Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 24, No.

60, June 2009

ISSN 0816-4649 print/ISSN 1465-3303 online/09/020149-17

Page 149
RELOCATING MARIE BONAPARTES CLITORIS
Alison Moore
The story of Marie Bonapartes clitoris reveals that sexual categories most
oftenimagined today to form part of the most repressive or misogynist
discourses of the pastwere, in fact, in their own time, those most riddled
with ambiguity in relation to genderand to national politics. Marie
Bonaparte and her early Freudian psychoanalytic views of female sexual
frigidity may be profoundly irrecoverable as models for feminist understandings of pleasure, but within their historic context they reveal much
about earlytwentieth-century discourses of gender differentiation and
sexuality. This is the context inwhich Bonapartes ideas about frigidity and
the clitoris will be considered here, since boththe ambiguous gender
politics of her work and the experimental genital surgery sheunderwent
can be shown to belong to that era in which French culture saw multiple
formsof anxiety about new forms of gender behaviour in the light of
declining population in theaftermath of the First World War and
preparation for the Second. Bonapartes bifurcatedvision of clitoral and
vaginal pleasure and her passionate conception of frigidity as
virileclitoridism have made her the object of disdain and disavowal by a
range of feminist andpsychoanalytic thinkers since the 1960s. Within the
genealogy of feminist ideas aboutfrigidity, Marie Bonaparte has been
patently vilified. While such accounts have beensupplanted by more
nuanced readings in the recent work of sexuality scholars such asJean
Walton and Thomas Laqueur, there has been little attempt to rethink the
historicemergence of Bonapartes ideas about frigidity in relation to their
anathematised place inthe history of feminist thought. This article is an
attempt to engage in precisely this kind of reconsideration, followed by a
claim to resituate Bonaparte in light of the historic contextin which she
belongs, a context that pre-dated feminist and sexological critiques of the
clitoral vaginal dichotomy as a repressive model. Bonapartes oftmisunderstood viewsabout the place of the clitoris in modern heterosexual
relations is subjected here to anhistorical contextualisation that relocates
them within interwar anxieties about genderdifferentiation, pronatalism
and womens social power. I argue that Marie Bonapartesclitoris may offer
much for an interrogation of simplistic binary habits of judging pastfigures
according to a reductive feminist/anti-feminist barometer. Her baffling
ambiguitywhen measured against recent feminist contestations of genital
pleasure highlights thealterity of the past she inhabited, while her
anathematised place within canonical works of feminist theory show just
how much such debates refuse to pass in the ongoingelaboration of
normative views of orgasm.In recent years, Bonapartes paradoxical
strangeness and, more generally, theproblem of psychoanalytic visions of
female genitalia have attracted a different, moreconsidered kind of

attention from scholars such as Jean Walton, Thomas Laqueur, andNellie

Thompson. Walton, in particular, has made an immense contribution to
under-standing the deeply racialised discourses embedded within
psychoanalytic conceptions of

150
feminine desire (Walton 2001). In the work of Laqueur, the generalised
early twentieth-century elevation of vaginal pleasure is seen as the cause
of specific psychoanalyticdenigrations of the clitoris (1990, 233). While for
Walton, Bonapartes simultaneousconstruction of the clitoris as both
essential and pathological is seen as underscoring herself-identification as
a phallic woman in opposition to a racially envisaged, castratedfemale
colonial body (2001, 100). Walton poses the mystery of Marie Bonaparte
as one of why she did not explore sexual relations with women given her
continual references to thevirility/frigidity question as bisexuality and
elaborated her own psycho-sexual make-up asone fixated on female
imagos (2001, 143). In the work of both Laqueur and Walton,
then,frameworks in which the absence of orgasm is constructed as lack
are never interrogated.This paper, drawn from a larger study of emergent
ideas about female sexual frigidityacross a long history, locates the
question another way: how did interwar thinkers likeBonaparte imagine
clitoral pleasure as biologically normative while
androgynouslypathological? Interwar psychoanalytic visions of female
pleasure, in part, rested on anew hierarchy that imagined the vagina as
superior to the clitoris. It also rested upon anew medical imperative of
pleasure that had appeared in the final decades of thenineteenth century,
a demand that women experience orgasm, that their pleasureconform to
this climactic, spasmodic structure of nervous organisation (Moore 2008).
InFrance in the early twentieth century, this imperative was accentuated
and complexifiedby pronatalist concerns and a more general growing
cultural pressure to reproduce,repopulate and return to what were in fact
newly constructed gender norms in theaftermath of the First World War.
The study of Bonaparte suggested here will emphasisethe particularly
vexed feminist question of frigidity as clitoridism within Bonapartes
opus,alongside an historically considered interpellation of her conflicted
sense of her ownpleasure, that she constructed both through
psychoanalysis and in relation to nationalpolitics.Bonapartes frigidity can
perhaps best be seen as a puzzle composed of severalparts. One part fits
into a longer history of sexuality in which medical and
psychoanalytictheorisation entailed an incitement of desire, and hence the
impossibility of its absence forfeminine normalcy (Moore 2008). Another
part is produced by a convergence of genderand colonialism in
psychoanalytic symbolism of the early twentieth century, as suggestedby
Walton. Yet a third part, I will argue, is that Bonaparte must be understood
in relation toFrench national politics and gender discourses of the interwar
period. Bonapartes frigidityis thus something of a penultimate synthesis
of the forces that dominated intellectual lifein her era: she was not only a

successor to late nineteenth-century medical visions of sexuality; she was

also a highly privileged, yet eccentric aristocratic woman from
thenationally symbolic but rogue imperial Bonaparte lineage. Her family
struggled for statusamong traditional aristocratic circles in an age of
rapidly burgeoning middle-classrepublicanism, and in an era of heightened
imperial and national conflict. The Frenchnation, moreover, was in this
period seen by many as under threat by the forces of socialchange
envisaged as a collapsing of gender differentiation. It is only by
appreciating theextraordinary tension of these contradictory and diverse
influences that it is possible tounderstand how someone with a
determination to explore and defend feminine pleasurecould propose
clitoral surgery as the solution to the problem of female virility
andfrigidity; why someone with a lifelong desire to maximise her
experience of sexualenjoyment would construct her own most
concentrated organ of pleasure as excessiveand submit it to
reconstructive surgery.

