Promiscuity in Western Literature [1 ed.] 0367228343, 9780367228347

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Promiscuity in Western Literature

Poet and novelist Charles Bukowski described promiscuity as “feast and feast and feast.” The promiscuous person is having fun, getting away with it, and showing no signs of stopping. More often, though, promiscuity has been seen as demonic, as the sign of an uncivilised race, or as a symptom of mental disorder. Promiscuity in Western Literature capitalises on the fact that literature gives us deep and varied resources for reflecting on this controversial aspect of human behaviour. Drawing on authors from Homer to Margaret Atwood, it explores recurrent ideas and scenarios: Why does the literature of promiscuity evoke ideas of the animal? Why does it so often turn upon the image of the “excessive” woman? How and why does promiscuity feature in comic writing? How does the emergence of the modern city change representations of promiscuity? And, in the present day, what impact have ecological concerns had on the way writers depict promiscuity? Peter Stoneley has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Texas, and Queen’s Belfast. He is currently Professor of English and Head of Department at the University of Reading, U.K. His previous books have been on US literature and culture, and on dance.

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels Exiled from Eden Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel Marta Puxan-Oliva Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art Frances Restuccia Conceptualisation and Exposition A Theory of Character Construction Lina Varotsi Knots Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film Jean-Michel Rabaté Double Trouble The Doppelgänger from Romanticism to Postmodernism Eran Dorfman Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning Wieland Schwanebeck Promiscuity in Western Literature Peter Stoneley

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/literature/series/LITCRITANDCULT

Promiscuity in Western Literature

Peter Stoneley

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Peter Stoneley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stoneley, Peter, author. Title: Promiscuity in western literature / Peter Stoneley. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Literary criticism and cultural theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Promiscuity in Western Literature capitalises on the fact that literature gives us deep and varied resources for reflecting on this controversial aspect of human behaviour. Drawing on authors from Homer to Margaret Atwood, it explores recurrent ideas and scenarios: Why does the literature of promiscuity evoke ideas of the animal? Why does it so often turn upon the image of the “excessive” woman? How and why does promiscuity feature in comic writing? How does the emergence of the modern city change representations of promiscuity? And, in the present day, what impact have ecological concerns had on the way writers depict promiscuity?”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019058853 | ISBN 9780367228347 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367228361 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Promiscuity in literature. | Sex in literature. Classification: LCC PN56.P7425 S76 2020 | DDC 809/.933538—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058853 ISBN: 978-0-367-22834-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-22836-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To my brothers, Johnny and Ben

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

1

Animals

23

2

The Excessive Woman

51

3

Sex Objects and Comic Objects

75

4

Libertine Ethics

101

5

The “Swarming City”

135

Index

173

Acknowledgements

My thanks to colleagues and friends in the Department of English at Reading for encouragement and ideas, and especially to Michelle O’Callaghan, David Brauner, Steven Matthews, Gail Marshall, Yasmine Shamma, Kia Michalopoulou, Carla Scarano D’Antonio, and the “Identities” group. Beyond the Department, Katherine Harloe gave me a lot of help with ancient materials, Clare MacManus with the early modern, and Nigel Harkness with the French. Jennifer FitzGerald, as always, was a great critical listener. I am grateful to library staff at Reading, and at the British Library, for their kind support. The anonymous readers commissioned by Routledge really helped me to improve the manuscript, and it has been a pleasure to work with the editorial team in the New York office: Michelle Salyga, Mitchell Manners, and Bryony Reece. For all that the help received has been significant, I don’t know that I have always made the best use of it; certainly all remaining errors and shortcomings are entirely my responsibility.

Introduction

The sexologist, Professor Alfred Kinsey, is popularly credited with defining the promiscuous person as “someone who has more sex than you do.” What he probably said is that a “nymphomaniac” is “someone who has more sex than you do” (Pomeroy 316). In either case, the “you” is disapproving of the “someone,” but envious as well. The promiscuous person is having fun, getting away with it, and showing no signs of stopping. It is a case, as poet and novelist Charles Bukowski put it, of “feast and feast and feast” (291). Kinsey was being mischievous, but he had a serious point. There is, according to him, no objective definition. To assert that another person is promiscuous is not to say anything precise and meaningful about him or her, so much as to reveal one’s own fears and frustrations. That he probably made the comment about the “nymphomaniac” or promiscuous woman makes it all the more provocative. Kinsey does not accept the double standard whereby promiscuity in a man is acceptable and even natural, whereas in a woman it is a compulsion, a mania, a condition in need of treatment.1 Perhaps the dictionary will help us to arrive at a precise meaning. The word comes from the Latin verb, promiscere, to mix. To be promiscuous is to join together, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “without respect for degree, kind, or number.” So, the Dictionary goes on to note, a “promiscuous crowd” is one that is made up of all sorts of people. A “promiscuous bird” is one, like the raven, that does not have a restricted diet, but eats flesh, insects, fruit, and grains. We follow the ancient Latin authors in using the word in this way. Livy, Seneca, Suetonius, and Pliny the Elder all refer to gatherings of nobles and plebeians as promiscuous (LCL 31:232–3; 394:28–9; 172:426–7; 310:436–7). The word appears in a sexual context in ancient writing on at least one occasion, when Apuleius writes in The Golden Ass of a farm-worker who is shared among a group of priests of Cybele (LCL 435:92–3). But again Apuleius uses the word here in the sense of “without discrimination or distinction.” The word on its own does not yet signify a sexual behaviour. It appears in a sexual sense in English as early as the sixteenth century. The English Puritan, Thomas Norton (1532–84), accused Catholics of being like “beastes” that are “redy to promiscuous and unchosen copulations” (2).

2 Introduction But in Norton’s period and for hundreds of years after, promiscuous appears in many contexts and continues to mean “indiscriminate” or “in no particular order.” As late as the 1890s the word features in nonsexual and positive ways. The friendly traveller is said to enjoy “crowd, chatter, promiscuity of acquaintanceship.”2 Leaving the friendly traveller to one side, indiscriminate mixing, sexual or otherwise, has often been seen as threatening. Religions and cosmologies have been founded on the idea that indiscriminate mixing is the chaos from which we have emerged and into which we might fall back. The world is often assumed to have started out as a confused jumble of things. Greeks and Romans pictured the beginning of the world as everything combined together in a “raw and undivided mass.” It was the god Kronos, or for the Romans, Saturn, who drew each thing out from the “blind heap” and placed it within a system (Ovid 1). In the Bible the earth is imagined as “without form” until God makes distinct elements of light and dark, water and land (Genesis 1:2). The Koran has its moment of separating out, in which Allah sets the sun and moon to “pursue their ordered course” and lays out the earth “for his creatures” (50:1). Promiscuity, or “mixture without respect for degree, kind, or number,” is how life begins. To sort out, to regulate, is a divine intervention. If, in many religions, order and measure are desirable and even holy, how the same religions deal with specifically sexual mixing is more complex. In the Bible there is one man and one woman in Eden. The fall from grace is made plain by the sexual greed that comes after. In the book of Genesis, for instance, Lot, a resident of Sodom, has two male visitors. The other men of Sodom surround Lot’s house and call to him to bring out his visitors so “that we may know them” (19:5). The wickedness of the men of Sodom is punished when the city is destroyed by fire and brimstone. But polygyny is accepted – if reluctantly – in the Old Testament. In the first book of Kings we learn that Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines (11:3). In Greek and Roman religion, it is the gods themselves who are spectacularly involved in sexual mixing. Zeus in particular transforms himself into many shapes and guises in order to carry off the women and boys he desires. In the Koran, number is hinted at as a reward for the male faithful. When Allah delivers the righteous from their struggle, they will dwell in a garden where they will be “attended by boys graced with eternal youth, who to the beholder’s eyes will seem like sprinkled pearls” (76:19), and they will live with “bashful virgins” (55:56). At other points in the Koran, a continuity of earthly relations is imagined, so that “together with their wives, [the righteous] shall recline in shady groves upon soft couches” (70:30–35). There are also the hadiths or reported sayings of Muhammad, less canonical than the Koran, but widely accepted as authentic, in which martyrs are promised 70 or more wives in paradise.3 Also, as with the Biblical patriarchs, the Koran accepts polygyny and concubinage in this life. Allah tells Mohammed

Introduction  3 that his wives, slave girls, nieces, and other women who gave themselves to him are all lawful to him. This acceptance of number is not a forgetting of all rule of degree or kind. Those who commit adultery – meaning in this instance men and women who have intercourse with those to whom they are not entitled – are to be punished. Promiscuity is, as Kinsey suggested, an arguable concept. The righteous man, in the Bible and in the Koran, may have intercourse with many women and not be promiscuous. His mixing is lawful, not indiscriminate. Women, in those texts, do not have the same rights and opportunities. In modern Western usage, promiscuity refers to a person who has sex with numerous different partners. It is a person who is “not picky,” who seems not to have the usual thresholds of taste and decency. This still leaves us in the realms of the arguable. How many counts as numerous? What are the “usual thresholds of taste and decency”? Regardless of precise numbers, promiscuity evokes the “oughtness” of sex. A person ought to have standards, ought to make discriminating choices, ought not, as Norton puts it, have “unchosen copulations.” In many cultures – as suggested by the Bible and the Koran – the oughtness rests on the assumption that a person does not own his or her physical self. He or she owes bodily existence to God and is then given by a father to a suitor. All desires that fall outside of this are to be denied. The oughtness might also be understood as contractual. If one partner promises him- or herself to another until death parts them, perhaps he or she ought to keep that promise. Then, there are also the obligations of the feelings. Ought not sex be the culmination of a deep attraction, emotional and physical, and part of a lasting, intimate relationship? Perhaps, though, we have not yet allowed for the strength of feeling towards promiscuity – the frequent horror of it. If adultery is a specific contravention of the law, promiscuity seems to present a more spectacular danger – that of a return to a completely lawless state, to the “raw and undivided,” the “beastes,” the “blind heap.” Adulterers, perhaps, can be isolated and punished. But promiscuity hints at contagion, at – as in Sodom – a generalised impulse that has passed beyond control. Is this logical? Equally, are there essential or necessary aspects to the rejection of promiscuity? If a woman has many sexual partners, it might well lead to her husband raising and passing property to a child that is not his own. In a promiscuous society, all possibility of lineage, of knowing both one’s parents, is undermined. But is it always necessary for a society to have individually owned property, which must then be transmitted to the next generation according to biological kinship? What other problems have led to the rejection of promiscuity? Are they always the same? It helps to turn back to the second half of the nineteenth century at this point, as that was when the word itself took on a more insistently sexual connotation. This happened with the rise of the social sciences and of anthropology. The so-called primitive races or savages were often

4 Introduction thought to lack measure or restraint in their sexual behaviour, and this was often referred to as promiscuity. Many of the new social scientists, echoing ancient Greek, Christian, and Islamic cosmologies, worked on the assumption that life begins as indiscriminate mixing, but becomes increasingly structured. Promiscuity is, for the early social scientists, the sign of barbarism, and monogamy the sign of an advanced civilisation.4 Although the scientists liked the idea of progress out of savage darkness towards enlightenment, they were also troubled by the implicitly irreligious notion that humankind was originally and instinctively promiscuous. So, W. Cooke Taylor argued that humans were civilised from the start, but that the “savage societies” represented “degraded vestiges of originally higher civilisations.”5 Others were willing to acknowledge early promiscuity, but they excused it on the grounds that there had been a logical necessity to it. John F. McLennan, in Primitive Marriage (1865), argued that early tribes killed female infants because they had scarce resources and needed warriors and hunters more than they needed women. This led to an imbalance between the sexes and so to promiscuity: the few women had to be available to the many men as common property (10). Similarly, Sir John Lubbock, in his The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1872), used the phrase “communal marriage” to capture the idea that “every man and woman in a small community were regarded as equally married to each other,” much as the tribal lands were held in common (109). Andrew Lang makes the same observation in his History of Scotland (1900), writing that the pre-Roman tribes of Caledonians and Picts had wives “in common” (I:4–5). The other response to the scarcity of women was to abduct them from other tribes, and McLennan, Lubbock, and Lang all note this as a frequent practice. Herbert Spencer, though, disagreed with the neat logic of his colleagues. In The Principles of Sociology (1876–96), he pointed out that the same tribes that needed warriors, and lived in a state of “chronic hostility” with their neighbours, would have suffered from high male mortality rates (I:634). The killing of female infants would not have created a lack of women but a re-balancing in the numbers of men and women. Spencer went on to argue that primitive tribes did not seek a balance of men and women in the first place. He notes that in many tribes men sought to have as many wives as possible, and the abduction of women took place even where a tribe already had plenty of women. He accepts that the abduction of wives would have improved the “tribal stock,” but he comments that “savages” were entirely ignorant of even the simplest ideas of improved breeding (I:634). Promiscuity, as the term comes to be used to describe a specifically sexual phenomenon, is already a subject of argument. The early anthropologists are not entirely clumsy in their use of the word, in that they usually move beyond it to write of polygyny and polyandry. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, they had moved to the idea that even

Introduction  5 behaviour that appears promiscuous to Western eyes is in fact, in Franz Boas’s words, “bound by taboo and custom.” What looks like promiscuity is in fact a tightly regulated exchange of partners. Promiscuity, Malinowski concurred, had never existed in “unqualified form” (Herbert 65). But the early anthropologists could not agree amongst themselves as to why promiscuity – unqualified or not – had ever featured in human life. Above all, they struggled with the moral implications. Spencer is typical in that he sees the sexual practices of other races as proof that they are “savage,” “barbarous,” “uncivilised,” and “semicivilised.” Yet at times he sees the same sexual behaviours as a sign of civilisation. So, he notes that “semi-civilised” men display hospitality by furnishing their guests with temporary wives. He claims that many races express courteous respect to their male visitors in this way (I:637). The sharing of wives, then, is evidence of both civility and barbarity. Spencer encounters yet larger problems. He expects to find obvious connections between promiscuity and other forms of social and moral “debasement.” But he finds the opposite. He writes that the sexual relations between men and women in the Aleutian Islands are “among the most degraded,” and so he is perplexed to notice that these same Aleutians are “the most peaceful, inoffensive people.” Similarly, he comments on the Tahitian “disregard of restraint in the sexual instincts” and is all the more “astonished” to find that, in other respects, Tahitians are “advanced” and “kindly.” On the other hand, he notes that the Thlinkeet, Fijian, and Bechuana men show “conjugal fidelity” and treat their wives “with much affection,” but are otherwise “thievish, lying, and extremely cruel” (I:664). He still insists, after his brief sexual tour of the world, that promiscuity weakens family bonds, that plural marriages are “unfavourable to the development of the emotions,” and that “monogamy has long been growing innate in the civilised man” (I:673). We find similar assumptions in the related and contemporary social science, sexology. Richard von Krafft-Ebing notes in Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886, that the “savage races” are still in a stage of “open intercourse.” Among the modest and Christian races of the north, love is “of a monogamic nature,” a fact which has assured “a mental and material superiority over the polygamic races” (4–5). This view would soon be reversed, though, by another sexologist. In 1903 Havelock Ellis dismissed the idea of “the unbounded licentiousness of savages” as “mere prejudice” (207). He observed that “the checks restraining sexual intercourse among savages, especially as regards time and season, are so numerous… that sexual excess cannot prevail to the same extent as in civilization” (209).6 It is the moderns, Ellis makes clear, who are “unrestrained” and “excessive.” Perhaps, after all, the attempt to explain the presence or absence of promiscuity in social-scientific terms – or indeed the aversion to it – is not straightforward. At its most basic, the horror of promiscuity seems

6 Introduction to be due to an equation of civilisation and morality with the structuring of sexual behaviour. That horror gives way to perplexity, as the anthropologist finds that the supposedly sexually “degraded” are also “peaceful,” “kindly,” “inoffensive,” and even “advanced.” Horror at the idea of promiscuity, then, indicates the fundamental fact that, in modern Western societies, sexual “oughtness” has underpinned the very idea of the human and the idea of a superior Western civilisation. Christopher Herbert analyses this idea at length. Borrowing a phrase from Foucault, he writes of a fear of the “lawless infinity of desire.” The fear was that once you let a barrier down, you would lose all control. Western civilisation was terrified that one thing would always lead to another, that any admission of desire would lead to a loss of order. Herbert links this kind of thinking back to theology and to the Biblical idea of original sin. Again one thinks of the men of Sodom here, their loss of control and their punishment. Sin is always near, already inside, and the fear of it leads to an obsession with “self-control, discipline, work, ‘purity,’ resignation, self-abnegation.” Herbert provides a neat literary example in George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, who is afraid that, “by forsaking the simple rule of renunciation, she was throwing herself under the seductive guidance of illimitable wants.” Herbert, like others before him, takes this “polarity” of “renunciation” and “illimitable wants” to be a defining feature of modern Western culture (32–3).7 One other possibility gets lost, or never quite features, in the material traced above, and that is the one with which we began. This is Kinsey’s suggestion that the promiscuous person is having more fun and not causing the world to end. The idea with Kinsey is that fun can be good in itself, and this is motivation and explanation enough for promiscuity. The resistance that Kinsey detects – and that I have described as the sense that someone is “getting away with it” – takes us back to moral fears and judgements. The idea of “getting away with it” implies that sex is never free or should never be free. To have sex without consequences – without being left “holding the baby” – is unfair. If sex does not cost the promiscuous person anything, perhaps that is because someone else is paying. Many stories of promiscuity in literary history involve privileged men and women who can avoid responsibility by denying, buying off, or otherwise hiding the consequences of their actions. Some could get away with it; others could not. Kinsey, though, was writing as birth control and penicillin became widely available. Perhaps, Kinsey signals, freedom of choice in sex was becoming an option for ordinary people and not just for the wealthy. Kinsey stands as a precursor to the age of “free love,” in which monogamy would be decried as “bourgeois” and “uptight.”8 The social scientists of the late nineteenth century wrote in an age of uncertain contraception and untreatable sexually transmitted infections. In the 1960s, though, the question could be asked, does sex need to be seen as part of a larger system of control? Could it not be seen

Introduction  7 as something that might be freely given and accepted as the expression of a personal wish? The contrary argument that we find at this same historical moment of “free love” is that promiscuous sex is bad sex. It may not have the consequences that it once had, of pregnancy or syphilis, but it is still not worth it. A nuanced and truly fulfilling sexual experience, it is claimed, is only to be found in a rounded partnership between one man and one woman. Real pleasure has to be earned through the work of shared life-building. Twentieth-century commentators have portrayed people who have many sexual partners as incapable of deep responses or driven by unacknowledged shame and low self-esteem. The argument is that a person only connects with lots of people if he or she is “desensitised.” As Bukowski would write in a different mood, it is a case of “the dead fucking the dead” (260).9 This book does not take a view on the possibility that the monogamous are “uptight” or that the promiscuous are “de-sensitised.” It does not assert that promiscuous sex is more and better, nor that it is the “the dead fucking the dead.” But, having at some length suggested that promiscuity is an arguable concept, perhaps the time has come for me to offer my working definition and to explain the purposes and scope of this book. Promiscuity here signifies a person or persons who are perceived to have a high number of sexual partners. Working with this definition, we will find that the literature reveals recurrent questions and preoccupations, some of which we have already glimpsed: Is promiscuity a natural behaviour – one that is always present in the instinctual core of personhood? Or is it unnatural – the perversion of an essentially moderate being? Does it indicate something about a person’s morality, or their intelligence, or their mental or physiological health? Does it indicate that there is something wrong in the society in which it occurs? There are other questions that are occasionally present or that we might bring: Can we identify particular institutions or groups that are especially concerned with how many sexual partners count as “too many” or “too few”? What are the sources of those concerns? How is promiscuity understood in relation to gender and to sexual identity? That is to say, is promiscuity understood differently if the promiscuous person is a man or a woman? Is it understood differently if the activity is between people of opposite sexes or between people of the same sex? Does promiscuity ever become a sexual identity in itself – more definitive of a person than whether they like their own sex or the opposite sex? How does literature understand the relations between promiscuity and social and financial power? What are the relations between promiscuity and ideas of lust or desire? More generally, in what ways does the writing of promiscuity bespeak or enforce or undermine a norm? These questions all feature in what follows. But we might also ask, why seek to answer these questions through literature? First, promiscuity and other non-approved behaviours feature frequently in literature.

8 Introduction This in itself tells us that, at times at least, literature has been a relatively safe space for thinking through the possibilities and conditions of living. Although quite a few of the authors we will look at were subject to control and punishment – some were put to death – writers were often allowed to describe and question because their product was only imaginary, or because their work circulated within a limited and privileged group, or because it seemed to reinforce an established morality. For readers, too, literature can seem a safe place of exploration. It is a more or less private means to receive new ideas and images, and test them out against one’s own. We might not want to laugh or cry at the “wrong moment” while watching a play. But we might read a poem privately, and the poem will not require a decisive response from us. A novel will never know how we read it. As we judge it, literature will not judge us in its turn. Further, for us as students of cultures that are distant from us in time, literature often ventures representations and discussions that are otherwise scarce or invisible. Poems, plays, and fiction have survived from many periods and cultures where other forms of evidence often have not. Literature gives us an incredibly wide field of study, from epic narratives of the ninth century BC to twenty-first century novels. It gives us promiscuity in many guises and under many different historical conditions. It enables us to trace out a variety of behaviours and identities across time and place. Literature, in short, gives us a broad repertoire for reflecting back on our own lives. Yet, of course, we cannot explore all the possibilities. This book has to be selective and, inevitably, it bears the marks of my own limitations and prejudices. Although I have mentioned the Koran, the focus here is for the most part on a European and North American, Judeo-Christian – and largely white – canon. This, then, is not a comprehensive study of promiscuity in literary history. The scope, though, is still very broad, and in a way that raises potential difficulties. The discussion moves from the ancient Greeks to the present day, across poetry, fiction, drama, and memoir, and across different languages. The most obvious danger here is that the broad scope can force us to ignore the specifics of any given moment. How, for instance, can we do justice to ancient literature if we are going to bundle it up with the medieval, the early modern, the modern? As the footnotes will show, many books and articles have been written on the sexual cultures of each of these periods, and the scholarship is often disputatious and inconclusive. Surely to “go large” is to lose all chance of arriving at the linguistic and historical context that we need if we are truly to understand what we are reading? Is it not to open ourselves up to a series of anachronisms, of homogenisations, of one-size-fits-all interpretations? Modern literary scholarship has been especially awake to this problem following the work of Michel Foucault (1926–84). Foucault’s vivid analyses showed that a practice in one culture or period might seem similar to that of another period, and

Introduction  9 even involve identical sexual acts, but the meanings and understandings of those acts might be different. He gave the example of same-sex acts among ancient Greek men. Those acts, Foucault argued, were understood in relation to certain phases of life, and to certain models of relationship (the youth and the older man), and not to certain types of people. By the late nineteenth century, the regime or terms of understanding had shifted, so that same-sex acts indicated a particular type of individual, the homosexual. This led to the observation – perhaps confounding at the time, but straightforward enough now – that homosexuality had only existed for 100 years. Foucault and his followers understood that male same-sex practices had been around for much longer.10 There is, in the wake of Foucault, a strong preference for sensitivity to specifics, to the structures of understanding of the moment under consideration, as opposed to a transhistorical lumping together. This seems to make good sense, but it can suggest complications in its turn. Doesn’t the pursuit of historicised understanding hold out the possibility of historical correctness, of getting it right, and isn’t such a sense delusory? Foucault himself came to admit that some of his corrections of his colleagues’ historical clumsiness were themselves clumsy. His exciting, magisterial pronouncements on how a different period operated under a different “regime of truth” turned out to be based on limited and on occasion misunderstood facts.11 Is not any given moment largely inaccessible when it has passed and even while it is passing? Is it not to run the risk of mistake to make any large pronouncements about any period or society? The fact that, as noted above, the scholarship is so often disputatious and inconclusive only serves to reinforce the notion that history is always an arguable venture. This does not mean, though, that we should give up on specifics and return to the idea that, after all, things and people have probably always been more or less the same. Different historical readings are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and the fascination and the value of any literary-historical enquiry surely lies in the fact that we are taking on intricate and various problems. If some of Foucault’s arguments seem overstated or otherwise wrong, his general effect was to get scholars reading with renewed intensity and precision. If I seem set on a dubious, “lumping” undertaking in including literary texts of different periods, genres, and national traditions, similar dangers are inherent in the linguistic scope. This book brings together texts in English, Greek, French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, but working in most cases with translated versions. There are many words in one language that have no exact match in another. Even where the same word exists in both languages, it may have different resonances. Word-choice in the original version often has subtle implications that will, inevitably, shift or be lost in translation. Leaving aside particular words, does not each language have its own feel, rhythms, textures? Richard Howard, notable poet and translator, comments that translation tends to “reduce the

10 Introduction patina, to falsify the tempo” (251). Howard notes particular problems with translating texts featuring sex. He observes that the French words to do with sex are either literal, or very obvious metaphors, whereas the terms in English tend to be more oblique or “extravagantly metaphorical.” So, for instance, the French verge for penis comes from the word for “rod” or “staff.” The connection is clear. But what about the English “cock” (251)? This, for Howard, is less direct. We might debate Howard’s point of view, using other examples (“shaft” seems direct enough, “pussy,” “tackle” and “muff” less so). But his point holds. Translation can only ever be an approximation. Yet, of course, Howard put great effort over many years into literary translation. He continued to pursue what another poet-translator has called the “art of the impossible,” of taking a text in one language and trying to reproduce it in another.12 To work across languages, then, to use translated versions, is another form of lumping together. As with transhistorical readings, we risk mistake, simplification, false impression. Other scholars on occasion make the case that, actually, the similarities across time, place, and language are as important as the differences. So, for instance, Wai Chee Dimock has revived the notion of the longue durée, the idea that some historical phenomena only emerge by looking across a very long period. At the extreme end, for instance, geology is a history that unfolds over 600 million years. For Dimock, history is a series of “loops of relations,” a “densely interactive fabric.” She reads a nineteenth-century US writer such as Thoreau alongside the Bhagavad Gita (a Sanskrit text probably written in the second century BC). She is not looking to ignore differences but to see how a writer such as Thoreau adopts but also transposes the ancient text (3–4). Similarly, Caroline Levine has argued that “none of our research matters unless it is generalizable, unless we can learn something from it that has implications beyond its own time.” Even the “most historically minded scholars,” Levine maintains, are making connections. If they choose to study “gender norms in ancient Rome or eighteenth-century global commodity routes,” it is “precisely because comparable arrangements of power operate now” (xii).13 A very different attitude to historicism has emerged in recent years in queer studies, namely that of embracing anachronism. Scholars have asked, isn’t historicism an implicitly heteronormative procedure? Is it not a method that limits our sense of present possibilities by making the present seem a “necessary outcome of the past”? Rather than pursue that falsely inevitable trajectory, a queer theorist such as Annamarie Jagose looks for a “queer temporality,” a “mode of inhabiting time that is attentive to the recursive eddies and back-to-the-future loops that often pass undetected or uncherished beneath the official narrations of the linear sequence that is taken to structure normal life.”14 Foucauldian historicism is often the target of this queer “unhistoricism,” in that Foucault’s model of “genealogy” can seem too concerned with teleological

Introduction  11 sequence, with the way in which “one model of same-sex relations is superseded by another,” and on each occasion “the superseded model drops from the frame of analysis.”15 It can seem too simple. What about persistence, and Jagose’s “back-to-the-future loops”? What about the complexity of any historical moment, of “synchronic incoherence”? Foucauldian historicism seems to reinforce “a dangerous consensus of knowingness about the genuinely unknown.”16 Queer critics now want to “violat[e]” the idea that “history is the discourse of answers.” History as a “commitment to determinate signification” has produced “false closure,” and it has blocked “access to the multiplicity of the past and to the possibilities of different futures” (Goldberg and Menon 1609). Queer historical writing might give up on broad and delusional statements, and look to a “process of touching, of making partial connections between incommensurate entities” (Traub 25). It might unsettle both past and contemporary texts by bringing them together in unexpected conjunctions. Carla Freccero, for instance, brings together sixteenth-century French writers, Marguerite of Navarre and Louise Labé, with American singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge, and the victim of hate crime, Brandon Teena. Freccero urges not genealogy, but spectrality, an ethical reading practice which is attentive to the after-effects of the past rather than a linear sequencing of how things came to be. In a vigorous counter-argument, Valerie Traub understands that this model of seeking associations, rather than pursuing continuities and moments of change, has the advantage of allowing “affective relations with the past to come powerfully to the fore.” But, Traub warns, this is to give up on trying to explain “the endurance or recurrence of some of the very similarities” that have interested queer scholars in the first place (25). Traub presents a defence of Foucauldian genealogy, which she sees as much more sensitive to variation than its detractors will allow. For her, history as the tracing out of difference and change is not necessarily straight or teleological, not about fixing identities and categories of identity. Queer, genealogical history can show “how categories, however mythic, phantasmic, and incoherent, came to be.” She ventures a queer critique that does not “create categories of identity” but seeks to explain such categories’ “constitutive, pervasive, and persistent force” (36). Which is it to be here? An old-fashioned universalising or lumping? A Foucauldian splitting, leading towards a genealogy of promiscuity? Or a queer unhistoricism which explores after-effects and hauntings? My broad tendency is always to want to split, to trace out differences within apparent similarities. But the primary goal is not to make totalising statements about “then” and “now.” Nor can I claim the deconstructive queerness of the unhistoricists. The aim is always to signal variation, to use literary texts and the surrounding scholarship to discriminate rather than to liken. But the aim is also to recognise, as does Dimock, that authors often adopt distant sources, and define themselves

12 Introduction via these sources with borrowings and revisions. There is another idea beyond that, which is that finally we are reading texts and contexts in our own present, and our reading – as suggested in passing above – gives us material for reflecting back on our own lives. Literature gives us a series of postulates that might affirm or contradict the way we understand ourselves. Literary history sets up contending possibilities; it makes for dialogue. The dialogue is often simply waiting for us, which is to say that writers of later ages often pick up and re-use ideas and scenarios from their predecessors. Time and again in this study, we find authors claiming kinship with and distancing themselves from earlier writers. The challenge for us becomes one of working through the appropriations, the enthusiasm, the distaste, the misapprehensions, in these conversations, and to think about what we ourselves might wish to borrow or reject. I have suggested that one reason for exploring promiscuity in literary history is the wealth of resources and the variety in points of view. The other principal reason is more particularly to do with literary history itself. That is to say that there has been very little discussion of promiscuity in literature. Has the topic been missed, or has it been actively avoided? Feminist and queer studies scholar, Gayle Rubin, provides a key here. In a ground-breaking essay first published in 1984, “Thinking Sex,” Rubin called for “rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history” (148). She saw obstacles to such descriptions, and especially in the “sex negativity” that she detected in second-wave feminists. Increasingly, women were asserting themselves in literary and cultural history, but they were reluctant to approve more than a narrow range of sexual behaviours and relationships. They feared sex as a continued subjugation, as a perpetuation of patriarchy. A promiscuous woman, in this view, was a woman who lacked self-worth and who looked to men for affirmation. A promiscuous man objectified and exploited women. Fearful thinking about sex pushed many feminists in the 1980s, Rubin argues, to fall into step in sexual matters with religious and social conservatives. Rubin contrasts herself with these “sex negative” feminists, allying herself with the feminism that had produced “an exciting, innovative, and articulate defence of sexual pleasure and erotic justice” (172–3). It bears noting that Rubin does not see all sexual behaviours as positive or benign. She offers an explicit set of criteria for assessment: “A democratic morality should judge sexual acts by the way the partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, the quantity and quality of the pleasures they provide” (154). It does not matter to Rubin whether the acts are between people of the same sex or different sexes, whether the acts are part of a wider social contract or a one-off event. We might question Rubin’s characterisation of other second-wave feminists, or we might see her view of “democratic morality” as too

