T.C. İSTANBUL KÜLTÜR UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF GRADUATE STUDIES BLACK HOLE OR LIVING HALL: RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE SEXUALITY, DECONSTRUCTING MALE ANXIETY Master of Arts Thesis Gizem SERDAR ÖMÜR 2000002386 Department: English Language and Literature Programme: English Language and Literature Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Gillian M.E. ALBAN JUNE 2022 II T.C. İSTANBUL KÜLTÜR UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF GRADUATE STUDIES BLACK HOLE OR LIVING HALL: RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE SEXUALITY, DECONSTRUCTING MALE ANXIETY Master of Arts Thesis Gizem SERDAR ÖMÜR 2000002386 Department: English Language and Literature Programme: English Language and Literature Supervisor and Chairperson: Assoc. Prof. Gillian M.E. ALBAN Members of Examining Committee: Professor Işıl BAS Professor Gülşen SAYIN JUNE 2022 i PLAGIARISM I hereby declare that all information in this document has been obtained and presented in accordance with academic rules and ethical conduct. I also declare that, as required by these rules and conduct, I have fully cited and referenced all material and results that are not original to this work. Name/Last name : Gizem SERDAR ÖMÜR Date: ii University : Istanbul Kültür University Institute : Institüte Of Graduate Studies Department : English Language and Literature Programme : English Language and Literature Supervisor : Assoc. Prof. Gillian M.E. ALBAN Degree Awarded and Date : MA- JUNE 2022 ABSTRACT BLACK HOLE OR LIVING HALL: RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE SEXUALITY, DECONSTRUCTING MALE ANXIETY Gizem SERDAR ÖMÜR In this study, the main concern is to apply a reconstructive approach to reshape the image of female genitalia by restoring a primordial representation of women. To achieve this, I delve into multiple disciplines once amalgamated by androcentric forces that debilitated women, with an intent of reverting the same perception for the benefit of women by activating such primordial images of women. Instead of the priority given to death and destruction in defining and contemplating the meaning of life, as observed in the present phallocentric systems, this study provides a new understanding arising from female genitals from which life emerges and to which all living beings yearn to return as nostalgia and 'a belated wish' as Freud says. Concentrating on the representation of the female sexuality in American cartoonist Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, British writer Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve and German writer Patrick Süskind's Perfume, this M.A. thesis employs several contemporary and interdisciplinary theories and methodologies to decode and recode the symbols, images, figures and metaphors attributed to women in cultural history. In this regard, placing the aforementioned literary works in their specific contexts and taking them under scrutiny in their attempt to cross the borders that western logocentrism dictates, this study suggests a thorough analysis of the distaff side, the underwritten part of history. iii This analysis is essential in that it aims to revive the repressed image of a Goddess figure, who 'creates the world by dancing', and asks for recognition by way of substitutions as they appear in the form of 'objet petit a', 'uncanny', 'abject', 'grotesque'; euphemistically called 'black hole' and 'black continent'. The sum of such concepts connotes monstrous, a non- human other in patriarchal discourse. However, such a view also assigns women to an in- between state of animate/inanimate, animal/human, female/male, defying the western binarized philosophy towards a nonbinary understanding. Therefore, this study concludes that the monstrosity attached to the female reproductive body through various ways, alongside the major anxiety that has governed the male economy for thousands of years, arises from a deathly attraction, as displayed by the keen analysis of the given three literary texts in the light of Irigaray's multiplicity and fluidity, fed by Cixous's aphorisms, supported by Kristeva's 'chora' and Ettinger's 'matrixial', manifested in Eisler's prehistoric Goddess figurines and Creed's 'monstrous feminine'. Key Words: Reconstruction, Black Hole, Primordial, Procreational, Female Genitals, Attraction, Pleasure, Non-binary, Monstrosity, Repressed, Nostalgia, Abject, Uncanny, Grotesque, Disgust, Home, Charles Burns, Black Hole, Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve, Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer Science Code: iv Enstitüsü : Lisansüstü Eğitim Enstitüsü Dalı : İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Programı : İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Tez Danışmanı : Doc. Dr. Gillian M. E. ALBAN Tez Türü ve Tarihi Tez : Yüksek Lisans — Haziran 2022 ÖZET KARA DELİK YA DA YAŞAM ODASI: KADIN CİNSELLİĞİNİ YENİDEN YAPILANDIRILMASI, ERKEK ANKSİYETESİNİN YAPISÖKÜMÜ Gizem SERDAR ÖMÜR Bu çalışmanın temel kaygısı, kadınların ilkel temsilini restore ederek kadın cinsel organı imgesini yeniden inşa etmektir. Bu amaç doğrultusunda, bir zamanlar kadınları zayıflatmak için erkek egemen güçler tarafından bir araya getirilen çoklu disiplinleri araştırarak aynı algıyı kadınların yararına olacak şekilde, Tanrıçaların ilksel temsillerini harekete geçirerek tersine çevirmek niyetindeyim. Mevcut fallosentrik sistemlerde gözlendiği üzere, yaşamın anlamını tanımlamak ve anlamak için ölüm ve yıkıma verilen öncelik yerine, bu çalışma, yaşamın filizlendiği ve nostalji ve ‘gecikmiş bir dilek’ olarak tüm canlıların geri dönmeyi arzuladığı kadın cinsel organlarından doğan yeni bir anlayış sunmaktadır. Amerikalı karikatürist Charles Burns'ün çizgi romanı Kara Delik, İngiliz yazar Angela Carter'ın Yeni Havva’nin Tutkusu ve Alman yazar Patrick Süskind'in Parfüm isimli eserlerinde kadın temsiline odaklanan bu yüksek lisans tezi, kültür tarihi boyunca kadınlara atfedilen semboller, imgeler, figurler ve metaforları çözmek ve yeniden kodlamak için çeşitli çağdaş ve disiplinler arası teori ve metodoloji kullanır. Bu bağlamda, batılı söz merkezciliğinin dikte ettiği sınırları aşma amacı güden bu edebi eserleri kendi özel bağlamlarına yerleştirerek inceleme altına alan bu çalışma, tarih yazınında az yer edinen, kadına ait kısmin kapsamlı bir analizini sunmaktadır. Bu analizi, evreni ‘dans ederek yaratan’ fakat bastırıldığı için ‘nesne küçük a’, ‘tekinsiz’, ‘iğrenç’ ve ‘grotesk’ ya da örtmece olarak ‘kara delik’, ‘kara kıta’ gibi ikamalar v yoluyla tanınma talep eden bir Tanrıça figürünü diriltme çabası gütmesi önemli kılmaktadır. Bu tarz atıfların toplamı, ataerkil söylemde canavarca, insan olmayan bir ötekini çağrıştırır. Ancak bu aynı zamanda kadını batının ikircikli felsefesine meydan okuyarak, ikircikliğin dışına doğru, canlı/cansız, hayvan/insan, kadın/erkek arasında bir konuma yerleştirirler. Buna binaen, Irigaray'ın kapsayıcılık ve akışkanlığı ışığında, Cixous'un aforizmalarından beslenerek, Kristeva'nın ‘chora’ ve Ettinger'in ‘matrixial’ terimleri tarafından desteklenerek, Eisler'in tarih öncesi Tanrıça figürlerinin tezahürü ve Creed’in ‘canavar dişisi’ bağlamında bahsi gecen üç metnin derin analizinin gösterdiği gibi, erkek ekonomisini binlerce yıldır yöneten en büyük kaygı olan kadının doğurgan bedenine çeşitli şekillerde bağlanmış canavarlığın, özünde, ona duyulan ölümcül bir çekimden kaynaklandığı sonucuna varmaktadır. Anahtar Kelimeler: Yeniden Yapilandirma, Kara Delik, Ilksel, Ureme, Kadin Cinsel Organlari, Cazibe, Zevk, Ikili Olmayan, Canavarlik, Bastirilmis, Nostalji, Igrenc, Tekinsiz, Grotesk, Igrenme, Ev, Charles Burns, Kara Delik, Angela Carter, Yeni Havvanin Tutkusu, Patrick Süskind, Parfüm: Bir Katilin Öyküsü Bilim Dali Sayisal Kodu: vi To Gökçe Ömür; A True Daughter of the Wild, whose two most precious early childhood years were devoted to this study. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis would be impossible without the excellent guidance, patience, supervision, profound knowledge, academic intellectuality, openness, encouragement, comments, contributions and insights of my dearest advisor, Associate Professor Gillian M.E. Alban to whom I owe lots and to whom I cannot express my gratitude with a few words. Thank you very much, Dr ALBAN; the Great Goddess embodied. I also would like to take the chance to thank Professor Işıl Baş, whose lectures inspire, impress and invoke awe in me while her personality and intellect are mesmerising. I wish I had met her in earlier years of my life; an ‘ideal image’ incarnate. My great gratitude is to Professor Gülşen Sayin, who honoured me by kindly accepting to be a member of my committee and finding my work worth reading. I had the privilege of studying with Assoc. Prof. Mustafa Zeki Cirakli, contributed to flourishing my love of literature during my undergraduate education at Karadeniz Teknik University. I am indebted to Assoc. Prof. Sumeyra Buran at Atatürk University, to Assist. Prof. Ayşegül Turan, Assist. Prof. Derya Altınmakas and Assist. Prof. Özlem Güner at Istanbul Kultur University for their contributions to my learning journey. I would like to thank our literary circle that continually motivates, listens, assists and is there whenever I need a hand. My special thanks go to Nursah Tuna for sharing her invaluable ideas, to Irem Gököz, for her academic glance, to Makbule Öztürk, Merve Güler and Halenur Sen for their assistance and comments.Last but not least, my husband and eternal love, whose tolerance and care with real father sensibility enabled me to achieve one of my dreams, Mustafa Omur, deserves a great thank. I also thank my elder sister Eylem Gedikli for the support and care she supplied for my daughter throughout these two years’ time. One last person I could not pass without mentioning is my elder sister Özlem Serdar Yesilbas, whose depth cannot be paid, without whose sacrifices the state I attained today would be possible. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS PLAGIARISM ................................................................................................................ i ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................... ii ÖZET .............................................................................................................................. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION ….…………………………………………………………………. 1 PART I: A BRIEF REVIEW OF (HER)STORY 1.1. Discussing the Representation of the Female Body …………………..…………… 5 1.1.2. Dissolving the ‘Mirror’ Signification ……..……………..…………….......... 16 1.1.3. Striving for the Uncanny (M)other …………..……………………………... 21 1.2. The Relation Between Womb, Home, and Nature …………….............................. 25 1.2.1 Managing the ‘Real Wound’ in Male Culture ………..……………………… 27 1.3. Theorising the Female (Reproductive) Body ………...……….………………….. 30 PART II: BLACK HOLE IMAGERY VS PROCREATIONAL POWER 2.1. Unearthing the Prehistoric Fertility Figurines …..………………………………... 35 2.1.1. Looking through Vaginal Eye in Black Hole by Burns (1995-2005) ………… 41 2.1.2. Exploding the Old Bottles in The Passion of New Eve by Carter (1977) ……. 47 2.1.3. Return to the Womb in Perfume by Süskind (1985) ………………….......….. 60 PART III: RETURN OF THE REPRESSED 3.1. Archaic Fears at Home …………………………………………………………… 72 3.1.1. Abject Implantation in Black Hole ………………………………...…………. 75 3.1.2. Double Implantation in Perfume ………………………………...…………… 82 3.1.3. Monsters as Feminine in The Passion of New Eve …………………...………. 92 CONCLUSION …………..……………..…………………………………………... 102 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………... 