In the book’s preface, the author notes the ubiquity of flagellation in English society, positing its presence as a larger cultural fascination, a site of eroticism within the commonplace. And while that may be true, monologues like the one delivered by Sally are the Victorian rendition of faux lesbian pornography even as they satirize the sadomasochism of quotidian discipline. Sally is turned on by the clandestine experience of seeing a pretty girl whipped, and the reader in turn is offered not only a careful account of the encounter, wherein Sally stands in as their surrogate, but also the pleasure of imagining one woman’s desire nourished by an intimate encounter between two others.
Yet these characters and their exploits are written not to argue for female sexual agency; on the contrary, their excessive lust and penchant for BDSM are presented as almost buffoonish. That said, the Papers also includes the incestuous ballad “Reginald’s Flogging,” in which Reggie confides his fear of being flogged by his schoolmaster to his father and brother—they are both eager for the boy’s bottom to receive a good birching—and then, ultimately, suffers at the hands of his teacher. And what a flogging it is, as his school chums can attest: “‘Oh, many’s the bum I’ve seen swished since / I’ve come / And many’s the swishing I’ve had / But I never saw yet, and I ne’er shall forget / Such a swishing as that of this lad, I trow, this / yellow-haired rosy-cheeked lad.’”7 Although no explicit confirmation exists, à la Oscar Wilde, there’s considerable speculation that Swinburne’s sexuality was fluid, and his blisteringly erotic work implies the same, particularly this relentless poem in which poor Reginald’s bottom is whipped to a pulp. Yet Wilde once remarked of Swinburne that he was “a braggart in matters of vice who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and beastiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer.”8 Maybe he was hiding in plain sight or maybe he delighted in being a provocateur in an age when weird carnality made grand old conservative gents especially squeamish.
But Swinburne’s queerness may also have inspired him to seek out the work of other poets who expressed unconventional desires. “Anactoria,” a dramatic monologue that takes as its inspiration Fragment 31 by the Greek poet Sappho, indicates, in fact, a less punishing view of intense female desire. Written from Sappho’s perspective, Swinburne imagines the poet’s anguish as she beholds her former lover, the titular Anactoria, marry a man. Sappho’s pain is somatic, wrecking: “I feel thy blood against my blood: my pain / Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein / Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower / Breast kindle breast, and either burn one hour / Why wilt thou follow lesser loves? are thine / Too weak to bear these hands and lips of mine?”9 The speaker positively gnashes her teeth with vicious longing. Swinburne’s word choice is both violent and fleshy; in this moment of anguish, Sappho seems to relive her most intimate encounters with Anactoria in a sort of ecstatic mourning. These are not, however, gentle verses; in fact, so brutal is Sappho’s lust that she imagines consuming her lover so that she may become a corporeal tomb housing her forevermore: “That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat / Thy breasts like honey! That from face to feet / Thy body were abolished and consumed / And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed.”10 When it comes to the too muchness of erotic yen, the urge to mutilate and eat one’s lover may take the cake. Of course, “Anactoria” is more than an explosion of romantic jealousy: it’s a contemplation of loss and legacy—Sappho asserts that she, unlike her lover, will be remembered because of her poetry—but it imagines female desire, lesbian desire, with an explicit ardency that was, to say the least, peculiar for the nineteenth century.
And yet, whatever Swinburne’s motivations might have been, he was still a man, with all the trappings of Victorian male privilege. Employing the poetic form as a kind of drag, he imagines what a queer woman from Greek antiquity might have felt as she watched her beloved abandon her for a more conventional romantic arrangement. Suffice it to say that a woman poet would not have enjoyed Swinburne’s popularity had she written about feminine desire with such visceral sinew. For all the controversy it stirred, Poems and Ballads, the collection containing “Anactoria,” was widely read. And in the meantime, much of Victorian literature, when it gestured to female sexuality, did so amidst a flurry of patriarchal anxiety.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance, published at the fin de siècle in 1897, intertwines female erotic longing with actual monstrosity. The vampire’s first victim, Lucy Westenra, is characterized as a sweet-hearted flirt who, upon receiving three marriage proposals, wonders why “they can’t let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?”11 (Generally, when a woman in a Victorian novel makes this sort of remark, she’s toast.) Once Lucy has become a vampire herself, she transforms from a naïve, boy-crazy peach into a dark-haired lascivious demon, whose thirst for blood is conflated with a hunger for sex:
When Lucy—I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her shape—saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares; then her eyes ranged over us. Lucy’s eyes in form and colour; but Lucy’s eyes unclear and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew. At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight. As she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile…She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace.12
In life, Lucy’s sex appeal was decorously packaged. But her vampiric body, as Dr. Seward, one of her rejected suitors, remarks, oozes at once with hellish brutishness and sensuality. Together with his band of vampire hunters, one of whom was Lucy’s betrothed, the doctor laments how her “sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.”13 As if to emphasize the point, her fair hair has grown dark (it’s always the dark-haired women in Victorian literature who find themselves in the most trouble). Seward’s urge to destroy her is galvanized by what he sees; his horror at her vampirism cannot be parsed from his disgust—and, to be clear, arousal—at her naked lust. This misogyny is borne out in the elderly Van Helsing’s plan to eliminate her. He says, with all the casualness of a doctor suggesting a dose of Tylenol, “I want to cut off her head and take out her heart.”14 After the men have staked Lucy—her former fiancé does the honors in what becomes an absurdly homosocial ritual of mutual male pleasure—Seward and Van Helsing carry out this plan with antiseptic brutality: “the Professor and I sawed off the top off the stake, leaving the point of it in the body. Then we cut off the head and filled the mouth with garlic.”15 In the world of Dracula, a female body so consumed with sexual wantonness becomes inhuman—demonic—and must be annihilated. Excessive lust is punished with excessive violence, a body torn apart so that she may no longer tantalize the men who, when she lived, desired her so feverishly.
