Epilogue

Abstract

In one scene in Scarlet Street, we see Chris Cross kneeling before Kitty March as she has him paint her toenails. The scene is a mockery of his desire to capture her on canvas, and the image represents the bind of those who wish to categorize others. The desire for control results paradoxically in one’s reliance on and fetish for that which continues to allude: the unsanctioned, the dissident, the deviant. The same image of the male subject groveling at the toes of his subject can be seen in Caspary’s Laura. The gum-shoe detective acknowledges, more than once, that the first thing he looks at on a woman is her ankles.¹ ‘It was hard’, the man comments callously at one point, ‘to think of those legs dead and gone forever’.² In accord with the empathy described through the portraits in works such as Lee’s ‘Oke of Okehurst’ (1892), Woolf’s Orlando (1928), and du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), the image of the foot-fetishist combines control and authority with an erotically charged dependence that exposes the dominant individual’s sense of fallibility and even evokes empathy for his self-doubt. The power dynamics reflect the mutual dependence between an object of desire and its producer or consumer as well as the emotional volatility of the relationship. It also reveals that, as far back as the invention of the photograph, nonvisual contributions to visuality have had a crucial influence because of their relative invisibility, a situation that had been exacerbated in part by the common assumption that sight is unmediated and uninfluenced.