重覆的夢境：論達芬˙茉莉兒之懸疑浪漫小說《蝴蝶夢》中的雙重快感 - 政大學術集成

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(1)國立政治大學英國語文學系碩士班碩士論文. 指導教授：陳音頤. 先生. 政治大. Advisor: Eva Yin-I Chen. 立. ‧ 國. 學 ‧. 重覆的夢境：論達芬˙茉莉兒之懸疑浪漫小說《蝴蝶夢》中的雙重快感. Nat. n. al. Rebecca. Ch. engchi. 研究生：喬郁珊. er. io. sit. y. A Repeated Dream: Double Pleasure in Daphne du Maurier's Romantic Suspense. i n U. 撰. Name: Yu-Shan Chao 中華民國 102 年 9 月 September, 2013. v.

(2) A REPEATED DREAM: DOUBLE PLEASURE IN DAPHNE DU MAURIER'S ROMANTIC SUSPENSE REBECCA. A Master Thesis Presented to Department of English,. 政治大. 立National Chengchi University. ‧. ‧ 國. 學 In Partial Fulfillment. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. n. v i n Ch of the Requirements for the Degree of engchi U Master of Arts. by Yu-Shan Chao September, 2013.

(3) Acknowledgement The completion of thesis owes much to the assistance of many people. First, my deepest gratitude goes to my parents, who educated me to be an independent thinker, and who have always been understanding and supportive towards me and my dreams. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to my advisor, Professor Eva Yin-I. 政治大 romance literature, and who keeps encouraging me to write down my thoughts before 立 Chen, who inspires me greatly with her profound achievement in the studies of. without her generous help and insightful suggestions.. 學. ‧ 國. the fear for imperfectness conquers me. This thesis would not have come into shape. ‧. I am deeply indebted to Professor Tsui-fen Jiang, my dear teacher who has. sit. y. Nat. always been like a mother for me since my college years. It was her kindness and. io. er. patience in listening to me and giving me warm encouragements during my hardest days that enabled me to finish my thesis.. al. n. v i n CtohProfessor Te-Hsuan Many thanks should be paid Yeh for the wonderful food engchi U. for thoughts he gives me in the study of pleasure and desire. It was in his excellent. lectures about gay pleasure that the very core idea of this thesis first occurred to me. I am also very grateful to my senior and classmates—Ching-yuan Hsueh, Amadeus Chen and Lawrence Yu—for their generous sharing of resources and experiences in thesis writing. The Yoga classes I had with Paris Shih and Valeria Lee have given me strength to hang on; while the hearty girls’ chats with my old friends Lisa Hsia, Reinelle Yang, Yi-hsin Lin, Stella Lin and Hsien-lan Chen never failed to inspire me again and again on the issue of female pleasure. This thesis would not have been completed without each of my friend’s contribution. iii.

(4) Last but not least, my special thanks should go to my boyfriend, who has enriched my life and given me abundant emotional supports for years. From his continuing care for me I always receive energy and love to accomplish the goals in my life.. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. iv. i n U. v.

(5) Table of Contents Acknowledgement………………………………………………………………iii Chinese Abstract………………………………………………………………..vii English Abstract…………………………………………………………….......viii Chapter One: Introduction………………………………………………………1 Literature Review………………………………………………………….4. 政治大. Methodology and Chapter Organization…………………………………..6. 立. Chapter Two: The Double Pleasure Theory…………………………………….13. ‧ 國. 學. Chapter Three: The Double Pleasure in Rebecca……………………………….31. ‧. Case 1: Rebecca……………………………………………………………31. Nat. io. sit. y. Case 2: The Narrator/Protagonist…………………………………………..45. al. er. Chapter Four: Readers’ Pleasure in Reading Rebecca…………………………..65. n. v i n C hwithin the Text of Rebecca……………………..66 Readers’ Double Pleasure engchi U. A Justice Done to Everyone?.........................................................................71 Mystery of the Ending: Double Pleasure in Fantasies and Dreams………..73 Readers’ Double Pleasure outside the Text: A Forever Continued Story…..75 Chapter Five: Conclusion………………………………………………………..81 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………...87.

(6) 國立政治大學英國語文學系碩士班碩士論文提要論文名稱：重覆的夢境：論達芬˙茉莉兒之懸疑浪漫小說《蝴蝶夢》中的雙重快感指導教授：陳音頤研究生：喬郁珊論文提要內容：本文研究暢銷懸疑浪漫小說《蝴蝶夢》（Rebecca, 1938）中所蘊含的大量閱讀快感，並試圖以羅蘭˙巴特對於快感之論述，融合羅曼史小說相關之大眾. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. 文化理論，勾勒出「雙重快感」之原型構想，並以此理論解析《蝴蝶夢》文本中的快感運作。「雙重快感」理論點出，不論是巴特提及的「一般快感（plasir）」與「極樂（jouissance）」，或者是大眾文化研究中，與父權社會合作的「共謀式快感（complicit pleasure）」以及相抵觸的「抵抗式快感（resistive pleasure）」，都無法帶來徹底的滿足。相反地，正是在這兩類快感之間的游移、模糊的地帶，才是衍生更巨大快感之所在。讀者能藉由文本中的多重角色身分，在兩類快感的擺. y. Nat. sit. n. al. er. io. 盪中，激發出更強烈的雙重快感。第一章首先對《蝴蝶夢》文本及相關評論作概略統整的介紹，並針對其歷久不衰的暢銷性，切入閱讀快感的主題。第二章針對「快感」的定義，做一系列的文獻回顧，並以巴特的快感理論為基礎架構，融合大眾文化研究領域裡的快感相關論述，構築出「雙重快感」的理論模型，並以圖像方式清楚呈現。第三章進入文本分析，討論文本中的重要角色如何反映了「雙重快感」的運作：莉碧嘉大膽享受著表裡不一的衝突生活所帶來的雙重快感，而無名的女主角抱持著對莉碧嘉的憧憬與模仿慾望，與莉碧嘉進行幻想式的重疊，再由自身複雜多重的身分認同之中，獲得雙重快感。第四章著重探討《蝴蝶夢》的讀者們如何能與角色進行心理重疊，脫離了日常自我的框架，游移擺盪於各種. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. 位置之間而獲得雙重快感。最終章將點出，《蝴蝶夢》的半開放（迴圈）式的結局，巧妙呼應著羅曼史文類「過程重於結局」的本質，也諭示出：羅曼史讀者重複閱讀、購買浪漫小說的普遍習慣，亦是試圖回歸雙重快感的一種表現。. 關鍵詞：雙重快感、《蝴蝶夢》、羅曼史文類、快感論述、一般快感、極樂、共謀式快感、抵抗式快感、多重主體位置. vii.

