I wrote this essay for a class in the Fall of 2024 to be presented at the second annual Comparative Literature Undergraduate Symposium, which, upon my presentation, Dr. Margerhita Long of University of California, Irvine called "sumptuous," and which I self-professed to having straightjacketed Miriam... I like it enough anyway... this is not the final version I ended up presenting and thus I did not quite stick the landing but I can't find my notated copy right now so this will just have to do.

When Freud Emerges from Ecstasy

It is next to impossible not to be taken by the very title of Joyce Mansour’s “When Miriam Emerges From Ecstacy.” Decidedly post-post- by way of the titular Miriam’s emergence from ecstasy— in and of itself an after-effect— Mansour’s reader is situated within Miriam’s haze before knowing Miriam at all. Given Mansour's own affiliation to the Surrealist movement, it seems only natural to perform a Freudian analysis of Mansour’s work; as Miriam’s rapture ends, her desires are uncovered. Elements of the Freudian unfurl throughout “When Miriam Emerges From Ecstasy,” proving Miriam to be caught in an endless confrontation with the unheimlich in her desire to escape the trappings of her latent sexuality.

As the poem’s title conveys, Mansour’s reader understands Miriam as narrator of her return from rapture. “I’m back” reads the first line; “Harvest is over / The yellow ears of morning / Stand against the door” (Mansour lines 1-4). Immediately, Miriam’s pastoral reflection is steeped with phallic imagery. Announcing her emergence as a return, Miriam has reaped and is sowing once more, introducing early “yellow ears” of corn from the harvest as forming a barricade against la porte in the original French text, notably feminine and close to the English “portal.” Was this door that from which Miriam emerged– or rather, was delivered from? As understood by Freud, the phallus “is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy [or, rather, the child more broadly] once believed in and … does not want to give up” (Freud 817). At once a child born out of a state of ecstasy and a holy woman of Biblical allusion, Miriam observes a displacement of her mother’s and her own lacking phallus. Erect upon the door stands the yellow ear, potent in its transmutability, at once the phallic cob and the listening appendage, yet out of place in either form; a scene of castration becomes apparent whether in reference to the vegetable rendered from its stalk, yellow under-body defleeced of its outer husk and silk, or the ear of a living thing, dismembered from the head, inflated to the presumed size of the door before Miriam. This dismembered state brings about sensations of the uncanny; says Freud “dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist … all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when … they prove capable of independent activity in addition. [...] This kind of uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration complex” (Freud 810). The door is at once exit and entrapment; she is bound by the phallus as it performs its assertive action, independent of its body in the space before the door. In reference to morning time, the disjointed ear is anchored in the opening of the day, an awakening to parallel Miriam’s own rebirth of an emergence.

However, all is not simple, shining, or new as daybreak; “Irritating problems / Of patina” arise, the natural warping of a metal surface alluding to the passage of time under neglectful circumstance (Mansour lines 5-6). Miriam has been here before. The patina which frustrates her is nothing new, nor is that which it covers. This natural metallic aging progresses into a refutation: “No more pickling olives / On the hills of adultery / No more passive pleasures” she asserts, moving forward with the beginnings of dissatisfaction over past distraction mechanisms which have not yielded her desired result (Mansour lines 7-9). In a Freudian context these pickled olives may represent the eyes, objects conflated with castration anxiety in a child’s fear of losing their eyes in a violent act of corporal punishment. Freud discusses the child’s fear of damage to their vision in relation to E.T.A. Hoffman’s story “The Sand Man,” the eponymous villain being a monster-character “who tears out children's eyes … a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the half-moon to feed his children … their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with” (Freud 804). Nathaniel, the main character of “The Sand Man” outgrows the belief in this monster, but a dread over the traumatic loss of his eyes remains, transforming into an obsession which haunts his unconscious adult mind and ultimately drives him to perform mad acts. Miriam’s olives, once preserved upon the “hills of adultery” suggest a blindness, a past stasis or even a stopping of time which is to be done away with. Dishonest relations upon the embodied landscape of her post-haze only bolster this blindness; the passivity of the pleasures the pastoral landscape of her body has known are insufficient and unsustainable. Here marks a shift in language and tone, welcoming the visceral confrontation of Miriam’s own form and entrapment within it. Miriam is the door which she references in the fourth line of the poem; her body is the hillside and the olives pickled upon it and the wear of the patina and the bitter-metal taste in the reader’s mouth.

