432
PARTISAN REVIEW
out of reach or for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky look–
ing, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of
leaves, hanging from a twisted root." Like the organs of some creature
midway between plant and animal, these orchids, alluring and repellent,
hint at forbidden fruit, the crossing of barriers, and an unruly fecundity.
They hang from "a twisted root"-perhaps that of Creole society itself
in its original sins of slavery and sexual exploitation.
The masochistic sexuality of the heroine has its own twisted roots in
her childhood at Coulibri. Rejected by both whites and blacks, she suf–
fers an even deeper injury from her mother, whose love she loses to an
afflicted younger brother. This loss is evoked in a poignant image:
"Once I made excuses to be near her when she brushed her hair, a soft
black cloak to cover me, hide me, keep me safe." But now, "she pushed
me away, not roughly but calmly, coldly, without a word....She wanted
to sit with Pierre."
Antoinette's experience here is that of many a little girl rejected in
favor of a brother; unconsciously the child attributes this rejection to a
catastrophic defect in herself and her own body.
In
Black Sun,
her study
of depression, Julia Kristeva writes that the loss of a love object is expe–
rienced by a woman as castration: "such a castration starts resonating
with the threat of destruction of the body's integrity, the body image,
and the entire psychic system as well."
The account of Antoinette's childhood contains many suggestions
of this sort of mutilation. The male power of the family has been cut
off by the death of the father, followed by the suicide of their only
male friend and protector, and then by the poisoning of the mother's
horse. Later the mother's second husband, Mr. Mason, clips the wings
of her pet parrot. Frightening allusions to cutting and dismemberment
appear in Antoinette's fantasies about the Obeah rituals practiced by
her nurse, Christophine: "a dead man's dried hand...a cock with its
throat cut.... Drop by drop the blood was falling." On the night
when vengeful blacks set fire to Coulibri, Antoinette wishes "that I
were very young again, for then I believed in my stick." This stick was
just a pet piece of wood, but it had great significance: "I believed that
no one could harm me when it was near me, to lose it would be a great
misfortune." But this misfortune occurs: having lost her primitive con–
fidence in her mother's love and in her own body, the girl sees herself
as vulnerable, imperfect, castrated.
Antoinette's sense of herself as damaged goods also appears in her
friendship with the black girl Tia. Here the motifs of racial impurity–
the idea of the "white nigger"-and the impurity of the damaged female