(7) Abstract This thesis aims to analyze the working of pleasure in the popular romantic suspense Rebecca through the “double pleasure theory” that is mainly based on Barthes’s pleasure theory of “plasir” and “jouissance.” Chapter One introduces the novel Rebecca and the pleasure issue involved within, a widely discussed topic raised. 政治大 pleasure by providing a general review of how the remarkable theorists, including 立. by theorists in the field of cultural studies. Chapter Two seeks for the definition of. Freud, Lacan, and Barthes, have discussed and analyzed the meaning of pleasure.. ‧ 國. 學. From their observations, it can be deduced that pleasure are mainly divided into two. ‧. kinds: the pleasure of the “Plasir” (the release of excitation) and the pleasure of the. sit. y. Nat. “Jouissance” (the intensification of excitation). The double pleasure theory inherits. io. er. this basic structure, while adding a new point that the greatest pleasure cannot appear alone in either kind of single pleasure, but can only exist in the shifting process. al. n. v i n C hbe brought to the cultural between these two. The theory can also layer of discussion engchi U about female pleasure, suggesting that women’s greatest pleasure occurs exactly. between patriarchal ideologies and feminist values. Chapter Three focuses on textual analysis of the novel, revealing that the most important characters of the novel, Rebecca and the narrator/protagonist, have both proven the successful working of double pleasure throughout the whole story. Chapter Four discusses how the readers can also receive this double pleasure by identifying themselves with the female characters in the novel, and how the novel’s circular narrative structure can also help readers to retain that double pleasure. Much emphasis is put in Chapter Five to show that the novel’s special narrative structure also highlights the very phenomena in the viii.

(8) romance genre—that the process of romance is far more significant than the ending—which presents as well a fact that romance reader’s repetitive reading/buying tendency is originated from the wish to regain double pleasure.. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. Keywords: Rebecca, double pleasure, romance genre, pleasure theory, plasir, jouissance, complicit pleasure, resistive pleasure ix.

(9) Chapter One Introduction. Rebecca, one of the best-selling romance novels in the 20th century ever since its publication in 1938, is a gothic romantic suspense written by the English author Daphne du Maurier. While numerous of du Maurier’s suspense novels and short stories have been adapted into popular motion pictures, Rebecca is probably her most remarkable masterpiece that has been translated into more than twenty languages and made into stage plays, television series and films, including the classic 1940. 政治大 country setting, the novel 立mainly tells how an inexperienced girl, the narrator/. adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock. Successfully capturing the atmosphere of the Cornish. ‧ 國. 學. protagonist “I,” whose name is never mentioned in the story, marries Maxim de Winter, the middle-aged aristocratic widower, and how she is haunted by the perfect. ‧. image of Maxim’s deceased first wife Rebecca after their marriage. After finally. sit. y. Nat. finding out that Rebecca is actually killed by Maxim and that she is an adulterous. n. al. er. io. “bad wife,” the narrator/protagonist is able to consolidate the love between her and. i n U. v. her husband. However, their beloved country estate Manderley is eventually burnt by. Ch. engchi. Rebecca’s loyal maid Mrs. Danvers, and the memory of Manderley still haunts the narrator/protagonist in her dream. Like many of the romance novels written for female readers, Rebecca has not received much critical acclaim despite its popular success. In fact, the whole romance genre is “the genre which has been taken least seriously in literary studies,” and “compared disadvantageously with more ‘serious’ literary forms” (McCracken 75). Since the romance, as a genre “created primarily for women” (Palmer 154), always offers the same pattern including fixed types of characters and a monogamous marriage that ends the story, feminist critics tend to rate it as second-class literature. 1.

(10) for duped women readers and consider that it “reinforces an assumption of male authority” (Mussell 126). However, such interpretation of women readers has fixed them into passive receivers of the text, and might be too narrow in exploring their repetitive motivation in buying and reading romances. Why do women read romances? Are female readers simply “either masochistic or inherently stupid” since they are “the victims of, and irrational slaves to, their sensibilities” (Light 8)? Romance clearly offers women readers pleasure, but is this pleasure simply propaganda for the patriarchal ideology,. 政治大 Enlightenment, John Cumming, trans. 150-51. 1986)? Alison Light’s arguments have 立. or the deceptive “complicit pleasure” raised by Adorno and Horkheimer (Dialectic of. heralded a new way of reading romance by pointing out pleasure as the key element. ‧ 國. 學. in romance reading:. ‧. I think we need critical discussions that are not afraid of the fact that. sit. y. Nat. literature is a source of pleasure, passion and entertainment. This is not. n. al. er. io. because pleasure can then explain away politics… Rather it is precisely. i n U. v. because pleasure is experienced by women and men within and despite. Ch. engchi. those [social and historical] constraints… literary texts might function in our lives as imaginative constructions and interpretations. It is this meshing of the questions of pleasure, fantasy and language… which makes it so uniquely important to women. (Light 8-9) In other words, pleasure serves a function to explain away female readers’ motivation in a positive way that is free from Left/Right wing ideologies or moral values (Light 8; Chen 151). What, then, is the pleasure in reading Rebecca? Readers might find it 2.

(11) exhilaratingly pleasant to see how the ultimately confident woman Rebecca crushes the patriarchal values within the marriage system; at the same time they might also feel glad when the narrator/protagonist’s middle-class femininity, which the readers might be more familiar with and can easily identify with, finally triumphs over Rebecca’s upper-class femininity because of her virtue (Light 11-15). However, “that triumph involves a deep sense of loss” because both Maxim and the narrator/protagonist have lost their place, and Rebecca’s spirit is still alive as a symbol of desire in the narrator/protagonist’s dreams (21). It is not only hard to tell who is. 政治大 or to Rebecca’s, the narrator/protagonist finally identifies with. The only thing that we 立. truly happy in the end, but also difficult to assert to which side, whether to Maxim’s. can be certain about by now, is the popular readers’ timeless joy in reading this fiction. ‧ 國. 學. that made it an eternal bestseller. Does the reader’s pleasure come from Rebecca’s. ‧. pleasure, or the narrator/protagonist’s? Or is this endless uncertainty of subjectivity. sit. y. Nat. between two kinds of values the key element that enables readers to make new. io. er. discoveries of selfhood and to enjoy the pleasure derived from such exploration? This paper will then give a close study of the pleasure issue in Rebecca, using. al. n. v i n especially Roland Barthes’s C ideas of “double pleasure” h e n g c h i U (“plasir” and “jouissance”). It will be discovered that it is from the double pleasure, the shifting process of. subjectivity between the realms of “plasir” and “jouissance,” that the feeling of pleasure in reading romances like Rebecca reaches its maximum. To prove the point, books and essays focusing on Rebecca and the pleasure issue in the romance genre will be generally introduced, particularly Alison Light’s “Returning to Manderley: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class, ” Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, along with Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance and The Women Who Knew Too Much. Together with abundant textual proof from the novel itself, a series of structural graphics will also be presented to explain and illustrate the working of 3.

(12) “double pleasure.” Finally, this thesis will argue that the novel’s “endless shifting” in double pleasure corresponds and mirrors the readers’ repetitive buying and reading of romances like Rebecca.. . Literature Review. Generally speaking, critics of Rebecca have put much emphasis on the novel’s presentation of “English society between wars” and “the identification problems of the narrator/protagonist.” According to Alison Light, “Rebecca is a rewrite of Jane. 政治大 aristocracy” (7). The novel keeps presenting a yearning for a past England, the 立. Eyre amidst a nostalgia for the waning of the British Empire and the decline of the. prosperity of the British Empire, and the decencies of the English, so strong that it is. ‧ 國. 學. akin to a yearning for a lost Eden. The novel also reflects the insecurity among the. ‧. English public between the two devastating wars, during which England was facing. y. Nat. the fast rise of America. Therefore the lost prosperity of England is lamented, and. er. io. sit. some of the traditional values are to be cherished again: “[a]fter the war, men and women were… sentimental also in the ways that embraced homes and family, local. al. n. v i n C hto see themselvesUreflected in the literature gossip, and ‘ordinariness.’ They wanted engchi. they read, however attenuated it might be” (Bloom, “Bestselling Fiction” 193). This. definitely has a thing to do with du Maurier’s strong obsession with the tranquil lifestyle in Menabilly, Cornwall, a place she loved so much that it even becomes the prototype of the fictional “Manderley” in Rebecca (Kelly 421). Indeed, such nostalgia for Englishness is apparent in the story especially when the narrator/protagonist despises the vain and vulgar American social climber Mrs. Van Hopper, and lauds the decency of the typical English gentleman Maxim de Winter. Another group of critics adopt the psychoanalytical approach in discussing the novel. Rebecca is not only a classical gothic romance but it also tackles complicated 4.

