Le Moyne College Calendar

Please join us at the Humanities Research Seminar, showcasing the scholarly work of the Le Moyne faculty, This event will feature Michael Davis, Ph.D., Francis J. Fallon Endowed Professor and associate professor of English. Dr. Davis will deliver a talk titled The Signification of the Fan in Lady Windermere's Fan: The Female Phallus and the Name of the Mother.

Born just a year-and-a-half before Freud, Oscar Wilde was a nearly exact contemporary of Freud’s and both began to publish their work in the 1880s. Like Feud, Wilde had a broad classical education and like Freud he was deeply interested in investigating the topic of sexuality. While Freud became a physician and would develop his own apparatus for making his inquiry into sexuality, namely psychoanalysis, first fully articulated in the Interpretation of Dreams(1899/1900), Wilde made use of the available devices of literature—poems, plays, novels, essays—to make his. Both focused their inquiries on genital sexuality, both settled on the trope of castration, and both apprehended the significance of the phallus in thinking about sexual difference. Wilde had a very avant-garde mind and not only anticipated Freud’s conceptualization of the phallus in the 1920s but also Jacques Lacan’s in the 1950s and even Judith Butler’s in the 1990s. In his play Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), Wilde is already conceptualizing the idea of the transposable phallus and more particularly the possibility of the female phallus, exploiting the theatrical convention of the stage property to explore the idea of the privileged sexual property.