” pathologization and/or
categorization of human sexual urges. The fictional Teodoro, then,
momentarily
participates in the trend of “scientific” realism, just as he
passively slips into marriage to meet social expectations.
Despite his earlier conformism,
Teodoro’s deeper instinctual impulses, awakened by composing the
Dionysian dithyramb, eventually prevail.
Ultimately
Teodoro hands over the sum of his earnings to be the sole owner of the
long
coveted fetish, which he believes to be, in his concupiscent state of
delusion,
a wig made from the original hair of Cleopatra herself:
Era
una cabellera de mujer, rubia, muy rubia, rubia obscura, rubia
veneciana, con
tonos de cobre pulido, sedeña, enorme, espléndida. Durante media hora sus ojos no se
cansaron de admirar esa cabellera sin cabeza, que tenía, para
él,
algo de enigmático y que le hacía pensar vagamente en
Cleopatra,
en Salomé y en la decapitación de San Juan Bautista. (…)
La
gran cabellera inmóvil le atraía, le subyugaba, le
obsesionaba.
It was a woman’s
head of hair, blonde, very blonde, dark
blonde, Venetian blonde, with tones of polished copper, silky,
enormous,
splendid. For half an hour his eyes
did not grow tired of admiring this hair without a head, that held, for
him,
something enigmatic and that vaguely made him think about Cleopatra,
Salome and
in the decapitation of John the Baptist. (…) The great immobile head of
hair attracted him, subjugated him, he was obsessed by it. 22
The wig
represents the return of Teodoro’s long lost
virility, but, ironically, it is also his welcomed castration. This is
clear in
the narrative through Teodoro’s great interest in putting himself in
the
place of Marc Anthony, Caesar, and even the doomed John the Baptist.
While
Teodoro’s withered virility in his everyday life is apparent in the
passive role he assumes with colleagues, the dreamlike state that the
wig
produces in him allows him to escape to a fantasy in which he is the
potent
lover of the most powerful women in the world.
His
subjugation to the wig and the merciless, seductive cruelty of the
women he
associates with it (Cleopatra, Salome) imply a degree of masochism in
this
erotic encounter. The daughter of Herodias’s request that her
stepfather/uncle Herod grant her John the Baptist’s head on a platter
is
an often-noted example of fetish, one that Oscar Wilde, a friend of
Gómez Carillo’s, exploits fruitfully in his 1894 play Salome. (7) While
Charles Bernheimer finds that
European decadent writers’ “seminal fantas[ies]” of Salome
are “fearful fantasies of feminine difference” that embody the
horror of castration, Gómez Carrillo’s notion of symbolic
castration implies a profound degree of pleasure for the poet, who
embraces
this castration and appears relieved of the burden of the phallus and
all of
the responsibilities it entails in late nineteenth-century society
(Bernheimer
62).
The
fact that Teodoro cannot reproduce with the wig is essential to the
intensity
of his delight; lusting after a wig defies expected social outcomes of
the
sexual act—bearing children whose material needs chain the poet to a
life
of drudgework. Freud’s definition in Three
Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1905) emphasizes this aspect of
fetish:
“the normal sexual object is substituted for another, which, though
related to it, is totally unfit for the sexual aim. (…) the sexual
object
is generally a part of the body but little adapted for sexual purposes,
such as
the foot or hair…” (534). Apter’s interpretation of the
fetish provides useful perspective here; although she speaks
specifically of
feminist essentialism, her thoughts apply to the case of masculine
essentialism
as well:
Feminist
essentialism is
resisted through fetishism’s implicit challenge to a stable phallic
referent (…) The imaginary phallus, venerated elsewhere, ultimately
comes
to occupy no fixed place at all. And the idea stipulated by classical
psychoanalysis that virtually any object—fur, velvet, chair legs…
can become a candidate for fetishization once it is placed on the great
metonymic chain of phallic substitutions ultimately undermines the
presupposition of a phallic ur-form,
or object-type. If the phallus no
longer resembles a phallus…, then perhaps an epoch obsessed with
castration anxiety has reached its twilight days. Apter, 4-5
I am not suggesting that
Gómez Carrillo advocates a constructionist view of gender to
free women
and men from essentialist assumptions about their sex and to further
women’s rights; his views of women in many selections outside this
study
contradict such a notion. However his own pleasurable yet unfamiliar
feelings
of emasculation in his relationship with Edda Christensen and the
androgynous
nature of his fictional characters’ eroticized objects offer a reading
of
desire that is beyond heterogenital.
