Dora was not pregnant, but nine months after Herr K kissed her, Dora gave birth to appendicitis. Then to a limp. Katherine Mansfield gave birth to. nothing.
A magic trick — there was nothing inside the box.
KM (Mansfield’s narrator/avatar) is unmarried but, when asked, discovers it is possible to give birth to a phantom husband (a sea captain, of all things). What a feat of ratiocination!
In the comments box beneath the hotel birth article: “I would rather stay in a hotel room that a baby had been born in, than a room where someone had a hooker!”
In the comments box beneath another article about the birth: “Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think that’s fair for the next hotel guest.”4
Whoever thinks about the next hotel guest?
Dora’s mother might have. She, says Freud, cleans the house so as not to be dirty.
FREUD
Her genitals, which ought to have been kept clean, had been dirtied. [Dora] seems to understand that her mother’s mania for cleanliness was a reaction against this dirtying.5
Dora, a scholar, scorns home work, but she also does not want to be dirty.
That’s the problem, isn’t it, and it’s the same problem now.
Who will clean the house?
Who will be dirty?
A cook in the kitchen, a lady in the living room, a whore.
Should I be one, or the other? Could I be all three? Is there a way to avoid being any of them?
All these problems are solved in hotels.
VI
FREUD
A Freudian slip is where you say one thing, but mean your mother.
Freud did not say that. It’s a joke (and, like many jokes, is anon).
It is a joke about parapraxis, in which the speaker expresses an unconscious wish, hidden inside a box of words that both reveal and conceal it. A parapraxis sounds like a joke, but it is an unintentional one. Freud did not name it the Freudian slip. He called these speech patterns Fehlleistungen, which means faulty actions. Sometimes, when they cannot be spoken, words enact off the page.
FREUD
If one’s lips are silent, one will be voluble with one’s fingertips, betrayal seeps through every pore.
Dora fiddles with her handbag.
FREUD
She was wearing a little purse around her neck, in a style that was modern at the time, and she played with it.
DORA
Why shouldn’t I wear a little bag like this, when it happens to be in fashion?
FREUD
The little bag, like the jewellery box, once again representative of the Venus shell, the female genitalia!
DORA
I knew you’d say that.
A symptom is a kind of Fehlleistungen. It is the physical evidence of something unspeakable.
FREUD
A symptom is a sign of, and a substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has remained in abeyance.6
A symptom is an action that, like a word, stands in for a something else, but it is not like a regular word that stands in directly, but more like one of these word forms, that are a bit like Freudian slips, and jokes, as they suggest two things at the same time.
FREUD
(Symptoms are)
Like garlands of flowers stretched over metal wire.
(This is simile.)
FREUD
Since bed and board constitute marriage.7
(This is metonymy.)
FREUD
[A symptom is]
The grain of sand around which the mollusc forms the pearl.
(This is metaphor.)
My bed stands in the middle of my hotel room. Important, would you say, sacrificial, would you say, ceremonial? No. Mansfield (or her avatar) despised metaphor, metonymy: “My dear little lady,” says Herr Erchardt, “you must not take the quotation literally.”
KM’s narrator refuses abstraction, but she also despises her own solid legs, the German Pension’s solid food, the solid bodies of the Germans and their children, and their bodily functions, which so delight them, especially when they turn them into words.
KM worries about bodies. Her physical condition produces mental symptoms (disgust).
Dora’s neuroses enact physically (Freud says, “somatically”).
A somatic symptom, says Freud, is neuroses’ “escape route into the physical.”
Dora is a physical case.
KM is a mental case.
I am always escaping. I am no more than a suitcase.
VII
FREUD
A regular dream stands, so to speak, on two feet, one of which is the actual and essential cause, while the other touches upon an important event in childhood.
I think of a dream as something like a hotel wardrobe. It has an inside and an outside. It is waiting to be filled. But two feet do not seem enough to support such a massy piece of furniture. A suitcase stands upon two wheels and is, perhaps, a more suitable metaphor.
My suitcase stands in the corner of my hotel room, small and black, square-shouldered as a visiting psychoanalyst.
It clasps its hands behind its back and says tell me about your symptoms.
No, I will tell it about Dora’s dream.
Dora dreamt that her house will burn down. Her mother wanted to save her jewelry; her father became angry and insisted the family must escape without it. In any case, Dora’s father did not like Dora’s mother’s jewelry.
DORA
Mama and Papa had a big row about a piece of jewellery. Mama wanted to wear something particular, drop pearls in her ears. But Papa doesn’t like that kind of thing, so instead of the drop pearls he brought her a bracelet. She was furious, and told him that if he’d spent so much money on a present that she didn’t like then he should give it to someone else.
FREUD
(To Dora)
So far you’ve talked about the jewellery and said nothing about a box.
DORA
(Says nothing about the box)
FREUD
You may not know that “Jewellery box” is a popular expression used to refer to something you recently alluded to when you talked about the handbag, that is, the female genitals.
It never does to explain a joke, but that’s psychoanalysis, I guess.
FREUD
I give both organs and processes their technical names. I call a spade a spade.
There are no spades in my hotel, no evidence of home work, or any other kind of work, only of its results. And indeed Freud did not say, “I call a spade a spade,” as it appears in the English translation of A Fragment, but “j’appelle une chat une chat” (I call a cat a cat).
FREUD
One can talk to girls and women about all kinds of sexual matters without doing them any harm.
Freud denies that mentioning a spade produces the frisson that calls the spade into action.
A spade is made for action but a symptom is the product of inaction, of “an instinctual satisfaction which has remained in abeyance.” It acts, but not like a spade. It is impossible for a spade to act in a hotel.
FREUD
No one can undertake the treatment of a case of hysteria until he is convinced of the impossibility of avoiding the mention of sexual subjects.
Or, as Freud says (again, in French), “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
You could break an egg with a spade, but it might not make for a good omelette.
You could make an omelette for a cat, but it might not lay eggs.
Freud calls a symptom a “conversion disorder.” It is true; my house is in disorder. I want something to happen, some kind of conversion. When I return from the hotel I must make myself a better house. I must convert it into what? A home? Would it have helped if I had at least spoken about things differently, if I could, perhaps, have itemized what went into home, described even the things I could not see: the gutter round the roof, the tiles? If I had been able to put home into different sorts of words?