Introduction  13 simple in its assumptions around the workings of power and coercion.17 That said, Melissa Sanchez has taken up Rubin’s arguments and traces through the consequences of “sex negativity” for literary criticism. In a recent essay on Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, she notes that critics – male and female – have seen Sidney’s poem as presenting via Astrophil an immoral and misogynistic sexual fantasy. Astrophil’s feelings for Stella seem too forceful; his arousal seems too self-oriented and disrespectful. Sanchez sees this critical reading of Astrophil as a symptom of narrow thinking about sex. She notes a “scholarly assumption that lustful or promiscuous sex is by definition selfish, regressive, and unfulfilling.” These same critics fail to see the moments at which Stella herself expresses a frank power of desire. The result has been to idealise Stella, to de-sex her, and, effectively, to silence her. Sanchez, drawing on Rubin and subsequent queer theory, contests the view that “ethically good sex must be gentle, romantic, or monogamous” (2–3). Her important point about literary history more generally is that the limited or negative view of sex has closed off what we are willing to see and discuss in literary texts. We can come to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of literature, then, if we can move beyond “sex negative” preconceptions. We can see what Stella actually says, and not what we would have her say. Of course, in the years since Rubin’s essay on “Thinking Sex,” many queer studies scholars have paid attention to non-normative sexuality in literature and more broadly in culture. Many have answered the call for “rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history.” In particular, they have opened out the meanings and structuring of sex. Critics and theorists such as Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Michael Warner, among many others, have emphasised the constructionist elements of sex and gender, and they have sought to unpick the patterns and processes whereby some sexual acts and identities are approved and normalised, while others are not.18 Queer criticism has challenged commonplace assumptions to do with sex, and it has asked different questions. So, we might ask, not is promiscuity natural, but how is this idea of the natural formed, and what and whose purposes does it serve? What is at stake, and for whom, in discourses of the natural and unnatural, in assertions of “too many” and “too few”? Similarly, among revisionist historical and sociological studies, there has been direct engagement with the normative and the non-normative in sex. Paying particular attention to promiscuity, there is Carol Groneman’s Nymphomania: A  History (2000), and Barry Reay, Nina Attwood, and Claire Gooder’s Sex Addiction: A Critical History (2015).19 Other studies, such as those by Jeffrey Weeks and Anna Clark, touch on promiscuity as they trace out broader evolutions in social culture. Finally, there have been self-described “sex-positive” memoirs from third-wave feminists, such

14 Introduction as those by Virginie Despentes, Carol Leigh, and Michelle Tea. And yet, in literary studies, as Sanchez notes with regard to Sidney’s poem, there is still very little indeed. The almost complete absence of studies in the field leaves a wide array of choices. There is no pretence here to a complete and continuous history. But, given that this book does not use the usual narrowing and deepening criteria – a tight chronological focus, a particular genre, or national tradition – what rationale for selection has been used? The main principle has been to organise the book around topics, a series of recurrent images, ideas, or scenarios. The topics are: animals and the supposed animality of promiscuity, the excessive or out-of-control woman, the comic potential of promiscuity, libertinism or promiscuity as an assertion of freedom, and promiscuity as an urban phenomenon. Each topic might have made for a book, so this is still very much a case of setting out an array of postulates, of indicating rather than encompassing. It is crucial, above all, to indicate variations within each topic. So, for instance, the idea of the excessive woman that we find in the Roman poets persists in later periods, but is also critiqued and modified. At times, as noted above, there is a sense of picking up on conversations. So, in the chapter on libertinism, I look at how Colette uses eighteenth-century libertines to ground her own twentieth-century exploration, even as she finds she must repudiate these otherwise helpful precursors. The topics have been arrived at because they feature so strongly and repeatedly in the literature, and because they feature heavily in presentday discussions of sex. In the case of the excessive woman, for instance, double standards and misogynistic perceptions of sex are still being fiercely debated. Libertinism, also, is a word and a concept with renewed currency in the twenty-first century, while the literature of libertinism, whether by Laclos or Colette, evokes present-day discussions of the relation between sex and individual self-determination. With regard to promiscuity and comedy, the awkwardness – the political incorrectness, indeed – of sexual comedy is a live issue, with the impact of the #MeToo movement, and resistance from comedians as they are asked to sign pledges as to what they will and will not make jokes about. 20 As for the selection of texts, this has been to some extent pragmatic, in that many of the choices are texts that are much-studied and readily available in English – Homer’s Iliad, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Petronius’ Satyricon, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Shakespeare’s Othello, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer, and so on. But the fact that these texts have so often been debated, but not in relation to promiscuity, is also an incentive. What might have been missed in these otherwise exhaustively analysed works? Further, these are texts that “speak to each other” in the sense noted above. Leaving

Introduction  15 aside Colette’s engaging with the libertines, Rabelais engages with Aristophanes and Petronius, Henry Miller engages with Rabelais and Baudelaire, and so on. The final point around selection of texts is to do with inclusivity. Much of the writing that survives from earlier periods is by men, and given that there have often been more severe social constraints on women than on men, it is not surprising that there is more literary representation of promiscuity by men than by women. I have not managed to impose a retrospective parity of male and female authors, but some of the lengthier and central analyses are of female-authored texts. There are related problems to do with inclusivity and sexual identity, and inclusivity and race. In the 1980s, and especially with the AIDS epidemic, promiscuity was emphatically perceived as a gay male issue, and it was definitely seen as a problem. Indeed, if popular media, and a number of religious and political organisations were to be believed, gay male promiscuity and a growing general acceptance of homosexuality had roused the “wrath of God,” and AIDS was the expression of this wrath.21 Equally, promiscuity in literature seemed only to be visible with the surge of new gay male writers: Larry Kramer, Andrew Holleran, Edmund White, Alan Hollinghurst, Oscar Moore. The present study is a reactionary book in the sense that it seeks to de-gay and de-contemporise promiscuity. It aims to show that the preoccupation with sex and number often centres on male-female relations, and that this preoccupation is to be found at various points in history. The book also shows that where same-sex activity is concerned, such acts do not constitute the sexual identity associated with the gay men of New York and London of the 1970s and 1980s. Gay writing of the late twentieth century, then, is perhaps noticeable more for its relative absence than for its presence. The aim here is to make the point that, if promiscuity has usually been perceived as a problem, it has not always been the same problem. If the relative absence of gay male fiction is a deliberate choice, the lack of writers of colour is a more vexed issue. As we saw with nineteenthcentury anthropological texts, white Western culture has often typecast racial others as promiscuous. For racial others living in white Western societies, the “over-sexed” identity was an imposition to resist. To this day in the West, sexual identity and particularly sexual shame are often constructed and experienced differently in different racial groups. I have struggled to include non-white authors, except in the form of resistance to racist sexual stereotyping. Other fascinating possibilities – for instance, the city writing of Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) and Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) – were excluded by my decision to focus on Paris, not New York. Again then, this is a study that at times only signals in passing to possibilities that it might well have taken up in earnest.

16 Introduction As for topics, the first is that of animals. When Homer’s Helen of Troy reflects on her sexual history, she demeans herself as “dog-like” and a “bitch.” Apuleius’ sexually avid hero in The Golden Ass is turned into a donkey. Ovid writes of monstrous human-beast couplings. Dante pictures the lustful as ants. Shakespeare’s Othello thinks of his wife’s supposed infidelity and rants about goats, toads, and monkeys. Promiscuity, it would seem, evokes the idea of animality, of a falling away from the human. If the question of ontology is definitely present – what constitutes the human? when and how do we cease to be human? – other issues are also at play. For Homer, this supposedly animal behaviour is seen as a threat to social structures and especially to dynastic succession. For a religious writer such as Apuleius, the promiscuous, animal self is the sign of an unregenerate soul. For others, giving in to animalistic promiscuity is an intimate, domestic matter – it is the betrayal of one’s life- companion. Promiscuity as the animal is a constant trope, and yet its composition and meanings shift from text to text. The first chapter analyses the interface between the human and the animal as it is enlivened, thrown into crisis even, by the idea of promiscuity. The second chapter investigates representations of the “excessive” woman. From Catullus’ Lesbia and her hundreds of lovers, to Martial’s Caelia, who takes on the men of all nations, to Juvenal’s “whoreempress,” the notion of the excessively desiring woman is a frequent one in classical literature. The idea is taken up in later ages, which also show a preoccupation with, as Andreas Capellano puts it, the woman “plagued by oppressive lust.” But where the Roman poets express a complex mix of fear, hatred, and admiration for the promiscuous woman, later portraits, such as Manon Lescaut (1731) and La Dame aux camélias (1848) would move in treatment from misogynistic condemnations to melancholy evocations of woman as lost, confused, and suffering. This chapter brings into focus a spectrum of responses to the notion of the sexually voracious woman, as writers see her as the symptom of imperial decadence, proof of man’s fallen nature, sign of physiological disease, and test-case for the Romantic conscience. This provides a lead-in to a sustained reading of a twenty-first century, female-authored text, Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Millet engages with and moves far beyond the tradition of the “excessive woman,” presenting her own sexual experiences as a series of explorations of identity, aesthetics, and belonging. The third chapter looks at how comedy and promiscuity both call up ideas of objectification, of the reduction or belittlement of others to the point that they may be laughed at or seen as a sexual opportunity. Taking on ideas from Kant, Freud, and late twentieth-century feminists as to what constitutes objectification, the discussion moves between classical and medieval comic writing, and ends with Rabelais. What we find in comic writing is that it uses promiscuous objectification to create sexual

Introduction  17 humour, but it is troubled by its own content. If comedy profits from the reduction of others to objects of sex and laughter, it also seeks to reverse this, to recuperate sympathy and fellow feeling. The chapter asks, why does sexual comedy depend on promiscuous objectification, and does this literature cease to be funny when it moves away from its own constitutive strategies? The fourth chapter moves to libertine writing. We find types of libertinism in, amongst others, Ovid, Tirso, Byron, Rochester, Laclos, and Sade. Promiscuity often features here as part of the libertine’s insistence upon freedom. But the values and meanings of this sexual freedom vary greatly from period to period and from one libertine writer to another. This chapter sets some of the different strands of libertine promiscuity into dialogue. The libertine’s ethical justifications for promiscuity here range from rebellion against a repressive society or religion to an insistence on the truths of nature. In repeatedly seeking to justify his or her actions, the libertine poses the question, is an ethics of pleasure ever possible, and what would it take to bring it into meaningful existence? This discussion provides a background to a discussion of the work of Colette, who radicalised the writing of sex and desire, and whose novels and memoirs deftly dispute and revise the libertine tradition. Chapter 5 focuses on the way in which the writing of promiscuity changes with the emergence of the modern city. In Paris, in 1798, a secret agent reported to his superiors that it was “almost impossible to maintain good behaviour in a thickly populated area where the individual is unknown to all the others and does not have to blush in front of anyone.” In writers from Baudelaire and Zola to Henry Miller to Renaud Camus, Paris becomes the exemplary modern city and, as such, a place in which promiscuity is inherent and pervasive. Paris is a sophisticated logistical network – Paul Valéry’s “smooth social mechanism” – but it is also Baudelaire’s “swarming scene,” a place of random conjunctions and passing opportunities. In the modern city, Baudelaire argues, “Ecstasy” is “Number.” This chapter takes Paris as a powerful example of how modern writers assert, bemoan, and celebrate the promiscuity of the city. It also considers how the same writers explore an ever-tightening relationship between sex and commercial exchange. The conclusion moves to the North American continent of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and looks in particular at how the writing of promiscuity intersects with ecological concerns. It traces promiscuity through writers such as Updike and Roth, in which sexual activity features as a proxy for a dangerously accelerated, consumerist narcissism. Writing with variously subtle and corrosive irony, these writers present promiscuity as the end-game of capitalist patriarchy. Gay writers, too, have seen promiscuity in relation to capitalism but also as permitting acts of liberation and as enabling the exploration of new forms of the

18 Introduction social. Moving into the twenty-first century, to feminist, speculative fictions, promiscuity is again a symptom of over-consumption and neoliberal exploitation. But biogenetic modification is also factored in as a way of imagining other futures. In Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” trilogy, biogenetic modification is both a further sign of exploitation and a possible solution. Promiscuity is once again in focus, as the sex lives of Atwood’s reconfigured creatures bring into question once more the relation between the human and the animal, the individual and the collective, sex and rights. This book neither advocates promiscuity nor laments it. Nor, though a number of explanatory narratives are ventured, does it lead towards a total theory of promiscuity, whether literary, biological, psychoanalytic, or historical. The chief idea here is that promiscuity reveals what powers of thought and action people have over their bodies. Promiscuity draws out in stark and curious forms that “oughtness” of sex – the fact that sexual behaviour evokes fundamental principles and values. The literature of promiscuity invites us to ask, what choices do we have, for celibacy, promiscuity, or some state between, and what are the terms under which we come to these choices? There is material in what follows that fails Rubin’s criterion of “mutual consideration,” and there are texts in view here that are misogynistic, racist, and homophobic. Hopefully, though, the discussion will follow Rubin’s “democratic morality.” Hopefully, it will open out to diverse identities and behaviours. It will not restrict anyone to embodying one or other of those polarities, “sex” or “renunciation.”

Notes

3 Interpretations of the hadiths, and the grading of them as to authenticity, vary from scholar to scholar. For citations of hadiths on this topic, see eShakkh. com, a website drawing on a number of scholars, and maintained by the Islamic Supreme Council of America. 4 See, for instance, Spencer I:634.

Introduction  19 area, see Beckerman and Valentine. I leave to one side the misogynistic elements of early anthropology, and the idea – threatening in the nineteenth century, but attractive to twentieth-century feminists – that early societies were matriarchal. It bears noting, though, that promiscuity still polarises in popular confessional discourses of the twenty-first century. The polarity of the present moment – and especially for women – is suggested by the titles and arguments of two recent confessional narratives, Sciortino’s Slutever: Dispatches from a Sexually Autonomous Woman in a Post-Shame World, and Fowler’s Pain, Promiscuity, Purpose: From Mess to Ministry. Naomi Wolf, in Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire, attempted a more critical view, arguing against the appropriation of women’s sexuality and writing that, contrary to tradition, it “is neither natural nor inevitable that women’s lust should be punished” (83).

12 See Peter Robinson, who incorporates the phrase into his title. For a sense of the history and theorisation of the field, see Malmkjaer and Windle.



20 The question of “who’s allowed to joke about what” has been the subject of much press debate; see for instance Rogers Media, and Hennessey.

20 Introduction

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda Martin. “Dangerous Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Pedophilia,” in Baker et al., Philosophy and Sex, pp. 500–529. Baker, Robert B., Kathleen J. Wininger, and Frederick Elliston, eds. Philosophy and Sex. 3rd edition. New York: Prometheus Books, 1998. Beckerman, Stephen, and Paul Valentine. Cultures of Multiple Fathers: The Theory and Practice of Partible Paternity in South America. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002. Bland, Lucy, and Laura Doan, eds. Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. ———. Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Bukwoski, Charles. Women. 1978. London: Virgin, 2009. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Clark, Anna. Desire: A History of European Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 2008. Despentes, Virginie. King Kong Theory. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Doan, Laura. “Then and Now: What the ‘Queer’ Portrait Can Teach Us about the ‘New’ Longue Durée.” Visual Culture in Britain, vol. 18, no. 1, 2017, pp. 18–34. Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, Love and Pain, The Sexual Impulse in Women. 1903. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1906. Elliston, Frederick. “In Defense of Promiscuity,” in Baker et al., Philosophy and Sex, pp. 73–90. Fluck, Winfried. “The Limits of Critique and the Affordances of Form: Literary Studies after the Hermeneutics of Suspicion.” American Literary History, vol. 31, no. 2, 2019, pp. 229–48. Foucault, Michel. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of the Work in Progress.” Ethics, edited by Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin, 1997, pp. 253–80. Fowler, Kendra. Pain, Promiscuity, Purpose: From Mess to Ministry. Ministry in Writing, 2017. Freccero, Carla. Queer/Early/Modern. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. ———. “Queer Times.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 3, Summer 2007, pp. 485–94. Goldberg, Jonathan, and Madhavi Menon. “Queering History.” PMLA, vol. 120, no. 5, October 2005, pp. 1608–17. Groneman, Carol. Nymphomania: A History. New York: Norton, 2000. Halperin, David. “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality.” The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp. 21–54. Hennessey, Matthew. “Standing Up to the Comedy Scolds.” Wall Street Journal, 22 February 2019. URL: www.wsj.com.

Introduction 21 Herbert, Christopher. Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Howard, Richard. “Translator’s Note.” In Renaud Camus, Tricks: 25 Encounters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Kinsey, Alfred J. Concepts of Normality and Abnormality in Sexual Behavior. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1949. Kraff-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis. 1886. London: Rebman, 1910. Lang, Andrew. A History of Scotland from the Roman Occupation. 4 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1900. Leigh, Carol. Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Works of Scarlot Harlot. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2002. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Lubbock, Sir John. The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man. 1872. London: Longmans, 1902. Malmkjaer, Kirsten, and Kevin Windle. The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. McLennan, John F. Primitive Marriage. 1865. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Norton, Thomas. A Disclosing of the great Bull. 1570. Early English Books Online A08355.0001.001/1:2. Olson, Stuart, ed. Historical Dictionary of the 1960s. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. Ovid. Metamorphoses, translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Petro, Anthony. After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pomeroy, Wardell B. Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research. 1972. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Primoratz, Igor. Ethics and Sex. London: Routledge, 1999. Reay, Barry. “Promiscuous Intimacies: Rethinking the History of American Casual Sex.” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 27, no. 1, March 2014, pp. 1–23. Reay, Barry, Nina Attwood, and Claire Gooder. Sex Addiction: A Critical History. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. Robinson, Peter. Poetry and Translation: The Art of the Impossible. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. Rogers Media. “The Big Story: Who’s Allowed to Joke about What?” 26 September 2018. URL: www.citynews1130 Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” 1984. In Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 2011, pp. 145–82. Sanchez, Melissa. “‘In My Selfe the Smart I Try’: Female Promiscuity in Astrophil and Stella.” ELH, vol. 80, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–27. Sauer, Michelle, Noreen Giffney, and Diane Watt, eds. The Lesbian Premodern. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Sciortino, Karley. Slutever: Dispatches from a Sexually Autonomous Woman in a Post-Shame World. New York: Grand Central, 2017.

22 Introduction Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Sociology. 4 vols. London: Williams and Norgate, 1876–96. Tea, Michelle. How to Grow Up: A Memoir. New York: Plume Books, 2015. Traub, Valerie. “The New Unhistoricism of Queer Studies.” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 1, January 2013, pp. 21–39. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal. New York: Free Press, 1999. Warner, Michael, and Lauren Berlant. “Sex in Public.” Critical Enquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, Winter 1998, pp. 547–66. Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800. Harlow: Pearson, 2012. Wolf, Naomi. Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire. London: Chatto and Windus, 1997.

1

Animals

When humans display “animal passion,” the suggestion is of frenzied embraces. Sex is “brutish” when it is not moderated by reason and feeling. The idea of “animal” copulation is of instinctual compulsion, an idea that is reinforced by the fact that sex between animals often follows an obvious and undeviating pattern – the “rutting season,” being “in heat.” No sense here of sex as an expression of individuals and souls. Animals have signified a range of things to humans, from food to abstract values such as courage (one thinks of the ancient Irish and Germanic warriors who claimed to have bears and lions as ancestors). The general presumption from the classical age onward is that, lacking the power of reason, animals are more prone to lust and to promiscuity. A number of animals have become renowned for their frequent, indiscriminate couplings: goats, monkeys, sparrows, polecats, horses, toads, asses, dogs, leopards, ducks, hyenas, mink, rabbits and hares among them.1 This sense of animal promiscuity has served to explain the difference between human and animal. The complex chosen-ness of human sexual behaviour is a clear instance of our being above the beasts. Alongside the other justifications of our superiority (use of language, ability to make and use tools, ability to think in abstractions), our attitude towards sex seems a further reason for, as the Bible has it, our “dominion” over all other living creatures (Genesis 1:26–8). 2 But this dividing line between human and animal, in matters of sex as in much else, has not always been maintained. Early Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas did not believe, in any case, that human sexual behaviour was different from the animal. Intercourse, for them, was always a bestial event, an occasion on which, as Aquinas put it, “man behaves like a brute animal.”3 Indeed, from Christ onward there is a favouring not of individualistic and soulful sex, as of abstinence. But if we keep to the idea that sex – and especially promiscuous sex – is animal, we are then forced to observe that people often fall away from the human into the animal, as they behave “like” dogs, goats, monkeys. In the twenty-first century, and especially in the wake of the animal rights movement, philosophers and theorists have offered a different critique of the supposed boundaries between human and animal. They

24 Animals have noted that the dividing lines have often changed. Giorgio Agamben comments on historical Biblical depictions of the righteous with animal heads. This indicates to him a sense of overlap, and the idea that for some Christians “man” must be “reconciled with his animal nature” (3). More fundamentally, for Agamben there is a problem at the heart of our conceptualisations in that “man” (and the gender implications here are not pursued) sees his likeness to the animal and for that very reason seeks to differentiate himself. He must “recognise himself in a non-man in order to be human” (27). Similarly, Cary Wolfe observes that “the animal has always been especially, frightfully nearby, always lying in wait at the very heart of the constitutive disavowals and self-constructing narratives enacted by that fantasy figure called ‘the human’” (6). If, in the present moment, activists and critical thinkers alike are throwing into question the terms “human” and “animal,” literature usually asserts a boundary, presenting numerous instances of people behaving promiscuously and, as a result, being reclassified as animal. This means that the boundary was always notional, always an idea to live up to, rather than an essential division. There is a threat in this non-essential division, which is that when an individual fails, and falls into the animal, it awakens an ontological anxiety for everyone. To use Wolfe’s term, the “fantasy” that we are different is undermined. But the precise nature of the anxiety over this boundary, or rather, the perceived threat of animalistic couplings, shifts through time. Bestial promiscuity signifies an endangerment of community structure and cohesion at one moment, while at another it indicates soul-sickness or mental disease. Moving from selected ancients to Shakespeare, this chapter does not provide a comprehensive or a continuous history of promiscuity as animality, so much as trace out the range of perceptions and arguments that circulate around the idea. *** Donna Haraway, in Primate Visions (1989), writes of “the confusion of boundaries at the nether regions of the great chain of being” (20). With the “great chain of being” she alludes to the idea that all life forms a hierarchy. Aristotle ordered animals into a “ladder of Life,” with mammals at the top and worms at the bottom. Later ages would include God, placing him at the top and working down to plants and minerals, moving, in Macrobius’ words, from the “Supreme God” down to “the last dregs of things.”4 When Haraway writes of the “confusion of boundaries at the nether regions” of this chain, she indicates that less privileged human groups are more likely to be associated with – seen to collapse back into – lower categories such as the animal. So, although white men might behave animalistically, their self-perception has tended to place them further from the species boundary than those inherently primitive beings, women and non-white peoples. Women and non-white

Animals  25 peoples are, as Catherine Mackinnon has put it, “the animals of the human kingdom” (265), variously serving as “pets,” “beasts of burden,” and “living acquisitions” (272).5 Homer’s Helen of Troy provides a particularly succinct example of such ambiguities. She, though much less sexually busy than the men around her, is more readily identified as promiscuous and therefore as animal. In The Iliad, and again in The Odyssey, Helen describes herself as a bitch (kuôn) and as bitch-faced (kunôps). She cannot mean that she looks like a dog, because Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, has acknowledged her to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Modern commentators interpret Helen’s description of herself to indicate shamelessness. She likens herself to the wanton bitch that, when in heat, will draw all the dogs and mate with them. In the same spirit, at least one translation into English gives kuôn not as “bitch” but as “slut.”6 Perhaps Helen alludes to the creation of the first woman, Pandora, of whom Zeus decreed that she should have “a dog’s mind and a thieving character.”7 What truth is there, though, in Helen’s description of herself? Does she act like a bitch at the centre of a crowd of tumescent dogs? If not, what is it in her behaviour, and in the social world around her, that leads her to judge herself as promiscuous and animal? What Helen has actually done is to leave one man for another. She was married to Menelaus, King of Sparta, by whom she had a daughter. The handsome Paris seduced Helen and carried her off to Troy. Menelaus and his older brother, Agamemnon, King of Argos, launch a campaign against Troy, along with all their Greek allies, which will lead to the destruction of Troy. But Helen’s fault would seem to be that of adultery, not promiscuity. She is seduced, it is true, but when she calls herself a bitch she exaggerates her fault. Consumed by remorse and regret, she tells Priam, King of Troy, “I wish I had chosen to die in misery before I came here with your son, deserting my bridal bed, my relations, my darling daughter and the dear friends with whom I had grown up” (50). Helen speaks of her choices, and yet we learn from the pre-history of The Iliad that both she and Paris were always fated by the gods to act as they did. Aphrodite awarded Helen to Paris, regardless of the fact that Helen was already married to Menelaus. So, when Hector bemoans the dreadful events that Paris has brought upon Troy, Paris tells him, “don’t hold against me the irresistible gifts I have from golden Aphrodite” (46). As is common in Greek literature, characters both choose for themselves and have their choices determined by the gods. Hector still blames Paris, even though Paris was fated from birth to bring disaster. Helen speaks of her error of judgement, even though she knows that “the gods have ordained things to this evil end” (108–9).8 Helen accuses herself of an animal, promiscuous disposition, yet we learn not only that she regrets her one weakness, but that she could not have chosen otherwise. We also learn that the warriors of Greece and Troy are much more sexually prolific than Helen, and yet this does not

26 Animals make them either promiscuous or animal. How can this be? What is it about her adultery that defines her as extreme, as a bitch, while the men, for their many couplings, are left uncensured? Frequent and dispersed male sexual activity is clear in Homer’s descriptions of the Greek encampments, and the arguments that have sprung up in them. Achilles has raided the Trojans many times and carried off numerous women. But one whom he especially wanted, Briseis, is taken from him and given to Agamemnon. In his disappointment and his anger, Achilles refuses to take to the battlefield; the tide turns against the Greeks and in favour of Troy. Agamemnon tries to mend his relationship with Achilles. He offers to return Briseis and to give Achilles seven other Trojan women. He also promises that when they sack Ilium, Agamemnon will give Achilles another 20 women. Achilles already has women to share his hut with himself and his friend Patroclus. The understanding is that, however many women a warrior has, more are always desirable. Achilles and Agamemnon have exceptional status as rulers and warriors, so they have many women. The rank and file do not, as becomes apparent when Nestor promises that the Greeks will not return to their homes until “every man of you has slept with a Trojan wife” (30). The taking of women is assumed to be a pleasure in itself, and a marker of prowess both within the group and between groups. The superiority of the Greeks will finally be accomplished both with military victory and in a series of rapes. Thereafter, the Trojan women will become slaves and concubines, adding to each Greek’s household wealth and pleasure. Greek warriors seem to live out an idea of promiscuity as opportunistic sex with numerous partners. But crucially this does not constitute a category entirely akin to a modern one of promiscuity, nor is it seen as animal. The men’s behaviour is not indiscriminate and it is not transgressive. It follows a pattern whereby the leading aristocrats and warriors can accumulate women as much as gold and weapons, all of which may then be dispersed downwards as rewards to ensure loyalty. Each Greek warrior seeks to add women to his retinue as a means of increasing his workforce and strengthening his dynastic reach. Similarly Priam, King of Troy, has 50 sons by his many wives. The male disposition to frequent sexual conquest, then, is not entirely or only a sexual behaviour. It indicates a hunger for power, with sex as a proof of power and as a means to power. In this world, sex and empire are always seen in relation to each other. But the ruling class woman’s potential for numerous sexual partners is a more dangerous issue. If Helen really were a bitch-woman who copulated with all the man-dogs, that sense of dynastic lineage, of building up distinct social and political units based on kinship alliances, would cease to be possible. Male sexual conquest can help to create the dynasty, but female promiscuity causes the lines to become confused and meaningless. Epics such as The Iliad and The Odyssey are about the formation of tribes, dynasties, nations, and so, inevitably, they have

Animals  27 to be about battles and about the control of women. Helen stands as the key figure through whom all is undermined, and through whom all may be rescued. It is her animality that matters most of all. If she truly is a bitch, the social structure cannot work. If she remains loyal to her husband, to her royal house, and to her line, then all becomes clear and firm once more.9 Given the accumulation of women by the warriors, is it then the case that Greek men were never seen as animalistically promiscuous? Men could be seen as animal and sexually indiscriminate, and the suggestion as to how and why is to be found in the figure of the satyr. Satyrs tend to be represented in Greek art as men with donkey-like features – long ears, hairy legs, sometimes hooves rather than feet – and they are frequently depicted with large, erect penises. They survive most spectacularly in painting, not writing, and particularly as the figures on the Attic vases of the Late Archaic period (540–480 BC).10 The satyrs are followers of the god of wine, Dionysus. On the vases, they are dominated by their sexual urge. They are shown trying to copulate with the female followers of Dionysus, the maenads. They tend to fail at their attempts on the maenads, who are more interested in hunting. The satyrs are thrown back on having sex with each other or masturbating. They are so full of sexual energy that they will stick their penises into the openings of amphorae or into animals such as deer and donkeys. As François Lissarague, scholar of the satyr, comments, their “erotic games take all imaginable forms” (“The Sexual Life of Satyrs” 56). These frenzied donkey- or horse-men are ludicrous. Their penis size is inconvenient and preposterous, and would have seemed so to the Greeks. The Greek idea of beauty, as far as male genitals were concerned, tended toward the average and even the small. Athletes and heroes tend to be shown with tidy, discreet genitals, or at least in a size that is not disablingly cumbersome. It is only the satyrs, old men, and savage pygmies who are depicted with enormous penises. The satyr’s outsize penis indicates an obsession with sex born in part of a difficulty in getting it. The sexually successful man’s penis stays in a regular and satisfied dimension (“The Sexual Life of Satyrs” 56). A Greek man, then, becomes promiscuous – an undiscriminating sexual animal – when his desire takes precedence over his role and his dignity as a warrior and a citizen. He may have intercourse with a wife, slaves, hetaerae, and concubines, but this is all within the Greek order of power, gender, and class. It is when he looks for sexual opportunities anywhere, and neglects his social and political responsibilities, that he comes dangerously close to the foolish donkey-man that is the satyr. The other obvious instance of animal coupling and promiscuity in Greek culture is of course that of the gods taking the form of animals to copulate with humans. Zeus is infamously promiscuous and becomes a bull to carry off Europa, a swan to mate with Leda, an eagle to take

