Abstract
Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murder is a riveting story of a murder, though not a murder-mystery. Perfume is not a ‘whodunit.’ The reader knows the villain of the story quite early in the text. None the less, the novel is mysterious but simply not in the traditional sense. While the reader does not play the role of detective, compiling clues to discover the who?, the why? or the how? of the text’s murders, the story is a gripping exploration into the nature of evil, indeed a mystery in its own right. And Siiskind’s narrative appears to suggest that there are two rather consistent patterns to the nature of evil: first, evil is inextricably bound to human nature, and secondly, evil is very violent.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Robert Browning
Perhaps the question that feminist critics should ask themselves is not ‘Is there a woman in this text?’ but rather: ‘Is there a text in this woman?’ Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman
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Notes
Susan Gubar, “The Blank Page” and the Issues of Female Creativity’, in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985) p. 295.
Patrick Süskind, Perfume, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Washington Square Press, 1986) p. 5. All future references are to this text and are parenthetically referenced in the essay.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
Gubar, “‘The Blank Page’”, p. 293.
Andrew J. McKenna, Violence and Difference (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1992) p. 77.
I use this title to suggest that we continue to reduce woman to a body part, a smell, an art object. One of 1992–3’s most popular films is called The Scent of a Woman. We seem to have learned little.
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) p. 37.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 94.
Robert Detweiler, ‘Torn by Desire: Sparagmos in Greek Tragedy and Recent Fiction’, Postmodernism, Literature and the Future of Theology, ed. David Jasper (London: Macmillan, 1993) p. 72.
Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986) p. 108.
Mieke Bal, ‘Sexuality, Sin, and Sorrow: the Emergence of Female Character — a Reading of Genesis 1–3’, in ibid., p. 308.
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© 1996 Mark Ledbetter
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Ledbetter, M. (1996). The Body Human: Violating the Self and Violating the Other, or Reading the Silenced Narrative — Patrick Süskind’s Perfume . In: Victims and the Postmodern Narrative or Doing Violence to the Body. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24590-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24590-1_4
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