Vagina: A New Biography
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The idea of the female body as topography, and the vagina as either a sulfurous pit in that landscape, or else a bucolic spring, also became a standard part of Renaissance rhetoric. For a more pleasing version of the vagina/landscape analogy, see Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” as Venus offers herself to Adonis:
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer.
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.22
With King Lear, Dr. Rees interprets Cordelia’s resistance to doing as her father insists, in the context of the Elizabethan word nothing as slang for the vagina. Dr. Rees’s theory is that, in Shakespeare, the vagina is often punned upon and used as a metaphor for the “otherness” of femininity, the unruliness of female sexuality, and the “diseased” and “contaminating” natures of both the female body and female speech, as they were understood at the time.
CORDELIA: What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent. (Aside) . . . Nothing, my lord.
LEAR: Nothing?
CORDELIA: Nothing.
LEAR: How, nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.
CORDELIA: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I love your majesty according to my bond, no more nor less.23
“The vagina,” Dr. Rees writes, “is emblematic of the chaos, of the ‘can’t’ ”—this is a Midlands pronunciation of cunt; Dr. Rees is punning—“that gapes at the play’s heart.” She writes, “Nothing is forced to take on the form of something through Lear’s insistence upon it and his fascination with it prior to his agonies on the heath: ‘nothing can be made out of nothing’ (I.iv.130). But what remains the play’s preoccupation is the fact that something can be made of nothing: if the vagina is the cipher, the absence, then what about when it brings forth a child? . . . When the Fool tells Lear that ‘thou art an O without a figure’ (I.iv.183–84), the ‘O’ could be read as emblematic of the vagina, and may suggest the increasing sense of emasculation Lear experiences.”24 Lear’s emasculation, she writes, led to his curse of one of his two daughters’ organs of reproduction:
Into her womb convey sterility,
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate [degenerate] body never spring
A babe to honour her. (I.iv. 270–73)
In this speech, the vagina and hell become one place: “Beneath is all the fiend’s / There’s hell, there’s darkness . . . stench. . . .”
Behold yon simp’ring dame,
Whose face between her forks presages snow,
That minces virtue and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure’s name. [IV.vi.116–19] . . .
Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above.
But to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend’s:
there’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption!
Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary to sweeten my imagination.25
The special ability of the vagina to serve as a cultural Rorschach—reflecting others’ attractions to it and anxieties about it that were often contradictory—debuted with the early modern period. The ability of the vagina to signify heaven, hell, and “nothing” at all—the presumed female existential absence—was established in the West around this time.
In King Lear, the tropes around the vagina reveal that by the Elizabethan period, the Pauline Christian perspective on the hideousness and hellishness of the female sex organ and female sexuality were strongly embedded in the culture, just as other lyricists’ work shows that at the same time, another stream of more classical references identified the same organ with pastoral delight and natural charm. “The symbolic power of the vagina is fundamental to understanding not only Shakespeare’s but also Renaissance concerns more widely,” writes Dr. Rees. By Shakespeare’s time, cunt and twat were both considered obscene; which led the playwrights of the time to use punning and allusion to communicate their meanings directly enough—yet seemingly indirectly. In this punning passage from act 3, scene 2 of Hamlet, the subtext is Ophelia’s vagina. Dr. Rees points out that “In Elizabethan English, the word lap could mean ‘lap’ as we now use the word, or it could mean, codedly, ‘vagina.’ And remember, ‘nothing’ also was understood at the time to mean ‘vagina.’ ”
HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? [Lying down at Ophelia’s feet.]
OPHELIA: No, my lord.
HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap?
OPHELIA: Ay, my lord.
HAMLET: Do you think I meant country matters?
OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
OPHELIA: What is, my lord?
HAMLET: Nothing.
OPHELIA: You are merry, my lord.
HAMLET: Who, I?
OPHELIA: Ay, my lord.26
“Country matters” meant, to an Elizabethan audience, sexual, that is, animal matters. When Hamlet asks Ophelia what she is thinking and she replies, “Nothing”—meaning that she is actually not thinking about anything, that she is intellectually submissive or neutral—Hamlet responds, tellingly, “That’s a fair thought to lie between a maiden’s legs.” The pudenda—the “nothing”—is attractive in itself, but it is also attractive when there is neither a thought in the female brain nor experience in, or wisdom in, the female pudenda. When Ophelia replies, “What is, my lord?”—that is, what is a fair thought to lie between a maiden’s legs? what is an appropriate way to be sexually female?—and when Hamlet replies, “Nothing,” he is saying that a vagina—implicitly, an inexperienced or untried or ignorant vagina—is the right thing, an attractive thing, to find between a maiden’s (virgin’s) legs. Shakespeare has brilliantly managed a double mirroring of the connection between the female brain and the vagina, and he’s reflected the Elizabethan understanding of the connections between the two—playing with his underscoring of the culturally understood fact that nothing is more attractive than “nothing” on the mind of a young women and that “nothing” in terms of sexual experience was the right evidence to find in the “nothing,” the vagina, that lies between young or virginal women’s legs. Ophelia’s seeming ignorance of the double meanings of all the wordplay just heightens the culturally understood message about the attractiveness of sexual and intellectual ignorance in women “at both ends.”
