This essay explores the symbiotic relationship between European modernity, its vision of woman and water. The union of these three metaconcepts is consecrated by the Ovidian story of Narcissus and his other, Echo. The West finally found itself completely through Hegel, the Ur-narcissist, who explains the immutable link between that European monopoly, history (by which he means the potential for becoming modern), and the sea. The narcissism of modernity is the great theme of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, which shows how the bourgeoisie seeks to remake the entire world in its own image. Psychoanalysis, through the writings of Ferenczi, joined in cementing the connection, likening woman to the primal sea to which the male ever yearns to return. And Foucault suggests a potential conclusion from this metaconceptual constellation: th a t Man, a Western creation, may well disappear like a face drawn on a sandy beach. keyw ords woman; modernity; water; Narcissus; psychoanalysis; bourgeoisie fe m in ist review 103 2013 (42-57) © 2013 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/13 www.feminist-review.com in tro d u c tio nIn what follows, it is shown how intimately the idea of water is enmeshed within the interstices of the Western imagination, relating in particular to its basic understanding of self and other. The aquatic plays a crucial role in the distinctly gendered and racialised discourse of the modern; indeed, from the high Enlightenment onwards, it is linked to the very possibility of modernity. Just as the West came to understand itself rigorously as such, and alongside the scientific invention of race and the consolidation of bourgeois gender norms, water became the elemental essence of European Man: it is made his attribute, and the very key to development, progress, world domination and freedom. This essay argues that water is central to the repressed displacement of woman and the non-European in the aquatically fraught horizon of Western Reason, the whole being underpinned by an age-old-new fable: Narcissus, a name so significant that it has spawned an enormous literature and bestrides language as proper name, common noun and adjective, all in broad usage. b e g in n in g w ith OvidThis is, then, a tale of three concepts, or better yet, metaconcepts, and their interrelations at a specific place and time, Europe and modernity. Woman, Water and the West-it is quite appropriate that all three words should begin with the same, singular letter, one carrying notions of romantic, undulating mystery combined with classical, orderly symmetry. As a pictograph, W evokes the waves of the ocean, the running flow of the stream and the body of woman.Words operate in constellations, and meaning is produced by their contiguous order in that system, rather than each being taken in isolation-hence the need to explore their interrelations. Thus, the analysis cannot proceed with any direct linearity, but rather in a more nebulous way, where the holistic effect appears unexpectedly, as a result of explicit and implicit, superficial a...
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