113 1 INTRODUCTION In this study, I will be delving into multiple disciplines to demonstrate and deconstruct the symbols attributed to female genitals in order to reveal their actual image in a reconstructive methodology. By reassessing the negative connotations of female genitalia, the analysis aims to restore the primordial representation of women stemming from their procreational power. Examining the representation of women in American cartoonist Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, British writer Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve and German writer Patrick Süskind's Perfume, this M. A. thesis intends to display how female sexuality is embedded in the male psyche in the novels. While there are studies aiming to voice genuine female sexual identity, this study differs in the aspect of taking female reproductive features of women as a strength. Previous studies that take female sexuality as a central concern deal with the patriarchal consideration of the woman's reproductive body as 'breeding machines' or 'walking wombs' under the scope of the mother myth. By contrast, this study brings forth a primordial mother image who emerges from chaos and water and lays the first egg or herself is seen as the Cosmic Egg. Life springs from her body. All living beings yearn to return to her in the end as both sources of life and death, good and evil, dark and light… She is a great non-binary Mother Goddess who involves everything altogether that western metaphysics divides into two, giving way to an egalitarian understanding of social life. Therefore, investigating and revealing the reasons behind negative connotations inscribed on FGTs, this study aspires to restore the representation of such ancient deity images, the prevalence of which indicates the powerful position and influence of women in ancient belief systems, from the layers of earth where it has been kept enclosed for hundreds of years. The main inspiration behind this study comes from the continuous confrontation with the strange way of describing female sexuality—as Black Hole—in the readings for the requirement of my postgraduate degree. In this way, I began to read more deeply about 2 the subject with Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed and Angela Carter's The Sadeian Women, in their attempt to describe and deconstruct the patriarchal definitions of female sexuality, as reflected in the works of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung. What might have caused the male mind to call female genitals a Black Hole? Why does Freud define female genitals as "uncanny" and "black continent," with Medusa's Head or ancient sites? Why is female sexuality constantly described negatively? Considering the negative attributions of female sexuality, I wonder whether this negative view emerges from a great compulsion, negative attraction or negative power. Instead, is it a deathly attraction that lies behind and beneath all? Does this connote the allure of the fearful? Reading the fiction of two male writers, Charles Burns' Black Hole and Patrick Süskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and a post-feminist writer, Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, contributed to my interest in the subject and carried the research to deeper levels. My deep research indicated a necessity to bring this argument to the literary field in a profound study of Riana Eisler's The Chalice and Blade, Bracha Ettinger's The Matrixial Borderspace, Barbara Creed's The Monstrous Feminine, Marija Gimbutas' The Language of the Goddess, and Robbins Dexter's Whence the Goddesses. In this way, I intend to shed light on the force behind men's return to women. The male writer's novels, chosen intentionally are evaluated to illustrate that the major anxiety that governs the male economy emerges from a deathly attraction that they develop towards the female sexual body. However, rather than acknowledging this reality, it is repressed to the unconscious in patriarchal systems in which sex turns into sin, taboo, and women are regarded as dangerous. I search for the factors that make a feminist woman writer compose an apparently anti-feminist work. To demonstrate all this, I research multiple disciplines that the androcentric forces have banded together to debilitate women. Reversing the same perception for the benefit of women by activating primordial origins through a study of myth, psychology, archaeology, philosophy and religion, this study aims to tell (her)story by incorporating the analysis with literary works. As literature propounds whatever is kept out of sight, it reveals the period's unconscious, unspoken, hidden secrets by carrying them into a fictional ground and employing figures of speech, 3 symbols, motifs, figures, imageries, analogies, euphemistic terms, metaphors, metonymies… All three literary texts shift the setting from the real-time they were written, giving an example of speculative fiction. Speculative fiction is a genre that combines various genres of fiction while employing speculative, fantastic elements in the novels. Black Hole, written in 1995 and collected in 2005, is set in the 1960-90s suburbs of Seattle, addressing a sexual epidemic that affected the social and urban life in the area. Published in 1985, Perfume is set in 18th century France, the cradle of reason/cogito, to illustrate the dichotomy within the Enlightenment's high principles. The Passion of New Eve is set in the dystopic United States in an ongoing civil war. In Black Hole, the characters undergo several body mutations; in Perfume, the protagonist has a supernatural sense of smell, and in The Passion, the mother character, as well as Eve(lyn) and Leilah, are depicted as unrealistic. In the end, all of the characters reflect the elements of supernatural and fantasy while the time of the stories is carried to the past or the possible future. In this way, the authors prepare their novel's context within a free ground to evade the frames western literary tradition draws as examples of the post-modern movement. Having the same threat of reflecting female sexuality by applying the common symbols attributed to women, these works contribute to reawakening a powerful woman image. In all the aforementioned novels, the writers euphemistically refer to the vagina and womb by implication of bleeding wounds incorporated with natural elements such as animals, plants, caves, eggs, water, earth and sky as the common features observed in the goddesses; half human half animal, emerging from the water, air or she herself is defined as the earth. These features invoke the human being's connection with nature and thus to women. By endorsing characters with abject, uncanny, grotesque, disgusting elements and diseases, the novels bring the monsters home, which are defied from the scene by western metaphysics. These monsters manifest themselves through body transformations and skin deformities. In western philosophy, the body signifies lust, impudent desires, and passions, while the head refers to divine spirituality. The bestialities that appear on the body connote the repressed feminine side. The body relates to women and the connection 4 with the mother; the link to the first home, the vagina, reminds the fragility of the symbolic order. That is why the fear factors must be concealed as monsters as prevailed in western literary tradition facilitated by patriarchal monotheistic belief systems. In the end, applying female sexuality as a sub-text, the novels suggest a plentiful reading to analyse and understand the dynamics shaping representation of women in cultural history. Overall, this study aims to defy the anthropocentric way of signification represented in western epistemology incorporating analysis with the theoretical works from various fields in their attempt to deconstruct the phallocentric norms, which also prepares a firm ground for their reconstruction. Then, the literary works are embedded in the process of reconstruction revealing the reality lying behind the substitutions used in defining FGTs. In this way, as opposed to the destructive male culture, the primordial image of the female reproductive body as the source of life is brought forth as a way to restore its actual representation. A strong apotropaic force arises from the speaking vagina, which tells another story that is far different from the patriarchal ones based on sameness or inferiority. Instead, female genitals signify a timeless, non-binary everlasting gate between the animate and inanimate states embracing all life forms, representing holistic oneness. The place in the beginning that all living beings belatedly wish to return to, both familiar and unfamiliar; allures and repels. 5 PART I: A BRIEF REVIEW OF (HER)STORY Love is home-sickness. -Freud, 'The Uncanny' 1.1. Discussing the Representation of the Female Body An image has a fundamental role to play in psychic formation. As Mircea Eliade indicates in the Foreword of Images and Symbols, everything begins with an image. An image justifies existence. It is prehistoric and prelinguistic. It comes before reason. It reveals the most profound aspects of reality. It defies other means of knowledge. The image carries the responsibility of creating the psyche. It can shed light on the most hidden modalities of being. It prevails in the unwritten part of history. It is the imprinted memory of a prosperous and beatific existence. It holds actual power. It never disappears from the psyche. Only some aspects are exposed to changes in order to survive. It requires looking beyond to understand what it conceals behind its mask. It attracts to be recognised, to reemerge from the decay. It lingers in the ill-controlled zones of the psyche. It takes a familiar form, blinking unfamiliar beyond. It lives within the subject holding the place of meaning. It carries a message to everyman. It is up to the receiver to reawaken and contemplate it, in its pristine purity or substitute it (12-21). Once upon a time—approximately four and a half billion years ago—there was only chaos. The void of chaos explodes, and the firstborn becomes the primordial Goddess Gaia in one of the world’s creation myths. According to one version of Greek cosmogony, the ancestral mother, Gaia, gives birth to the Earth and everything in it parthenogenetically. To another, she creates Uranus(sky). From their union, the Earth comes into being. In either version, a goddess figure is at the centre of everything; human or nonhuman, animate or inanimate. The world comes into being from an egg in some other origin myths. Thereby, life emerges from the primordial egg laid by the parthenogenetic Archaic Goddess possessing the male/female good/terrible aspects 6 altogether. As exemplified in Greek Mythology, or going beyond it, almost all ancient creation myths before Genesis are attributed to female deities. In the end, ‘The Tree of life’-yielding fruits monthly- emerges from an almond-shaped seed. The shape of the almond in ancient myths refers to the union between earth and heaven, matter and spirit while alluding to the female genitalia; the cosmic womb of dark maternal waters that enables a passage from an inanimate state to an animate one (Panaioli 154). Then the Earth comes first, as the home where every being is born. Then, the womb or laid womb-egg is the very first home all living creatures dwell in. Thereby, the female procreative body gave way to women’s deification in ancient civilizations in which all life forms were equally valued. As a result, the primordial representation of women signifies a powerful nonhierarchic image derived from female genitals which are blessed with the divine power of creation. Current archaeological evidence from the prehistorical excavations indicates that in many ancient civilisations like Sumerians, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, or Indians, Goddesses are depicted as creating alone. They are almost always associated with fertility as well as often in harmony with all living beings. Moreover, the "ancient archaic figurine who gives birth to all living things" "exists in the mythology of all human cultures as the Mother- Goddess who alone created the heavens and earth" (Creed 25). "In China, she was known as Nu Kwa, in Mexico as Coatlicue, in Greece as Gaia (literally meaning 'earth') and in Sumer as Nammu", in India as Mansa Devi who carries both good and evil sides, and in Anatolia as Cybele; Magna Mater (Creed 24). Later, emerging from the waters; the Celtic Melusine, the serpent goddess or her equivalent, living under the earth; Anatolian Shahmaran, meaning the 'queen of snakes' who dates back to the Genesis serpent; the Lilith, connote the connection between women and ophidian concerning the renewal power; the continuum of birth, death, and regeneration. Nonetheless, these central female figures must have posed immense problems "in both the history of human imagination and the history of the individual subject" that the features attributed to them began to be subverted (Creed 25). Sometime in prehistory, men discovered their own part in reproduction. Then creation as a function is transformed from Goddess to God with specific manipulations. 