Cultures of Fetishism (10 page)

The Chinese had their footbinding; the Dutch had their “pronken.” What are the cultural forms that express the contradictions in our culture? I hope to be able to answer that question, as I continue along in my explorations of the cultures that breed and nurture the fetishism strategy. For the moment, I can offer only a tentative outline of what that answer might turn out to be.

All of these cultural phenomena, Neo-Confucianism and footbinding, Dutch Protestantism and Pronk paintings, American fundamentalism and financial greed, have a similar fetishistic structure. In each instance, the moral stance allays the anxiety that arises in connection with the expression of human desires, whether these desires take the form of eroticism of the bound foot, or gustatory excess, or simply plain old financial greed.

My studies of Chinese footbinding stirred up a few other questions in my mind. Some scholars have proposed that footbinding might be an expression of a female opposition to the cultural contradictions inherent in male culture. In other words, females are said to have been attracted to footbinding because they saw it as a method of transmitting female culture to females. While initially I disagreed strongly with this hypothesis, after thinking some more about the contradictions that are inherent in the fetishism strategy, I was willing to consider that it might have some merit.

For example, in the late sixteenth century, just around the time that footbinding reached its peak of popularity, there was an outpouring and flourishing of poetry written by females and transmitted to other females orally. Much of the writing took the form of embroidery and painting on

fans.
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Even the traditions and techniques of footbinding were regarded as a sacred form of writing meant to be transmitted from woman to woman and from mother to daughter. Most of that writing on the body, especially the word-of-mouth “words” that described and perpetuated the accouterments of footbinding, such as the weaving of the binding cloths and the intricate embroidery on the satin shoes that would encase the tiny mutilated feet, were fetishizations that turned against those who created it. Nevertheless, foot- binding is often depicted as an art form, a form of writing on the body that women created. All in all, it is generally believed that the practice of foot mutilation was not entirely a creation of males. As I would see it, footbinding embodied certain contradictions that are typical of gender role conformities. It was a female capitulation to a fantasy of male desire, posed, however, as a form of resistance to male domination. You might say, a sort of
Sex in the City
of ancient times.

When I assimilated the possibility that the Chinese woman needed to perpetuate and immortalize her mutilation, I realized how helpless I was in the face of such a woman’s helplessness to alter her fate. It was then that I decided to become an impostor-poet. I invented a memoir and pretended that it was written at the beginning of the twentieth century by a woman who had had her feet bound as a child. I chose those years in Chinese history, because it was a time of sweeping social change, when the Natural Foot Societies that had been formed in the late nineteenth century by missionaries and educated Chinese women were taking hold all over China. The natural foot began to be more valued and revered than the bound foot. And as my memoirist will explain, this positive change in social values, which included greater equality between women and men, did not ameliorate her suffering but brought with it pain and unhappiness of other kinds. After I recognized the extent of the bodily torments that would begin and end my heroine’s life, I decided to give her some of the erotic pleasures that purportedly accompanied having bound feet. And to advance that purpose, I also gave her a husband who showed her his appreciation for her bound feet by introducing her to a few of the extravagant eroticisms that exploited the advantages of the bound foot. I did all this with the full knowledge that many Chinese husbands treated their wives like chattel, beat them for their minor disobediences, and had sexual intercourse only with their mistresses and concubines. But since I was about to offer my fictional heroine a cure, I couldn’t bear to make her entire life a litany of unspeakable sufferings.

