Page 40 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

34 CULTURAL STUDIES

encroachment of the abject) to this family. Yet the connection that Deleuze and
Guattari make manifest between the economic, social structuring of difference
(capitalism, bourgeois privilege, the financial resources to employ maids) and the
psychosexual structuring of the (male, bourgeois) subject in the symbolic
depends precisely upon the confusion of an economically contracted, debased
cleaning practice with a libidinally contracted connubial sexual act. Erotically, in
Freud’s gaze, the mother’s and the maid’s positions in this fantasy tableau are the
same; in their economic status and practice, of course, they are very different.
Elided from the Wolfman’s fantasy and Freud’s analysis are considerations of
money, work and dirt; arising from them are a fusion of two very different
activities—cleaning and sex—where sexuality absorbs and displaces the
significance of cleaning. Today, we can see the remnants of this imaginary
matrix of displacements and confusions in culturally sanctioned discursive
comparisons: metaphors of cleanliness and dirt are frequently used to evaluate
both monetary (‘filthy lucre’, etc.) and sexual (the ‘dirty deed’) transactions, not
to mention their even more frequent occurrence in judging the quality or value of
female sexuality.
In addition, Grusha’s ‘animalistic’ posture in the gaze of the ‘Wolf’ man
indicates that the differences being simultaneously articulated and mystified in this
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cleaning scene are both complex and profoundly interrelated. They include at
least the following sets of binaries: male vs. female, gender vs. class, human vs.
animal, voyeur vs. object, sex vs. labour, submissive vs. subservient. Freud’s
interpretation privileges the first term of each binary, but what interests me are
the range of differences managed and put in place by the mistaking of cleaning
for sex, a work practice for an erotic position.
In their reading of the Wolfman case, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White
implicitly relate Freud’s obfuscation of class differences to a particularly
Victorian imaginary that linked sexuality and cleanliness. Class differences are
disguised and articulated as hygienic problems; a cross-class sexuality becomes a
dirty sexuality. And the discursive occurrence of these display- ments marked by
‘dirt’:

To become his parents’ child, [the Wolfman] must forego those pleasures
which he associated with serving maids (Grusha and Nanya) and with what
would henceforth be named ‘dirt.’ He must distance himself from the
subordinated classes even as he distanced himself from the physical
processes and products of his own body.
(Stallybrass and White, 1986:167)
In ‘Class and gender in Victorian England’, historian Leonore Davidoff (1983)
illuminates the connections between the pragmatic and symbolic particulars of this
historically specific imaginary. Citing another cleaning scene, she underscores the
role of cleaning practices in maintaining appropriate social significations of
gender, class and sexuality in Victorian culture. Victorian middle-class