Recently, however, there has been a reappraisal of Taubes’s work. Inevitably, for readers, the novel’s dead narrator and its dead author merged into an emblem of glamorous, doomed femininity. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday.ĭays after the novel was published, Taubes walked into the sea at East Hampton and drowned herself. ![]() But that, Taubes suggests, is not living at all. Most of us simply accept the whole business of being a person and go about our lives. “I’m not hanging on to the old psychology, ego hang-up, continuity bit, the whole business of being a person, it’s absurd,” Sophie declares. She must unburden herself from the expectation that she will be consistent and knowable, like a character in a nineteenth-century realist novel. But how should a woman be after she has been severed from the social order? Cut off from the men who gave her a sense, however oppressive, of her place in the world?Īt one of the funerals, the head rises to deliver a kind of answer to these questions: “Woman is part less than human, part more than human and part human.” A woman must be an entity that is unformed and unfixed. All this seems to have led her to a turning point, a moment of self-definition. She recalls her hostile and baffling encounters with her parents, her love affairs, her degrading fights with her husband, and her anxious fussing over her children. Leaving her marriage is one way of casting off this self and “coming into consciousness, a lifelong struggle,” Sophie thinks. “Divorcing” is the story of a woman estranged from a sense of self that she never assented to, a self she seems to have accumulated passively. The head is the ideal guide to a novel whose subject is severance in its many agonizing forms: familial, national, religious, and, above all, subjective. ![]() Poseidon, where are you? Homer, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Joyce, comfort me!” Sophie pleads. It can fantasize about her funerals-there are at least two-or imagine her dead body on a dissection table, “the four limbs together, the skin carefully folded, the glands in a separate bowl.” It can filch a phrase here, an entire form there: a joke from Freud, an essay on “losing and being lost” by his daughter Anna, a dreamlike play-within-a-novel from “Ulysses.” When it cannot make sense of Sophie’s life, it can summon gods and men to its aid. It can leap across time and space: to her marriage in New York, to her melancholy childhood in Budapest. Her head can detach from the first-person point of view and float into omniscience. In death, her severed head is free to wander backward through her life in a series of surreal images. In life, Sophie’s mind and her body were beholden to men. She is killed before she has a chance to finish arranging the furniture in her new apartment. In flight from her married life in New York, she has just moved to Paris with her children. She is also the mother of mostly male children, and the lover of Gaston, Roland, Alain, Nicholas, and Ivan. The woman, Sophie Blind, is, like Taubes, the daughter of a psychoanalyst, the granddaughter of a rabbi, and the estranged wife of a scholar and a rabbi. Susan Taubes’s novel “ Divorcing” (1969) begins with a report in France-Soir of a femme décapitée, a woman whose head was cut clean off when she was hit by a car in the Eighteenth Arrondissement of Paris. Had he put the two heads together, he might have wondered at the paradox they presented: that the fierce and divine female child could symbolize both the extension of the patriarch’s authority and its undoing. “To decapitate = to castrate,” Freud wrote elsewhere. In some versions of the myth, Metis, while pregnant inside Zeus, made her daughter a breastplate, which Athena eventually adorned with the decapitated head of the gorgon Medusa, whose eyes held the power to turn anyone who looked upon her into stone. Athena did have a mother: Metis, whom Zeus swallowed, fearing that the children she bore would be too mighty for him to govern. “Athena had no mother, but sprang from the head of Zeus.”īut Freud was wrong. “The prehistoric figures which show a smaller person sitting upon the head of a larger one are representations of patrilineal descent,” he wrote. It was an idea that sprang, as if already fully formed, from one’s mind. Paternity was not a physical relation, Freud explained. For a man to believe that his father truly was his father, he had to accept what no evidence could corroborate. ![]() In Sigmund Freud’s “Rat Man,” a case history of a neurotic young man, there is a curious footnote about the natural uncertainty of paternity.
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