Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 2 | Page 54

45

abjection, by the mind. Abjection at once goes beyond norms and because of this it
produces a nauseating anxiety within both the individual and the observer.
In ‘Inversion’, there is a subject-on-trial, or one who has been on trial and is now
suffering the consequences of her actions. The concept of a subject-on-trial is borrowed
from philosopher Julia Kristeva. The subject, for Kristeva, is fluid and non-fixed. Anne Marie
Smith suggests she sees ‘psychical bisexuality’ as the integral part of female identity, yet this
is repressed or sublimated in a phallocentric culture.13 Sexuality is central to her identity and
therefore the image of capital punishment where the guillotine has been used in the poem
represents the murder of a lesbian or the silencing of her desire. Her guilt is her pride. As
pride is one of the seven capital sins in Christianity, it is one of the roots of evil, then this
type of punishment seems fitting to the murderers. The poem is an extended metaphor of
lesbian desire which is associated with a feeling of guilt. The ‘inverted head’ is a symbol of
genital mutilation, where the penis has been operated on to form the clitoris. This alludes to
an underlying ‘masculine complex’ where women, for Freud, are attracted to women
because of an unresolved complex which keeps them at the masculine stage of
development.14 The ‘girl’ in Freud’s case study of the psychogenesis of female
homosexuality ‘had not only chosen a feminine love-object, but had also developed a
masculine attitude towards that object’.15 In other words, ‘lesbians are not women’ but kind of
censored men, with male sexual expectations and desires.16
The ‘perversion’ of lesbian existence is compounded by the object of desire’s ‘birth
mark’. This is a mark of motherhood, or womanhood, in the poem women are expected to
become mothers, if not they are strange spinsters. This is the ‘perversion’ of the narrator
who orgiastically takes the ‘loosened and untightened head’ in an act of sexual pleasure.
She owns the head/clitoris which has been loosened by the murderers. She reclaims the
clitoris after her lover’s clitoridectomy.
The silencing of desire is further represented by the silent brackets in the poem. Yet
these only appear in the first stanza, which is the most overtly sexual in terms of explicit
words (‘breasts’, ‘body’). The line ‘[ ] high ground’ doubly effaces the moral and keeps it in
place, it is at the forefront of her mind because of its seeming absence. The female narrator
lets her imagination flourish in the subsequent stanzas, yet she still details her ‘disabled’
and ‘mutilated’ lover, suggesting violence, which is both sadistic and masochistic. The
narrator is enjoying her feelings and what she is observing. She is pro-sex and anti
13

Anne Marie Smith, Julia Kristeva (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 38.
Quote from Sigmund Freud in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Freud on Women (London: Vintage, 2002),
249.
15
Ibid.
16
Quote from Monique Wittig in Stevi Jackson and Jacki Jones, Contemporary Feminist Theories
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 119.
14