Abstract

A literature response to Lacan's concept of the objet petit a - the imaginary “object-cause” of desire, which accounts for certain consciousness and unconsciousness of Scarlett for her pursuit of Ashely. And then I explore the Lacanian dimension of phantasy and gaze appear in object a to elucidate the inner object-cause of desire of Scarlett in order to demonstrate the lack and loss deep in her mind of symbolic castration to her mother.

1. Introduction

Gone with the wind depicts a historic framework in which a lot of romantic elements have been inserted. As she wrote this novel, Margaret Mitchell drew from the American Civil War and the Reconstruction period’s event headlines about topics such as king cotton, the politics of slavery and light-hearted atmosphere of the pre-Civil War. It contains a power of love story with the shifting relationship of desire and knowledge, from which Scarlett develops her own recognition- “the discovery of her own erotic truth” (Marx 258), and her knowledge on love. Margaret Mitchell uses a sense of nostalgia to create a lost world with nearly nothing left on the current situation. She writes a delightful scene before the civil war in the south, “raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one's liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered” (26). Kant suggests this delight may bring out desire that “the delight which we connect with the representation of the real existence of an object is called interest. Such a delight, therefore, always involves a reference to the faculty of desire” (40). Here the absence of the life of carefree South provokes the desire of the writer and people who cherish the memory of the prior Civil War.Therefore, not only the writer yearns to travel back to the previous world, but the heroine in her novel bravely chases her true love as she identified as well.

As such, Margaret Mitchell’s use this desire to write a novel to show a strong narrative of the past event and a vivid eye for details. “Narratives both tell of desire” as Peter Brooks notes, “typically present some story of desire—and arouse and make use of desire as a dynamic of signification” (37). From the view of Scarlett, she’s chasing for true love, and the process of constantly losing the loved ones can demonstrate the transition from absence to the acquired object, the impetus for her to move close to the object, the pains caused by obstructions when she realizes it is not the love she would pursue, and the action for achievement of desire. This desire, as Henry Rutgers Marshall addresses, “is accompanied by hope, and when, though action for the attainment of the desired object is not possible, still some activity adequate to relieve the strain on the nerves is possible” (97).

Roland Barthes suggests that “absence becomes an active practice…there is a creation of a fiction which has many roles (doubts, reproaches, desires, melancholies)” (I6). Therefore, we can say that the loss of the war and the light-hearted atmosphere of the pre-Civil War are the cause of a sense of absence and invoking desire for Mitchell to write this novel. How about the fiction itself, where is the desire of the heroine originated? And what causes this desire to go on and on? Perhaps some readers who have read this novel would say the desire Scarlett O’hara wants but never gets is the desire for Ashley. But in my view, it is the transference of love from her mother to Ashley that has caused the desire itself, and the process is unconscious to Scarlett. This is what Lacan mentioned in his Ecrits, the cause of desire is derived from “the deprived of the Phallus” (216).

In the following I will discuss this complicated causation of desire in love. After presenting the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan concerning this division, I will read them into Margaret Mitchell's masterful portrayal of the complicated pictures of desire and love as they entwine the narrator of her magnum opus, Gone with the Wind.

As mentioned above, desire and love are the important factors throughout the text which Lacan articulated the cause of desire as a division of object a. Therefore, it is natural to start the study towards Lacan’s research on object a. Next, I will examine the places where Lacan hints at an expression in Object a between what he refers to as phantasy and gaze, respectively. Finally, I will supplement and elaborate Lacan’s theory of desire on my reading of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.

2. Lacan, the Cause of Desire-Object a

In Lacanian view, Phallus means its functional meaning. “It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes” (E 218). ^{1} Phallus is a signifier without specific signified. The definition of phallus is “the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire” (E 220). And Lacan mentions that the desire is nothing but “the phallus” the mother loses. So, if the mother’s desire is “the phallus”, then her infant wishes to be the phallus to satisfy that desire of her mother. When the infant tries his/her best to meet the needs of her mother’s desire, it is demand generated in the process of achieving the goal. For Lacan, he claims that any demand is a demand for love, “referring back to the primal moment of a baby's first cry that is interpreted by the loving mother” (E 321). This can be seen clearly in the fiction, when Scarlett depicted her mother was as holy as Virgin Mary. “Ellen O'Hara was different, and Scarlett regarded her as something holy…When Scarlett was a child, she had confused her mother with the Virgin Mary” (39). Because she knew that in her heart, Ellen stood for something special, “Ellen represented the utter security that only Heaven or a mother can give” (39).

