Lygeia and her familiar
What no one, even most feminists are willing to examine is the ambivalent relations between adolescent and grown-up sons and their middle-aged mothers. For Freudian-derived attachment theory is out, having been thrown overboard by cognitive behavioral therapy. (https://clarespark.com/2015/02/08/steven-pinkers-reciprocal-altruism/. For evidence that the middle-aged mother is the target of S-M addicted males, see https://clarespark.com/2009/07/13/eros-and-the-middle-manager-s-m-with-implications-for-multiculturalism/.)
Without the embarrassment of developmental psychology, it is easy to applaud the broad popularity of the just-released homage to sadomasochism, Fifty Shades of Grey, which has opened almost as enthusiastically as American Sniper. And for some critics, financial success is just fine, and then they may drop the subject without reflection. http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2015/02/14/box-office-fifty-shades-of-grey-spanks-spongebob-with-30m-friday/.
But even recognizing the [middle-aged woman] as the creature to be silenced, is not enough, for the remarkable popularity of the novel and the movie is susceptible to class analysis. How many shop-girls or working class women or house-bound wives are not dreaming of an ever more elusive upward mobility, personified in the black Knight to carry them off in a private plane or helicopter to a life of luxury, notwithstanding the bondage and humiliation, even death in life that is submissively endured in S-M sex. After all, didn’t Edgar Allan Poe write “Lygeia,” the epitome of romantic necrophilia, to be updated with Fox’s The Following?
And is not Linda Darnell’s double corset one of the most popular clicks on my website? (https://clarespark.com/2009/11/07/dream-girl/)
But perhaps the scariest image I have found today is in the Spring Fashion Magazine of the Wall Street Journal. The model is propped up against a painted tree (http://www.gardeningknowhow.com/ornamental/trees/tgen/painting-tree-trunks-white.htm), thus allying her with the latest Nature-preserving identifications. But to me, she is yet another Lygeia, especially the come-hither gesture combined with the blood-red shoes. Is she an image of the male’s own death?
Wyeth: Spring 1978
Gone is grandma’s lacey Valentine; in comes a new era of the femme fatale/male double, enticing though dead to the world.
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