LAURA MLRLV AFTERTHOUGHTS ONVISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA' the libido to this antithesis. It ut rather ne sort of libido would pursue the rammar of the story places the reader, listener or spectator withthe hero.The sexual life and another sort those of a fer the cinema can make use of an age-old cultural tradition nothing of the kind is true. There is only one libido, which serves both the lasting her to this of her own sex into ny argument too t was specific to cinema, that is the eroticism and cultural ttion 'feminine libi e common to other forms of folk and ido when it is pressed into rh. mor ther than those of the look iture, with attendant fascination onstraint has been applied ess careful account of its(that function' s demands than in the case of he remarks on stories and day-dreams provide another angle of appro: eleologically-in the fact that th mplishment of the aim of biology giving a cultural rather than psychoanalytic insight into the dilemma has been entrusted to the aggressiveness of men and has been made to some emphasises the relationship between the the na concept of the rest in the third Freuds shift from the use It is the true heroic feeling, which one of our best writers has expressed in ology tha ngh this revealing characteristic of invulnerability we can immediatel vo problems here: Freud introduces the use of the wo cognise His Majesty the Ego, the hero of every day-dream and every conventional,, apparently simply following an established social-linguistic practice (but which, Although a boy might know quite well that it is most unlikely that he will go out however, secondly, and constituting a greater intellectual stumbling-block, the into the world, make his fortune through prowess or the assistance of helpers, feminine canno lifferent, but rather only as opposition and marry a princess, the stories describe the male fantasy of ambition, reflecting passivity)in an antinomic sense, or as similarity (the phallic phase). This is not suggest that a hidder girl, on the other hand, the cultural and social overlap is more confusing. Freuds aplied by Freud's use of the word Nature)but thatits structural rel argument that a young girl's day-dreams concentrate on the erotic ignores his asculinity under patriarchy cannot be defined or determined masculinity and the active day-dreams necessarily offered. This shifting process, this definition i sociated with this phase In fact, all too oft leaves,The correct road, femininity, leads to increasing repression of"the also shifting between the ted by the passive, the waiting(Andromed formal closure to the narrative structure. Three elenbain) ts can thus be dra In this sensei ther: Freud's concept of masculinityin women, the identification trigge xual identity, the never fully repressed bed-rock of feminine neurosis ireriality in a text, for women(from childhood onwards)trans-sex identifica- tion is a habit that very easily becomes second nature. However, this Nature ARRATIVE GRAMMAR AND TRANS-SEX IDENTIFICATION does not sit easily and shifts restlessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes. ced by Freud (active/masculine)structures most popular atives, whether film, fol THE WESTERN yth (as I argued inVis ere his metaphoric usage is acted out literally in the story. Andromeda s concept of character fur ased on V. Propp's Morphology of the I want to argue for a chain of links and shifts in n Itis not my aim, here, to debate the rights and wrongs of this narrative division of up the changing function of woman. The Western (allowing, of course, for as many deviations as one cares to enumerate) bears a residual