Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Tess of the D’Urbervilles 239
Did they? None that I ever knew. Nor do many women seem notably
galvanized by the idea of penis envy on the part of their sex:
‘Authorized to test her powers in work and sports,
competing actively with the boys, she would not find the
absence of the penis—compensated by the promise of a
child—enough to give rise to an inferiority complex.’ 18
There is probably no such thing as penis envy at all, except in the
eyes of adults like Freud. De Beauvoir elsewhere hints as much:
‘Thus, far from the penis representing a direct advantage
from which the boy could draw a feeling of superiority, its high
valuation appears on the contrary as a compensation—invented
by adults and ardently accepted by the child—for the hardships
of the second weaning.’ 19
The conception of the boy child being in constant fear of castration at
the same time as envious of his father’s penis is, in other words, only
a baffling absurdity until you recognize it as an adult rationalization
for a repressive male society.
This of course is the hub of most of D. H. Lawrence’s unfortunate
verbal dervish-dancing about something called the phallus. We notice
his prose—as in the Fantasia of the Unconscious—becoming unreadably
rhetorical directly he touches on this subject. For if the universe
can only be apprehended through the phallus, woman is deprived
of all rights at the start of the game. Man is saying, Come and play
tennis with me, but only I am allowed a racquet. Significantly, therefore,
Lawrence keyed his love ethic to monogamous relationships in
which woman discovers her derivation in man. Perversions of this
plan generally proved disastrous. 20
Now this is not surprising in a sensitive male. For at times the
phallus does seem to act rather like some existential ‘Other’. Maddeningly
so. It erects itself whimsically, will refuse to perform at will, and
then goes and ejaculates at night without permission. Surely it must be
a god. What man of middle age, who has made love regularly all his
adult life, would deny, on the threshold of paradise, that the clitoris is
a far more reliable, and sensitive, organ? ‘Feminine sexual excitement
can reach an intensity unknown to man’, 21 writes de Beauvoir; but it is