king off so unexpectedly…this was an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part… No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhibit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through unscathed” (100). Freud has taken Dora’s story and departure on a personal level because she was able to turn the tables and conjure up Freud’s own demons. The intellectual arrogance that he has presented to the world is simply a front. Freud’s constant fixation on Dora, the fact that, “he had still not done with Dora” (Marcus, 64), was because she was able to strike a chord with his greatest professional fear. Her abandonment without being fully cured reinforced Freud’s inner conflict over his inability to heal as well as demonstrating his failure of the male gender role of “protector”. By retaining the Victorian definition of a woman, Freud fails both at controlling and curing Dora. Freud’s extended preoccupation with Dora’s psychoanalysis in addition to the personality of Irma reflects his unconscious guilt surrounding the sexist role-play of the Victorian Era. Hlne Cixous, on the subject of Dora’s disgust of men, write that Dora…resists the system, the one who cannot stand that the family and society are founded on the body of women, on bodies despised, rejected, bodies that are humiliating once they have been used…it is by questioning them (men), by ceaselessly reflecting to them the image that truly castrates them, to the extent that the power they have wished to impose is an illegitimate power of rape and violence, the hysteric is… the typical woman in all her force (285). Like Freud, Dora is ahead of her time, yet a product of it. She desires to get out of the oppressive role that a woman must take—to be desired until motherhood and then to be forgotten. However, like women o...
