TEXTILE

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Beast Dreaming: Myth, Materials, Fantasy, and

Psychoanalysis in Making a Beast Costume

Jane Graves

To cite this article: Jane Graves (2003) Beast Dreaming: Myth, Materials, Fantasy, and
Psychoanalysis in Making a Beast Costume, TEXTILE, 1:3, 230-242

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Published online: 01 May 2015.

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 Beast Dreaming: Myth,
Materials, Fantasy, and
Psychoanalysis in Making
a Beast Costume
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 03:52 19 March 2016
 Abstract
T his paper examines the process
of creativity, primarily in the
context of psychoanalysis,
oscillating between tactile
experience—my love of fabric and
the creation of a beast costume—
and my thinking about both the
experience and the process. It can
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also be read as a dialectic between
my roles as amateur costume maker
and professional psychotherapist—
although both disciplines are
practice based, one in the studio,
the other in the consulting room. In
recording my experience I have tried
to follow the nuances of dream and
fantasy, but in a cultural context.
Psychoanalytical concepts are
introduced that can be located not
only in theories of child
development, dreaming and
daydreaming, but also in the myths,
fairy tales, films, and literature to
JANE GRAVES
Jane Graves worked as a lecturer in cultural studies
for nearly thirty years, devising and teaching a cultural
studies programme to MA design students. She now
works as a psychoanalytical psychotherapist, living
and working in the East End. She writes, and gives
occasional lectures on design and psychoanalysis.
Amongst other papers, she has published “Pattern—
a psychoanalytical approach—pleasure or oppression”
Bulletin of the John Rylands library: “Inside the inside—
when things go wrong. A psychoanalytical history of a
jug.” Journal of Design History.
which I refer, as well as my own
thoughts about the role of women’s
sewing in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The journey,
however, is an erratic one, following
the methodology of “free
association” that is used in the
consulting room. The associations
that accompany my beast dreaming,
although located in specific
contexts, are peculiar to me, but the
methodology itself can be applied
elsewhere. My aim is to illustrate
how apparently incompatible
concepts and texts can meet
together in the process of creating a
product, or at least in recording it. It
is this process that engages me
rather than the analysis of the end
product, although by definition this
is both evasive and elusive and
risks breaking the butterfly on the
wheel of theory.
Textile, Volume 1, Issue 3, pp. 230–243
Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
© 2003 Berg. Printed in the United Kingdom.
 232 Jane Graves

Beast Dreaming: Myth,

Materials, Fantasy, and
Psychoanalysis in Making a
Beast Costume
Introduction. disguised. The second does not
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Fascination with fantasy beasts discard the first but pulls in, plays
informs my thinking about materials with, overt and conscious fantasies
and making a beast costume. It is and daydreams of the beast.
this that I am calling beast Dreams, but also daydreams need
dreaming. The first part of this to talk together to make a beast
article looks at the passion inspired costume.
by a tactile object—a piece of So let me confirm my passion for
material, touched, smelt, measured, materials. I rejoice in the moment in
folded, wrapped, carried away from which the shop assistant, unfolding
the shop to be unwrapped and the fabric from its cardboard flat,
unfolded for self-indulgent overfills the counter space with
delectation. It then moves on to material pouring down like
consider the use of this material, Rapunzel’s hair from the tower. I
informed by daydream, dream or always over-buy because I cannot
fantasy/phantasy,1 into a made resist the seduction of that moment.
object—a costume. The second part Materials are bought to be used,
is the specific history of the making but I love the remnant box, which
of a beast costume. It follows a sells you a tiny unrealizable dream. I
methodology of free association, 2 always kid myself in the shop—but I
which allows the writer’s mind to know, in my heart of hearts, it is
wander about her own experience unlikely to be used—so I put my
and understanding of sewing but, impossible dreams in my own
far more importantly, she teases dream box. Definitely a box. For a
and sniffs out the dreams, remnant does not cascade.
fantasies/phantasies, and desires Wonderfully useless, an
that inspire her own beast embarrassing souvenir of a
dreaming. misplaced dream—except for these
brave souls who struggle to fit a
A Love Affair maximum of pattern into a
To be exact—two love affairs; a love minimum of material. The dream is
affair with materials and a love secret from myself. So I certainly will
affair with beasts—united by our not give you the chance to tread on
dreaming selves. The first love affair my dreams.
with materials is informed by our Perhaps I do not dare to tread on
earliest experiences of being alive; them myself. Perhaps I do not even
the primitive phantasies, which are know them. Love of materials may
retained in our play and night- spring from our first experience of
dreams—but often heavily our mother’s skin, deeply lost in the
 Beast Dreaming: Myth, Materials, Fantasy, and Psychoanalysis in Making a Beast Costume
unconscious. Through the process
of birth the baby loses the mother in
the sense it loses whatever touch/
taste/smell exists in the womb.
