Page 38 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

32 CULTURAL STUDIES

eroticized point of focus. But while the doctor and his patient view the woman’s
backside, the alarming site of fundaments and the fundamentals of
psychoanalysis, the maid/woman sees and contends with something else. Rather
than the configurations of the primal scene, Grusha perhaps views those of a
primal clean, a dirty floor, the fundaments or grounds of a differently articulated
manifestation of sexual difference and the problems of civilization. The men
behind her, standing erect—the doctor, the wolfman—cannot see her activity,
her function, as these movements are obscured by her ‘prominent buttocks’.
Where they see her, her veiled genitals, her potential relation to their possession,
she sees, touches, smells dirt and suds, negotiating a transformation between
them. The men behind her, the men captivated by her behind, are pointing,
contemplating, fantasizing, theorizing. Their words make manifest certain
crucial relations between fantasy, memory, repression and identity in the
bourgeois imaginary. From their position, Grusha is an animalistic figure,
regressed to a posture reminiscent of Freud’s pre-civilized, pre-erect human
beings. Yet beyond their purview, Grusha is moving dirt from one place to
another, solving a geographic problem of inside and outside. Dirtied in the
process, she keeps things clean and proper, rendering invisible the traces of these
other civilizing relations. Seeing her in this pose, the Wolfman urinates, thereby
assuming the position of his father in the primal scene. Freud does not mention
who mopped up the effects of this seminal simulation. But we can confidently
surmise that Grusha had a hand in it.

Scene 4:
Cleaning and class: Grusha and the step girls

Dirt is matter out of place…
(Douglas, 1966/1988)

Freud’s analysis of Grusha’s cleaning scene also has a hand in using sexual
difference as a cleaning strategy, one that effectively mops up all traces of other
differences from this tableau. 10 What allows the slippage from maid (social
other) to (m)other in Freud’s narrative is both the maid’s presence in the bourgeois
household and her cleaning activities that cause her to resemble or to be taken
for both the mother and an animal. These fantastic identifications reveal crucial
features of the psychoanalytic imaginary. Freud’s interpretation of Grusha (as
both mother and animal) incorporates what Julia Kristeva identifies as the two
places where we are confronted with the abject—the debased, the filthy, the
absolutely defiled or rejected, the state of non-being:

The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where
man strays on the territories of animal…. The abject confronts us, on the