Signes et métaphores de la féminité dans le discours

Abstract

After having undergone the “trauma” of birth, the baby establishes its first type of communication:
that type of immediate, bodily communication, which is pre-verbal and intra-generic (if the baby is a girl) or
inter-generic (if the baby is a boy) will be soon replaced with the indirect, mediated communication that is with
language. Since language cannot exist in the absence of a body, the transgression of the biological to the
symbolical is never neutral, while the metaphor seems to be the perfect vehicle of the symbolic identity
hierarchy, mediated by mothers; the feminine discourse extends, in absentia, the originally suppressed bodily
contact, while the (discursive) weaning does not take place any longer. Symmetrical or asymmetrical, the
dialogue between the mother and the child constantly remakes by means of a familiar code, what seemed to be a
completely lost primordial interpersonal relationship, which goes from mere chatting to poetry. The
retrospective illusion and the image of one’s own identity reflected in the Other, within the couple-in-abyss:
mother/child will be reinforced by the metaphor. The children remain the most receptive to metaphors (just like
the artists and the psychotics), being endowed with the “magic thinking” and the “analogical language”; it is
this type of language that the mothers use to socialize their child (the linguistic tissue of the dream belongs to
this language learned in early childhood, which is called “maternal”). However, the access to the symbol, which
mothers make possible, takes place within a patriarchal culture and society, while the infanthood myths – the
fairytales- reiterate and make lasting impression (although women have been the first narrators and creators of
fairytales) of the male/female asymmetry. The metaphors of the femininity in the literary or daily discourse are
based on the dichotomy Beauty/Ugliness and place the feminine on the last rank inside the classical triangle
(according E. Berne): Saviour / Hangman /Victim. Bearing various names (Little-Red-Riding-Hood, Snow White
or Sleeping Beauty), Eve embodies all the capital sins, ranging from curiosity to infanticide; the motif of the
sleep (or the analogous one, of loosing one’s voice) the classical punishment for the heroines of the fairytales,
makes reference to this eternal, self-protecting human need to euphemize death.