Whatever a baby searches for after
its ferocious ejection into this
unfamiliar world, it begins by
discovering the mother’s skin,
smell, taste, and touch—often, but
not exclusively through her breast,
which can be pulled, yanked,
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stoked, cuddled, smelt—and
sometimes even sucked or bitten.
Neither mother nor baby can at that
moment in time consciously know
what this means to them. Not
everybody who loves materials is a
mother, but they have had some
kind of mothering—however
inadequate. And every mother has a
skin—even if she does not love
materials.
Skin is the baby’s first toy. Other
toys will soon be introduced into the
baby’s life, soft toys which
reproduce some of the qualities of
the mother’s skin; also hard toys
that offer resistance to the baby’s
touch whilst introducing other
qualities, such as sound and color
and a wider range of surfaces—
rough, smooth, cold, warm, shiny,
sticky.
Once a baby is mobile the world
is radically changed. In exploring a
chair the small child discovers
space and distance. Objects may
escape its grasp and disappear. It
takes many games of “peekaboo”
for the child to understand that that
which has disappeared may still
exist (Freud 1967 [1920]: 284).
Initially this is the mother and other
loved persons, but it may extend to
multiple objects and ultimately
concepts.3
But alongside this ferocious
intellectual and motor development
the love of soft toys often persists—
sometimes even into adult life. The
psychoanalyst, Winnicott, in his
work with children, was fascinated
by identifying the imaginative
“bridge” that children use to
develop the relationship between
the self and the outside world. This
bridge he named the transitional
object. It is nearly always soft, often
a piece of material or an old nappy
as well as a soft toy (Winnicott
1958). (The transitional object is not
the absent mother but the bridge
between the mother and the cultural
world.)
Material is for me such a
transitional object, a renounced
memory of maternal skin, which has
expanded into a social and cultural
framework. Material can be treated
like skin. As such it is a toy with
which I can play endlessly. (We
speak of the “play” of a fabric.)
Modern materials lack some of the
exciting and primitive qualities that
can be found in materials such as
chiffon, crêpe de Chine, viyella, and
velvet. Although they can simulate
the superficial qualities of these, I
at least feel less emotional rapport
with them, because they do not
invite me into the process of
making. There is no occasion to
entertain the sense of a weaver
working on the loom or a spinner
spinning (although I would not wish
to glamorize these harsh
occupations). The weft and warp
were easily visible in these fabrics
and it was possible to pull a thread
to make sure one cut straight. Many
clothes were cut on the bias and by
a process of tugging and yanking
one could easily discover this.
Modern materials are hard to cut
and over-stretchy—although this
may help to secure a better
233
response to the curves and twists of
the human body. They have,
however, a quality that I love—
glitter. No doubt glitter is for me
reminiscent of the breast. Clearly
breasts do not glitter—but they are
to the baby mysterious as well as
wonderful, the source of food and
love. Glitter is for me mysterious. It
retains the primal narcissistic magic
of our first mirror, in which we see
ourselves in our mother’s loving
gaze. I buy silver and gold materials
in abundance—and as for sequins!
When the development of
sensory-motor intelligence is
restricted, the sensuous vitality of
the first love affair with the breast
continues to dominate. This may
lead to enrichment rather than
deprivation. Ruskin, whose mother
forced her small child to sit still,
developed a profound love of
pattern. As a child he could
endlessly entertain himself with
studying the patterns in the carpet.
As an adult this developed into a
love of all things filigree—from lace
to the nest of the bullfinch, “lightly
interwoven out of the withered
stalks of clematis bloom” (Ruskin
1978 [1885–9]: 112). Like Ruskin I
love pattern, especially on fabric.
And my favorite toy as a child was a
kaleidoscope. Mine contained
fragments of gold and silver paper,
which turned the world into a
shimmering, shivering delight of
patterns.
Proust was subjected to a similar
immobility as a result of his severe
asthma. The asthmatic’s
sensuousness is transferred to the
eye, and Proust dwells ecstatically
on the clothes of the Duchess de
Guermantes and the clothes he
chooses for Albertine, lingeringly
longingly on his own voluptuous
 234 Jane Graves
gaze (Proust 1999 [1922]: 33–43,
497–500).
Synaesthesics carry the
conflation of sensuous and sensual
experiences into a total confusion,
which can be, to some, disturbing—
and, to others, creative. (This does
not seem to be result of any
frustration in early development.)