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The Place of Bonapartes Clitoris in the Corpus of Feminist Ideas
Bonaparte, then, helps to show us how the question of female orgasm
(and itsperceived failure) regrouped some of the most prevalent social
anxieties of earlytwentieth-century France. Yet there are a range of
present-day gender disputes andassumptions that make her a difficult
figure to approach without aversion and confusion.As an object of study,
she exemplifies some of the most problematic encounters, some of the
most troubling misrecognitions, that can occur when contemporary
feminists, gendertheorists and sexuality historians consider discourses of
feminine sexual desire in a pastthat has perhaps not entirely passed.
While sexologists, doctors and psychiatrists haveranged widely in opinions
about what kind of pleasure is normal for women, and while thespecifics of
orgasm have not always been a part of such discussion, within
feministdefences of clitoral desire a simple narrative has emerged to
account for the repression of the clitoris and of the realities of feminine
sexual needs.Since the 1970s, anglophone feminists such as Anne Koedt,
Ti-Grace Atkinson,Betty Friedan and Kate Millet, and French psychoanalytic
feminists such as Luce Irigaray,have actively critiqued the notion of
frigidity in medical and psychoanalytic thought.They have noted that,
embedded in this concept throughout most twentieth-centurymasculine
writing about sex, is an assumption of normative femininity in which
onlyvaginal orgasm experienced through heterosexual coitus is a true
and legitimate form of pleasure (Koedt 1973; Atkinson 1974; Friedan 1963;
Millet 1979; Irigaray 1977). Indeed,while post-war American sexologists
such as Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnsonemphasised the centrality
of the clitoris in all forms of female orgasm (Kinsey et al. 1953;Masters
and Johnson 1966), these ideas remained marginal amongst the majority
of medical writers on female sexual anatomy throughout the 1950s and
1960s (Herbst Lewis2005).Within psychoanalytic traditions, the notion of
female sexual maturity as vaginalremained central to theories of female

sexuality throughout the 1960s and 1970s (forinstance Deutsch 1969)

until its contestation by French feminist psychoanalytic thinkers inthe
1980s (Irigaray 1977, 66). Yet prior contestations occurred from within
Americanfeminist circles, and spread to other English-speaking and
European cultures. Anne Koedtsinfluential article The Myth of the Vaginal
Orgasm first appeared in 1968 and was rapidlycirculated as a popular
underground text prior to publication, and unofficially translatedinto a
number of European languages. It became widely popular, for instance, in
WestGermany during the 1970s (Herzog 1998). Koedt actively debunked
the concept of vaginalorgasm as a masculinist myth, arguing that even
where women climaxed from vaginalpenetration the orgasm takes place
in the sexual organ equipped for sexual climax the clitoris (1973). TiGrace Atkinson claimed that heterosexual coitus was patently incapableof
producing orgasm in any woman (1974, 168).Of course, no consensus has
ever occurred about the existence or non-existence of the vaginal
orgasm amongst sexologists or feminist thinkers. Germaine Greer,
forexample, bemoaned the post-Freudian re-construction of the vagina as
passive andirrelevant to female orgasm, and cuttingly satirised the
sexology-conscious maleheterosexual lover as laborious and inhumanly
computerised as he: dutifully does the rounds of the erogenous zones,
spends and equal amount of time oneach nipple, turns his attention to the
clitoris (usually too directly), leads through the

152
stages of digital or lingual stimulation, and then politely lets himself into
the vagina . . . (1971, 41 43)
Greers claim was that a new dogma of feminine erogenous zones based
on the centralityof the clitoris no more served the multiplicity of the
possibilities of womens pleasure thanthe vaginal clitoral hierarchy it
displaced. Feminist sexology today recognises a range of loci through
which women may reach pinnacles of pleasure. Sex therapist
DeborahSundahl conducts workshops on how to find the Grafenberg spot
and how to experiencevaginal orgasms and urethral ejaculations (Sundahl
2003). At the same time, feministsexologists such as Rebecca Chalker and
Betty Dodson have asserted the all-centralimportance of the clitoris to
feminine pleasure, measured in terms of the number andconcentration of
nerve endings (Chalker 2000). Dodson conducts workshops aimed
atteaching women how to perform clitoral self-pleasuring, and advises all
women to practisesome form of direct clitoral stimulation during
intercourse with men, and not assume itpossible to experience orgasm
from penetration alone. She once referred to the Freudianconstruction of
the infantile clitoris as one of the great sexual tragedies in
history(Dodson 2001) and sees critiques of the Freudian paradigm as
bound up with the politicsof a radical sex-positive minority who celebrate
female pleasure in opposition to a sea of conservative liberal feminist
attitudes as typified by Eve Enslers Vagina Monologuesstage show
(2001). In attacking the failure of the Vagina Monologues to acknowledge
theclitoris, Dodson claims that Freud would be laughing in his grave at

the triumph of avagina-centred definition of female genital pleasure.

