and besides, they are only able to mime a language they have not produced.

Luce Irigarary.

The critical reception of Sarah Scotts Millenium Hall in the last decade and a half has been, it would not be an exaggeration to say, incongrous. By which I mean it does cohere. It lacks the most sublime harmony of the five female characters playing pieces from the Messiah and Judas Maccaeus, that greets Sir George Ellison and Mr. Lamont when they enter the Hall itself. If not out of time, these critics appear out of place with each other, at least the themes, forms and concepts, to use Foucaudian terms1, of their discourses appear not to adhere to each other in anyway near the same way that Scott describes Miss Mancel and Miss Melvyn, who could not be unhappy when they were together (p.52). There appears to be something that centres the novel that has escaped critical attention. I will argue that it escapes Sarah Scott equally, and that she, like her critics, can be situated outside of the space of Millenium Hall, and with her the center that holds the structure together, leaving the relationship between novel and author, as well as the relationship between author and critic de-centererd, to follow Derridas logic.2 I will take two critics as examples of the critical discord around Scotts novel. According to the critic James Cruise, Scotts novel reverses the polarity of the typical eighteenth century conduct book in that its author is a woman who tries to affect the alteration and regulation of the behaviour of men, and not visa-versa.3 For Cruise the novel is concerned with the way in which Scott uses an already constructed discourse in such a way that the positions of those who subjugate and those who are subjugated by the power relations implicit in that method of constructing relationships is reversed. This implies firstly that Cruise considers the power relations implied by a conduct book as being gender neutral, that is to say that the same structure of power remains intact whichever gender is the subject or object of the power in question. Furthermore, Cruises logic would imply that there is space within that reversal of power for the power structure itself to be changed, but not the affects of that power. Thus the aim of Scotts novel is to regulate, even if that regulation is performed in a different way than it would otherwise be by a man. What is at stake here is the difference between what is stated, and how it is stated. If Scott is, as Cruise asserts, re-inventing the eighteenth century conduct book, it follows that Millenium Hall must be read for not for what it says, but for the way Scott says it. Susan S. Lancer gives a rather different interpretation of the novel. For her it does not even take a reading of the novel in order to conclude, based on Scotts friendship with Barabara Montagu, that Millenium Hall argues for the legitimacy of female co-habitation4. The difference between Lancer and Cruises discourses is immediately apparent. Lancer is taking the novel to be an effect of The accord that can be heard between these seemingly opposing readings is what I intent to strike over the course of this essay, for what Cruise and Lancer are both ultimately concerned with is the
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way in which desire, and specifically the desire to assert ones own subjectivity, is expressed in the novel.

I will argue Scotts novel is a demonstration of the fact that it is the forgetting of the sexual relationship itself that facilitates the naturalisation of ideological reproduction. It is my intention to spend the course of this essay elucidating that statement, and lucidity is precisely what is at stake, if the fairy land of Scotts novel is not to be conceived as excluding the possibility of containing a means for fashioning subjectivity.

