Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Perhaps Delilah only wanted to know, just for a little while, what it felt like to hold the weight of the world and the strength of the universe in her arms, at her mercy. Maybe Delilah could not reconcile herself with the belief that her love alone could control and consume Samson, or tell herself that her sexual tyranny could compete with, say, the divine rights of Canaanite kings. The delusion-fatigued Delilah, while certainly still a desirable beauty, was worldly enough to trust no one—not even herself: she could not quite accept on faith that her soft, silken charms were enough to hold Samson’s attention and hold him beside her, especially with his solo intifaddeh for competition. She felt him slipping away, felt it the way lights drain from the sky as the days get shorter after the Summer Solstice, or the way there’s that much more darkness in life: she felt it with a terrible, subtle sorrow, the kind that’s metastasized deep inside your bones long before it’s made it to your conscious mind. And what woman does not know some version of this feeling? Who, born female, has not felt a twinge of insecurity when her man has looked away just for a few moments—and then for a few minutes, then hours, then incalculable time, until love is gone not because it is renounced but because it is forgotten? The lucky few, I imagine, don’t fall prey to these insecurities, the ones with confidence and fortitude. But in a world that defines women by the marriages they make—in millennial America, it is still like that to some extent—even an independent woman like Delilah can go into paroxysms of panic at the thought of losing her man. Even Delilah, this shiksa goddess in the big city who seductively cast a spell on Samson—sorceress of the Sorek—wondered when her boy would tire of her, return to his people: come to his senses. What woman, once again, has not felt that a man’s infatuation with her is a delusional state from which he will recover? Somehow, society convinces us that we are nothing without a man, and simultaneously feeds us subliminal messages that make us feel that no man in his right mind would really want us. And this is fucked up enough today; imagine how it was for Delilah in the late-Old Testament era. And I bet she wished that Samson could know her anxiety, her fear of abandonment, if only for a little while. For once, Delilah wanted to have all the power while Samson was helpless, useless, blinded and shorn.

  How easy it must have been to turn him over to the Philistines. How empowering. And for Samson too, it must have been some sort of relief from the relentless pursuit that was his life, it must have been some kind of liberation to be finally freed from the quest. At a certain point in life—your late twenties, perhaps—it’s got to be nice to know once and for all that you’re never again going to spend the night with a whore and carry away the city gate in the morning; it’s nice to know your salad days are over. In the novel Hopscotch, by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, narrator Horacio Oliveira spends the whole book questing through a life of philosophical peripatetica centered in Paris’ Latin Quarter. It is a book of ideas, a collage of thoughts about blindness and insight, with Klee, Fritz Lang, Saint Augustine, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anaïs Nin, Louis Armstrong (referred to with the familiar “Satchmo”) and post-Structuralist aesthetic theory all thrown in for atmosphere. Oliveira is, to say the least, an avid pedestrian, a street seeker of nothing in particular. “It was about that time I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses,” Oliveira announces early in the book, not so much to explain as to simply introduce—acquaint us with—his wanderings.

  Often he’d wander in the direction of his girlfriend Lucia, always known as La Maga (perhaps another woman possessed of magical powers). In the hyperintellectual, pseudointellectual scene that Horacio and La Maga occupy, she comes to represent the deceptively simple. “She was one of those people who could make a bridge collapse simply by walking on it,” Cortázar writes, leaving us to wonder if La Maga is, as her name suggests, that mythically powerful—or simply so clumsy and colossal. The only thing that is certain is that in all La Maga’s presumed stupidity, her whole way of being poses huge challenges to Oliveira’s sense of self. “[H]e is looking for the black light, the key, and he’s beginning to realize that you don’t find those things in libraries,” a mutual friend tells La Maga. “You’re the one who really taught him that, and if he [leaves] it’s because he’s never going to forgive you for it.” Indeed, that is exactly what happens.