7 The beginning of history writing sets the beginning of an ongoing systematic diminution in the status of women. In Theogony, accepted as one of the earliest examples of Greek and Western literary tradition, Hesiod describes the origins and genealogy of the gods. By doing so, he sets the recorded beginning of the passage from mythos to logos transforming the oral myth-telling tradition into the written one, giving way to the loss of dynamism. In this way, the static, solid, hierarchal understanding starts to be praised from a holistic, fluid, dynamic, heterogenic one associated with Great Goddesses (Uzunoglu 418). Genesis 1, placing human beings at the top, suggesting everything is for their service to ‘subdue’ and be ‘fruitful’. In Genesis 2:22: “And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made a woman, and brought her unto the man”. Genesis 2:23 follows as such: “And Adam said, This [is] now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (King James Version). Afterwards, women and men are also put into a hierarchy, considering women as secondary. In the Biblical story, the first woman is created from the rib of the first man who is created by a male god, as exemplified by the above-given excerpt. Robins Dexter delves into the prehistoric myth in her book Whence the Goddesses "[t]o better understand the interrelationship of the elements in the Hebrew story" (47). She writes that in "a Sumerian paradise myth, which dates to approximately 3000 BCE", there is "a paradisiacal land called Dilmun", which is almost perfect other than lacking fresh water. "Therefore, the Sumerian water god, Enki, causes the land to be filled with fresh water, and it becomes a lush garden". Moreover, "the 'Great-Mother' goddess, Ninhursag, causes eight plants to sprout in this garden" after hard work. However, Enki devours the plants and Ninhursag "pronounces the curse of death upon him, and several of his bodily organs become diseased". Afterwards, Enki's friends "in high places" want the goddess to cure him as she is the only one who can revert the curse. "So she seats him by her vulva and creates eight healing deities, one for each of his ill organs” (emphasis added). "The goddess created to heal Enki's rib was Nin-ti, 'the lady of the rib'. In Sumerian, ti has several meanings, including 'rib' and 'to make live.' Eve, Hebrew Chava, means, 'she who makes live'" (Dexter 48). In this quotation, Dexter compares the two stories and asserts that in 8 opposition to the ancient myth in the "Hebraic scenario", Eve is portrayed as a "foolish" woman who "is subordinated to Adam that she is born from one of his ribs, plucking an apple from the tree of knowledge (and, we must remember, wisdom and knowledge were particular realms of the goddesses), bringing ruin upon herself, Adam, and the rest of humanity, particularly female humanity" (48). However, in the original Sumerian story, the mother goddess –Ninhursag– is the source of life. She is the analogy for earth upon which the water, the seeds, fall and life sprouts. On the other hand, Enki is the carrier of water/seeds and responsible for the unrest in Dilmun. It is written in Genesis 1:27 as such: "So God created man in his [own] image, in the image of God created he him; male and female" (King James Version). This indicates that in the beginning both God and the first man were androgynous as Joseph Campbell writes while investigating the God figure as male and female in ancient myths (141). The creator in Islam has also androgenous connotations. In al-Iklhlas in Quran, it is written as follows: “He begets not, nor was He begotten. And There is nothing comparable to Him” (241). This part is translated as being neither male nor female, neither giving birth nor being born in many Turkish translations. However, current Islamic regulations are highly androcentric as the subject pronoun chosen as ‘he’ to address the creator indicated, in the quotation above. Nevertheless, the roots of Islam also allude to the female deities as "Arabian society was originally matrilineal and polyandric" (Alban, Melusine 136). There was a figure of a goddess that was worshipped in Anatolia and Arabia in prehistory, known as "Kubaba, or cube, whose sky body was worshipped as a meteorite and later called Cybele, comes from Kaaba of Mecca" ( Melusine 136). Kubaba and Kaaba have a similar rhyming, while Cybele reminds the word Kible; the direction Muslims turn their face while praying. Moreover, the goddesses that were worshipped at Kaaba are "Al-Lat, or Leto, or Caria, Kore, and Aluzza … Illat, Allat, and Allau", which directly refers to the name Allah, the name of the creator in Islam (Ergener qtd. in Alban 136). Furthermore, the meteorite that gave way to the worship of the Kubaba is still in Kaaba. The egg-shaped black stone is placed on the southeastern corner of the Kaaba and signifies the point where a tour around the Kaaba begins and ends during the pilgrimage. Moreover, the pilgrims are required to touch and kiss the stone in each of the seven circumambulations of the 9 Kaaba. It is considered highly sacred and said that the holiness of the Kaaba comes from this black stone (Ögüt). The modern appearance of the stone —from the outside— is similar to female genitals in shape. In a circular form, pieces of the original stone resemble an embryo's shape—the letter و (Vav) in Arabic— and it is surrounded by red stone. The letter – و – is used as a symbol of the believers, the human being and is found on the walls of many mosques (Durmus). The outer shape of the black stone—Hecerü’l-esvet —is made from silver to protect the core of the stone and it resembles vaginal lips. When the black stone and the outer shape are combined, the stone apparently resembles the first egg laid by the primordial goddess; her womb. Moreover, the black stone found in many other ancient myths, such as Indian Shiva’s lingam which takes the form of a male sex organ put on the top of yoni—the symbol of the female genitals, is widespread in Indian temples even today. This refers to an androgynous creator figure at some point involving both male and female principles which is most probably subjected to change in patriarchal systems and has come to be known as male- Shiva. Because there is not given an explicit female deity figure associated with yoni. Greek Goddess Rhea gives the stone to Chronos to save Zeus. It also directly connects the ancient figures depicted with explicit female genitals as the Greek Baubos or the Celtic Sheela na gigs. Moreover, circumambulation may refer to coming from Allah and returning to him when life ends, the eternal cycle of life and death. Another familiar understanding appears in the New Testament. In the Book of Revelation, Greek God is also defined as immortal and represented through Alpha (Α) —first letter—and Omega (Ω)—last letter— of the Greek alphabet. Accepted as a standard reference to the creator in Christianity, representing God's comprehensiveness as both the beginning and end, these signs are found in altars of the churches (Alban, Melusine 70-71). Interestingly, the symbol of Omega –Ω resembles the female genitals in its shape again. Moreover, in traditional Christian iconography, there is a double-almond similar to the lens shape, called vesica piscis in technical art and used for female genitalia–vulva– in the Middle Ages (Panaioli 154). Surrounding the figure of Jesus Christ from which Jesus emerges, this almond shape is found in the frescos in the churches and medieval manuscripts, which apparently refer to the divine power of metamorphoses that happens inside the mother's womb. This common aspect of the 10 Abrahamic religions connects with the polytheistic pagan roots relating them to the Great Mother figure. Similarly, Sheela na gigs —"the stone carvings of supernatural females who display their vulvas on medieval churches" in between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries "first on sacred then later on secular architecture— on rural churches, castles, holy wells, tombs, and standing stones" (Goode 96) date back to the "legacy of powerful female figures" appears in ancient Irish iconography and literature representing birth, death, and rebirth; all possibilities of the Life Continuum (Goode and Dexter 1). However, Abrahamic religions, as in Islam have served only for men's needs as a patriarchal myth for centuries by subverting the holy books or preserving the secondary position of Genesis 2 for the female gender, as shown in the following excerpt from Quran. "O people! Fear your Lord, who created you from a single soul, and created from it its mate"; "marry the women you like—two or three or four" (an-Nisa 1, 3). For instance, in the current story of Islam, subverting the archaic religion in which a woman could divorce her husband "when [she] turned her tent to face east three times in a row" are changed into men's saying three times (be divorced), "boşol" in Turkish (Alban, Melusine 136). In this way, women are meant to be kept under their subordinate position while the hierarchal and dualistic understanding are sustained through patriarchal systems. In medieval times, the western famous Christian Great Chain of Being, derived from Plato and Aristotle's works, directed the western mind to categorise all life and matter in a hierarchal form until the 19th century. Darwin's evolution theory struck the grand narratives appointing men superior to their counterparts –women– and all other creatures, giving way to questioning grand narratives–in the Holy Books. Many years have passed since Darwin's view on the evolution of species, and now, modern genetics has also confirmed that all life is related. However, the image of divinity, representing a chaotic and non-hierarchal wholeness, in the beginning, has already been transferred to an old man with a white beard sitting on the clouds and observing us from there. In the end, founded upon binaries, western logos has prioritised anthropocentricity over ecocentrism, monotheism and patriarchy over the holistic, egalitarian worldview observed in ancient cultures. As a result of this tendency in patriarchal societies, the man is placed at the core while considering women inferior. 