She felt her love rise up in her like a flame. She felt her whole body tremble with the excitement and the ecstasy of the thrill that swept over her, because she knew that in a few seconds she would be his wife and belong to him forever.10
Both these books I bought for three and sixpence in a supermarket, but it could not claim to have been a random choice, because I remembered these names, Heyer and Cartland, from my fantasy-ridden teens. Indeed I met Miss Cartland in a cascade of aquamarines at a university debate where the topic was ‘Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever’, Miss Cartland of course taking the affirmative, as if it were possible to be good without being clever! Nowadays she seems to have set up as a sentimental counsellor and purveyor of honey-based aphrodisiacs and may point to her daughter’s success in happily marrying into the peerage. If women’s liberation movements are to accomplish anything at all, they will have to cope with phenomena like the million-dollar Cartland industry. The third book bought on that same day was bought on spec. It was called The Loving Heart, and described as ‘another great romantic story of the Australian outback’. All the well-tried paraphernalia of romance were there. In inventing Grant Jarvis, Lucy Walker availed herself of the feudal paternalism of the sheep-station set-up. Not only is her hero wealthy, he directly rules a society of loyal retainers, white and relatively infantile, as well as black and totally infantile.
In order to bring the elements of her story unto the juxtaposition that will provide the maximum in sentimental thrills, Lucy Walker devises a situation so intricate and unlikely that it would take as long to summarize as it did to invent. All we need to know is that Elizabeth Heaton is posing as Grant Jarvis’s fiancée to protect him from designing women who desire him for motives of alliance and ambition. They are fast, energetic and gorgeous, but she has an English complexion and purity, as well as a trick of imitating the queen in carrying out her functions as lady of the worse-than-feudal manor. Her modesty is so excessive that she suffers acutely when, on her first night on the station, the resolution of a crisis involves her in sleeping in her slip on the ground beside the fire, with Grant’s body shielding her on the cold side. When Grant visits her bedroom in broad daylight, despite the fact that she is not alone she cannot ‘for the life of her’ prevent ‘the tell-tale blush that crept up her cheeks’. She is thankful that ‘the breakfast tray lay across her knees…some kind of symbolic shield’.11 Physically Grant is well-constructed as the father—phallus, ‘extremely handsome’, ‘with cold grey-blue eyes’, which coupled with his straight mouth and firm jaw ‘gave an impression of hardness…and indifference’.12 All her efforts in the book are expended to earn his approval, and in her quiet moments when not teaching the children, or washing the Union Jack (truly!), she falls to contemplation of his hard masculine beauty, and to masochistic reverie.
Yet as she looked at Grant, leaning on that balustrade, staring out over the plain, with that fine white scar showing on his arm, she felt he was, for all his wealth and power, a lonely man. Whether he was isolated by his personal tragedy or by his great wealth Elizabeth did not know. If he required her to stay on she would not raise difficulties. She had a strange compulsive inclination to serve him.13
All romantic novels have a preoccupation with clothes. Every sexual advance is made with clothing as an attractive barrier; the foot fetish displayed in Miss Walker’s descriptions is an optional extra.14 The book has been through four impressions in the Fontana edition, and the authoress has written eleven others at least. The climax of the titillation comes when Grant Jarvis joins the ship in which Elizabeth is travelling home to London at Colombo.
She knew he was real because the tweed of his coat hurt her nose, and she could feel the great power of his arms as he crushed her to him…
The incredible had happened. Someone in the world had crossed continents and flown oceans to get her…Elizabeth Heaton, typist…
He bent his head and his lips met her lips. For a long moment Elizabeth had the taste of heaven on her mouth.15
This is the hero that women have chosen for themselves. The traits invented for him have been invented by women cherishing the chains of their bondage. It is a male commonplace that women love rotters but in fact women are hypnotized by the successful man who appears to master his fate; they long to give their responsibility for themselves into the keeping of one who can administer it in their best interests. Such creatures do not exist, but very young women in the astigmatism of sexual fantasy are apt to recognize them where they do not exist. Opening car doors, manoeuvring headwaiters, choosing gifts, and earning money, are often valued as romantic attainments: in search of romance many women would gladly sacrifice their own moral judgement of their champion. Many a housewife thrills to the story of Charmaine Biggs, and in telling her story to the dailies the train-robber’s wife or her ghost has known just which aspects of a relatively sordid and confused life to delineate and emphasize.16 Biggs’s size, physical strength and daring are reiterated, along with his impudence in courtrooms and remand centres, his cavalier attitude to money and his prowess in bed. Even an adultery has been taken in stride.