In order to elucidate what is happening between Cruise and Lancers readings it is necessary to read together Foucaults Of other Spaces and the twentieth published seminar of Jacque Lacan, titled On feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge. I ultimately wish to arrive at an understanding of Foucaults concept of heterotopic space within which is integrated a notion of how desire, and specifically the repression of sexual desire, or anaphrodisia as Freud terms it, can facilitate the ideological reproduction which constitutes the heterotopia itself. It is through this altered conception of heterotopic space that, I would assert, the space of Millenium Hall can be properly understood as unconscious, and moreover, as the unconscious underpinning of ideological reproduction. In order to think together ideology and the unconscious, which really amounts to nothing more than integrating Lancer and Cruises readings, I would like to propose a method of reading not unlike Freuds analysis of a certain moment in his treatment of Dora. Freud explains that, in the course of Doras treatment, she suddenly developes the ability to more fluently. Freud links Doras newly acquired ability to her aphonia, which occurred only when the object of her love, Herr K, was absent. The coincidence between the onset of her aphonia and her propensity for writing is taken by Freud as evidence of the fact that the symptom of her illness5 is compensated for by writing. Dora writes, according to Freud, in order to make up for the absence of the fact that she cannot speak to Herr K, which is in turn a result of the fact of Herr Ks absence. Thus writing is read as a second order effect of the absence of Doras beloved. Doras aphonia is read as a somatic effect of Doras illness (p.72), while her enhanced ability to write can be seen as a symbolic of the fact that Doras aphonia occurred when the man she loved was away; speech had lost its value since she could not speak to him (p.72). Writing then gains importance as a mode of communication with he whom she cannot otherwise communicate with. Writing is the then for Freud the symbolic symptom of the symptom of the illness caused by an absence. Writing can be
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read as the signifier for the symptom of the illness, but not for the illness itself, as Freud himself goes on to state. He is clear that one is not to diagnose the existence of a loved person who is at times away from the patient in every case of aphonia. Writing is thus in Doras case specific to her, and as a symbol specific to the was Doras symptoms present themselves. What is clear is that Freuds analytical procedure requires reading Doras writing as secondary evidence, it is not enough to read what is written but, why it is written, in order to diagnose the emergence of an illness. This method of reading proposed by Freud is then not unlike Cruises reading of Scott. Her intentions can be read for Cruise, not through the discourse, but the way the discourse is written. Cruise is proposing the discourse is read first, then the way in which it is written is read afterwards, as the symptom of the symptom of Scotts intention to regulate male behaviour. I will however stop short of calling the desire to reform a symptom of an illness, at least before I have said that the desire to reform is based upon a repression of another desire, and in order to explain I will need recourse to Jacques Lacan. More specifically, to his concepts of the unconscious, and the jouissance of the subject. For Lacan the unconscious is what is read6. Like Freud and Cruise it is reading the enunciation of what is spoken or written rather than the announcement itself that is crucial, for the subject herself is not a being, but rather something attributed to that which speaks (p.120), or writes, in Doras case. Freud finds Doras subjectivity, is able to diagnose her hysteria, not by reading what she says in Herr Ks absence, not simply because she does not speak, but because she speaks through her writing. She is symbolised, as I have shown by an effect of her discourse, or lack of it. It is at this point the meaning of Lacans essay on The Mirror Stage as Formative of the function of the I can be fully elucidated. The observance of ones body in a mirror is for Lacan, an identification or transformation that takes place when the subject assumes an image (p.2). It is through this identification with an image which is not the same as the physical body of the subject only because it is not the physical body of the subject, that the experience of meconnaissance occurs, which is to say that the subject misrecognises itself in its own reflection. It is however that same reflection which allows the subject to enter into any given discourse, to form an ego-ideal and everything it represents itself by under the signifier I. That is to say Freud can only identify Dora by her propensity to write, literally her propensity to represent herself. It has already been pointed out that her unconscious desire for Herr K. is not read by her physical symptom, aphonia, but by the way that that symptom is symbolically represented, her writing. Thus Doras unconscious is read by a symptom the effects of which are unknown to Dora herself, indeed, it became necessary to obscure the coincidence between her attacks of illness and the absence of the man she secretly loved for the length of the attacks would then remain as a trace of their original significance7. The significance of the coincidence is exactly that which reveals to Freud Doras unconscious desire, but that significance is obscured from nonother than Dora herself. She speaks, and by speaking reveals herself, but she is only able to recognise the reflection, not the unreflected contents of her unconscious. So it is that Lacan can claim jouissance has nothing to do with the subject8, for the subject can have no knowledge of himself except in discourse, it cannot experience pleasure for itself because that please is always mitigated by its own reflection. The pleasure is always that of the person observing the reflection, literally, I only take pleasure by way of an I that is constructed, and the pleasure experienced by
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that I is the pleasure I assume is experienced by someone else. In Doras case, it is Freud who solves the puzzle of her hysteria by reading the symbolic representation of herself Freud gives him in language, and Freud who is the only possible receiver of any pleasure afforded thereby, Dora being absent, like her beloved Herr K, from herself. This elucidates a second of Lacans contentions, that desire is the desire of the other (p.100). The image in the mirror is constructed for those who are going to view, for those others who are going to take pleasure in something which the subject has constructed for them. Thus Freud has to read past Doras secondary symptom of writing, which I have suggested is Doras performance of herself, in order to understand her hysteria, her desire, her love for Herr K. Thus it is crucial to understand desire as an effect of the unconscious which is read in the subjects symbolic construction of herself, which can be read only as a secondary symptom (representation) unbeknownst to the subject of the discourse herself. It is now necessary to ask whom else write the discourse by which the subject can be read. Put simply, the answer is the owners of dominant ideological discourse. I will show this by reading Harriet Guests articled on the treatment of the political in eighteenth century gothic texts. Guest argues that the gothic is a space in which actions or truths which are historically diverse or discrete9 can be represented. Guest demonstrates this by reading Richard Wilsons painting The White Monk, which she claims, represents a pleasurable unity between unity and dissolution, owing to the painting presentation of a complete view of the landscape which at the same time allows each element of its composition to be viewed individually:10

