Chapter 7 - Rearranging the Oedipus

Summary

To rearrange the living room is to rearrange the Oedipal structures of kinship, sexuality, and sociality, and vice versa. While this formulation may or may not hold true for actual physically existing households, it works surprisingly well for nineteenth-century French literature. For example, many fantastic and decadent writers rearrange the traditional bourgeois interior in direct proportion to their rearrangement of bourgeois social order. In order to express this interconnectedness of the material, the textual, and the social, I propose the notion of the bourgeois Oedipus, defined as two related sets of norms historically specific to late nineteenth-century Europe: on the one hand a set of normative plot structures, and on the other a set of socially accepted rules which regulate kinship, sexuality, and economic exchange.

These norms are applied to the world of goods by way of the notion of fetishism, the term first coined in the mid-eighteenth century to describe primitive religion, later appropriated by sociology (Comte) and the critique of commodity capitalism (Marx), then finally by fin-de-siècle sexologists (including Freud). In all three cases “fetishism” denotes a perceived over-privileging of things, the elevation of things to a status usually reserved for persons or deities. These various notions of fetishism all assume that things can and do mediate relationships between people, but that there is a danger inherent in things being substituted for people.