Though in noting Enslers inspirationto be drawn more from Radical
Feminist positions on heterosexuality, pornography andviolence, it is clear
that aligning her to Freud functioned more as a calumniatory devicethan
as form of intellectual genealogy. Enslers unspecific vision of the the
vagina bearsno signs of the psychoanalytic model of mature receptivity in
opposition to infantileclitoridism. It rather stands for the whole of the
female sexual apparatus in a way thatallows female genitality to be
celebrated, but in a polite, vague fashion, based perhapsmore on what
queer theorist Leo Bersani has termed aversion displacement
(Bersani1995, 261), the use of evasive language aimed at alluding to
sexual relations whilesanitising their corporeal messiness. This was the
essence of Dodsons concern; not thatthe clitoris was being hierarchically
demoted again, but rather that the recognition of thespecific and
differentiated parts of female genitalia so crucial to her own exploration of
sexual technique were being subsumed under a polite category of the
vagina.The question of female orgasm remains highly contested across
biological,psychological, feminist and sexological fields at the beginning of
the twenty-first century.When philosopher and biologist Elizabeth Lloyd
attacked evolutionary biological theoriesof female sexuality and proposed
that female orgasm has no reproductive or evolutionaryfunction (Lloyd
1993), she was greeted with howls of horror and protest from a range of
feminist activists, as well as with some more sober disciplinary critiques,
about herbiological argumentation from evolutionary psychologists
(Barash 2005). Academic genderthinking across a range of disciplines in
the past 50 years has largely come to take forgranted that female orgasm
matters immensely in all new attempts to imagine genderedrelations and
sexual behaviours, and that the Freudian dogma of vaginal pleasure is
nowutterly outmoded and debunked. As one influential psychologist
remarked in the 1980s,the psychoanalytic sacrosanctity of the vaginal
orgasm has utterly collapsed in the face of advancing physiological
knowledge (Lieff Benderly 1986, 69). Similarly, notions of

153

frigidity that were bound up with the clitoral/vaginal dichotomy have

been widelymocked and dismissed within recent feminist and
psychoanalytic thought. The clitoris of the post-war era has been encoded
politically as a form of feminist democratisation of male-centred visions of
pleasure. Needless to say, in Marie Bonapartes time all this
wascompletely unheard of.In this context, then, it is not difficult to see
why Marie Bonaparte has been aparticularly difficult figure to reconcile
within a feminist genealogy. From the early 1930s,she published a range of
works on female sexuality and frigidity, more scientific onesunder her own
name, and more personalised accounts under the pseudonym Narjani,
thisdual identity reflecting the multi-dimensional nature of her
specialisation, driven by bothintellectual curiosity and by the personal
conviction that she herself was a frigid woman.Not only did she theorise

the concept of female sexual frigidity to a greater degree thanany other

psychoanalytic thinker (with the exception perhaps of Wilhelm Stekel
1926), shealso self-identified as frigid and had her own genitalia operated
on up to three times by aDr Josef Halban between 1927 and 1931. This
was in the hope of being able to experienceorgasm from coitus without
specific clitoral stimulation (Bertin 1992, 314, 328 -31). Moreover, she
venerated the sexuality of women in cultures that practised clitoral
excision,and claimed that their example offered something valuable to the
understanding of thefrigidity of European women, which she defined as
the failure of vaginal orgasm in coitus(Bonaparte 1932). Freud had
theorised in the 1924 essay The Dissolution of the OedipusComplex that
clitoral pleasures corresponded to the infantile stage of feminine
sexualdevelopment and would naturally cede to the desire for vaginal
heterosexual coitus oncethe Oedipus complex was resolved (Gay 1995,
665). He had already argued in the 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality that the clitoris was a kind of phallic organ, makingboys and
girls analogous up until puberty, at which time the locus of female
sexualityshifted (Gay 1995, 287).As Jean Walton and Thomas Laqueur
have emphasised, the psychoanalytic dualismof clitoral/vaginal pleasure,
while couched in biologically essentialist language, was in factclearly
founded on a logic of cultural imperative. Women must actively relocate
theirdesire to the vagina hysterically, in spite of its lesser concentration
of nerves, and againstthe grain of biological reality (Walton 2001, 94 - 95;
Laqueur 1989, 100 - 01). This was theappropriate path to Oedipal
resolution and true femininity. Those who continued to desireclitoral
stimulation, or who failed to experience spontaneous vaginal orgasm
from coitalthrusting alone, were thus women who had not accepted their
own castration andrescinded the phallus, but rather clung to an image of
the father, resisting identificationwith the mother and hence falling short
of full feminine sexual maturity. But Bonapartestake on the Freudian
theory of gender placed an inordinate emphasis on the clitoris as thesite
of feminine sexual agency. It was not Freud but Bonaparte who elaborated
the idea of a normative hysterical displacement implied in the shift from
clitoral to vaginal pleasure:
It is not only in the hysteric, and pathologically that the exclusion of the
phallus occurs, itis what must happen normally in the little girl if she is to
adapt later to her erotic role as awoman. (Bonaparte 1958, 20)
The phallic nature of the clitoral woman was not a perversion, but was
biologicallyTinscribed within an evolutionary vision of the psyche. Clitoral
pleasure may represent theprimitive stage of libidinous development for
women, but it was in fact more organic thanvaginal pleasure, which
required a further move away from biological reality (Bonaparte

154
1958, 8). Bonaparte saw herself as precisely the kind of maladapted
woman who could nothysterically relocate her pleasure away from the
clitoris. Instead, she attempted to cheatthe system and move her clitoris
to a position where it would be more directly stimulatedby coitus. She