Interpreting one sense in terms of
another, hearing with eyes, seeing
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smell can lead to a feeling of total
bombardment. The most common
symptom is seeing the days of the
week and numbers in color. The
Man who Tasted Shapes, by Richard
Cytowic, is a more unusual example
(Cytowic 1994). Vladimir Nabokov’s
Speak Memory (Nabokov 1999)
describes the synaesthesia which
not only fed his creativity, but
through such total recall allowed
him to retain his exiled land in his
memory.
Anybody who loves materials is
in touch with this synaesthetic
experience—even if they are not
synaesthesic. Materials reintegrate
our experience and return us to our
first moments of joy. Sight, touch,
smell, sound meet together and
illuminate our lives. And also our
passions. I am myself seldom
indifferent to a piece of fabric. I
either love it or hate it. And some of
my loves go deep back in the past,
like my love of gingham, of which I
occasionally recall an elusive
glimpse from a novel or a story I
remember.
For most of us it is our dreams
which give us access to our
unconscious. But the senses are not
there in full sensory recall. As Freud
said, dreams are primarily visual—
words occasionally, and touch not at
all (Freud 1967 [1900]). Smell, the
most delectable of our senses, is
missing. In the words of Sir Thomas
Browne, “Nor will the sweetest
delight of gardens afford much
comfort in sleep; wherein the
dulnesse of that sense shakes hand
with delectable odours, and though
it be in the bed of Cleopatra, one
can hardly with any delight,
summon up the ghost of a Rose”
(Browne 1958 [1658]: 114).
This nighttime looking is recalled
in the Lacanian Gaze (Lacan 1981
[1973]: 67–119) in which, as in the
dream, the senses are restricted to
a primarily visual experience. There
is something disturbing about the
experience of finding ourselves in
our dreams watching ourselves, like
looking through the keyhole whilst
being looked at;4 or admiring the
tattoo on the penis5 which only
becomes fully evident once when
the penis is erect—as fabric changes
by stretching. The gaze deludes.
Both the viewer and the viewed are
constantly reconstructed through
the oblique prism of the
unconscious—but an oblique prism
which includes something Lacan
called “desire.” Not just an
impossible longing, but realized in a
artifact, a shimmering surface—“the
rain of the brush,” 6 “the light in the
jewel”7—which we endlessly
rediscover, for example, through our
vision of fabric. Like glitter, the
butterfly shimmers across Lacan’s
text, revealing the unconscious but
in a teasing and elusive way, which
has no sense of self. The butterfly’s
wings are the most delicate and
vulnerable of materials—far too
delicate for stitchery.
But by uniting the erratic/erotic
gaze to the full sensory experience I
dare embark on this rash enterprise
of costume making. Costumes give
us an additional skin through which
 Beast Dreaming: Myth, Materials, Fantasy, and Psychoanalysis in Making a Beast Costume
we can explore our alternative
selves, which struggle for existence
in our limited time span.8 But this
reminds me of our disturbing
unconscious. The unconscious
fulminating through our dreams,
reveals our primary aggressive
urges as well as our libidinal desire.
Klein has identified from the
beginning of life the infant’s
aggressive and sadistic attacks on
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the breast. 9 Any creative activity
involves this furore. I have made a
beast of my grandchild—and this
could be given a negative reading as
well as a positive. But children need
a second skin to explore their own
aggressive feelings. Parents
certainly do (and perhaps
grandmothers)! Many traditional
fairy stories, such as Cinderella, and
Hansel and Gretel, explore this
ambiguity.
Ironically, the making of the
beast costume did not allow me the
sensuous luxury I have outlined in
my love of materials. Needing a
furry material I arrived at a very
unattractive warehouse which
stocked curtain and other domestic
fabrics. There was none of the rich
visual, tactile, and olfactory
resonance that I anticipate when I
visit a fabric shop.
As a wartime child there was
something attractive about the
limitations of the materials at my
disposal—although I was at time
frustrated by my lack of skills. Make
do and mend was the credo of the
world in which I was reared. It may
also at times stimulate great art.
Cocteau’s wonderful movie La belle
et la bête (1946), was made at the
end of the Second World War. His
biographer records the great
difficulty that was experienced in
discovering enough unpatched
sheets for the washing scene
(Steegmuller 1970: 478).
The Inside Story—The Tale of the
Beast
I made a beast costume. The beast
could have been a sculpture, or a
painting, but my beast was made of
material, cotton, and thread. He
rested on my knee and grew as I
talked and listened and thought.
And whilst my task gave me delight,
it also opened up questions in my
mind about the relationship
between dreaming and doing. And
as I sewed I dreamt my thoughts.