(13) issues, as Richard Kelly mainly points out in his biography of Daphne du Maurier: “[d]u Maurier’s Rebecca… contains most of the trappings of the typical gothic romance… however, [it] is much more than a simple thriller of mystery. It is a profound and fascinating study of an obsessive personality, of sexual dominance, of human identity, and the liberation of the hidden self” (Kelly 54). While du Maurier has always been described as a “Brontë-esque” writer due to her wonderful technique in presenting the gothic and mysterious atmosphere with emotional intensity (Bloom, Bestsellers, 148), she has invented her idiosyncratic style in writing Rebecca with. 政治大 uncertain about selfhood. Unlike the heroines of the Brontë sisters who are confident 立 deep psychoanalytical portrayals of its narrator/protagonist who is troubled and. with themselves, the narrator/protagonist in Rebecca suffers from a lack of confidence,. ‧ 國. 學. “childishness,” “total incompetence” and is in a desperate eagerness to replace. ‧. another woman by imitating her (Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 47). As. y. Nat. Modleski clearly indicates, the story of Rebecca is “all about a woman’s problems of. er. io. sit. ‘overidentification’ with another woman” (44). It is from this angle that the “feminine oedipal complex” is frequently raised up: “Rebecca is the story of a woman’s. al. n. v i n C hcome to terms withUa powerful father figure and maturation, a woman who must engchi. assorted mother substitutes… Rebecca is an oedipal drama from the feminine point of view” (46). Among all of Rebecca’s critics, Alison Light is the one who points out the importance of the pleasure issue in her essay “Returning to Manderley: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class.” This essay “argues for a social construction of bourgeois femininity in the narrator/protagonist’s collusion with the male (Maxim), and in the self-suppression (murdering) of the disruptive alternative of sensual and independent femininity (Rebecca)” (Makinen 35). Light is also “arguing for an appreciation of how romance works as a space of psychic and cultural resistance and 5.

(14) pleasure, even though it is not a site of open rebellion” (35). More recent critics have followed Light in focusing on the pleasure issue in the analysis of romance novels.. . Methodology and Chapter Organization. What this paper aims to do is to analyze Rebecca by using the idea of “double pleasure,” and to study the positive effects of pleasure in romance reading. In doing so, an observation of the essence of romance would be given at the beginning of Chapter Two, along with the study of the co-existence of women’s passiveness and activeness. 政治大 Modleski, who is always arguing “for a complex process of reading that is both 立 in romance reading. According to Makinen, such an idea is inspired by Tania. oppositional and capitulating,” and Janice Radway, who discovers “romance’s value. ‧ 國. 學. in serving ordinary women’s needs within an oppressive system” (Makinen 34). Their. ‧. theories are to be combined with a study on the evolution of the idea of pleasure that. y. Nat. follows later on. Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a good starting point for the. er. io. sit. pleasure theories, since he provides the very first distinction between “Thanatos” and “Eros,” the two ways of the working of pleasure through the death drive and the. al. n. v i n sexual drive. Lacan’s research aboutCthe term “jouissance”Uprovides the very basis for hengchi Barthes’s pleasure theory, in which pleasure is divided into two main kinds: “plasir,” the release of excitation, and “jouissance,” the intensified excitations. Barthes offers insofar not only the most relevant research for the hypothesis of “double pleasure” theory, but also the idea of “resistive pleasure” that sets a contrast with Adorno’s “complicit pleasure” in the cultural layer of discussion. In sum, the basic format of double pleasure in the reading experience of Rebecca is based mainly on these sets of comparisons, as the following graph may offer a clearer structure for the concept:. 6.

(15) The Basic Format of Double Pleasure. Self Identification. Plasir/ Complicit. pleasure (of patriarchy)/release of excitation. 立. Self Identification. Jouissance/ Resistive pleasure (of the feminism)/ intensified excitation. Where the ultimate jouissance exists. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學 er. io. sit. y. Nat. (The shades of color represent the greatness of pleasure.). al. n. v i n What this chapter also seeksC to prove is that the real h e n g c h i U“jouissance” lies not in the. extremity of a particular object, symbolism or value, but rather, as is pointed out by Barthes, in the “seam,” the “cut,” and the “edge” of pleasure (Barthes 7). That is to say, the real pleasure exists not in a single kind of pleasure, but instead, within the process of transition of different kinds of pleasure. It is from this structure we can understand that the strongest pleasure exists in the shifting of the subjectivity between two contradictory feelings or values.. 1. Chapter Three deals with how this working of double pleasure is reflected in the novel, particularly on the most important two female characters, Rebecca and the 1. The capitalized terms “Jouissance” and “Plasir” refer specifically to the two groups of pleasure. 7.

(16) narrator/protagonist. They serve as the main examples for the working of double pleasure since they are able to obtain different kinds of pleasure, unlike people of the traditional Manderely, including Maxim, Beatrice, Old Gram and other servants, who are wholly subject to the rigid social orders that lack excitements (e.g. the stale library, the strict routines in the house… etc.). None of these characters can enjoy Rebecca’s double pleasure that shifts between “Plasir” and “Jouissance,” as the following picture shows: Rebecca’s Pleasure. 立 = Plasir. Jouissance =. Independently. 學. ‧ 國. Patriarchal. 政治大 liberal female. social order (role as a perfect. (role as a promiscuous. (Complicit. (Resistive. woman). Pleasure). n. al. er. io. sit. y. Nat. Pleasure). ‧. mistress). Double Pleasure. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. Rebecca does everything “only to make her laugh” (Rebecca 340). In other words, she does things only to find pleasure. Her sexual games, her false marriage with Maxim and her hypocritical acts in front of people as a good wife and a perfect mistress, her choice to meet her sex partners once in a while instead of permanently divorcing Maxim…etc., are all to serve her own pleasure at the cost of her husband and the patriarchal order she mocks at. Her seemingly contradictory behaviors can be explained by the double pleasure theory: it is by role-playing a perfect mistress and a promiscuous woman that she could obtain the strongest pleasure in her life. 8.

(17) The second part of Chapter Three will be dealing with the narrator/protagonist’s pleasure, which is more complicated than Rebecca’s, since the narrator/protagonist can obtain excitement and sexual joy only through her identification with Rebecca, as can be explained through the diagram below: The Narrator/ Protagonist’s Pleasure. Plasir (the virtuous. Jouissance (sexual. 政治大. patriarchal orders) (Complicit. 立 Narrator/. of orders). Pleasure). Identification. The imagined “Rebecca”. protagonist. (another self. Maxim and. created by. ‧. (devoted to Manderley). (Resistive. 學. ‧ 國. Pleasure). attractiveness, breaking. fantasy). Double Pleasure. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. i n U. v. The narrator/protagonist, always trapped in patriarchal values, has no other. Ch. engchi. means to experience sexual pleasure but to imagine herself as Rebecca. On the one hand, she feels content and secured within the patriarchal social orders in Manderley, and succumbs to her husband’s absolute authority; yet on the other hand, she also longs for a transformation into a mature and attractive woman like Rebecca. Textual evidence proves that the moments considered most amazingly pleasurable for her are when she switches herself from a dull girl into Rebecca—for example, at the dinner table (du Maurier 200), and before the masquerade ball (205). What is also worth mentioning is that, both Plasir and Jouissance are the important sources of pleasure for the narrator/protagonist, and the greatest pleasure exists only during the process in. 9.