The poem continues: “I can’t fight narcosis / Asleep like mud in enclosed gardens / My sex gleams with a great bitter thirst / the exquisite yawn of death” (Mansour lines 10-13). Miriam is possessed by passivity, finding displacement for her dormant sexuality in an enclosed garden, this latency unable to be fought. Is this state of fertile waiting, bound by imagined wrought-iron garden gates, the alternative to the aforementioned “passive pleasures” she denounces herself of? Direct recognition of dissatisfaction in the “great bitter thirst” of her sex forms a clarity in the hidden mud she is bound by; of interest is the continued confrontation within the next line as she likens her sex to death’s yawn— her sex, sa porte, becomes the mouth, communicative and exhalant in its own right, at once welcoming and dispelling. Displacement of the sex organ upon the mouth offers a curious relationship to Freud’s reading of the uncanny; the mouth and the sex are at once heimlich, familiar to Miriam and her reader both, until displaced upon one another, under which circumstance they are solidified as the unheimlich. As death itself, the yawning narcotic, an interest in the repressed takes the stage. Death, that dreaded idea which must be repressed, forms Miriam’s perverse sex, situated at the very same place as her biological porte from which new life may be created and released into the world. Her emergence from ecstasy is at once a death and a rebirth itself, brought about through the likening to the sex as the mouth of death. A question hangs unpunctuated, an open door of its own: “Why do I know sadness without understanding it / Without the medlar pit swollen with rustic blood / To be held like a widow’s last / Between my fingers drenched in light” (Mansour line 14-17). “Without understanding it” Miriam calls into question her own latency and dissatisfaction, unable to hold the yonic rosebush’s stone, another instance of phallic imagery. While the medlar pit may serve to represent her lacking phallus, she imagines it alive, full of flowing blood; this could very well be the image of the child, born of her fertile mud— a phallus of her own. Miriam waits in the wake of the ecstatic harvest, stilled and longing.

Bored of the rupture and repression she circles, Miriam continues to question her own desires. “How to satisfy my need for freshness / No passion / No old punishment / That does not wear vice’s uniform” she laments, undone by the dissatisfactory rustic quality of her blood— understood to border on the animalic— and past attempts to satisfy or reprimand which fail, her progression and development stalled in the homogeneity of vice (Mansour lines 18-21). The collapse: Miriam “fall[s] to the ground with great sealike movements / And swirls of cobblestones with the sound / Of drums” (Mansour 22-24). Static no longer, the drain of the rupture she has circled seemingly swallows her, the “swirls of cobblestones” harkening back to the texture of the “yellow ears” of the poem’s beginning which now form the ground that consumes her. The drums she hears, empty vessels thrashed violently so as to produce their ritual music, soundtrack her journey’s Freudian choreography. From the harvest and the pastoral reflections, Miriam narrates “I fall and I rise and the surface of the city / Cannot be far from misery and time / I come back too soon / O son of my maternal flame / Hello” in simultaneous closing, returning, and recognition (Mansour lines 25-29). Here, the poem ends; Miriam, sealike and unanchored in her cyclical procession from pasture to urbana, is never wholly removed from this misery— akin to her inarticulate sadness— as time brings her back to the site of the rupture. At this rupture, she greets a son born from her “maternal flame” with an unceremonious Salut, forming reference to the Biblical Miriam’s prophecy of her brother Moses who would deliver Israel, undeniable in its Oedipal, incestuous identification of family member and sexual partner. Might this even be Miriam’s own son— Miriam’s own phallus?

The psychosexuality of the presumed prophetic trance Miriam emerges from at the start of the poem reveals itself willing to submit to Freudian interpretation, a picking apart of the trappings of desire presented throughout “When Miriam Emerges From Ecstasy.” Mansour’s continued lingering on surfaces and thresholds throughout offers resistance to a Freudian analysis of what lies under these surfaces; however, the unheimlich returns, ecological displacements of organs and latent lechery, and problematized phallic imagery Mansour presents through Miriam’s rebirthing remain close to the psychoanalytic theory at the foundation of her Surrealist background and training. Miriam’s deliverance from herself bears the phallic fruits of her prophesying labor as she returns to the site of psychic rupture— a place she never left— from a place she never left.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. Excerpts from “The Uncanny” and “The Fetish” provided by Dr. Natania Meeker.

Mansour, Joyce. “When Miriam Emerges From Ecstasy,” from In The Glittering Maw, translated by C. Francis Fisher, 2024.