28 Animals Ganymede. Animality would seem here to lose connotations of disgust, of a falling away from a superior state. Zeus does not necessarily endanger his divinity in chasing after the maidens and youths. Rather, he proves his godly power with his amazing transformations into the more noble creatures of the animal kingdom. But Greek discussions of his activities are at best ambivalent. Plato in The Republic laments the people’s love of stories of the gods, precisely because, to Plato’s mind, the gods set such bad examples with their sexual abductions (131, 133). Similarly Aeschylus, in his play The Suppliants, writes of the legend of Zeus and Io, in which Zeus’s wife, the jealous Hera, turns the maiden Io into a cow. Zeus turns himself into a bull to continue to mate with Io, but Hera adds to Io’s punishment by having her continually stung by flies. The pain inflicted by the flies means that Io cannot stay still long enough for Zeus-as-bull to mount her. This is not a picturesque, romantic episode, such as the Roman Ovid would give us 500 years later in his Metamorphoses, in which beautiful god-animals ravish charming maidens. Aeschylus presents us with a pair of fly-stung beasts stumbling through attempted copulations. The compulsion to have sex becomes its own punishment, and the sign of animality, as Zeus labours on in spite of the difficulty and the humiliation (325–7).11 The transformation into an animal in order to carry off and to mate can be a wondrous, divine act. But in Aeschylus’ version, at least, it indicates a tortuous acting out of a behaviour that has ceased to be a pleasure. The commentary so far is a long way from a comprehensive study of animality in Greek literature and culture.12 But it has opened out a number of different and in some ways counter-intuitive ideas of human sexual behaviour, especially in terms of how this behaviour at once constructs and blurs the borderlines between the species. The accusation of promiscuity, of an extreme and undiscriminating sexual hunger that is defined as animal, depends not strictly on the number of one’s sexual partners but on one’s gender and on whether or not one pursues sex to the endangerment or enhancement of one’s social and political position. A ruling-class man may pursue many sexual encounters and maintain his position; a ruling-class woman may not. The threshold at which a woman becomes promiscuous and animal is much lower than that for men. *** I want in the rest of this chapter to consider writing from the Roman, the medieval, and the early modern periods. I do not pretend to offer a historical development, and still less a sense of a teleology or of one period leading inevitably into another. This will again be a setting out of a range of perceptions, rather than a comprehensive study.13 That said, there are a number of echoes and reactions in what follows. Let’s move forward to the only Roman novel to survive in its entirety, Apuleius’s

Animals  29 Metamorphoses, now more familiarly known as The Golden Ass. Apuleius wrote his novel around the middle of the second century AD, more or less a millennium after Homer, but he based his story on a now-lost Greek text.14 Apuleius is fascinated by the peculiarities of sexual behaviour, and he sees them as relating to the animal. With him, a schema emerges whereby the promiscuous animal self is symptomatic of the soul that has not been redeemed. In Apuleius, religion is not oriented towards gods like Zeus who are themselves promiscuous and whose divinity is also happily animal. For all that The Golden Ass is largely comic, we find a soulfulness that tends towards the ascetic. Sex, promiscuity, and the animal go together once more with Apuleius, but his goal is to lead us towards a spiritualised and de-sexed vision of existence. Apuleius sets up the theme of a species borderline in his title. Whether Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, he announces the problem that humans are not reliably different to animals. They tend to shift or change into the animal, and their sexual behaviour is the most obvious symptom of the problem. This is established via the figure of the protagonist. Lucius is a traveller who is led astray by his curiosity about sex. He finds himself in the house of a promiscuous sorceress who has her servant linger at barbershops to gather up the hair-clippings of young men. The sorceress uses the clippings in spells to make the young men desire her. Rather than turn his back on this household, Lucius plunges in, enjoying a “wild love-orgy” with the sorceress’s servant. When Lucius is “wearied with her feminine generosity,” the servant offers him “a boy’s pleasure” (Golden Ass 51). This falling into a happy sexual friendship is risky, but his more grievous error is to take an interest in the sorceress’s mystical practices. She has not had much success in maintaining her supply of vigorous young men, so she transforms herself into a bird to spy out more talent. Lucius is eager to see this transformation, but soon he decides he can only be satisfied with having the experience of being a bird himself. With the servant’s help he attempts the metamorphosis, but the servant makes a mistake. Lucius is transformed into an ass. To break the spell, he must eat roses. This would seem easy enough, but Lucius is destined for a long series of humiliating adventures as an ass, during which roses are nowhere to be seen, or are tantalisingly out of reach. Lucius has committed two errors that are figured by animals. He takes an interest in the unholy arts of the promiscuous sorceress, even to the point of wanting, like her, to cross the species boundary and become a bird. Secondly, he is too open himself to passing sexual pleasures. The ass is perceived in the world of the novel as a heavily sexual animal; the implication is that Lucius’s sexual eagerness has been ass-like, so there is justice in his being turned into an ass. Apuleius gives us a hapless narrator who becomes involved in a series of bizarre episodes, many of them featuring promiscuity. He introduces a number of stories within his story, as Lucius sees or hears of

30 Animals the misadventures of others. Although there is a lengthy and beautiful recounting of the Cupid and Psyche myth, most of the anecdotes are ribald accounts of men and women who cheat on their spouses. The narrative is rich in irony, in that Lucius, humiliated by his transformation into an ass, is substantially cured of his wandering desires. So, we have a number of scenes in which the supposedly sexual ass witnesses with sadness the gross erotic escapades of humans. Yet many of the episodes are best understood as Milesian tales – comic incidents in which lustful characters meet with triumph and disaster. The lugubrious ass ends up being as much a part of a comedy as part of a moral lesson. But Lucius also witnesses horrendous events – beatings, abductions, rapes, murders. Gradually, and via many ludicrous and painful detours, Apuleius is leading us towards the need for a straighter path – a path that, as we will see, he finds in the worship of the goddess Isis. The most frequent response to Lucius in his metamorphosed form of an ass is incitement to sexual frenzy. Humans look at the ass, consider the ass’s genitalia, and think of sex. Lucius, whether he wishes to or not, often arouses the “bestial” in the humans that he encounters. At one point, for instance, he is sold to a cinaedus (a cinaedus is usually understood as a man who takes a passive role in sex with other men).15 This cinaedus is called Philebus (“boy-lover”). Like many of his kind, Philebus is a priest of Cybele, a goddess of fertility and wild nature. In the mythology, Cybele’s son and consort, Attis, went mad and castrated himself. Many of Cybele’s followers castrated themselves in mimicry of Attis, and so Cybele’s adherents are often represented either as eunuchs or as cinaedi. Philebus falls into the latter category. He and his acolytes need an ass for the practical purpose of carrying their figurine of the goddess Cybele from place to place. The auctioneer who is selling Lucius makes ribald comments on the rightness of the ass for Philebus. He tells Philebus that the ass is a Cappadocian (Cappadocian men were legendary for enormous genitals), and so, Lucius “will be able to offer you satisfaction both outdoors and indoors” (154). Philebus is offended and launches into a mystical diatribe against the auctioneer. But he buys the ass and takes it home, telling his fellow acolytes: “Look, girls, what a handsome slave I’ve bought for you” (156).16 The person most pleased at Lucius’ arrival among the cinaedi is a “well-built young man” whom they have been using as “communal bed-fellow.” The well-built young man gives Lucius a good feed, hoping that the ass will “relieve the pressure on my now wearied loins” (156). The priests go from settlement to settlement with their image of the goddess, and at each place, they go into a religious frenzy, during which they cut themselves with swords and scourge themselves with whips. The people are either terrified into giving money and goods, or they give because they are genuinely impressed by this show of piety. Lucius is in no doubt that this is false piety and that the oracular wisdom they sell

Animals  31 to the people is nonsense. The priests are eventually found out when, after getting a good haul from one village, they plan a celebratory feast. They clean up at the baths and invite as their dinner guest “a peasant of powerful physique, especially chosen for the capacity of his loins and lower parts.” Lucius, though now an ass and ostensibly a sexual animal, is disapproving. When the cinaedi begin to smother the young man with “their abominable kisses,” Lucius brays as loudly as he can. This causes the villagers to rush up to the scene, and the priests are caught in their “obscenely foul practices” (158). Apuleius uses his story of The Golden Ass to raise the question of the borderline between the species. He suggests that, in their sexual and social behaviour, humans may be as bad as or worse than animals. The central irony of the novel is that the ass is not promiscuous, even though he functions for the people around him as an image of gross sexuality. This is explored in the later stages of the novel, when Lucius is presented as a performing ass that nods and shakes his head in response to questions. Among the crowds that come to see Lucius, there is a “married lady of position and wealth.” She conceives an “insane lust” for Lucius and gives the animal-keeper a large sum of money to spend the night with him. Lucius is worried and wonders “how that woman could admit my massive penis.” She, however, hugs him close and admits him “all the way” (206). His owner then decides to make a public spectacle of the ass copulating with a woman, arranging for Lucius to make love to a particularly vicious woman criminal who is due to be thrown to the beasts. Lucius, though, is disgusted at the thought of contact with such a dreadful woman and fearful that the beasts that will be released to kill her will almost certainly kill him too. He waits for a moment when his keeper is beguiled by the scenes on the stage, and he runs off. The point is made that people use the figure of the animal to stage and give diverse shapes to their own sexual hunger. Apuleius’ view is that people are themselves essentially animal until they are saved by a higher religious morality. But Apuleius is also something of a tease. He often sketches in promiscuous activity and then interrupts it. He likes to tell of the young men and their impressive endowments, but he likes to have a moral intervention before the men’s powers have been proven. Only the wealthy woman is fully exposed; only she is pictured “all the way.” Shortly after his escape Lucius is rescued by worshippers of Isis, who enable him to regain his human form. He is told by the worshippers of Isis: “In the green years of youth, you tumbled on the slippery slope with slavish pleasures, and gained the ill-omened reward of your unhappy curiosity” (227). Now, he is to lead a holy life under the protection of Isis. Having suffered so many trials, he is ready to “join the procession of the saviour goddess with triumphal step.” The preceding scenes of debauchery, then, are symptomatic of a lascivious society. In abandoning this

32 Animals society, Lucius becomes reliably different from the animal and achieves a new “state of religious blessedness” (227). If Apuleius loves to give us gross comic scenes, he cannot allow them to remain unanswered or unimproved. He permits himself to tell the stories because they are leading towards “blessedness.” Whether out of his own religious feeling – Apuleius was a follower of Isis – or out of moral timidity, he rounds off the tale of man-as-ass with virtue and transcendence. The body or ass-self is left behind, as are all the peculiarities that made for a story. In the process, Apuleius marks himself and his narrative as finally and definitively beyond promiscuity, and beyond the animal.17 *** The leap from Homer to Apuleius has revealed changes of emphasis and meaning in promiscuity-as-animal, even if the central idea is present in both. The second historical leap, from ancient to medieval, will show further – but awkwardly related – modulations of the theme. They are awkwardly related in that there is usually understood to be a strong pattern of either influence or reaction from ancient to modern. The most familiar narrative of historical change is of a happily sexual ancient world changing into a repressive Christian one. Yet we have seen sexual shame among the ancients, whether that of Homer’s Helen or Apuleius’ Lucius. Equally, we will find frank expressions of sexual liberty among the Christians of the middle ages. Michel Foucault observed that the Greeks and Romans could be resistant to the idea of sexual freedom, and this led him to argue against the idea of “a moral rupture between tolerant antiquity and austere Christianity” (“On the Genealogy of Ethics” 271, 266). Foucault’s became the prevailing view, leading numerous other scholars to accept that the Greeks and Romans “were often like the Christians and moderns in preferring monogamous, heterosexual, and procreative sex.”18 Indeed, a consensus emerged that the Christians were adopting Greek ideas in their own ascetic practices. Kathy L. Gaca, however, points out that the mainstream view in ancient culture was that sexual desire was sent by Aphrodite and Eros, and that it was dangerous to resist such powerful gods. Equally, Gaca reminds us that the Greeks thought that “mortals have not genuinely lived unless their reason and will power have been incapacitated by eros,” unless, as Archilochus put it, they have been “skewered to the bone” by desire (65–6). Against the relative liberality of ancient Greece, we might offer the usual reference points of Christian anti-sex policy: Christ’s declaration that “they which shall be accounted worthy” are those that “neither marry, nor are given in marriage” (Luke 20:35); Paul’s observation that it “is good for a man not to touch a woman” (1 Corinthians 7:1); John’s prophecy that heaven will have 144,000 male virgins, or “they which were not defiled with women” (Revelation 14:4); Augustine’s references to “unclean

Animals  33 members,” the “puddly concupiscence of the flesh,” and the “disease of carnality” (50, 130, 175).19 The list might be extended indefinitely. There are also injunctions against crossing the species borderline from the Old Testament onwards, and the Old Testament links sexual adventuring with animality. So, Jeremiah likens the men of Jerusalem to horses “for every man neighed after his neighbour’s wife” (Jeremiah 5:8). He has witnessed “thy neighings, the filthiness of thy whoredom” (Jeremiah 13:27). We might speculate on the causes and uses of Christian asceticism. Historians argue that the early church fathers were strengthening Christianity by urging dependence on God alone. Believers should, according to Cyprian, “hold themselves free for God and Christ” (Lane Fox 366). But given this asceticism, it is not surprising that the theme of blessedness versus animal promiscuity is often explored in medieval Christian texts. So, for instance, it is briefly present in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which the “Lustful” are pictured as columns of ants that nuzzle each other as they pass. These sad, damned souls also cry out the name of Pasiphaë because she notoriously descended into the animal when she “made herself a beast in beastlike flanks” so that the bull would penetrate her (281). Other animals in Dante embody attractive qualities, and even here with the nuzzling ants, there is perhaps a sense of companionability and shared feeling. But the Lustful speak of having “served our appetites like beasts” (281). 20 The counter-point to Lust in the Divine Comedy is Beatrice, who inspires a chaste, adoring love. The poet’s love for Beatrice is distant and unconsummated. Lust is what inspires promiscuous activity; lust is desire that does not respect all of the constraints around sexual object-choice. Lust is always deeply suspicious. It is sudden, unruly, and leads towards irregularity – promiscuity, adultery, bestiality. Base, instinctual desire must be purged by reason and by dedication to an ideal vision. High, true love, for Dante, is desire without erections and emission. There is a stark choice in Dante, between the desiring, “animal” fornicators and the saved. We find a more equivocal position in medieval Christian culture and especially in the idea of a spiritualised passion or courtly love. This is the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guenevere, in which the man worships the woman and aims to earn her love through acts and trials which prove his devotion. Courtly love is, according to C. S. Lewis, made up of “Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love.” But there are problems here. Most love in the literature of the period is not adultery, and often the lovers marry and live happily ever after. And, far from being accepted as an essential trait of love, adultery, when discovered, was often very harshly punished. 21 Whether we see courtly love as a usefully descriptive phrase or not, it seems not to lead to a medieval interest in promiscuity. But one of the major treatises to which scholars refer on courtly love, Andrea Capellano’s On Love, has a great deal to offer on the topic of promiscuity

34 Animals and on the connection between promiscuity and animality. And again, Andrea’s writing on sex invokes levels or a chain of being. Andrea exemplifies Haraway’s point about “confusion,” and the reflection that those who attempt to assert a hierarchy of being will often disregard complication or self-contradiction. From Andrea, we learn that men and women are changeable in their appetites. In On Love, he acknowledges that the only way a couple can maintain a passionate commitment is in unconsummated love. This may reflect the reality of courtly life, in that many marriages were contracted for dynastic reasons. Courtly love, in the form of an adulterous but physically pure liaison, created the possibility of an intimate emotional life for people locked into marriages of convenience. The crucial point, though, is that this is not Dante’s transcendence of the physical in the love of a pure object. It is rather that people should experience emotional and physical longing, and non-consummation intensifies that longing. The spectre of promiscuity is present, in that Andrea is writing out of a sense that people are disposed to consummate and then move on. In trying to admit and to govern this problem, animals are again invoked. Andrea admits that there are those “who are possessed of so strong a desire for pleasure that they could not be contained by the nets of love” (41). These are men, Andrea admits, who “wish to indulge their lust with every woman they see.” He compares these men with dogs and monkeys, “not moved by man’s true nature, which makes us distinct from all animals by difference of reason” (41). The implication is that all men are inherently dogs and monkeys, except that their reason prevents them from being so. Love, then, is what comes from a man using his reason and not acting on all his sexual impulses. Andrea is sure that “excessive indulgence” with numerous partners “hinders love” (41). But elsewhere he allows that any “indulgence” leads to “waning” and “regret” (181). Love is not a prime, independent fact, but a by-product of chastity. Love emerges not simply as the urge to adulterous caresses, but as a conscious structuring – both encouragement and repression – of those dog- and monkey-like wishes. The sexual urge is transposed into a code of subservience, attendance, favours granted, and friendly as well as erotic contact. Knights and ladies are so immersed in this code and its benefits that it becomes natural to them. Others fail, either because their minds are dominated by sensual opportunities or because they refuse to accept their dog- and monkey-like self and prudishly reject all approaches. Desire must be acknowledged and accommodated, but in moderation. However, it emerges over the course of On Love that the rules vary according to gender and class. A lady who “breaks faith” with her lover is committing a “primeval sin.” Andrea writes, “God forfend that I should ever proclaim a pardon for a woman who was not ashamed to satisfy two men’s lusts.” But what if a man strays with “an unknown woman, or a courtesan or someone’s maid in a randy mood?” (241). The answer is that it does not matter, unless “he chances to commit

Animals  35 such excesses quite often with several women.” Then, we must presume “sexual licence in his case.” The upper-class man is allowed to deviate into dog-like indulgences, as long as he does not do it a lot. Or, if he does it with peasants, it does not matter at all. Andreas even gives advice on correct procedure in taking advantage of peasants. In a classic instance of Haraway’s “confusion of boundaries at the nether regions of the great chain of being,” we are told that peasants are “impelled to acts of love in the natural way like a horse or a mule.” The noble who wants a peasant woman is advised that he should “praise them lavishly, and should you find a suitable spot you should not delay in taking what you seek, gaining it by rough embraces.” He continues, “You will find it hard to soften their outwardly brusque attitude as to make them quietly agree” (223). This is of course rape. Andrea legitimates rape on the basis that someone so close to the animal condition cannot meaningfully object to a sexual approach. Equally, he observes that peasants themselves should not be encouraged to become interested in love, as it will lead to them neglecting their work. The peasant, then, is a beast who must be treated with beast-like acts by a man who is understood to be part-beast, but also noble and discriminating. When the peasant shows any higher tendencies, his or her “horse” or “mule” nature must be insisted upon. *** Andreas Capellano is far from alone in seeing lower-class women as a sexual resource for ruling-class men. He follows in a tradition that is most obviously derived from Ovid. 22 More generally, what we see in a range of texts is that the assertion of animal promiscuity is part of an enforcement of social and political structures. In classical and medieval texts, there is an idea of reason as making us different from the animals and less prone to brutish sex. Yet alongside this, there is often a subsidiary judgment of sexual behaviour not according to reason, nor by any absolute moral standard, but by whether or not it endangers social organisation and, more specifically, the hierarchies of gender and class. Added to these, there is the idea of a spiritual as well as a rational self, a spirituality that will again lead us away from lust and into a realm in which neither animals nor promiscuity has a place. This spirituality, though, also reflects social and political values, in that writers interested in spirituality, from Apuleius to Andreas, allow more play to men and male characters than to women. To make a third historical leap however, as we move into the early modern period a different possibility emerges. The key factor is the revaluation of marriage. Promiscuity-as-animality is still present, but it is understood differently again. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (probably written c. 1595 and first printed in 1600), we seem not too far removed from earlier sexual worlds. The young lovers are to be separated by parents in order

36 Animals to fulfil dynastic ambitions. Egeus wishes his daughter Hermia to marry Demetrius, even though Hermia loves Lysander. Theseus, Duke of Athens, tells Hermia she must follow her father’s wishes, not her own. “To you your father should be as a god,” he tells her. The Duke then decrees that she must marry Demetrius, or become a nun, or die. The nun’s chastity is approved, but it is not celebrated. Theseus pictures convent life to Hermia: For aye to be in shady cloister mewed, To live a barren sister all your life, Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon. (I.i, ll.71–3; 137) In his own life Theseus has treated sex and marriage after the old Homeric pattern of conquest and allegiance. He has loved and abandoned Aegyle, Ariadne and Antiopa, and now he will affirm his victory over the Amazons by marrying their queen, Hippolyta. This old model of force, dynasticism, of numerous sexual conquests, is also suggested by the scenes involving the fairies. Oberon and Titania struggle over the possession of a boy and argue over their infidelities. Oberon will anoint Titania’s sleeping eyes with an elixir so that when she wakes up, she will fall in love with whatever she first sees. Unsurprisingly, when this random and disorderly sexual love is brought into view, animals are not far behind. Oberon decides that Titania will fall in love with that first object, whether it be lion, bear, wolf, bull, “meddling monkey” or “busy ape.” In an echo of Apuleius, what Titania will first see is Bottom with the head of an ass.23 Against this background of trickery, violent imposition, and animalisation, the young lovers Hermia and Lysander must hold fast to the order and meaning, the security, that is promised by their feelings for each other. Drawing on Lawrence Stone’s influential historical study, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977), literary scholar Mary Beth Rose argues that a play such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a perfect example of the increased prestige of marriage in renaissance England and the “enhanced respect for the human dignity of sexual life as well” (39). Rose’s source, Lawrence Stone, observed a shift in the culture of marriage. Previously, marriage among the upper and middle classes “was not an intimate association based on personal choice,” but “a means of tying together two kinship groups, of obtaining collective economic advantages and securing useful political alliances” (5). After 1500, marriage became more of a love-match, with a new emphasis on the couple itself, and the isolated nuclear family, as opposed to the larger dynastic formation. At the same time, there was a shift from the medieval prizing of chastity to praise of “holy matrimony.” Marriage, not celibacy, becomes the ideal state. Marriage was the “true and perfect contract” that provided companionship, mutual help, and personal happiness (135–6). With this revaluation of marriage, promiscuity is not so much an endangerment of dynastic lineage, as the betrayal of love and intimacy.

Animals  37 This, as Rose shows, is a neat and satisfactory way of reading Shakespeare and other early modern authors. 24 Why, though, is this not an adequate interpretive framework? Much of the work on early modern writing since Rose has pointed towards a richer and more varied sexual culture. Scholars have indicated the wealth of materials for thinking about non-normative desire – all the complications and variations around sex that Jonathan Goldberg would place under the label of “sodometries” (Goldberg passim), and that Valerie Traub would call a “renaissance of lesbianism” (Traub passim). My focus is not on same-sex relations, but I do show that, however the play turns on the importance of marriage, it reveals messy, uncertain, repressed, and fraught sexualities. In Othello, for instance, there appear to be two chosen, stable heterosexual partnerships in the play: Othello and Desdemona, and Iago and Emilia. In the case of Othello and Desdemona in particular, the play exemplifies the focus on chastity and on fidelity in marriage. Except that the play does not confirm, but shows the failure of its key premise. Othello will kill his wife and himself; Iago too will kill his wife. I want to suggest that while the early modern focus on chastity and fidelity is a critical commonplace, the concern with “animal promiscuity” has not quite been seen. Even as the central characters of this early modern drama congratulate themselves on their love and constancy, promiscuity as animality is waiting as a barely suppressed issue. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, as we have seen, and beyond, Shakespeare uses the idea of the animal to figure sexual irregularity. In Cymbeline, Imogen thinks of Iachimo’s lustful machinations as evidence of a “beastly mind” (I, vii, l.153; 41). In Hamlet the Ghost refers to Claudius as “that incestuous, that adulterate beast” (I, v, l.142; 212).25 Othello, though, is the play in which animals are most fearfully and powerfully invoked. This is the play that turns most insistently upon the importance and the problems of species boundaries, of tensions within the “great chain of being.” Shakespeare takes us in Othello to the city-state of Venice, a place legendary for its wealth and refinement. Venice prides itself on being a civil society, but it is menaced by the Turks, who have sent a fleet to invade the Venetian outpost of Cyprus. The Turkish empire is not described in any detail, but it has a shadowy existence as a non-Christian, contemptible place – a place of “dogs,” in Othello’s words (V, ii, l.354; 396). We are once again, then, touching on ideas of speciesism, and the confusion of boundaries between human and animal. Within this chain, Othello himself is in an ambiguous position. He is a “Moor” warrior, therefore not white and not a Venetian. We might see him as a mercenary, or perhaps more fairly as an adoptive Venetian. He has also converted to Christianity. His prowess in battle has been of great use to the Venetian state, and now he stands, trustworthy general, between the rampaging Turks and the Christian order of Venice. But how securely has he established his position with regard to Turkish “dogs” and Christian Venetians?

38 Animals Othello poses the question as to how much of a Venetian he has become when he secretly marries Desdemona, the young white daughter of Brabantio, a Venetian senator. Will Othello be embraced as a worthy addition to the Venetian élite, or has he presumed too much? As general of the Venetian forces, he is a leader, and yet he is also perhaps no more than a high-ranking servant. We never learn Othello’s precise degree of blackness, nor precisely his age or Desdemona’s.26 There is the suggestion that the marriage itself is promiscuous in the sense of a monstrous crossing of the rules of degree and kind, an act of sexual anarchy. In the early modern period, blackness was routinely equated with uncontrolled sexuality (see for instance Callaghan, Newman, and Neill). The villain, Iago, plays on ideas of passionate miscegenation, and he uses animal imagery to do so. He speaks of Othello’s age and blackness coming into bestial contact with Desdemona’s tender whiteness, telling Brabantio, “An old black ram is tupping your white ewe” (I.i, ll.88–9; 203).27 Equally, with a nod towards Plato’s idea of the desire and pursuit of the whole, he speaks of Othello and Desdemona “making the beast with two backs” (1.i, l.116; 204). In his grotesquely humorous commentary, Iago likens Desdemona’s having intercourse with Othello to her giving herself to a “barbary horse.” In an echo of the book of Jeremiah, Iago tells Brabantio that if he is not careful, he will have his grandsons “neigh” to him.28 If the audience sees the coming together of the old black general and the young white maid as monstrous, how can they also see Desdemona, who chose Othello, as a heroine deserving of pity? Thinking back to the historical model proposed by Stone and Rose, should such questions even be asked in an age that is emphasising personal choice in marriage? Does this “animal” coming together of “old black ram” and “white ewe” set out the limits of choice?29 Brabantio claims that Othello must have tricked Desdemona into marriage, but it is telling that the Duke and the other senators seem not to have any particular horror over the match. They can well believe that, regardless of the difference in age and race, the dealing between Othello and Desdemona has been that of “soul to soul” (222). Echoing the idea of marriage as companionate and loving rather than dynastic, they think that if the marriage was the wish of both parties, then there is nothing wrong with it. The secrecy surrounding the marriage is not significant to them, and they make it clear to Brabantio that he must prove his claims of trickery. If he is not able to do so, then Othello and Desdemona should be allowed to live out their choice. Desdemona declares in front of her father and the assembled nobles that she acted freely, and so the matter is resolved. How then does the promiscuity-as-animality feature? How does it become the spectre of this marriage? The tragedy for Othello and Desdemona is to do with the plausibility of promiscuity in a play that turns on stories. The key story here is the lie that Iago tells to Othello – that Desdemona is in love with and having sex with his lieutenant, Cassio, and that Venetian women are more generally disposed to promiscuity. Iago is

Animals  39 able to introduce into Othello’s vision of his lovely, virtuous wife images of notoriously libidinous animals – of “goats and monkeys,” of toads that do not copulate singly but form heaps of aroused bodies. Why, we might ask, are the two central characters so vulnerable to stories, and above all to this one that turns a faithful wife into a goat, a monkey, a toad? To understand their vulnerability to the story of promiscuity, we need to begin with the stories that Othello and Desdemona tell of themselves. When accused in front of the Duke and the senators, Othello places himself very firmly on their side of the species boundary. In his account of his relationship with Desdemona, he acknowledges that he is a rough soldier – “Rude am I in my speech,/ And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace” – and he adopts a humble position before these rulers of Venice (220). But there is a curious double speak here. Othello tells all that he is “rude,” but he makes an extreme verbal display. He acknowledges the superiority of his “masters,” but he tries to mimic the speech of the ruling class. He performs obedience so determinedly, with such overwrought and flattering oratorical flourishes, that it lures the nobles into granting him equality. Of course he is one of them and not a “dog,” and of course he may marry one of their daughters. He also explains that Desdemona fell in love with him because he told her of his life, of his time spent as a slave, his many battles and sufferings. This involved telling her of a series of encounters with beings who, though human, throw up most horribly the question of species boundaries. Othello told Desdemona of his battles with “Cannibals,” “Anthrophagi” (also man-eaters), and “men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders” (I.iii, ll.143– 5; 224). By invoking these horrendous variants of the human, Othello places himself clearly with Desdemona herself as a civilised being. He too is capable of horror at the confusion of boundaries, at the thought of savage and animalistic men. Indeed, he has killed these monsters. Desdemona then has fallen in love with Othello as a series of stories, all fearsome and moving, about boundaries. Othello characterizes her love in terms of moral beauty. Her feelings have been sparked by her admiration for his acts and her “pity” for his rough experiences. But there is a suggestion of voyeurism, of masochistic joy, in Desdemona’s falling in love, as she listens to another “distressful stroke,” and weeps, and swears that it is “strange” (I.iii, ll.157–60; 224–5). Terry Eagleton argues that Othello’s “love” is “sheerest narcissism,” in that he wins Desdemona “by military boasting.” Moreover, Othello is “agreeably flattered by her admiration for his skill as a professional butcher” (73). We might add that their love is aroused by and turns upon the idea of the “great chain of being.” To place themselves together, in the same place in the chain, and to imagine others violently forced into lowlier positions – this makes them feel like a couple.30 In her account of their relationship, Desdemona strikes a moral posture of duty and honesty, of “downright” openness in siding with the

40 Animals man she loves regardless of the consequences. She tells the Venetian Senators that she will have her choice “trumpeted,” not hidden away. But is she really entitled to such brave postures?31 She leaves out of her account the fact that she deceived her father and, far from “trumpeting” her love, married in secret. Her story seems to make her a heroine of the Lawrence Stone version of history – of the new stress on personal choice and on marriage as a glorious destiny. But of course English Protestant society no more approved of secret marriages entered into without parental consent than does Brabantio. The idea was that parents would try to respect their children’s wishes and that children would be attentive to the wisdom of parents. It was not supposed to be a battle, attended with trumpets, but a mutually respectful and affectionate negotiation. The crucial point is that both Othello and Desdemona live according to stories, to versions of themselves that they have articulated to and for each other. They have formed a perfect narcissistic unit, as each thrills the other with speech and responsiveness. Eagleton discusses Othello’s verbal mastery as a danger, as it indicates his imaginary relation to reality.32 If Othello and Desdemona cannot see how they actually relate to circumstance – if they live solely through their stories of themselves – then they will be vulnerable to the other stories that might be told to them. But then their relation to the life and the people around them can only ever be an assessment of probabilities. This problem of truth and apparent truthfulness is Brabantio’s final jab at the couple. He tells Othello: “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:/ She has deceived her father, and may thee” (I.iii, ll.290–1; 233).33 What is the story that will cause the story of love to unravel? It is the tale of promiscuity, as told by Othello’s ensign, Iago. Iago will use images of animal promiscuity to question a woman’s place in the “great chain.” Does Desdemona really belong with Othello and other dominant men? Or does she appear to belong there, when in fact she has a secret animal self which ought to place her much lower? Iago will of course tell this second story. He has motive. He believes he has suffered professional wrongs, and he suspects that his vibrant wife Emilia has slept with both Othello and Cassio. He is excited to revenge. In seeking his revenge, his prime story is about love. But in his version it is not the noble pity of which Othello and Desdemona speak, but a question of brutish flesh, of “carnal stings” and “unbitted lusts” (I.iii, l.26; 236). A bit is the metal bar forced into a horse’s mouth to bring it under control. With his equestrian metaphor, Iago suggests that lust is the beast within that Desdemona has not yet learned to recognise and manage. But whether she herself realises it or not, her nature, according to Iago, will make itself felt. He looks at Desdemona’s love for an aging man and foresees a natural, inevitable process: It is merely a lust of the blood… It was a violent commencement in her, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration… She must