failed in her attempt to modify her body to fit the gender expectations
sheheld. Her clitoral-relocation operations did not produce the vaginal
orgasm she hoped for.In the years after her surgery she remarked that her
libido was entirely in her head andthat while work is easy, pleasure [ la
volupte ] is difficult (Bertin 1992, 320 - 34). At first glance, Bonapartes
notorious forays into clitoral surgery and her detailedtheorisation of
clitoral attachment as a kind of frigidity appear to be an
extremeelaboration of Freudian dogma. There are obvious reasons, then,
why she has not beenconsidered an important figure in feminist
understandings of sexual pleasure (in spite of her significant opus of
autobiographical novels and theoretical analyses), while herpsychoanalytic
contemporaries Melanie Klein and Karen Horney have drawn a
consistentfollowing, even though they too marginalised the clitoral as an
inferior form of pleasure(Klein 1932; Horney 1926). Bonaparte has not
merely been ignored; rather, she has beenactively anathematised by
certain feminist thinkers, and quietly disowned in much
recentpsychoanalytic thought. Refutations of frigidity and of the inferiority
of clitoral pleasure arerecent enough feminist battles to make Marie
Bonaparte a specifically disturbing voice. ForBetty Friedan, Bonaparte was
a lackey of Freud, who was in turn one of the mostdangerous misogynist
thinkers of the modern age (1963, 101-02).Kate Millets discussion of
Bonaparte in her 1969 Sexual Politics was perhaps themost influential in
global assessment and judgement of Bonaparte as an anti-feminist
icon.For Millet, Bonaparte was part of the reactionary trend of Freudian
followers (1979, 204).In the work that has graced essential reading lists of
gender studies throughout theEnglish-speaking world for over 40 years
and seen numerous re-editions, Millet quoted outof context from
translations of Bonapartes work, focusing on biologically
deterministpassages that are, in fact, atypical within the larger context of
Bonapartes rather unusualideas about female biology. In her careless
assumption that Bonaparte merely reiteratedFreuds ideas, Millet even
falsely asserted that Bonaparte advised an avoidance of inadvertent
clitoral contact during intercourse (1979, 205), which was clearly not the
caseas Bonapartes surgical relocations show. Millet also ignored the
rather more ambivalentdiscussion in Bonapartes work regarding the
relationship between vaginal and clitoralpleasure and the importance that
Bonaparte placed on the clitoris in her vision of normative female arousal.
Indeed, contrary to Millets characterisation, and unlike Freud,Bonaparte
was somewhat obsessed with the question of how to ensure greater
clitoralstimulation during intercourse for women whose clitorises were not
so fortunate as to belocated close to the vaginal opening (Bonaparte 1967,
95 - 96). As Jean Walton remarks, forsomeone whose symbolic order
denigrated clitorises, Bonaparte spent an inordinateamount of time talking
about them (Walton 2001, 85).Bonaparte first began theorising about
female sexuality in 1924, and remarked thatshe sought psychoanalytic
treatment in search of orgasmic normalcy (Bertin 1992, 293).The surgery
Bonaparte advocated in La Sexualite de la femme , and which she
underwentthrough the Viennese gynaecologist Dr Josef Halban, was not
removal of the clitoris but a severing of the suspensory ligament attaching
it to the mons pubis (Bonaparte 1932). The result was a dropping of the
clitoris to a position closer to the vaginal opening, allowing (in theory) for

it to be stimulated more directly during coitus. Bonaparte sought this kind

of surgery not to overcome her desire for clitoral pleasure but rather
because she hoped to
155
fuse it with what she perceived as the social necessity of pleasure in
vaginal penetration.She sought clitoral relocation precisely in the belief
that clitoral stimulation was an integralpart of adult feminine pleasure, in
contrast to the views of Freud and indeed other femalepsychoanalytic
contemporaries such as Melanie Klein and Karen Horney (Klein
1932;Horney 1926). Bonaparte did not emphasise the clitoris as the organ
of feminineperversion as did these other thinkers, and as did Wilhelm
Stekel, who also wrote aboutfrigidity in the 1920s (Stekel 1926). Rather,
she sought to reconcile what she saw as theexternal and virile with the
internal and receptive qualities of female anatomy. Sheunderwent therapy
in order to feel more open to vaginal pleasure through coitus withmen, but
also sought to modify her own body to bring about a harmony of what she
sawas the unfortunately conflicting drives of the biologically natural
clitoridism of womenand the socially required receptivity of coitus. In
concluding La Sexualite de la femme, Bonaparte mused that humanity
does sometimes know how to reach happy compromises . . . (1967, 285).
The key to this problem, she claimed, was not for womento remove their
virility but rather to know where to place it.In Bonapartes case, this
placement was literally inscribed on her own body in theform of Dr
Halbans genital reconstruction surgery, of which Freud disapproved
stronglysince he claimed her frigidity could be overcome only through
psychotherapy (Bertin1992, 314; Thompson 2003, 356). While her
anthropological comparisons drew her tospeculate that the use of clitoral
excision among primitive women demonstrated theirgreater acceptance
of gender receptivity and femininity, in her discussion of this possibilityfor
European women, the surgery she advocated, and had herself, was not
excision(removal) of the clitoris but rather its relocation. This difference
stemmed from her viewthat androgyny, and hence the greater clitoridism
of European women, was an inherentpart of the modern civilisation. She
drew from the teleological gender philosophy of theeccentric Spanish
physician Gregorio Maranon, who had argued in the late 1920s
thatdifferences in gender systematically declined with the evolution of
human societiestowards greater levels of civilisation (Maranon 1931). In
this way, Bonaparte was able tolocate the clitoris within normative female
biology while maintaining the Freudian Oedipaldichotomy. The virile
European woman was not to be turned back in her demands; menmust
accommodate her in the modernising tendency towards androgyny. Nor
was she tobe indulged in her stagnation at an infantile stage of
development. Rather, her pleasuremust be made to compromise, must
take the step towards rapprochement with genderdifferentiation, just as
the clitoris must be surgically rapproche (moved closer) to thevagina.
Her conception of the problem of clitoridism was thus an argument about
thetendency for gender difference to collapse with civilisation, and the
tension between thisforce and the other demand of society for normalcy
through heterosexual coitus. Since these pressures were mutually

contradictory, compromises must be found by women placing their

virility where it would assist and not resist in their penetration.
A National Sexual Politics
The extent to which Marie Bonapartes theorisation of female sexuality
was imbuedwith political understandings of civilising progress and
pronatalism can perhaps be betterappreciated by situating her within the
context of her familys national status. The sense of paranoia and
indignation surrounding the Bonaparte family is important for understanding Bonapartes own sexual identification with frigidity, something
Phyllis Grosskurth