Ordinarily, people like to focus on the “subject of desire”, then to the “object of desire”. But Lacan treats it conversely, he thinks there must be an object then there can form the subject of desire. And this object is not merely a simple one, it is the “object-cause” to further form the process of desire in motion. However, this object is lost from its beginning, according to Lacan’s theory, and it appears at any time in the subject's phantasy, but is still in the form of absence, that is, it expresses its own being by its own lost. Lacan defines this as “a privileged object, which has emerged from some primal separation, from some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the real, whose name, in our algebra, is the object a” (Lacan Seminar XI 83). ^{2}

Correspond to this, Anika Lemaire puts forward two thoughts about object a:

In its first sense, it is the object lost in the subject's Spaltung, the unnamed, the phallus which the child wishes to be in order to complete its mother, the symbolic complement of its own lack.

……

In a second sense, (a) is the representative of the object of lack (the phallus), or the metonymic object of desire (the fetish for example). It is, to use another of Lacan's expressions, the fallen (le caduque), the remainder fallen from the signifying concatenation. In short, object (a) is the signifier of desire, whatever it may be, deprived of its symbolic reference to the unconscious signified (the object of lack of being: the phallus) (174).

What Lemaire explains to us is the core meaning of the definition of object a and how to understand it. First, it is being the cause of desire, a surplus jouissance; Second, in the field of vision it is gaze. For Lacan, child wants to figure out the inexplicable things in the Other’s desire. Child tries his/her best to fill in mother’s entire lost, making up for all her lost space. Mother’s desire is what his/her command and request.

Lacan addresses that “man’s desire is the désir de l’Autre (the desire of the Other)” (E 238) which means man's desire is always concerned with the Other/mother. Once the men goes into the Symbolic Order, who understands that it is a necessary progress of losing the phantasy of the mother. In the course of human growth, a baby becomes a real man who must overcome Oedipus stage which father is the rule of law and then goes through the passage of Symbolic Castration – realizing self cannot be the mother’s phallus. “It is, therefore, the assumption of castration which creates the lack through which desire is instituted. Desire is the desire for desire, the desire of the Other and it is subject to the Law” (Lemaire, 164). Owing to language cannot express explicitly what objects need when they transform need into requirement through language- the Symbolic Order, as Lacan puts it elliptically, “it is precisely because desire is articulated that it is not articulable, I mean in the discourse best suited to it, an ethical, not a psychological discourse” (E 231), there must leave something obscure which it cannot be clearly expressed. “Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need” (E 237). In this situation, the object a is a surplus, the reminder.

All forms of phantasy are the illusory fulfillment of desire. Phantasy is an activity of thought separated from reality. It belongs to the Symbolic Order and it solves the problem of the subject entering the Symbolic world in an illusory way. More importantly, for all these fundamental phantasies, there is a tendency to restore or reproduce the original lived experience of desire associated with the objects. As Lemaire suggests:

All the objects of the subject's desire will always be a reminder of some primal experience of pleasure, of a scene which was lived passively and will always refer back through associative links, which become more complex and more subtle with the passage of time, to that lived experience (164).

Phantasy is essentially a verbal activity, although there can exist lots of colorful images. Therefore, subject’s desire can generally be represented by different sounds as well as pictures and figures, which all exemplify the signifier. Lacan calls this signifier a requirement. For Lacan, request shows general terms in the Symbolic Order and it also denotes important places for the gradual dissimilation of primal desire.