Animals  41 change for youth: when she is sated with his body she will find the errors of her choice. She must have change, she must. (I.iii, ll.329, 338, 343–4; 237) It is not necessarily the case that Iago believes this, but it is the alternative story of desire that, for purposes of his own, he wishes to put back into circulation. He has a tremendous advantage in spreading his story. This is what has been called the “myth of Venice.” The city may have been known for its wealth, commercial expertise, and cultural refinement, but it was also known for a prolific sexual culture. Iago, when trying to arouse Othello’s suspicions about Desdemona’s fidelity, refers to what Venetian women are renowned for: “In Venice they do let God see the pranks/ They dare not show their husbands” (III.iii, ll. 205–6; 294). There had been numerous popular travellers’ accounts of Venice, stories of the numbers of “Cortezans,” and the openness with which they practiced their trade. As one contemporary put it, Venice “is taxd all the World over for the latitude of liberty She gives to carnall pleasure, and the large conscience She hath under the navill” (McPherson 43). Seeking to persuade Othello that his wife has been unfaithful, Iago draws on two traditions: the ancient misogynistic one that women have tremendous and undisciplined sexual appetites, and the more recent one that Venice in particular is a licentious and duplicitous place.34 More particularly, when Othello demands visible proof of Desdemona’s activity, Iago explains how difficult that would be, but at the same time he conjures up images of bestial lust: It is impossible you should see this, Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, As salt as wolves in pride. (III.iii, ll.405–6; 307) The logic of Iago’s statement is that they are not “as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys,” but his intention is to implant in Othello’s mind associations between Desdemona, Cassio, and animal sex. His plan is a success. Later, when Othello rants in torment over Desdemona’s supposed infidelity, he shouts out, “Goats and monkeys!” (IV.i, l.255; 340) Shortly after that, he refers to toads. To lie with Desdemona knowing her to be false would be, he thinks, like keeping a “cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in!” (IV.ii, ll.61–2; 345–6). The thought of his wife’s infidelity opens up the idea of endless concupiscence, of an aquatic orgy, of the sexual stews for which Venice was renowned. Othello has fallen for Iago’s alternative story – that a seemingly pure woman is, like all the others, going to descend into promiscuous, animal copulations. One might wonder, along with many generations of playgoers, why Othello is so willing to believe Iago. Perhaps his credulity, as noted earlier, is sponsored by the flaws in Desdemona’s own story – her failure

42 Animals to acknowledge her deception of her father. But we might also relate this back to Othello’s insecurities about the “chain of being.” Perhaps those founding narratives, in which he and Desdemona felt themselves so securely unified above “Cannibals” and other man-beasts, are not to be relied upon? Perhaps women – even white aristocratic women – are closer to the animal? Iago, of course, works these thoughts into Othello’s mind. It helps that there is also the sexual culture for which Venice is renowned, and on which Iago can draw in opening up Othello’s anxiety. There is further opportunity for Iago in Desdemona’s supposed lover, Cassio. He, we know, is immensely handsome and well-bred. He also parades his courtliness in the way that Othello paraded his obedience. Cassio greets Iago’s wife, in front of Iago, with an intimacy that he knows will disturb Iago. He kisses Emilia. To excuse his action, but also perhaps to compound the offence, he tells Iago: “Let it not gall your patience, good Iago,/ That I extend my manners. ‘Tis my breeding/ That gives me this bold show of courtesy” (II.i, ll.97–9; 247). Iago laughs it off, but one can see why he might be filled with hatred. Cassio has leapfrogged him to become the general’s lieutenant, seemingly because Cassio is upper-class and has upper-class behaviour or “breeding.” Cassio then acts by his own admission “boldly” and goes beyond the polite (he “extends” his “manners”), and explains that, given his social superiority, his boldness should be seen as a form of “courtesy.” Cassio has the right to play a little with the social boundaries that Iago must observe. Emilia too is subject to boundaries. As a servant and as a lower-class woman, she must allow Cassio to kiss her, whether she wishes him to or not. If Cassio confirms the idea of courtliness as an eroticised behaviour, he also confirms the sense of a frenzied sexual reality underneath this courtly performance. We learn early in the play that Cassio is married, and indeed that he has made a very fine marriage. He is, in Iago’s words, “almost damned in a fair wife” (I.i, l.20; 197). Scholars have struggled with the idea that Cassio is married. Furness, after many thousands of words, concludes that the text must be corrupt at this point (10). The editors of the third Norton edition state that Cassio “is unmarried” (Greenblatt et al. 2084), and Sanders writes that “Cassio is clearly not married” (66). Neill withholds judgement (197). Their discomfort stems from the fact that Cassio has an “animal” existence as well. He has a concubine, the pleasant, affectionate Bianca. Bianca has fallen in love with Cassio and dotes on him. He, though, sees her as little more than a convenience, and he likens her to an animal. In conversation with Iago, he refers to her as a “customer” or prostitute, not the more dignified “courtesan.”35 When she dares to approach him in public, he refers to her as a polecat (meaning lecherous), and a “perfumed” or stinking one. “What do you mean,” he asks her, “by this haunting of me?” (334) Cassio is afraid that he will be seen with Bianca by Othello and that Othello will identify

Animals  43 him as effeminate, which is to say too interested in women to be a disciplined and effective officer. Cassio is evidence of a complex culture, where he may perform love publicly with his colleagues’ wives but, for social and professional reasons, abruptly throw off in public the woman with whom he has a sexual relationship. But the idea that he should have a liaison with Bianca in spite of the fact that he is “almost damned in fair wife,” may have surprised twentieth- century critics, but it surprises no one in the world of the play. Beneath the stateliness of Venice, of Othello, Desdemona, and the senators, there are signs of an immense and ruthless sexual hustle, and it is this that gives plausibility to Iago’s lies. If Othello did not attach so much importance to stories, he still would not believe Iago. He would ask, like the practical Emilia, “What place? What time? What form? What likelihood?” (351) In his narcissism he tells and looks for stories, and Iago knows how to make them from the plentiful materials at hand. But in Othello we can see another problem. He has images of intense and random copulation in his head – of goats, monkeys, wolves, and toads – and he calls them up in horrified fascination. His pain at the thought of Desdemona’s sexual betrayal leads him towards total chaos. It leads him to the idea that with a woman, however civilised and pure she may seem, the “great chain” does not exist. That is to say, the woman belongs, simultaneously, to all levels in the chain. No less than the lovers in the romantic comedies, Othello holds to the idea that sex is the acting out of a deep, individual commitment, to be expressed and contained in marriage. Anything else, especially for the woman, belongs to an earlier, less-than-human stage of existence. A heroine in Shakespeare’s world is a heroine because she has an exclusive devotion to one man. She must be pure because it guarantees the man’s worth and status – his very humanity. With Desdemona at his side as a loyal wife, there is no question that Othello is more Christian Venetian than Turkish “dog.” If she fails to love him alone, if she is promiscuous, then Othello is plunged once more into a trauma where there are no fixed boundaries, no great chain in which he has a privileged place. The thought of her betrayal causes him to feel too close once more to the cannibals, the anthropophagi, and the animals. That Othello needs Desdemona to preserve him from confusion over category boundaries is affirmed at the end. When Othello comes to realise his grievous mistakes, and kills himself, he once again differentiates himself from animals and animalistic people, while implicitly punishing himself for being one. He describes a moment in the past when he heard a Turk – in Othello’s words a “circumscisèd dog” – criticise Venice. Othello took the Turkish “dog” by the throat and “smote him – thus” (5.2.353–4; 396). As he says the words, Othello stabs himself. ***

44 Animals Even when literature moves beyond an emphasis on dynastic or religious concerns, and elaborates a more personal, intimate model of relationship, promiscuity is still prone to re-emerge as an ill-suppressed animality. But this is as likely to indicate male paranoia, and the struggles between men, than to indicate a reliable truth about women. Women in Othello are likened to the most notoriously lecherous of animals – polecats, goats, toads, wolves, and monkeys – because once again, and even in the age of the revaluation of marriage, female promiscuity is not only the personal betrayal of a man, but the betrayal of the structures of power. The woman’s promiscuity – and not the man’s – throws into question not only the boundaries by which a man constructs his power in relation to other men, but how men construct their power in relation to the world. The woman’s supposed promiscuity seems to endanger that most basic and essential of hierarchies, that between man and nature. The concern here has not been to resolve whether or not humans behave like animals when they are promiscuous, nor to resolve the extent to which humans are or are not animals. The emphasis is not on the ontological question of the limits and the special properties of the human. Rather it has been on the issues and ideas that are being debated, assumed, or suppressed when promiscuity is seen as a descent into the animal. A number of points have emerged with regard to gender and power. There is the fact that promiscuity is defined differently according to whether a character is a man or a woman. As we have seen, men and women are often defined as obsessively lustful, or sexually out of control, not so much for the number of their partners as for the perceived damage that their choices may have. Helen of Troy has very few lovers, but she likens herself to a bitch in heat because her sexuality undermines patriarchal dynastic structures. A woman such as Helen is pivotal. Other women – the Trojan captives – are not significant to Greek lines of succession and are disposable. Agamemnon and Achilles have many concubines, but this is an accepted assertion of mastery. More generally we have seen that sex and definitions and thresholds around sex are never isolated from their social contexts. This is even the case when, with the interpersonal intimacy of early modern marriage, a relationship is understood – in the words of the Duke in Othello – as one of “soul to soul” (222). The possibility of Desdemona’s intimate betrayal of her husband undermines the hierarchy of a general and his subordinates; it also undermines the relation of a Christian state to its infidel others. There are two aspects that I want to take forward from here. One is that figure of the excessive or sexually voracious woman – the woman that we glimpse in Iago’s accusations and in Othello’s horrified ramblings. This figure is the subject of the next chapter. But alongside this figure, there is a question more generally to do with ideas of pleasure, choice, and compulsion. We have seen that associating promiscuity with the animal is to bind pleasure and sexual expression to an idea of compulsion. When we

Animals  45 live monogamously, we are expressing choice, but when we act otherwise we are following a primitive drive, an animalistic behaviour. Monogamy, with its associations of reason, deep emotional experience, self-discipline, and obedience, is seen to be human. Promiscuity is seen as a deviation into the animal. But might not a person be “reasonably promiscuous”? Might he or she even be “compulsively monogamous”? Other writers, as we will see in the next chapter, would ask these questions.

Notes



46 Animals cowardly, and self-serving. As followers of Dionysus, they bring elements of disorder and low cunning, but they are not the sex-hungry wretches of the drinking cups. On the connections between satyrs in the drama and on the vases, see Lissarrague, “Why Satyrs Are Good to Represent.”















Animals  47 25 The ghost only speaks thus in the 1623 version. See Thompson and Taylor (212). 26 For discussion of Othello’s identity, and the uncertainties around the term “Moor,” see Neill 1998. 27 For the transhuman aspect of this line, see Perrello. For a fascinating gloss of slippages between tupping, topping, and tapping, see Masten. 28 Neill notes the Biblical precedent (204). 29 For a reading that, in its concern with animalisation, anticipates my own, but that focuses much more on shame in the relation between Othello and Iago, see Swarbrick. Equally, Boehrer does not focus on promiscuity, but he notes that “Iago repeatedly images the couple’s miscegenous embrace in terms of bestial intercourse” (Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals 20). 30 For comment on links between Desdemona’s “greedy ear” and early modern fears of women’s sexual voracity, see Perrello 66–7. 31 The complex mix of values embodied in Desdemona is noted by Snow (407–8) and by Rose (137). 32 Eagleton writes that Othello’s “rotund, mouth-filling rhetoric signifies a delusory completeness of being” (74). 33 As Altman states in his lengthy and intensive analysis, Othello is “a tragedy of self-representation and of the self’s representation of others.” Each of the main characters “can understand himself, herself, and other selves only probably” (10). 34 For a study that reads the “monstrous” of femininity alongside the “monstrous” of blackness, see Newman. 35 Bianca’s status is uncertain. Iago defines her as a simple sex-worker who “by selling her desires/Buys herself bread and clothes,” though Iago also admits that she “dotes on Cassio” (4.1.94–6). Bianca herself maintains, “I am no strumpet, but of life as honest as you that thus abuse me” (5.1.124–5). For a discussion of the gradations between sex-workers, and discussion of Bianca in particular, see Salkeld 170–71.

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48 Animals Augustine. Confessions and Enchiridion, edited and translated by Albert C. Outler. London: SCM, 1955. Barkan, Leonard. The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Blondell, Ruby. “‘Bitch that I Am’: Self-Blame and Self-Assertion in the Iliad.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, vol. 140, 2010, pp. 1–32. Boehrer, Bruce. Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. ———. Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Callaghan, Dymphna. Shakespeare without Women: representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage. London: Routledge, 2000. Campbell, Gordon Lindsay, ed. The Oxford Handbook on Animals in Classical Thought and Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Cantarella, Eve. Bisexuality in the Ancient World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Conklin Akbari, Suzanne. “Ovid and Ovidianism.” The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, edited by Rita Copeland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 187–208. Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Davidson, James. The Greeks and Greek Love. London: Weidenfeld, 2007. Desmond, Marilynn. Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Eagleton, Terry. “Nothing.” 1986; Reprinted in A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare’s Othello, edited by Andrew Hadfield. London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 70–74. Forbes Irving, P. M. C. Metamorphosis in Greek Myths. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Furness, Horace Howard, ed. Othello. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1886. Gaca Kathy L. The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Generosa, Sister M. “Apuleius and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Analogue or Source, Which?” Studies in Philology, vol. 42, no. 2, April 1945, pp. 198–204. Goldberg, Jonathan. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Greenblatt, Stephen, et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989. Harrison, S. J. Framing the Ass: Literary Texture in Apuleius’ Metamorphosis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hesiod. Works and Days 60–68. LCL: 57. Homer. The Iliad, translated E. V. Rieu and Peter Jones. London: Penguin, 2003.

Animals  49 Ingram, Martin. Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Jaeger, C. Stephen. Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Jordan, Mark D. The Ethics of Sex. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Kay, Sarah. Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Lane Fox, Robin. Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World. London: Penguin, 2006. Lissarrague, François. “The Sexual Life of Satyrs.” Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 53–82. ———. “Why Satyrs Are Good to Represent.” Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama and its Contexts, edited by John J. Winkler and Froma Zeitlin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 228–36. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being; A Study in the History of an Idea. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Mackinnon, Catherine. “Of Mice and Men: A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights.” Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, edited by Cass R. Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 263–76. Masten, Jeffrey. “Glossing and T*pping: Editing Sexuality, Race, and Gender in Othello.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, edited by Valerie Traub. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 570–86. McPherson, David. Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. Miller, Fergus. “The World of the Golden Ass.” Oxford Readings in the Roman Novel, edited by S. J. Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 247–68. Moore, John C. “‘Courtly Love’: A Problem of Terminology.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 40, no. 4, October–December 1979, pp. 621–32. Morrison, J. V. “Kerostasia, The Dictates of Fate, and the Will of Zeus in the Iliad.” Arethusa, vol. 30, no. 2, Spring 1997, pp. 276–96. Neill, Michael. “‘Mulattos,’ ‘Blacks,’ ‘Indian Moors’: Othello and Constructions of Human Difference.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 4, Winter 1998, pp. 361–74. Newman, Karen. “‘And Wash the Ethiop White’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello.” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor. New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 143–62. Perrello, Tony. “Old Black Rams and Mortal Engines: Transhumanist Discourse in Othello.” Renaissance Papers, edited by Jim Pearce and Ward J. Risvold. 2017, pp. 65–72. Plato. The Republic. London: Penguin, 1974. Poliquin, Rachel. The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. Rose, Mary Beth. The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

50 Animals Salisbury, Joyce E. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 1994. Salkeld, Duncan. Shakespeare among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500–1650. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Sanders, Norman, ed. Othello. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Schildgren, Brenda Deen. “Animals, Poetry, Philosophy, and Dante’s Commedia.” Modern Philology, vol. 108, no. 1, August 2010, pp. 20–44. Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline, edited by J. M. Nosworthy. London: Arden, 2009. ———. Hamlet: The texts of 1603 and 1623, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden, 2006. ———. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Peter Holland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. ———. Othello, the Moor of Venice, edited by Michael Neill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Shannon, Laurie. “Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 2, Summer 2009, pp. 168–96. Singer, Charles. Greek Biology and Greek Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922. Skinner, Marilyn B. Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Snow, Edward A. “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello.” English Literary Renaissance, vol. 10, 1980, pp. 384–412. Steel, Karl. How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977. Swarbrick, Steven. “Shakespeare’s Blush, or ‘the Animal’ in Othello.” Exemplaria, vol. 28, no. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 70–85. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. London: Allen Lane, 1983. Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Uden, James. “The ‘Contest of Homer and Hesiod’ and the Ambitions of Hadrian.” Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 130, 2010, pp. 121–35. Williams, Craig. Roman Homosexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Winkler, John J. Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

2

The Excessive Woman

One of the grimmest descriptions of the excessive woman is also one of the earliest. The Whore of Babylon, in the Bible, is dressed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones. She is drunk on the blood of saints and martyrs, on “abominations,” and on the “filthiness of her fornications.” The Whore has a freakish, supernatural aspect – she sits upon a “beast,” and she and the beast sit “upon waters” (Revelation 17:1–18). We are invited to read the scene as a series of symbols. The “waters” are spelled out for us as “peoples, nations, tongues” (17:15). We might then extend our symbolic reading – as most commentators do – to see the Whore of Babylon as the pagan Roman Empire, which has enslaved and corrupted kings and nations, and attempted to destroy Christianity.1 She represents “fornication,” a word deriving from fornix, which is Latin for vaults or arches. Prostitutes in Rome would wait for customers under arches, and so fornix became a euphemism for brothels. Rome in this case, then, is an eager and domineering sex-worker, and to be on the side of Rome, to accept its rule, is to be slavishly devoted to unsanctified, paid-for sex. The woman who will have sex with any and all, for pleasure and gain, is put before us as the embodiment of wrong practices, wrong beliefs, and cruelty. There is another, similar case in the Bible. In the Book of Kings, Jezebel tries to convert Israel to the worship of a false god in the figure of Baal. In popular culture, Jezebel has become a byword for the brazen, overly sexual woman. In the Bible, though, Jezebel does not prostitute herself, nor does she commit adultery. But she is bold, in attempting to influence public affairs in the worship of a false god. She is bold again when Jehu, the new king of Israel, comes to kill her. She paints her face, dresses her hair, and stands at the window to watch his arrival. Jehu is not impressed by this regal gesture. He has her thrown from the window and trampled under horses’ hooves. Her dead body is eaten by dogs (Kings1, 16:31, Kings2, 9:30–33). Jezebel, guilty of financial and religious scheming, has since become associated with voracious sexuality. As we will see, this is a frequent pattern. A woman’s involvement in the public sphere often leads to suppositions about her sexual nature. Her willingness to transgress one boundary – to enter

52  The Excessive Woman public, political life – leads to the assumption that she will transgress others. Often, indeed, there is an assumption that a woman’s desire to act in public matters has its source in an extreme sexual appetite. The connection between a woman’s public involvement and sexual insatiability was present when the Romans came to write of imperial decline. Juvenal, writing in the late first and second centuries, deplored the decadence of his day. Romans, he argued, had become rich and luxurious. No longer fighting to extend the empire, they have turned to the basest forms of self-indulgence. The men, many of them, had become “grim-looking perverts” (LCL 91:149), while the women copulated without limit, taking on gladiators, servants, and donkeys. Juvenal uses the emperor’s wife, Messalina, to exemplify the depravity of Rome. She, the “whore empress,” goes to work in a brothel for the pleasure of it. Sunk in the reek of old blankets, she is always the last to close her cubicle to customers for the night. At that point, her cheeks “dirty from the smoke of the lamps,” she is “inflamed and stiff,” and “exhausted,” but “not yet satisfied” (LCL 91:245). There is no credible evidence that Messalina ever worked in a brothel. She was married in her teens to Claudius, who was at least 30 years older than her. She was certainly active in purging her enemies, and she had at least one extra-marital affair. But the legend of the brothel seems improbable. 2 Messalina, like Jezebel before her, seems to have fallen victim to the tendency to see women who involved themselves in public affairs as acting out of sexual depravity. Romans often assumed a woman was political because she was promiscuous. As Anise K. Strong has pointed out, Romans struggled to imagine that a woman might have an interest in the public sphere, except as an extension of her sexual ambitions (97, 100).3 Like the Whore of Babylon, Messalina embodies in her unbridled sexuality all that has gone wrong around her. The sense is that woman is the measure of society. She is the proof of virtue, or the sign of decay. Further, it is in her nature, it would seem, to be both more virtuous and more depraved. Women represent the possibility of renunciation, of modest, controlled behaviour; but they are also more likely to go astray. There are, though, differences in these ancient imaginings of the excessive woman. The Whore of Babylon is rendered explicitly as a symbol, and she is represented to us in grandly pictorial terms. Messalina too is offered as a representation of more than herself, but in contrast to the Whore of Babylon, she is also offered as a real individual, and one with feelings. She is portrayed – however negatively – in intimate detail, with her cubicle in the “reeking” brothel, her capacity for exhaustion, her wish for satisfaction, and her lack of it. The personalisation, the horrified fascination with specifics, is even more pronounced in other Roman poets to write about the excessive woman. Before Juvenal, Catullus (c84–54 BC) wrote at length about his tortuous love affair with Lesbia. He laments Lesbia’s infidelity, but he

The Excessive Woman  53 also cannot resist imagining it. He pictures the “sleazy bar” where he thinks Lesbia may be spending her time, he thinks of her hugging her hundreds of fornicators, and he imagines his revenge – he will “facefuck” all the men in the bar (LCL 6:45).4 There seems a masochistic element here, as Catullus deplores Lesbia’s promiscuity, but is excited by it. Martial (40–103/4 AD) gives us images of the excessive woman that are not complicated by sentiment. He is, like Juvenal and Catullus, making a display of condemning decadence, but there is a much stronger sense of relishing the woman, and being fascinated by her transactions. He writes of Caelia, who makes love to men of all races, but not to Romans. The poet is not obviously condemnatory; rather he is mystified by this quirk in her tastes. He evokes the “beds” and “loins” of the many men, but he expresses no horror (LCL 95:97). He offers something similar in an epigram addressed to Cinna, about Cinna’s wife, Marulla. She, we are told, has had seven children but none by Cinna. One can tell the fathers by the appearance of the children: the boy with curly hair was fathered by the cook, another looks very like the wrestling coach, another has the pale complexion of Cinna’s favourite catamite. Indeed, the poet claims, Cinna would have even more children, were it not for the fact that two of Marulla’s lovers were eunuchs. Here again there is visual detail – Martial mentions the “truckle-beds” and “mats” where Marulla’s encounters took place (LCL 95:29), and he pictures for us the flattened nose of the wrestler. The poem seems calculated to excite contempt, but not necessarily, in this case, for the excessive woman herself. Cinna is the weak husband who must bear the humiliation. We may be appalled – perhaps Martial assumes we will be – by Marulla’s “escapades” (LCL 95:29), but he leaves us free to admire the way Marulla has given and taken pleasure without concern for social class. We may also admire her for daring to use her body and bear her children as she wished, and this in an age in which abortion was common. The marriage of Cinna and Marulla is offered as another instance of monstrous decadence, but it is more domestic than symbolic, and it offers us a counter-reading which is about liberality and self-determination. There is range, then, in ancient writing, from the explicit symbolism of the Whore of Babylon, pictured drinking human blood, to the realist evocations of Messalina, Caelia, and Marulla. There is also a medical tradition, stretching back at least as far as the Greek physician Galen, who wrote of the “uterine fury” that can overtake a woman if she is not kept in balance by sexual intercourse. 5 The ancient figures and phrases establish a frame of reference which is taken up repeatedly. Perhaps the most famous example in English literature is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales (1387–). The Wife’s face is bold and “red of hewe” (20). She makes sure to out-dress all the other women in her parish with lace head-dresses and scarlet stockings. The Wife has been married five times, and while she is keen on pilgrimages, this seems to indicate not so

54  The Excessive Woman much a spiritual disposition as a fierce appetite for new experiences. She wears sharp spurs, and when she comes to talk of her life with her fellow pilgrims, she makes it clear that she is very highly sexed. God ordered us to “wexe and multiplye” (212), she tells the pilgrims, and she wishes she had been “refresshed” (212) half so often as Solomon with his 700 wives. Her selection of her husbands depended on their “nether purs” or testicles, and on their money. She laughs out loud to remember how she made each of the five work in the marriage-bed, and she is happy to tell her fellows that she is looking for her sixth. Her fifth husband was a clerk from Oxford, and he serves as a force for male vengeance. When burying her fourth husband, she sees Jankyn walking behind the coffin and is struck by the beauty of his legs and feet. But once married, Jankyn beats the Wife and tells her “old Roman geestes” (233) and episodes from the Bible which indicate a man’s rights and a woman’s weakness. In particular, Jankyn reads from a book of “wikked wiyves,” an anthology of stories from the Bible and from mainstays of misogyny among the early church fathers, such as Saint Jerome. The book contains selections from Ovid’s Ars amatoria, and the story of Pasiphaë and her “horrible lust” (236).6 Chaucer is evidence of the way in which ideas of the excessive woman, derived from the Romans and the Bible, are passed across generations. But we might look well beyond Chaucer and the fourteenth century. When the “father of criminology,” Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), was formulating his ideas of the “delinquent woman,” he cited Agrippina, Fulvia, and Messalina, amongst others, who “mingled immense cruelty with lust” (148–9). Lombroso makes a particular case of Messalina. He gives us a full-page portrait of her, and, applying his own scientific archetypes, writes that she “offers many of the features of the criminal and born prostitute – having a low forehead, very thick, wavy hair, and a heavy jaw” (98). For Lombroso the female criminal is usually “remarkably erotic” (223) or “exceptionally erotic” (187), and the “remarkably erotic woman” is, we may confidently suppose, a criminal. The “normal woman” presents “sexual apathy,” though she too is “deficient in the moral sense” and “possessed of slight criminal tendencies” (263). We might trace the excessive woman across time in greater detail, as other scholars have done.7 I want, though, to focus on some modern representations of women who are interesting because they are not portrayed as monsters or grotesques, and they are not driven by sexual need. I want to pick out women who are labelled as excessive but also seem vague, enigmatic, and impressible – who never become the towering “scarlet woman” or “whore empress.” Two have proved particularly enduring. Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut was a bestseller when it was first published in 1731, but was soon banned. The novel re-emerged, though, and was reprinted every year from 1830 through the rest of the nineteenth century.8 The story has been the basis for a number of later works in ballet, opera, film, and graphic novel.9 Alexandre Dumas fils’

The Excessive Woman  55 La Dame aux camélias was a great bestseller on publication in 1848, and has given us an even more legendary and more frequently recycled heroine in Marguerite Gautier.10 My third and final figure, another French woman but of much more recent date and notoriety, is Catherine Millet, whose The Sexual Life of Catherine M. was first published in 2001. There are strong, deliberate echoes of the earlier texts in the later texts, but as with the chapter on animals, the divergences are at least as telling as the similarities. Above all, these three texts use the figure of the excessive woman to reflect on her context. It is how she is perceived that counts, as much as what she herself might be. Indeed, she is endlessly studied but not necessarily revealed or explained, and more than anything, she is not so much a problem in herself, as in what she reveals in the social world around her. Most interesting of all, the texts discussed here throw into question the assumption that a woman can be defined by her sexual choices. *** Manon Lescaut has its beginning when two teenagers meet by chance. They fall instantly in love and run away together. Soon they are penniless, except that she, mysteriously, starts to come up with cash. He discovers that she has taken on other lovers, and so begins his heart-rending life of following her, putting up with her many affairs with richer men. It will be a dramatic life of abductions, rejections, reconciliations, and fear. Finally she is deported to the wastes of America as penalty for prostitution, and he follows her. They find again their love and fidelity, but their new-found happiness is short-lived. She dies, and he returns to France. The Abbé Prévost’s novel is remarkable for many reasons, but it is especially of value here because Manon is promiscuous, but is neither coarse nor evil. Not transcendent “Whore,” not besmirched drudge, not sexually voracious, still less does she prove to have a cynical exterior that hides a “heart of gold.” Manon is always sweetly appealing, always regretful and kindly, even as she betrays her devoted lover. The story was an instant hit with the French public, but as noted above, within days it had been banned.11 It was not obscene by the standards of the day – Prévost never gives the sexual details of Manon’s many encounters. Nor did Prévost commit the sin of allowing Manon to escape punishment for her trespasses. She is sorry, she is exiled, and she dies. If we pursue the scandal of Manon Lescaut in the eyes of the authorities, it takes us into the curious ironies of what might seem a simple tale. Was it enough of an offence that Prévost had presented France with a likeable sex-worker? Manon retains a seemingly virtuous gentleness and beauty through nearly all her adventures. Should not evil be made ugly? Prévost’s offence was probably more specific, and to do with class. Manon’s lover, the Chevalier des Grieux, is of noble birth, and his family plans for him to enter the religious Order of the Knights of Malta.

