(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

BENJAMIN’S GENDER, SEX, AND EROS
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bathhouse, ostensibly to visit the manager, who was an acquaintance of
Proust’s. He is particularly attentive to the outward appearance of the
bathhouse, and of the “erstaunlich schöne Jungen” (“astoundingly beautiful
boys”), and he appears to perversely approve of the charming aura
of respectable bourgeois family (or boarding school) life with which they
masquerade the offensive scenes that take place. At the threshold between
charming aura and sexual reality stands the “Ladentisch oder d[ie] Kasse”
(“counter, or the till”), where one buys “Badekarten” (“tickets to the
baths”) and gains entrance to the theater of vice. The descriptive tone
of this passage expresses Benjamin’s ambivalent fascination with baths’
phantasmagoria of subversion and their transsexualizing and dehumanizing
transformation of boys into consumable “nuttigen Puppen” (GS
IV.1:576–77; “tarty dolls,” SW :344).
Dolls/Uncanny Eros
Images of the doll abound throughout The Passagen-Werk, most notably
in convolutes A, “Passagen, magasins de nouveauté‹s›, calicots” (“Arcades,
Magasins de Nouveauté, Sales Clerks”), B, “Mode” (“Fashion”), L,
“Traumhaus, Museum, Brunnenhalle” (“Dream House, Museum, Spa”),
and Z, “die Puppe, der Automat” (“The Doll, The Automaton”). These
images are exclusively feminine, including the little girl’s toy doll, the
fashion mannequin — whole and partitioned into breasts and legs, and
the mechanized feminized automaton or “woman-machine.” Of these,
images of the fashion mannequin figure most prominently. She is the
uncanny assemblage of woman-corpse, woman-machine, woman-commodity,
and woman-thing. Fashion mannequins are “die wahren Feen
dieser Passagen” (“the true fairies of these arcades,” Z1,2) and they
enchant the living with the fashionable charm and sartorial allure of the
unliving. In the society of the spectacle, the natural female body is dressed
in the mannequin’s unnatural femininity, whose erotic, sexual, and commercial
appeal becomes the model of self-fashioning for female consumers
of all classes — for bourgeois women, sales women, and prostitutes alike.
What disturbs and fascinates Benjamin most about the mannequin is the
phantasmagorical magic with which this prop of visual advertising spellbinds
female window-shoppers into seeing and transforming themselves
into living dolls geared to dress in poses and apparel that contort the
body’s organic integrity while accentuating its sexual anatomy. Modernity’s
woman of fashion is mesmerized into collaborating with the commodity
market; she suffers her living body to be made over in conformity
with the mannequin’s virtual body, like a well-dressed corpse.
As Benjamin notes, new modes of fashion dictate the sexual exhibition
of the female body for public consumption. In this arena of women’s
sexual objectification, as he cites it, mannequins serve as the mass props