The Victorians must have regarded vampirism as a convenient way to discuss female sexuality, because Dracula is not the only narrative of its ilk. Published in 1872, predating Stoker’s novel by over two decades, Carmilla, a novella by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, chronicles a love story between two girls, one of whom happens to be an ages-old vampire with designs to feed upon her mortal companion. Laura is conveniently dim and so while she regards Carmilla’s affection as peculiar, she is slow to understand the supernatural threat being visited upon her:
[My] strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.” Then she had thrown herself
back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.16
In response to these ministrations, Laura asks Carmilla, “Are we related?” which, frankly, is very funny, especially when Carmilla reacts with frustration in the face of her mark’s towering—and obstructive—cluelessness. For Le Fanu makes no bones about the intensity of Carmilla’s desire: the yen for blood and for intimacy are, as in the case of Lucy Westenra, indistinguishable and incandescent in their power. Her attentions remind Laura of “the ardour of a lover” because, in essence, that is what they are, although it’s entirely possible that Carmilla is more interested in acting as a sire to Laura—that is, turning her into a vampire—rather than merely feeding on her, which she could do easily, and all at once. This act would establish an eternal bond; as she exclaims, “You and I are one forever.” But even if she were to kill Laura, as she has done with previous girls, the protracted ritual of smaller, steady attacks mimics a clandestine romance where lovers unite in the dark, commingling and entangled. What Laura does not understand is that she has already become a part of Carmilla: her blood flows through her veins, together with the life force of other past conquests.
Carmilla, like Lucy, is tracked and destroyed by those determined to prevent her from wreaking further destruction. Her desires, of course, are all the more pungent to the men who eventually kill her because they are, as the Victorians would say, “against nature”—of a same-sex persuasion. Ultimately, Carmilla, revealed to be the anagramic alias of the ancient Countess Mircalla, is discovered inside her coffin, “floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, [she] lay immersed.”17 The text luxuriates in the image of a porcelain-skinned demon drenched in crimson; so does it also, with near eroticism, narrate the process of her staking and beheading, a young woman’s body torn apart for its sins of the flesh:
Here then, were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. The body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects such as might escape from a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head was next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire.18
In case there’s any question, I do not support vampirism; it strikes me as quite an unhealthy way of life. But this caveat aside, what Stoker and Le Fanu reveal, through the metaphor of monstrosity, is a searing intolerance of flagrant feminine wantonness. Lucy and Carmilla both articulate and embody their desires without shame, a form of sexual audacity that is judged intolerable. Victorian vampires, particularly those coded as feminine, are generally motivated by arousal; the text presents them as endlessly libidinous, ravenous for the bodies of their victims. Victorian culture, however clandestinely it might have been titillated by women, could not conceive of them expressing such unruly desire; the cultural understanding of femininity foregrounded dispositions both docile and self-denying. To imagine a woman otherwise, to imagine her lascivious and hungry and ready to fuck, was to imagine nothing less than a bloodthirsty monster.
* * *
Thankfully, literature has supplied us with women’s narratives in which erotic desire is celebrated and nourished as something fundamental and sustaining. We are not so Victorian that it has been impossible to carve open these spaces for freer discourse. In addition to The Awakening (1899), which glares unflinchingly at the domestic constraints of fin-de-siècle female sexuality, Louisiana writer Kate Chopin also composed erotic fiction. Early in the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf gestures to the potency of desire between women in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and a few years later crafted a gender- and genre-bending romp of a novel, Orlando (1928), which is at its heart an affectionate missive to her lover, fellow writer Vita Sackville-West. Los Angeles memoirist Eve Babitz penned Eve’s Hollywood (1974), Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), and Black Swans (1993), all of which are flush with heady sexual interludes involving men and women alike. From girlhood, French-American writer Anaïs Nin was an avid diarist, often recounting her varied romantic relationships, although Delta of Venus and Little Birds, collections of short erotic fiction, were both published posthumously.