Writing is a form of expression that can be transformative, very much like the expression of one’s life narrative through remembrances, dreams, fan- tasies, and wishes, in psychotherapy. So, while I am not in any position to heal an actual Chinese woman who submitted to footbinding, I could read the books that contained some of the early poetry written by women. I could read the interviews with women who were willing to talk about their foot- binding and to reveal their feelings about the resulting mutilation of their bodies. I could compare these revelations with the life narratives of my female patients, many of whom suffered from female perversions, like extreme

sexual submissiveness, delicate-cutting, and eating disorders, that were tanta- mount to a self-fetishization of their bodies and minds and all in the name of their quest for love, admiration, adoration, veneration. Thus my clinical understandings of contemporary women, who also inscribe their fantasies on their bodies and minds, enabled me to give my invented Chinese heroine the gift of expression. Her name itself, and many of the words and phrases in her
faux memoir
, are derived from the interviews
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I read. However, the psycho- logical insights and narrative cohesiveness I am attributing to this woman would not have been available to an actual Chinese woman at the beginning of the twentieth century. The verbal forms I am inventing for her would feel alien to her. Nevertheless, my methods of writing words on paper are the only healing I can offer. The memoir of my imaginary patient is a composite of the voices of the many women I have read about and listened to. I imag- ined her writing the story of her life for me so that I could listen to her words and then transcribe them in my book for others to read.

Now, even as I am just beginning to inscribe her story on paper, I am already recognizing that many aspects of this story of self-fetishization will turn out to be a reflection of my own magical thinking. Footbinding, a form of writing transmitted from mother to daughter, and from one woman to another, is a form of magical thinking that turns against its creators.

And so, as an impostor-poet, who holds the magical belief that words can heal, my tale will surely turn against me. For example, why did I choose to emphasize certain details and not others? Why did I decide that erotic pleasure should compensate for my heroine’s horrific bodily sufferings? Surely there must be something fetishistic about my strategy of offering pleasure to my hero- ine as a form of cure. Perhaps it is an illustration of Derrida’s idea that the death drive tints itself in erotic color; that the impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin? Perhaps this offering of pleasure has something to do with an erotic surface disguising and covering over the absences that would oth- erwise force us to think about the pain of trauma?
Maybe
several years from now, or maybe very soon after I finish writing this entire book, or
maybe
even sooner, as I come to the conclusion of this book and am trying to integrate my ideas on footbinding with my other depictions of the fetishism strategy, I
may
look back on this imposturous memoir and comprehend the fetishistic nature of the words I have attributed to my invented author, who I named A-Hsui.

M
y
B
eloved and
T
errible
L
otus
*

by A-Hsui

Until I was seven years old I was a lively child. My mind was alert and as frisky as my body. I looked everywhere at every thing. My imagination was riotous. I asked intelligent questions. Not all of them could be answered. But most of

*
The basic outline for
My Beloved and Terrible Lotus
is derived from Levy’s report of an interview with a woman named A-Hsui, “A Precaution to Lotus-loving Gentlemen,” 210–12. However, her memoir is my invention and a composite of several of Levy’s reports, 203–285.

them could and usually were. So, even though I studied at home and only in the mornings, I learned faster than my brothers, who went to school for a full day. In the afternoons I liked to jump about and dance. We had a big space of grass in our courtyard where I played jumping and hopping games by myself until my brothers came home. Then I would challenge them. Usually I could jump higher than any of them—except for the twelve-year-old.

Then on the lunar moon of the first month of my seventh year mother told our wet nurse to start binding my feet. I was so excited that I wanted to shout the news to the whole world. I laughed as I told my younger sister and my cousins that from the next day on I would have the prettiest feet in the family. I had heard three inches was the prettiest and that night I dreamt of three-inch lotus feet under a half-moon sky.

At that time, when I was still an innocent child, I didn’t know why they had given feet the name of a flower. Nor did I consciously realize that the half-moon in my dream was the big toe hanging over the other four petals. I had seen my mother’s feet without the bindings. They did not look like a lovely flower. They looked squished and pointy and her big toe was a hideous lump. But I tried not to think about what I had actually seen and kept dream- ing about a luxurious, languorous lotus with petals moist with evening dew and all lit up by the shining moon. Now, at the age of forty-five, after so many tragedies have come to me because of my lotus feet, I understand the misun- derstandings of my childhood. I can recognize that I was denying what my eyes had told me. I was softening the harsh and ugly image with a dream of softness. I wonder now whether I really deceived myself the way I am saying now. In any case the deception soon began to crack and wither away.

