Zürn and the Wound of the Knife

        Near the beginning of her novella Dark Spring, Unica Zürn presents a striking image of a little girl mutilating “a big, expensive doll” given to her by her father’s female companion. The moment both reveals the inner psychology of the character and introduces a symbol that will become important later in the story: the knife. Because she is “[angry] and desperate about the unhappy conditions inside her home,” the girl “takes a knife and cuts out the doll’s eyes” and “slices open the belly of the doll and tears her expensive clothes” (40). At first glance, this appears to be an abortive act, slicing open the womb of the doll to express frustration in her struggle to understand her budding sexual desires and her inability to have her father all to her own. Two of the novella’s primary themes are a search for a lack of completeness and for a feminine identity, which are both symbolized in slicing through the doll’s womb.

        In The Uncanny, Freud links blindness and fear of losing one’s eyes to castration anxiety. For women, this happens is when a young girl attaches to the father and grows separate from the mother at the phallic stage. In the previous paragraph, Zurn describes the girl’s initial rejection of her mother’s body as monstrous, setting up a tension throughout the novel between the girl and her overbearing mother.

        The Freudian reading of the scene is even more apparent when the word “knife” again appears in the text when the girl’s brother forces himself onto her and “drills his ‘knife’ (as she calls it) into her ‘wound” (56). By referring to her brother’s penis as a “knife,” the girl links the aggressive sexual act to the violent dismembering of the doll—the moment at which she first acknowledges her own psychological wound. We must then return to the doll scene and understand the slice across the belly as not only abortive, but also sexual—both a creation of and an attack on the vaginal “wound” that foreshadows the sexual thrusting of her brother. In this sense, the doll scene can be read as the girl performing her own “wounding”—that is to say, both coming into the sexuality of her own womanhood and lashing out against the lack of completeness she feels as a direct result of that sexual awakening.