156
noted was an absence in Celia Bertins biography of the Princess
(Grosskurth 1982, 15). TheBonaparte family was not a long traditional
aristocracy. Their supremely privileged statusonly dated from the rule of
Napoleon Bonaparte I, whose leap of upward social mobilitywent from
Corsican petty noble with Jacobinist sympathies to Emperor of a
nationconquering European territories at a rate not equalled since the
Romans and notsurpassed until Hitler. By the early twentieth century,
while the modernising andaggrandising features of the Napoleonic era
were recognised within most patrioticnarratives about the nations past,
the more recent reign of Napoleon III (1852 - 1870) conjured more
ambivalent responses. Scathingly critiqued by canonical writers such as
Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, the Second Empire was despised by left-wing
groups as theregime that had crushed the Paris Commune and before that
had robbed the 1848republican movement of its rightful victory. While the
vast expenditure of public funds forthe beautification and modernisation of
Paris under Louis-Napoleon was a source of national pride, his status as
the emperor who lost Paris and lost power to the Germansiege of 1871 left
less than glorious memories of the last example of the rule of
theBonapartes. Roland Bonaparte (Maries father), moreover, was not a
direct descendant of the imperial succession. His great-grandfather was
the disgraced brother of Napoleon,Lucien Bonaparte, whose princely
status had been revoked during the Bourbonrestoration. Roland Bonaparte
continued to struggle to have the exclusion of his lineageoverturned in the
eyes of the official clan of Bonapartes. Marie represented a beacon of hope
and a projection of paternal aristocratic aspiration. Her family forbade her
to studymedicine in the belief that excessive education and
professionalism would endanger thefamilys chances of finding a
prestigious marriage for her, one that would redeem itseminent status.
This was accomplished successfully in her marriage to Prince George of
Greece (Grosskurth 1982, 15 - 17). Marriage and abundant childbirth then
was the fate towhich Marie Bonaparte was dedicated against her own
ambition to study medicine.Theorising frigidity through her psychoanalytic
induction was thus both a product of heroverburdened heterosexuality and
a vector for reclaiming the phallic intellectualism withwhich she
identified.Maries own sexual experiences were implicated profoundly in
her relationship tonational politics. Her first amorous obsession as a

teenager was with a man namedLeandri, the Corsican secretary to her

father and a prominent political supporter of thepersecuted Jewish captain
Dreyfus of the infamous Dreyfus Affair. Her love letters toLeandri allowed
him to blackmail the Bonaparte family and, by her own declaration,marred
Maries experiences of sexual trust for years afterwards (Bertin 1992, 118,
145). Thelover who so disappointed her sexually during the First World War
years was none otherthan Aristide Briand, several-times Prime Minister of
France and later Minister of ForeignAffairs. Years later, on the eve of the
Nazi Occupation of France, she wrote in her diary atthe royal family home
in Greece that the French defeat by the Germans was the
greatestcatastrophe to happen to France since the One-Hundred-Years
War. At the same time sheacknowledged her disappointment at missing
the spectacle of the rape of the mother-nation by the father-victor
(Bonaparte 1960).As Jean Walton notes, Marie Bonapartes views about
sexuality were also profoundlyenmeshed in ethnographic reflection about
civilised and primitive difference. She was aproponent of the utterly
unpopular idea (both then and now) that African and Arabwomen might
have some greater sexual wisdom from which Europeans could learn.
Thissuggests a novel variation on ethnocentric visions of African and
Islamic gender relations

157
which tend to view European women as having greater sexual freedom
and agency, aswell as supposing the normativity of the white intact
female body against the mutilatedgenitalia of circumcised African women
(Walton 2001, 82). In describing primitive relationsto the body as
autoplastic, Bonaparte inscribed herself within prevailing
interwaranthropological theories that characterised the modern civilised
European as alloplastic,simultaneously transcendent or alienated from
the body, from matter and muck as marksof civilisation (Douglas 1966,
116- 17). Bonapartes adoption of these ethnocentricassumptions
nonetheless complicated the values embedded within them by
creditingprimitivity with a bodily wisdom deemed lacking in civilised
cultures.Waltons rich and fascinating reading of Bonaparte as a thinker
who welded sexualsubjectivity into colonial difference overlooks, however,
the very intrinsic relationshipbetween frigidity constructed as clitoridism
and concerns about gender differentiationthat were rife in interwar French
hygienist and pronatalist movements. Concerns about thedeclining birth
rate and about women cutting their hair short, having careers,
wearingrevealing but more box-shaped clothing, and taking lovers in the
manner of a bachelor,filled conservative political tracts, mainstream
newspapers and popular novels in Franceduring Bonapartes time. Fears of
androgyny and the perceived masculine traits of modernwomen filled the
hygienist and medical literature with which psychoanalytic
thinkersengaged. Bonapartes work, like other psychoanalytic texts,
referred to frigidity as a phallicdisorder. The clitoris was seen as like a
penis and therefore the pleasure of it was amasculine aberration. It must
be sublimated into vaginal receptivity, since to fail to do sorepresented a
failure of the necessary feminine castration bound up with

successfulresolution of the Oedipus crisis. The disorder of clitoral

hypersensitivity (l hypersensibilite clitoridienne ) implied a resistant or
vengeful femininity in place of the desirable womanwho accepts
( lacceptatrice) (Bonaparte 1958, 4 - 11). A large part of Bonapartes
majorwork on feminine sexuality is devoted to explaining how the genderspecific psychologicaldevelopment of boys and girls must proceed to
ensure their functional masculinity andfemininity. Both begin life
enamoured with the phallus, of which the girl must mourn herown loss,
while the boy must renounce his desire for the female phallus in order to
bevirile later with women. In other words, he must learn to love a total
being without aphallus . . . (Bonaparte 1958, 21). While these ideas drew
from Freuds conception of gender-differentiated Oedipal development,
Bonapartes discussion of them in the contextof frigidity and clitoridism
revealed a stronger relation to interwar national gender politicsthan can
be detected in Freuds work. Her obsession with frigidity as a failure of
genderdifferentiation echoed pronatalist and hygienist anxieties about
French national decline.Hence, while Walton locates a colonial racial
politics in Bonapartes visions of femaledesire, I see an equally national
racial politics embedded in her stance. Of course, there isno point at which
these two kinds of racialism can be separated; however, the emphasison
colonial identification in Waltons account of Bonaparte suggests a lack of
appreciationof the specific national context that was unique to Marie
Bonapartes status within Frenchgender and hygienist concerns. The
additional perspective I am proposing here might bebest illustrated
through a discussion of the female corpses to which Marie Bonaparte
wasexposed as a child. Walton discusses at length Maries fascination with
the skeleton of aHindu woman that she recalled her father kept in his
study. The skeleton gave Marienightmares and yet she begged her father
to let her keep it in her room with the aim of conquering her fear of it.
Walton suggests the Hindu womans statue stood for the bodyof Maries
dead mother, both in the eyes of Roland Bonaparte who acquired it and in
the