“Amor ideal” is
a story of a woman’s fetishization of
her suitor’s hands. Gómez Carrillo’s choice of women as
subjects of fetishistic desire is relevant, as Krafft-Ebing does not
attribute
this “illness” to the delicate sex and offers no case studies of
women who show sexual interest in body parts or objects. In the
selections
below women are agents of their sexual desires without falling prey to
death,
disease, or vilification, as often happens in the case of desirous
women in
fiction of the period (Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina are two well-known
examples).
The story is
written in the
style of a personal diary so we do not know the young lady’s name. The
description of her suitor Gabriel isolates her arousal to looking at or
touching his hands; “no es guapo ni mucho menos” (he is not
handsome, nor even much less)
Lo
único que en él me parece bello, verdadera, completa,
delicada y
exquisitamente bello, son sus manos---esas manos aristocráticas
y
nerviosas, blancas como las de una princesa de Wislers [sic], y tan
largas, tan
afiladas, tan armoniosas, que habrían podido servir de modelo al
escultor Rodín para completar la belleza incorpórea de su
Bautista de bronce!
The only thing
in him that seems beautiful to me, truly,
completely, delicately, and exquisitely beautiful, are his hands---
aristocratic and nervous, white as those of one of Whistler’s
princesses,
and so long, so tapered, so harmonious, that they would have been able
to serve
as models to the sculptor Rodin to complete the incorporeal beauty of
his
bronze Baptist! 84-5.
In the passage above the allusion to Salome is evident in the
reference to Rodin’s bronze of St. John the Baptist. The woman compares
her intended’s lovely hands with those of Rodin’s Saint, putting
herself metaphorically in the position of the decapitator/castrator.
However,
the narrator shifts the phallic emphasis back and forth between her and
her
intended; at times she is the one who feels “domada” (dominated)
and at others she sees him in a role that is “suplicante”
(supplicating). The story subtly juxtaposes two sides of the narrator:
the
outwardly proper young lady of the privileged class and the woman who
is a
product of sophisticated influences and times.
Several
of the scenes in “Amor ideal” make reference to the older
generations of women of the narrator’s family. It is in these
references
that the reader is given some perspective on new explorations in
sexuality for
the modern era. The narrator painstakingly devises elaborate strategies
to
prolong activities that allow her to touch her suitor’s hands. One such
strategy is conceived when she finds that “un anillo muy feo” (a
very ugly ring), a gift from her grandmother, is stuck on her finger.
She begs
Gabriel to help her “separar[se] de tan odiosa joya.” (free herself
of such a hateful piece of jewelry; 89). Her distaste for her
grandmother’s preference in jewels suggests the new generation’s
rejection of passé mores, while her irreverence toward tradition
is
apparent in the way that she uses the gift as a pretext to achieve a
sexual
thrill.
As
the narrator’s obsession with Gabriel’s hands intensifies, she
finally decides to confide in her mother and seek an explanation. Her
mother responds: “La razón es muy sencilla: las manos de
Gabriel te gustan, porque la mano es el símbolo del amor puro. Dar la mano es
dar de
alma.” (The reason is simple: Gabriel’s hands please you because
the hand is the symbol of pure love. To offer one’s hand is to offer
the
soul; 91). The story ends abruptly with the narrator’s compassionate
yet
disdainful exclamation that reveals the full extent of the sexual
component of
the fetish: “¡Inocente mamá!...” . Just as a man might
imagine his mistress in many states of dress, the narrator imagines her
young
man’s hands in all permutations from waxen saintly hands, to large
feline
claws grasping at prey; she imagines them sweet, cruel, and despotic
(90). The
stark contrast between the young woman’s involved intimate fantasies
about Gabriel’s hands and her mother’s simplistic and romantic
explanation
leaves little doubt that the 1890s woman is in tune with her desires in
a new
way, although restricted in the pursuit of their satisfaction.
The
protagonist/narrator of “Amor ideal” reminds the reader of
fictional women in tune with their desires featured in Gómez
Carrillo’s “La suprema voluptuosidad” and “La
guillotina”. In the first story a young wife is sorely disillusioned
with
her conjugal routine and longs for the supreme sensual pleasure about
which she
has read. She discovers that
viewing erotic paintings is the key to igniting these passions. “La
guillotina” is the story of a young woman’s arousal upon watching a
public beheading. It appears the
gruesome intensity of the act and perhaps the power-fantasy of
castration
inspire her to rush home with her husband. Both of these stories
explore the
subversive erotic desires of otherwise “normal” women of the
bourgeoisie. Unlike other modernista
novels and short stories in which the sexually subversive woman is
punished for
her “unnatural” desires--José Asunción Silva’s
protagonist José Fernández comes to mind as a
misogynistic
character who seeks out but then physically abuses the sexually
adventurous
women Nini Roussett and “La Orloff” (137; 107)--Gómez
Carrillo’s women in these short selections are not demonized or
punished.