The word “Beast” is for me the
“Open Sesame” to my dreams. But
it is also the open door to my
struggle to convert a fantasy,
remote from restraints, into a made
object, subject not only to its
limitations as such but also to the
restrictions imposed by my limited
skills. There is also, inevitably, a
further dimension. Dreams, whether
sleeping or awake, spring from the
unconscious, and are therefore
outside time and space. This
narrative converts my beast
dreaming into a linear structure
within conventional restraints of
time and space. Paradoxically, my
sewing, although in itself a linear
activity, created a three-
dimensional object. In writing my
beast’s story, I am liberated from
the daydream, which inspired his
material form, and gain access to
creative dreaming.
But to use my beast dream I have
to engage in a dangerous activity—
one that could damage my dreams
as well as my beast. I must cut—cut
out my dream (or is it a daydream?)
as well as my costume. Both
physically and mentally, I have
235
picked up a pair of scissors—one to
begin on the task of converting my
beast from two-dimensional
material into a three-dimensional
creature; the other to cut the
umbilical cord between conscious
and unconscious—in order to
initiate a creative access to both. In
other words a necessary brutality in
order to gain conscious access to
the dream-work, a three-
dimensional activity. At least Freud
describes it as such.10
My beast embarks on life when I
release him through my scissors.
But before that he has to be shaped
in my mind. However much I fiddle
with tape measure, bits of
newspaper, and endless pins, I
must have already embarked on the
process of dreaming my beast into
life before I dare abandon myself to
picking up a pair of scissors, and
weighing them in my hand. Then,
holding my breath, I commit myself
to the first cut—a combination of Dr.
Frankenstein and an over-ambitious
surgeon.
So where is my beast—does he
only exist in relationship to myself?
Eternally lacking an inside (he is
after all only material and thread) he
might feel himself condemned as a
“false self”—mine of course. Turned
inside/outside like Hiawatha’s
glove he is brutally exposed—
possibly as an android. Scott’s film
Blade Runner (1982) narrows the
gap between the human and
inhuman. After all, what is the
nature of memory—is it the
authentic badge of humanity? The
android’s memories are fed into
him—but we know we all
misremember—especially our
dreams. Blade Runner, whose job is
to destroy the androids who have
escaped to earth, may realize that
 236 Jane Graves
he too is an android. Like the other
androids, however, he has become
human/e in that he has developed
human emotions—specifically a
capacity to fall in love—despite
having only four years to live. He
may be shaken by realizing his
memories were implanted. But then,
is this so very unusual? Dreams of
unicorns (which he discovers in his
memory bank) have a creative
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potential. It may be the remaining
humans, condemned to planet
earth, who survive through the
possession of a false self. Nobody
human grieves like the android Roy
over the death of his lover Trish.
Dick’s novel, which fueled the
movie, was called Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick 1996
[1968]). No—they dream just like us.
Dreams may lie—but they are
essential for our humanity. My beast
may have dreams of his own—and
he might not be entirely happy with
the thought that he is the creature
of my dreams—and I might be
extremely disturbed to perceive
myself as a product of his. (How
long is his life span? When will he
be discarded and hit the textiles
bank?)
Dreams give us something we
cannot ignore. Borrowing from
dreams, we create pleasures, which
render our experience of the
limitations and frustrations of
external reality less bruising. Like
Orpheus, we need our underworld—
as long as we escape. To melt
though the mirror into the
underworld, like Cocteau’s Orphee
(1959), may reveal the poetry in the
commonplace—as long as we
remember it is death to get lost
there. So it is with some relief that
my beast costume does not involve
a journey to the underworld. I shall
not pursue Eurydice, the dead wife
who can only be regained from the
underworld if Orpheus never looks
back—thereby avoiding dangerous
revelations from my own
unconscious depths. Fortunately,
my beast is a second-hand creature,
who lives off the beast tales of
others. The proliferation of these
tales testifies that I am not alone in
my obsession. The beast fantasy not
only haunts children’s fairy stories,
but also adult texts from Beowulf
(1922) to Brontë’s Heathcliff (1946
[1847]) and the fatherless monster
in Shelley’s Frankenstein (1995
[1818]). So one could say, the beast
as a collective obsession is safe,
although he allows us a chance to
flirt with danger, and glamor.