  “I know you’re tired of me and don’t love me anymore,” La Maga says as their relationship is falling apart. “You never did love me, it was something else, some kind of dream you had.” It happens that Delilah says more or less the same thing to Samson: as she attempts to extract the secret of his strength, she says to Samson, “You don’t love me, you only hate me.” And she’s somewhat right. He is obsessed with her, which is not the same as love, and she is finally at a point where she is desperate for him to see her as flesh and blood and need—she is tired of being worshipped like a movie star, a screen goddess, a sexual icon. Both these women are frustrated by men who fail to see them the right way—or fail to see them at all. Delilah, at the end of the day and by the end of this episode, is a woman who wants to be loved for herself, she wants to settle down and be serious. She is made furious by the way Samson has allowed a failure of insight and eyesight to infiltrate their relationship.

  It is in this context that Delilah, whose name means “of the night,” gives Samson, whose name means “of sunshine,” the gift of darkness and blindness. For without his eyes, Samson can finally see God clearly and have a relationship of greater spirituality than he has ever achieved before, even in all those moments of galvanized strength. Samson was distracted by his eyes, made irascible and irrational by all that he saw—and when he came across a pretty girl, he seems to have become silly as a teenager no matter how old he was. Delilah freed him from his visual compulsions; his spiritual self was reborn. And in Hopscotch, Oliveira recognizes at first that the intuitive, anti-intellectual La Maga might in fact see with greater clarity than he does, lost as he is in a muddle in the middle of his cerebral cortex. One bit of dialogue:

  “Do you think I’m so blind?”

  “On the contrary, I think it might do you some good to be a little blind.”

  “Ah, yes. Touch replaces definitions, instinct goes beyond intelligence. The magic route, the dark night of the soul.”

  At first Oliveira finds her way of seeing, her choice to valorize emotion over logic, completely silly. He breaks up with her, and naturally finds that he misses her desperately, that he has lost the use of her eyes, that he is bereft of her vision, that he is walking around at least half blinded. “But La Maga was right, as always she was the only one who was right,” Oliveira thinks longingly of a time when she was the only one who despaired of getting to hear a Brahms sonata while the rest of the group focused its attention uselessly on some domestic squabble across the alleyway. “La Maga had no idea at all that she was my witness, and on the contrary, was convinced that I was eminently the master of my own fate,” he confesses in the reverie of another day of missing her. “But no, what really exasperated me was knowing that I would never again be so close to my freedom as in those days in which I felt myself hemmed in by the Maga world, and that my anxiety to escape was an admission of defeat.” The intellectual gymnastics that define his social set start to seem stupid.

  “I can make a dialectical operation even out of soup,” he thinks with self-loathing as he contemplates his loss. He scours the Paris newspapers for any description of a crime victim that fits La Maga; he searches every pharmacy he can in Buenos Aires since she’d once worked at such a place; he traipsed through the bad neighborhoods of Montevideo. Finally, despairing of ever finding La Maga again, knowing that she may well have returned to Uruguay, a place where people disappear and occasionally turn up as corpses in a football stadium, Oliveira is overwhelmed with regret, wondering: “perhaps I should have spent a little more time in Montevideo and done a better job of searching.”

  In desperation, Olivei
ra just admits, without restraint, how desperately he feels the loss of La Maga—an absence that he brought on all by himself—and how right she always was. “There are metaphysical rivers, she swims in them like that swallow swimming in the air, spinning madly around a belfry, letting herself drop so that she can rise up all the better with the swoop. I look for them, find them, observe them from the bridge, but she swims in them. But she doesn’t know it, any more than the swallow. It’s not necessary to know things as I do, one can live in disorder without being held back by any sense of order.” Of course, glorifying her naïveté, as if she were the unwashed exotic in Truffaut’s Wild Child, he once again tries to classify her, find the phylum for her nature. Finally, knowing he is stuck in his linear, Cartesian, enlightened thinking, Oliveira begs her revenant for deliverance. “Oh let me come in, let me see some day the way your eyes see,” he cries out.

