Gender Disgussed

36     The patronne of La nausée, who is — due to not only her skin color, but also her maternal traits — a "white woman" in Theweleit's sense, conjures up the fear of the devouring mother. Her scent, that of "a newborn child," can be interpreted as a Freudian displacement for the mother. Whereas this mother figure smothers the narrator, pressing him against her maternal breast, he rescues himself psychologically by "distractedly" evoking the image of another male figure and "intellectual" pursuits. The narrator's reaction to feminized sexuality expressed in metaphors of lower flora and fauna is a feeling of disgust and physiological sickness. The verb vomir not only denotes physiological disgust; vomiting also marks a border transgression, the transgression of the bodily boundary between inside and outside and thus, abjection.

J'ai dîné au Rendezvous des Cheminots. La patronne étant là, j'ai dû la baiser, mais c'était bien par politesse. Elle me dégoûte un peu, elle est trop blanche et puis elle sent le nouveau-né. Elle me serrait la tête contre sa poitrine dans un débordement de passion: elle croit bien faire. Pour moi, je grapillais distraitement son sexe sous les couvertures; puis mon bras s'est engourdi. Je pensais a M. de Rollebon: après tout, qu'est-ce qui m'empêche d'écrire un roman sur sa vie? J'ai laissé aller mon bras le long du flanc de la patronne et j'ai vu soudain un petit jardin avec des arbres bas et larges d'où pendaient d'immenses feuilles couvertes de poils. Des fourmis couraient partout, des mille-pattes et des teignes. Il y avait des bêtes encore plus horribles: leurs corps était fait d'une tranche de pain grillé comme on en met en canapé sous les pigeons; elles marchaient de côté avec des pattes de crabe. Les larges feuilles étaient toutes noires de bêtes. Derrière des cactus et des figuiers de Barbarie, la Velléda du Jardin public désignait son sexe du doigt. "Ce jardin sent le vomi," criai-je. (La nausée 88-89)

As Kristeva explains, the expulsion of what is inside, nausea, is a protective mechanism necessary to the subject's ego formation. [12]Cf. Kristeva: "Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck [. . .]. Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection [. . .]. I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly [. . .] <em>nausea</em> makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. 'I' want none of that element, sign of their desire; 'I' do not want to listen, 'I' do not assimilate it, 'I' expel it. But since the food is not an 'other' for 'me,' who am only in their desire, I expel <em>myself</em> out, I abject <em>myself</em> within the same motion through which 'I' claim to establish myself [. . .]. [T]hat trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that 'I' am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which 'I' become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit" (2-3).In the passage quoted above, vomiting abjects the threatening inner drives and protects the ego from dissolution, from being engulfed by the suffocating mother.

37     Matrophobia, the fear of the archaic mother, also finds its expression in Les mouches, where the feminized Erinyes are depicted as a perversion of maternal love and metaphorically linked to animals, fluids, floods and innundation. In Aeschylus' ancient version of the Oresteia, the Erinyes already represent Clytemnestra's spirit. In Sartre's adaption, the First Erinye, conjuring up images of the engulfing, devouring and suffocating mother, declares that she will roll on Orestes' and Electra's stomachs and chests "comme un torrent sur des cailloux" (Les mouches 213; my emphasis) and further states: "La haine m'inonde et me suffoque, elle monte dans mes seins comme du lait" (Les mouches 214; my emphasis). She then further predicts her penetration of Electra's body: "J'entrerai en toi comme le mâle en la femelle, car tu es mon épouse, et tu sentiras le poids de mon amour" (Les mouches 214). Similar to fluids, the Erinyes, who are (traditionally and also in Sartre) depicted as women, overstep and blur boundaries — including bodily boundaries and the boundaries between male and female sexuality — and are exponents of Kristeva's abject. Moreover, as in Aeschylus, the Erinyes are metaphorically associated with putrefaction and pus (Les mouches 216), a contamination of clean, proper matter with improper matter.

38     In Les mouches, the threat posed by abjection is thematized not only in the description of the Erinyes, but also in that of the title metaphor — the flies. The flies, which have an important symbolic function, are attracted by flesh/meat and are agents of contamination. The pedagogue who travels with Orestes calls the old women of Argos "[v]ieilles carnes" (Les mouches 104), literally "pieces of old, spoiled meat," establishing a metaphorical link between the flies, putrefaction, contamination, and feminized fluidity [13]When Orestes is bothered by the flies, the pedagogue chases them, saying: "Allons, paix! paix! pas d'effusions!" (Les mouches 107). — abjection. The eyes of the idiot at the beginning of the play are infested with flies. His eyes secrete a white liquid resembling sour milk (Les mouches 107), again conjuring up the theme of the mother as the primary abject. Like fluids that transgress boundaries and blur and contaminate the categories of the symbolic system, causing pollution, the flies in Argos do not fit conventional categories; they are bigger than ordinary flies (Les mouches 107) and more invasive/threatening. The city of Argos is beset by abjection. Not only is it infested with flies, but the towns around it view the repentance of the inhabitants of Argos as a plague and are afraid of being contaminated.[14]Cf. also the images of rats and lepra (<em>Les mouches</em> 244).

39     The link between Electra, animals, and feminized abjection becomes even clearer when Aegisthus orders Electra to leave town. He declares that if she is still inside the city walls, i.e., the masculinized inside or center, the next day at dawn, she will be slaughtered "comme une brebis galeuse," like a mangy sheep (Les mouches 166). Electra, who, like a diseased animal, is threatening contamination, needs to be expelled from the center, abjected. When Electra's dance is interrupted by Jupiter, the people call Electra a seductress and a witch: "Nous n'avons rien fait, ça n'est pas notre faute, elle est venue, elle nous a séduits par ses paroles empoisonnées! A la rivière, la sorcière, à la riviêre! Au bûcher!" (Les mouches 164-165). Hans-Peter Dürr analyzes the witch as a woman who continually crosses the boundary between inside and outside, culture and nature, civilization and wilderness (46).

40     By depicting feminized abjection as a negative threat, Sartre's play participates in the patriarchal process of othering described by Kristeva. There are only two instances in the play where abjection seems to be presented as a positive force: the Electra of the beginning of Les mouches, who is still representing Agamemmnon's masculine claim until Orestes comes to replace her in that role; and finally Orestes, the male hero, who has recognized his existential freedom. As the discussion of the viscous and of sexual desire in L'être et le néant will show as well, Sartre's work gives expression to the extreme fear of abjection — ultimately, the fear of maternal engulfment and sexuality — that, as Theweleit has suggested, is at the basis of both patriarchal society and fascism.