But can daydreams be as
creative? Has the negative
perception of daydreams been
reinforced because they are so often
linked with women and with
women’s “trivial occupations”—one
that shrinks the beast to
manageable proportions. Freud
despised the daydreams of sewing
women in particular because such
activities do not engage the whole
mind. In Studies in Hysteria (Freud
and Bruer 1957 [1895]: 12) he refers
sharply to women who daydream
whilst sewing. Sewing is not an
activity in which Freud would have
engaged, and his fantasy about
women sewing clearly has its own
agenda. He was indeed right in
supposing that sewing privileges a
wandering mind—in other words a
propensity to daydream—but in his
view this induces “a dispositional
hypnoid state” and as such
stimulates the development of
hysteria.
My desire is to consider a
positive role for daydreaming in so
 Beast Dreaming: Myth, Materials, Fantasy, and Psychoanalysis in Making a Beast Costume
far as it relates to an amateur role,
one which cannot match up to the
skills of the professional. I, an
amateur, have to struggle with
tasks that the professional has
already encountered many times,
and has thereby developed skills
which resolve these issues. And
daydreams are the supportive
device for such a structure —in
my case sewing—a rhythmic
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activity, which is accompanied by
reverie—which may not match up to
the deep dreaming of the creative
artist.
Nonetheless, daydreaming
requires reverie. If disturbed, we
may jump into startled life and
confess we do not know where we
are. But the reverie that
accompanies sewing is secret—not
necessarily from the dreamer but
from the observer. Parker quotes
Collette’s responses to her daughter
sewing. “What are you thinking of?”
her mother asks her. “Nothing
mother,” the child replies, “I am
counting my stitches” (Parker 1984:
10). This child has discovered the
joy of privacy—but the joy of this
particular privacy is that it can take
place in public. Although it is often
to be seen as rude to read in the
presence of guests, sewing is a
feminine luxury. Women are still
allowed to take up their needlework
(just about!). There was once a time
when it would have been seen as a
requirement as it had important
social functions. Bonds were forged
between women, which could not
have been sustained in any other
format—and, as Parker insists, the
seductive pastime of sewing has
been an inducement to masculine
gallantry—a ruse to indicate that the
sewing woman is a woman of
mystery.
There is something disturbing
about such composure. It gives an
illusion of self-sufficiency. Drawing-
room sewing, primarily embroidery,
was often seen as a redundant and
useless activity. No doubt it
sometimes was, and still is.
Moreover, women were seldom
allowed to devise their own
patterns, or to make things they
liked for themselves. Some even
hated sewing. “Polly Cook made
this and hated every stitch,” was a
rare cry from the heart recorded by
Parker. But whether loved or not,
“composure” was a often a strategy
for presenting independence in
order to secure a livelihood by
dependence—at the worst, a
necessary support for those who
failed to achieve, or chose to be
excluded from marriage. As Austen
said, “Single women have a
dreadful propensity for being
poor.”11 Was this perhaps an
incitement to daydream? Austen’s
acerbic realism certainly kept
daydreaming in its place. The
suppressed irony of her views on
marriage can barely be contained
within the formal narrative of her
novels despite the propensity of her
readers to interpret her ironic text as
a panegyric to the stultified cliché—
the wedding dress and the wedding
lingerie, for example in Pride and
Prejudice (1972 [1813]).
Austen’s heroines engage in
drawing-room sewing. The poor
woman, of course, ended up with a
very different kind of sewing, the
necessary work of making and
mending. (At this point my beast—a
middle-class creation, if ever there
was one—must retire in confusion.)
What would the poor woman’s
dreams have been? Exhausted
through overwork, she may not have
237
dreamt at all, but she might have
had daydreams occasionally. Do we
know what they were apart from the
occasional text such as The Song of
the Shirt (Hood 1843 in Jerrold
1980)? It was rare for gentlewomen
to engage in such activities,
although Eliot speaks of Maggie
Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (Eliot
1860) whose skills are used for the
plain sewing of shirts—an unusual
choice for a gentlewoman but
admirable in one who values her
independence.
Such sewing was usually
reserved for the woman who had to
sew for her family, or else sew to
support a family. This sewing was
unlikely to stimulate any positive
fantasies in the woman who took up
her needle when she was already
exhausted. Sewing was not the
device for securing a marriage—but
a needful activity for cohabitation,
marital or otherwise. And no
costumes.
Inadequately, I cringe from such
a painful role model. But
nonetheless I come from a family in
which women made clothes for
themselves and each other—and for
their children. During the Second
World War, I have vivid memories of
the constant cutting and recutting.
No reluctance with the scissors
here. Paper patterns were squeezed
into fabrics, sometimes too small,
sometimes too old. (Eschewing the
paper pattern, I must commit myself
to a rash patternless cutting for my
beast.)
