Artrite 7 k.way 2008

Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10, 1929, pp. 36-44.

“I wonder if anyone realizes, until they try it, the freedom of being without tempestuous petticoats? Whatever arguments may be urged against a boy’s dress for a woman anywhere within range of civilization, those arguments do not hold good in wilds such as we went through…A real boys dress is, in my view, far preferable in every way to a compromise such as so-called ‘reformed costume’…”

Constance Barnicoat, who in 1903, along with three other women, climbed the 7180-foot high Copeland Pass and tramped through virgin bush to Hokitika, twenty-three years before Joan Riviere authored this paper, wrote the quote above. Barnicoat, who had already attained an undergraduate arts degree, went on to study languages, climb mountains and explore countries where tourists were rare. During the later stage of her life she worked tirelessly against the Germans during the First World War whilst based in Switzerland.(1)

According to Stephen Heath, Joan Riviere was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. “From 1916 to 1920 she was in analysis with Ernest Jones and by 1919 had patients of her own. The relationship with Jones was intense and fraught, a result certainly of strong transference and counter-transference and possibly too of an actual love affair. She writes to Jones in 1918 of 'the long tragedy of my relationship with you'; he describes her as a patient as 'the worst failure I ever had'.”(2)
Her paper investigates how “women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.”(3)
Her case study is a woman succeeding in her different roles as wife and as a professional who has times of anxiety with public speaking whereby she ‘”obsessively seeks reassurance” both on her performance and sexual attractiveness, from men described as “father figures” .(4)

Within a structured and narrow Freudian analysis, Riviere expounds on the cause and effect of this behaviour, basing her analysis on the oral-sucking stage of development whereby the nipple, milk is deemed analogous with receiving the penis and semen from the father. Hence subconscious horrors of castration, father giving mother the penis, sadistic fury against both parents and the resultant need to have supremacy over them were visited upon her. No wonder the poor girl needed reassurance after her public speaking events.

Heaths essay on Riviere and the time in history when her paper was written helps to explain the context within which she was working, professionally and emotionally, and my perception of her failure to distance herself from one particular analysis. I am suspicious that the case study is more a transference of her situation onto that of her patient.
I still question the seemingly obvious, why did she not analyse the problem of her patient’s anxiety in relation to having to succeed in male terms within the male gaze with which women have been constructed?

In 1929 the world that successful women masqueraded themselves in is aptly described by John Berger as follows:
“Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space.” Is this the masquerade that Riviere writes of?
Berger continues, “But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room, or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father,” or while she is speaking publicly, “…she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping.
From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.” (5)

If Riviere and her patient were to undergo therapy in the present post-modern environment, Berger’s description of the impact of the male gaze would certainly seem an important consideration in seeking the cause of her anxiety.

When I compare the recorded lives and work of the three women, Constance Barnicoat, Joan Riviere and her woman patient, they become connected. Each woman would have been treated within the construction of alterity, otherness to women in their time. That the complexity of pluralism, individual relationships and circumstance, and societies within society, meant that each experienced their alterity differently is relevant individually, but irrelevant to their contribution to women’s history and the ongoing investigation into a liberation from the male gaze.

1. McCallum, Janet. 'Barnicoat, Constance Alice 1872-1922' Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007. http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/dnzb/
2.Stephen Heath JOAN RIVIERE AND THE MASQUERADE P .47
http://www.ncf.edu/hassold/WomenArtists/heath_riviere_and_masquerade.htm
3. Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10, 1929, pp. 36-44.
4. Ibid.P.36
5. John Berger reading from his 1972 book “Ways of Seeing”
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1335486.htm