Thus there is no narrative link between the elements of the painting but they can be observed at once. This is the pleasurable separateness of Gothic unity (p.134) which Guest argues characterises the Gothic. What is striking about his conception of the genre is that it allows for otherwise disparate elements to be brought together in a unified manner within a space of fantasy. This space not need be visual. In gothic texts, Guest shows, disparate political and social truths can be mystified by the readers pleasure in the ornaments of Gothic fantasy. Thus the reader, like the viewer of Wilsons painting, can enter into the fantasy, but in the same movement can withdraw and distance himself from it (p.122). That is to say the reader enters into the political or historical concerns of the Gothic novel only through fantasy. Ideological reproduction is thus perpetuated and centered around the fictional. Thus the Gothic allows for the readers social and political speculation
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of the issues discussed in the works only as the reader is interpolated as a reader of fiction. The readers relationship to the political is symbolic. What is produced by the Gothic is then a kind of political jouissance, allowing pleasure to be taken by the process of reading the fantasy rather than having access to the mystified political reality that fantasy supports. The reader is not allowed access to the political qua political, rather only through heterotopic fantasy, Dora is only allowed to access her unconscious as she constructs herself for Freud, qua hysteric. Thus the gothic functions as the unconscious in Lacan and Freud, as that which can be read but which at the same time constitutes the subject as political. What I have attempted to show thus far is that ideological discourse is produced in what Lacan calls the symbolic, that the discourse is what defines the subject and that that discourse is produced in an unconscious space which can be read psychoanalytically, but is unknown by the subject. In the final part of this essay I intend to demonstrate how each of these assertions can be applied to the text of Millenium Hall. Moreover, I would like to show how by combining seemingly disparate discourses in a space other than the text of Millenium Hall I have not in fact always been referring first and foremost to that structure. For the space of Scotts novel is unconscious, Gothic and the site for the construction of Scotts subjectivity. One does not have to venture far into Scotts novel to understand its status as Gothic. It is described by the narrator, Sir George Ellison, as a fairy land (p.7) whose shepherds sweet melody on his oaten reed (p.4) backgrounded fields that would have made Nebuchadnezzars seven years expulsion from human society seem agreeable (p.4). Scott certainly describes the country around Millenium Hall as fantastical, but the sight of so many little innocents that greets Sir George when he enters the Hall, which makes him think he was almost amoungst the heavenly choir (p.10), makes clear the fact that Scott wishes us to imagine Millenium Hall as, if not utopic, at the very least heterotopic. The space of Millenium Hall is heterotopic, to paraphrase Micheal Foucault, in that it acts as a mirror, in precisely the same way Lacan describes the function of the mirror in the creation of a subjects awareness of his subjectivity as being different from himself. Foucault says as much: The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes the place that I occupy, at the moment when I look in the glass at once absolutely real and absolutely unreal I discover my absence from the place where I am.11 Thus, to read between the two French critics discourses: I am the heterotopia of myself. This suffices, I suggest, to explain why you can never begin to answer the question posed by Susan Lancer at the opening of her article. She asks whether the bluestocking feminists were lesbian. Without raising questions of what a lesbian is, or how their desire might be economised by the Sapphic friendships; expressed in Scotts novel, which I would not wish to argue arent legitimate positions, I would argue that she ignores the fact that any evidence, textual or otherwise, for anything relating to Scotts subjectivity that is gained from any statement of hers beginning with the first person pronoun must not be taken as a literal expression of desire. Furthermore, Cruises reading is equally problematized by the fact of Foucault and Lacans discourses, for simply reiterating a discourse, however effeminately, still constitutes the subject in a symbolic order. Cruise reads Scotts meconnaisance, that ego-ideal which she presents to the world as utopic, and like Doras aphasia, we read only the symptomatic expression of her unconscious desire, and not the desire itself. It is necessary to read not the aphasia, but the expression of the aphasia itself, in Doras
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case writing, in Scotts case, the way she negotiates between different discourses, different subjectivities. One need only look at the frontispiece of the novel to see how Scott achieves this:12

The picture satisfies the criteria Guest describes for constituting the Gothic space. The juxtaposition of the fairy land of trees in the foreground of the picture and the structure of the Hall itself in the background unites two disparate elements in an echo of Wilsons piece of the same period.

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