(She is so often dismissed, made the punchline, the darling punching bag, later the baglady joke. They keep her Outside.)
Henry Miller’s CUNT PORTRAITS. The woman is reduced to the cunt, to the body, through which he can achieve his own mystical revelations. The whore acts as a conduit. In the last ecstatic rushes at the end of Tropic of Cancer, jerking off deliriously on literature while looking down “into this fucked-out cunt of a whore,” he falls into a volcano (her body the ruins he meditates on). Flaubert’s metaphors of fucking for writing. He gets off on himself—“The erections of thought are like those of the body; they do not come at will!” In Guilty, Bataille is drunk, grieving, mad. He surrounds himself with prostitutes, like a Surrealist Charlie Sheen, nameless goddesses who he can fuck to find some sort of release, a temporary death, reaching a mystical ecstasy that is an exit of the self. “My true church is a whorehouse,” he writes. Dirty a desirous corpse in Blue of Noon. Troppmann jerking off to his mother’s corpse. “I realized, in any case, that my attraction to prostitutes was like my attraction to corpses.” They lay there and play dead.
(Yes, yes — the exquisite corpse is female.)
During a weekend in New York, I buy another gray coat, this one a long wool winter coat with an upturned collar that I think makes me look mysterious. John and I become so consumed like the Fitzgeralds — we become at times extraordinarily possessed by thingness, the texture and fabric of these things. And everything and everyone is always so beautiful in New York, and there’s all the art to go see, and it’s almost staged, this beauty, or conformist, this beauty. Like the Anselm Kiefer show at the Gagosian, all these immense poetic landscapes encased in ornate cells.
On the plane home I read Lydia Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s exquisite attention to clothes. In New York all the women click-click on the cobblestones in their delicately heeled ankle boots.
I have just interviewed with the head of the creative writing department at Pratt, where I have been offered a couple of boutique (yet low-paying) classes in the fall. John is trying to round up work so we can finally move here. Although he has also just been offered a rare books position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It is an extraordinary opportunity.” I went with him to visit — it is green, calm, boring.
And yet in New York I feel unsettled by it all. Voluptuously sickened by all of this intense and fervent consumption. The existential female nausea Sylvia Plath depicts in The Bell Jar. The first half of the novel is set in the Manhattan glossy magazine world, and Esther becomes infected by the desire for a patent-leather purse that matches her belt like Doreen has, and the clothes that she buys with her scholarship money at Bloomingdale’s, and she loses track of her identity, what she wants (to write). And conformist Hilda like an empty dybbuk in her hats, droning on and on about the Rosenbergs and all the colors of green. And how Esther rebels from the indoctrination of the fashion magazine, throwing her clothes like confetti off the rooftop, letting the streaks of blood dry on her cheeks, a grotesque mimicking of the ritual of makeup, as she rides back to the dreary suburbs.
The desire, sometimes, to throw everything away.
I wonder if Flaubert’s characterization of Emma B. is mostly surface, the feminine excess — her extravagances for clothes that turned into her fatal debt, the silk rose parasol, her delicate shoes.
Zelda who made paper dolls. She herself was written as a paper doll — transparent, easily destroyed, one-dimensional.
She is the dolclass="underline" he dresses her.
I wonder if the male genius identifying with the female heroine is really a form of masquerade, like Marcel DuChamp in drag as his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy. An exaggerated performance of feminine stereotypes as opposed to really trying to enter and understand a character.
These modernists can descend into stereotypes when writing women, the eternal feminine — Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Henry James. They write her as Simone de Beauvoir’s Young Girl who acts out these stereotypes, but without any gasps, any stirrings of something different. Emma’s melancholy after her mother dies is depicted as self-conscious, as if to attain some image (John Berger’s girl at a funeral). Flaubert does not give her boredom or disillusionment any real existential weight. He gets at some truths of her childhood (the raw material supplied by Louise Colet) — but then afterwards does she have any real humanity? What is authentic behind her frivolities? What well of loneliness inspired her to turn to romance novels? What intensity of emotion made her voluptuous towards God? Towards her lovers?
In the last chapter of Room Woolf calls for the perfect writer to be androgynous, quoting Coleridge on the subject, who writes that an androgynous mind is one that “transmits emotion without impediment” yet doesn’t necessarily have “any special sympathy with women.” But I think of how fervently, in letters to Louise Colet as well as in his novel, Flaubert dismissed women and their minds. He writes to LC (how did she handle these dismissive letters?) that the only writer who understood women, “these charming animals” was Shakespeare. “He portrays them as overenthusiastic beings, never as reasonable ones.” He might have identified with Madame Bovary, or had been her, but he also thought of her as a frivolous thing, with a feminine (weak) mind, all flesh instead of spirit. There is no ambivalence to her characterization, there is no consciousness, or possibility of consciousness. She is in Kant’s minority, a silly, frivolous animal. Her emotions are never sincere, unlike even Charles’s misguided uxoriousness (yet Emma’s husband also just romanticizes her as the character in his own novel, he never really sees her).
Perhaps Flaubert’s identification—“C’est moi”—is really about ownership. He did draw on his own life for Madame Bovary, his stealing furtively into Paris for his rendezvous with Louise Colet, trapped at home in the country house, yearning to escape. But he also said “C’est moi ” to make even more complete the idea of the NOVELIST as manufacturer, of something spun out into air, to deny any real-life examples (there were several), or to deny in some way these other narratives. He contributed the mythology himself — that over years he went through the grueling process of tattooing his soul with his bad-girl Emma. This process, this model of the writer as god, as Creator, obliterates whomever came before. They who commit surgery on themselves, pretend also to a sort of surgical knowledge of all women, like the doctor with his patient, the priest and the same tortured housewife of another era. In a letter to Louise Colet, Flaubert amazingly tells her he KNOWS a woman’s sufferings, including her own, because he is author of them.
You speak of women’s sufferings: I am in the midst of them. You will see that I have had to descend deeply into the well of feelings. If my book is good, it will gently caress many a feminine wound: more than one woman will smile as she recognizes herself with it. Oh, I’ll be well acquainted with what they go through, poor unsung souls! And with the secret sadness that oozes from them, like the moss on the walls of their provinicial backyards…
I remember D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love as one of the first novels I really felt ecstastic about. I saw myself in Lawrence’s sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen. But reading the work again recently I am struck by how the characterization of the female characters often exists on the level of fashion — Gudrun’s emerald-green stockings, modeled on his wife Frieda and Katherine Mansfield. The yellow velvet get-up of Hermione, modeled on Ottoline Morrell, who Lawrence portrays as a frantic erotomaniac. He sets these stylish Bloomsbury women in mine country, rendering them ridiculous.