56  The Excessive Woman Manon too looks like “a person of the first rank,” but she is not an aristocrat. Her family has servants, and she is to be sent to a convent, so while she is “not a person of quality,” she is “of quite good birth” (148). One of the key regulations concerning prostitution was that middleand upper-class women could not prostitute themselves. There was meant to be a clear division between virtuous and privileged women and lower-class women. A middle- or an upper-class woman could not overturn the hierarchy by making herself available to a lower-class man who happened to have a bit of money. Women of good birth had to be virtuous, even – as Prévost was to learn – in fiction. The Abbé resolved the problem in a revised edition of 1753. In that later version, Manon is “of humble birth.” The censors, and readers, had no difficulty accepting that a woman from a poor background might be unashamed and calculating in her sex life. The solution creates another problem, though. Why should the fine, elegant des Grieux fall in love with a woman so far below him? People of humble birth were supposedly easy to recognise. They looked inferior; they carried themselves less well, and were usually less clean. The Chevalier des Grieux might be expected to have a casual, slumming liaison with a woman like Manon, but how could he fall in love with her? The further we pursue Manon Lescaut, the more we find that the story touches on sore points in the French social order of the time. As the Journal de la Cour et de Paris put it, it showed people “playing roles not suitable for them.”12 Des Grieux is from a noble family, but he does not have much money. Manon takes up with newly wealthy men, because they are more likely to make her lavish gifts. Manon, then, offends in opting for money over rank. She exposes one of the awkward social shifts of the age, as the ruling nobility was increasingly being challenged by the new entrepreneurs. Nobles might have their wealth tied up in land – land which might already be mortgaged to the new rich – whereas the rising classes had less prestigious, but more mobile forms of income. The biggest challenge, though, is not to do with class, but to do with the nature of women. There is a paradox and a problem at the heart of the story. It is that this promiscuous woman is not motivated, or truly defined, by sex. Manon, it would seem, prefers des Grieux to other men. She often follows him when her financial interest lies elsewhere. But she loves – even needs – the gorgeous life of Paris. She craves the beautiful clothes and jewellery, the operas, promenades, and carriage-rides. Des Grieux comes to realise that while she may love him, she cannot accept a life without diversion. He acknowledges, “however faithful and however fond of me she was in times of prosperity, there was no counting on her when times were bad” (35). Manon’s need for the reassurance of nice things, of attention, is not casual. Des Grieux tells us that when she does not have things and diversions, she feels she is “no longer anything,” and that she “does not even recognise herself” (78). Manon has no deep roots

The Excessive Woman  57 in French society – she is more or less a nobody – and as a woman she has no chance of identifying herself with one of the great careers of the age, whether the church, the military, the bureaucracy, or even business. She ought to identify herself through a man and marriage, but she does not. She identifies with finery and pleasure, with the modern world in all its brilliancy and inventiveness. We come here to the central enigma of Manon, and that is that while she “needs” “pleasure,” this is clothes and excursions, not sex, nor money in itself, nor power for its own sake. Manon seems to have no difficulty in switching from one man to another. We are never told that she has feelings of revulsion, or that she feels invaded or exploited. She appears neither to want sex particularly nor to dislike it. Sex, for Manon, is an easy, unobjectionable means to an end. She presents an appearance of pleasurable softness, but she does not actually register the permanent impression of any man. She grants access, but is never finally possessed. Perhaps we are supposed to take des Grieux’ part in the affair, and share in his suffering. He tells us over and over again of his high-minded feelings, of “the fervour of his passionate love” (21). There would appear to be a clear moral scheme close at hand. The shallow, materialistic woman betrays the man who is too big-hearted to see her as she really is. But the novel is more complex. Increasingly, des Grieux emerges as a buffoon. He plans to take advantage of Manon’s lovers, but they take advantage of him. His foolishness finally leads to Manon’s death. As for his passionate sincerity, we see him fall in repeatedly with shameful compromise. When Manon’s brother suggests they should be pimping Manon for their own benefit (“A girl like that ought to support us all”), the Chevalier claims to feel outrage, but he responds to the brother that “his advice was a last resort, to be used only in extremes” (39). Similarly, he professes the greatest respect for his father, but he breathlessly looks forward to his death. “My father is old and may die,” he thinks, “I will inherit something, and all our worries will be at an end” (35). Manon Lescaut presents us with another instance of the legendary excessive woman, paired here with a sensitive man. But this case makes an enigma of her “excessiveness,” and it critiques his sensitivity as egotism and self-deceit. Des Grieux believes that his elevated feelings are what matter – that they are a guarantee of his nobility and heroism. Prévost indicates that this is not the case: we may be drawn to the Chevalier’s intensity, but we should see it as a weakness. Manon herself may seem an enigma – loving, but finally ungraspable. But this enigma is an effect of des Grieux’ feelings. That is to say, he wants to believe that Manon can be defined by love, and especially by the giving of herself in sex. But Manon is not strongly motivated by love or sex. She is promiscuous, but this is a significant fact to des Grieux, not to her. Manon likes to define herself by a shifting array of things and occasions. We might wish to judge her for this, and to say – as above – that she is materialistic and

58  The Excessive Woman shallow. But would we really approve of her more if she had defined herself by an exclusive attachment to the vain and foolish des Grieux? Manon presents a challenge, in that her promiscuity does not make for a clear moral judgement. We are not invited to see her as wicked, or as psychologically damaged, or suffering from “uterine fury,” or as a sign of decadence. What she finally suggests is that a woman need not be defined by her sexual choices. This is the “problem” of Manon. She does not wish, does not seem able, to understand herself within the terms that society wishes to impose on her. She likes and wants pleasure, which may be people, things, experiences. She wants diversion, not fixity. She is reluctant to be confined or defined by any one man or role. This resistance to fixed identity, to the idea that certain acts and behaviours are definitive, is something to which we will return. For now, though, Prévost shows that, whatever Manon wishes, there will be limits. A fixed identity will be violently imposed upon her – that of “prostitute.” She cannot be allowed to thrive after the manner of her own choosing. She must die so that the young aristocrat can reconcile with his family, and all social identities can seem, for the moment at least, clear and sure. *** Alexandre Dumas fils revived the legend of Messalina in his play La Femme de Claude (1873), in which the Emperor Claudius returns as the scientist, Claude, and Messalina as Claude’s treacherous and libidinous wife. I want, though, to focus on the most famous of Dumas fils’ excessive women, and the one who picks up most closely from Manon Lescaut. Dumas fils refers back to Prévost’s novel several times in La Dame aux camélias, and there is a strong resemblance between the two texts. But for all his borrowing and acknowledgements, Dumas fils has a very different understanding of womanhood and excess. In a repeat of Manon Lescaut, in La Dame aux camélias Dumas fils recounts the story of a noble young man who falls in love with a woman who is beneath him. Marguerite Gautier, the “lady of the camellias,” is already a celebrated courtesan at the moment at which Armand Duval meets her. She is locked into an expensive life. She must dress brilliantly, maintain an elegant home, and appear at public events such as the opera if she is to continue to attract wealthy clients. She is not looking to be saved – she enjoys having “countless” lovers (7). Rather, she wants a relationship that is not part of her mercenary life, a love affair to run quietly in parallel with her business as a courtesan. What she wants, then, is a “young, easy-going lover, someone who would love [her] without asking questions” (72). But this does not fit with Armand’s idea of love. He wants to believe in love as a transcendent, exclusive meeting of souls. As with des Grieux, we might see this as romantic intensity. But Armand himself senses that his love may be narcissism. He notes

The Excessive Woman  59 that Marguerite, the great beauty, receives lavish gifts from the richest and noblest men, and now, he wants to believe that she will give herself to him, exclusively, for nothing. Armand may have mixed motives, but he also reveals to Marguerite her own ambivalence. He sparks in her a dream of escape and redemption. She already suffers from tuberculosis, which will kill her, and her life as a courtesan is exhausting. Armand represents a return to an innocent, more truly loving self. They retire to a charming country house and live happily together a life of “violent, trusting, requited love” (130). Dumas fils sets up a dialogue between his novel and Prévost’s when he has Armand present Marguerite with a copy of Manon Lescaut. She reads it “frequently.” Indeed, Prévost’s novella serves as a kind of Bible in the process of Marguerite’s purification. As she reads, she weeps. But why has Armand given her this book, and why does it cause her to weep? Presumably Armand wants Marguerite to read herself into Manon’s redemption. He wants her to follow the same path, turning her back on the world and devoting herself to him. Does Marguerite weep because she reads the book differently? She sees, perhaps, the weakness and vanity of des Grieux, and projects this back into Armand? More surely, she must see that Manon’s redemption is in effect a process of destruction, ending in death. However she reads, she starts to resist the idyll of isolated love. She decides she wants visits from her Paris girlfriends – she longs for a “party mood” (125). Armand is jealous of Marguerite’s renewed interest in the world beyond, and he starts to suspect her of renewed infidelity. Marguerite, though, is much more articulate than Manon and more able to see and explain her lover’s weaknesses. She sets out exactly how his love contains a vanity that will destroy her. Her logic here is that life has an economic base, and an elegant country hideaway must be paid for. If they pooled their resources – most importantly, if she sold her jewellery – and planned carefully, they could continue to live in this way. Armand is ashamed to have Marguerite contribute to his support, but he accepts her logic and her jewellery is sold. Crucially, there is one line that he will not cross, and of which neither ever speaks. He does not talk of marriage. He will not damage patriarchal respectability with marriage to a woman of ill repute. However, his father pays a secret visit to Marguerite, and explains that her affair is damaging not only Armand’s prospects, but the family as a whole. Armand’s blameless and loving sister has a chance at a good marriage, but stories of Armand’s alliance with Marguerite threaten to ruin everything. Marguerite proves her true nobility in sacrificing herself for Armand and for his sister. She does not explain her actions to Armand, because she knows he will resist. Instead, she allows him to believe that, after all, she was not capable of fidelity, and preferred to return to a life of promiscuity and fun. She chooses to become, once again, the excessive woman, in order to preserve a respectable upper-class family.

60  The Excessive Woman La Dame aux camélias might seem at this point to follow very closely its acknowledged precursor, Manon Lescaut. But there are several key aspects which, though present in the earlier text, are taken much further, and in unforeseen directions, by Dumas fils. Let’s pause, in particular, on the patriarchal aspect. In both Manon Lescaut and La Dame aux camélias, the son threatens to overturn the established order by choosing a woman who disrupts that order. In both tales, the father intervenes, the woman is removed from the scene, and the young man accepts his re-absorption into the family. The orderly transmission of property and social power is undermined by the excessive woman, but not for long. We might read an Oedipal pattern here, of the youth who kills his father and marries his mother. Freud suggests that a male infant feels murderous rage towards his father because he must share his mother’s affection with the father. But the male who successfully negotiates this Oedipal stage is the one who comes to sense that his future lies in an alliance with the powerful father, as this will, eventually, lead to the transmission of power to the child. This male child will grow up to have a woman and power of his own, that he need not share. That impulse to remove the father, then, is always half-hearted. The rebellion is not open, or not for long.13 In La Dame aux camélias as much as in Manon Lescaut, desire is agonistic. It is a struggle with those – fathers and rivals – who would prevent access to the object of desire, and it is a struggle with the woman herself, who is disposed to give herself to those others. This is why, even when his love is “requited,” Armand’s love is still “violent” – there is always in her the possibility of excess, and he must continually assert his exclusive possession. Freud’s Oedipal model offers a way of formulating and comparing father-son-woman relationships in both texts, but it seems less adequate to account for what happens in La Dame aux camélias. Armand is intensely aware of the many competitors for Marguerite, and he admits that it is this competition that makes him want her more. Had it been made plain to him at the outset that she was easily available for a sum of money, he would have “wept like a child who sees the castle which he had glimpsed during the night vanish as he wakes” (44). His desire is aroused by the sense of rivals around him, of difficulty, and to lose that sense is to be reduced to helplessness. We might want to extend our Freudian explanatory idea here with that of mimetic desire. This is the notion, powerfully explored by René Girard, and taken up to great effect by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that no desire simply springs up from within. We learn to desire through seeing the desires of others. The infant witnesses the father’s desire for the mother, and his own desire is formed alongside and in competition with the father. Armand needs to believe others want Marguerite, because his desire is a desire to copy and displace them. Indeed, the mimetic and rivalrous nature of Armand’s desire is

The Excessive Woman  61 indicated by the fact that he has fallen for one of the most famously desirable women of the day. This Girardian reading of desire brings us directly to the role of promiscuity in La Dame aux camélias. Dumas fils shows that a woman like Marguerite exists between and has a function for many men. He shows this by tracing out the pattern of Armand’s desire, but he also explores it via the objects in Marguerite’s home. Her “finest treasures,” kept in her boudoir, are “countless objects” in gold and silver. Each of these “magnificently wrought implements” bears initials and a coronet (7). Marguerite’s noble, wealthy clients signal their conquest of her with a monogrammed “gift,” a payment that identifies the name, status, taste, and wealth of the man. Having sex with Marguerite must be discreetly made evident to one’s peers, much as one might show off a race horse or a painting. The excessive woman, then, is a means of communication between men. She has been the “mistress of the most fashionable young men,” and in Paris “the lovers of any celebrated courtesan see each other every day” (7). Even though they will not be seen in public, in daylight, with Marguerite, to know her, to have been one of her clients, is to belong to a semi-secret, privileged set. She seems, then, to promote bonds between men more than between men and herself. Men desire in relation to other men, wanting what they want. This is in order to have the sense of a pleasure shared – something held in common between them, and to which other, less distinguished men do not have access. Alongside them, there is the more anxious example of Armand, who wants what other men want, and is haunted by their power to exclude him.14 Girard’s idea of mimetic desire became a leaping off point for queer theory. Sedgwick, drawing on Girard’s writing, explored the idea of the homoerotic, the idea that even men’s desire for women is formed around their acute awareness of other men. Armand does not desire other men; the “fashionable young men” do not desire each other. But they desire in relation to other men. This became such a powerful point of departure for queer reading not because it suggests that all men are implicitly homosexual (it does no such thing), but because it indicates that even the most approved, heteronormative desire is not entirely self-evident and straightforward. Even the desires of straight men like Armand have their involutions, detours, and disavowals. Patriarchy emerges as an erotic exchange between men, even if it requires the figure of the woman in order to function. The excessive woman in La Dame aux camélias is not, then, necessarily seen as a physiological issue, or a moral one, but as a structural issue. She fulfils a role that seems to threaten the social order, but actually she enables that order to function. How, though, do other women feature in this structure? In La Dame aux camélias, there is a sharp recognition on the part of society women that, for all that they have wealth and status, they are excluded from the inner sexual workings of the upper-class

62  The Excessive Woman brotherhood. This leads to an obsession on their part with Marguerite, around whom that secret world turns. They would not have agreed to meet Marguerite during her lifetime, but once she has died, they rush around to her home during the auction of her property. Dumas fils suggests that their interest is a plain case of prurience. He writes that they are looking for “traces of the secret life of the courtesan” (2). They are appalled and aroused by the thought of her many sexual adventures, but they will see nothing of them: “Unfortunately, the mysteries had died with the goddess, and in spite of their best endeavours these good ladies found only what had been put up for sale since the time of death, and could detect nothing of what had been sold while the occupant had been alive” (2). The narrator is satirising these “good ladies,” who rejected Marguerite and her way of life, but who are keen to catch a whiff of it all. They are, he suggests, hypocrites. Perhaps, though, these women can be forgiven their interest in Marguerite. She may have been excluded from polite society, but she had her own money, her own home, and the fervent attention of “the most fashionable young men.” What these women actually want to see, perhaps, is not so much Marguerite herself – they know she is dead – but the place in which patriarchy discreetly signals its more intimately shared values – those unacknowledged but powerful bonds that are created via the shared woman. It is these “mysteries,” over which Marguerite as “goddess” presides, that they wish to figure out. The “mysteries” are not Marguerite’s many sexual acts, but the social force-field that formed around them. What of Marguerite herself? We might think her life enviable. She has a beautiful home, attention, and autonomy. She enjoys her life of operas, supper-parties, and elegant clothes. The narrator struggles with this. He cannot believe that Marguerite does not suffer for her pleasures. Similarly, when Armand first meets Marguerite, he resents her seeming ability to pursue her life without remorse or penalty. He tells her, “I cannot bear to see you bright and cheerful” (68). Marguerite actually desires her many customers, a fact that neither the narrator nor Armand can accept. To deal with this, Dumas fils will re-introduce a piece of conventional wisdom about the excessive woman. He falls back on the medical tradition that dates back at least as far as Galen, in seeing her desires as a physiological aberration. In this case, it is because she has tuberculosis that she desires so much and so many. The narrator tells us that her desires are “feverish,” and that her behaviour is “almost invariably the result of consumptive disorders” (11). Dumas fils, though, does not want only to tell a physiological story; he wants, above all, to tell a moral story. Marguerite, like Manon before her, must be redeemed. This, in La Dame aux camélias, is a particularly unpleasant process. We might think it will be kindly, because the narrator tells us that he is pitying and forgiving of courtesans. He has a “boundless forbearance” for them (6). This is not because he accepts their right to determine their

The Excessive Woman  63 own lives, or because he senses that they act to survive in a world that gives them few options. Rather, he pities them because they suffer from “blindness of heart, deafness of soul and dumbness of conscience.” They must be helped to hear the Lord and to speak “the pure language of love and religion” (16). His piety, we may already realise, is sadistic. The pity and forgiveness for such women as Marguerite comes with a righteous wish to see them broken. In the process of their redemption, the women will “cut their feet and graze their hands, but will at the same time leave their gaudy rags of vice hanging on the briars which line the road.” Finally they will “reach their journey’s end in that naked state for which no one need feel shame in the sight of the Lord” (17). Marguerite will be saved if she can undergo this process of being cut and ripped and exposed to view. Nakedness, if it is sensual, is shameful. But being exposed as having nothing left, having no responsiveness beyond the moral response – this is the acceptable outcome. Dumas fils continues with his lecture on Christianity, including a few side-swipes at the scepticism of Voltaire, and exhorting his readers to “take pride in Goodness” (17–18). He does not reveal any Christian feelings at any other point in the text. Marguerite is the sole prompt for a discourse on religious morality. We might read a personal disavowal in Dumas fils’ moralising. He had an affair with the young woman, Alphonsine Plessis, who then served as his model for Marguerite Gautier. Perhaps he is also making his obeisances to the moral expectations of others. He wants to be clear that, in writing La Dame aux camélias, he is not offering “an apology for vice and prostitution” (16). But Dumas fils is not simply covering his tracks here. He became increasingly priggish and bullying in his statements on women. In the various diatribes published together in La Question de la femme (1872), he argued that, to protect the national virtue, 15-year-old girls without proof of means of support should be conscripted to labour in state workshops or be placed under police surveillance (Femme 55–6). We see these attitudes unfolding in La Dame aux camélias, and the novel is an example of structural misogyny – the structure which creates community between men via the excessive woman, but that will punish that woman all the same for her freedom. The only woman who can be approved in the novel is the one for whom Marguerite sacrifices herself, Armand’s sister, Blanche. She, whose name is “white,” has the “cleareyed gaze and serene mouth which point to a soul that conceives only saintly thoughts and lips that only speak pious words” (201). In Blanche, Dumas fils sets out the conditions of existence for woman. She must be “saintly.” It is not enough that she “speak pious words”; she must only speak them. The irony is that Blanche may be admirable, but she has no story. Dumas fils makes his novel out of Marguerite. There is then a violent fascination with the desiring woman, in spite of pledges of allegiance to the chaste woman. This fascination is played out in the way that the narrator and Armand need to check over and over

64  The Excessive Woman that Marguerite is really dead. The narrator visits the cemetery where she is buried, and tells us, “I cast a final glance back at the flower-strewn grave whose depths, despite myself, I would have gladly plundered for a sight of what the earth had done to the beautiful creature who had been lowered into it” (32). Armand feels a similar impulse. He has Marguerite exhumed from a temporary grave so as to move her to a permanent resting-place. This gives him and the narrator, and finally us, the grim pleasure of knowing that the beguiling, excessive woman has now lost all power: “The eyes were two holes, the lips had gone, and the white teeth were clenched” (38). The story begins and ends with Marguerite’s death, and the reassurance that she will get away with nothing. After they have seen her corpse, the narrator puts the prostrate Armand into bed. Even in death, she mediates the relationship between the men. Woman as desiring, as living, actual, responsive body rather than “saintly” form, is finally frightening and disgusting to Dumas fils. We see this in the way he refuses to know the significance of the flowers with which Marguerite identifies herself. He tells us that for 25 days in every month, Marguerite wore white camellias, and for five days she wore red. He writes that neither he nor anyone else “ever knew the reason for this variation in colour which I mention but cannot explain” (9). The reason, though, is not so hard to figure out. Marguerite uses the flowers to signal her menstrual cycle and, therefore, her availability. In doing so, she deploys a widely understood code of the time. For all that Dumas fils pretends not to know this, it becomes clear that somehow his novel does. When Armand first tries to make love to Marguerite, she agrees to give herself to him. But as she does so, she slips out of his arms and gives him one of her red camellias, saying, “you can’t always implement treaties the day they are signed.” Armand, at least, is sure that her “meaning is plain” (73).15 Perhaps then this is the final mystery and problem of Marguerite. She is neither Blanche nor the “scarlet woman,” but occupies both identities in repeated succession. Dumas fils can accept woman as white, pure, ideal, and vulnerable. He struggles with the thought that, alongside all this, there may be red; there may be a woman unashamedly conscious of herself as a body, as desire in her own right.16 *** In Manon Lescaut and La Dame aux camélias, women are expected to allow themselves to be contained, to be private, exclusive selves, as defined and confirmed by monogamy. Manon and Marguerite remain enigmatic and exasperating to the men who desire them because they use their bodies to experience a measure of autonomy and self-invention. I want now to consider a much more overt and self-conscious exploration of the same theme. If Manon and Marguerite shocked and fascinated readers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus now is on a text that

The Excessive Woman  65 would shock and intrigue readers of the twenty-first century. With The Sexual Life of Catherine M., the renowned art critic and editor Catherine Millet made herself notorious for her accounts of sex with as many as 30 men in a single evening.17 She did not do this with the justification, such as Manon and Marguerite might have claimed, of a need to make money. Although the response to her writing has often been pitying, condescending, or appalled, I want to present The Sexual Life of Catherine M. as a subtle exploration of the bodily self, its boundaries, and its possibilities as a vehicle for discovery. We are a long way from Prévost and Dumas fils here, but as between the two earlier texts, there are some evocative echoes in Millet. Above all, as with Manon and Marguerite, Millet is aware of the perception of her excess on the part of others, the sense of horror and contempt that she may inspire. But her own register is quiet, thoughtful, questioning, or, one might say, experimental. Writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and from within a highly intellectual context, Millet has at hand theories and models for sexual behaviour that were unknown in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She and her friends are readers of Georges Bataille (1897–1962), and she refers to him several times in her memoirs. Bataille wrote of eroticism as the means by which the individual seeks to move beyond him- or herself, to achieve a fusion, a loss of isolated identity – a loss which will prove liberating. For all that we may pride ourselves on our independence, and for all that we may function as separate bodily selves at almost all moments, there is always this counterforce, this yearning for an annihilation of individuality, and a regaining of a lost, primal continuity. Death is the final annihilation, but sex is a momentary experience of death of the self. As Bataille writes, we are “projected beyond [our] limits by the sexual orgasm” (103). Sex enables people to “share in a state of crisis in which both are beside themselves” (103). Eroticism seems to lead to “blending and fusion of separate objects” (25), and this seems to lead to death, and through death to continuity or eternity.18 But this is a “projection” in which there is no real union. However exhilarating the experience, not much remains once the crisis is over. This sense of the shaking up, the abolition even, of boundaries, is present in many of Millet’s characterisations of her sexual experiences. It is about surrendering control to surrounding forces: “I entered my adult life in the same way that, as a child, I went into the tunnel on the ghost train, blindly and for the pleasure of being jostled and grabbed as chance would have it. Or, you could say, swallowed up by it as a frog is by a snake” (19). At other times, sex is swallowing or ingesting rather than being swallowed, but all the same there is an exciting confusion of boundaries. On being penetrated in sex, she feels that her “entire body has been put on and filled out like a glove” (173). Orgasm too is a way of being lost or usurped, a fulfilment that is also a kind of annihilation. It is “like the state we reach shortly before passing out, when we feel the

66  The Excessive Woman body is emptying itself” (213). Perhaps, though, the clearest formulation of Bataille comes in a later memoir, Jealousy, in which Millet comments, “I have learned […] that there is a form of egocentricity which paradoxically seeks not to focus on and strengthen the ego, but rather to scatter it and break it down” (30). The body, after all, can seem “a rather burdensome mass.” In the paroxysm of sex one can achieve a “brief absence from oneself” (38). If we wish to escape ourselves, to experience continuity through the mindlessness of orgasm, we might achieve this with one person over and over again. Promiscuity does not follow as an automatic consequence here. But what underlies Bataille’s work is the idea that eroticism is always the breaking of a rule or a norm. He writes that sex is obscenity, and by obscenity he means “the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession” (117). Orgasm, then, even within a stable, monogamous relationship, is “obscene” in the sense of disrupting the individual’s self-possession. But often people seek to explore and realise further this obscenity by departing from the conditions under which sex normally and acceptably takes place. Millet, a keen student of Bataille, echoes him in speaking of sex as always involving a “projected fantasy or spectacle” that is obscene, a rupture of the ordinary, and she asks, “Is there, for human beings, any other source of pleasure than that of obscenity” (162)? Certainly for Millet the breaking of boundaries in sex, in orgasm or not, includes the breaking of the norms of late twentieth-century womanhood. She breaks those norms in the number of sexual partners; in the places in which she will have sex; and in a quasi-incestuous experimentation with, for instance, a man and his two nephews. Millet operates a more fundamental movement across and testing out of boundaries in the organisation of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. When we learn that someone is to narrate her sexual experiences, we might expect that the who – the identities of her lovers – will be of prime importance. Millet, though, gives us other ways of thinking, in that her headings are “Numbers,” “Space,” “Confined Space,” “Details,” and so on. She has, as it were, de-coupled sex from the other person. She has changed the defining context or concept. Millet is especially interested in thinking about what makes or defines a space and how we might experience sex and space in relation to each other. She takes a lead from art here, in that she looks at how contemporary artists “open space out” and “seal it.” Her examples are Barnett Newman with his “closing zips,” Yves Klein with his crushed forms, and Alain Jacquet, who experiments with the endless but closed curves of the Möbius strip. Millet picks up on this preoccupation with sensation and different spaces – zipped, crushed, endless – when she describes having sex out of doors, with a vast landscape before her. She is aware at this moment of a “correlation” between her sensations and the space. She feels as though she “abandons” herself

The Excessive Woman  67 to the contours of the hills as much as to her sexual responses (106–7). In this state, all is present and yet dissolving; she is joined to another but also “unfurling” (108). She notes that natural spaces “do not feed the same fantasies as urban spaces.” In the countryside, the participants are unobserved, and “let their pleasure spread as far as the eye can see.” The moment creates the illusion that one’s “ecstasy is on the same scale as this expanse,” that the body that “houses” us is “dilating to infinity” (115–6). Millet is also intrigued by the way in which a confined space alters the experience. She remembers having sex with a succession of men inside a Ville de Paris works van (one of the men was a municipal employee). In that “creaky little vehicle,” she becomes a motionless idol who accepts “the homage of a suite of followers” (133). Aside from her sense of herself as an “idol,” in this urban setting the scene is “by definition a social space,” and so desire in this space has a more pronounced element of transgression, of “exhibitionist” and “voyeuristic” impulses. If the countryside threatens boundaries with endlessness, here there is the possibility of invasion, with the likelihood that others will “penetrate the aura of intimacy” (115). Millet is so open to the idea of playing with boundaries, space, and sensation, and to de-coupling sex from the context of an interpersonal relationship, that she re-imagines her partners themselves as space – men can be space “with a slightly closer weave” (116). Another concept for sex that Millet draws attention to, independent of any particular who, is that of time. For her, sex can create the illusion not just of spatial infinity, but of a dilation of time, so that the participants feel suspended in their moment, in a Bataille-esque eternity. She remembers group sex in a garden above Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and recalls, “Nothing ever disturbed the unspooling of those compact segments of afternoon, their rhythm slowed further by the humming of the traffic absorbed by the buzzing of insects” (104). Again like the Möbius strip, there are clear shapes or elements – the “compact segments of afternoon” – each of which can “unspool” beyond its limits. Along with space and time, Millet likes to define sex in terms of texture. She focuses early on, and in some detail, on the feel of different penises. She compares the “monolithic contours” of one man’s circumcised penis with a more malleable, uncircumcised one. These contrasts produce a corresponding diversification in herself, as she discovers that “every kind of dick required different movement, different behaviour” from her (18). Indeed, she frequently defines her experience in terms of adapting to different complexions and body types. “Not only,” she tells us, “do you hold on to the torso above you in a different way if it is as smooth as a stone or filled out with the beginnings of a bosom or obscuring your view with a thatch of hair,” but also “these images do not have the same resonance in your imagination” (18). Sex becomes an endless series of connoisseurial adjustments, for the self and for others, and it is

68  The Excessive Woman always an imaginative experience, an experience of “fantasy” and “resonance” – even in its most immediately physical moments. The argument has come up repeatedly from Messalina onwards that promiscuity is a lack of discrimination. The promiscuous person will “have anyone” because everyone seems to be more or less the same. Or the person is so overcome by extreme sexual need that he or she will not discriminate. Millet is an affront to these ideas. For all that she has had many sexual encounters with hundreds of different partners, she is always discriminating. The many have never been for her an undifferentiated mass. She is also aware that, like Marguerite Gautier before her, she is most often the means of communication between men. She is “an emissary of a network in which [she] couldn’t hope to know all the members, the unwitting link in a family joined as in the bible” (45). Even at orgies, there is a kind of brokering or communion. She always goes with a man who passes her on, who even “curates” the whole experience (21). Her many different types of experience do not amalgamate in her mind to form “sex.” All her experiences are linked but separate. Remembering orgies in clubs, evenings of group sex in the Bois de Boulogne, or time spent with a particular person, she finds that her memories are like “the interlinked rooms in a Japanese palace.” She thinks she is in a “closed room,” only for a partition to slide back, “revealing a succession of other rooms” (33). This creates endless scope for contemplation, for “the rooms themselves are numerous,” and “the ways of passing from one to the other are infinite” (33). What are the political aspects or political consequences of Millet’s choices and experiences? What does she offer, if anything, by way of explanation – does she offer a psychological background or causal narrative for her choices? She seems to surrender any claims to feminism in that she makes it clear that she was passive in her encounters. A series of male lovers create new opportunities for her with other men. As for explanations, she does not feel a need to think much about them. She assumes that she just happened to have fallen in with men who “liked to make love in groups or liked to watch their partners making love with other men.” As she herself was “open to new experiences” and “saw no moral obstacle,” she chose to “adapt willingly to their ways” (14). But this passivity is one in which she feels empowered. Of her earliest encounters, she writes, “I was not obviously the one who took the initiative in the situation, but I was the one who precipitated it – something I still cannot explain to myself” (13). The scene in which she finds herself, over and over again, is always one in which she is the – or at least a – pivotal figure. Being “used” is also being “the centre of attention.” One might argue, indeed, that it is hard to distinguish between “user” and “used” in her encounters; she is passed around, and she is the “idol” who receives “the homage of a suite of followers” (133). It is the grammar or the ritual of the situation that the men are active and she is passive, but all are willing. This fundamental sense of “precipitating” without taking

The Excessive Woman  69 the initiative is crucial to her. Above all, she always “exercised complete free will” (63), and only did what suited her. She was never interested in inflicting or receiving pain or abuse, and she “never had to suffer any kind of clumsiness or brutality” (25). There may have been incidental pain – her back on the hard, corrugated metal floor of the Ville de Paris van, or on the edge of a table in a sex club – but she never “put [herself] in a masochistic situation” (204–5). She has met with much “vigorous” sex, and she has ended up at times feeling stiff and slightly bruised (itself, she tells us, a kind of “pleasure”) (23). But what she notes in her partners, even the vigorous, is “attentiveness,” “kindness,” and “civility” (25). On each occasion, she and they form an “ephemeral little community” (25), an “elastic” space of mutual intent, of “reciprocal freedom” (48). In fact, one of her more wishful and utopian reflections is to imagine the “quiet, unassuming civility which reigns in a sex-shop spread to every aspect of social life” (139). As noted, Millet is not especially interested in psychologizing her behaviours or her motives. All the same, she gives glimpses of her childhood which prompt the idea that she was reacting against her upbringing. If Bataille argues that all eroticism involves the breaking of prohibitions, Millet allows us to see that her childhood was marked by some peculiarly intimate and shaming constraints. She connects her awareness of sex in relation to space with childhood experience. She was “born into a family of five living in a three-bedroom apartment” (125). She had to share a bed with her mother, and she would masturbate “in a tightly hunched ball,” trying to move and breathe as little as possible. Occasionally her mother would realise and shake her and call her “a dirty little girl” (127). As an adult, the experience of sex is fundamentally tied for her to the “mastery of physical space” (125), something she feels would be less the case had her “individual intimacy” been “respected” as a child. Similarly, when she was 13 or 14 her mother insisted that she wear “an underwired bra and panty girdle” on the basis that “a woman ‘should be held in place’” (14–5). In the same moment, Millet tells us of her subsequent decision to stop wearing underwear altogether. The intention here is not to present Millet as a model for others, or to argue that she is happier or unhappier than other people. She offers a sensitive and imaginative thinking through of the experience of promiscuous sex, and she is attentive to that experience rather than to ideas of the excessive. Nor does she present herself as a model for others. Is not her writing about her experiences a kind of exhibitionism, an advertisement of herself? She tells us early on that she found it “offensive” that other girls and boys would publicly kiss and maul each other about at parties, and then boast about it the next day. She is not a “collector” who wishes to show off her trophies (16). We might suppose that Millet had spent many years writing about contemporary art and the challenges it presents, so why would she not write about the challenge of sex? What actually leads to writing about her sexual life is a wish to

70  The Excessive Woman explore how sexual experience relates to language. When she is in “one of those hyper-conscious states crystallised by pleasure,” she thinks, at that very moment, that “one day [she] would have to find a way of putting into words the extreme sensation of joy” (108). Frustration too was a strong prompt. She found after a time that she could not reach a climax in sex. In this period of her life, she became intensely aroused, but then the process “ground to a halt.” On each occasion, she found herself struggling to put her feelings into words. “What name,” she asks, “should I give this singular emotion?” (89). It is the highs, the reverses, and curiosities of sex that lead her to writing. The recourse to language is often understood as a sign of failed desire. If we are entirely satisfied, we have no need for words. Writing attempts to cross a gap, to make good a failure, or prolong that which is about to be lost. But writing also makes for a critical separation between oneself and one’s experience. When Millet writes about herself, she soon finds that the first person starts to seem like a third person: “The more I describe my body and my actions, the more I leave myself behind.” She likens this to the psychoanalytic process which, through talking, “helps you to shed unwanted parts of yourself” (188). But she likens it also to sexual pleasure, another activity which “brings you outside your own limits” (188–9). Whether in promiscuity, or in intense pleasure, or in writing, Millet is always testing out her ability to move beyond the fixed. To speak of her experience is an attempt to capture it, and to leave it behind for something new. *** I have drifted, unpredictably I would have to admit, across a range of versions of the excessive woman, from the Bible through Roman poets to two nineteenth-century texts and a twenty-first-century memoir. There is little in the way of continuous coverage, or depth of coverage. What these writers have at least enabled us to do is to trace out how a seemingly intractable staple of misogynist thinking is not identical over time, and does not constitute a universal, essential understanding of women. Even where a writer such as Dumas fils seeks to revive a longfamiliar notion of the promiscuous woman – that she is diseased, she must be purged, and we must be purged of her – other counter-readings present themselves. We see that, far from being contaminated by the supposedly aberrant mind and body of the woman, society organises itself through and around her. Whatever her motives – money, pleasure, selfdetermination – she has a complex symbolic function for the very people who spurn her. Catherine Millet, on the other hand, leaves far behind the well-worn narratives about women’s misplaced ambition, their wickedness, or their physiological weakness. She even leaves behind the interpersonal element of the sexual encounter, swapping that for her own categories of “Space,” “Numbers,” and so on. For her, sex is always

The Excessive Woman  71 obscene, but also gentle and civil, always an agreed-upon convergence. With her, obscenity takes on a creative sense; it indicates that in sex she is playing with her sense of her relation to the world around her. With Millet, excess is always inherent to the act, and her aim is to witness that excess as directly and as intelligently as she can.

