RIVIERE'S "WOMANLINESS AS A MASQUERADE

         CRITIQUE OF RIVIERE’S “WOMANLINESS AS A MASQUERADE”

Riviere’s womanliness as a masquerade is an essay that describes two types of women mainly ‘Heterosexual’ and ‘Homosexual’. This essay aims at destabilization of masculinist psychoanalysis, whereas the latter in its vivid imaging of castration of anxiety qualifies as one of Freud’s most explicitly phallocentric essays. The essay is developed mainly on the area where she looks at an area of sexual development of intellectual women where femininity is a defensive mask that is used to hide masculinity.

From the title ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ one comes to know that a woman hides her identity and acts as another person for men which is stated in the essay. Due to the society in which we live in women one of the topics which are discussed in the essay is that women are shelved by men due to certain character traits which are not appreciated by them which women possess. The essay also gives us a clear picture of how women switch between roles in one’s personal as well as their professional life. This can be seen in working women mainly since they must have one personality at the workplace and once, they come home it's different.

With reference to the first category of classification where it is mentioned that ‘Not long-ago intellectual pursuits for women were associated almost exclusively with an overtly masculine type of woman, who is pronounced cases made no secret of her wish or claim to be a man’ is the tomboy category of women. Their behavior and dressing sense are all equivalent to that of a boy. An aspect of the Oedipus complex has been explained which is part of Freud’s Psychosocial development.

Later, she describes that she does not find any difference between womanliness and masquerading, and it exists in the most completely homosexual women. An example is given of a woman at 29; she had great anxiety about defloration and had had the hymen stretched or slit before the wedding by a woman doctor. This was done just because she wanted to have a desire and an expectation of enjoyment for sexual intercourse before marriage but disappeared once she learned about her husband getting castrated. This brings into picture “Womanliness as a Masquerade”. Since womanliness doesn’t usually have this. During analysis, while the hostile castrating impulses towards the husband were in process of coming to light, the desire for intercourse very much abated, and she became for periods relatively frigid. The mask of womanliness was being peeled away, and she was revealed as castrated. This takes away the very essence of the essay’s topic.

 

Lastly, another incident wherein a woman dresses in a feminine way in front of her male colleagues while lecturing and giving the sign of masculine behavior as a joke which says that she cannot behave like men contradict the topic.

 

Concluding as well as interpreting the essay one needs to ponder over the question as to when exactly or what exactly is attaining womanliness when it is clearly seen that a woman must hide her own self, her own body and pretend to be someone else for the other party. Which is clearly not the meaning of womanliness.