Before binding, my nurse softened my feet in a basin of warm water. The idea was to soften my toe bones so they could be bent into the proper shape without too much pain. As I gazed into the friendly warm water, I was aware that I was one of the lucky little girls. My nurse, who came from Hunan Province, had let me know that there were other bone-softening techniques. Nurse herself, who had never had her own feet bound because lotus feet were not convenient for a working woman who needed to be on her feet at all times of the day or night and walking from here to there whenever their mis- tress or master needed them, had been taught that the urine of a young boy
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was the most reliable softening medicine. However, and fortunately, my mother, who was an elegant and enlightened upper-class woman, did not believe in the superstitious methods of country folk.

Indeed I was a fortunate girl to have such a wise and considerate mother. Since the time when I was three years old I had been hearing about the little girl who lived in Ta-T’ung near my cousin’s village, who had had her feet softened by having them stuck for nearly two hours in a slit-open lamb’s belly brimming with the hot blood of the lamb who was still crying out piteously for an hour before he finally expired.
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My cousin was told that the girl’s screams of terror were as much about the lamb and its bloody torment as about the suffering she was experiencing now and imagining she would endure after the binding began.

My binding cloth was made of hand-woven white cotton about five feet long and two inches wide.
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After my toes were softened, Nurse placed one end on the top surface of my foot just below my ankle and wound it once around the four small toes; then she pulled the cloth toward the outside of my foot and turned it back toward the sole in order to bind the four toes more tightly. As she went along, Nurse would be pressing down on the binding around the toes as hard as she could. Pulling from the inside of the foot, she guided the binding toward the point made by the backward tilt of my little toes and then pulled the binding around my big toe. After that she pulled the cloth from the outer side of my foot and wrapped the heel guiding the binding toward the point of my little toes and wrapped it around the point, covering all except for the big toe. She wrapped the cloth over the instep and went once around the ankle and returned to the instep. Once again, she turned the bind- ing toward the heel and wrapped it from the inner side of the foot to the point, which was becoming more pointed with each turn of the binding. After wrapping the cloth over the instep to the outer side of my foot, Nurse finished her task by pulling the binding around the heel and pulling that end of the cloth toward the end of the cloth covering the instep. The procedure, which looked complicated, actually had a certain pristine precision. It had been passed on by word of mouth from one generation of women to the next. The goal was to create a binding that would press my four small toes as far back- wards toward the heel as possible until their tips reached nearly to my heel. Nurse wrapped the cloth around the front part of my foot two times and the rear part three times. Eventually, after several re-bindings, the big toe was also supposed to reach to the heel. To finish off, the front and back ends of the cloth were then sewn into place with needle and thread.
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The cloth was soft. My feet had been softened to mold more easily to the cloth. But the pain was unbearable, nevertheless.
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When I tried to stand up to walk, I could not take even one step. Nurse had to carry me to bed. Mommy came to kiss me goodnight and praise me for my bravery. As I said, I had a wise and thoughtful mother. Though she was upper-class, she clung to the ways of her social order even though some mothers of her class no longer believed in footbinding. It was toward the end of the nineteenth century and already, in the big cities, many men and women, especially the intellectuals, were joining Natural Foot Societies. The best friend of my mother even drew up leaflets to pass out in the public demonstrations against footbinding. But mother would have none of these new-fangled notions. She was sure the natural foot fad would come and go just like so many other foolish ideas of the time. She wanted me to grow up to marry well just the way she had. Her certainty about the ways of the world enabled me to undergo the long and often painful process, with my own dreams and fantasies as her allies. She was determined to make it as easy for me as possible. As she told me many years later, she still remembered how painful it had been for her. And in her days, mothers didn’t bother to console and comfort their daughters.