(18) which she is trying to free herself from a single kind of female model, to swift her pleasure from one kind to another kind. With “Rebecca” being the fixed model representing Jouissance and Maxim/Manderley representing Plasir, the narrator/protagonist is able to obtain double pleasure by simultaneously identifying with the patriarchal social orders and a liberated female figure. Double pleasure can also be seen within the entire reading process of Rebecca. Chapter Four specifically aims to study how fantasy theory can explain the multiple positions in the story, and how it can also present readers’ “double pleasure” in. 政治大 help to explain how the reader of Rebecca first identifies with the narrator/protagonist, 立. reading the story. Radway’s use of fantasy in studying the reading of romance will. positions to gain double pleasure, as the following graph shows:. 學. ‧ 國. and then gradually identifies with Rebecca through fantasy and multiple reading. ‧. Readers’ Pleasure within the Text of Rebecca. n Patriarchal social order. Plasir. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Double Pleasure. Ch. engchi U. v ni. Jouissance. Independent modern female. (complicit. (resistive. pleasure). Identification. The. pleasure). imagined. Narrator/. “Rebecca”. protagonist. (another self. (=readers). created by. Double Pleasure. fantasy). Readers can easily identify themselves with the narrator/protagonist as their 10.

(19) alter-ego, and, as the narrator/protagonist gradually “overidentifi[es]” with Rebecca (Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 44), they are encouraged to identify with Rebecca as the ideal self as well. In other words, this chapter deals with the viewing positions of romance readers. The double pleasure derived from multiple identifications can prove that fantasy is not a merely passive escape from the reality (Chen 165-70), but rather a positive means to experience the maximum of pleasure by shifting between “Plasir” and “Jouissance” within the text. The unique circular narrative structure of the novel would also be put into. 政治大 clear ending of the story, the novel Rebecca urges reader to go through the beginning 立 discussion in the remaining part of Chapter Four. By not providing readers with a. again, and successfully creates a situation in which the readers could repetitively. ‧ 國. 學. experience the reading pleasure. This structure not only corresponds to romance. ‧. critics’ suggestion that for the readers, the process of a courtship in romance is far. y. Nat. more important than a closure or ending (Ang 528-29), but also mirrors the. er. io. sit. “repetitiveness” in the general reading and buying process of the entire romance genre. It is expected that through the analysis of the narrative structure of the popular. al. n. v i n Canswers romance Rebecca, suggestive readers’ pleasure can be discovered, U h e n tog romance i h c and prospective contributions can be further made to the study of romance genre.. 11.

(20) 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v.

(21) Chapter Two The Double Pleasure Theory To understand how the novel Rebecca can be analyzed by the double pleasure theory, first we should take a thorough survey into the historical connection between romance genre and pleasure theory. Janice A. Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature argues that the real female readers “are certain… that the activity of romance reading is pleasurable and restorative as well” (Radway 119). Linda K. Christian-Smith furthermore points out in her study. 政治大 be concluded that the readers’ reasons for reading romances “combined elements of 立. Becoming A Woman through Romance that, in both her and Radway’s studies, it can. fantasy, knowledge, and pleasure” (Christian-Smith 105). While many critics agree. ‧ 國. 學. that pleasure is the motivation and function of romance reading, what, then, is the. ‧. exact structure of such pleasure?. sit. y. Nat. Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance provides us with a good start to study. io. er. the issue of pleasure in romance novel reading. Modleski firstly points out that there is an ambiguous perspective toward patriarchy in popular women narratives: it. n. al. Ch. enhances patriarchal marriage system but. engchi. v i n Usimultaneously. voices women’s. dissatisfaction as well: “women writers of popular fiction have indeed registered protest against the authority of fathers and husbands even while they appeared to give their wholehearted consent to it… plots have to be ‘submerged’ into more orthodox ones just as feminine rage itself” (Modleski 25). Such a phenomenon subverts the Frankfurt School’s presupposition of women readers as merely duped readers who, as Adorno suggests, are planted with false consciousness of patriarchy through romance novels, the products of culture industry (Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 47). Instead, these critics view romance reading in a positive way, since women’s agency is hidden under the “highly ‘orthodox’ plots,” and that women can fulfill their 13.

(22) desires and needs by recognizing their own agencies through the reading process of the romance novels (Modleski 25). However, this will lead us to another question: if what women readers wish for is an opportunity to voice out, to protest against patriarchy, why don’t they simply read feminist literature instead? Recent scholars tend to dig into psychoanalysis to find proper reasons: “[r]ejecting the notion of ‘false consciousness,’ many Marxists have turned to a study of the unconscious, as it is structured in and by the family. This emphasis has the merit of beginning to explain why people cling to oppressive. 政治大 elsewhere… [and] why the sales of Harlequin Romances have not simply remained 立. conditions even after it is pointed out to them that their own best interests lie. steady in recent years but have actually increased along with the growth of feminism”. ‧ 國. 學. (Modleski 29). The desire to rebel against patriarchal society certainly cannot be the. ‧. only reason for the large readership in romance novels which often conversely. sit. y. Nat. provide readers with domestic happy endings. One may then want to ask: what are the. io. er. exact elements in such romance fictions that can give readers what they need, fulfill their desires, and make them feel pleasant during the reading? Modleski suggests we. al. n. v i n C hand that it is “onlyU by taking psychoanalytic dig into psychoanalysis for answers, engchi. insights into account, by understanding how deep-rooted are the anxieties and fantasies contained in (and by) popular narratives for women can we begin to explain why women are still requiring what Jameson calls the ‘symbolic satisfactions’ of the texts instead of looking for ‘real’ satisfactions,” so as to probe out “what constitutes narrative pleasure for women” (Loving with a Vengeance 29; 32). In order to find out the answers, a thorough survey toward the basic construction of pleasure and the history of pleasure theory will be helpful. Throughout the discourses about pleasure, what should never be omitted is Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he observes the important 14.

(23) relation between the feeling of pleasure and the two general kinds of instincts lying in the nature of human being: death-instinct and life-instinct. Freud finds his original concept “pleasure principle” cannot fully ascribe the truth of pleasure without the addition of these two instincts. According to him, pleasure principle is “a tendency operating in the service of a function whose business is to free the mental apparatus entirely from excitation or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or to keep it as low as possible;” however, more than this, he also discovers that “the greatest pleasure attainable by us, that of the sexual act, is associated with a momentary. 政治大 elimination and the intensification of excitation can bring out pleasurable effect, and it 立 extinction of a highly intensified excitation” (Freud 62). In other words, both the. is from this point that the two main kinds of instincts that drive human beings to make. ‧ 國. 學. such elimination and intensification are elaborated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.. ‧. Death-instinct is “the compulsion to repeat” (19), “an urge inherent in organic life to. sit. y. Nat. restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon. io. er. under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic. al. n. v i n C h “towards theUrestoration of an earlier state of life” (36). Under the death-instinct engchi. things,” a person gains pleasure through repetition so as to be close to death, since “everything living does for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’” (37-38). Life-instinct, on the other hand, is the “Eros,” the “self-preservative sexual instincts” that “do not seek to restore an earlier state of things” (42; 55; 41). Working in an opposite way from the death-instinct, the life-instinct (also as sexual instinct) drives a person to obtain pleasure through the intensification of excitations. However, Freud also admits that “[t]he pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts. It is true that it keeps watch upon stimuli from without… but it is 15.

