Object Choices: Taste and Fetishism in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale

Abstract

My title is a loose play on words since ‘object’ choice in psychoanalytic discourse refers to the grammatical sense of object and has nothing to do with material things. Yet erotic choices in Flaubert are invariably mediated or accompanied by the investment of affect in material objects connected with the loved person, and critics have variously explored the function of fetishism in the construction of characters’ psychologies, and in motivating the presence of movement of objects in the novels.¹ Fetishism is here used partly in the fairly unspecified sense of a Bachelardian emotional investment in objects, exploited by a descriptive writer for symbolic or generally poetic potential.² But it is also used in the explicitly Freudian sense of a neurotic structure — the elevation of part of the body or an item of clothing to the status of magic substitute for the maternal phallus. For the split fetishising subject, the absence of the phallus is at once acknowledged and denied in its attempt to ward off the castration anxiety supposedly entailed in a male recognition of sexual difference.³