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Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, by Elisabeth Bronfen. New York: Routledge, 1992. Pp. 460. $59.95, cloth; $17.95, paper.
Although Edgar Allan Poe's 1846 statement that the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world" (cited p. 59) does not appear in Elisabeth Bronfen's book until the beginning of the second section, it nonetheless underwrites the entire project. The prevalence of dead, beautiful women in western art and literature provides the pretext for examining the assumptions and strategies supporting the image. Through uncovering displacements and doublings negotiated literally over the woman's dead body, Bronfen explores how representations of death function symptomatically for the (male) survivor-artist, mediating the dual threat of femininity and mortality. Her densely argued, copiously illustrated, and thoroughly researched text constitutes a significant contribution to applied psychoanalytic theory and to the cultural critique of linkages between women and death.
The chapter in which Poe's assertion appears carefully analyzes each word of his famous sentence, reflecting Bronfen's meticulous approach to her material. Working from a psychoanalytic viewpoint with which she allies feminist, formalist, and anthropological perspectives, she offers a formidable series of readings: they range from texts by Rousseau and Dickens to the Crimm Brothers and Atwood, from visual art by D. G. Rossetti and Millais to Lichtenstein and Hitchcock, from theory by Lacan and Derrida to Benjamin and Cixous. If the sheer volume of material combined with the opaqueness of Bronfen's style can be overwhelming, the revolving door of texts at least keeps the jumble interesting. And fortunately, Bronfen's central argument is relatively uncomplicated. Throughout her catalogue of examples, she traces the way in which the double castrative threat posed by female death is assuaged by the creation of a safe aesthetic or symbolic double that essentially kills the woman it replaces. This attempt at protective substitution, however, never completely succeeds; the repressed returns either as a threatening, uncanny doppelganger or through the gaps of the woman's subversive complicity.
Bronfen most frequently argues in terms of the death drive, of separation anxiety anchored in umbilical rather than genital rupture, of das Unheimliche, and of female hysteria. Thus Over Her Dead Body occasionally displays a tension between historical and psychoanalytical method. Bronfen seems aware of...