(24) more especially on guard against increases of stimulation from within, which would make the task of living more difficult. This in turn raises a host of other questions to which we can at present find no answer” (63-64). In other words, further explorations are still in need to explore the relation between death-instinct and life-instinct: Are they parallel forces that never meet each other in a binary structure, or two forces that contradict yet entangle with each other? How exactly can pleasure be attainable under such condition? Jacques Lacan’s contribution is especially notable in his “promotion of the. 政治大. principle of jouissance” (Connor 211). Lacan prefers another angle to define the term “pleasure” as “desire:”. 立. not. pleasure.. Pleasure. limits. the. 學. desire,. ‧ 國. We shall come back to all this, but I would point out that I said scope. of. human. ‧. possibility—the pleasure principle is a principle of homeostasis.. sit. y. Nat. Desire on the other hand found its boundary, its strict relation, its limit,. io. threshold imposed by the pleasure principle.. al. er. and it is in relation to this limit that it is sustained as such, crossing the. n. v i n C h Concepts of UPsychoanalysis, 31) (Lacan, The Four Fundamental engchi. Lacan makes a few corrections of the term “pleasure” in Freud’s pleasure principle, pointing out that it is but a limited concept because of its “conservatism and homeostatic inertia” (Connor 211). Lacan further provides a promotion of the theory with one of his most remarkable terms, the jouissance: “The subject… will realize that there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle” (Lacan 183-84), suggesting that “a true ‘beyond’ of the pleasure principle” should be found “not in death but in jouissance or desire” (Connor 211). The term jouissance here may indicate the ultimate desire, or the ultimate goal for the pleasures. The translator Alan Sheridan of. 16.

(25) Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis can perhaps give us so far the most adequate concept of the term jouissance: JOUISSANCE (jouissance). There is no adequate translation in English of this word. “Enjoyment” conveys the sense, contained in jouissance, of enjoyment of rights, of property, etc... “Pleasure,” on the other hand, is pre-empted by “plasir”—and Lacan uses the two terms quite differently. “Pleasure” obeys the law of homeostasis that Freud evokes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, whereby, through discharge,. 政治大 transgresses this 立law and, in that respect, it is beyond the pleasure. the psyche seeks the lowest possible level of tension. “Jouissance”. ‧ 國. 學. principle.. (Sheridan 281). ‧. Combining Freud and Lacan’s contributions to the pleasure theory, there can be seen. y. Nat. io. sit. a general division between the two kinds of pleasure: one is of the “plasir,” of the. n. al. er. release of excitations and of the pleasure principle, the law of inertia and homeostasis;. i n U. v. while the other is of the “jouissance,” of sexual desire and of intense excitations.. Ch. engchi. No one has used the terms “plasir” and “jouissance” in a more distinctive way than Roland Barthes. In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes links the discussion of pleasure with the textual reading experience, and “suggests, like Lacan, that there are two kinds of pleasure and two kinds of text to go with them, the text of pleasure and the text of bliss” (Connor 211). In defining the text of pleasure (plasir in French) and the text of bliss (jouissance in French), Barthes lists clearly in this way: Text of Pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a 17.

(26) state of loss, the text that discomforts, unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, bring to a crisis his relation with language. (Barthes 14) Apparently the text of pleasure can be classified into the group of plasir/release of excitation, while the text of bliss is more of the group of jouissance/intensified excitation. Albeit the two systems of pleasure work in contradictory ways, they can be obtained at the same time: “the subject… simultaneously and contradictorily. 政治大 culture: he enjoys the consistency 立 of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its participates in the profound hedonism of all culture and in the destruction of that. ‧ 國. 學. loss (that is his bliss)” (14).. However, what remains questionable is the relation between the two groups of. ‧. pleasure: are they different only “of degree,” or are they “parallel forces” that “cannot. sit. y. Nat. meet” (20)? Barthes has given us some clues through a series of related questions:. n. al. er. io. “[i]s pleasure only a minor bliss? Is bliss nothing but extreme pleasure? Is pleasure. i n U. v. only a weakened, conformist bliss—a bliss deflected through a pattern of. Ch. engchi. conciliations? Is bliss merely a brutal, immediate (without mediation) pleasure?” (20). This leads us to the confusion of the term “bliss (jouissance),” which cannot be simply identified as merely one of the elements in Barthes’s binary structure of plasir and jouissance since, according to Barthes, “[b]liss is unspeakable, inter-dicted” (21), and that “the general rule… would assign bliss a fixed form: strong, violent, crude: something inevitably muscular, strained, phallic. Against the general rule: never allow oneself to be deluded by the image of bliss; agree to recognize bliss wherever a disturbance occurs in amatory adjustment (premature, delayed, etc.): passionate love as bliss?” (25).. 18.

(27) We are certain by now, after a series of surveys of pleasure theories, that there basically exists two systems of pleasure (that of the release of excitation and that of the intensification of that excitation), and a reading subject can simultaneously obtain the two pleasures, yet there seems to be another “unspeakable” jouissance, outside of the two pleasures (Barthes 21). In fact, “bliss (jouissance)” seems to have split into two roles: the jouissance of the second group of pleasure (the intensified excitation) and a jouissance that belongs to neither of the two groups. What is the exact form of that ultimate jouissance, if it really exists? What is the difference between it and the. 政治大 merely “strong, violent, crude” (25)? Also, how will a reading subject experience that 立. original jouissance (in the second group, the intensified excitation) that seems to be. ultimate jouissance through romance, along with the “passionate love” (25) described. ‧ 國. 學. within?. ‧. Barthes’s later discussion of the “extremity” in the text of bliss can be supportive. sit. y. Nat. for the existence of such ultimate jouissance: “it is the extreme of perversion which. io. er. defines [bliss]: an extreme continually shifted, an empty, mobile, unpredictable extreme. This extreme guarantees bliss” (52). Here, let us perceive in this way: there. al. n. v i n C h is the “unpredictable is an ultimate “bliss (jouissance)” extreme” that flees out of the engchi U fixed region of pleasure (plasir) and the original bliss (jouissance). The ultimate. jouissance is a transcended form of pleasure: it has not only transcended the first group of pleasure (the group of plasir/ release of excitations) but also the second group (the group of jouissance/ violent, strong, intense excitations). It lies in neither of the two groups, but in somewhere between: it is in the transitioning progress, the fluctuation from one kind of pleasure to another, that one can obtain the pleasurable feeling to the greatest degree. This is the constitution of double pleasure, the basis of this thesis that combines the ideas from pleasure theorists—Freud, Lacan, and mainly Barthes—with a little revision, and tries to explain away the complicated relationship 19.

