June as Anaïs first saw her, in her red velvet dress with the holes in the sleeves and the stain down the front, a cape and man’s fedora, her face powdered white, her eyes lined heavily with kohl, her lipstick black or green, her blonde peakedness. June Miller a “figure of doom” like the femme fatale Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, another object of obsessive love, she is the character in everyone else’s novels (perhaps that’s why she wanders, she wanders to escape this fate). A cipher sleepwalking through the night, through love affairs, pulled by others’ desires for her. Robin Vote who was partially modeled on Djuna Barnes’s longtime and unfaithful lover Thelma Wood. Yet also Robin Vote is also Djuna’s friend, Elsa, (Robin also called the Baroness), who nicknamed herself La Somnambule. She with her revolutionary costumes made out of street detritus and stolen department store items. Like some sort of mythical warrior with her trench helmet and Joan of Arc hair.
In his Arcades Project Walter Benjamin seizes on Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” for his chapter on flânerie. In the story the narrator follows a flâneur down the streets of London and (as a voyeur) observes the man’s erotic compulsion towards the crowd, this ecstasy of being lost in the crowd. Yet the flâneur by his essence is male — the woman in the city is still viewed as both commodity and consumer.
What is the flâneuse escaping? She is escaping her role as the object of desire. She wants instead to gaze, to desire. Lol Stein walking around the town in a state of amnesic consciousness, she goes shopping as well, the work about the erotics of witness as opposed to being witnessed. She leaves her body, the scene of the crime. Lying in the field of rye, voyeuring Tatiana and Jacques Hold in the hotel room.
And so what is Robin Vote escaping from? She is escaping being a character.
Gail Scott writing the flâneuse in My Paris, haunted and resurrected and newly gendered from modernism, the character is reading The Arcades Project, she watches across the street, the erotic tableaus of the mannequins in the shop window, yet she is also watched, or internally watches herself, she is always worried about what she is wearing, whether she looks French enough. To be a woman, perhaps, is always to be a foreigner.
She is seen as the living embodiment of a philosophy, but not a philosopher herself. (Flapper and Philosophers, Fitzgerald’s first story collection.) And yet: Zelda was a brilliant philosopher of herself as archetype, in her articles on the flapper she was commissioned to write for women’s magazines: “I refer to the right to experiment with herself as a transient, poignant figure who will be dead tomorrow.” She lives and he writes it down. She acts, she throws scenes (how literary), she externalizes (while also remaining so curiously blank and passive). A muse for a violent style of living. In his texts she is defined by her recklessness, her brave cruelty, her brazen Nietzscheanism, devouring and destroying everything in her path. To Bataille his mistress Colette Peignot was the embodiment of the Sovereign, his Sadean libertine. He described her as “one of the most vehement existences ever lived.” (She writes a poem, “Archangel or whore / I don’t mind / All the roles / are lent to me.”) After her death he posthumously renames her Laure, publishing her secret writings.
As I picture her, I realize Colette Peignot is almost a doppelgänger for June Miller. The femme fatale is self-destructive; the femme fatale is also murdered.
In Blue of Noon Bataille drew upon Colette for the character Dirty, the desire object (as well as the lovetorn Xenie, he breaks her up into fragments). “She is the abject character in sumptuous dresses and drunken stupors,” he writes. He depicts Dirty as a libertine, a Courtney Love figure: the work opens with her drunken spectacle — a scene of grande abjection and convulsive beauty. She pisses herself, is dolled up again in her exquisite clothes. She is foul-mouthed, folle, she asks the maid to masturbate. At the end he dresses her as an Aryan goddess, in her bright-red swastika of a gown, he portrays her not him as the fascist, dictatorial; it is her will that overpowers.
(A recent Style story in the Times, on Courtney Love, looking like a Hans Bellmer doll, the one with the blonde frazzled wig and blue bow. She enters her hotel room to meet the reporter completely naked, on the arm of the painter Anselm Kiefer, and she tugs on a sheer lace dress that still shows everything, cunt and nipples and all. This is a very Bellmer image actually, and Kiefer bends down the supplicant position to try to stuff her into a pair of black Givenchy heels, while she insists that the reporter also helps her.)
She who makes all these scenes in hotels (this is how Nadja was put away, how the writer Leonora Carrington was put away).
They are always throwing things — parties, selves, fits. (Scott threw himself at the feet of Martha Graham, Zelda threw herself off a staircase in retaliation.)
When he met her she was a golden girl written up in the newspapers, Judge Sayre’s baby girl, a belle of Montgomery society. A gorgeous spectacle, like when she rode through the center of town in a one-piece flesh-colored bathing suit.
The stunts they pulled together then. (He with the American name, Francis Scott; they were an American pastime, starcrazy, starstruck.) Riding on the tops of taxis. All the wild gin-soaked parties. Driving to Alabama in their white knickerbocker suits. Scott collecting guests’ watches and jewelry and burning them in tomato soup. In Hollywood, gatecrashing the Goldwyn party barking on all fours. She would take baths at other people’s parties. Often she would play hostess from the bathtub.
He loved her eccentric behavior — indulged it, cultivated it. Until he decided her behavior was self-destructive, or was destroying him, when so much of their behavior was mutually and singularly self-destructive — burning her clothes in the bathtub, throwing her diamond watch out the window, all over Lois Moran. In literature when these women act out it is first seen as an embodiment of a philosophy (sometimes monstrous and possessed), but later, once he grows bored with her, as is the case with Breton and Nadja, the violence he originally fetishized is now interpreted as the ordinary bizarre behavior of a madwoman he had confused for a muse.
I am sitting near the front desk at a salon in a town called Hudson. John and I make the 30 minute drive here for yoga. It is a town centered around an expensive boarding school. The town is empty because of spring break. In the town, shopping is limited to the Chico’s, GAP, and an accessories store.
The “women’s issues” section in the local bookstore contains books about dieting, what not to wear, and how to deal with your mastectomy.
I am at the salon to get my long neglected eyebrows waxed. Since joining the yoga studio I have felt very ungroomed. Amidst the blonde women with their disciplined muscular and marital bodies. (Next to them I am swarthy, collapsed in pools of sweat.)
There are magazines set out on the little table while I wait but I have brought Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker. I underline a line before I am called: “The monstrous and the formless have as much right as anybody else.”
The woman who is waxing my eyebrows tells me she’s from the more blue-collar Canton. She has a scar on her eyebrow where a piercing used to be. She has green eyeshadow that matches her tight-fitting shamrock top. Her hands are freezing cold as she touches me. She apologizes chirpily. Her hands smell faintly of smoke.