Notes

72  The Excessive Woman Fonteyn, Rudolph Nureyev, and the Royal Ballet, and John Neumeier’s Lady of the Camellias (1978), choreographed to Chopin for the Stuttgart Ballet. Both are still frequently revived.

12 “...l’on y fait jouer à gens en place des rôles peu dignes d’eux” (Deloffre and Picard clxiii).







Works Cited Ballard, J. G. “Everything under the Sun.” Guardian, 29 June 2002. URL: www.theguardian.com Bataille, Georges. Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo. New York: Arno Press, 1977. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales, edited by Jill Mann. London: Penguin, 2005. ———. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, edited by Mark Allen and John Fisher. The Variorum Edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 2. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012.

The Excessive Woman  73 Daumas, Maurice. Le Syndrome des Grieux: La relation père/fils au xviiie siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Dawson, Lesel. Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Desmond, Marilynn. Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Diski, Jenny. “Hang on to the Doily.” London Review of Books, 25 July 2002. URL: lrb.co.uk Dollimore, Jonathan. Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Dumas fils, Alexandre. La Dame aux camélias, translated by David Coward. Oxford: Oxford University Press-World’s Classics, 2008. ———. La Question de la femme. Paris: Association pour l’émancipation progressive de la femme, 1872. Fortune, A. W. “Babylon in the New Testament.” International Standard Bible Encyclopedia Online. URL: www.internationalstandard bible.com Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) translated by James Strachey. London: Penguin, 1991. Galen. On the Affected Parts, translated by Rudolph E. Siegel. Basel: S. Karger, 1976. Girard, René. Desire, Deceit and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. Hanna III, Ralph, and Traugott Lawlor, eds. Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Juvenal. Satires. LCL: 91. King, Helen. “Once upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates.” Hysteria Beyond Freud, edited by Sander L. Gilman et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 3–90. Linz, Bernardette C. “Concocting La Dame aux camélias: Blood, Tears, and Other Fluids.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 33, nos. 3–4, Spring–Summer 2005, pp. 287–307. Lombroso, Cesare. The Female Offender. 1893. London: Peter Owen, 1959. Millet, Catherine. Jealousy, translated by Helen Stevenson. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009. ———. The Sexual Life of Catherine M., translated by Adriana Hunter. London: Corgi, 2003. Plaza, Maria. The Function of Humour in Roman Verse Satire: Laughing and Lying. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Prévost, Abbé Antoine François. Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, edited by Frédéric Deloffre and Raymond Picard. Paris: Garnier, 1965. ———. Manon Lescaut, edited and translated by Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press-World’s Classics, 2008. Richlin, Amy. “The Meaning of Irrumare in Catullus and Martial.” Classical Philology, vol. 76, no. 1, January 1981, pp. 40–46. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Sgard, Jean. Prévost Romancier. Paris: José Corti, 1968.

74  The Excessive Woman Strong, Anise K. Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Sullivan, Courtney. The Evolution of the French Courtesan Novel: From de Chabrillan to Colette. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Tallent, Alistaire. “Intimate Exchanges: The Courtesan Narrative and Male Homosocial Desire in La Dame aux camélias.” French Forum, vol. 39, no. 1, Winter 2014, pp. 21–31. Wyke, Maria. The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

3

Sex Objects and Comic Objects

“The desire of a man for a woman,” Kant asserts in his Lectures on Ethics (1784), “is not directed to her as a human being” (156). Kant believes in love between human beings, but this is unconnected to sex. Love may be felt for a child or for a very elderly person. Kant does not consider other types of desire beyond the “desire of a man for a woman,” but it soon becomes clear that, for him, all sexual relations work against love. In sex, we can only see each other as objects. We have an appetite to satisfy. The other person becomes a means to an end, a tool, a necessary component in a function. Sex, Kant tells us, tends always toward “degradation” and “debasement.” As soon as we desire another person, “all wishes of moral relationship fall away.” The other person becomes the “thing” through which we must get our release (156). Men and women, in this view, are inherently promiscuous. We have what Kant calls a vaga libido or a wandering and indiscriminate lust, whereby once we have satisfied ourselves, we want to throw the other person away “as one throws away a lemon after sucking the juice from it” (156). It is only our capacity to feel shame, to feel what is and is not acceptable, that causes us to “restrain the untamed sexual impulse.” How, then, are we to build ethical sexual relationships, in which we do not objectify others or reduce them to our own needs? Kant sees the solution in monogamous marriage. This is a system of “mutual dominance.” In marriage I have the right to “dispose” of a person as I wish, but only because she, he or they have the same right over me. Sex will still turn one’s partner into an “object of appetite,” an “instrument” or a “thing,” but this objectification will be contained within an ethical structure. This means, Kant thinks, that the act is “without debasement of humanity or violation of morality” (158). Objectification, for Kant, is an essential component of sexual desire. When, in the late twentieth century, feminists took up the term, they introduced a different emphasis. For Andrea Dworkin, for instance, objectification is more inherent to a sexist social structure than to sex itself. Men learn that in order to survive and be accepted by other successful men, they must assert their dominance over other people and over things. To be a respected member of the tribe of men, a man must prove

76  Sex Objects and Comic Objects his mastery over women. Following de Beauvoir, Dworkin argues that it is partly through women and their victimisation that the man becomes a man (128). Women may be – must be – treated as objects or tools. Their wishes and responses need not be taken into account as a man’s might be; they may be seen as inferior and as undeserving of the freedom of men. Under this system, women struggle to rise above the status of object or interchangeable tool. Martha Nussbaum gives the example from Homer’s Iliad in which Agamemnon offers Achilles seven tripods, ten talents of gold, twenty cauldrons, twelve horses, and seven women. The women are objects of exchange like horses and cooking pots (219). Nussbaum follows Dworkin in noting the same objectification of women in modern pornography. In Playboy, Nussbaum writes, the women are distinguished from each other, but only in the way that a Mercedes is distinguished from a Chevrolet. They are all still defined in terms of their use or pleasure for men (219). Even in advanced societies, as Dworkin notes, women have had “chattel status” – in certain respects they were legally defined as objects – until the twentieth century (102). Dworkin finds continuing objectification most obviously in pornography, in which women are often reduced to the body parts that might be required to arouse and fulfil a man’s desire. Similarly, Carol J. Adams writes of the “sexual butchery” of pornography, as it turns a woman into a “piece of ass” (59). Pornography is the graphic realisation of the wish to see women as interchangeable objects, as an endless resource that is available for exploitation. In pornography, there are always more “pieces” to be had. Objectification and promiscuity seem to be twinned. If sexual desire is primarily oriented to its own needs, it does not respect the other, but sees him, her, or them as the means to satisfy the self. And because many objects or persons can satisfy the desire, we are always prone to turn to what is available and attractive in the moment. Promiscuity would seem the natural consequence of objectification, as the function takes precedence over any person with whom we might associate it. It may be that we find certain people much more attractive than other people, but this may not be because we recognise the other’s individuality, so much as that we have a particular “trigger” or “fetish.” Ernest Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary Welsh, remembered him encouraging her to dye her hair from red to blond. Hemingway preferred blonds. “He would have been ecstatic,” Welsh commented, “in a world of women dandelions” (Dworkin 114). Welsh wryly remembers her own self-objectification, her becoming a “dandelion,” in order to excite her husband. The wryness, the regret, is her recognition that in becoming another blond, she offered herself as one in a field of many. Is objectification necessarily harmful or regrettable? Is it possible to decouple objectification and promiscuity? Nussbaum raises these possibilities. She analyses the passage from D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), in which Mellors and Lady Chatterley objectify each

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  77 other as they look at and speak of each other’s genitals. Each person is identified as a “cock” or a “cunt.” But Nussbaum notes that Mellors and Lady Chatterley do not “reduce” each other to body parts. Their “intense focusing” on each other seems “an addition rather than a subtraction” (229). In this relationship the objectification is not dehumanising. Nussbaum then turns to Kant, and makes the simple but astute observation that Kant “apparently believes that personhood and humanity, and, along with them, individuality, do not reside in the genital organs.” Lawrence, on the other hand, insists that the genitals are “a major part of the humanity in us, and the individuality as well.” Nussbaum agrees with Dworkin that objectification is often reductive and commodifying – whether in Homer or in pornography – as women become status objects, and “part of a self-regarding display” by men. She maintains, nonetheless, that objectification may be intimate, joyous, and even a “regular or necessary feature” of sexual life, as it is in the relationship between Mellors and Lady Chatterley (235). Nussbaum also tries to address more explicitly what is at the “core” of objectification. This “core” is not necessarily sexual. Nussbaum cites John Stuart Mill to the effect that the education of men in his society “teaches the lesson of domination and use.” Mill does not “put the blame at the door of the specifically sexual education” (238). Nussbaum uses Mill to critique the idea that the “deformation of sexual desire” into objectification is “prior to and causes other forms of objectification.” Like Dworkin, Nussbaum sees the possibility that “in many cases, an antecedent deformation of attitudes to things and persons infiltrates and poisons desire” (238). Nussbaum leaves us with some unresolved problems. What is the “core” self that is “deformed”? Can we ever state what such a thing is or might be, and what is the self that ends up “formed” rather than “deformed”?1 Nussbaum suggests that objectification may be a “joyous” and “necessary” part of sexual life, and yet she allows it to be a “deformation,” a damage inflicted on the psyche by an unjust social order. Nussbaum makes the point, though – very useful here – that although objectification is often taken to be inherent to and a cause of promiscuity, this is not necessarily the case. Objectification may not be about interchangeability, but about developing one’s sense of the other’s individuality. But might we not push the questions yet further here? What is the opposite of an objectifying desire? The popular phrase is to “make love to the whole person.” This may be an appealing concept, but is it actually possible? How can we be sure that this is, indeed, what we are doing? Must we be concerned about objectification as interchangeability anyway? If we return to Rubin’s criteria for “democratic morality” that we looked at in the introduction, she disconnects “mutual consideration” from monogamy, and suggests that a free and respectful sex life might involve many partners. Is, then, interchangeability, being one of many, having one of many, necessarily a bad thing?

78  Sex Objects and Comic Objects *** What is for Kant, Dworkin, and Nussbaum a matter of serious concern is for others a source of laughter. Comic writers are especially interested in objectification and object-ness, in promiscuity and individuality, and in the humanising and dehumanising possibilities of sex. But if comic writers make fun out of objectification, they too see it as a problem. How do they bring us to laugh at the awkwardness, the seeming unkindness of desire, and how, in the process, do they add to the ideas of Kant, Dworkin, and Nussbaum? Jokes and the comic are often seen to function in terms of the reduction of another person. Aristotle sees laughter as a form of belittlement. We laugh at the defects of others. There is a sense, when we laugh at someone, either that we do not care about their feelings or that we actively wish to damage their feelings. 2 This might lead us to argue that there is a comic objectification alongside a sexual one. It is because we do not respect the feelings of the other that we can laugh at him or her. But in laughter the flow of derision is not always clear and not always in one direction. Take the example of the satyrs mentioned in the first chapter. These donkey-men are so tormented by sexual desire that, although they may prefer a maiden, they will stick their penises into animals and into the necks of bottles. The satyrs exemplify the idea that a strong sexual urge reduces the other to an object or a tool – even to the point that the other may be an object, such as a bottle. But in failing to rise above their sexual impulse, the satyrs confirm themselves, not their objects, to be ridiculous. We laugh at the satyrs, not at the maidens, the animals, or the bottles. And yet, in the Attic vase paintings of satyrs, they are usually grinning. They too are in on the joke. Another way of reading laughter in this case is that it is not simply that we do not care about the other person – in this case the satyr – nor that we wish to damage his feelings. Rather, it is that we enjoy our superiority to him. This was Hobbes’s elaboration of Aristotle’s idea. He suggested that “laughter is nothing else but the sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”3 We laugh because we are not subject to the same foolishness. But perhaps we also laugh out of a nervous recognition that we are not so very far removed from the satyr, that we too have been, or might be, made ridiculous by inconvenient desires, by the impoliteness of sex. Indeed, Hobbes continues that our sudden glory may come from our eminency over our earlier selves. When we laugh at the poor, stupid donkey-men, we may be thinking of our own satyr-like moments, or we may be dimly aware of our own satyr potential. If discomfort, awkwardness, and cruelty seem central to laughter, so, often, does sex. Comedy in the West is usually traced back to the Greeks, and especially to sex as objectified in the penis. Aristotle hypothesised that comedy began with the komos, the tradition of a group

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  79 of drunken men parading around while singing “phallic songs” (LCL 199:41–3). The men or komasts would carry a large phallus, indicating their allegiance to Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy. From the evidence of painted vases, they would wear protuberant additions to their own bodies – large buttocks, big artificial penises. The grotesque nakedness of the komasts was further played out in the form of dances, in which the men would fondle or slap each other’s buttocks, or simulate anal penetration. On occasion the komos is represented as a sexual orgy, sometimes including women, or men costumed as women.4 The komasts’ outfits reappear in Greek comedy. In contrast to the naturalistic masks and costumes of tragedy, comic actors wore “leering” masks, and their supposed nakedness was in fact a costume which enhanced belly, buttocks, and phallus.5 The evidence suggests, as Alenka Zupančič puts it, that there is “a strong phallic reference at the heart of comedy” (213). Howard Jacobson, indeed, notes a tradition, with the komasts’ phalloi followed by “Harlequin’s batte, Punch’s cudgel, the jester’s marotte, Chaplin’s cane, and Ken Dodd’s tickling stick” (Bevis 21). The comic figure originally, then, was always excessively his or her body, an amalgam of objects – penis, belly, and buttocks – that signify sex and appetite. In ancient Greek comedy, the characters are always represented in terms of object-ness, of being made up of an assemblage of outsize bits, rather than a smoothly integrated and proportionate whole. There is a link to be made here to one of the most influential modern treatises on comedy, Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900). Bergson explained comedy as “something mechanical encrusted on the living” (37). His idea is that any person is liable to end up behaving in an automatic way, as though he or she were part-machine. There is “some rigidity or other applied to the mobility of life” (38), such as the person who trips on something instead of stepping around or over it. He also gives the example of the automatism of officialdom. He cites the customs guard who asks those rescued from a sinking ship if they have anything to declare. He also gives the official account of a “terrible murder” on a train which concludes, “The assassin, after dispatching his victim, must have got out the wrong side of the train, thereby infringing the Company’s rules” (46). Bergson sees in humans a machine-like behaviour, a tendency which is an “irksome ballast” for “a soul eager to arise aloft” (50). The “ballast” might be official regulations, but it might also be the inflexible call of the physical self. Indeed, the strongest comic moment for Bergson is when “we are shown the soul tantalised by the needs of the body” (50). The body is the other, mechanical or automatic self that comes to us or arises within us, whether we consciously wish it to or not. The phallus becomes a prime example of the problem, in that it may become erect at an inappropriate moment, or fail to become erect at the appropriate moment. The phallus is a driving force of comedy precisely because it exists in problematic relation to the self. As Zupančič puts it, aside from sudden, unwanted

80  Sex Objects and Comic Objects arousal, the phallus may be “excluded, detached, or attached, annexed,” or, indeed, cut off (201). The penis comes to symbolise that mechanical other, that sense that “something of our life lives on its own” (215).6 Sexual object-ness, then, inspires a nervous reaction, a Hobbesian “glory” or “eminency” which is haunted by vulnerability. The object-ness of comedy puts us in mind of a power or responsiveness that undermines us, but that we fear to lose. We project that object-ness outwards, in laughing at and objectifying the other person. I want to add one further consideration here, before focusing on literature. Freud is particularly helpful for thinking about comedy because he discusses this process as nervousness around desire is deflected onto others in the form of objectification. In his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), he traces out many situations that can produce laughter, but he writes in particular about what he calls the “tendentious joke.” This is a joke that has a purpose. The tendentious joke is “either a hostile joke (serving the purpose of aggressiveness, satire, or defence) or an obscene joke (serving the purpose of exposure)” (140). Freud considers the obscene joke, or “smut,” at some length. He understands it, at its most basic, as a sexual comment directed at a person by whom one is excited. Smut was “originally directed [by men] towards women and may be equated with attempts at seduction” (140). In a civilised society we are expected to renounce direct sexual behaviour, to repress or to channel it. But, Freud writes, “to the human psyche all renunciation is exceedingly difficult, and so we find that tendentious jokes provide a means of undoing the renunciation and retrieving what was lost” (145). The rejected or renounced desire re-emerges as smut, which takes revenge on the persons or institutions that have forbidden us our pleasure. The tendentious joke is at the expense of the unwilling man or woman, or at the expense of the society that attempts to control our wishes. The joke reduces the other as a punishment for rejection. Freud offers us the example of an entry from a joke-book put together by Viennese artists: “A wife is like an umbrella – sooner or later one takes a cab.” Might we laugh that a person is suddenly reduced to that miscellaneous object, an umbrella? Is there some implicit sense that both wives and umbrellas are ridiculous objects? Perhaps there is a subliminal association between men sheltering under umbrellas and men seeking to get under women’s skirts? It would seem to be a clear example of Aristotelian belittlement, as the male artists laugh at how men may reduce and switch women around. Following Bergson, we might observe a collapsing of the human and the mechanical, in that the women are both women and machines (umbrellas, cabs). But men share in this condition of “something mechanical encrusted on the living,” in that they shelter under umbrellas and climb into cabs. The woman is a prosthetic extension of the man, and although the man is the one with choices, he is not completely free – he must, it seems, use the umbrella or take the cab. If we try to work out a logic to the joke, the wife would seem to be like an

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  81 umbrella in the sense that a man “makes do” with a modest object day after day, but once in a while he decides on something novel and luxurious. On this basis, the cab is a sex-worker or mistress, someone that one does not keep with one all the time, but who can be hired for a period and a purpose. These are the lines along which Freud himself explains the joke. For him, the umbrella is marriage. A man marries in order to solve the problem of the “temptations of sensuality,” much as he carries an umbrella to protect himself from the rain. Men will still take a cab, though, which is to say that “marriage does not allow the satisfaction of needs that are somewhat stronger than usual.” What the joke indicates above all is that, finally, “marriage is not an arrangement calculated to satisfy a man’s sexuality” (156). Freud observes that, in a civilised society, one must not speak of sensuality and the fact that marriage does not satisfy. The joke becomes the oblique and therefore acceptable way of expressing the frustrations of monogamy. Equally, taking up with Bergson again, the joke is more generally about our vulnerability to automatic selves, and especially to the sexual self. The Viennese artists’ joke makes all women, and not just the wife, objects of use. But surely the unspeakable aspect relates to the fact that the supposedly revered figure of the wife is placed on a level with the disposable figure of the sex-worker or mistress? The element of revenge lies in this. The woman whom the man must constantly carry around and support and love is suddenly no more than an umbrella or a hired person. We might change perspective here, and observe that marriage might not be “an arrangement calculated to satisfy a [woman’s] sexuality” either. Would the joke be funnier if it were more inclusive, if it did not isolate the wife as its victim? There can be no fixed answer to this. For some, it will be the specific affront to women that makes it funny. Freud has a great deal more to say – much of it contentious – about what laughter is and what produces it. Let’s here, though, turn to how comic writers explore this same nexus of sex objects and comic objects, and especially in relation to promiscuity. I want to argue that sexuality as objectification, and as impulse toward promiscuity, is often a source of comedy, but not necessarily in the neatly sexist way of the Viennese artists’ joke. Comedy is often troubled by its own operations and values; it needs to close down the very topics and sensations that it opens up. The texts in view here are Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 BC), Petronius’ Satyricon (1st C AD), and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534– 51). Although they are separated by centuries, by language, by genre, and by much else, they are all preoccupied with sex, objectification, promiscuity, and inclusivity. We might say that as the phallus was such an obvious feature of all old Greek or Attic comedy – a part of the costume – it becomes unremarkable. I want to focus, though, on a play in which comedy and the phallus are insistently in focus as topic and not just as an aspect of costume: Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. In Lysistrata, the phallus may signal the unruly or

82  Sex Objects and Comic Objects automatic aspect that is “encrusted” on the “living body,” but this sexual drive is common to the female characters as much as the male. Early in the play, Aristophanes presents us with a fussy, censorious magistrate who bemoans the sexual behaviour of men and women. Women are, according to the magistrate, wicked, but they are able to be wicked because men are naive. The magistrate’s evidence is a man who goes to the goldsmith to tell him that “the necklace you mended for my wife – she was dancing last night and the pin slipped out of the hole.” The husband tells the goldsmith to go round to his wife to “fit a pin in her hole.” Similarly, the magistrate tells of another man who goes to a well-endowed shoemaker and tells him, “the strap on my wife’s sandal is hurting her little toe… could you go over around lunchtime perhaps and loosen it up, make the opening a little wider?” (156–7). The joke here would seem to be at the expense of foolish husbands, who unwittingly set their wives up with virile artisans. But perhaps the humour fits a more generalised idea of Freud’s tendentious joke, in that the magistrate’s comments imply that women are inherently and indiscriminately promiscuous. In this way, the play ventures a comment that does not reflect or belong in civilised society. Aristophanes lifts the renunciation for us, says the unsayable, and incites laughter (because we are delighted to have the secret truth spoken at last), or provokes groans (because we disagree with these tired old prejudices). The joke, though, is also tendentious in that it is at the magistrate’s expense. He is shown to be a prim, ineffectual figure. The joke does not actually require us to believe that women are promiscuous, that middle-class men are fools, and that artisans are more virile. Rather it suggests that magistrates and others in authority fuss over things that are beyond their control and that do not matter anyway. The jokes about necklaces and sandals may be at the expense of respectable matrons, or their husbands, or magistrates. We could get locked into a hopeless argument here about who is the real victim of the joke. But perhaps the humour is more “flooded,” more alive to a general problem to do with the social order and its wishful fictions about human behaviour.7 Sex is the near-uncontrollable force that can make a mockery of the structures and values by which the characters pretend to live. Sex and comedy both become liberating elements, as the less powerful – women and artisans – take their revenge on those that otherwise dominate them. But at the same time, sexual hunger becomes a burden even for those that get to enjoy it – it is that cumbersome object for which one must find a place. Bearing in mind that the male actors were probably wearing large, obviously artificial, detachable penises, there is the sense that the phalloi exist between the characters – artisans and wives – and require urgent placing to the satisfaction of both. And, as Helen Foley reminds us, all the roles would have been played by men (260). As would have been well known to the audience, even the female characters have the inconvenient object for which a home must be found.

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  83 Aristophanes seems to write out of the same belief as Kant, that sex reduces us to a basic level of needs, with others cast as the objects or tools that we need to fulfil those needs. The wives do not choose the artisans, but they are happy to use them when they turn up. The artisans are equally happy to use and be used. The humour seems to lie in an acknowledgement of objectification as men and women are offered as things – pins, holes, organs, sandals. The sex that is often so intensely sought, and yet so often forbidden and awkward to get, becomes here a laughably simple matter of putting one thing into another. And as suggested above, the object-ness, the tendency towards mechanism, is shown to be commonly shared. Promiscuity, or at least the disposition towards it, is assumed in Lysistrata. This does not make for tragedy, social critique, or lamentations on the human condition. The promiscuous impulse threatens to make fools out of us, but we would be fools to worry about it too much. Unruly desire is oddly unifying, in that it is presented as a sign of our shared humanity. For all his tolerance, though, Aristophanes, as so many to follow him in the comic tradition, still sees a problem in the social scene that he describes. His play turns on the fact that if desire is indiscriminate, the social order can neither approve it nor control it. There is to be, it would seem, a constant tension or struggle. The sense of struggle features in several ways in Lysistrata. The little skirmishes between husbands, wives, and artisans to control or to escape control are reflected in large, in that the play is set during the seemingly endless war between the Athenians and the Spartans (the Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC and would not end until 404 BC; it followed closely on the first Peloponnesian War of 460–46 BC). But in comedy, at least, a solution can be found. Aristophanes chooses to join both his struggles together, and to propose that the solution to one will be the solution to the other. He writes of a situation in which the Athenian and the Spartan women alike are tired of war, and of the way that war has denied them a satisfactory life with their husbands. Their men are too often absent or distracted. Perhaps this also explains the fraying of sexual fidelities, as the wives take their pleasure with the artisans. The heroine, Lysistrata, brings the women of both sides together, and leads them to refuse to have sex with their respective husbands until they make peace. Her plan suggests the centrality of marriage to Greek life in spite of the philanderings with the artisans, in that her strategy shows results. The sex-starved men on both sides are soon having to hide their erections from each other as they try to conduct normal life. They are transfixed by the sight of “arse” and “pussy,” and again desire here is essentially objectifying and promiscuous, in that any “arse” or “pussy” will do. Lysistrata offers a series of broadly comic scenes. The warriors are humiliated by their unruly penises, and try to stand or to drape themselves so as not to show how the “spears” at their groins are getting in

84  Sex Objects and Comic Objects the way of discipline. The women are shown to be equally afflicted by desire. There are ironies and inconsistencies too. If the men are meant to be away fighting, how are the women supposed to effect a sexual boycott?8 Perhaps the suggestion is that when the men are finally able to leave the battlefield, and look to enjoy their wives, to be refused after a long absence makes their desperation all the greater. There is wishfulness, though, in this, the play’s founding premise. Greek men of citizen and warrior status did not only have sex within marriage. They had many other opportunities, most obviously with slaves, concubines, and sex-workers. Other Greek comedies, as scholars have pointed out, assume that men routinely have sex outside of marriage.9 The social assumptions of this play are benevolent. Similarly the women in Lysistrata have a strong sense of their rights, and are quick to claim them. But even women of the upper classes in ancient Greece had virtually no social and political rights. Aristophanes presents women who are powerful in spite of their lack of rights, which may at times have been the case in Greek life. But if adultery is laughed at in the play, in actuality an adulteress had to be divorced, and she was no longer permitted to enter temples. The laughter might contain a strong measure of anxiety. For all that Kant’s Lectures in Ethics and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata are very different reading experiences, Aristophanes engages with the same problem of objectification and object-ness in sex, and the implications that this has for the social order. Sexual desperation causes men and women to treat each other as the means to a very limited end, as objects or tools. This leads to the subversion of authority, as citizen’s wives and lowly artisans forge their own opportunistic alliances. It also leads to disorder in that warriors can no longer focus on war. All are disposed to grab at the passing opportunity, regardless of the consequences. This reduction to a base level is figured in the language, as desperate men talk to each other of wanting to “get down to some husbandry,” or rather, “wanting to get stuck into the muck” (188).10 But at the end Aristophanes shows husbands and wives reunited. The Athenian and the Spartan men make peace with each other so as to renew their lives with their wives. Monogamy, in Aristophanes as in Kant, is after all the social arrangement that creates – or allows the illusion of – a just and civilised social order. Comedy, in Lysistrata at least, allows for a reductive, indiscriminate, objectifying tendency in sex, with all the embarrassments and incongruities that follow. But the purpose is to re-engineer the human and the civilised. Husbands and wives are joined in peace at the end. Sex outside of marriage is, in the opening scenes, a secretive bumping in the dark. At the end, sex within marriage is publicly celebrated with songs to Aphrodite and Athena. All, happily paired off, depart together, with the same purpose at the same moment. Marriage has changed from a fragile fiction to the symbol of the harmonious, well-ordered state. The danger, surprises, embarrassments, and ridiculousness of sex are done away with.