As we have mentioned above, the cause of desire is the surplus jouissance; now let us discuss object a from another point of view- the gaze view. “The gaze I encounter—you can find this in Sartre's own writing—is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other” (S XI 84). In Lacan’s view, what Sartre means is that gaze is not a direct view from others but a sight from the object’s surroundings:

If you turn to Sartre's own text, you will see that, far from speaking of the emergence of this gaze as of something that concerns the organ of sight, he refers to the sound of rustling leaves, suddenly heard while out hunting, to a footstep heard in a corridor (S XI 84).

Sartre is focus on objectification when the subject is gazed at, and Lacan develops this point and emphasizes the difference between the eyes and gazing.

From the outset, we see, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there is no coincidence, but, on the contrary, a lure. When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that—you never look at me from the place from which I see you (S XI 102-3).

But what is the relation with object a? Lacan combines observing behaviour with the observer and the observed, which is successfully revealed the complexity in the impetus to observe. The third position, although it is invisible, is working all the time to vitalize the subject a commitment to a visual object. And it is the object a,rather than anything else. “The objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze” (S XI 105).

3. Scarlett and Desire

Who is Scarlett? And, what is Mitchell’s own representation of Scarlett? Although it is not an easy question to answer, she is a girl with uncanny sense of intuition to love, who releases her charm on the one hand- to satisfy men’s desire and get what she wants, and on the other hand, disguises her true feeling for Ashely, who possesses her real vacancy of desire. The narrator has sketched her as below:

“Scarlett O'hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were” (1). ^{3}

Scarlett is so charming that “she was the belle of five counties, and with some truth, for she had received proposals from nearly all the young men in the neighborhood and many from places as far away as Atlanta and Savannah” (39). The reason for this is that Scarlett is very fond of her mother and obeys what her mother requires her to do. Scarlett herself is not a girl with ladyhood, “it was Gerald's headstrong and impetuous nature in her that gave them concern” (39). Scarlett herself knows “nothing of the inner workings of any human being's mind, not even her own” (39). But she wants to be a lady just in front of her mother. She only knows how to show the best faces to her mother, and conceals “her damaging qualities” (39) in front of her mother, “for her mother could shame her to tears with a reproachful glance” (39).

As Yannis Stavrakakis observes, “it could be argued that the concept of the objet petit a gradually takes, in the work of Lacan, the place of the symbolic phallus. The object-cause of desire takes the place of the signifier of desire. It could even be possible to view these two terms as identical” (Laca and the Political (London, 1999) 50). In Lacan’s early work, phallic signifier was a precursor to the objet petit a, as Lacan says, is the cause of desire. And loss and lack cause man to desire. “Desperately she longed for her mother's return from the Slatterys', for, without her, she felt lost and alone” (40). Because Scarlett does not acquire her mother’s whole love and attention, which causes her own desire of her mother transference to the desire on Ashley. After realizing the way of symbolic castration, Scarlett transfers her love to another man, that is, as Freud suggests “the magic trick is what we call transference love” (Freud 1915/1958).

Lacan calls this transference “the desire of the Other” (E 238). And Scarlett develops its full use of function. After receiving the news of Ashely going to marry his own cousin, Melanie, Scarlett was heartbroken and desperate, and then took a phantasy on Ashely, “phantasy, which is where object a takes root” (E 323-60). She first thought that “If he knew she loved him, he would hasten to her side” (45). What she had to do is to tell Ashley that she loved him, not any other man around herself. “Through phantasy this missing object is interpreted and reconstructed as an object of desire” (Smith 357). And this can directly inform discussion of literature.

However, phantasy is just a phantasy. “She pictured the whole scene in her mind” (47) that Ashley would stay alone with her and then she would express her love in a ladylike way. The day was warm without raining, and such a glowing morning called Scarlett to wear her most beautiful dress and dream about Ashely’s proposal to her. “Scarlett sat on a high rosewood ottoman” (64), waiting Ashely coming to see her. The barbecue was at its peak and “she had scarcely touched plate in her hands and seven cavaliers about her” (64). But “Ashley had made no attempt to join the circle about her” (64). “He only looked up at Melanie and talked on” (65), and Melanie’s face lit up with delight as she looked at Ashely, “for if ever a loving heart showed itself upon a face, it was showing now on Melanie Hamilton's” (65). All these things happened between the couples did not run away from Scarlett’s eyes, “for all that she had a superfluity of beaux, she had never been more miserable in her life” (64).