11 Thus, the existing system creates the domination of a superior force over what is assumed inferior. Western philosophy follows the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras' understanding of "The Nature of Reality" founded upon "sets of opposites". Later on, it has come to be known as the "Table of Opposites". Pythagoras categorised "limited, odd, one, right, male, rest, straight, light, square and good" on the one side and "unlimited, even, many, left, female, motion, curved, darkness, evil, oblong and bad" on the other (Malone 25). In this way, Western philosophy, following the guise of 'love of wisdom', composes the roots of binary opposites that place women on the side believed to be secondary. Then, once praised, female reproductive organs have also begun to be associated with negative images. Hysterical women myth stems from Plato's Hyster; the thought of a walking womb inside the women's body causing them to become ill. Aristotle's definition of femaleness as deformity and the Biblical definition of women as unclean, sinful, and foolish contribute to women's assigned role as the 'inferior'. By implication, "being weaker, more prone to (hormonal) irregularities, intrusions, and unpredictabilities," the woman's body is considered "to be incapable of men's achievements" (Grosz, Volatile Bodies 14). The emergence of psychoanalysis in the 20th century replaced the function of philosophy. However, it sustains the same tendency to define female sexuality that prevailed in western patriarchal societies. Within this frame, female genitals were defined as castrated male genitals, little penis, or just an envelope for the 'master signifier'. Notwithstanding, the female reproductive body has never lost its archaic image that lurks behind its negative connotations. That is why, while the female genitalia are defined as being 'nothing to see' in patriarchal discourse, it is also counted as the locus of male anxiety. The first encounter with "an almost invisible sex organ" causes many to suffer from a castration complex striking terror in their hearts with the idea of being swallowed by this "nothingness" (Irigaray, Speculum 406). This void is the cause of their "becoming stiff [which] means an erection" (Smith, Freud-Complete Works 3943). "His desire, fragile and kept alive by lack, is manifested by absence" (Cixous, "Sorties" 67). Freud calls female sexuality the 12 uncanny, dark continent or an undeveloped penis, referring to the clitoris. Lacan states that "woman is not whole (pas toute) — woman's sexual organ is of no interest (ne lui dit rien [says nothing to him]) except via the body's jouissance" (Feminine 7). Along the same lines, misogynists thought of self-justifying women's secondary social positions to a body image "represented even construct[ed] … as frail, imperfect, unruly, and unreliable, subject to various intrusions which are not under conscious control" (Grosz, Volatile Bodies 13). These controversial definitions of female sexuality pave the way for its revaluation in a reconstructive view in this study. Concerning the problematic representation of female genitals, Sara Mills argues that "women's genitalia" are sexualised "from a heterosexual male perspective" therefore, looking at the "female genitalia slang" is "expected to encode ideas about women's bodies, women's place in the world, and women's place in sex", as the slangs are the production of shared cultural knowledge (Braun and Kitzinger 147). In their article "'Snatch,' 'Hole,' or 'Honey-Pot'?" Virginia Braun and Celia Kitzinger evaluate the results of two questionnaires concerning the female genitals in charts by categorising slang under several terms. They divide the graph into two and list the central common answers by contrasting the slang concerning female genitals (FGTs) and male genitals (MGTs) to show how the words differ according to gender. It is most striking that female genitalia are depicted as "cave, gap, hole, pit, slot" about "space", whereas there is no equivalence for male genitalia in this category. Under the "danger" category, there are "Bermuda triangle, black hole, growler, sharpener, squirrel trap" (Braun and Kitzinger, Table 4 149). While "these terms invoked the vagina dentata motif (the vagina equipped with teeth and dangerous or deadly to penises)" (153), it is apparent that "(hetero)sexual encounters [are] predicated upon female genitalia as simply a hole to be filled" (157). Moreover, "[m]any of these [terms] refer to the landscape, to spaces created by "absences" of land –a cave, a hole, a love canal, a tunnel." In addition, "[s]uch terms implicitly constitute the female body as a landscape with attendant suggestions of exploration, colonisation, and ownership" (151). As a result, "FGTs generally signal a passive danger" (152). "In contrast, MGT danger [is] an attacking danger- implemented, used, fought" with "[w]ar imagery" (e.g., stabbing truncheon, heat-seeking missile, torpedo, sword) (153). 13 On the other hand, terms like "Black Hole", "Bermuda Triangle", "Grand Canyon", "Cave", or "Gap" refer to the connection between nature and women. Not male but primarily female genitals are depicted as connected to nature as they connote dynamism and unpredictability. The procreational power is the prominent feature women and nature share in common, breeding the nature analogy for women which was once thought to confine women solely to their reproductive function. There is a common thought while comparing the association between nature/ culture and gender; males are associated with culture, arguing that they do not possess natural features—like life-giving ability—while the female body functions in the same manner as nature does. "Woman creates naturally from within her own being, while men are free to, or forced to, create artificially, that is, through cultural means, and in such a way as to sustain culture" (Ortner 16). Due to the reality that women's bodily activities, especially their birth-giving regenerative power resemble nature, the patriarchal thought suggests that the occupation left for the man is to activate their minds, which paves the way for Cartesian—body and mind duality. Therefore, "[i]n patriarchal societies, culture and reason are perceived as male attributes, in opposition to the female attributes of nature and emotion" (Warren and Erkal 315). Because of this dichotomy, the mind and reason become the essential components of human beings while the body and emotions are considered secondary in binarised western philosophy by cherishing the former. Furthermore, "male activities involving the destruction of life (hunting and warfare) have more charisma, as it were, than the female's ability to give birth, to create life" within this frame (Ortner 14). As Warren and Erkal state, "[a] man learns to be tough, to dull his sensual perceptions and responses. And the making of boys into men belongs to the same habit of mind that uses the conquering of nature as a central metaphor" (219). Therefore, "neither the word woman nor the word nature can be read apart, and both are shaped by, marked by, and contain traces of a larger system, a philosophy that is also a submerged psychology" (Warren and Erkal 216). In the end, "[i]t is woman's fertilisable body which aligns her with nature and threatens the integrity of the patriarchal symbolic order" (Creed 50). Strikingly, the “vagina might indeed be patronisingly regarded as a speaking mouth, but never one that issues the voice of reason” (Carter, The Sadeian 4). The actual image of the reproductive female body asks 14 for recognition. It will return from the nostalgia as "nothing is lost if all or nothing ends in an image. Myths of the past will be revived in new lives; what lies forgotten from earlier times will not be lost, will return, whatever its form or state” (Kristeva, The Severed Head 123). It will arise from the ‘uncanny’, ‘shadow’, ‘grotesque’, and ‘abject’ deifying the binary opposites toward the primordial representation of dualities altogether, as the reality of existence. Up until the emergence of continental philosophy, especially after the philosophical and literary analysis of 'deconstruction' derived from the works of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, which were mainly concerned with the binary understanding of western philosophy, women were situated on the negative side of men as the inferior gender. Accepted as the most critical psychoanalyst of the last century, Sigmund Freud and his successor Jacque Lacan posit a negative perception of women and their genitals, reflecting the common thought in society. Famed as the ground-shaking psychoanalyst, Freud is counted as a fiction writer and philosopher as well. Freud is known for his famous psychosexual theory, 'Oedipus Complex', in reference to the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, which forms the connection between 'seeing and being' in western ocular-centralism that facilitates the physical position of MGTs since they are perceptible from the outside. In contrast, the FGTs, as not visible from the outside, are equated with nonexistence. For instance, according to Freudian psychoanalysis, "[w]omen are castrated. Femininity is an effect of castration (often euphemistically renamed [as] "lack"), a woman is a void, a nothingness" (Moi, “From Femininity to Finitude” 843). By contrast, Freud's ideas about castration, penis envy, and motherhood, among many others "to theorise women," asserts Toril Moi, "are pitiful" and adds that he is "mistaken about penis envy, clitoral and vaginal pleasure, motherhood as a compensation for penis envy, women's general preference for sons over daughters" (“From Femininity to Finitude” 842). Accordingly, in Speculum of the Other Women, Luce Irigaray, a former student of Lacan, under "Another Cause-Castration", rewrites the Freudian interpretation of a woman and her genital organs. First, she questions the connection between seeing and being. She argues that "the collusion, between one sex/organ and the victory won by visual dominance" "leaves woman with her sexual void, with an 'actual castration'" leaving 15 her again with "the option of a 'neutral' libido or of sustaining herself by 'penis envy'" (48). Hence, due to the victory of perception, women are left with two choices, neither of which meshes with female sexuality. Angela Carter writes concerning the anatomical representation of male and female genitals in graffiti as follows: the prick is always presented erect, in an alert attitude of enquiry or curiosity or affirmation; it points upwards, it asserts. The hole is open, an inert space, like a mouth waiting to be filled. From this elementary iconography may be derived the whole metaphysic of sexual differences – man aspires; woman has no other function but to exist, waiting. The male is positive, an exclamation mark. Woman is negative. Between her legs lies nothing but zero, the sign for nothing, that only becomes something when the male principle fills it with meaning. (Carter, The Sadeian, 3) Under "Anatomy is 'Destiny", Irigaray asserts that even this position of women as "'neuter is hard for Freud to account for in his theory of the difference of sexes…the subject of woman's sexuality is still very "obscure'" (Speculum 48). It must be related to "axes of visibility of (so-called) masculine sexuality". That is why Freud directs his attention to the clitoris; thus "the little girl" becomes a "little boy". "In other words, THERE NEVER IS (OR WILL BE) A LITTLE GIRL. All that remains is to assign her sexual function to this "little boy" with no penis, or at least no penis of any recognised value" (Irigaray 49). Then the "phallic" develops into penis envy because "'he' has only a tiny little sex organ, no sex organ at all, really, an almost invisible sex organ" (Speculum 49). Therefore, there is no space for the woman and her sexuality for "'this nothing to be seen,' to defend its goals." "Here again, no economy would be possible whereby sexual reality can be represented by/for [the] woman". She is "abandoned in her lack, default, absence, envy, etc. and is led to submit, to follow the dictates issued univocally by sexual desire, discourse, and law of man. Of the father" (49). As Irigaray evaluates more, the question is; why does there emerge a need to create a "law of the father" if the female sex organ does not even exist. However, when the little girl sees her own "nonidentical, the nonidentifiable" sex organ, as opposed to male economy, the girl understands that "there cannot be a nothing to be seen". Therefore, there is a flaw, a lack, and an absence, outside the system of representations and auto- eroticism. Which are man’s. By a hole in men’s signifying economy. A nothing that might cause the ultimate destruction, the splintering, the break in their system of presence,’ of ‘re-presentation’ and ‘representation.’ A nothing threatening the process of production, reproduction, mastery, and profitability, of meaning, dominated by the phallus- that master signifier whose law of functioning erases, 16 rejects, denies the surging up, the resurgence, the recall of a heterogeneity capable of reworking the principle of its authority. (Irigaray, Speculum 50) Moving on with penis envy, Irigaray argues that this is the way of situating women in her place in western logos as a negation of the binary of the phallus. For Freud: "sexual 'otherness' comes down to 'not having it.' Thus women's lack of a penis and her envy of the penis ensure the function of the negative, [and] serve as representatives of the negative, … in phallocentric-or phallotropic- dialectics" (Speculum 52). In her book This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray questions the tendency to depict female genitals in the same way as male genitals and says that the vagina is not a little penis. Instead, it is within the frame of a different description which directs to multiplicity rather than sameness. The book's title also refers to this sex as not one; in the phallocentric view, "she has no 'proper' name. And her sex organ, which is not one organ, is counted as none". While at the same time, the title asserts that "she has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as one" (28), with "two (lips) which keeps the woman in touch with herself" (26). In this way, "the lips [...] defy the subject/object split so necessary for phallocentric reasoning to function" (Schwartz 248). Subsequently, Irigaray writes, "[i]ndeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural". "She finds pleasure almost anywhere" though her entire body is hysterized, the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined-in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness" (Irigaray, This Sex 28). 1.1.1. Dissolving the 'Mirror' Signification In his famous "The Mirror Stage" article, Jacque Lacan argues that depending on individual development, children idealise the image in the mirror when they understand that it is their reflection around the age of six months old. As Philippe Julien explains in his book Jacque Lacan's Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, "[t]he mirror effects a victory over the fragmentation of the disjointed members and assures motor coordination. A sense of unity, mastery, and freedom of stature is achieved" (31). Before the mirror, children had only a fragmented perception of things and their identity instead of the mirror image, which is complete and easier to 17 identify with. Henri Wallon also adds to the studies on the development of children concerning the effect of mirror image and subject formation. The reality attributed to the image is so complete that, between the forty-first and the forty-fourth week, not only does Preyer's child laugh and extend his arms toward it every time he sees it, but Darwin's child looks at his mirror-image every time he is called by name. When he hears his name, he no longer applies it, albeit in a passing or intermittent fashion, to his proprioceptive self, but rather to the exteroceptive image of himself that the mirror offers him. (Wallon qtd. in Julien 30) Hence, "when the child recognises himself in the mirror, for then he has a representation of his body distinct from his internal motor sensations — a representation made possible by the nature of the image exterior" attracts them (Julien 30). Moreover, "the mirror stage, a universal phenomenon" happens "even where there is no such material object like a mirror. Strictly speaking, it is the other who functions as a mirror" (Julien 30). Hence, "[i]t is not an inside closed in upon the self, but an outside constitutive of an inside” leading to “an original alienation" (Julien 33). Likewise, "The Symbolic Order" — begins when the child learns language at eighteen months — the child becomes alienated from their authentic self because language is syntactic and composed of signs which form a system outside of the personal reality. As Roland Barthes argues in Mythologies about signs and myth formation, "myth is a language" (10). Myth cannot "be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form". It is "a system of communication that it is a message (55). There are tri-dimensional patterns in myth: the signified, signifier and sign as a peculiar system, constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system becomes a mere signifier in the second. We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth. Myth sees in them only the same raw material; their unity is that they all come down to the status of a mere language. (Barthes 113) In the myth-making process, the primary sign loses its meaning and becomes the symbol of a set of things that may not be closely relevant to the word's primary meaning. The "meaning and form, full on one side and empty on the other", leads "the signifier of myth" 18 to present itself "in an ambiguous way" (Barthes 116). The outside symbols are dominant in the overall meaning, which is the third signification according to Barthes' definition of myth; the external meaning transgresses the boundaries of the original sign. It becomes the representation of an overall signification. Because the aim is not "meeting the facts: they define and explore them as tokens for something else" (Barthes 110), it exemplifies that language is a set of symbols. Corollary with the argument that "[n]ow psychoanalysis shows that there is no inner without an outer and, in addition, that the inner derives from the outer" is a justification of the role of "signifier" in ego formation (Julien 89). Because the signifier in the mirror stage is "the image exterior", which can also be "the image of the other" (Julien 38), this also meshes with "the unconscious is structured like a language" (15) in which Lacan says, "whereas in fact, woman does not exist"—La femme n'exist pas (Feminine 7). However, this means there is a "'feminine resistance to symbolic identification'" (Myers 89). Because there is a difference between "what is said and what is heard". As Lacan explains further: "the act of saying is judged" and "what one does with what is said remains open" (Lacan, Feminine 15-16). Therefore, as what is understood is determined by what is called the 'master signifier' — phallus or 'Law of the Father', it does not include a representation of women. As Irigaray suggests, "according to our culture[,] he [the father] superimposes upon [women from the] ancient world of flesh and blood a universe of language and symbols that has no roots in the flesh and drills a hole through the female womb and through the place of female identity" ("Body" 16). Therefore, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, the phallus represents the symbolic order, and it is shaped following the male attributes, which leaves women no other room than absence. However, this creates resistance as women's representation is inconvenient to that of the phallus, which originates from her different sex organs. In their seminal work, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar ask: "[i]f the pen is a metaphorical penis, with what organ can females generate texts?" (The Madwoman in the Attic 7). Then they argue that as a result of this biased thinking trait reigning in western literary history, as a patrilineal heritage passing from Father to son, the women writer as 19 "she experiences her own identity as a writer", "fail[s] to define the ways in which" she finds herself (“Infection in the Sentence”2026). Hence, the question of "where does a woman writer 'fit in'" "in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are ... both overtly and covertly patriarchal" (“Infection in the Sentence” 2026; 2024). They reply as such: At first sight, "she seems to be anomalous, indefinable, alienated, a freakish outsider," so, "a woman writer does not 'fit in'" (Gilbert and Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence” 2026). Later, Gayatri Spivak urges the analogy of the womb as “the box in the head” as the reproductive parts of the two sexes, as opposed to “the male fetish” (255). Indeed, as Gilbert and Gubar explain in their book’s chapter “Infection in the Sentence”, both sexes "are born into the desire of the mother" (2026). However, through cultural heritage, the mother's desire is defined as "the phallus-turned-baby", which directs "both children[’] desire to be the phallus". In the end, as a possessor of the phallus, the masculine child "can fully recognise himself in his mother's desire". In this way, children abandon the "implication of femininity". The girl understands that she is subjugated to the Law of the father, which "entails her becoming the representative of 'nature' and 'sexuality,' a chaos of spontaneous, intuitive creativity (Gilbert and Gubar 2026). Therefore, Gilbert and Gubar, in opposition to this misreading of women's social position as the reflecting mirror image of men, suggest that the woman writer begins a struggle just by "seeking a female precursor". This female ancestor makes it possible to "revolt against patriarchal literary authority" by setting an example rather than being a "threatening force to be denied or killed" (2027). The search for “motherly precursors” is facilitated even though “the woman writer may find only 'infection,' debilitation”. It is crucial to see “female power” “because of her lost literary matrilineage”. In this connection, Dickinson's own words about mothers are revealing, for she alternately claimed that 'I never had a mother,' that 'I always ran Home to Awe as a child… He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none,' and that 'a mother [was] a miracle.' Yet, as we shall see, her own anxiety of authorship was a 'Despair' inhaled not only from the infections suffered by her own ailing physical mother and her many tormented literary mothers, but from the literary fathers who spoke to her even 'lied' to her - sometimes near at hand, sometimes 'at distances of Centuries,' from the censorious looking glasses of literary texts. (Gilbert and Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence” 2029) 20 However, this search may cause further suffering to the women writer since "[i]t is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels[,] they must be monsters" in an aged-old patriarchal philosophy in which "nervous disorders, was thought to be caused by the female reproductive system as if to elaborate upon Aristotle's notion that femaleness was in and of itself a deformity" (2029; 2030). Therefore, "[w]hether she is a passive angel or an active monster", the culture surrounding the woman writer debilitates her "by the images of disease, traditions of disease, and invitations both to disease and to dis-ease" (Gilbert and Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence” 2033). That is why women writers often choose madness as the specific subject matter in their works, however, in an ironic way. For instance, there appear "eye troubles", which "symbolically represent (and parody) the sort of intellectual incapacity patriarchal culture has traditionally required of women" (2034). As Exemplified "with Dickinson matter-of-factly noting that her eye got 'put out,' George Eliot describing patriarchal Rome as 'a disease of the retina,' Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh marrying blind men, Charlotte Bronte deliberately writing with her eyes closed, and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge writing about 'Blindness' that came because 'Absolute and bright, / The Sun's rays smote me till they masked the Sun'” (“Infection in the Sentence” 2034). Gilbert and Gubar refer to the ocular-centric western literary tradition by including close readings of several women writers to lay bare their attempt to eliminate the glass coffins that the patriarchal society metaphorically confines them within. Irigaray conveniently argues in "Body Against Body" that "fertility of the earth is sacrificed in order to establish the cultural domain of the Father's language … But this is never spoken of. Just as the scar of the navel is forgotten, so, correspondingly, a hole appears in the texture of the language" (16), which causes a loss of meaning women writers find in themselves. Gilbert and Gubar deduce that "many women writers manage to imply that the reason for such ignorance of language —as well as the reason for their deep sense of alienation and an inescapable feeling of anomie —is that they [the characters] have forgotten something" (2034). For instance, "Emily Bronte's Heathcliff 'forgets' or is made to forget who and what he was; Mary Shelley's monster is 'born' without either a memory or a family history, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora 21 Leigh is early separated from-and thus induced to 'forget’—her 'mother land' of Italy". Hence, as the reason lies behind the forgetfulness of the characters, Gilbert and Gubar suggest "what all these characters and their authors fear they have forgotten is precisely that aspect of their lives which has been kept from them by patriarchal poetics: their matrilineal heritage of literary strength, their "female power" which, as Annie Gottlieb wrote, is important to them because of (not in spite of) their mothers" who are "lost foremothers" and remembering and recovering "could help them find their distinctive female power" (2035). 1.1.2. Striving for the Uncanny (M)other The idealisation of an image, returning to the earlier point, makes the authentic self a stranger within. The imaginary realm sustains the alienation process with a 'master signifier'— the phallus in the symbolic results in a clash within the subject. As Julien puts it regarding Melanie Klein's "depressive position": "Either the other kills me, or I kill the other", which is "a result of the imaginary discord that is intrinsic to the constitution of the ego and is its essential sign" (35). This alienation process begins with introducing a mirror image. The point when the child understands that they are not the continuation of their mother — is the beginning of narcissism. So, to be wholly independent, there emerges a need to be separated from the maternal in order to gain the subject position. Thus, the child finds themself in a position where they think; "the other in his image both attracts and rejects me. I am indeed nothing but the other, yet at the same time, he remains alienus, a stranger. This other who is myself is other than myself" (34). As a result, human beings have a strange feeling towards their original "primitive" self in becoming civilised beings. Conveniently, as it can be inferred from what Freud argues in Civilisations and Its Discontents in general, the more the human subject is civilised, the more they are estranged from their primitive self, which can be counted as a reminder of the maternal bond. Civilisation “obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression” “by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city" (Complete Works 4513). Thus, the connection to the very early state of being is equated with barbarism which lurks within and asks for recognition. This is the remainder of the very early state of being related to 22 the mother, as she is the primary entity with whom the child interacts. Therefore, "the only guarantee against 'irresistible regression', against a return to barbarism, was a guard within", which is achieved via suppression of the pre-linguistic link with the mother by the agency of the symbolic order (Kolocotroni 163). Julia Kristeva re-evaluates the register theory of Lacan as 'chora', adding 'abject' before 'imaginary' and 'symbolic'. Kristeva emphasises the importance of chora in how the child communicates with the mother through gestures or voices that she calls semiotics. However, when the child comes across their images, this drives them into an in-between state where they are neither subject nor object but 'abject'. Kristeva states that "abjection is what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules" (Powers 4). Moreover, this poses a threat to the child with the risk of losing the autonomous self as being attached to the maternal at the same time. The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our personal archaeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of the maternal entity even before–existing outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, 'with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling'. The difficulty a mother has in acknowledging (or being acknowledged by) the symbolic realm—in other words, the problem she has with the phallus that her father or her husband stands for—is not such as to help the future subject leave the natural mansion. (Kristeva, Powers 13) Nonetheless, Kristeva emphasises the role of the mother and argues that before the emergence of language as a system of signs, there was a pre-linguistic stage in which the mother could communicate with the child, which is called 'archaic' in the symbolic order, where the very first bond is destined to perish. "There would be a danger of fusion, death, lethal sleep if the father did not intervene to sever this uncomfortably close link to the original matrix." Therefore "the father replace[s] the womb with the matrix of his language" whose exclusivity of law refuses all representation to that first body, that first home, that first love" which "are sacrificed and provide matter for an empire of language" (Irigaray, "Body" 14). Irigaray emphasises here the link between mother and child that comes from the navel, the umbilical cord. The loss of this connection is grave for the child, and they actually look for it throughout their lives as a belated wish or desire. 23 In The Severed Head, Julia Kristeva connects cannibalism with the search for a mother whose "body leaves me: her tactile warmth, her music that delights my ear, the view that offers me her head and face… all are lost" (6). She explains the old rituals of eating skulls and connects them with a striving to reform the connection with maternal. “Cannibalistic, and later, totemic meals can be interpreted as a conjuration of the original loss of the nurturing body that the subject hallucinates as a head that leaves it. I try to cry out in the face of this loss, to name it, to envision it: I also appropriate it, consume it, I do not want to lose it, I rediscover the pleasure of the archaic orality that this breast, this mass, this head provided me” (Kristeva The Severed 14). Kristeva argues that the lack into which human beings fall and the desire to fulfil emerges from the 'original separation' between child and mother. "Before very young children begin to talk, they become irremediably sad. This transient state, which has been designated a "depressive position," corresponds to the experience of a precocious, formative bereavement: it transforms the autoerotic baby who enjoys its body parts, its mother's nipples, a blanket or a doll, into a speaking being" (Kristeva 5). By stepping into the Symbolic, becoming 1, human beings fall into the depths of 0, which is confined to 'archaic' —the mother's absence. Furthermore, "some never recover from this first grief: if it seems as though Mama is dead", which also requires the death of the self to reunite (The Severed 5). Hence, as Freud theorised in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the child develops the death instinct, which turns into a desire in the phallocentric discourse and governs (his)story for centuries. In his book, the desire developed by the self for death is explained through the "repetition compulsion" and associated with an urge to return to an earlier state of being, to reunite with what is lost, the mother. Likewise, Freud writes that "the goal of all life is death" (148) which "may be seen as a wish to return to [the] sexual mother and the womb at the beginning of time" (Slochower, "Quest for 'Matrem'" 2). In his well-known article, "The 'Uncanny'", Freud deciphers the strange feeling that emerges both familiar and unfamiliar in some cases. As he defines it, "the 'uncanny' is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar (220). He explains that "the word heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich", continuing as such: "the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but 24 belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory are yet very different: on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight" (224-5). The uncanny then refers to the side that the human psyche knows in its very nature, which is confined to the unconscious, which can also be connected to the woman–mother. Similarly, Freud says, "Love is home-sickness" (Freud 245) which is interpreted as the expression of nostalgia for the mother. As he explains the unheimlich feeling male patients have in front of the female genital organs. "This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning". And "whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, still in the dream, 'this place is familiar to me, I have been there before,' we may interpret the place as being his mother's genitals or her body" (Freud 245). Hélène Cixous comments in "A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The "Uncanny")" on the saying: "Love is a yearning for a country": "You have already passed through here: you recognise the landscape," but "[w]hy it is that the maternal landscape, the Heimlich, and the familiar become so disquieting? (544). Irigaray also argues that "the unheimlich is what was once Heimlich, familiar" and adds that "the prefix 'un' is the token of repression". And she answers Cixous's question as such: "The women-mother would be unheimlich not only by reason of a repression of a primitive relationship to the maternal but also because her sex/organ are strange, yet close; while 'heimlich' as a mother, the woman would remain 'un' as a woman, since women's sexuality is no doubt the most basic form of the unheimlich" (Speculum 411). In this way, female genitals resist definition and cannot be included in the scope of sameness; the female sexuality turns into an unknown place, 'a dark continent'. As Cixous writes, “hers is the dark region: because you are Africa, you are black … you can’t see anything [in] the dark … [women] haven’t gone exploring in their house” (“Sorties” 68). While directing a critical glance to the notions of patriarchy attributed to women, Cixous draws attention to the fact that this black continent, the unheimlich place, is the home of all living beings. Including the words home and continent also connotes the association between female genitals, home and nature. 