i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Truth Unveiled / 151Nadya’s „esh succumbs to gravity, pulling the thighs open, not in provocationbut in fatigue. Her tiny head has no control over her material bulk which, loglike,rolls forward under the force of its own weight. Nadya Nude reopens thequestion of sexual identity that had been deƒned in the Ashton portrait interms of lack—the shapeless body fragment, the black hole of the pubic region,all of which denied Ethel an intact sexuality. Whether intentional onNeel’s part or not, the profound sense of inferiority, even shame, conveyed byher expression makes Ashton an almost textbook illustration of Freud’s conceptof the female as a castrated male. Nadya’s utter lassitude, in turn, appearsillustrative of Freud’s deƒnition of feminine personality traits, such as irrationalityand passivity, that result from her discovery of her “castration.”In his essay “Femininity,” which was published in New Introductory Lecturesto Psychoanalysis in 1933, the year Nadya Nude was painted, Freud locatedthe key to feminine psychic experience in the moment when a girl discoversthat she is not fully human, for she lacks a penis. From that time forward she isdestined to “fall a victim to envy for the penis.” The three corollaries of femininepsychology that result from penis envy are passivity, masochism, and narcissism.9 As Kate Millet argued in Sexual Politics, any woman who resists herrole “is thought to court neurosis, for Femininity is her fate as ‘anatomy is destiny.’”Nadya could be considered a textbook case of female neurosis. Mindless,lacking will or consciousness, Nadya passively and without any anticipationof pleasure opens herself to observation. Blanketing her “hapless defect” isa luxuriant growth of pubic hair, which Freud described as “the response of‘nature herself ’ to cover the female fault.” 10 If depilation had historicallyserved as a convention that visually deprived the classic nude of any evidenceof the model’s own sexual desire, Neel’s overcompensation suggests thatNadya suffers from a surfeit of sexual freedom.Published in the United States during the Depression, Freud’s theory of femalesexuality marked the end of the ƒrst wave of feminism. Looking back in1969, Millet could argue convincingly that,Coming as it did, at the peak of the sexual revolution, Freud’s doctrine of penis envyis in fact a superbly timed accusation, enabling a masculine sentiment to take the offensiveagain . . . The whole weight of responsibility, and even of guilt, is now placedupon any woman unwilling to “stay in her place.” 11Is that the “argument” of Nadya? If she is the half-civilized force Freud described,will the exercise of sexual liberty drag her further toward animality? Inan era of free love, this modern Olympia need not be paid for, but, even gratis,a mindless body is not much of an offer. The Freudian sexual revolution hasnot liberated Nadya in any signiƒcant way.