Although romance is essentially vicarious the potency of the fantasy distorts actual behaviour. The strength of the belief that a man should be stronger and older than his woman can hardly be exaggerated. I cannot claim to be fully emancipated from the dream that some enormous man, say six foot six, heavily shouldered and so forth to match, will crush me to his tweeds, look down into my eyes and leave the taste of heaven or the scorch of his passion on my waiting lips. For three weeks I was married to him. The impression that women dress to please men must be understood as meaning that women dress to create an impression which corresponds they think to the devastation wrought on Peter Harvey by Amanda in white muslin. Ballroom dancing is an extraordinary capitulation on the part of society to the myth of female submissiveness; the women travel backwards, swept along in a chaste embrace, their faces close to the men’s but not actually touching. Such dancing which is only as old as Heyer’s Regency Buck may be seen as the expression of middle-class manners, for the aristocratic modes of dancing were formal while the lower orders allowed an independent part to the woman, involving greater or lesser exertion. There is no folk dance or native dance that I have ever heard of in which the man takes over the automotion of the woman. The favourite spectacle of the middle-class female is ballet; all the romantic stereotypes are embodied in it, as the female, although her solo exhibitions demand great power and discipline, leaps but appears to be lifted like a leaf or a pile of swansdown. Even at the merely social level successful ballroom dancing involves the same contradiction. The woman must exercise physical control so that she appears to be guided weightless about the floor.
The most significant operation of the romance myth, however, is in the courting situation. Boys, unless they are consciously exploiting female susceptibility, have little idea what the kiss means in the romantic canon. For them it is a beginning, a preliminary to intimacy; for the girls it is the crown of love to be staged at climactic points. While a girl does not really believe this, she does not understand the boy’s attitude to it either. Reverent intensity is most frequently lacking from adolescent embraces although maturer men might fake it, and fake it almost unconsciously. The best behaved teenager necks, even if nobody ever does in Valentine, Mirabelle or Sweethearts, but even acknowledging this fact a teenage girl yearns for love and romance as things that could happen to her, but which she cannot bring about. The impulse to yield militates against the impulse to impose the right form on the circumstances, and most often a girl breathing out her soul on the lips of her callow lover seduces herself with an inflated notion of what is really happening. She offers at one time both more and less than he is asking. The baffling scenes that ensue when boys violate sentimental protocol testify to the fantasy operations of romance. It is such a simple role that more cynical young men fake it deliberately: the veriest tyro soon learns the best line is the suppress
ed-but-almost-uncontrollable-desire line, which a little heavy breathing and significant glancing can put over. How about the Cartland line, ‘If I kiss you I won’t be answerable for the consequences’? Such dialogue could be dynamite. For all their prudish insistence on blushing and the excision of any suggestion of less intense and less decorous human contact, Cartland and Heyer are preparing the way for seducers—not lovers, seducers. But while they make the handsome man’s job easier they put even more obstacles in the way of the homely male. Although the romantic male is not so invariable a stereotype as the characterless, passive female, he has certain indispensable qualities. He is never gauche, although he might be insolent or even insulting; he is never nervous or uncertain or humble, and he is always good-looking. In the tribal teenage situation there are some boys with whom one does not go out; they are not acceptable, being homely, or corny, or eager. Actual debauchery is less of a disqualification than any of these.