Scarlett could not satisfy her desire, and this loss made her hate Ashely as well as his wife Melanie. She made a great shame of herself to Ashely, that she showed her love to him but Ashely did not take in. At that time Scarlett was very sad and angry and hated Ashely for marrying Melanie rather than herself. She did not understand why, and that was not an important issue for her anymore. “For the moment, Ashley as Ashley was forgotten…and she hated them all because they laughed…in her hot heart now for anything but hate” (78).

Desire is produced in the beyond of the demand, in that, in articulating the life of the subject according to its conditions, demand cuts off the need from that life. But desire is also hollowed within the demand, in that, as an unconditional demand of presence and absence, demand evokes the want-to-be under the three figures of the nothing that constitutes the basis of the demand for love, of the hate that even denies the other’s being, and of the unspeakable element in that which is ignored in its request. (E 201).

She decided not to go home but to fight at this miserable situation. Deep down in Scarlett’s heart engendered the unspeakable element: she wanted to be the focus of everybody, just like the pearl of her mother’s palm. She rushed to agree to marry Charles Hamilton, the cousin of Melanie, and quickly became a widow after losing her husband in the war. But deep in her heart, “under layers of hurt pride and cold practicality, something stirred hurtingly” (81). Scarlett understood that she still loved him, “she loved Ashley and she knew she loved him and she had never cared so much as in that instant when she saw Charles disappearing around the curved graveled walk” (81).

But her love could only rest on a delusion and phantasy on other’s desire. What she did with Charles was to get Ashely’s attention. But now Ashely was gone, he was not around her any longer for the war. “Now he was gone and she was married to a man she not only did not love but for whom she had an active contempt” (83). And all this caused her regret it all!

In an uncertain relationship, something of the other is found in oneself (McSherry; Loewenthal & Cayne 2019). Scarlett fancied herself as Melanie, when Melanie consoled her with her arm around Scarlett’s. “But it was not of dead Charles she was thinking. It was of Ashley” (109) that caused her cry and worry. Scarlett now was dreaming about what Melanie dreamed about Ashely. She had no intention of leaving the spot, where “the newspaper office was the only place where she could learn the truth” (157). And Scarlett was worried about Ashely’s fighting-perhaps he was dying in the war or even worse.

She also dreamed of Ashely becoming her husband, and she could get rested on him during this terrible war. “If only Ashley were her husband, instead of Melanie's, how sweet it would be to go to him and lay her head upon his shoulder and cry and shove her burdens onto him to work out as best he might” (319).

But the situation changes as the war going on. Phantasy is an activity of thought separated from reality. Once the reality is touched, the illusion will be destroyed. Once the desire gets clear, the desire will be satisfied with another desire. This is the situation with Scarlett to her desire of Ashely. Ashely finally came back from war and full of desperation. “At the sight of Ashley in rags, with an axe in his hand” (320), and she could not bear to see him like that, for Ashely was the one “playing the piano and writing things which sounded beautiful and made no sense whatsoever” (320). But at that moment, all that fine and elegant thing was gone far away, and the most important thing right now was how to survive from this war. Tara was at risk for paying tax, but Scarlett did not get enough money to pay it. “They were deadly serious matters to her and sometimes she was almost irritated at his remarks” (320). Scarlett found out that Ashely only focused on something in the air, not the real things happened around her, then she remained a little disappointment, “because the tired feeling was back on her more strongly than ever. Ashley wasn't being any help at all” (320).

Finally, Scarlett realized that Ashely was not her desire any more, for the reason that she got clearer about this desire-Ashely. “He never really existed at all, except in my imagination” (623), she was very tired and weary of him. Now, Scarlett did not want him anymore. She thought:

I loved something I made up, something that's just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn't see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all (623).

