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These two books are part of the series Reading Women Writing and belong to the currently fashionable postmodernism within feminist literary theory that purports to liberate women. Whereas
Biddy Martin presents Lou Andreas-Salomé as “a writer, thinker, and lay analyst who spent the greater part of her life among the cultural and intellectual elites…[and made her mark] on the basis of her liaisons with famous men” (p. 1), Patricia Elliot primarily is concerned with expanding the secondary literature about Freud and Lacan and the ever-growing academic discourse that expects to advance feminism.
According to Martin, Salomé was both an intellectual and a seductress; she allegedly “entered a discursive and social universe in which gender polarity was essential” (p. 3); and her “construction of femininity did not challenge the ultimate fact of sexual difference of the presumption of heterosexuality head on… [because] affirmative femininity, free of competitiveness and ressentiment, exposed man's lack and his need, but also reassured him, protected him from the threat of direct challenge” (p. 5). Quoting profusely from the usual sources of postmodernist feminism, such as Michel Foucault, Jane Gallop, and Luce Irigaray, Martin maintains that Salomé “enjoyed a privileged place among her male colleagues and associates,” did not identify with feminists, and “conceived and enacted positions other than oedipal ones, [in] her efforts to imagine and to perform the oxymoron of feminine individuality” (p. 22).
Until page 191, Freud is just another influence on Salomé, another famous conquest—Nietzsche, Rée, Rilke, among many others, preceded him. But her analysis with Freud was to be her first relationship to “displace the hierarchical gender divide and inevitable appropriation that had characterized other pedagogical exchanges, other all-too-conventional scenes of seduction,” which, in François Roustang's familiar formulation, meant she found a “father” who “granted her her own desi