Settings, clothes, objects, all testify the ritualization of sex which is the essential character of romance. Just as the Holy Communion is not a real meal and satisfies no hunger, the Almighty Kiss stands for a communion which cannot actually be enjoyed. Cartland’s imagery of hem-kissing and lilies gives away the fact that we are dealing with a kind of sexual religion. Devotion is what is demanded, not love. For some women these rituals are necessary even in married life to make sex acceptable. Without such observances, sexual intercourse is another household duty and some such need of glamour is very often closer to the heart of wifely reluctance than mere sordid sexual bargaining. The desire to have sex built up into an important occasion has a curious relationship with the alleged slowness of feminine response, for many women seek in sex not physical release but exaltation, physical worship as promised in the marriage service. Some of the sexual demand women make is actually the demand for the enactment of the sexual ceremony of togetherness, which men recoil from because they misinterpret it as a demand upon their potency.
I whined and tried to coax him. He said I was a ‘nympho’. I’ll love you the way I loved you at Saint-Remy in the story…He gave way, I was in despair.
I began with arabesques. All my hope was in my hand. Frivolous, light, aerial, adventurous, simple, complicated, coaxing, surprising, deceptive, hesitant, precise, rhythmical, unending, subtle, lively, slow, dragging, conscientious. Do you like this, this long circling round your nipple? There is a swallow back from the warm-south, Gabriel, fluttering from your thigh down to your ankle, listen to it on the outlines of your body. Moving carelessly, diligently, attentively, curiously, watchfully, I traced the name of Saint-Remy over my lover’s flesh. I also wrote down the old woman picking up the rotting flowers when the market was closing. I twined a long paragraph of honeysuckle around his haunches, around his wrist, around his ear. My slow lotus stream flowed into his blood, but it didn’t make Gabriel go to sleep. A shiver across his shoulder blades, token of my power. Dance-hall bowers, potatoes frying in the open air, his armpits, his groin. Hunched inside the chaos of my love, my hand followed the outline of his leg as I fed like a baby at my husband’s heel. Dear teacher, you encouraged me, I listened at the sounds of the clearing: his shoulder as I gambolled around it. My fingers and my nails told about a very fragile moon intimidated by a cloud, about a sunset being massacred, about the trills and the waterdrops of a shadow bird. A heavy walk we went on then. Oh God, how well I wrote from his knee up to his groin; oh God, that was my religion.17
In the work of Violette Leduc vulgarity is a strength. Here cheap romance joins the superior variety called romanticism to create a pantheistic ritual of love. Following the romantic notion of togetherness La Bâtarde embarks on an egotistical sentimental journey over her husband’s helpless body. One could imagine any man feeling a deep disgust for this kind of preciosity, craving some straight dirt, some gusto in the business instead of this neurasthenic need. Some inferior version of this amalgam of vanities and devotion is at the bottom of feminine refusal to tolerate certain sexual acts which are unmistakably specific and mechanical, and tolerance of perversions, conversely, because they are ritually apparelled. Much can be accomplished sexually by flattery, which is a version of prayer. The act of adoration of a woman’s nakedness is not overlooked by the most extrovert lovers, and much caress is in fact ritual observance, not to mention the ritual repetition of the phrase ‘I love you’ demanded by some of the most dissolute of women. The recurrent terminology in sexual magazines of orgasm as the ‘supreme’ experience is another reflection of romanticism and the belief in a kind of mystic immolation in sex.
Like most young girls, I had always been vaguely longing for my ‘Prince Charming’ to come and awaken me with his magic kiss. But when I had my first kiss and many more without the promised results, I was deeply disappointed. It was not until much later when, after a deep and satisfying orgasm, I suddenly realized the true meaning of the fairy tale and the nature of the magic kiss of which it speaks.18
As a cynical young sexual reformer I often observed that the mystical kiss of the romance was more properly to be understood as orgasm, but I have come to think that that was wrong. What happens in the romantic view of sex is that the orgasm comes to signify the kiss, not vice-versa. The fairy-tale conditioned mind is translating the phenomena into terms of popular pulp culture. No boy who has ever masturbated, whether into a baseball mitt in a burlesque show or on to a clean sheet of white paper, would be tempted to describe orgasm in such a silly way. Maxine Davis does not see the pomposity of her own prose in this statement.
