7 - Abjected masculinities

Summary

She is the devil! Beautiful – beautiful; but the devil! … How am I to sleep when I see her sitting down yonder at the foot of the bed with her great eyes watching and watching hour after hour? I tell you it saps all the strength and manhood out of me.

Arthur Conan Doyle, “John Barrington Cowles”

The Beede-Woman presents a spectacle of corporeality at its most fearsome, of a material body which resists classification within categories of sexual and species identity from which “the human” takes its meaning. Besides confounding such oppositions as animal/human, male/female, and masculine/feminine, she is a creature driven purely by appetite. Her sexual appetite in particular calls attention to the embodiedness of (ab)human beings, imperfecdy evolved and imperfecdy acculturated subjects disrupted by drives and desires that testify to the tenuousness of a “civilized” human identity.

Though exploring the Thing-ness of the human body at great length, The Beetle to a certain extent works to delimit Thing-ness by identifying it as the peculiar liability of women and non-whites, two discredited groups already associated with the abject suchness of a purely material reality. A “fully human” identity, in other words, can be recuperated as the property of the European male. This strategy is only partially successful, most notably because the novel cannot decide whether a fully human identity shall be determined on the basis of sex or race, and is thus ambivalent towards femininity. When their whiteness is foregrounded, women's full humanity emerges by virtue of contrast with the abhumanness of the Oriental. However, women are abhuman non-subjects in relation to men (particularly when their sexual difference is compounded by racial difference).