(28) between plasir and jouissance by providing a new vision: the existence and the working of an ultimate jouissance, as presented in the diagram below: The Basic Format of Double Pleasure. 立. 政治大 Where the ultimate jouissance exists. Jouissance/ intensified excitation/ sexual desire. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. Plasir/ release of excitation (law of homeostasis). n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. v shades of color i(The n U represent the greatness of pleasure.). With the aim of this diagram, we can then understand what Barthes means when he suggests “what pleasure wants is the site of loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss” (7). While Barthes has never made clear the definition of bliss, the structure of the double pleasure, the two kinds of bliss—the area Jouissance and the ultimate jouissance— could solve the confusion of the term. It is at the “seam,” the “cut,” the transiting, the shifting process from mere release (the area marked as Plasir) to mere sexual excitation (the area marked as Jouissance) –or vice versa— that can bring the subject the ultimate 20.

(29) jouissance, which gives him the greatest effect of pleasurable experience. The double pleasure can also solve the riddle-like description of pleasure when Bathes says “‘pleasure’… sometimes extends to bliss, sometimes is opposed to it” (19), and the ambiguity of the Lacanian definition for pleasure/desire as “the repetition in order to reach the perfect oneness in the past… a process of the searching for pleasure that already contains the discontent, anxiety, and excitation” (Chen 153), since Plasir and Jouissance are both contained in one circle, representing their tendency to become a “onenss,” to extend to each other, to neutralize the qualities in each other, and to. 政治大 Connor’s annotation could be supportive for the existence of the ultimate 立. create the ultimate jouissance so as to achieve the greatest pleasure.. jouissance (bliss): “Barthes’s text of bliss is orientated towards extremity rather than. ‧ 國. 學. containment… an extremity of nonfinality. As opposed to the centered, genital. ‧. finality of texts governed by the pleasure principle and the sense of an ending, the text. sit. y. Nat. of bliss perversely resists or turns aside from centered pleasure… this is a claim for. io. er. the absolute value of bliss over mere pleasure” (Connor 211-12). What should be specifically added here is that, the term “bliss” here should not be equalized as the. al. n. v i n C h even the plainUintensification of sexual excitation Jouissance group of pleasure—for engchi. can only be a fixed, centered form of pleasure. Instead, it should be realized as the ultimate jouissance that is unpredictable (because it is always in a shifting status between two kinds of fixed pleasures), unrestrained by any centered pleasure or an ending, a finality. A discussion for the pleasure attainable in romance novels can also help us understand the non-finality in the ultimate jouissance. As Barthes has also wondered “passionate love as bliss?” (25), we may find it not so hard to understand the working of double pleasure in the pattern of most romance novels. While passionate love is a necessary element in romance fictions, happy ending is another crucial element for 21.

(30) the romance readers. In most cases, the heroine, originally living in a mundane reality, experiences the passionate, violent, or even destructive love with the hero, and together they welcome a happy ending that guarantees a happiness that is peaceful, harmonious, and relieved, totally different from the love they have experienced in their love adventure. From the general pattern we can suggest that the reader, along with the heroine, gains the ultimate jouissance exactly from the switching from one kind of pleasure to another: she enjoys to the fullest when being rescued by the hero from the mundane reality into the thrilling and sexy adventure (from area Plasir to. 政治大 happy as well when. area Jouissance); yet when the adventure becomes too excited and even problematic to bother her, she is extremely. 立. being promised an. anxiety-relieved, peaceful future with the hero (from area Jouissance to area Plasir).. ‧ 國. 學. Ien Ang points out in her research that the romance readers actually enjoy such a. ‧. pattern in which the heroine is being passionately wooed by the hero especially under. sit. y. Nat. the promise of a happy ending:. n. al. er. io. When the reader is sure that the heroine and the hero will finally get. i n U. v. each other, she can concentrate all the more on how they will get each. Ch. engchi. other. Finding out about the happy ending in advance could then be seen as a clever reading strategy aimed at obtaining maximum pleasure: a pleasure that is orientated towards the scenario of romance, rather than its outcome. If the outcome is predictable in the romance genre, the variety of the ways in which two lovers can find one another is endless. … After all, it is more than striking that romance novels always abruptly end at the moment that the two lovers have finally found each other, and thus never go beyond the point of no return: romantic fiction generally is exclusively about the titillating period before the wedding!. 22.

(31) This could well indicate that what repetitious reading of romance fiction offers is the opportunity to continue to enjoy the excitement of romance and romantic scenes without being interrupted by the dark side of sexual relationships. (Ang 528-29) Such preference of the readers shows as much the work of the double pleasure, in which the greatest pleasure is obtained in the fluctuation between two kinds of pleasure, the Plasir and the Jouissance, instead of the finalities, the ends in either of. 政治大 reading subject can reach 立the maximum of his pleasure from the endless uncertainty. these two. It is by living such contradiction, by being a “living contradiction,” that the. ‧ 國. 學. of selfhood, as Barthes describes: “… this subject is never anything but a ‘living contradiction’: a split subject, who simultaneously enjoys, through the text, the. ‧. consistency of his selfhood and its collapse, its fall” (Barthes 21). The source of the. sit. y. Nat. subject’s enjoyment is the feeling of the unpredictable, the inconsistency of the. n. al. er. io. selfhood that brings the subject into the forever-shifting status which provides him with the greatest pleasure.. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. One may doubt here that the romance readers who tend to find out a happy ending in advance actually prefer to walk into a fixed ending instead of accepting the unpredictability of the storyline. But to look at it in a different way, we can also suggest that, what those readers truly search for is not exactly what happens in the ending but rather the pleasure of the whole reading experience, something they have to make sure that will not be ruined by the sad endings that are notorious for their sheer, realistic unpleasantness, as Radway concludes in her field study: “[sad endings] negate the romance’s difference and distance from [readers’] day-to-day existence, dominated as it so often is by small failures, minor catastrophes, and ongoing. 23.

(32) disappointments” (Radway 73). As Ang indicates, readers focus more on “the variety of the ways in which two lovers can find one another is endless” (Ang 528), it is obvious that the process of the romance, in which the unlimited possibilities of the romanticity contained within, is the real source of pleasure in a romance novel. This corresponds to the double pleasure structure: the greatest feeling of pleasure occurs not at the end of Plasir but the area between Plasir and Jouissance. Happy endings being read in advance provides readers with a free space to enjoy the romanticity of the process, defended from the disappointment and the unpleasant sad endings that. 政治大. can only make romances “failed romance,” “the garbage-dumped romance” (Radway 76-77).. 立. The working of double pleasure can be presented in romance novels not only in. ‧ 國. 學. the sphere of psychoanalysis but also in the research of mass culture. The pleasure. ‧. theory raised by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer introduces the idea of. sit. y. Nat. “complicit pleasure,” the tendency in people to search for relief and comfort, has. io. er. made people into a bunch of conservative cowards that are dumbly controlled by the capitalists with their invention of culture industry. Since “pleasure always means not. al. n. v i n to think about anything, to forget C suffering even whereU h e n g c h i it is shown. Basically it is. helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance” (Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, John Cumming, trans. 144. 1997), the group of people who hold the economical power learn to use this feature of pleasure to advertise commercials to people, and to build up a false model of culture so as to spread the legitimacy of the products: Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system… The conspicuous unity of macrocosm and. 24.

