Gender Disgussed

31     The devaluation not only of women and homosexuals, but also of feminized inner and outer nature links Sartre's work to Western patriarchal ideology and ultimately as well to fascism as theorized in Männerfantasien. Since in this tradition feminized libidinal drives are perceived as threatening, Les mouches advocates an ideology of emotional restraint. Whereas Orestes, the male hero, thinks rationally and therefore does not come to repent what he has done, Electra is consumed by feelings of guilt, because her participation in the murder was — like Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon — an act of passion, of hatred. In L'existentialisme est un humanisme, Sartre, giving expression to the patriarchal and specifically bourgeois distrust of libidinal drives, denigrates passion:

L'existentialiste ne croit pas à la puissance de la passion. Il ne pensera jamais qu'une belle passion est un torrent dévastateur qui conduit fatalement l'homme à certains actes, et qui, par conséquent, est une excuse. Il pense que l'homme est responsable de sa passion. (37-38)

Passion, according to Sartre, is an escape, an excuse. While Electra consequently cannot escape the plague of the city of Argos, namely, the flies, symbolizing guilt and repentance, Orestes does not feel bothered by them (209). In contrast to Electra's miserable fate at the end of the play, the last sentence of Act II has Orestes say: "Demain je parlerai à mon peuple" (210). Orestes is the new king of Argos, the new — male — authority.

32     As we have seen, it is above all women who are associated with unreflective nature and with animals in Sartre's play. Whereas Orestes senses his alienation from nature, Electra is depicted as still part of nature and metaphorically linked to animals.[11]She says to Orestes, for instance: "Tu étais mon frère, le chef de notre famille, tu devais me protéger; mais tu m'as plongée dans le sang, je suis rouge comme un boeuf écorché; toutes les mouches sont après moi, les voraces, et mon coeur est une ruche horrible" (<em>Les mouches</em> 280). In their black mourning attire, the women of Argos as well resemble the flies of the play's title. The association between animals and (feminized) lack of consciousness also becomes clear when Aegisthus calls his subjects (represented as women), whom he keeps in a state of fear and does not want to know that they are free, "chiens" (Les mouches 165), dogs.

33     Establishing a link between feminized sexuality, violence, and animal imagery, Sartre uses the latter to thematize the threat posed by feminized and negativized libidinal drives ("inner nature"). In Powers of Horror, Kristeva links the abject to animals:

The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were representative of sex and murder. (12-13; my emphasis)

In his Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), Freud interprets animals in dreams as the displacement of the repressed libido. Animal imagery marks the site where libidinal energy and violence meet.

34     In Sartre's play, the apathy of the people of Argos, who fail to warn the returning Agamemnon of the impending violence and danger to his life, is linked to "volupté" and "une femme en rut," a woman "in heat." In the same passage, Jupiter then refers to an old woman as an insect and a fish, as

cette vieille cloporte, là-bas, qui trottine de ses petites pattes noires, en rasant les murs; c'est un beau spécimen de cette faune noire et plate qui grouille dans les lézardes. Je bondis sur l'insecte, je le saisis et je vous le ramène [. . .]. Voilà ma pêche [. . .]. Voyez ces soubresauts de poisson au bout d'une ligne. (Les mouches 111)

The woman's "voluptuousness" and silence are held responsible for Agamemnon's death and thus ultimately for bringing the flies to Argos. With reference to the murder of Agamemnon, Jupiter says to the old woman: "Tu as rudement bien dû faire l'amour cette nuit-là" (Les mouches 112). This conflation of violence and sexuality is reminiscent of the texts examined by Theweleit, whose fascist subjects' only access to sexuality is through a sexualization of violence. Uncontrolled, unmastered, abject sexuality and nature are what Sartre's characters — like Theweleit's protofascist subjects — fear, what causes their nausea, and what — again like Kristeva's abject — at the same time exerts a deadly fascination over them.

35     Abjection, the fear of engulfment by what is only projected outward, namely the inner drives, the fear of border transgression and ensuing erasure by the feminine, is addressed in Les mouches as well as in other texts of Sartre's, such as La nausée. In La nausée, cities figure as protection from "wild nature," from the feared libidinal drives:

J'ai peur des villes. Mais il ne faut pas en sortir. Si on s'aventure trop loin, on rencontre le cercle de la Végétation. La Végétation a rampé pendant des kilomètres vers les villes. Elle attend. Quand la ville sera morte, la Végétation l'envahira, elle grimpera sur les pierres, elle les enserrera, les fouillera, les fera éclater de ses longues pinces noires; elle aveuglera les trous et laissera pendre partout des pattes vertes. Il faut rester dans les villes, tant qu'elles sont vivantes, il ne faut pas pénétrer [!] seul sous cette grande chevelure qui est à leurs portes: il faut laisser onduler et craquer sans témoins. Dans les villes, si l'on sait s'arranger, choisir les heures où les bêtes digèrent ou dorment, dans leurs trous, derrière des amoncellements de détritus organiques, on ne rencontre guère que des minéraux, les moins effrayants des existants. (La nausée 217-218)

The unpredictabilty of what escapes the laws of the symbolic, the threat of the feminine ("elle"), is also addressed in the following passage:

Cependant, la grande nature vague s'est glissée dans leur ville, elle s'est infiltrée, partout, dans leur maison, dans leurs bureaux, en eux-mêmes. Elle ne bouge pas, elle se tient tranquille et eux, ils sont en plein dedans, ils la respirent et ils ne la voient pas, ils s'imaginent qu'elle est dehors, à vingt lieues de la ville. Je la vois, moi, cette nature, je la vois [. . .]. Je sais que sa soumission est paresse, je sais qu'elle n'a pas de lois: ce qu'ils prennent pour sa constance [. . .]. Elle n'a que des habitudes et elle peut en changer demain. (La nausée 221)