Gender Disgussed

21     Reflecting patriarchal societies' feminization of the abject Other, the Sartre of "Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur?", in clearly misogynist and homophobic fashion, discusses collaborators with the German occupation force as weak, effeminate men, as women and/or as homosexuals[7]As Carroll (152) points out, "Sartre was certainly not alone among political theorists of the left in characterizing the fascist as a 'failed male' or homosexual. Theodor Adorno, in a section of <em>Minima Moralia</em> [. . .] [w]ritten in 1944 and entitled 'Tough Baby,' made the sweeping claim that 'totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together.'" See also Andrew Hewitt's excellent chapter, "The Frankfurt School and the Political Pathology of Homosexuality," in his <em>Political Inversions</em>. Theweleit takes up — and for a long and disturbing time goes along with the conflation of homosexuality and fascism, in order eventually to prove it wrong., and as societal misfits ('les éléments marginaux," 46; "les ratés," 47). The collaborator, according to Sartre, uses "les armes du faible, de la femme," i.e., "la ruse, l'astuce [. . .] le charme et la séduction" (58). As we can see from the syntactic juxtaposition of "femininité" and "haine de l'homme" in the essay (60), the target of the perceived threat posed by the feminine is man.

Les mouches and La nausée

22     The repudiation of the feminized Other that characterizes Sartre's essay "Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur" is also a trait of his drama Les mouches, written two years earlier. Since Theweleit examines the intense fear of the feminine as the central trait of both the patriarchal and fascist psychological constitutions, my investigation of Sartre's drama focuses on the representation of the female protagonist, Electra; but contrary to earlier, at times essentialist studies of Sartre's "sexism," I also want to look beyond anatomical sex or gender. As this essay will further show, existence, nature, the fluvial facticity of the en-soi, sexuality, maternal engulfment, and feminized abjection are what Sartre's characters fear, what causes their nausea and what — like Kristeva's abject — fascinates them at the same time. By the end of Sartre's play, the threatening feminized force represented by Electra has been contained, appropriated and absorbed by the male hero, Orestes. Whereas Oreste Pucciani asserts that "Sartre was perfectly aware of the dangers of dualism and protected himself against it" (153), I argue that in contrast to Hegel's work, Sartre's rigid dualistic ontology denies the possibility of a synthesis or mediation between the (masculinized) self and the (feminized) Other. Whereas Theweleit's protofascist subjects found their protective "ego armours" in military mass formations, Sartre establishes a rigid binary philosophical system to fend off the perceived threat posed by feminized abjection.

23     A juxtaposition of Les mouches with the protofascist texts analyzed in Männerfantasien is especially intriguing since Sartre himself repeatedly emphasized the political, antifascist implications of his modern Oresteia adaptation, and since the validation of Les mouches as "a work of political protest" (Pucciani 159) has gone largely unquestioned in Sartre scholarship.[8]One notable exception is Gilbert Joseph's <em>Une si douce occupation</em>. Following Sartre's essay "Paris sous l'Occupation," which describes the Vichy régime's cult of remorse, national defeat and humiliation, the attitude of the people of Argos, who live in fear and remorse, can indeed be read as a thematization and critique of the attitude of the French people during the Nazi occupation. As Ingrid Galster points out, Vichy propaganda spread the idea that the French defeat was a logical consequence of the sins committed by the French during the Third Republic (12). In this vein, the character of Jupiter can be interpreted as Hitler, and Aegisthus as the Vichy government or Pétain. In his Sartre biography, Ronald Hayman furthermore argues that Clytemnestra can be read as a collaborator: "The queen represents the docile conformism of occupied France: 'For fifteen years we have kept silent, and only our eyes betray us" (187). Hayman's reading makes Orestes and Electre appear as Resistance fighters. Like Orestes' liberation of Argos, the Résistance was, "a movement not of revolution but of revolt. It had no intention of taking power after the war; its single goal was to liberate France from the occupying Nazi forces" (McCall 23). The critique of paternalistic authority structures in Sartre's play, finally, can be seen as a critique of Pétain's speeches proclaiming the renewal of France along the lines of a clerical and restorative paternalism (Kohut 158).

24     In contrast, or rather in addition, to the interpretations prevalent in criticism on Sartre of the surface text of Les mouches as a liberal, antipaternalistic and antifascist text, a reading of the subtext, of the "excess" (in Kristeva's sense) of Sartre's play, reveals a language that is not only profoundly patriarchal, but reminiscent of the proto-fascist texts examined by Theweleit. The dualistic role distribution between Electra and Orestes in Sartre's play reflects the binary structure of Western patriarchal thought, where, as feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous (in the section "Sorties" of La jeune née) have pointed out, the devalued side of oppositions such as weakness/strength and nature/culture is associated with the feminine. In Sartre's play, women are again depicted as inefficient and impotent. In contrast to Jean Giraudoux' Oresteia adaptation, Electre, written six years earlier, Sartre's Electra is clearly weaker than her brother Orestes. At the beginning of the play, she declares herself too weak to deal with Jupiter, the representative of paternalism, on her own. She waits for Orestes, the male phallic hero ("avec sa grande épée," Les mouches 125), to reveal the hollowness of divine authority and to kill her hated mother and step-father. After Orestes has then declared his determination to kill his mother and Aegisthus, Electra accepts Orestes as her brother and acknowledges his male authority: "Oreste, tu es mon frère aîné et le chef de notre famille, prends-moi dans tes bras, protège-moi, car nous allons au-devant de très grandes souffrances" (Les mouches 182). Electra sketches the picture of a patriarchal family, in which authority is based on gender and age and entails the protection of the "weaker sex."

25     The same dualistic and hegemonic rhetoric also structures the rest of the play. In contrast to Orestes, who represents metaphysical freedom and authenticity, Electra is shown as ultimately still embroiled in negativized paternalistic authority structures. In spite of her initially very vocal and determined opposition to Jupiter, her latent entanglement in paternalistic conventions becomes manifest when, ravaged by remorse after the murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, she accepts Jupiter's interpretation of her act as that of a child who does not bear responsibility. By accepting this interpretation, Electra falls back into paternalistic — i.e. divine, royal and paternal — authority structures, the master-slave dichotomy, and the state of an object (in Sartre's terminology, the state of en-soi): "Au secours! Jupiter, roi des Dieux et des hommes, mon roi, prends-moi dans tes bras, emporte-moi, protège-moi. Je suivrai ta loi, je serai ton esclave et ta chose, j'embrasserai tes pieds et tes genoux" (Les mouches 239; my emphases).