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  85 The ending of Lysistrata is happy, but it is not funny. At this moment of renewed monogamy, of paired sexual intent, there is no need for the oblique statement or the tendentious joke, no threat of objectification or promiscuity. Society has, for the moment, become entirely speakable. So it would seem, at least. The seeming unity at the end of the play obscures the fact that the women have actually lost out. They have achieved their goal of peace, but as Andrew Bowie observes, “ironically what they also achieve is the restoration of that male control of the two areas of sexuality and politics which caused all their problems in the first place” (201). Also, the ongoing objectification underlying the happy ending is clear from the scene of peace-making between the Athenian and the Spartan men. Peace here is symbolised in the female figure of Reconciliation, and she remains silent and passive as the men divide her up. A Spartan indicates Reconciliation’s bottom and says, “We’re willing if ye’ll give us back this roond hill.” An Athenian replies, “Very well… give us these Prickly Bushes here, and the Malian Gulf behind them” (188).11 The happy ending seems at best flawed, and likely to be no more than momentary. It fits Matthew Bevis’s point that “comedies have to end fast, otherwise they may turn bad.” Happy endings are “always ironical,” always a trick that will be found out soon enough.12 *** Aristophanes engages the question that concerned Kant, that sex is inherently destabilising, promiscuous, and reductive of the individual to an object or a means to an end. Both, in their different ways, engineer solutions. Kant’s is simply that we must marry, and treat marriage as the granting of exclusive rights over each other. Aristophanes offers a more complex view. Sexual hunger and objectification are a negotiable fact in his world, as his characters must work through the push-pull of sex and social organisation. Lysistrata and her friends laugh at unruly desire even as they seek to bring it into line. The human lies in this territory – in recognising the problems and embarrassments, and trying, in one way and another, to manage them. Aristophanes confirms Simon Critchley’s point about humour, that it “recalls us to the modesty and limitedness of the human condition” (201). Comedy, in this view, is quietist. For all the aggression that Freud detects in sexual humour, the long-term tendency is toward settlement. Comedy is about the over-excitement and fearfulness of sex, its unbiddable, excessive aspect. Comedy reveals the promiscuous will that lies beneath the barely maintained social order. But comedy also releases and absorbs that excitement, and leads us back to normality. As Critchley also observes, for all that jokes and humour often rely on incongruity and disruption, they take us back to consensus, and status quo. Humour may be radical, or cruel, or conservative, but most of the time it “toys with existing social hierarchies in a charming

86  Sex Objects and Comic Objects but quite benign fashion” (11). Comedy relies on shared perception, on an ability to be “in on the joke.” But as Critchley is well aware, it can also be bleak, misanthropic, and damning. I want to explore this different possibility via a text that is notoriously scabrous (both in the sense of “indecent” and “harsh”), Petronius’ Satyricon. Petronius allows us to pursue further the theme of objectification and promiscuity. But as he does so, he unfolds a different sense of the comic. Although there are fewer large fake penises in the Satyricon than in Lysistrata, the sexual and comic object in question is again, as we will see, the phallus. Petronius wrote his novel at the court of Nero, and ever since the “Petronian” has been a byword for the grand scene of depravity.13 The title does not indicate satire, but “the doings of satyrs,” or “a recital of lecherous happenings,” so we might expect a series of grotesque sexual incidents.14 Unfortunately only an eighth of the Satyricon survives (sections 14 to 16 of a narrative that probably ran to 24 sections).15 The satyrs in question are two students, Encolpius and Ascyltus. They are accompanied by Encolpius’ boyfriend-cum-servant, the beautiful 16-year-old Giton. The names hint at an objectifying lust, and give away the knock-about comic world we have entered. Encolpius suggests on or concerned with the lap or groin; Giton means “neighbour,” but “neighbours” was a familiar euphemism for the testicles; Ascyltus means “unwearied,” but again with a strong hint of a sexual sense.16 This is, in several ways, a Priapic narrative, in that it features the god Priapus, and it revolves extensively around sex, penises, and impotence. Priapus was a minor god of fertility who was identified by his enormous penis. He became very popular in Rome from the first century BC. Romans put statues of him in their gardens, supposedly warning off those who would come in and steal the fruit. A number of priapic poems survive which might have featured as inscriptions on the statues, in which Priapus threatens sexual humiliation to robbers of the gardens.17 The poems are an obvious form of Freud’s tendentious joke, in that Priapus confronts people with the unspeakable wishes that – he claims – he inspires in them with his massive penis. Craig Williams characterises Priapus as “something like the patron saint or mascot of Roman machismo, and his vigorous exploits with women, boys, and men indiscriminately are clearly a mainstay of his hyper-masculine identity” (18). While Priapus is in this sense a fearsome figure, he is also always potentially something of a joke, or the cause of one. He speaks the poem or epigram, threatening sexual subjection to his large penis. But he is a ridiculous figure, all the more laughable for the fact that he cannot enact any of his threats. He remains on his plinth, an aroused little man who cannot move, who will never find fulfilment. Petronius deploys Priapus to a related comic effect. He uses Priapus as part of a parody of Homer and the Odyssey. In the Odyssey the hero is persecuted by the great god Poseidon; the Satyricon gives us Homeric epic in ridiculous miniature,

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  87 as Encolpius is persecuted by Priapus.18 We should not see Priapus as only a joke. As Williams reminds us, for the Romans he was a fetish object. People would pay tribute to him in hopes of being rewarded with pleasure and fertility. He has this dual role in the Satyricon. He is a minor deity, worshipped by eccentrics, but he is still supposed to have the fearsome power of granting or removing men’s potency. After Encolpius upsets followers of Priapus, he finds himself afflicted with impotence. Much of the story revolves around his offences against the god Priapus, and his desperate attempts to regain his sexual powers. Petronius’ translator’s best guess as to the whole story of the Satyricon is that it begins in Marseilles, where Encolpius is engaged to be married. After a series of misadventures, during which he incurs the wrath of Priapus, he leaves the city by ship. While on board, he robs the captain, Lichas, and seduces his wife, Hedyle, and also their woman friend, Tryphaena. From Tryphaena he steals the beautiful slave, Giton, with whom he will also have sex. After coming by some gold, Encolpius and Giton meet up with Ascyltus, and arrive in the Bay of Naples. There they meet Quartilla, a priestess of Priapus, and for the second time Encolpius challenges the god’s patience by desecrating his tomb.19 The surviving text begins with the three – Encolpius, Ascyltus, and Giton – in the Bay of Naples. Encolpius, as student and teacher, goes to the School of Rhetoric. On leaving, he gets lost in the unfamiliar town, and asks an old woman to take him to his lodging. Whether by mistake or by design, she takes him to a brothel instead, where he meets his friend, Ascyltus. The old woman’s directions epitomise the world Encolpius and his friend have entered. In the heated, pell-mell society on the Bay of Naples, all incidents veer toward sexual activity. The whole town is in a frenzy, as if the populace had been “devouring aphrodisiacs” (6). Encolpius and Ascyltus make their escape from the brothel and find their lodging. Giton is there, but he is crying. The boy reveals that while Encolpius was out, Ascyltus tried to take advantage of him. The two students argue, and there is some suggestion in their argument that the two of them have taken a sexual turn together in the past. We soon begin to see that Petronius presents a world of extreme, casual, and various sexual appetites, and of frequent and passing contacts. Encolpius stands out against this cynical and manipulative sexual regime, in that he loves Giton. But his love with Giton will always be disrupted by events, and by his own foolishness. On this occasion, Encolpius gets rid of Ascyltus and begins to make love to Giton, only for Ascyltus to burst back in with a strap and beat the naked Encolpius, shouting, “This will teach you to share with your brother!” (8) Soon Giton will abandon Encolpius for Ascyltus, then return to Encolpius, while Encolpius and Ascyltus, and all three stumble through a series of ludicrous events. So the incident begins with Encolpius’ desire to get home to love, but he is led astray, and taken to the brothel. But the distinctions between brothel, home, and all other places seem far from secure.

88  Sex Objects and Comic Objects Encolpius’ desire for a romantic “home” with Giton seems absurd. This is partly because Encolpius, as his name suggests, is too centred in his groin to make much of a home with anyone. Petronius will make fun  – of a rather painful kind – of Encolpius and of the fact that Encolpius is never in control either of his own penis or of other people. Even as he passes through a series of promiscuous adventures, he will be object more than subject, and especially at the hands of women. This is a world in which people live through and by the penis, but those who have them are as awkwardly placed as those who do not. We see this in the next episode. Encolpius and Ascyltus have resolved their differences, but Quartilla, the priestess of Priapus, arrives to seek some redress from them. The men have disturbed a sacred ritual, which, given the god concerned is Priapus, probably means they disturbed a sexual scene of some kind. Although Quartilla claims to be concerned for them, and worried about the punishment that may fall on them for their offence against Priapus, the implication is that she wishes to make sure of their silence by inducting them into the same rites. The men are taken to Quartilla’s lodgings, where they are plied with aphrodisiacs. Encolpius tells how suddenly a cinaedus appeared, “wrenched our buttocks apart and forced his way in, and then besmirched us with the foulest of stinking kisses, until Quartilla, wielding a whalebone ferula and lifting her skirts high, gave the order for our release from our unhappy service” (15). Seemingly not exactly wanting this service, but unable to resist, they are then rubbed down with oil and given wine and a feast. They begin to fall asleep, but Quartilla will not allow that, because “a night’s vigil is owed to the guiding spirit of Priapus” (16). The text is fragmentary at this point, but the “vigil” clearly involves various further sexual indignities in the midst of servants and other guests. Ascyltus finally nods off and has his face painted in soot and his body in scarlet, while another cinaedus labours “long and hard over [Encolpius’] parts,” but can get no response. Quartilla turns to Giton and decrees that he and her maidservant should lose their virginity together. Encolpius protests that Giton is “an extremely modest lad, not up to such wanton behaviour,” and that the girl is not old enough to “take the woman’s role.” Quartilla replies that she was no younger when she first submitted to a man. So a youth of sixteen who has been the lover of several men is to attempt intercourse with a girl of seven, who has no objection. They are put in a chamber apart, while Quartilla looks through a chink to spy on their “youthful sport.” She draws Encolpius to her side to watch, and to be felt up in his turn (18–9). Quartilla’s orgy takes the form of a nightmare. She takes ferocious joy in presiding over a scene in which older men make love to younger men. The younger men prefer youths and women, and do not want the older men but find themselves unable to resist. A youth and a child are sent off to experiment with each other. The scene is so degraded, so immersed in potions and oils and alcohol, that it takes on an air of unreality, of

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  89 phantasmagoria. There is again obvious objectification here, but it is more complex than men objectifying women. The male figures are central because they have penises, but as Zupančič might observe, their penises seem oddly “detached” or “annexed” or “autonomous.” The men may experience pleasure, but they do not own or control it. This sense of comedy consisting in being estranged from one’s most intimate parts and capabilities is affirmed later in the novel when, having again offended Priapus and struck once more with impotence, Encolpius seeks a cure from an old woman and her priestess friend, Oenethea. The priestess, whose name signifies that she is a “wine-goddess,” or at least a drunkard, tries to reverse his fortune. She uses auguries and spells, and at this point Encolpius must endure another experience with a “detached” or “annexed” penis: a part of Oenethea’s treatment is to sprinkle a leather phallus with oil, ground pepper, and nettle-seeds and to insert it “by degrees up [his] backside” (142). She also sprays Encolpius’ own genitals with the peppery oil and beats them with the nettles. In the process, it is the old woman and Oenethea who become potent or aroused. Encolpius decides to give up on this “cure,” and he runs away. Quartilla’s and Oenethea’s rites are depraved, and yet they are to be accepted. People must order their lives around the prime sexual object which is the phallus, whether it is their own or another’s. Desire, figured in Priapus, must be served as though it were separate from individuals and their wishes. And this extreme phallic order, paradoxically, enables women such as Quartilla and Oenethea to become powerful over men. These women have found ways to serve Priapus, and to wield fearsome phallic objects, while Encolpius must rely on his own relatively modest and unreliable penis. In the Satyricon, everyone, momentarily at least, may own the phallus, and everyone takes it in and shares it among the group. We see this in the scene of Trimalchio’s feast, in which an enormous pastry phallus is served. Whether one has a phallus, or one is having it forced up one’s backside, or one is enjoying it as a sweetness taken willingly into one’s mouth, the object that represents sexual pleasure is never finally owned. There is objectification and promiscuity here, but is there comedy? Do we laugh? The scenes of the Satyricon allow for laughter as belittlement, for a Hobbesian sense of “glory” or “eminency” over the students and what happens to them. Perhaps we are nervously entertained, aroused, and appalled by turns. We are still in a comic realm in that no one, it would seem, is really hurt and nobody dies. The comedy in Petronius certainly invokes Freud’s tendentious joke, in that Encolpius wants a home and love, but he is constantly reminded that neither he nor anyone else is capable of the consistency and renunciation that this would involve. Equally, Encolpius affirms Bergson’s idea, taken in a sexual direction by Zupančič, that the self is not unified and self-regulating, that it has ticks, compulsions, and autonomous dispositions; it is this that makes us ludicrous. But the vision here is bleak. Encolpius is never far from

90  Sex Objects and Comic Objects despair, and there is no escape for us into a happy ending, ironical or otherwise. Perhaps we find a rueful humour in recognising, finally and honestly, the depravity to which people may sink. There is no sense of moral improvement in the future, but there is a grim satisfaction in seeing things as they are. It is an anguished enjoyment, which is frequently a feature of satire. As Geoffrey Grigson expressed it, “satire postulates an ideal condition of man or decency, and then despairs of it; and enjoys the despair masochistically” (Bevis 92). Centuries of editors and translators have seen the Satyricon rather differently. They have insisted that Petronius is in fact offering us a satire in the sense of a narrative which will improve us by making us avoid the same follies. Or they have thought that we could only be disgusted by the Satyricon, or that if we are not, we ourselves are depraved. Disapproval of any kind of pleasure associated with Petronius led editors to censor and bowdlerise the Satyricon up to and through most of the twentieth century. Often, anthologists would reprint moral segments of the novel, but not the context in which those morals are ironised. 20 A similarly redemptive approach was to explain that a writer such as Petronius is offering a satirical narrative that attempts to undermine the regime in which it is set. So Petronius does not wallow in Neronian depravity, but rather he exposes it to view. His moral intent is all the more clear for the parallel to Homer’s Odyssey. The parody of the Odyssey, some scholars would have us believe, is not an irreverential game with the great Homer, but a moral lesson showing how we should aspire to the values of the past. 21 This interpretation gives us as readers a slightly more respectable position. The suggestion is that, with satire of this kind, we and our author are at a distance from the world that is being described. We measure and judge over the course of our laughter; we are not involved. Petronius would surely see all such self-distancing as priggish delusion. He grants us the scopophilic pleasure of looking at scandalous behaviour while not being looked at, and we take the opportunity. 22 The world of the Satyricon may be appalling, but we are not to suppose ourselves any better. What we see in the criticism of the Satyricon, though, is that when comedy does not close down the problems that it thrives upon, it ceases to be admissible as comedy. As centuries of scholarship have told us, either we must not read Petronius, or at the least, we really ought not to laugh. 23 *** I want to end this exploration of promiscuity, objectification, and comedy with a great student of the ancients, François Rabelais (1490–1553). Rabelais lived in an age in which the church was fearful about the learning of Greek, because they were afraid that reading the ancients would reveal and give momentum to alternative thinking. Rabelais was a man of the church, but he learned Greek all the same, and was an admirer

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  91 of Aristophanes. He wrote in Greek and Latin, and translated some Roman texts into French. In his first poem written in French rather than in one of the ancient languages, he describes himself as an “Homme de grans lettres grècques et latines.”24 If “Petronian” indicates scenes of grand depravity, “Rabelaisian” indicates gorging on meat, drink, and sex. Rabelais seems to fit in this tradition of komastic or Dionysian excess. He is known for the large comic object which is Gargantua and Pantagruel – over 600 pages in most editions and 1,800 pages in the scholarly Gallimard edition – a novel that takes up the problems that we have already encountered. Rabelais too uses comedy to approach ideas of objectification and promiscuity, and he also takes forward the idea that comedy thrives on masochistic tensions at the heart of selfhood. Further, he again indicates the move in comedy – seen more in Aristophanes than in Petronius – from opening up tensions to containing them or closing them down. Rabelais seems at the very start to affirm the idea noted earlier that whatever disruptions comedy might conjure up for us, it has a baseline of consensus. From the “Author’s Prologue” of Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which Rabelais salutes us as “noble boozers” and “esteemed and poxy friends” (41), we are immersed in a boorishly companionable realm. Our narrator offers himself as a simple, jolly fellow, and he includes us in his hugger-mugger male community. This is a world in which all men are assumed to move well beyond polite ideals of behaviour. Rabelais presents a world of spontaneous plenty, in which there is always a spilling over of physical and material abundance. And in Rabelais, as much as in Petronius, this excess is Priapic. Rabelais explores the theme with a supreme Priapic object, his hero’s cod-piece, which he describes with explicit reference to ancient mythology. To cover Gargantua’s genitals, the cod-piece needs to be so large that it takes 24 yards of blue damask to make. It is superbly decorated with an emerald the size of an orange, and other beautiful details: But if you had seen the fine wire-thread embroidery, and the charming plaiting in gold-work, set with rich diamonds, precious rubies, rare turquoises, magnificent emeralds, and Persian pearls, you would have compared it to one of those grand Horns of Plenty that you see on ancient monuments, one such as Rhea gave to the two nymphs Adrastea and Ida, the nurses of Jupiter. For it was always brave, sappy, and moist, always green, always flourishing, always fructifying, full of humours, full of flowers, full of fruit, full of every delight. I swear to God it was a pleasure to look at! (55) Even the hard, precious stones are imbued with life, in that Rabelais soon tells us that emeralds have an “erective virtue” and are “encouraging to the natural member.”25 The “sappy” and “moist” quality of the

92  Sex Objects and Comic Objects design, it is implied, signals the quality of Gargantua’s genitals. In case we are in any doubt, Rabelais subsequently assures us that the cod-piece is “well furnished” and “well victualled” within (55). Gargantua is not just his Horn or his sex; he represents a more general appetite and swallowing (his name is close to the popular Latin gorga for throat and so to the French, la gorge, and the Spanish la garganta). He is the prime figure of abundance; of an involuntary throwing off of sap, greenness and fruitfulness; of inexhaustible consumption and renewed production; and of simultaneous and never-ending spring and harvest. He embodies and symbolises desire and reproduction as endlessly selfgenerating. Gargantua’s Horn is not for any one person; it is “brave,” “sappy,” and “moist” simply in its presence in the world. There is an availability, a transferability in this Horn, signalled in the reference to ancient mythology, and the fact that it was Jupiter’s mother, Rhea, who gave the Horn of Plenty to the nymphs to feed the infant God. This sense is also present in the scenes from Gargantua’s infancy, as he is attended by a team of governesses whom he feels up and who rub his cod-piece between their hands “like a roll of pastry.” The Horn of Plenty is treated as an object in itself, as though it were detachable from Gargantua, and available to be passed around between the governesses. It is imagined as something good to eat, but as many other things too. Each governess gives it a different name, each name with different connotations, from the playful to the sporting, the aesthetic, the vigorous, the pathetic, the sadistic, and the laughable. They name it pillicock, ninepin, coral-branch, stopper, cork, quiverer, driving-pin, auger, dingle-dangle, rough-go stiffand-low, crimping iron, little red sausage, and sweet little cocky (63). If Gargantua’s genitals are imagined in some detail, we are not heading towards a life of triumphant promiscuity. For all that his penis and its housing are given such attention in the early pages, Gargantua does not have a detailed sexual career. He wins battles and becomes a wise ruler after a comic fashion, and fathers Pantagruel. The place of sex is much more to the fore in Pantagruel than in Gargantua. Rabelais seems to continue the idea of endless appetite and potency with Pantagruel, in that his name means “all thirsty.” A giant like his father, as a baby Pantagruel has cows for wet-nurses. But the books named for Pantagruel are actually more given over to Panurge, his friend and follower. Panurge’s name also is descriptive of his character. Aside from alluding to the Greek mythological man-goat, Pan, it is a bringing together of the Greek prefix pan-, meaning all or entirely, and urge, a Latin verb meaning to press, desire, or compel. Panurge soon manifests this all-embracing impulse in his talk. Many of his anecdotes and imaginings turn on his own promiscuous adventures. But they are hardly the celebration of sex suggested by the description of Gargantua’s cod-piece. They are rather more tendentious in the Freudian sense – full of insult, and underwritten by spite. When, for instance, Pantagruel and Panurge are walking towards the suburbs to visit a brothel, Panurge suggests that walls ought to be built of

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  93 female genitals with an interlacing of stiff penises, to make the same fine lozenge pattern as on the great tower of the cathedral at Bourges. His reasoning is that women hold their virtue so cheap that it is less expensive to make the walls out of their parts than out of stone. Panurge also reasons that his wall of vaginas will give cannonballs the pox. Panurge projects the same endless sexual potency as suggested by Gargantua’s Horn of Plenty, but he lacks credibility, and is rather closer to the boastful but powerless little statues of Priapus. His claims are shot through with arrogance and anxiety. When Pantagruel objects to Panurge’s comments on the looseness of women, observing that there are “many modest and chaste women” in Paris, Panurge replies that he has “stuffed” 419 of them in the nine days that he has been in the town (219). Similarly, when told of an army with “a hundred and fifty thousand whores, as fair as goddesses,” Panurge worries about how he can “manage to roger all those whores there this afternoon.” As for the battle with this army, Panurge exclaims that his “cod-piece alone will sweep all the men down,” while the contents of the cod-piece will deal with the women (253). He later boasts that if women are “insatiable,” he has “an indefatigable instrument of the same character” (363). He is better than “those fornicating paragons Hercules, Proculus, Caesar, and Mahomet” (364). Panurge is driven to say all. He does not observe polite renunciation, but rather his speech is endlessly tendentious in the sense elaborated by Freud. But of course Panurge does not really have the potency that he claims. In contrast to Gargantua’s authentically well-filled cod-piece, Panurge puts a piece of fruit in his (234). At times, his boasting falls to one side, and a nervousness comes to the fore. He admits that he wants to get married, but is afraid of being cuckolded. In spite of his earlier comments on the cheapness of the women of Paris, he believes in the idea of “some honourable and virtuous woman” (312) who will save him from the perils of adultery (the perils are violent husbands and sexually transmitted infection or “the pox”). Pantagruel encourages Panurge to marry, but Panurge continues to veer between his myth of himself as the irresistible champion of promiscuous sex and his fear that he cannot engage the affections of any woman for very long. In Panurge we find a desperation and a fear of belittlement that seems central to comedy and to Rabelais’ idea of sex. With Gargantua and his legendary and beautiful cod-piece, we have an image of sex as an endless potency that is identified with the phallus, but which exists in the world as a natural fact, rather than being the sole property of men. But this idea of sex is counterbalanced by Panurge, with his anxiety and his defensiveness. In this comedy, we again get the phallic vaunting which is undermined by fears of collapse. We again get gentler, sadder truths, and a sense, to use Critchley’s phrase once more, of the “modesty and limitedness of the human condition.” We see this laughter-in-pathos also in the account of the giant Gargantua’s birth. His mother, Gargamelle, carried him for 11 months, a fact which leads Rabelais into a lengthy

94  Sex Objects and Comic Objects discussion, with references to Hippocrates and others, on how a child born 11 months after the husband’s death is deemed legitimate. This takes us, in turn, into a jocose ramble on sexual opportunism: [O]n the strength of which laws [on the child’s legitimacy eleven months after the husband’s death,] widows may play at the closebuttock game with all their might and at every free moment, for two months after their husbands’ decease. So I beg of you, all my fine lechers, if you find any of these same widows worth the trouble of untying your cod-piece, mount them and [then] bring them to me. For if they conceive in the third month, their issue will be the dead man’s legal heir; and once the pregnancy is public they may push boldly on, full sail ahead, since the hold is full, after the example of Julia, daughter of Emperor Octavian, who never gave herself up to her belly-drummers unless she knew she was pregnant, after the manner of a ship, which does not take on her pilot until she is caulked and loaded. (43) Rabelais presents sex here as a straightforward pleasure that is hemmed in with laws and proprieties, but that most men and women will take when they can get it. It is undignified, but these men and women will not allow a sense of dignity to spoil their fun, and Rabelais does not trouble to castigate Julia for her promiscuity. We might see this as a frank and earthy understanding of sex. But is it actually frankness to use graphic euphemisms – “rubbing their bacon together,” “belly-drummers,” “the close-buttock game” – to refer to intercourse? Or does it evoke the potential embarrassments of sex? Is not this seeming frankness actually a nervous excess, an insistence on simplifying images, precisely because sex has elements of strangeness and unpredictability? To describe intercourse as “belly-drumming” is to make it straightforward and unthreatening, when it may be desperately intense, or humiliating. 26 There is a fear or sorrow that has been thrown off in crudeness, and we begin to see that – as in parts of the Satyricon – we are subject to, almost victims of, sex. The topsy-turvy nature of the sexual event – pleasurable, mechanical, wishful, liberatory – is contained in his final image. The immensely powerful emperor’s daughter “gives herself up” to be “drummed” and “piloted” by men, and yet the men are ridiculous, each a tiny pilot mounting the enormous ship that is woman. All parties are empowered, and reduced. Rabelais laughs at all this, but he sees it as human and as deserving of sympathy. There is the sympathy that leads the characters to understand and want to supply each other’s pleasure, and also sympathy for the humiliation that is implicit in the pleasure. Sex here provokes a slightly cruel laughter, but also pity. If Rabelais is not especially interested in sex, and does not address promiscuity at any length, he nonetheless prefers an idea of desire as a

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  95 generalised and open-ended fecundity rather than a pining and singular devotion. Sex, as in Aristophanes and Petronius, is casual, opportunistic, and vital. There is an added complexity with Rabelais, however, in that this view of sex infuses his practice as an author. As with the long list of names given by the governesses to Gargantua’s cod-piece, there is a procreative urge in the writing itself, as words and descriptions spin endlessly on, with one thing begetting another, and on again. Rabelais more or less invites us to see his linguistic inventiveness – this endless passing embrace of millions of sounds and syllables – as related to sex. He has been considered “too weak and impotent” to be a soldier in a time of war, so he will drink and write. If he is endlessly writing because he is otherwise “impotent,” the writing itself becomes a kind of potency. The “cask” of his stories will, like Panurge’s penis, be “inexhaustible,” and like Gargantua’s Horn of Plenty it will be “endowed with a living spring and a perpetual flow” (286). This urge to prolixity is more firmly attached to sexual performance in the epithets that Panurge gives to testicles. Taking off from the thought of his friend Friar John’s couillon or “ball-bag,” Panurge enumerates types of “ball-bag,” from stumpy to lumpy, dumpy, milky, silky, veined, confident, hammered, stuffed, swollen, polished, brazil-wood, and so on, and so on, through 157 labels. The thought of Friar John’s couillon leads him to this lengthy verbal display, which is ridiculous, surprising, and impressive. But if the male generative organs symbolise and inspire feats of creativity, the same performance is haunted by a despondent list two chapters later, as Panurge worries about being cuckolded. In the second list, of 160 epithets, the ball-bag is faded, jaded, mildewed, cowardly, cowed, dispirited, eunuchized, blighted, thrashed, weather-beaten, and so on. As Terence Cave observes in his study of Rabelais, the myth of the Horn of Plenty or cornucopia “always presages a fall” (183). The phallic productivity of the first list “will sooner or later begin to appear… as an emptying out, or mere flux or repetition.” Panurge’s promiscuous imagination, or his “desire to maximise his sexual activities,” leads towards impotence. The “vigour” of the first list of couillons is fated to end in the “debility” of the second one (189–90). Similarly, Rabelais’ activity as a writer is a form of potency that faces up to and anticipates a final silence. Rabelais takes up familiar ideas of objectification and promiscuity, and makes familiar comic fun out of them. The emphasis is on the anxious or crestfallen self that casts up glorious images and histories, but that is more profoundly aware of disappointment and failure. We saw this self in Encolpius in the Satyricon, but here there is sympathy for the anxious and failing self, and a sense that depletion and failure are an inevitable fate. The masochistic glee with which we might read the Satyricon becomes here a gentle regret. Rabelais dares to enter and explore the Priapic imagination, and to do so with an eye to what it tries to ignore or suppress. The most powerful twentieth-century reader of Rabelais, the

96  Sex Objects and Comic Objects Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, saw Rabelais precisely in this light. Rabelaisian laughter, for Bakhtin, is defined by its moments of pensiveness, its awareness of the limits of existence. Rabelais recalls from Aristotle that “only man is endowed with laughter,” and comedy is a force that “heals and regenerates” and “aids the regulation of life” (68, 70). There is a degradation in comedy, but according to Bakhtin, Rabelais shows that to “degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better” (21). Bakhtin’s Rabelais is he who celebrates fecundity, who lavishes attention on Gargantua’s Horn of Plenty. Bakhtin loves the promiscuous mode of the Rabelaisian grotesque, in which “inner movement” is always “passing from one form into another,” producing a “freedom of artistic fantasy,” a “laughing libertinage” (31–2). Bakhtin wants finally to emphasise the Rabelaisian body as endlessly productive, as “always conceiving” (21). To do this, as others have pointed out, Bakhtin must forget about the abject body, the – to borrow the adjectives applied to Friar John’s couillon – faded, jaded, mildewed, dispirited body.27 There is an attempt in Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais to close down the range of movement, to limit it to the positive terms, when humour actually depends on the co-presence of both. The tension or oscillation between positive and negative terms, finally, is where the discomfort lies, and where the comedy comes from. We reach a point at which the discomfort is no longer a pleasure. We need to step out of the comic dynamic altogether. At some point, as Aristophanes suggested, if we are to be happy, we must stop laughing. The chapter has shown that object-ness, objectification, and actual or potential promiscuity are central to comedy. Object-ness is an uncomfortable fact for all, and for precisely this reason, it becomes the means through which writers work towards ideas of the human, and of sympathetic identification. That said, the discussion has been one in which male voices and masculine images predominate. Even if myths of phallic power have been ironised and made fun of, we have still been moving through a preponderantly phallic realm. The next chapter, though, is closer to Chapter 2 in that it shows how a woman writer takes account of a largely male tradition and moves beyond it into new territory.

Notes

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  97







98  Sex Objects and Comic Objects struck or visited “down there” or on the groin (“der darauf geschlagene”), which fits with Encolpius’ recurrent problems with impotence (447).



