(33) microcosm confronts human beings with a model of their culture: the false identity of universal and particular… The truth that [films and radio] are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. They call themselves industries, and the published figures for their directors’ incomes quell any doubts about the social necessity of their finished products. … The standardized forms, it is claimed, were originally derived from the needs of the consumers: that is why they are accepted with so little. 政治大 unifying the system 立 ever more tightly. What is not mentioned is that the resistance. In reality, a cycle of manipulation and retroactive need is. ‧ 國. 學. basis on which technology is gaining power over society is the power of those whose economic position in society is strongest.. ‧. (Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,. sit. y. Nat. Edmund Jephcott, trans. 94-95). n. al. er. io. Adorno and Horkheimer view the concept of pleasure in a much pessimistic way,. i n U. v. asserting that the pleasure in the mass culture is but the wish for mental relief, and is. Ch. engchi. used as a tool by the capitalists to take the advantage for the expansion of their business. Death-instinct is the notorious origin of the complicit pleasure. Since “the repetitiveness, the relief of excitation in the pleasure of mass culture is linked with death instinct,” Adorno criticizes mass culture as “deadly, valueless, and even conservative in cultural and political concerns, which turns mass culture’s pleasure into a ‘complicit pleasure’ with the propaganda, the tool of the authority to maintain the established social orders, to paralyze and to cheat the mass readers” (Chen 153-54). While romance novels are nominal for their successful sales in the mass culture, the romance genre becomes a target despised by Adorno, Horkheimer and. 25.

(34) other traditional Marxists with a specific negative prejudice for romance readers as merely dupes who enjoy being manipulated by the book market that produces novels advertising patriarchal social values. Objections have risen of course. While “Barthes’ pleasure theory points out the diversity of sensual pleasures and indicates the possibilities of the positive meanings of popular culture” (Chen 157), the idea of “resistive pleasure” is then brought up as the contrary to “complicit pleasure,” suggesting women readers’ agency in the interpretation of romance novels, as Mary Ellen Brown introduces: “[r]esistance. 政治大 can resist hegemonic, or dominant 立. theory comprises a body of work which addresses the issue of how ordinary people and subcultural groups. pressures, and. consequently obtain pleasure from what the political, social and/or cultural system. ‧ 國. 學. offers, despite that system’s contradictory position in their lives” (Brown 12).. ‧. Modleski takes numerous textual evidences from best-selling romances to point out. sit. y. Nat. the “female resentment,” “heroine’s anger and frustration,” “women’s revenge. io. er. fantasies” between the lines in romance’s texts (The Women Who Knew Too Much 43; 47). However, as much as it seems that the female readers’ resistive pleasure is. al. n. v i n C h Modleski and other brought up against the complicit pleasure, scholars in the study of engchi U. popular female romance have not denied the ambiguity of the position of female readers, who can never be simply judged as the believers of feminism or the supporters of patriarchy. The major paradox exists in that, romance novels often show female sexuality as a sort of danger or sin yet at the same time intend to discover the sexual desire for the readers (Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 51). Female readers do not surrender to patriarchy wholeheartedly; their rebel, their discovery of sexual desire, is quietly actualized inside the domestic family. Their reading pleasure is ambiguous: it does not completely belong to the extreme of resistive pleasure (that of the radical feminism) or totally to the extreme of complicit 26.

(35) pleasure (that of the absolute obedience of patriarchy). Female readers have escaped from the fixed identifications to gain pleasures that cannot be easily classified under either social extremity. On the other hand, the Frankfurt School scholars like Adorno and Horkheimer seem to be too assertive in their distaste of mass art and in their preference of high art (Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance, 26-27). Irony exists in their own definition of pleasure: while the culture industry advertises the relief of excitation, it is actually a relief “prolonged,” as Adorno and Horkheimer admitted themselves: “[t]he culture. 政治大 promissory note of pleasure issued by plot and packaging is indefinitely prolonged: 立. industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. The. the promise, which actually comprises the entire show, disdainfully intimates that. ‧ 國. 學. there is nothing more to come, that the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu”. ‧. (Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Edmund Jephcott, trans. 111).. sit. y. Nat. Since the final relief of excitation will never be reached, it can be speculated as well. io. er. that in order to reach this illusory pleasure, people have to endure endless excitation. The most controversial part is that there must be pleasurable feelings contained in this. al. n. v i n C hall, people have toUfeel content blindly and endlessly excitation as well, since, after engchi while being manipulated by the social propaganda: “[i]t seems like, therefore, the. pleasure in the mass culture consists not only of the relief of the excitation, but also the continual existence of anxiety and excitation, the frustration and discontent of the relief, which proves the insufficiency of the clear distinction between pleasure and the excitation” (Chen 154). It is from this sense that we can notice again that the borderline between the complicit pleasure and the resistive pleasure is indistinct, which can be explained as well in the double pleasure model, and be grouped under the two areas of pleasure, the Plasir and the Jouissance, as presented below:. 27.

(36) The Basic Format of Double Pleasure. Plasir/ Complicit. Self Identification. pleasure (of patriarchy)/release of excitation. Self Identification. Where the ultimate jouissance exists. 立. 政治大. Jouissance/ Resistive pleasure (of the feminism)/ intensified excitation. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. Nat. y. sit. er. io. (The shades of color represent the greatness of pleasure.). al. n. v i n While the complicit pleasure C can be linked with the h e n g c h i UPlasir area because of its. drive toward the relief of excitation, the resistive pleasure, full of intensified. excitation, can be linked with the Jouissance area.1 Take a female reader’s situation for instance: when reading a romance novel, she can sense two kinds of reading pleasure at the same time: one is the pleasure coming from the liberation of social duties by experiencing the exciting sexual adventures (the Jouissance/resistive pleasure), and another is from the sense of security when being provided with a happy 1. In this chapter, Freud’s theory of “death instincts” and “life instincts” will only serve as the starting point of the discovery toward the distinction between two kinds of pleasure: the pleasure originating from the intensification of excitations and the pleasure originating from the release of excitation. Freud’s ideas about the death drive and life instinct concern many issues, but this thesis focuses only on this aspect. 28.

(37) ending (the Plasir/complicit pleasure). However, the crucial point is that, in order to enjoy the liberation or the sense of security, one must compare the situation in the now-moment with the situation in the past time, since one can only be liberated from some restrictions that strained him before, and can only be secured by something that has not protected him before. The point is clear now: the real enjoyment cannot simply originate from an eternally exciting adventure or plainly from a fixed happy-ever-after. Instead, it is always between the shifting of these two that the greatest pleasure can be created. Therefore, as presented in the diagram, it is only. 政治大 into both of the identifications in these two pleasures/social values, and who freely 立 when a reader who learns to appreciate both kinds of pleasure, who submits herself. switches her position from one to another, that she can enjoy herself to the upmost, to. ‧ 國. 學. obtain the ultimate jouissance. The greatest happiness occurs in the process when she. ‧. gradually liberates her sexual desire with the heroine, and the process when she is. sit. y. Nat. gradually given a sense of security under patriarchal social orders when the heroine is. io. er. guaranteed a happy marriage with the hero. It is only during the changing process that is free from the restrictions of the fixed type of social value that the ultimate. n. al. Ch. jouissance can be actualized.. engchi. i n U. v. Radway’s field study towards real romance readers would be the most representative source to enlighten the importance of such shifting process of identifications: Romance reading… is a strategy with a double purpose. As an activity, it so engages [women’s] attention that it enables them to deny their physical presence in an environment associated with responsibilities… Reading, in this sense, connotes a free space where they feel liberated from the need to perform duties… At the same time… they escape. 29.