25 1.2. The Relation between Womb, Home, and Nature Freud writes in "The Question of Lay Analysis" that "the sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology" (Complete Works 4355). In her book Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Ranjana Khanna explains Freud's use of the "Dark Continent" as a metaphor for a woman's sexuality. In this book, Khanna combines "the experience of uncanny feelings" when Freud enters the "ancient, empty, enclosed spaces" with the metaphor of a dark continent to explain that these old places make him remember the archaic relationship with the mother (56). Correspondingly, In her book Reading Lacan, Jane Gallop comments on Lacan's use of 'nostalgie'. When we look up the definition of nostalgia, the first meaning that comes forward is a "[s]tate of withering or of languor caused by the haunting regret for one's native land, for the place where one lived for a long time: homesickness" (Gallop 148). Moreover, the other means "[m]elancholy regret (for something elapsed or for what one has not experienced); unsatisfied desire" (Gallop 148). Thus, "[b]oth the principal definitions relate to a return, the first in the wish to return to a place" (Gallop 150). In addition, "the etymology of "nostalgia" informs us that "nostos" in Greek means "return" (Gallop 150). Subsequently, when the definitions are considered concerning the child's sharp separation from the mother in the phallocentric world, "the mother as the womb, homeland, source, and grounding for the subject is irretrievably past. The subject is hence in a foreign land, alienated" (148). Therefore, when we connect Freud's feeling of uncanniness with nostalgia, it becomes apparent that "Freud says of homesickness that it can be understood psychoanalytically as a longing to return to the womb, that the lost homeland is the mother's womb" (Gallop 148). From the letters written to his friends, Freud tells his quest for the mother symbolically, "transpos[ing] them into cultural and historic symbols". Likewise, "when he stood on the Acropolis", "under the impact of the 'old' memories, and perched over the Aegean, he survey[ed] and attempt[ed] to unify his past" (Slochower, "Quest for 'Matrem' 4). Especially, through "[h]is journey to Athens, and the Acropolis is to the 'Mother' of Western culture and to the sacred temple standing on the mountain" is equivalent to search unification with his mother (Slochower, "Freud's Déjà Vu" 90). Furthermore, "what seems 26 to have fascinated Freud during his tour is an absence: the absence of another temple", "destroyed and rebuilt so many times". The absence of the temple creates "a figure similar to the opening of Woman. The look seeks to fill in this hollow, substituting for it a 'perspective object', an elusive representation that continues to evade one's grasp" (Gendron 62). This is the reason why "Freud's feelings at the Parthenon are interpreted through "the Uncanny" and "Medusa's Head" (Khanna 55). As Guy Rosolato also comments: As for the Parthenon, the outside seems especially ravaged, being but a shell—but if one can imagine it intact and reconstruct the sacred place (the cella) that one enters [ pénètre] by way of a door (which one imagines between the cracks that cover the columns). The place contains the statue of the goddess but does not allow the faithful to congregate within it, as the worship takes place in front of the temple. The unknown is located in the inside . . . the Virgin, as focal object, phallic body, and the goddess of reason and intelligence [Athena], marks out the central cavity and fixes the unknown. (Khanna 56) Because the “symbol of horror is worn upon her dress by the virgin goddess Athene. And rightly so, for thus she becomes a woman who is unapproachable and repels all sexual desires —since she displays the terrifying genitals of the Mother” (Freud, Complete Works 3943). This leads to the worshipping of Athena as she defies the sexual gaze turning into a representation of the ban on incest possessing the mother’s genitals on her shield. Gradiva, a female figure in an antique bas-relief found in Pompei, which means “she who walks beautifully” (Smith 197), is fictionalised by Wilhelm Jensen in his novella Gradiva. In his article “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva”, Freud argues that the fiction represents the unconscious feelings of the author about his mother. As Rosolato also comments, the depiction of the ancient place where the figure is found refers to the uncanny feeling men have in front of the female genitals. “Empty and silent, the room lay there, appearing absolutely unfamiliar to the man, as he entered, awaking no memory that he had already been here, yet he then recalled it, for the interior of the house offered a deviation from that of the other excavated buildings of the city (Khanna 56). Moreover, Freud writes his impression at “the Vatican, after such a long lonely spell, the familiar face of a loved one… speaking of seeing the ‘Gradiva’ who hung high up on a wall” (Khanna 56). Hence, Harry Slochower connects the experience of Freud’s confrontation 27 with ‘Gradiva’ to “a symbolic relic of mater nuda,[naked mother] the time when Freud saw his mother naked” “on a trip he took with her when he was about four years old” (Khanna 57; Solochower, "Freud's Déjà Vu" 90). Subsequently, as Slochower states, when “Freud remarks ‘... seeing something with one’s own eyes is after all quite a different thing from hearing or reading’”, he refers explicitly to this memory ("Freud's Déjà Vu" 91). Likewise, in “The Physical Mechanism of Forgetfulness”, Freud writes, “[n]o one calls in question the fact that the experiences of the earliest years of our childhood leave ineradicable traces in the depths of our minds” (Complete Works 941), adding that “what is important is suppressed and what is indifferent retained” in memory (Complete Works 947). Therefore, the “interpretations concerning the ravaged temple as [the] confrontation with the uncanniness of the mother’s body” reveal Freud’s feeling of nostalgia for the very first home where he once dwelt, which, in turn, demonstrates the importance of women being suppressed in the unconscious (Khanna 57). As Freud writes in one of his letters to Wilhelm Fliess “on 12 January 1898”, “[h]appiness is the belated fulfilment of a prehistoric wish” which cannot find expression in western metaphysics (Kolocotroni 162). As Jean-Claude Arfouilloux also argues, the prehistoric wish “refers to what has been known of the mother, of the origin, and what has been subjected to primary repression in inscribing itself in the form of the first signifier of demarcation, enigmatic signifiers which are not directly accessible to consciousness” (Gendron 62). Subsequently, “beyond this knowable unknown, necessarily emerges an unknowable unknown, which marks the untraversable limit of absolute knowledge” (Gendron 63). This is what brings forward the “dark continent” metaphor that “is indefinable” and “primitive” which “allows its explorers a heroic narrative of discovery and a feminisation of the land” (Khanna 52). 1.2.1. Managing the ‘Real Wound’ in Male Culture In her book Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference, Alison Stone resonates with the reason behind the mother-related anxiety of Freud. According to Irigaray, there are two different and specific rhythms in nature for males and females. However, since 28 the male rhythm dominates and is reflected in culture, the female does not have a chance to embody her proper rhythm. So “she sees nature as dynamic and bodies as active and striving for expression, consequently proposing a cultural change to give expression to nature generally and to female bodies, with their inherent rhythms, which have never achieved adequate expression in western culture” (Stone 127). “As the reason lying behind the unrepresented nature of women, Irigaray suggests the fact that “males have particular trouble negotiating separation from their mothers: the ‘task . . . of differing from another human . . . is . . . especially difficult for a man because of his maternal origin’” (Stone 129). The real “wound we can never heal, never cure, opens up where the umbilical cord is severed” (Irigaray, “Body” 16). That is why “[m]en respond to this difficulty by construing mothers and, by extension, all women, as ‘nature from which man has to differ’ hierarchically, and which men must transcend and control” (129). For this aim, males develop a series of strategies to cope with matriarchal differences. Thus, “[b]oys cast corporeality and nature as something inferior to them, an ‘object’ to which they are opposed. These strategies instil in males an attitude of thinking themselves superior to nature, which they inescapably associate with the mother and, by extension, with all women” (Stone 134). This attitude of boys towards mothers is called for short, “the ‘murder’ of the mother — not (usually) a literal murder but an attitude of denying the mother’s importance and value at a symbolic level” (Stone 135). In Thinking the Difference, Irigaray argues that males’ strategy to murder mother symbolically is the reason of “an ecologically destructive culture because, much of the time, boys/men will seek to detach themselves from whatever is corporeal and natural, towards which they will act in a way which denigrates and devalues it” (Stone 136). Whereas they are bound to “a fantasy according to which the natural, corporeal, and (by association) maternal remains ever-present and indestructible”. Nonetheless this “very collective fantasy” is “threatened by the severity of the Chernobyl disaster” (Stone 136). Western culture is under the impact of Abrahamic monotheism. As written in Genesis 1:26, “And God said, Let us make man into our image after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all of the earth, and over all of the creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (King James Version). Following God’s 29 command, human beings urge dominion over nature and everything on it which results with ecological disasters. This is also what reflects “the deeper-lying problem that western culture is fundamentally destructive, towards nature particularly” (Stone 132). Thus, western culture acquires “the (allegedly) enduring form of an anti-natural, ecologically damaging, culture” (Stone 132). Donna Haraway directs a critical gaze to the Man's—which is used for describing the whole humanity—hegemony over all creatures, "[i]n nature, there is only one Actor, and we are It". In western philosophy, "[n]ature mutates into its binary opposite, culture, and vice versa, in such a way as to displace the entire nature/culture (and sex/gender) dialectic with a new discursive field, where the actors who count are their own instrumental objectification" by summarising the result of the whole edifice western philosophy build upon seasonably. "Context is content with [a] vengeance. Nature and culture implode into each other and disappear into the resulting black hole. Man makes himself, indeed, in a cosmic onanism" ("Otherworldly Conversations" 172). She elucidates the previous discussions concerning women as the reflecting mirror image of men contributing to the construction of male culture. Women are still far away from attaining the subject position. Haraway goes on with the "object status of animals enforced in the Western histories and cultures" through "Marxist formulations" and "capitalist relations of production" (175). "Marxist analysis cannot talk about animals at all. In that frame, animals have no history; they are matrix or raw material for human self-reformation, which can go awry, for example, in capitalist relations of production" by adding that "[a]nimals are not part of the social relationship at all; they never have any status but that of not-human; not subject, therefore object" (175). Haraway compares the situations of non-humans and othered humans like workers in the Marxist system, women, and enslaved people in the context of sexual and racial objectification, and concludes that even so, the system does not function in the same way for all. Non-humans are more objectified than others. But the kind of 'not subject, not human, therefore object' that animals are made to be is also not like the status occupied by women within patriarchal logics and histories…In masculinist sexual orders, woman is not a subject separated from the 30 product of her life-shaping activity; her problem is much worse. She is projection of another's desire, who then haunts man as his always elusive, seductive, unreliable Other. Women as such is a kind of illusionist's projection, while mere women bear the violent erasures of that history-making move. There is nothing of her own for her to reappropriate; she is an object in the sense of being another's project. (Haraway 175-6) As Harraway later suggests for the animals quoting Marx: "[t]hey cannot represent themselves; they must be represented". This "resonate[s] with the pro-life/anti-abortion question, 'Who speaks for the fetus?' The answer is, anybody but the pregnant woman, especially if that anybody is a legal, medical, or scientific expert", implying the Foucauldian patriarchal institutions (176). As Haraway herself replies in the interview, "Cyborgs at Large": "I subscribe to the claim of Foucault and others that biopolitical modes of fields of power are those which determine what counts in public life, what counts as a citizen and so on" (Penley et al. 11). "Or a father" about "language games of fatherhood" (Haraway 176). Even if this culture is nourished by "male nature", "Irigaray carefully attempts to avoid reifying this culture as something independent of nature and to understand this culture, instead, as an internal torsion within the natural" (Stone 137). To understand this torsion, this work uses a combination of different theoretical approaches and criticism in the reconstructive method to understand and contemplate actual female sexuality in connection with nature. 