Page 35 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T 29

Armstrong investigates the articulation of desire and femininity in eighteenth-and
nineteenth-century domestic fiction to trace ‘the emergence and domination of a
system of gender differences over and against a long tradition of overtly political
signs of social identity’ (1987:21). In order to pursue what I believe is a related
phenomenon—the connections between cleaning, gender construction and
sexuality, and the eradication or mystification of other differences—I would like
to look at several cleaning scenes analysed and recounted by the most important
theorist of bourgeois sexuality: Sigmund Freud.

Scene 3:
Sigmund Freud, sexuality and the primal clean

Take care of sanitation and civilization will take care of itself.
(Reynolds, 1943:16)

In a sense, psychoanalysis could be considered a theory of bourgeois house-
keeping: Freud worked in the home, on the home, finding in the private life of
the bourgeois family, in its individual members and in their unconscious the
psychic dynamics fundamentally related to and determinative of cultural
phenomena. While he asserted the universal relevance of his theories,
particularly that of the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety, his work can be
seen to be culturally bound and limited by, among other things, the conventions
of bourgeois housekeeping. Because housekeeping practices establish norms of
care for our bodies and domestic space, because we are born into and shaped by
these norms, these practices and their cultural origins materially and conceptually
effect such a construction of identity. Freud’s reasoning frequently implied such
a connection. The nuances of the anal phase, as well as Freud’s presupposition
that the maintenance of an infant’s hygiene could be expected to result in genital
stimulation, depend profoundly upon bourgeois conventions of cleanliness. 8
Freud’s theoretical gifts, essential to contemporary thought and the development
of feminism, of the unconscious, castration, and their complex relations to
subject construction, diagnose the psychic and social nuances of modern sexual
difference and gender formation as they are coming into being in the nineteenth
century. This diagnosis addresses a specifically bourgeois subject whose
subjectivity, because of the psychic and ideological particulars of bourgeois class
ascension, 9 will become the normative model for all humanistically conceived
subjects. Thus we can read Freud to discern the importance of cleanliness and
cleaning and their function in the construction of modern subjectivity as it is
formulated within a bourgeois social order.
The family romances, the psychosexual dramas Freud describes, take place
within a historically and theoretically significant mise-en-scène, the nineteenth-
century bourgeois home. Because of Freud’s scrupulous attention to detail, we
will find in the cleaning scenes that occur in his work traces of the class structure,