It is significant, however,
that Gómez Carrillo’s lusty women live out their newfound libido
with their respective husbands (which may explain why they are
presented
relatively favorably), while Silva’s characters seek partners outside
of
marriage. Like other types of early
attempts to question and subvert conservative social mores, then,
Gómez
Carrillo’s is framed to resemble sexual propriety familiar to the
typical
middle-class reader, yet the content within this frame is provocatively
unfamiliar.
Gómez
Carrillo’s foray into the struggle against prescribed sexual and gender
norms, on a symbolic level through fiction, anticipates Ellis’s
thoughts
on the natural diversity of human sexual desire, Freud’s recognition of
the primacy of “uncivilized” sexual urges in human beings (Civilization
and its Discontents) and,
in the late twentieth century, Michel Foucault’s inquiries into the
history of sexual repression in Western culture, as well as Judith
Butler’s ideas on the mutability and performativity of gender.
Gómez Carrillo’s use of fetish in short prose to highlight the
restrictions on sexuality and suggest a new, more sexually ambiguous
era likely
gave pause to contemporary readers taught to view non-traditional
desires as aberrations. His choice of
title, Almas y cerebros (Souls and Brains),
draws attention to the importance of the deep-seated psychological,
emotional,
and even spiritual dimensions of erotic desire that were bypassed in
the
unwavering focus on the procreative functions of the heterosexual union
in
mainstream discourses. Gómez
Carrillo’s popularity during his lifetime might rest in part to his
appeal to these very readers, many of them women, who saw alternative
representations of gender and desire in these bits of fiction that
contradicted
highly categorized and pathologized notions of alternative sexualities
in the
“scientific” literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
Notes
(1).
Note that Doris Sommer makes a case for the acceptability of the
somewhat
effeminate romantic hero in the nineteenth-century novel, whose
vulnerability
and sensitivity would make him a desirable companion in the eyes of
women
readers. However this flexibility of
gender traits and more pliable definitions of romantic virility did not
translate easily to print media.
Generally, mainstream journal articles maintained conservative
gender
norms by publishing articles about men’s public feats and women’s
chastity,
religiosity and domestic virtues. Modernista journalists, many of them
quite popular in their day, evidently had other agendas and wrote
material that
subverted strict gender categories and traditional notions of the
normative
family unit.
(2).
Nellie Bauzá Echeverría’s 1999 monograph is the most
recent
critical book-length study of Gómez Carrillo’s novels. Most of the few dozen scholarly journal
articles on Gómez Carrillo’s writing focus on his travel
narratives, on his orientalist representations of Japan, on his
Francophilia,
or on his relationship to other well-known writers of his day.
(3).
A reading of Gómez Carrillo’s writing based in Marx’s idea
of commodity fetishism is tempting here.
However this idea was elaborated in 1867 and Marx’s use of
fetishism refers to the anthropological definition in primitive
religions,
rather than to the psycho-medical notion of the fetish later in the
century.
While a Marxist reading is outside of the scope of the current study,
Gómez Carrillo’s short prose, replete with references to
consumerism, productively lends itself to such an exploration.
(4).
The interconnectivity between psycho-medical science and literature at
the end
of the nineteenth century was strong owing to the union of these two
areas in
the French novelist Emile Zola’s naturalism, a literary movement that
took scientific method as its core principal. Indeed
both Krafft-Ebing and Ellis cite
popular contemporary novels frequently as evidence to support a claim
or a
particular behavior in a case study.
(5).
See Robert Nye’s article “The Medical Origins of Sexual
Fetishism” for a complete discussion of the pathologizing of
non-reproductive sexual practices to inhibit depopulation in fin-de-siècle France. An
example of fetish that could result
in murder or assault is found in Krafft-Ebing’s chilling case study of
a
man obsessed with the idea of cutting and eating white female flesh
(238-240).
(6).
The title of this case study is “The History of Florrie and the
Mechanism
of Sexual Deviation.” It is
from part two of volume two of Ellis’s Studies,
“Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies.”
(7).
The story and topic of Salome appears frequently in Gómez
Carrillo’s work. In Treinta
años de mi vida he
dedicates a chapter to his conversations with Oscar Wilde about the
creation of
the Irish writer’s Salome character.
Later the Guatemalan wrote a short story about a young woman, a
professional dancer, who composes her own music to a dance performance
piece, El triunfo de Salomé (which is
also the name of the short story).
“El triunfo de Salomé” focuses on a perverse
fetishization of dance, rather than on erotically charged act of
decapitation. Please see
José Ismael Gutiérrez’s article for a detailed
comparative
analysis of Wilde’s and Gómez Carrillo’s works about Salome.
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