1.3. Theorising the Female (Reproductive) Body This study shelters different approaches based on two lips imagery directing to multiplicity, dynamism and fluidity as put forward by Irigaray, building upon the previous literature review, taking the folding shape of female genitals at the core. In western cultural history, as Cixous writes, the woman's place is distributed "to be the nonsocial, nonpolitical, nonhuman half of the living structure" ("Sorties" 66). The "woman represent[s] the eternal threat, the anticulture", the "outside", whose "continent is dark" and "dark is dangerous" (Cixous "Sorties" 67-8). However, the anatomy of the female genitals tells another story. Anatomically defined, the vulva is the visible external female genitalia. By external what is meant is all that isn't within the pelvis, so the vaginal aperture is included. Divergent from psychoanalysis and classical sculpture, [the] external 31 female vulva is visible only through exploration. It is two sets of lips, clitoris, vagina, anus, g-spot and apocryphal elements. It is spreading out and convergence of labia. It is the unity of the clitoris and its concealment of the urethra, a single organ as [a] palimpsest. The vaginal 'aperture' is a volitional hole, both penetrable and ingurgitant. The general perinea, the indiscernibility between what constitutes the vulva (not the thigh, not the belly) and what constitutes the surrounds (not vulva) and the internal aspect of the vulva, which reflects the infinite potential found in the exploration of all internalities (seen in such activities as speculum sex, fisting, and douche and enema play among other things) offer an organ far removed materially and conceptually from the hypostasis of the phallus. (Maccormack 11) She is the embodiment of nature represented through the analogy of earth; she is the archaic goddess carrying both good and evil within; she is the repressed of the psyche. That is why illustrating all within this work requires the explanation of a combination of parts of several theoretical literary approaches and methodologies. To begin, the Archeomythology methodology is propounded by Marija Gimbutas and can be observed in her book The Language of the Goddess. In this book, she unearths the hidden symbols of western civilisation by studying an archaeomythology—a field that combines archaeology, comparative mythology, and folklore—to open new horizons for reconstructing prehistoric ideology depending on a "-gylanic, nonviolent, earth-centred culture" (Gimbutas xxi). As there is a wide range of archaeological findings concerning the representation of female awkward procreative power, this contributes to the reconstructive method of this study in reawakening the actual female image through primordial relevance. Another field that applies primordial images, is psychology in its use of mythology. Freud's and Jung's works exemplify that they consult archaic myths and images to understand people. Using their work in a deconstructive manner affords to reconstruct of female representation. For this, Feminist Posthumanities supplies a beneficial approach to involve in the process. Feminist Posthumanities is an interdisciplinary theoretical approach that delves into the hierarchal understanding of existence “at various crossroads of human and nonhuman co- constitution”. It is “a jamming of the theoretical machinery in asserting the existence of excluded others of the humanities” (Asberg & Braidotti, A Feminist Companion to the 32 Posthumanities 4). Braidotti suggests that "[a]s a figuration, the posthuman is both situated and partial—it does not define the new human condition but offers a spectrum through which we can capture the complexity of ongoing processes of subject–formation. In other words, it enables subtler and more complex analyses of powers and discourses" ("Framework for the Critical Posthumanities" 36). For Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari "anything that is irredeemably other, woman, girl, animal, and a semiotic element without signification such as colour, harmonious music without melody—prevents unfolding- refolding from producing a hybrid third term or self as part of a greater in-between and less than its own ideational subjectivity" (Maccormack 12). In connection with "the late twentieth century, our time, [is]a mythic time" Haraway says , "we are all chimeras" ("A Manifesto" 3). Harraway's feminist figure 'Cyborg' intents to interpret the concepts of hierarchies and dualism between female/male, mind/body, nature/culture, animal/human; "a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals … , not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints". Thus, this wages a defence "about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war" ("A Manifesto" 8). Therefore, it is necessary to activate this perspective which connects the study to the non-binary understanding of eco-feminist literary criticism. Ecofeminist literary criticism has a nonbinary point of view valuing all creatures in the world. "It offers a unique combination of literary and philosophical perspectives that gives literary and cultural critics a special lens through which they can investigate … the ways representations of nature are linked with representations of gender, race, class, and sexuality". Moreover, another "primary projects of eco-feminist literary critics is [the] analysis of the cultural construction of nature, which also includes an analysis of language, desire, knowledge, and power” (Warren & Erkal 227). Subsequently, nature "has been inscribed in the same way that women's bodies and sexual pleasure have been inscribed in patriarchal discourse, as passive, interceptive, docile, mirror and complement". Eco- feminism, "on the other hand, aims to create a consciousness that goes beyond nature/culture and male/female dualisms toward a consciousness of peoples living with the earth, valuing both biological and cultural diversity" (Warren and Erkal 315). 33 Therefore, "[t]he conceptual links between women and nature suggested by eco-feminists make rewriting one part [is to] rewriting the other" (Warren & Erkal 233-4). She is the embodiment of nature. Returning nature means a return to women. In this sense, many radical eco-feminists chose "to return to nature-based religions and a revival of goddess spirituality. Carol Christ, Riane Eisler, Monica Sjoo, Barbara Mor Spretnak, Starhawk, and Merlin Stone celebrate ancient traditions that honor women's power and creativity, above all the capacity they share with nature of giving life" (Rose 80). Charlene Spretnak states as such: "the sacred link between the Goddess in her many guises and totemic animals and plants, sacred groves, and womblike cave, in the moon rhythm blood of menses, the ecstatic dance—the experience of knowing Gaia, her voluptuous contours and fertile plains, her flowing waters that give life, her animal teachers" was intriguing (5). Riane Eisler exemplifies this in her book The Chalice and the Blade by including Neolithic art in which "the theme of the unity of all things in nature" is "personified by the Goddess" and "in some of her representations she is herself part human and part animal" in the shrines of Catal Huyuk where "we find representations of the Goddess both pregnant and giving birth". Furthermore, this is also displayed by the "symbols of the Goddess, whose body is the divine Chalice containing the miracle of birth and the power to transform death into life through the mysterious cyclical regeneration of nature". In addition, "the supreme power governing the universe is a divine Mother who gives her people life, provides them with material and spiritual nurturance, and who even in death can be counted on to take her children back into her cosmic womb" (19). This is what Freud writes about "the conservative nature of drives" in his famous work; "it must aspire to an old state, a primordial state from which it once departed, and to which via all the circuitous byways of development it strives to return" (Beyond 154). Freud’s interpretation in this excerpt meshes with the divine Mother image, giving life and taking the dead back in the end to regenerate. The entire aim of life is a return to the point where everything begins. This point refers to the mother as the holder of the egg, cave, womb, and crypt. The mother is a woman at first. In the end, it is the female body that creates the men and all living beings, as the language games of the father’s law also reveal: Wo(man). 34 I thus claim the purpose of this study is to reawaken an archaic goddess figure who has positive affinities directing to a powerful representation of women emerging from her creative power. The fact that the woman is blessed with the power of metamorphosis embodying natural cycles of regeneration places women in an in-between state. As a result, female genitals threaten Western sensibility because, in that submerged philosophy, human beings learn to think, as Irigaray argues, ‘either-or’, connoting to dualism. The significance of the female body is underestimated or associated with negative connotations to hold the power of creation. However, the fertile female body connotes non-binary in connection to its regenerative power as a reminder of nature. On the other hand, men’s link with nature reminds them of the fragility of the symbolic order; thereby transforming nature into the culture by way of rules to control it, the female body is either underestimated or associated with monstrosity. Therefore, this analysis asserts that men’s effort to conceal their deathly attraction toward the female genitals is the main reason behind all the negative connotations attributed to female sexuality. Through the thorough analysis of the Black Hole, The Passion of New Eve and Perfume, this study illustrates that the suppressed image of the primordial mother goddess blinks beneath the disgust, danger, infection, and monstrosity attached to her through her reproductive body. By manifesting all, this work employs a reconstructive view of female imagery endorsed with procreational power that enables the flourishing of the seeds of life whose exclusion from the cultural domain brings about nothing other than destruction, as observed in the previous centuries. 35 PART II: BLACK HOLE IMAGERY VS REPRODUCTIVE POWER 2.1. Unearthing the Prehistoric Fertility Figurines A black hole is a fascinating and mysterious gigantic circle in the universe that cap