ellauri083.html on line 338: Hendershot recalls that, in the Schreber case, God was believed to manifest his creative and destructive power as celestial rays (Freud 22). As with spider-webs and hedgehogs quills, this radial pattern describing dilation and contraction, movement back and forth from center to circumference and from circumference to center, is the essential figure for the paranoid narcissism of a subject who feels threatened by the world and guilty for having taken "his own body [...] as his love-object" (Freud 60). Signaling Fistule's repressed homosexuality, the rays of his intelligence had first been focused on the masochistic annihilation of his genitals, which he denies were the original object of his love ("organes hideux," "vomitoires de dejections"), and then had been used in reconstructing a sexless new reality. Insisting on his exemption from the Naturalist law of biological determinism, Fistule denies his human parentage and maintains that he was born of a star, which, shining like the rays of his genius, had inseminated him and allowed him to be the father of himself, causa sui. Homosexual guilt initially projected as the corruptibility of matter is overcome by Fistule's principle of Stellogenesis, which turns flesh into radiance and bodies into starlight. As Hendershot concludes: "In Freud's theory, the paranoiac withdraws from the world (decathexis), directs his or her cathectic energy to the ego resulting in self-aggrandizement, and then attempts to reestablish a cathectic relationship with the world in the form of a delusional system"
xxx/ellauri086.html on line 659: In Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, a crowd gathers to witness the punishment of Hester Prynne, a young woman who has given birth to a baby of unknown parentage. Her sentence required her to stand on the scaffold for three hours, exposed to public humiliation, and to wear the scarlet "A" for the rest of her life. As Hester approaches the scaffold, many of the women in the crowd are angered by her beauty and quiet dignity. When demanded and cajoled to name the father of her child, Hester refuses.
xxx/ellauri120.html on line 223: In Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, a crowd gathers to witness the punishment of Hester Prynne, a young woman who has given birth to a baby of unknown parentage. Her sentence required her to stand on the scaffold for three hours, exposed to public humiliation, and to wear the scarlet "A" for the rest of her life. As Hester approaches the scaffold, many of the women in the crowd are angered by her beauty and quiet dignity. When demanded and cajoled to name the father of her child, Hester refuses.
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