But the unkindest cut of all in
this case was not the scissors
(authorized by Simplicity) but the
sewing machine. (I always sew by
hand.) The sewing machine is not an
aid to fantasy. It is a tyrant—and a
noisy tyrant at that. It cuts the sewer
 238 Jane Graves
off from himself/herself as well as
everybody else, and the
remorseless noise harasses
anybody within earshot. But for my
mother and grandmother, the
clothes they created were a means
of achieving respect—their long
hard struggle, not entirely
successful, to make it into the lower
middle class. Their children were
well dressed. Buckley (1998) recalls
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a similar experience, but more
positively than I do. So my beast is
not the product of a sewing
machine—for this at least he may be
grateful.
He might have preferred,
however, to have been the product
of my mother’s or grandmother’s
imagination. For they possessed
skills and also discovered an
opportunity to explore their own
creativity. Despite the arguments
about “Who could turn a collar
best?” they both found a creative
freedom in their sewing, which they
would have been unlikely to find
elsewhere.
My mother and grandmother
were, of course, privileged. For a
more horrendous version turn to the
sweatshops of east London, a
memorial to those who suffered
there. Underpaid, exhausted, their
lives were not only restricted by the
tiring and repetitive activities of the
day, but by the arthritis that
crippled their hands. In McGrath’s
Silvertown her grandmother is
dragooned into the sweatshop:
“Her small dexterous fingers are
ideal for passing the cloth through
the machine . . . but the machines
take their toll. The vibration gives
her the tremble . . . callouses, the
size of mothballs grow along her
fingers which become immune to
every pain except the constant
thrum of rheumatism . . .” (McGrath
2002: 58) And one must remember
the end product is meaningless to
her—civvie suits? What are we
talking about? She did not get the
chance to dream her own clothes.
And what would a costume mean to
her? She would neither have had
the opportunity nor the desire to
make a beast costume.
And perhaps my beast will
remind us that the seamstresses
who do the sewing behind the
scenes in haute couture are as much
exploited as the workers in the
sweatshops who produce the cheap
clothes we buy off the peg.12 There
are those who cut, the fashion
designers, who move easily from
three to two dimensions. But it does
remain for the seamstresses to
convert the fabric into dream (or
fantasy?)—from two dimensions to
three, at whatever cost to
themselves. Because cutting is a
swift action—a movement from
three to two dimensions it is easy to
forget the trauma of those who have
to move the opposite way—the long-
term, time-bound linear process of
the stitcher.
In the sewing trade, the
professional stitcher becomes a
victim, which the amateur may
escape. The amateur is allowed to
fail—at least avoid professional
judgment. And my poor beast is to
learn that in sewing terms, he is an
economy job—in terms of his
materials and my sewing ability. His
body leaked and all his seams had
to be bound. As for his head-piece!
Hessian does not just fray, it melts
the moment the sewer’s back is
turned. He is not produced by skills
equivalent to those of my mother’s
and grandmother’s. He is a second-
hand job. And as his legs slowly
 Beast Dreaming: Myth, Materials, Fantasy, and Psychoanalysis in Making a Beast Costume
come into existence, he may
discover that one leg is shorter than
the other and he will be walking in
circles: like Pooh Bear.
My beast is growing and he is
brought into existence by repetition.
One stitch after another, ideally the
same. Repetition is often perceived
as a limitation. And it is clear that
sewing is repetitive—for which
reason it is rarely taken seriously.
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Well, children certainly love
repetition. “Do it again!” the child
cries until the adult is exhausted.
But repetition is often seen not just
as restrictive but as dangerous,
especially in daydreams. Sexuality
hovers, a dangerous ritual, between
repetition—and incorporation of
uneasy elements. But the word
“ritual” has struck a bell. Ritual is
an anticipatory ploy. I thread my
needle—and this is the beginning of
the daydream. My beast wonders
what it is. Daydreams may often be
stereotyped—ritualized. They are,
unlike dreams, safe—and we have
the same measure of conscious
control over them as we do in telling
fairy stories. This is my beast’s
world. Here, amateur or otherwise,
he may discover his metier—and be
safe. As in all good fairy stories, the
end is happy—and clear. The good
are rewarded; the bad are
punished, or any rate disappear.
The statuary end of the dream is the
celebration of marriage, which
probably remains the basic motif of
the daydream—a fantasy, which has
no doubt accompanied much,
though not all stitchery.
At times, stitching may evade the
full force of imaginative risk.
Stitching has its own rhythm, but if
that were disrupted by dangerous
and difficult thoughts, sewing could
not continue. The risk is that the
fantasy accompanying sewing
becomes perverted—if the
unconscious breaks through the
daydream, then the activity will
cease. We drop our scissors and
needles and my poor beast is
abandoned. One could say that the
dream has become masturbatory—
not a deferred expectation but an
immediate necessity. This definitely
reduces daydreaming to a form of
pornography—as opposed to a task.