(38) figuratively into a fairy tale where a heroine’s similar needs are adequately met. As a result, they vicariously attend to their own requirements as independent individuals who require emotional sustenance and solicitude. (Radway 93) Romance novels serve the function of fulfilling women readers’ hidden desire exactly because they help women readers to escape from their original identification and free themselves from social responsibilities. However, what is not often discussed is the. 政治大 interest for mere excitation could 立be eventually worn out. The term “liberation” could tendency in women readers towards the sense of security, and an awareness that the. ‧ 國. 學. fall into the same dilemma as the term “jouissance” did: once it is fixed into a classical, strict type of term that tends toward an end, or finality, it will immediately. ‧. lose its original meaning: the freedom originates from a breakthrough, and the. sit. y. Nat. pleasure created from within. This issue of liberation will be brought to the next. n. al. er. io. chapter with a more detailed analysis of how pleasure and sexual liberation have. i n U. v. worked in the novel Rebecca, in which the two important female characters’s. Ch. engchi. pleasures can be explained under the working of double pleasure, presenting the endless entanglement of Plasir/complicit pleasure and Jouissance/resistive pleasure in women’s search for pleasure.. 30.

(39) Chapter Three The Double Pleasure in Rebecca This chapter aims to discuss how the theory of double pleasure has actually worked in the novel Rebecca. The discussion will be mainly divided into two parts, analyzing the double pleasure working on the two most important characters of the novel: Rebecca and the narrator/protagonist. What makes these two characters specifically representative is not only because they are the most important two female characters of this story but also because they have more apparent pleasurable. 政治大 original source of their pleasures, it will also be revealed that their pleasures in fact 立. experiences in the story than other characters. As this chapter goes on to discover the. work under the structure of the double pleasure theory; that is, through their search for. ‧ 國. 學. pleasure, there can be clearly seen an endless entanglement between Plasir/complicit. sit. y. Nat. Case 1: Rebecca. io. er. . ‧. pleasure and Jouissance/resistive pleasure.. Rebecca might be the most impressive character for the readers with her strong. al. n. v i n C h in search for sexual personalities and her bold attitude pleasure. Although Rebecca is engchi U. publicly remembered as a beautiful and elegant mistress: “beautiful, talented, and. loved by all who knew her” (Rebecca 301), under the surface, she secretly holds non-marital sexual relationships with her numerous adorers, as described by her closest maid Mrs. Danvers: “men she’d meet up in London and bring for weekends… They made love to her of course, who would not?” (245). In fact, Rebecca lives a two-faced life: on the one hand, she gracefully acts the angelic lady in Manderley; on the other hand, she savagely enjoys her complicated sexual relationship with her multiple sex companions in London. What is amazing about her two-faced life is that she is fully capable to shift from one lifestyle to another freely, as exemplified by her 31.

(40) husband: I can remember days when [Manderley] was full for some show or other, a garden party, and she walked about with a smile like an angel on her face, her arm through mine, giving prizes afterwards to a little troop of children; and then the day afterwards she would be up at dawn driving to London, streaking to that flat of hers by the river like an animal to its hole in the ditch, coming back here at the end of the week, after five unspeakable days.. 政治大 (Rebecca 274) Rebecca’s husband, Maxim de 立Winter, has no courage to reveal her secret to the. ‧ 國. 學. public, due to his obsession with the reputation of his family name and his homeland: “[s]he knew I would never stand in a divorce court and give her away, have fingers. ‧. pointing at us, mud flung at us in newspapers, all the people who belong down here. sit. y. Nat. whispering when my name was mentioned… I thought about Manderley too much…. n. al. er. io. I put Manderley first, before anything else” (273-74). Clever as Rebecca is, she. i n U. v. clearly sees this care for reputation as Maxim’s weak point, and makes good use of it. Ch. engchi. in order to carry on her two-faced life. Maxim is informed by Rebecca of all of her lustful history shortly after their marriage, and is advised, rather threatened, to act as a good couple in front of the public with her: ‘I’ll run your house for you,’ she told me, ‘I’ll look after your precious Manderley for you, make it the most famous show-place in all the country, if you like. And people will visit us, and envy us, and talk about us; they’ll say we are the luckiest, happiest, handsomest couple in all England. What a leg-pull, Max,’ she said, ‘what a God-damn triumph!’ She sat there on the hillside, laughing… 32.

(41) (Rebecca 273) It is ironical indeed that Rebecca, a woman who actually disregards chastity, the greatest virtue, the most fundamental rule in all traditional values, would seem “so lovely, so accomplished, so amusing” to the traditional de Winter family, that even Maxim’s stubborn grandmother, who is “the most difficult person to please,” adores Rebecca at the first meet, reassuring Maxim that “[s]he’s got the three things that matter in a wife… breeding, brains, and beauty” (272). Rebecca has acted so well as a “perfect wife” (280) not only by her physical beauty but also by her wonderfully. 政治大 what to say to different people, how to match her mood to theirs” (271). 立. sophisticated acting and social skills, as Maxim also comments, “she knew exactly. However, although Rebecca has successfully acts a wonderful mistress of. ‧ 國. 學. Manderley with the help of her stunningly beauty and social skills, what may remain. ‧. vague and confusing for the readers is Rebecca’s motivation: what does she want?. sit. y. Nat. What can she gain from her acting and her secret sexual relationships? What is her. io. doings in the story?. er. purpose to continue this two-faced life? How can we find a way to explain all her. al. n. v i n Cmost “Pleasure” might be the answer to these questions. Much textual h eplausible ngchi U. evidence can support the fact that pleasure-seeking has always been an issue for Rebecca in all the things she has done. She promises Maxim to run the house of. Manderley because she thinks it is “a leg-pull,” a joke that she heartily laughs at (273). While her friends, relatives, servants in Manderley “all believed in her down here… all admired her,” Rebecca “laughed at them behind their backs, jeered at them, mimicked them” (274). When she tortures her husband with her faked news of pregnancy, she cannot stop her laughs, and regards the situation as “funny… supremely, wonderfully funny” (279). It is Rebecca’s talent to discover the hypocrisy lying under the crumbling social orders and fragile human relationships, and to mock 33.

(42) at, and even play with, the difference between the graceful appearances of things and their disgraceful or pitiful facts. Mrs. Danvers’s description of Rebecca may give us a closer understanding of her pleasure-seeking nature in which a certain degree of self-centered egoism is contained: Spirit, you couldn’t beat my lady for spirit… She did what she liked, she lived as she liked… she cared for nothing and for no one… she didn’t care. She only laughed. ‘I shall live as I please, Danny,’ she told. 政治大 course, who would not? 立She laughed, she would come back and tell me me, ‘and the whole world won’t stop me.’… [Men] made love to her of. ‧ 國. 學. what they had said, and what they’d done. She did not mind, it was like a game to her. Like a game.. ‧. (Rebecca 243-45). sit. y. Nat. Since “[p]assion is no guarantee of moral strength” (Hardy 97), Rebecca, having too. n. al. er. io. much passion for life, does all things only for herself, only to amuse herself without. i n U. v. moral concerns. Throughout the most of the texts, her existence is followed by. Ch. engchi. triumphal laughs. What should particularly be mentioned is how she views her love affairs as unserious and entertaining games. Love-making with her sexual partners turns out to be merely “a game with her, only a game… she did it because it made her laugh” (Rebecca 340). The pleasure of finding laughingstocks is what she mainly seeks for, and sex is but one of the means for her to gain such pleasure. There is no romantic fantasy in the sexual games she plays, and she treats men as pleasurable tools instead of people to fall in love with, as Mrs. Danvers disproves Rebecca’s love to Jack Favell, Rebecca’s cousin and one of her sex mates: “[Rebecca] was not in love with anyone. She despised all men. She was above all that… she had a right to amuse. 34.