Phallic women in the contemporary cinema.

The critic Georgia Brown (1990) has recently observed that if the old formula for terror in movies was a woman alone pursued by a berserk man, the new formula is a harmless man terrorized by a crazed woman. Brown characterizes the 1990 film Misery - in which an immobilized James Caan is at the mercy of a powerful and looming Kathy Bates - as "Rear Window with James Stewart in the same room with Raymond Burr in drag." On the one hand, the violent phallic woman in Misery can be understood as one more manifestation of the "backlash" against the various feminisms of the recent past (Faludi 1991): women who stray from traditional female roles - or pervert these roles like Bate's character in Misery - are increasingly likely to take monstrous forms in Hollywood movies. So long as a woman's assumption of power is widely regarded as aberrant, America's entertainment industries will continue to capitalize on collective fantasies that are widely forbidden and hence profitably displaced into the narrative of a film. On the other hand, Hollywood has produced a dazzling variety of what we are calling, for want of a better term, "phallic women." Many of these characters are presented as something other than monstrous, and some appear in narratives that do not speak directly to feminist issues, pro or con. Regardless of how popular cinema presents phallic women, psychoanalysis provides a means for understanding the developmental, political, and cultural forces that lie behind this trend. Specifically, we would argue that psychoanalytically derived techniques of dream interpretation can be read into a cultural criticism of Hollywood's commodified fantasies. The omnipresent image of the phallic woman in recent cinema is surely an over-determined phenomenon, on that speaks to a variety of anxieties and fantasies, some more clearly articulated than others. An especially complex example of the phenomenon occurs in a handful of recent films that revolve around the discovery that a woman does not possess the phallus.

Our argument begins where so much of contemporary film theory begins, with Laura Mulvey's extraordinarily influential article, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema" (1975; 1989). As many have argued, Mulvey's theory of the cinematic punishment and fetishization of women as a means of assuaging the castration anxiety of the male viewer is only a partial account of gendered and nongendered pleasure at the cinema (Studlar 1988; Williams 1989; Rodowick 1991). More specifically, the possibility that a woman may not be castrated - that she may in fact possess a penis - has been identified as an even more fundamental fear than castration anxiety (Lurie 1981/82; Modleski 1988; Gabbard and Gabbard 1989). While a number of recent films have foregrounded women with phallic qualities, this paper will address two films, Sea of Love (1990) and Working Girl (1988), that are more concerned with male anxiety about the possibility that a woman may possess a penis or something very much like it.

The Phallic Mother

Freud wrote that the fantasy of a maternal phallus is a fundamental and therefore universal aspect of normal development. An extensive elaboration of this theme appears in his notorious psychobiographical study of Leonardo (1910). Freud seized on the symbolic meaning of a screen memory from Leonardo's childhood in which the artist remembered a large bird's tail being inserted into his mouth while he was an infant in a crib. Relying on a secondary text that mistranslated "nibio" as "vulture" instead of "kite," Freud searched for mythological correlates of this childhood fantasy. Noting that the vulture - headed Egyptian mother goddess Mut was typically represented as having both an erect male organ and breasts, Freud suggested that the male child must naturally assume that women possess a penis like his own. For Freud, mythology was preserving a primitive fantasy of the mother's body that reflected a universal developmental period in the male child.

In subsequent writings Freud used the fantasy of the female phallus as the centerpiece of his explanation of fetishism (1927; 1940). The male's castration anxiety leads him to regard the fetish with a peculiar form of intrapsychic splitting in which the fetish is both a denial and a confirmation that women are castrated. In subsequent elaborations on perversions by Bak (1968) and Stoller (1975), the fantasy of the woman with a phallus continued to play a key role in the pathogenesis of other forms of sexual deviation. Bak, for example, even went so far as to say, "In all perversions the dramatized or ritualized denial of castration is acted out through the regressive revival of the fantasy of the maternal or female phallus" (16). Stoller linked the fantasy to transvestism, in which a man dresses as a woman in an effort to concretize the unconscious fantasy that women do indeed possess a penis.

This myth of the phallic mother, however, has other functions besides relieving the male child's castration anxiety by reassuring him that women are just like he is. Beneath the genital imagery resides an omnipotent pregenital phallic mother born out of the male child's fear of a castrating, penetrating, all-powerful mother who may take advantage of his vulnerability (Brunswick 1940; Chasseguet - Smirgel 1964; Eigen 1974). Perhaps the most obvious example of the phallic mother's centrality is the ubiquitous image of the witch on her broom - stick with facial hair and pointed hat. By 1945, Geza Roheim had already traced the phallic mother theme to legends about witches in European folklore. Roheim also pointed out the association of mythological witches with cows or milk that is ruined or poisoned. More recently, Kulish has written, "The phallic mother is really the oral mother, then, the witch who attacks the source of mild and embodies the infant's aggression against the mother" (1986, 394). This equation of penis and breast is clearly present in the Leonardo screen memory. As Freud noted, the active situation of the infant suckling at the breast is transformed in Leonardo's memory into a passive version in which the phallus/breast is thrust into the infant's mouth as he passively receives it.

For Kleinian theorists, the infant combines breast and penis by assuming that father's penis is contained in mother. In her lucid…