But if the daydream survives as a
form of dreaming, how does this
relate to a child’s play? For if we are
to talk of daydreaming and task, we
cannot resist playing. Winnicott
makes it clear in Playing and Reality
that instinctual excitement always
spoils play, just as it does in
daydreams (Winnicott 1958: 39). But
there is another element to the
daydream—the element of mastery.
Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure
Principle” (1967 [1920]: 285) speaks
of the way the child masters her/his
anxiety—in particular about the
mother’s absence. A daydream also
is a mechanism for mastering
anxiety—a fear of loneliness, death
or powerlessness. So the thrust of
my sewing must remain—the end
product is a beast costume.
Fairy stories also allow us to
engage with these dangers in a
manageable way. Especially in their
beast stories, which allow us to
engage with early primitive shizoid-
splitting, as in Cocteau’s La belle et
lâ bete (1946).
The internal drama of Klein’s
paranoid–schizoid position is
resolved in the union of the
protagonists. 13 None of this is
achieved without a struggle. The
Beast’s hands smoke when he gives
way to his greed/lust and makes a
kill. He allows Beauty a brief return
239
to her father (who is ill because she
is away) and he gives her his
treasures, the mirror, the glove, and
the key.
Mystery lies in precise things. It
is these precise things that reveal
that the Beast’s fairy-tale world
mirrors the so-called real world.
Until the end of the story the
Oedipal conflict is not resolved in
either. The mirror in La belle et la
bête is a truth teller. The Beast must
renounce his infantile/adolescent
greed and lust. What it gives to
Beauty is the knowledge of what
must be relinquished in order to
grow up. She sees her sick father
dying for love of her when she lives
in the Beast’s world, and she see
the sick Beast when she returns to
her father dying without her love.
(Lying next to a pool of water—
another mirror.) In the end she
returns to the Beast—who, restored
by love, is transformed into a Prince.
Her father disappears. Symbolically,
the parents lose their significance—
which expresses in fairy-tale terms
the resolution of the Oedipus
complex.
The Prince is, however, Avenant,
her earthly lover, the wastrel, whom
she also loves—and who dies as the
Beast springs from death into life.
The implication in the text,
obliquely indicated, is that Avenant
has bewitched the Beast’s parents.
Is he the Beast’s Oedipal self who
cannot renounce his parents—who
must die (psychically) before he is
capable of a true union with a
woman. But the beast is also the
umbilical cord between the
unconscious and the conscious—
allowing Beauty access to her own
unconscious. Cocteau’s choice of
images may seem as arbitrary as
those in fairy tales, but they speak
 240 Jane Graves
as powerfully. The hand is the
specific human gift, which the Beast
lacks. Beauty discovers him lapping
into a pond and she cups her hands
to scoop up the water so he may
drink more comfortably. “Does it not
disgust you?” he asks her. With
unconscious love pouring into her
words like water she answers,
“Non, ma bête.” Without either of
them knowing it they have become
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lovers.
The key to the treasure is
Beauty’s love—or is it? For Cocteau
the treasure is “the lustral bath of
childhood” (Steegmuller 1970: 463–
75), located in the pavilion in his
grounds, which allows an entrance
into the adult world—but only for
those who value their childhood
(their inner world). As he puts it in
the introduction to the film,
“Children believe in the stories they
are told. They have complete
faith . . . They believe in countless
other useless thing. It is a little of
this artlessness I ask of you . . . So
. . . Once upon a time.”
One of the useless things is my
sewing, but the useful aspect of this
uselessness is the space it gives me
for dreaming both my competence
and my incompetence. Which leads
me on, naturally, to another story
(Sendak 1963): “That night Max
wore his wolf suit and made
mischief of one kind and another
. . . and his mother called him ‘Wild
thing’ and he said ‘I’ll eat you up’
and he was sent to bed without
eating anything at all.” Max’s
infantile dramas are resolved by
taming his own rage (and perhaps
his mother’s) when he sails away
through a year and a day. Through
this act of reparation he can sail
back to find his supper is still hot.
(As in Ravel’s L’enfant et la
sortilege—so tellingly described by
Klein.)14
But my beast is, “alas,” not truly
himself. Not a proper beast. He only
comes to life as a costume. He
springs into existence when he is
worn by another, lending a full
body, a face, and hands and feet
rather than paws. And as a beast he
is a generic creature. He has no
relationship with a real animal—or a
real child. He is a daydream. Not
even a wolf—nor even a dandy
lion—but a flat piece of material
reluctantly summoned into thinking
life. Not even a place in a circus. No
clapping.