Now Scarlett looked back down on the old days and realized how foolish she had been. “She could see so clearly now that he was only a childish fancy” (623), and that Ashely was not her desire anymore for the reason that she could see clear of him, and could get him whenever she asks. Because the greatest obstacle was lost, and that obstacle was the death of Melanie. “And now she's dead and I've got him and I don't want him” (623).

Object a exists in a situation of subject that contains both lack and surplus. The cause of desire is originated in frustration, not in completeness.

Not frustration of a desire of the subject, but frustration by an object in which his desire is alienated and which the more it is elaborated, the more profound the alienation from his jouissance becomes for the subject (E 32).

Therefore, Scarlett has acquired Ashely as Ashely the desire in a way and there left no more sense of frustration in the process of gaining him. And in a way, she has finished her desire and was recognized by Ashely. What she needs now is to be recognized by Rhett Butler, who is becoming her new desire.

In short, nowhere does it appear more clearly that man’s desire finds its meaning in the desire of the other, not so much because the other holds the key to the object desired, as because the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other (E 43).

Gaze is another factor that can cause human’s desire. And Lacan puts it as “not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other” (S XI 98). For example, when Scarlett was surrounded by a group of beaux, she was not satisfied with these boys’ flirting but hoped that someone, especially Ashely, could notice what happened around her or gaze her in a way.

Another example was when Scarlett lost her first husband and became a widow, she wanted to be focus of boys again. The dancing was about to begin. Having become a widow, however, Scarlett could not dance anymore. But when Rhett Butler announced that he wanted to dance with her, “Scarlett was so startled she could not even move” (118). She was so astonished and “everybody turned to look at her” (118). It was obvious that “she was in mourning and it was impossible for her to appear on the floor” (118). But Scarlett still wanted to satisfy her desire and become focused by everyone at the ball. Thus, she said yes and danced under gaze of others.

Is there no satisfaction in being under that gaze of which…I spoke just now, that gaze that circumscribes us, and which in the first instance makes us beings who are looked at, but without showing this (89)?

Just as Lacan mentioned above, the function of gaze is to meet man’s desire and “satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness” (S XI 88). The gaze in the ball was not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by Scarlett. As Sartre writes, “I no longer see the eye that looks at me and, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears” (S XI 98).

4. Conclusion

Lacan named Object a as “a privileged object, which has emerged from some primal separation, from some induced by the very approach of the real, whose name, in our algebra, is the objet a” (S XI 97). Object a always appears in the phantasy. Whether it is conscious or unconscious in the illusion, we need to figure out the desire of the subject. Therefore, we should find the cause of object, as objet a. In the fiction, Scarlett is the desire of the subject, and the cause of object is originated from the lack of her mother’s whole care and love. She needs this love, but it loses forever. And this kind of lack can cause what Lacan mentiones as Objet a. “This serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking” (S XI 117). Because it is lacking, Scarlett starts to get her transference love or desire from her mother to Ashely, and later to Rhett Butler, which causes her phantasy on them. Just as Lacan puts it, “the man’s desire is the desire of the Other” (E 238).

Then we also find out that Objet a can also cause gaze. “The gaze may contain in itself the objet a of the Lacanian algebra” (S XI 91). As Scarlett danced in front of all the guests and she did realize the gaze from all people around, including the far away parents at home. Because “the object on which depends the phantasy from which the subject is suspended in an essential vacillation is the gaze” (S XI 97). And “the gaze is specified as unapprehensible” (S XI 97). Scarlett found that consciousness was in her mind as she dancing, flirting with other beaux, and “that consciousness, in its illusion of seeing itself seeing itself, finds its basis in the inside-out structure of the gaze” (S XI 96).

Notes

1. Quotations from Lacan’s Ecrits are hereinafter marked only by capital letter (E) and page numbers in the parenthesis.

2. Quotations from Lacan’s The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis are hereinafter marked only by capital letter (S XI) and page numbers in the parenthesis.

3. Quotations from Gone with the Wind are hereinafter marked only by page numbers in the parenthesis.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my tutor and my family for their mental support when I did research on Lacan.

References