ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how modernist writers negotiated the relationship among objects, the commodity and the fetish, and how, in particular, attitudes to the gendering of the voice are shaped by that relationship. When fetishes stand in for the feminine, especially in Sigmund Freud's analytical trajectory of fetishism, they do so in order to stand for a feminine lack, and in Karl Marx they stand for the missing order of labour, man's splitness from his labour. It was also psychoanalysis that –provided modernist writers with a language with which to negotiate the complexities of modernity and to characterize, analyse and make sense of the toll it took on the inner life of men and women. Even after 1945, the voice remained problematic, fetishized, holding modernist writers in the charm of its auratic splendour. For Mladen Dolar, modernism is a project characterized specifically by the requirement that, 'there must be an object other than the fetish'.