158
eyes of Marie who sought to domesticate it (Walton 2001, 125 - 26). It is
worth noting, too,though, that Marie located this symbol, at once of
primitivity and of female coldness, inrelation to her own intellectual
development. It was in this period that she compensatedfor the prohibition
against studying medicine by devoting herself to private study, often inher
fathers office, alongside the skeleton of the Hindu woman. In that
paternal study, too,was another article of female bodily remains, the skull
of Charlotte Corday, the infamousmurderess of the French revolutionary
hero Jean Marat (Bertin 1992, 123). This othermacabre ornament of
Maries youth was thus a French republican national symbol of
anexecuted, treasonous, aristocratic femme fatale, a famous French
womans decapitatedhead to be contemplated alongside the skeleton of
the nameless colonial femininesubject. Waltons discussion of Bonaparte
emphasises the colonial feature of her racialisedthinking about female
sexuality, since it forms part of Waltons book precisely about

whitewomens colonially embedded visions of desire in twentieth-century

ideas. While I agreewholeheartedly with Waltons characterisation of
Bonapartes sexuality theories as alwaysinherently racialised, I would add
that there are also specific European nation-state formsof symbolism that
are crucial to understanding how this racialisation operated.
Frigidity as a Feminist Phallicism
It is clear that for Bonaparte the problem of female frigidity was a question
of genderconflict. Celia Bertins biography of Bonaparte draws attention to
the frequent descriptionsof herself (and indeed other powerful women) as
phallic (Bertin 1993, 35, 332- 36). In herpersonal correspondence and
reflection, Bonaparte used this term to describe a dominantpersonality, an
intelligent and independent woman, not to describe sexuality
(Bonaparte1950). They were also terms she used in her theoretical
writings to describe frigidity, andthey were widely invoked, too, by other
frigidity theorists such as Wilhelm Stekel andRobert Teutsch. What this
points to is that implicit in Bonapartes sexuality writings is aconcern
about female social power, an issue she was of course not alone in
ponderingduring the 1920s and 1930s. The German sexologist Wilhelm
Stekels massive two-tomedvolume on frigidity constructed it clearly as a
form of gender warfare. The opening chapterto the second volume is
entitled The Struggle of the Sexes (Der Kampf der Geschlechter)(Stekel
1926). Analysing female frigidity as repressed sexuality, Stekel added
thatrepression was not so much an inability as an unwillingness to see the
truth. Frigiditywas only ever caused by one of four possible factors, he
claimed. These werehomosexuality, prudishness, hatred of the father; or
fixation with the mother; all of whichadded up to some form of active
resistance to heterosexual normalcy (Stekel 1926, 108).Stekels patient
notes frequently read like scenes out of the Victor Margueritte novel La
Garc,onne (1922): independent career girls reject male attempts to court
and pleasurethem, either because they are sexually involved with women,
or because their self-definedpersonalities make them unwilling to submit
to the will of a man. For Stekel, to fall in loveor to accept pleasure is to
lose control and thus to submit. A woman who does notexperience
simultaneous orgasm at the moment of her partners ejaculation is
resisting hisnatural masculine will to dominate and refusing her own
natural feminine instinct toreceive pleasure, as his rhythm, on his terms.
Reversing the order of attack, Docteur RobertTeutsch in 1934 published a
virulent attack on le Feminisme in which he located les frigides as one
of the categories of feminist aberration:

159
Dressed in solid masculine fabrics, or else on the contrary, sporting soft
girlish blouses . . .
barely capable of true love, but thirsty for a lewdness that refuses
toacknowledge itself . . . [it] tenses their personality, tortures them, then
makes them chokewith disappointment, often out of rage and bitterness.
(Teutsch 1934, 167 - 68; my translation)

The frigid woman was thus not asexual, but rather warrior-like (guerrie`re)
and wilful, battling masculine social power within the terrain of her own
body.As gender historian Mary Louise Roberts argues in Civilization
without Sexes (1994),and as Laure Murat has shown in La Loi du genre
(2006), the French interwar period saw amarked fixation with anxieties
about the failure of appropriately differentiated genders.While texts
demonstrating these anxieties focused on the lack of maternal desire in
thenew Career Woman as the source of population decline and national
degeneration, theyalso frequently located this gender dysfunction on the
body as read through fashionsignifiers of femininity, as Teutsch
exemplified with his complaints about the excessivelymasculine or
excessively feminine dress style of the frigid woman. Right-wing and
socialhygienist diatribes against short hair cuts and box-shaped, yet
revealing, dresses helped toalign the greater social and economic power of
women in the aftermath of the First WorldWar with lack of reproductive
drive in France during the period of ongoing nationalistrivalry between
France and Germany. Babies make soldiers; therefore a woman who
doesnot make babies betrays her nation in future wars. Cartoons in the
Catholic hygienistpublication
La Femme et lenfant
explicitly blamed French womens rejection of motherhood for causing the
First World War, since if the population had been morenumerous then
Germany would not have dared make war against France in the
firstinstance (Roberts 1994, figure 15). In rejecting motherhood, the figure
of the Garc,onne stood in uneasy relation to the pronatalist national
politics in this era. The idea that youngwomen would not contribute to
population growth inspired discourses of horror in theface of the looming
threat of another war. With the rise of Italian fascism and GermanNazism,
the outbreaks of conflict between France and Germany in the FrenchoccupiedRhineland, followed by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and
the growinginternational tensions around it, war seemed likely and
imminent to many Europeansthroughout the 1920s and 1930s. In one
cartoon of in
La Femme et lenfant
in 1920,Marianne in battle armour is shown dangling babies from a pair of
scales, asking Howwill I manage to replace all those who have fallen if this
[war] continues? (Roberts 1994,figure 16).Visions of national
degeneration associated with gendered perversion appearedcommonly in
interwar hygienist and criminological texts. Fears about female
criminalspeaked in the late 1920s in France as never before. In a 1926
doctoral thesis from theFacultede Droit at the Universitede Paris,
Panagiote Yocas argued that the influx of women into the workforce since
the First World War had created a massive escalation infemale crimes of
violence and theft. The more women took part in the social (meaningthe
labour market) the more they were exposed to struggles that could lead
them to crime(Yocas 1926, 44-46). The famous trial of the murderous
Papin sisters in 1931 furtherfleshed out the imaginary link between
lesbianism, frigidity, violent monstrosity and thebreakdown of French