Worse still, the beast costume is
for a child. And even worse, there is
another beast costume, for another
child. How cruel to discover a
missing sister . . . and how like a
fairy story. So I shall carry on day
dreaming . . .
“Once upon a time, in a land that
never was, never can be, but always
will be . . .”
Notes
1. The spelling “phantasy” refers
to the deep phantasies of the
unconscious, which are only
indirectly available to
consciousness, and “fantasy”
refers to daydreaming.
2. “Method according to which
voice must be given to all
thoughts that come into your
mind, whether such thoughts
are based upon a specific kind
of element (word, number,
dream-image or any kind of
image at all) or produced
spontaneously.” (Lapanche and
Pontalis 1988: 169).
3. Freud’s grandson, about
eighteen months, played a game
with a cotton reel tied to a piece
 Beast Dreaming: Myth, Materials, Fantasy, and Psychoanalysis in Making a Beast Costume
of string. He would throw it
under his cot, exclaiming “fort”
(“gone”) and then using the
term “da” to celebrate its return
when he pulled it out. He did
this when his mother was
absent. In Freud’s view the child
was convincing himself she
would return (Freud 1967 [1920]:
284). Piaget pursued the same
course but in terms of the child’s 8. “When the body is absent the
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motor skills and his/her
conceptual development (Piaget
1977).
4. A gaze surprises him in the
function of voyeur, disturbs him,
overwhelms him and reduces
him to a feeling of shame. The
gaze in question is certainly the
presence of others as such. But
does this mean that originally it
is the relation of subject to
subject, in the function of the
existence of others as looking at
me, that we finally apprehend
what the gaze is (Lacan 1981
[1973]: 84). Looking at materials
can be experienced as looking
at another person. They look
back!
5. “Imagine a tattoo on a penis,
traced in a state of repose and
assuming, if I may say so, its
developed form in another
state” (Lacan 1991 [1973]: 88).
This reminds me of the material
cascading over the counter and
slipping away from the touch.
6. “What he [Merleau-Ponty] has
shown me, in a quite admirable
way, beginning with what he
calls, with Cézanne himself,
‘those little blues, those little
browns, those little whites’,
those touches that fall like rain
from the painter’s brush . . .”
(Lacan 1981 [1973]: 110). Like
paintings, fabrics change when
viewed from a different distance
or angle. The surface has
meaning.
7. “. . . the point of gaze always
participates in the ambiguity of
the jewel” (Lacan 1981 [1973]:
96). The jewel both reveals and
conceals its light/dark heart,
depending on the angle from
which you view it.
form of the garment loses its
shape; it is lifeless, anonymous
and negative.” Diane Hall,
“Private spaces,” unpublished
paper in the author’s
possession.
9. “The breast, on which life and
death instincts are projected is
the first object, which by
introjection is internalised”
(Klein 1988 [1978]: 245). The
creation of a good inner object
has a major influence on our
creativity in personal
relationships and creative
products.
10. Freud’s theory of dreams give us
a fascinating insight into the
creative process. In
Interpretation of Dreams (Freud
1967 [1900]) he identifies
mechanisms of condensation,
displacement, and
symbolization which, in my
view, can be identified in the
creation of the aesthetic
product.
11. Jane Austen, “Letter to Fanny
Knight,” March 13 1817 (Le Faye
1997: 332); Austen’s ambivalent
attitude to marriage can be seen
in another letter to Fanny,
March 23 1817, on a woman
approaching her third childbirth
in three years. “Poor animal!
She will be worn out before
she’s thirty” (Le Faye 1997: 339).
241
12. London’s Evening Standard
newspaper, November 19 2002,
exposed Top Shop’s use of
sweatshops in the East End. Top
Shop denied all knowledge of
this.
13. In Klein’s view the depressive
position follows the paranoid–
schizoid in which the infant
owns his/her hostile feelings,
thereby becoming capable of
guilt and reparation. In this
state of mind we are able to
interact with others because we
are able to retain our own point
of view whilst seeing another’s.
It must be understood that we
continually oscillate between
the paranoid–schizoid and the
depressive. For a full theoretical
explanation see Britton (1989:
87).
14. Klein analyses Ravel’s opera
L’Enfant et la sortilege. A
“naughty” child attacks a
squirrel and damages the
furniture and wallpaper. They
come alive and threaten the
child who is terrified. In other
words, his destructive impulses
overwhelm him. When he binds
up the squirrel’s damaged paw,
the furniture and other animals
forgive him. He has made
reparation. To Klein this binding
up of the destructive impulses
through reparation is essential
to creativity (Klein 1988b [1975]:
210–18).
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