Philip Castille
Ruth calls on Martin to stop regarding her as an icon of maternal
this hotel scene she is anything but “‘that pale, shriveled, female thing’” scorned
by the misogynist poet Brissenden (Martin Eden 345). She refuses the role of
the nurturing Oedipal mother that Martin has assigned her. In the discourse
of feminist psychoanalysis, Ruth instead takes on the part the erotic Oedipal
mother—a “disturbingly seductive and aggressive” force (Sprengnether 220).
Martin is unprepared for her role reversal and determined to repress and
contain Ruth’s emerging sexuality. He ignores her passionate appeal and
walks her out of the building—as if she were a bundle of laundry (Martin Eden
457). Martin’s silencing of Ruth is a keystone of his life-denying project of
renunciation. For her part Ruth is “stunned” (466) by Martin’s rejection.
Ruth was as unprepared for Martin’s transformation into sexual
impotence as he was for hers into sexual assertiveness. She did not anticipate
see “himself as being superior to Ruth in every possible way” (Anderson
11). Martin regrets his own former abjection before Ruth; now he makes her
feel inadequate. She did not expect that he would associate class privilege
with access to white women’s bodies and target hers for his resentment and
renunciation. His refusal to make love causes a deep injury, part of his hostile
intent to make her feel inferior. Thus, Ruth experiences both sexual arousal
and refusal in this traumatic encounter. The presence of her brother outside
the hotel suggests that her family pushed her back to Martin. So Ruth is caught
between her manipulative parents and her embittered former suitor, and she
suffers abjection and humiliation—internal wounds that Martin himself has
known. But Martin pays an even steeper price for his rejection of Ruth’s body
and the social acceptance that marrying into the Morse family would represent.
Martin is not self-aware enough to understand that he has become
trapped in the western dilemma of binarism. His “crippling ‘double
consciousness’” (Reesman 211) submits him to the urban predicament of
seeing only class, race, and gender alienation, with no direction home. He can
perceive white women only as pure or impure, and their bodies must either be
angelic or soiled. He cannot merge his dual images of Ruth as the passive,
resolution in the modern industrial city to this split projection. Neither socialism
nor capitalism appeals to him, and his antiquated philosophy of Nietzschean
individualism proves inadequate. Oddly, Martin as a writer does manage “to
transcend perceived oppositions between critical and commercial acclaim”
(Gair, Complicity, 132); but he gives himself no credit for it. By the last part
of the novel the two main women in his life simply change places, yet he still
he cannot form an integrated perspective. Ruth is repudiated as a succubus
39