  The only way Oliveira could possibly see the vistas of La Maga is without her; and the only way that Samson could see the world as Delilah did was dismantled, effectively eviscerated by the Philistines. She knew that. All his life Samson had been this hulking beast that none could vanquish—in his bullying and belligerence, Samson was all-powerful. Delilah, despite her sexual sorcery, would always be essentially powerless in a man’s world, was still required to respond to the higher-ups among the Philistines, she was still compelled to hand over her man at will—anyone who doubts that she was forced to forfeit Samson will recall that the Philistine soldiers and officials waited outside her door as she questioned her husband about the wellspring of his strength, which would seem to suggest to me that this woman was hounded by law enforcement officials; her tent was no less under siege than David Koresh’s compound in Waco as it was invaded by ATF troops. So Delilah is first at the mercy of the instability of her lover, who between her and his private jihad is serving at least two masters; and then she’s at the mercy of the demands of her own state, with orders coming from the highest echelons: stretched, divided, cracked, confused, she is, above all, drained. By turning Samson into a helpless blind man, Delilah is forcing him to see the world as she sees it, to feel humbled before God and man alike. She wants Samson to know her helplessness, and she wants him to feel what her devotion to him has cost her. She is also finally putting up the Heisman hand and saying enough; she is tired of the craziness. “And that’s how blind people are the ones who light our paths,” writes Cortázar, expressing the idea that those who say they cannot join us in our ventures can sometimes be an excellent barometer of the sanity of our schemes. “That’s how someone, without knowing it, comes to show you irrefutably that you are on a path which he for his part would be incapable of following.”

  Delilah wanted the pain of her worldview to count, to hold currency with Samson, and though he was blinded in the process, in fact it seems he could finally see, finally feel the darkness and depth of life that one misses when he is a man of action, of thrashing out, of riddles and massacres, but not of solitary sane contemplation. “Reverse everything,” exhorts Marguerite Duras in an interview in the literary journal Signs. “Make women the point of departure in judging, make darkness the point of departure in judging what men call light, make obscurity the point of departure in judging what men call clarity.”

  I think, finally, for Delilah, disempowering Samson seemed like the best shot she had at keeping him around. In a very humane reading of the situation, Wolf Mankowitz’s novel The Samson Riddle, shows her to be a woman in a panic, he’s coming around to see her less and less, he may have someone else, she’s bound to lose him anyway in this jihad, so she takes the bribe money as a nest egg. She has no man other than the loose cannon that is Samson, and has no other security against old age. We see her as a survivor in a man’s world. According to Dr. Gregory Mobley of Harvard Divinity School, she isn’t “a conniving femme fatale as much as a woman trying to carve out her own place in a world that was against her.” Dr. Carol Fontaine of Andover Newton Theological School adds, “I think Delilah was someone caught in the middle. I think she is trying to save her own life. I don’t know how a woman alone—we have no indication that she has brothers or a father—could have said no to the Philistine lords with that kind of force and for that much money.”

  In a discussion of all the wiles a wife must use to keep a straying husband around, the energy she must expend to reduce all rivals, whether other women or worldly causes and concerns, Simone de Beauvoir writes: “If nothing succeeds, she will resort to bursts of weeping, nervous outbreaks, attempts at suicide, and the like; but too many scenes and recriminations will drive her husband out of the house. The wife thus runs the risk of making herself unbearable at the moment when she most needs to be seductive; if she wants to win the game she will contrive a skillful mixture of affecting tears and brave smiles, of blackmail and coquetry.” Or she might cut his hair, subdue and tame him, like Delilah.

  But Beauvoir is making the point that the patriarchal, traditional marriage has set woman up to be necessarily wily, and yet it complains when she does only what she must. “This is indeed a melancholy science—to dissimulate, to use trickery, to hate and fear in silence, to play on the vanity and the weaknesses of a man, to learn to thwart him, to deceive him, to ‘manage’ him. But woman’s good excuse for it all is that she has been required to involve herself wholly in her marriage. She has no gainful occupation, no legal capacities, no personal relations, even her name is hers no longer; she is nothing but her husband’s ‘half.’ ”

  Of course, the women’s movement was supposed to change all this, but has it really? We may no longer be “managing” marriages but we are managing relationships, reading books like The Rules and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and trying to work things out that we ought to abandon. We are trying to save and cling to what we have, like the wife in Scott Turow’s novel Presumed Innocent, the woman who is willing to kill a foxy mistress to save our marriage. Delilah just got in over her head and into Samson’s hair. I’m sure her motives to begin with were happiness on the home front. We all gladly buy into the notion that marriage is woman’s way of taming the wild beast that is man. We accept this, but what we don’t like is if she then takes this domesticated tiger, this declawed and defanged feline, and turns him over to the zookeepers because—well, because she can. Which is exactly what Delilah did. The Philistines captured Samson and entertained themselves by observing him in all his weakness and helplessness in the center of the city.