To King Lear, the vagina was a sulfurous pit; to Poet John Donne, who also used a subterranean metaphor, it was a blessed, and blessing, New World natural treasury, a “mine of precious stones”: at a time of great discovery of new landscapes and valuable minerals and gems overseas, Donne, in his poem “Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” compares his beloved’s lower body, and her vagina, to the treasures of a newly discovered empire:
License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.27
The sexual meaning of the vagina as a “kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d” is clear. “Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be” is another very tender metaphorization of the vagina: though it is true that the female body is conquered, as new lands at the time were being conquered and consecrated to England or Spain with the phallic planting of imperial banners, nonetheless the conquest in this case is celebratory and loving. The poet is caressing his lover’s vagina with his hand, and if you understand what “my seal” meant to an Elizabethan reader—a signet ring at the time would be pressed into wax, to create a personal mark—Donne’s erotic rega
rd for the vagina is overt. Though Donne is claiming the vagina as “his” by metaphorically impressing a “seal” against it, it is also true that wax must be gently warmed and melted to receive and retain the impress of the signet ring.
This tension about whether the vagina was heaven or hell was reflected in the fact that, just as anatomy began to be firmly established as a Renaissance discipline, so the clitoris as an organ began a centuries-long process—which historian Thomas Laqueur identified, and which I referenced in my book Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood—of being lost and found and lost and found by anatomists. The cultural history of Western anatomy does not reveal any parallel continual misplacement and “forgetting” of the location, role, or function of other organs on the human body. The pancreas, let alone the scrotum, once identified on the body and their function once understood, remain located and understood—indeed the understanding of other organs’ functions has only improved over the past four centuries, while the understanding of the role of the clitoris continually reeffaces and redegrades.
This “Where did it go?” “What was it for again?” intellectual journey regarding the clitoris should also reflect to us Western culture’s ambivalence about the role of the clitoris not just as a trigger to female sexual excitement, but as the gateway or catalyst to female courage and confidence. Ambivalence about identifying, once and for all, the clitoris—where it is and how it works—can surely, we now see, given the brain-vagina connection, reflect ambivalence about handing to women, once and for all, the keys to the kingdom of personal assertiveness, and of the desire for freedom.
The clitoris has been discovered, “lost,” and rediscovered consistently since 1559. That year, Renaldus Columbus identified the site he called “preeminently the seat of women’s delight.” “If you touch it,” he noted, “you will find it rendered a little harder and oblong to such a degree that it shows itself as a sort of male member [. . .] since no one has discerned these projections and their workings, if it is permissible to give names to things discovered by me, it should be called the love or sweetness of Venus.” He added that “if you rub it vigorously with a penis, or touch it even with a little finger, semen swifter than air flies this way and that on account of the pleasure [. . .] without these protuberances, women would neither experience delight in venereal embraces nor conceive any fetuses.” In 1671, midwife Jane Sharp identified it yet again, noting that it “will stand and fall as the yard [penis] doth and makes women lustful and take delight in copulation.”28 The Anatomy of Humane Bodies, a medical textbook written by William Cowper in 1697, showed it for the first time as a distinct organ. And Laqueur cites another seventeenth-century textbook, this one French, which points out that the clitoris is “where the Author of Nature has placed the seat of voluptuousness—as He has in the glans penis—where the most exquisite sensibility is located, and where he placed the origins of lasciviousness in women.”29
But these “forgettings” and rediscoveries merely foreshadow the greatest “forgetting” yet, which lay still ahead.
8
The Victorian Vagina: Medicalization and Subjugation
The state of arousal, which had occurred very frequently . . . leased entirely after the surgery . . . on January 6, 1865, the wound was totally healed, the condition of the patient good . . . nor was she troubled by sexual excitement.
—Gynecologist Gustav Braun, “The Amputation of the Clitoris and Labia Minora: A Contribution to the Treatment of Vaginismus,” 1865
The “modern” Western conception of the vagina, the one we inherit today—shamed, sexualized in a narrow and functional way, desacralized and scientifically scrutinized—developed in the nineteenth century. As Michel Foucault points out in The History of Sexuality, this was the century of medicalized control of sexuality in general.1 The vagina was medicalized and controlled in highly specific ways in this era that were unprecedented at the time, but that have endured since—and that descend to us, often intact.
As industrialization and increased education created an expanding class of increasingly restless and enfranchised women, new sources of sexual subjugation worked to repress those women. Growing cultural forces sought to keep women ignorant of their anatomy and sexual responses and to develop a state of sexual “passionlessness.” Many new sources generated these repressive pressures: newspaper commentators, doctors’ manuals, marriage guides, and the rise of gynecology as a medical specialization.
