But she immediately follows this observation with what feels like a retraction:
The capacity for womanliness was there in this woman – and one might even say it exists in the most completely homosexual woman – but owing to her conflicts it did not represent her main development, and was used far more as a device for avoiding anxiety than as a primary mode of sexual enjoyment.
(1929: 306–7)
Here Riviere reverts to a claustrophobic pairing of physiological and psychological reductionism: a ‘capacity for womanliness’ as an ontological characteristic of female bodies; and the subject’s representation of this capacity as a function of internal conflicts. For Riviere, the womanly masquerade seems to be dependent on a speculative magic trick that conjures a naturalised internal capacity whose functioning is dependent on conflicts that are internal to the subject. She maps these conflicts as an individualised unconscious representation of familial dynamics, explaining her patient’s compensatory femininity as ‘an unconscious attempt to ward off the anxiety which would ensue on account of the reprisals she anticipated from the father figures after her intellectual performance’ (305); and elaborates the origin of this anxiety in a primal scene of envy and appropriation of the father’s penis, followed by reparation and appeasement via the feminine masquerade (310–11). This analysis of her patient’s supposedly individual unconscious nevertheless conforms to the stereotypical – Jean Walton says ‘obligatory’ (1995: 790) – features of a Kleinian narrative of ego development. An apparent opening up of the categories of sex and gender is thus tamed into an individualising story following an established psychoanalytic discourse of internal phantasy as a defense against anxiety, rage, dread and helplessness (Riviere, 311).