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Cela avait donc un sens? He had said all this to me with a playful, extremely respectful air, without a look that undresses you, like most men give. From the moment he walked into the salon, his eyes remained obstinately fixed on my boots. The word boots, reminding me of the vulgar wisecracks of the coachman, struck me dumb. Did it mean something? The boot, visually detached from the rest of her body, stands in as the sign of her sexual role, more important than the directly accessible but less fetishistic blouse.
Like the apron, another object of desire in classic scenarios of sexual fantasy, the boot operates as a casing, or cache-sexe, for the invisible feminine phallus, acquiring through contiguity a value as a substitution for a substitution. A double metonymy then, or is it in fact triple? In this regard, it throws into relief once again the close relationship between literary chronicles of perversion, pathology, criminal anomaly, and the genres of medical and criminological reportage.
But the fact that literary and nonliterary case studies cross-reference each other during this period comes as no surprise. What constitutes a more interesting problem, it would seem, is the way in which servitude, erotic submission, and foot fetishism are curiously enmeshed within a complex system of representation centering on the maid.
This may happen occasionally, but it is certainly not the determining factor. It seems rather that when the fetish comes to life, so to speak, some process has been suddenly interruptedβit reminds one of the abrupt halt made by memory in traumatic amnesias. Conventionally, he attacks from behind, furtively lifting her skirts as she bends over to dust or straighten a household object.