  But even if you accept every justification for Delilah’s betrayal, I’d still maintain that she did not ever mean to give him over to his enemies. Every commentator points out that she made her intentions plain, gave Samson three chances, and since the first three times he lied about the source of his power, Mankowitz suggests that she believed he may have been lying when he said the haircut would work. Samson’s surrender to Delilah with such great ease, so little coercion, and despite her complete lack of guile makes it seem as if he wanted, at long last, to give in and give up the fight, to abandon the one-man war. In the end, Samson was like any fugitive who does something stupid just to get caught, like Timothy McVeigh driving a car without license plates from his Oklahoma City bombing mission, creating through oversight the opportunity to get pulled over by the cops.

  And as much as Samson in his tragic heroism resembles suicidal Kurt Cobain, in his forcefulness, in his presumptuousness, in his peacock pride, he also reminds me a bit of O.J. Simpson. Perhaps Samson had no desire for surrender at all, he had simply come to believe that the source of his strength was his own will, not God’s—he had come to believe that not even a haircut could sap him, much less kill him. He reminds me of a man who believes he could get away with murder. Samson seems like a man who might give away his secrets, believing himself invincible. Who can say that Samson too wasn’t beating his wife, that Delilah kept calling on the authorities to restrain him and they couldn’t? Perhaps Delilah was more clever and accomplished at the art of survival than Nicole.

&n
bsp; There is no escaping that this is a story about fear of women. In the view of contemporary culture, this is a narrative about the power of women, but that is only an attempt at fashioning an excuse for men’s irrational dread of this phantom female potency—a dread that is actually a direct consequence of the male of the species’ God-honest down-deep awareness that since time immemorial he has had a stranglehold on all the power (and since Karl Marx has proved correct in positing that he who has the capital has control, all I have to say is seventy cents on the dollar to prove my point)—which is why he lives with the fear of one who has something to lose. He’s so busy protecting his pot of gold that in all his vigilance he’s failing to enjoy it—and to translate that into the subject at hand, it seems that male fear of the world’s freewheeling, devastating, difficult and complicated women is actually obviating a hell of a good time. Delilah’s punishment for assuming freedom as her birthright—beyond just having the roof fall on her head—is going down in history as a very bad woman. The punishment for similar behavior today, thousands of years later, has its own twists.

  Consider this: consider that if a female athlete or performer—a respected one, a role model, a nice girl, a Chris Evert or Bonnie Raitt—admitted to being HIV-positive and claimed she slept with a thousand men, she would not be accorded the dignity that’s been granted Magic Johnson, who served on a presidential commission, bitches and ho’s aside. “Delilah is often referred to as a ‘loose woman’ but no one calls Samson a ‘loose man,’ ” notes J. Cheryl Exum in her essay “Feminist Criticism: Whose Interests Are Being Served?” in judges and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies. In Italy a porn star is in parliament. Here, we can’t even elect one woman President and a potential Attorney General, Judge Kimba Wood, was removed from consideration with talk of her training to be a Playboy Bunny in London in the sixties tossed about as indications of inappropriateness. Feminism has taken us far, to far, far places, but it still hasn’t made it comfortable for women to be sexual subjects, it still has failed to eliminate the threat of female sexuality from the American psyche—a female cannot be whole successfully. In the case, for instance, of Ms. Wood, it’s as if the delight we ought to feel knowing that such a smart and capable creature is also a major babe is seen instead as a threat, an uncomfortable, itchy possibility. Could no one have said: All that and big boobs too? Of course. But no one did.