Vicki Mahaffey

Père-version and Im-mère-sion: Idealized Corruption in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Picture of Dorian Gray

This essay outlines two complementary models of corrupt desire, which it labels “père-version” and “im-mère-sion” after the father and the mother, respectively. The perversion legislated by the father is characterized by detachment and is expressed through homophobia and misogyny, whereas immersion signifies a corruption initiated by the “purity” of an engulfing mother; because the object of desire is hidden (or immersed), such desire is associated with the closet. If the desire taught by the father is a formula for “non-relation” because the emotional bonding with men must be non-sexual and the connection with (commodified and idealized) women is only sexual, the idealized desire associated with the mother is one characterized by mutual unconscious dependence, a toxic cocktail of worship and shame. Finally, the essay demonstrates how perversion ages a child, in contrast with immersion’s infantilizing of the child, and how perversion is associated with waste and immersion with food. In both models, the desiring subject demands a fetish, but perversion fetishizes the woman and immersion the child. Desire for a fetish facilitates an avoidance of the complexities of changing (and mortal) flesh.A redacted version of this essay was published in Quare Joyce, edited by Joseph Valente, and also in Mahaffey, States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and the Irish Experiment.