A girl may have studied marriage manuals diligently and tried to absorb any instructions made available by objective, responsible people. But if she has never kissed or petted or masturbated or dreamed to the point of climax, she has not the faintest idea of what the supreme experience might be like.19
I have always been troubled by the same kind of quality in D. H. Lawrence’s writing about actual sexual experience. He couples a strange reluctance to describe what his protagonist is actually doing with the most inflated imagery of cosmic orgasm. It is a short step from the more familiar
Slowly, very slowly, and with a wonderful tenderness, his lips found hers. Just for a moment their mouths touched; the petal of a flower against the petal of a flower…His mouth sought her once more and it was as if the whole world was swept away from them and they stood alone above the clouds in the glory of the sunshine, which had something divine about it.20
with all its fairy-tale religious elements to
She seemed to faint beneath, and he seemed to faint, stooping over her. It was a perfect passing away for both of them, and at the same time the most intolerable accession into being, the marvellous fullness of immediate gratification, overwhelming, outflooding from the source of the deepest life-force, the darkest, deepest, strangest life-source of the human body, at the back and the base of the loins.21
This is the same romanticism that would have Elizabeth Heaton protecting her lap with the breakfast tray, the notion that the penis is a mighty fountain forced momentarily out by some mysterious dynamism. Nevertheless, I was not sure what was wrong with it until I paid attention to the sexual imagery of urban blues which seems to escape all the prudery and false mysticism of the sex prophet. Perhaps that might explain the emergence in America of writers who can talk of sex with enthusiasm and clarity. However, one could not class Hemingway amongst them, for his description of successful orgasm is when the earth moves and the older tradition seems still to be by far the better represented.
The prudery, excitement and ‘poetry’ of Lawrence’s and Hemingway’s writing places them in the tradition of the sexual romantics, even if their wares are sold to a more literate readership. Their vocabulary is larger than Cartland’s but the structures of titillation are the same, provided we accept the fuck as the end of the story and not the kiss. As indications of a sexual lifestyle they are as misleading. The female role is still one of passing mysteriously, with all proper delay, from state to st
ate of feverish exultation. It is perhaps worth notice that both Lawrence and Hemingway have been accused of impotence. Now that the sexual role of women is being admitted the masochistic postures of the feminine romance are being complicated and enhanced but they remain essentially the same. Women are now expected to enjoy sex but not to descend from imprisonment in the bourgeois temple. Instead sex is being brought into the temple as a part of ritual observance, a mystical experience which is a grace from men, as Teresa of Avila was granted ecstasy by God.
A woman is never so happy as when she is being wooed. Then she is mistress of all she surveys, the cynosure of all eyes, until that day of days when she sails down the aisle, a vision in white, lovely as the stefanotis she carries, borne translucent on her father’s manly arm to be handed over to her new father-surrogate. If she is clever, and if her husband has the time and the resources, she will insist on being wooed all her life; more likely she will discover that marriage is not romantic, that husbands forget birthdays and anniversaries and seldom pay compliments, are often perfunctory. Nobody flatters, nobody makes her feel desirable. She realizes that her husband’s susceptibility is much more sexual than personal, or at least she feels it is, because he is so careless of the rituals that she established as a blushing bride. In the courting phase her relationship was all glamour (spell-binding as the preliminary to imprisonment in the glass mountain) for she met her husband only when she was being taken out, wined and dined and dated and fêted, looking pretty, talking only of herself and her love. If her need for the old adulation grows desperate she may be seriously affected. Romance had been the one adventure open to her and now it is over. Marriage is the end of the story. Women’s magazines exhort her not to let the romance die out of her marriage. She tries not ‘to let herself go’, keeps young-looking, pretty, tries not to ask her husband every single day if he loves her, wishes his morning kiss before leaving her alone for the day were a little less mechanical. Sooner or later she sees her courting as a seduction; she may blame her husband for it but in fact she engineered the seduction herself. What love seemed to be in her head, all electric lips and dreaming of him wide awake in her bed, it never really was at all. She sees that she was a silly romantic girl. Now she finds that marriage is a hard job. Her romanticism becomes, if it has not already become, escapism. She treats herself to little romantic things like perfumes which her husband does not even notice. Romance is now her private dream.
The Female Eunuch Page 19
