Woman Does not Exist

Lacan, Poe and Re-(W)righting the Feminine

Abstract

For Lacan, in a social order characterized by the Law of
the Father, women’s identity is erased and they have to appropriate
themselves according to the idea of the ‘feminine’ as conceived by
masculine phantasmatic economy. This cultural ‘reconstruction’ of a
woman’s self is carried thorough a rigid process of mortification that turns
women into an ‘object’ of knowledge, left to be reconstituted and
reformulated. Literature is one such site where this textual reconstruction
takes place and where this idea of ‘The Woman’ is raised to the level of a
cultural fantasy. This essay interprets three short stories “Ligeia”, “The
Oval Portrait” and “Morella” by Edgar Allan Poe to demonstrate how
the female self is obliterated and her identity reconstituted to fit into
masculine fantasy framework. All three stories have male narrators and
the women characters die at the end and the essay contends that this death
should be read as the symbolic extinction of female self to morph her into
the male idea of the ‘feminine’.