This era saw the dissemination of the theory that the clitoris was a cause of moral turpitude, that reading novels could drive young girls wild with unconstrained desire, and that “good” women had no sexual (especially clitoral) feelings whatsoever, but that “bad” women could be ruined by their sexual appetites.2 Paradoxically, this period also saw the explosion of treatments that let women have orgasms without losing social standing, because they did so at the hands of physicians. Some doctors simply advertised “uterine massage” for nervous conditions—and made fortunes masturbating their high-status, ladylike female clients on their treatment couches. Some doctors, no doubt exhausted from the demand, even developed electrical masturbation machines to bring about female “nervous release.” Many kinds of electric dildos were developed at this time, too, all advertised for euphemistic purposes.3
The deeply ingrained idea that we inherit “good” and “bad” vaginas—the former, that will be protected by society and the state, and the latter, fair game for punishment and violence—descends from this moment. It was in this period that our uniquely modern anxiety—that “good,” or respectable, vagina, which through its respectability lays claim to some social protection, not “degrade” itself through our own wantonness, inviting all the punishments that accrue to “bad” vaginas—became codified. By the mid-Victorian period, medical discourses about “respectable” women’s vaginas, and pornography or punitive legislation aimed at “bad” women’s vaginas, were virtually the only two discourses in which the vagina appeared in public or private commentary at all.
I cannot stress enough how many of our current anxieties about the vagina and about female sexual pleasure were introduced to society at this time and descend to us even now in forms recognizably dating to this period.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, women’s devilishness—or, less judgmentally, their lust—was seen as integrated in women, if not as laudable. That unified, if not especially admiring, view of female sexuality changed for good by about 1857, and it was a dramatic change. Before 1857, the year of the first Obscene Publications Act in Britain, a wave of erotic lithographs, as well as slang and bawdry, treated the vagina in ways that descended from the raunchy but amused tradition of depicting the vagina—the lustful, active vagina—in such eighteenth-century erotic classics as John Cleland’s 1748 Fanny Hill. But the Victorian era created our duality: a medicalized “good” woman’s vagina, and a harlotized, pornographic “bad” woman’s vagina. The Victorian ideologues of gender rejected the bawdy, sometimes adoring, more integrated middle ground in relation to the vagina and clitoris that the previous century had taken for granted. The new discipline of gynecology recast female masturbation, which had to that point been scarcely noticed and hardly commented upon, as an obsessed-over sinkhole of shame and degradation, and also recast female sexual pleasure in intercourse, which to that point had been taken for granted, if sometimes inveighed against, as a chimera, a blazing stigma, or a degrading grotesquerie.
It may also have been an unconscious cultural expression of an innate recognition of the dopamine-vagina-brain connection: in this period, middle-class women were successfully pushing for greater access to rights and influence of all kinds. They lobbied for the right to divorce from abusive husbands (the Married Women’s Property Act, 1857); opposed the rounding up of women accused of prostitution, who were then forced into brutal pelvic exams (the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, 1869); fought for greater control over their own earnings and inheritances in marriage (the Married Women’s Pro
perty Act, 1870); and sought the right to leave a marriage with their own property and retain custody of their own children (the Married Women’s Property Act, 1882). By the end of the century, they were establishing women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge and fighting to get into the professions. Given the dopamine-vagina-brain nexus, it is not unreasonable in retrospect to understand that an ideology would arise—however subconsciously—that would increasingly rigorously keep these same newly educated, middle-class Western women, who were seeking and gaining so many new rights, from understanding how their own vaginas even worked, and that would indeed punish them in many ways for even considering touching their vaginas and clitorises in ways that would activate more unruly dopamine.
By the 1850s, Victorian medical and social commentators were asserting that masturbation for both sexes led dangerously to “a spectrum of physically horrible diseases” that finally brought the self-abuser to a state of madness. But the preoccupation with the dangers of female masturbation led to violence. The Victorian obsession with stamping out female masturbation was often tied to fears about women’s education, and often connected to images of girls or women seduced by reading. (The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had virtually no such preoccupation with a potential link between female reading and female masturbation.) In the pre-Victorian world in which even elite women were generally uneducated and propertyless, it really didn’t matter much to anyone if they masturbated. This nineteenth-century obsession with the dangers of female masturbation, which emerged in a century in which women secured legislative victory after legislative victory involving access to rights, must be understood as a reaction against the dangers of female emancipation from the patriarchal home.
Gynecologist William Acton asserted, in his influential 1875 treatise, Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, that “masturbation may be best described as an habitual incontinence eminently productive of disease.” He noted, though, that “the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.” Acton also believed that “As a general rule a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s embraces, but principally to gratify him . . . the married woman has no wish to be placed on the footing of a mistress.”4