The Uncanny, Lacanian Jouissance, and Social Masks: Femininity in Silvina Ocampo's "El vestido de terciopelo"

Abstract

This article analyzes the short story "El vestido de terciopelo", by Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993), from an intersectional perspective that combines psychoanalytic theory — notably the Freudian concepts of the uncanny (Das Unheimliche) and the repressed, as well as Lacanian elaborations on jouissance, objet a, and the phallic signifier — with a critical reading of gender and class representations. Through the analysis of female characters hierarchized by naming, the article argues that the velvet dress functions as a narrative operator of the uncanny and as a metaphor for the phallus: an object of desire that simultaneously seduces, interdicts, and destroys. The death of the bourgeois protagonist Cornelia Catalpina, suffocated by the very dress she sought to embody, is read as an allegory of the symbolic violence exerted upon women by the ideals of beauty, purity, and youth imposed by patriarchal order. The infantile gaze of the narrator, embodied in the ironic refrain "¡Qué risa!", denaturalizes the tragedy and reveals the banal, everyday character of gender oppression. The conclusion is that the uncanny in Ocampo is not merely a stylistic device, but a critical pathway that unmasks social facades and the subjective costs of normative femininity.