social structures as suggested by the working-class nature of theattack on

a bourgeois mother and daughter (Dean 1992, 43). Marie Bonaparte, too,
took part in these debates, theorising the notion of auto-punition (selfpunishment) as the

160
source of murderous femininity in the case of another much-published
murderess, MmeLefebvre. The female killer was thus a frigid woman
driven by a masochistic desire to sufferher own guilt, producing acts that
would justify her in feeling the shame from which shederived a perverse
pleasure that replaced normative sexuality (Bonaparte 1927).The
Margueritte novel La Garc,onne (1922) allows us further to situate
Bonapartesvision of frigidity within prevailing gender anxieties of her
time. The majority of iterary interpretations of La Garc,onne note its
inherent reprobation of career girls characterisedby their sexual agency,
bisexuality and refusal to submit to bourgeois pressures to marryand bear
children without emotional satisfaction or respect (Roberts 1994; Sohn
1972). Theimage of aberrant androgyny with this novel also bears a close
relationship to accounts of frigidity by Bonaparte and others in this period.
Monique, the novels central character, isdriven to debauchery by the
betrayal of her heartless fiance, a story that resembles MarieBonapartes
betrayal by her first love, Leandri. In the novel, Monique is shown clearly
tolive out the worst kind of feminine behaviour, that of being un-feminine
in her frigidhyper-sexuality: Ah men! After being at first ferociously
disgusted by them, then disdainfulof them, she began once more to take
them into consideration. But she saw them exactlythe same way a boy
sees girls: soullessly . . . (Margueritte 1922, 131; my translation).
WhileMoniques typical bourgeois Parisian parents are shown to be
hypocritical, her ownpassage through debauchery leads her to the
acceptance of loving heterosexual normalcyvia the discovery of her own
vaginal clamping as the sources of both her infertility and herfailure to
embrace pleasure fully and find a good honest husband. Monique is thus
aquintessential archetype of the interwar frigid woman * do not be fooled
by her sexual adventurousness * as Stekel and Teutsch show us, the
agentially libidinous phallic womanis indeed the most frigid of all, since
she resists her natural feminine impulse to submit tothe will of men and to
derive her pleasure from his. In other novels of a similar vein, such asCle
ment Vautels 1924 Madame ne veut pas denfant , the selfish career
motivations andboyish fashion of the career woman are closely bound to
the refusal to procreate, to thelove of sex for its own sake, and to
cigarettes, short hair, and other masculine habits.What Mary Louise
Roberts shows in relation to the anxieties about womens shorthaircuts in
interwar France applies identically to the apparent contradiction of
frigiditytheories that related sexlessness with hyper-sexuality. Roberts
notes that journalists andeditors in the late 1920s were equally as
offended by the boyishness of short hair and newdress fashions as they
were by the saucy and revealing nature of them (Roberts 1994,
1).Inverting gender norms made women both sexless and oversexed, since
they both missedtheir natural feminine calling, and occupied a virile

libidinous prerogative imagined asbelonging to men. This makes sense if

we consider Marie Bonapartes notion of clitoralpleasure as phallic, and of
masculine libido as excess. For a woman to take on traitsdeemed
masculine, whether haircuts, clothes or externally located genital
pleasures,marked her as failing or resisting femininity, as enjoying a
pleasure that did not belong toher, and as enjoying patently too much of
the wrong kind and not enough of the rightkind of pleasure and nonpleasure. The clitoris viewed as a kind of phallus became athreatening
organ in interwar gender relations because it represented the nonreproductive potential for pleasure in women, a pleasure that could be
shared evenwith other women, or with oneself, neither of which would
produce babies later tobecome soldiers for the nation.Images of the
clitoral woman, the murderous frigid woman and the boyish careergirl all
shared a sexual excess that was deemed fundamentally unfeminine in a
symbolic

161
order where all forms of excess were encoded as masculine. This curiously
interwar logicmust be understood in all its nuances if we are to appreciate
how, for Bonaparte and othersexuality thinkers of the time, a sexually
active woman experiencing pleasure couldnonetheless be deemed frigid.
The concept of frigidity was thus a way to assert the lessersexuality of
women compared to men, against the new social realities of women
aspolitical agents (if still not voting subjects), as intellectuals, and as
doctors, all of whichsuggested the falsity and injustice of this gender
dichotomy. It is no coincidence that sucha vision occurred at a time
commonly recognised as a period of crisis of masculinity in arange of
European cultures (Fout 1992; McLaren 1997). If some men saw
themselves asincreasingly dispensable in a workforce now far more
inclined to hire women, they couldat least take solace in the idea that they
still possessed the phallic primacy of sexualagency defined in opposition
to female receptive passivity. Any woman who appeared tocontradict that
rule was put in her place, that place now called frigidity. Marie
Bonapartethus stands as a sad figure who fought with herself to accept
this gender division of desireat the same time as she thrashed against it.
She put her genitals to the knife in order toachieve the receptivity she
believed necessary for feminine sexual maturity, but all thewhile
contested the parameters of predominant psychoanalytic views of the
clitoris.
Conclusion
When Celia Bertins biography of Bonaparte appeared in its English version
in 1982,the
New York Review of Books
psychoanalytic gender writer Phyllis Grosskurth reviewed itnegatively. She
questioned Bertins sources and implied that either the Library of
Congressor the Bonaparte descendents had been complicit in denying
archival access to moreimpartial scholars such as Grosskurth herself, while

