ABSTRACT
Joan Riviere’s ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, published in 1929, is one of the most frequently referred to papers in this collection.
The title of the paper takes its cue from the dreams that an analysand, whose history is summed up here, had of people putting on masks in order to avert disaster and injury. Riviere first offers a synopsis of Jones’s essay ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality’ (with its rough schema of heterosexual, homosexual and ‘intermediate’ types) to introduce her analysand, ‘a particular type of intellectual woman’, who, as one of Jones’s intermediate types, is principally heterosexual in development but also displays strong features of the other sex. Riviere’s suggestion is that women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men. The case study is given in support of this claim: womanliness is assumed and worn as a mask both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if found guilty of the crime (cf. her analogy with the thief).
The paper is of particular interest, for it erases the distinction between genuine womanliness and masquerade. It also raises the question of ‘the essential nature of fully developed femininity’, a question lurking everywhere in the controversy, yet never properly addressed.
Both masquerade and womanliness are used as a device for avoiding anxiety, Riviere argues. They should therefore not be seen as primary modes of sexual enjoyment. If one sketches the early libido development of womanliness as a mask, one finds that the womanly woman’s reactions to both men and women lies in the little girl’s reaction to her parents during the oral biting-sadistic phase. In its content, the womanly woman’s fantasy in relation to the father is similar to the normal Oedipal one, the difference being that it is predicated on sadism. Because she has ‘killed’ her mother, she is also excluded from enjoying what the mother had, and what she does obtain from her father, she has to extort.
For Riviere, as for Deutsch and Jones, fully developed womanhood originates in the oral-sucking stage, the source of primary gratification , i.e., receiving a child from the father (via nipple, milk, penis, semen). The acceptance of castration is partly determined by the overestimation of the object in the oral-sucking phase, but mainly by the renunciation of sadistic castration wishes during the later oralbiting phase. Thus full heterosexuality coincides here with that of genitality. What makes a female homosexual, then, is the degree of sadism and anxiety involved in castration.
