Page 44 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

38 CULTURAL STUDIES

Bauer (Dora’s mother) desperately, obsessively cleans her home to rid it of
contamination: ‘No one could enter the Bauer home without taking off his shoes;
on Fridays and other occasions of “thorough” cleaning, the apartment had to be
avoided altogether’ (Rogow, quoted in Ramas, 1985:160). Kathe Bauer kept
certain rooms, for example, the one ‘where Philip Bauer kept his cigars…locked
at all times to ensure against contamination’. Ramas notes that ‘Kathe Bauer’s
permission was necessary’ to enter these rooms, as ‘she had the only key’ (1985:
160).
In their readings of the Dora case, Freud, Ramas and Deutsch all either posit
or accept a psychic relationship between sexual frigidity and obsessive
cleanliness. Ramas qualifies this relationship by citing statistics on venereal
disease which indicate that bourgeois women of the period had very real reasons
to fear infection by their husbands (1985:160). However, the relationship
between sex acts and pathological cleaning remains assumed, yet untheorized, as
does Kathe Bauer’s cleaning scene. If we accept this assumed connection, the
logic of Kathe Bauer’s cleaning obviously depends on the home space standing
for her body. She closes this space off for thorough cleaning, refuses to have
shoes, that article of clothing that must make contact with the world outside the
home, within it. As a consequence of her sexual, internal contamination, she
enhances and emphasizes the difference between her home and what is outside it
by cleaning. The confusion in this narrative is not between a sexual act and a
cleaning act, but rather between two very different interiors—a maternal, sexual
interior (the housewife’s contaminated body) and a social one (the home or
private sphere, characterized by familial relations untainted by economic
exchange). While the Wolfman’s confusion or mistake involves the mother/maid
in a position of either sexual submission or economic subservience in relation to
him and his gaze, Kathe and Ida Bauer’s house-cleaning combats both real (Kathe)
and imagined (Ida) sexual contamination in a space that figures as a
displacement of their own bodies.
The inferred but unmentioned figure in this cleaning scene is the prostitute. She,
like the maid or governess, supplements the services provided (without pay) by
the wife. The prostitute performs her domestic services outside of the home, yet
in such a way that their effects can still penetrate it. She is, in a sense, the mirror
image of Grusha, another vacuole in the phantasy of the closed family circle, but
one that opens it up from without. Her sexual services threaten to ‘dirty’ or
‘contaminate’ otherwise secure and isolated private, domestic (female) bodies. In
compulsively cleaning their homes to offset sexual contamination, both Kathe
Bauer and her daughter metaphorically attempt to emphasize the difference
between domestic space and the public world of economic exchange outside it.
Their cleaning symbolically shores up the ultimately illusory distinction between
the public exchange of women and its private variation, of which they are both
the objects.
Freud and the Wolfman’s mistaking of cleaning acts for sex acts, of maid for
mother, reflects the in/difference, the stability of these systems (economic and