allowing it to Bertin and others underan agreement of content restriction

that would ensure a positive presentation of thePrincess in any ensuing
biographic publication (Grosskurth 1982, 15). Grosskurths reviewquipped
that
...
and any attempt to make her into a forerunner of modern feminism
isludicrous, though without specifying how she imagined Bertin to be
guilty of portrayingBonaparte in this way (Grosskurth 1982, 17). A
comment on Grosskurths review appearedin the
New York Review of Books
several months later. In it, Frank R. Hartman accusedGrosskurth of
competitive distortion in her account of the rival biographic work by
Bertin,and suggested that Bonapartes life indeed deserves closer study in
light of the easycharacterisations that have been made of her as
antifeminist in the work of Millet, Friedanand Koedt (Hartman 1983).
Hartman made no attempt to point out that the charge of presenting
Bonaparte as a forerunner of modern feminism can hardly be applied
toBertin, but rather attempted a mild defence of Bonaparte herself as
someone whobemoaned the gender inequalities and institutions she felt
denied her the legacy of herintellectualism, a plea for her to be pardoned
of all judgement about her complicity in amisogynist Freudian tradition. I
suggest instead that this binary system of feminist/anti-feminist
judgement ought now to be jettisoned as a model of historiographic
analysis, andthat Marie Bonapartes example can help us to do so. Bertins
biography indeed resists thebarometer of binary feminism in that it
portrays Bonaparte in a highly ambiguous light, asintellectual, strongwilled and assertive while at the same time victimised,
melancholic,confused, passive and fearful (Bertin 1992, 199).Indeed, it is
striking how little Bertin passes judgement on the most
controversialaspects of Bonapartes approach to female sexuality.
Discussing Bonapartes search fo

162
personal sexual satisfaction through genital surgery and through analysis
with Freud,Bertin employs, without irony, the very same terms used by
Bonaparte herself to describeher virility or frigidity. Bertin leaves it to
the reader to decide what Maries problem was:her lack of appropriate
desire; her fixation on the
idea
of her desire as lacking; or theinadequacy of her lovers who always
seemed to disappoint her (Bertin 1992, 251, 259). Thevision of Bonaparte
that appears in Bertins account is rather one of a tormented
womanwhose own perceived sexual needs were not supported by
prevailing beliefs about femaledesire in her era (and not met by the men
she chose to have sex with); a woman whoconsequently searched for

intellectual understandings and surgical solutions to her mal-adapted

expectations.Celia Bertin, a literary scholar by training, is also the author
of a detailed study of women under the Nazi occupation of France (Bertin
1993), and was herself a member of the French resistance during the war.
Her other work is a finely grained consideration of the many roles and
pitfalls of female political agency in a time of profound social
rupture.Wealthy collaborators such as Corinne Luchaire are judged in no
uncertain terms for theirprivileged enjoyment of the German invasion, at a
time when most French womensuffered tremendous hardship (Bertin 1993,
104

09). The position of women within FrenchResistance Maquis was marked

by ambivalence. They occupied positions of politicalsignificance that
profoundly challenged the gender roles of that time, while being forcedto
adopt ambiguous gender identities to pass as agents in a male-dominated
milieu(Schwartz 1989). Bertin, then, is perhaps of a background more
likely to imagine thedilemmas faced by a proactively independent,
intellectual woman in a time of formalpolitical exclusion. The lack of moral
judgement in the biography reflects a more nuancedappreciation of French
gender relations in the time when Marie Bonaparte produced thebulk of
her work. It is important to consider Bonapartes personal relationships
and herscholarly writings within the context of other views about female
sexuality, frigidity andsocial power in France of the 1920s and 1930s.
What is striking about her attempts tomediate her phallic self-perception
is precisely that she did not accept Freuds account.Rather, she carved out
her own peculiar vision of the social place of feminine
sexuality,indefatigably pursuing the pleasure she felt she lacked and to
which she had a right.The importance of reading Bonaparte in her own
time is made most apparent bythe deeply embittered constructions of her
when she is judged according to a simplisticpro- or anti-feminist
barometer. While all historians bring attitudes and expectations of their
own era to the study of the past, it is worthwhile unpacking some of the
assumptionsembedded in approaches to Marie Bonaparte in order to
consider her relationship togender and sexual politics of her time, and not
of our own. By maintaining her as asemiotically convenient symbol for
posterity, her mysterious complexity is overlooked. It isreductionist to
situate her as either a feminist or an anti-feminist icon. It also closes off
thepossibility of appreciating Bonapartes as a feminine intellectual
agency. Hers was lessrecognisable to twenty-first-century agendas, a form
of agency that is undesirable forfeminists to emulate precisely because it
was so burdened by the suffocating choice of social, political (and in some
cases, sexual) roles for women in that era. It is particularlyworthwhile
revising judgements of Marie Bonaparte that construct her as nothing
morethan a rather offensive (because a woman herself) mimic of Freudian
phallocentrism. Hervision of ideal feminine desire and her perception of
the role of the clitoris, while operatingwithin a Freudian framework, were
both entirely peculiar, or idiosyncratic as Grosskurthacknowledges (1982,
17). They drew from her own experience, from her discussions with

163
other women and from her study of ethnographic research on African
cultures. While itmay be irrecuperable for ongoing projects of elaborating
feminist understandings of desire, or of deconstructing stereotypes of
femininity,
it should not be judged
only as thework of a dupe or traitor. Her theories of female desire were
riddled with extraordinarycontradiction and proposed a deeply unusual
solution (e.g. genital surgery) to theproblem of clitoral pleasure. It
would be a shame to lose the sense of Bonapartesprofoundly unique
weirdness by collapsing her thought unproblematically into that of Freud.
What greater insult could be made to female intellectuals as agential
subjects thanto imagine them only worthy of considered study in the
event they strike us asredeemable heroines, or to dismiss them as foolish
on the basis of a hasty assumption of their masculinist mimesis?
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