Audre Lorde’s love poetry, as well as her “biomythography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)—a lyrical meditation upon her relationships with women—insists with particular incandescence upon the undeniability of black lesbian desire, but also recounts, tenderly, the fledgling erotic experiences of youth. Lorde’s memory of helping her mother make the Caribbean dish souse commingles the synesthesia of her African heritage—accessed through the physicality of cooking—and the masturbatory pleasure she discovers in using a mortar and pestle:
Without even wiping it, I plunged the pestle into the bowl, feeling the blanket of salt give way, and the broken cloves of garlic just beneath. The downward thrust of the wooden pestle slowed upon contact, rotated back and forth slowly, and then gently altered its rhythm to include an up and down beat. Back and forth, round, up and down, back, forth, round, round, up and down…There was a heavy fullness at the root of me that was exciting and dangerous…That invisible thread, taut and sensitive as a clitoris exposed, stretched through my curled fingers up my round brown arm into the moist reality of my armpits, whose warm sharp odor with a strange new overlay mixed with the ripe garlic smells from the mortar and the general sweat-heavy aromas of high summer.19
Coming of age, being shocked into a glimmering awareness of one’s own body is, by Lorde’s account, both extraordinary and commonplace, a startling event and a moment that swims into the everyday, the practices of workaday life. The exquisite too muchness of mounting pleasure, the escalation toward climax, and our relishing of these fleshly experiences, cannot be emblazoned with the stigma of excess when our lives are punctuated this way—by the little ecstasies and the big. To lust is not, as the Victorians posited, to be a monster, but merely to discern the world in all its sensuous particulars and to take it into oneself. Lorde’s prose is all the more radical because she dares to demand a black queer woman’s right not only to pleasure, but to openly articulating it.
For, even now, feminine lust is treated as an exclusive privilege, accessible to only certain bodies, while the rest are presented as grotesqueries. The 2011 comedy Bridesmaids supplies just one exemplary case in Melissa McCarthy’s character, Megan. McCarthy is an extraordinarily talented comedian, which she makes clear in the film, but its focus is myopically fixated on her too muchness. She’s outspoken, exuberant, fat—and she’s lusty as hell. The running gag regarding an erotic conquest is not written as empowering, or even as typical. The foundation of the joke, in fact, rests in Megan’s sense of sexual entitlement. She’s rendered as lascivious and dogged in her pursuit, and her nonnormative body emphasizes the “comedy” of her horniness. Isn’t it hilarious, the film asks, that this character who shits and farts in abundance and dresses with frowsy tomboyishness would also want to have sex? It’s so often the fat woman, or the conventionally “ugly” woman, or the elderly woman, who makes the dirtiest joke in the film. After all, these are “safe” characters whom we don’t imagine as belonging to the sexual circuit anyway: we don’t need to fear for their chastity or, in the case of older women, fight to protect it.
Even the HBO series Sex and the City, hailed in the early aughts for its frank discussions of masturbation, tea-bagging, and female desire in general, implies a “norm” in terms of how horny we can be without slipping into aberrant territory. Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), we are meant to understand, is an anomaly both for her intense desires and for her openness in articulating them. SATC does not, like so many other instances in popular culture, imply that her desires paradoxically render her undesirable. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. But in this case, her glamorous beauty points to her as an exception�
��and we’re meant to chuckle when she indicates, reluctantly, that she’s a decade or so older than her friends. Her storyline is also arguably the most fanciful: while she is not a punch line, per se, we are often meant to laugh at her antics. She’ll fire an employee and then immediately fuck him on her desk, and wait out a hundred women in a restaurant to ensure she is the one to bed the waiter. It’s unsettling that her sexual fluidity is placed in the same domain as these endeavors. She is, after all, the only one of the four to date a woman; Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), on the other hand, evinces acute biphobia. If you were the so-called “Samantha” of your college friend group, then you were likely dubbed the “freaky” one, someone vulnerable to slut-shaming by those intolerant of intense female desire.
Many of us related instead to Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), or we told ourselves that we did—and I would argue that we are encouraged to do so. Her storyline, though meant to trouble the obsession with searching for the ideal husband, nonetheless follows a common trajectory. A preppy, Connecticut-bred art dealer, she enjoys the privileges of a blue-blooded upbringing as well as those dealt to a comely, white brunette. She dates rigorously, and with hawk-eyed focus, marries, divorces, marries again, and then attempts to become pregnant. (The narrative of her infertility is, on the other hand, a foray into urgent, under-discussed territory.) But when it comes to sex, only the extreme circumstances of forced abstinence drive her to hormonal distraction. Unhappy in her first marriage, her self-imposed decorum breaks when she lapses into a bout of savage screaming at a Kappa Kappa Gamma luncheon over her longing to be good and fucked: a scene played for laughs rather than resonance, because Charlotte has broken the tacit gentility agreement of this notoriously well-monied sorority. And unlike Megan from Bridesmaids, Charlotte’s urgent horniness is charming precisely because she is culturally coded as such: thin, sexy—but genteel and well-dressed. It’s okay to love sex, SATC says, it’s natural, and it’s healthy! But the contingencies the show imposes on ultra-horniness, embodied by Charlotte, suggest its plumb absorption of cultural mores.
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