Works Cited Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Aristophanes. Birds and Other Plays, translated by Stephen Halliwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. Lysistrata and Other Plays, translated by Alan H. Sommerstein. London: Penguin, 2002. Aristotle. Poetics. LCL: 199. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. LCL: 19. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswoldsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Sex Objects and Comic Objects  99 Barber, Michael. The Captain: The Life and Times of Simon Raven. London: Duckworth, 1996. Beard, Mary. Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan, 1911. Berlant, Lauren. “Humorlessness (Three Monologues and a Hairpiece).” Critical Enquiry, vol. 43, Winter 2017, pp. 305–40. Bevis, Matthew. Comedy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bowie, Andrew. Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Connors, Catherine. Petronius the Poet: Verse and Literary Tradition in the Satyricon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Cooper, Richard. “Rabelais’s neo-Latin writings.” Neo-Latin and the Vernacular in Renaissance France, edited by Grahame Castor and Terence Cave. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, pp. 49–70. Cornford, F. M. The Origins of Attic Comedy. London: Arnold, 1914. Critchley, Simon. On Humour. London: Routledge, 2002. Csapo, Eric, and Margaret C. Miller, eds. The Origins of the Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Dover, K. J. Aristophanic Comedy. London: Batsford, 1972. Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. London: The Women’s Press, 1981. Foley, Helen. “Performing Gender in Greek Old and New Comedy.” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, edited by Martin Revermann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 259–74. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, edited and translated by James Strachey and Angela Richards. London: Penguin, 1991. Halliwell, Stephen. Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Harrison, S. J. Oxford Readings in the Roman Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Henderson, Jeffrey H. The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Hooper, Richard W. The Priapus Poems: Erotic Epigrams from Ancient Rome. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Kant, Immanuel. Lectures on Ethics, edited by Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925. Lowe, N. J. Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

100  Sex Objects and Comic Objects Maass, E. “Eunuchos und Verwandtes.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, vol. 74 (1925), pp. 432–66. McGurl, Mark. “Gigantic Realism: The Rise of the Novel and the Comedy of Scale.” Critical Enquiry, vol. 43, Winter 2017, pp. 403–30. Morgan, J. R. “Petronius and Greek Literature.” In Prag and Redpath, Petronius: A Handbook, pp. 16–31. Nussbaum, Martha C. Sex and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Petronius. The Satyricon, edited and translated by P. G. Walsh. Oxford: Oxford University Press-World’s Classics, 1997. Plato. Timaeus and Critias, translated by Desmond Lee. London: Penguin, 1977. Plattard, Jean. L’Oeuvre de Rabelais (Sources, Invention et Composition). Paris: H. Champion, 1910. Plaza, Maria. Laughter and Derision in Petronius’ Satyrica: A Literary Study. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 2000. Rabelais, François. The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, translated by J. M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1955. ———. Oeuvres complètes, edited by Mireille Huchon. Paris: Éditions Gallimard-NRF, 1994. Revermann, Martin. Comic Business: Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and the Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Richlin, Amy. “Callirhoe: Displaying the Phallic Woman.” Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, edited by Amy Richlin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 212–30. ———. The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. “Sex in the Satyrica: Outlaws in Literatureland.” In Prag and Redpath, Petronius: A Handbook, pp. 65–81. Slater, Niall W. “Reading the Satyrica.” Petronius: A Handbook, edited by Jonathan Prag and Ian Redpath. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Stone, Laura M. Costume in Aristophanic Comedy. Salem: Ayer, 1984. Sullivan, J. P. The Satyricon of Petronius: A Literary Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. Tacitus. The Annals of Tacitus, translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb. London: Macmillan, 1882. West III, James L., ed. Trimalchio: An Early Version of “The Great Gatsby.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Zweig, Bella. “The Mute Nude Female Characters in Aristophanes’ Plays.” Pornography and Representation in Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Amy Richlin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 73–89.

4

Libertine Ethics

We may think of the libertine as an eighteenth-century figure – Casanova (1725–98), the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), the aristocratic seducers of Dangerous Liaisons (1782). The word, though, has renewed currency in twenty-first century France. An internet search will produce hundreds of listings for “libertine clubs,” “libertine saunas,” and “libertine zones.” The search will also reveal reviews of all the different clubs within a city or region, and “practical guides” as to what to expect and how to behave in libertine places. The guides stress ethics alongside practicalities. What might be assumed to be a free-for-all turns out to be governed by strongly held values. So, for instance, the nervous explorer who wonders if it is “acceptable not to fuck in a libertine club” is assured in capitals, “YES,” with the explanation that “consent is king.” But the same nervous person is also told that it is not okay to act as though you were “in a zoo.” You should not stare at people, while keeping yourself aloof, unless, that is, you are in a part of the club that is designed for exhibitionist and voyeurist exchange.1 If we put eighteenth-century libertinism next to that of the present day, we will find gulfs in values, perception, and behaviour. The eighteenthcentury libertine is most obviously an upper-class sexual predator. But he or she is not promiscuous simply because he or she has a strong sex drive and plenty of opportunity. The libertine of the eighteenth century is often using sex to express contempt for the hypocrisies of society and religion. This libertine is armed with philosophical and ethical justifications for his or her manipulative (at times, violent) behaviour. Every conquest is an act of truthfulness; every conquest is nature rebelling successfully against convention. The libertine seducer proves to his or her victim that virtue is just a pretence that nature, sooner or later, will overcome. In twenty-first century libertine clubs, on the other hand, there can be no ethical justification for manipulation or force. It is about choice and pleasure, and not about using others to prove a point about one’s own freedom or independence. In entering the libertine club, all have declared themselves beyond the usual rules, and all must be assumed to be equally enlightened. One thinks again of Millet’s finding in such places an atmosphere of “reciprocal freedom,” in which the reigning spirit is that of “unassuming civility” (48, 139).

102  Libertine Ethics This chapter does not seek to bridge the gulfs between eighteenthcentury and present-day libertinism. It traces out the history of the term, pausing in particular in the eighteenth century. The eventual goal is to see how a later writer, Colette (1873–1954), engages with the tradition of libertinism, and uses the term and the tradition to explore her own thinking about fidelity, promiscuity, and ethics. *** The word libertine is Latin in origin; it means “made free.” A libertine was a slave who had been freed by his master. From the outset, the term denotes freedom and entitlement, but it contains within it the reminder of its opposite: the libertine is a free man who is not far removed from slavery. Libertine comes into use again in the sixteenth century in a religious context. Christian theologian John Calvin, among others, condemned as libertine those who had moved beyond orthodoxy. The word, then, comes to indicate free-thinking in religious matters. Soon, though, this free-thinking is associated with a more generalised abandonment of discipline and convention. We see a twinned moral and sexual rebellion in the most famous libertine of all, Don Juan. Although he has become a byword for the sexual adventurer, his prime motivation was not so much erotic pleasure as the desire to make fun of and unmask hypocrisy. Don Juan was invented by Spanish dramatist and monk, Tirso de Molina (1579–1648), who made him the protagonist of The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest (1630).2 Don Juan tricks women into having sex with him, but it is the women’s fake virtue that makes them vulnerable. He is as much a satirical figure as a sexual one – he exploits and exposes social falsehood. The play seems to assert an obvious moral scheme – Don Juan is wicked, and he will be dragged down to hell – but perhaps it is more finely balanced. For all that Don Juan is shown to be scheming and promiscuous, we may well enjoy his satirical energy, and we may well appreciate the way that the play reveals the cynicism that lies under a moral surface. Tirso’s Seville is populated with pompous aristocrats who are obsessed with brothels and sex-workers. The playwright may have punished his seducer, but his critique of society-at-large was obvious. The play was soon banned, and Tirso was sent into exile. It was too late, though, to contain the dangerous, fascinating libertine. Don Juan rapidly became tremendously popular across Europe. Not long after the play’s first publication, there were five versions doing the rounds of the French theatres, while in England Thomas Shadwell’s version, called The Libertine (1675), was also a hit. There were to be hundreds of versions across Europe in the following decades, and they often drew huge crowds. Don Juan also circulated in other forms, as, in England, in small, cheap illustrated pamphlets or chapbooks. Leading artistic figures were also drawn to him – Molière, Corneille, Goldoni, Byron, and most famously Mozart, who composed the opera Don Giovanni (1787) to lyrics by Daponte.3

Libertine Ethics  103 It might be tempting at this point to venture into a statement on the universal allure of the promiscuous trickster. One might maintain that he is a type that is so common to human experience, or to human fears, that the story is a compelling one across different nations and generations. But we might take caution from the fact that versions and interpretations differed from each other a lot. Otto Rank listed the main ideas of Don Juan, none of which is close to Tirso’s original: the figure who is “driven by some cosmic force, such as a longing for the ideal or the infinite”; “the pure essence of sensuality”; “the bored narcissist who is incapable of forming ties to others” (18); and a representation of the “primal struggle to subdue the mother” (22). The place of sex in the legend varies from one version to another. Certainly, the supposed joys of promiscuity are not, in themselves, sufficient incentive for Tirso or his character. As Rank puts it, “unbounded sexuality” is not “the principal motif” (39). Tirso’s original Don Juan is more trickster than lover. He loves to make fools of those around him, and sex is how he goes about it. Fifty years after Tirso, Molière offers a much more sophisticated and reflective hero in his Don Juan ou le Festin de Pierre (1665). In Molière’s version we see less of the gleeful trickster, but we see the initial glimmer of the connoisseur and theorist of pleasure. Molière picks up on Tirso’s play and on the erotic poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the writers of the “Pléiade” such as Ronsard (1524–85), and the “dirty atheist,” Théophile de Viau (1590–1626). But there were dangers. The reaction against Théophile was violent. He was imprisoned and soon died. Molière’s play was not “dirty,” and generally Molière was much more cautious. His play was not banned, and it enjoyed great success. But Molière was made anxious by accusations that he was “preaching libertinism.” He withdrew the play, and it was not performed again in France until 1841 (Haslett 25–6).4 The re-focusing on pleasure would become more pronounced in the next century, and in a new generation of libertines. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, libertinism would develop into a repeated and lengthy imagining of the methods, the philosophy, and even the ethics of promiscuous sex. Why does the libertine become more central, and more permissible, in eighteenth-century France? There are two strong reasons, one to do with the old ruling class, the other to do with a new group of scientists and thinkers. When Louis XIV died in 1715, he was succeeded by a period of regency under the notoriously promiscuous Philippe, Duke of Orléans (1640–1723). Philippe was followed by the equally prolific Louis XV (1710–74). Rulers set the tone, and the tone was permissive. But matters were more complicated. Just as important was what had happened to the rest of the aristocracy. Louis XIV had insisted that nobles live at Versailles, and take part in the elegant life of the court. He succeeded in making them less of a military elite that might threaten his own position, and more of a leisure class. Leading aristocrats declined from powerful figures with their own provincial power-bases into

104  Libertine Ethics decorative individuals (Jones 15). So, we move through the eighteenth century with, as Nancy Mitford put it in her biography of Madame de Pompadour, the “cheerful spectacle of several thousand people living for pleasure” (87). The pleasure was shadowed. As we saw in Manon Lescaut, the aristocracy was losing ground to a rising entrepreneurial class. The libertine’s determined pursuit of women is often understood as the compensatory activity of this demilitarised and undermined ruling elite. As Simone de Beauvoir put it, young men whose families had once possessed “concrete power” now tried to “revive symbolically, in the privacy of the bedchamber, the status for which they were nostalgic, that of the lone and feudal despot” (8). Beyond the court, it seemed that the new permissiveness was being copied by the middle classes of Paris. According to the regent’s own mother, under Philippe’s rule Paris became a new “Sodom and Gomorrah.” It was, according to her, “full of men who cheated on their wives, wives who sought out lovers, spouses who took syphilis in their stride and youths who preferred homosexual liaisons to more conventional couplings” (Jones 48). While we might not want to fall in too readily with such a sensational discourse, there is much evidence of a thriving illicit sexual culture through the eighteenth century in Paris. By the 1780s, poet and dramatist Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814) would estimate that there were 30,000 female sex-workers in the city to supply the wants of the 150,000 bachelors. Sex-work was technically illegal, but, aside from casual street trade, the police authorised a number of madams and brothels. In a heady mix of tolerance, political surveillance, and prurience, there was a Département des femmes galantes which compiled extensive notes on sex-workers and their clients, and especially at the élite end of the trade. Most of the women would seem to have been motivated by poverty. They were from destitute homes or employed in the hardest, least remunerative jobs: seamstress, washerwoman, servant. The only rule imposed by the police was that any monks or abbés presenting themselves as clients had to be turned away and reported, as must any girls from middle- or upper-class families presenting themselves for work. Sexually transmitted infections were common in the brothels, and the only treatment – with mercury – was lengthy, sickening, expensive, and ineffective. Perhaps out of a fear of infection, by far the most popular service requested of the women was “manualisation,” or hand-jobs.5 Aside from social change at the court and in Paris, the other key element to eighteenth-century libertinism was the emergence of Enlightenment philosophy and science. The philosophes of the Enlightenment were largely middle-class men who sought to challenge superstition, and to question – as far as they dared – the domination of the monarchy and the church. At the more sex-radical end, they opposed the way the church associated sex with sin. Sex was one of the natural facts of existence, they argued, and it should be accepted and enjoyed by all. The

Libertine Ethics  105 scientist, Julien Offray de la Mettrie insisted that humans were primarily biological mechanisms, and sex was an important and necessary function. He claimed that “man is but an animal, or a contraption of springs” (65). De la Mettrie wrote plainly about sexual appetite, an appetite that, according to him, should not be complicated by morality. In his notorious Man a Machine (1748), he wrote of the “frenzy” produced in men and women by lives of abstinence. He attacked the idea that the decent woman was sexless. The most timid and modest of young women, he argued, could not help but lose all shame under the force of desire, and if she did not find “prompt relief,” she could develop “mania.” He wrote that such a woman might even die, and with rude jokishness he added, “of a disease for which there are physicians aplenty” (34). Copies of Man a Machine were burned. De la Mettrie was forced to flee the country.6 But other works and writers came to replace de la Mettrie and drive forward a belief in sex as a natural and welcome part of existence. An important later influence was the publication of Antoine de Bougainville’s Voyage around the World (1771). Bougainville’s narrative included an account of free love among the naked inhabitants of Tahiti. He told the French that the Tahitians were happily promiscuous. Jealousy, he declared, “is so unknown a passion here, that the husband is commonly the first who persuades his wife to yield to another.” Even an unmarried woman in Tahiti is told to “follow the inclination of her heart, or the instinct of her sensuality” (Hénaff 55). The philosophe Denis Diderot was keen to use Bougainville’s account to give the French a lecture on sex and morality. He quickly wrote a “Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage,” in which an imaginary Tahitian asks a Frenchman, “[I]s there anything so senseless as a precept that forbids us to heed the changing impulses that are inherent in our being… that violate the liberty of both male and female by chaining them perpetually to one another?” (Diderot 90–91). Diderot’s Tahitians see that European ideas of procreation are poisoned. But the emphasis on nature is not an emphasis on pleasure. Diderot’s fictional Tahitians see nature as a system that always has procreation as its goal. Sex with an infertile woman cannot lead to childbirth, and so it is seen as unnatural. Indeed, in this imaginary Tahiti, an infertile woman must identify herself with a black veil. If she removes her veil to get a man, she is seen as “libertine.” If she is caught, she is exiled or made a slave. Diderot, like de la Mettrie, favours promiscuity as natural and pleasant, but he cannot quite allow pleasure for its own sake. In fact, when he tries to describe a “naturally free” society, he comes up with something that is, after its own fashion, as coercive as the French society of the time. Even the seeming feminism of Diderot’s Tahiti – with women free to choose sexual partners – is open to question. Women are “offered” to others by their fathers, and they are under pressure to build up a dowry of children to present to their husbands. Diderot does not pause to fill out the picture, but we can assume that in his Tahiti women face a life of

106  Libertine Ethics near-constant pregnancy, as they attempt to satisfy their husbands, and live up to what is taken to be the force of nature.7 The Enlightenment idea of conforming to nature, as shown by de la Mettrie and Diderot, involves a de-mystification of sex. Desire and intercourse are natural, and as such are neither to be sanctified nor demeaned. A certain level of promiscuity is also natural, as men and women respond to their desires, and to the need to procreate. But the picture of the eighteenth century as the “libertine moment,” a sexually permissive regime led by a debauched aristocracy and supported by philosophers and scientists, is a partial view.8 The life at court was not approved by wider society; Louis XV and his mistresses were often attacked in caricatures. Nor did the free-thinkers presume that they were living in a permissive age. Diderot did not publish his “Supplement” because he sensed that he would have been visited with the same consequences as de la Mettrie had had to suffer a generation earlier.9 And alongside a sex radical like Diderot, there were other philosophes, such as Rousseau, who saw promiscuity not as a sign of nature at work, but of human corruption. The church too, of course, remained sexually conservative. While the higher orders of the clergy consisted largely of corrupt and atheistic nobles who held religious office for the money and the power, at the lower levels there were ambitious attempts to “re-Christianise” the poor people, leading to reduced levels of premarital sex among the lower classes, and fewer illegitimate births (Jones 96–7). In fact, the poor had to be chaste. They seldom had the means to set themselves up in an independent life, and they had to wait for land or a home or an occupation to become available via inheritance. Poor people married later, and they could not risk the burden of children out of wedlock. For them, this was not a “sexual age” (Jones 152, 290). *** The libertine, then, emerges in the eighteenth century as someone who embodies different kinds of justification. He is the aristocrat whose class privilege grants him sexual freedom. Often, though, he draws on the new ideas of the Enlightenment. These give him the additional justification that he is living out the truths of nature. But libertinism in its heyday soon starts to display variation. A libertine at this point may simply be an upper-class man or woman with a relaxed attitude to sex as an enjoyable pursuit. But he or she may take a more rebellious, vengeful, or idealistic stance. He or she may feel that he or she has the right to exploit hypocrisy, and a duty to make society confront its hypocrisy. In his analysis of male libertines in fiction, Michel Feher suggests that he is either a safe, companionable “petit maître” or “little master,” or he is a “dangerous man” (31). The little master accepts the nature of men, women, and society. He does not seek to reform himself or them. He leads a life of worldly pleasure, enjoying his liaisons without expecting them to last

Libertine Ethics  107 very long, and without investing them with great significance. The little master and his friends and mistresses lead urbane, unemotional lives. With them, we are back to Mitford’s beguiling vision of Versailles, of men and women all playing gently and by the same rules in the great palace.10 The dangerous man, on the other hand, is an angry, rebellious figure, who has been scarred by his early experiences. As a youth, he falls deeply in love with a woman whom he idealises. When she tires of him and rejects him, he feels such intense humiliation that it becomes a primal moment that will govern all his future actions. His mission is to punish all women for his initial humiliation, to triumph over them and then to abandon them. The dangerous man targets the prudes, the teases, and the pretentious. He wants to expose the falseness of their “sensitivity” and their “virtue.” The problem for him is that he wins glorious notoriety for his conquests, but he does not respect the society that admires him. As Feher shrewdly notes, the only pleasure that retains any value for him is that first innocent passion that he experienced in the “lovesickness of his youth” (Feher 31). If the little masters and dangerous men have very different motives, they all subscribe to the same idea of desire. They believe that it is a “purely physical phenomenon” (Feher 16). If a desire is not consummated, it leads towards an over-valuation or idealisation of the object, and even to melancholy and madness. Love is seen as a kind of sickness, a sign that a natural sexual impulse has been denied. The aim for a little master is to give each pleasure the moment it deserves, and no more. Libertinism in this sense is, as Casanova would put it, about “the present enjoyment of the senses” (Cusset 1999, 3). As Catherine Cusset observes, in this world we enter a “libertine temporality” which consists entirely of enjoyable moments, in which the body is separated from its “moral and social identity,” and functions as if it had “no past and no future” (Cusset 1997, 756–7). All the while, it is polite to seem to accept the rules by which society is governed. The little master offers no serious critique. He is the well-adjusted libertine, who appears to live within the rules, all the while discreetly stepping around them. The problem for the little master is that his sexual affairs are an exercise of freedom, but eventually he gets bored, and the women who enabled him to express his freedom start to seem a burden. As Nancy Miller argues, for all that he looks for success with women, the final success of the libertine is to be “purged of desire and free of women’s bodies” (38). There is a counter-point in the best-selling women’s fiction of the period, novels such as Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747) and Riccoboni’s Lettres de Mistress Fanni Butlerd (1757). Women writers portray heroines who are betrayed but remain faithful to their own love (although in Madame du Tencin’s Mémoires du comte de Comminge [1735], it is a male narrator who suffers the agonies of an ill-starred romance as keenly as his beloved). These narratives were as

108  Libertine Ethics enduringly popular as libertine fiction – Lettres d’une Péruvienne went through 42 editions in its first 90 years. They do not address promiscuity, but their protagonists’ intense suffering offer a reverse reflection of the libertine’s cynical self-indulgence.11 The problem of women and sex as encroachment on man’s freedom is explored fully in Charles Duclos’ immensely popular little master fiction, The Confessions of the Count of *** (1742).12 Duclos gives us the story of an aristocratic everyman. The Count wants to succeed after the manner of a man of his rank, to fulfil the role of the masterful, leisured military gentleman of the period. The title of “confessions” promises sexual sins, but there is nothing agonised or remorseful here. The Count may be confessing his secrets, but he does not suppose himself to have done anything wrong. As far as he changes over the course of the story, it is not out of a sense of religious conviction. For a long period in his life, he can only think well of himself if he has a number of simultaneous affairs. He sees himself as part of the generation that cut loose during the regency, making up for time lost during the pious later stages of the reign of Louis XIV. The regency, though, is not something he wishes to deplore. As he explains, after Louis’s death “the few who were truly virtuous stayed as they were, and those who pretended virtue, in abandoning it, became more honest than they had been.”13 In his Confessions, Duclos pretends to offer a panorama of womankind. He takes us through a succession of types: the ageing, libertine marquise; the competitive woman who demands the sacrifice of his other mistress; the darkly fatalistic Spanish woman; the snobbish wife of a provincial governor; the capriciously demanding woman; the successful shopkeeper (“une bonne grosse maman” [63]); the libertine woman who does not even require him to pretend to be in love with her; the financier’s wife who tries to treat him “like a piece of furniture” (“comme un meuble” [69]); and so on. But Duclos’ Count is kindly. When he encounters sex-workers at bachelor parties, he senses that the young women have been procured by “misery” and “seduction.” He recalls that these women, the “sad victims of our fantasies and our whims,” always presented to him “the image of unhappiness, and never that of pleasure.”14 The Count needs to believe that a woman has chosen him without compulsion. She may have any number of motives – desire, vanity, a tyrannical disposition – but if he wants the act, and she wishes to grant it, then he is happy. Finally, though, Duclos moves towards the dilemma of the little master’s life. The Count loves variety, but he dreams of an affair of such profound intensity and intimacy that it will displace all others. He meets the young Comtesse de Selve, and falls deeply in love. This is his strongest attachment, but it is not enough to hold him. He is bored and faintly disgusted by promiscuity, but he is bored by the Countess. Duclos’ fiction is interesting because it seeks to push beyond this endpoint of boredom, disgust, and alienation. In The Confessions of the

Libertine Ethics  109 Count of ***, the Comtesse de Selve claims that “fidelity is not in men’s power.” A man’s attachment to a woman “depends on the liveliness of his desires,” and when the pleasure fades, “love and respect cannot re-light it, only another object.”15 She proposes that they cease to be lovers, but become friends, and he is to have mistresses. Her “wisdom” re-ignites his love, but she resists him. He sees her more because he is no longer embarrassed and remorseful in her presence. Ever more sated and appalled by his familiarity with other women, the Countess acquires a new lustre. He loves her now not with impetuous sensuality, but with a tranquil, soulful feeling. He presses her to marry him, and she agrees. The happy ending is unmistakably a moral one: “We delight in this union of hearts, which is the reward and the very idea of virtue.”16 Duclos offers a racy tale, but he is moving towards the idea that promiscuity will only satisfy for a time and to an extent. For people capable of true feeling, there is more to be gained from life. But Duclos also suggests that real, soulful happiness is only to be arrived at via promiscuous adventures. He presents the little master’s life as a series of stages, and the fulfilment the Count can find with the Countess is possible because he is moving beyond youth and “impetuosity.” Fidelity is only suitable for men, the narrator suggests, after the intense physical impulses of youth have passed. Although Duclos shepherds us at the end to the safety and reciprocity of a loving marriage, he also makes it clear that there is no short cut, that a diverse and extensive sex life is automatic to the young man. He leaves women in a slightly different place. Promiscuity, Duclos would have us believe, is not necessary to a woman’s life. Many women may be promiscuous, but, as it is not an essential stage in their development, many women are not. This is the final reassurance for the men in the world of this novel. When the little master moves beyond promiscuity, the good woman, patient and sympathetic, is waiting for him. *** What of the dangerous man? He comes to the fore in the master-work of libertine fiction, Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons (1782). Laclos, though, takes what had become standard scenarios and works them through to bleak, disastrous conclusions.17 The protagonists of Dangerous Liaisons are like those that have gone before them. They are young, wealthy, attractive aristocrats who seek to enjoy their good fortune. Their sense of class entitlement combines with Enlightenment rationality: they are not weighed down by prudery and religious superstition. They live out their freedom most keenly through their sex lives. Above all, they are sexual connoisseurs. When the pleasure begins to fade, they find a new prospect to excite them. For the female protagonist, the Marquise de Merteuil, there is an element of feminist determination in her actions. Through her choosing and rejecting

110  Libertine Ethics as she wishes, she affirms her social and financial independence. No man controls her. She and her friend and former lover, the Vicomte de Valmont, enjoy their escapades and tell each other of them in letters. Above all, they take pride in the fact that they have left behind the rules, fears, and shame that enslave the fools around them. But Laclos begins to pose some sharp questions. Is it actually possible to have pleasure beyond the rules? Is sex ever a “free” activity? Is sex ever only about pleasure? The pre-history to these lives of sexual prowess is crucial. The Vicomte fits Feher’s definition of the dangerous man, in that he was made to feel shame by his first youthful love. His mission now is to exact revenge on many women for the humiliation he suffered at the hands of one of them. He seeks to prove over and over again that he is now invulnerable, that he is master of himself and of women. There is nothing “purely physical” about his sex life. His conquests are always an expression of vengeful power. Further, his experience of pleasure is always social. He is aware that when he copulates with a servant, it is a servant with whom he copulates. If he desires a prostitute, the woman’s identity as a prostitute is how he defines the encounter. When he sets out to make a conquest of a virtuous wife, it is precisely because she is a virtuous wife that he wishes to take her. It is as though he has sex with people’s social identities, not with their bodies. He enjoys the fact that the servant cannot withstand his seigneurial insistence; that the prostitute is bought with ease; that when he seduces the virtuous wife, she sees that her virtue is not as strong as her desire. He does not abandon social rules and categories, so much as play upon them.18 Valmont’s partner in his beliefs and activities, the Marquise, is similar. She presents herself as a woman who controls her admirers. But as with the Vicomte, Madame de Merteuil’s pride is a symptom of ancient and unforgettable humiliation. She was brought up to be obedient – schooled in a convent, and kept ignorant of the world she was about to enter. Possessing nothing of her own and having no control over her destiny, she realised that her “thoughts were the only things that belonged to her” (164). She resolved that those thoughts must remain entirely her own, and so like a young lady of breeding, she learned to present a docile face to society. She knew that there were parts of life that were of momentous concern to men and women, and that she was not supposed to understand. Curious to “learn about love and pleasure,” her head was “seething” for lack of information. The Marquise was married off to a man chosen by her mother. Her desire for knowledge has the philosophical colouring of the age. She approached the marriage-bed not with superstitious fears, but “purely as an experience,” an event to be analysed: “I took note of the pain and the pleasure and saw my various sensations merely as a means of gathering information for later evaluation” (164). Although she “developed a taste for this sort of study,” she kept true to her policy of hiding her feelings, and pretended to be frigid. Her husband,

Libertine Ethics  111 seeing this lack of response, placed “blind and unhesitating trust” in her. When he died, she continued her “studies,” and broke through to the truth as set out by the Enlightenment thinkers: love, supposedly the cause of pleasure, is only the pretext for it. Men and women dignify their lusts with the sentimental fictions of love, instead of acting honestly and seeking a simple, “agreeable” fulfilment (165). The Marquise asserts a separation between the man and the pleasure. As she explains to Valmont in a sacrilegious metaphor, other women worship men, which is as foolish as worshipping the priest instead of the god. She gives her “respect and belief” not to men but “only to Eros himself” (162). The Marquise de Merteuil would seem to have everything as she wishes it. But her self-presentation as a successful and independent rationalist is shot through with bitterness. The Marquise does not forgive society for its treatment of her as a woman, and she resents the advantages of men. They are not judged for their sexual appetite; they are not required to be virtuous. Her determination to enjoy sex in an unencumbered way is like Valmont’s pursuit of pleasure – a vengeful activity that is infused with anger. She claims to Valmont that she was “born to avenge my sex and subjugate yours” (162). Over the course of events, however, we see that she is as brutal to women as she is to men. Her desire for vengeance is not a rebellion against an unfair society, but more to do with particular men who have hurt her. Her love life has not been as successful as her letters to Valmont would make believe, and what brings the two together is not a belief in pleasure but a suppressed grief. They were lovers, but Valmont abandoned Merteuil for a judge’s wife, who abandoned him for another man. Valmont and Merteuil speak with the confidence of eternal victors, but Laclos allows us to see that they have failed, and it is unspent rage that motivates them.19 Laclos uses his libertines to suggest that there is no pleasure beyond the rules, that promiscuity is never solely about enjoyment, and even those who laugh at conventional morality tend to construct an ethical justification for their acts. But Laclos does not wish simply to reveal his libertines to be damaged and self-deceiving. He also wants to critique the society that produces and enables libertinism. He does this with the introduction of the naïve 15-year-old Cécile de Volanges. She has been brought up in a convent and kept ignorant. As David McCallam reminds us, the root meaning of Cécile is “little blind one” (858). Now she is to be introduced to the world, and married off to a man she has never met, Gercourt. She does not know that Gercourt has wounded both Valmont and Merteuil, and that they have a strong incentive to corrupt her in order to gain revenge on him. Merteuil befriends Cécile and her mother, and gently steers Cécile towards Valmont. There is, though, an additional complexity, which is that Cécile’s supposed innocence is open to question from the start. She and her friends at the convent have exchanged bits of information about love and sex, and she, like Merteuil

112  Libertine Ethics before her, is keen to learn more. If Laclos believes in original, pure, or transcendent innocence, he does not show it to us in Dangerous Liaisons. Rather he suggests that what is seen as innocence is the ignorance that is produced in young girls by keeping them from learning about the world around them. This ignorance makes them helpless, and easily bent to the wills of adults. 20 Cécile will be forced into a series of painful self-realisations. She falls in love with a young nobleman, Danceny, but she comes to think that her love for Danceny is not as complete as love is meant to be. When Valmont manipulates her into having sex with him, she has to admit to the “dreadful feeling” that she “didn’t resist him as much as [she] could have done” (207). Laclos offers a type of psychological realism. His characters are neither angelic nor devilish, but signs of cause and effect. His novel as a whole affirms in melancholic form the truth that so excites Valmont – that people are forced to experience themselves by social category: the young girl must gain her experience from the position of the young girl, and the same holds for the young man, the anxious mother, the servant, and the wife. Laclos shows how each must encounter the problem of desire from a particular subject-position, and he asks, what choices do they have, and can we blame them for the choices that they make? But there is to be blame and redemption. The libertines must fail. Valmont meets his own destruction when he decides to seduce the intensely religious Madame de Tourvelle. He longs to see her agony as he makes her realise that she loves him more than she loves her faith and virtue. She, so devout and unquestioningly faithful to her husband, is the perfect opportunity for Valmont to give a virtuoso performance of his powers, and proof of the determining power of sex. Madame de Tourvelle will be his finest demonstration of his view of human nature. He will indeed manage to make her love him, but the episode will reveal that he has failed to understand himself. The path to his final self-knowledge is his ally, Madame de Merteuil. For all that they share with each other their cruelties, they never quite accept that each, at some point, might make a target of the other. Valmont assumes too readily that Merteuil has accepted his abandonment of her. She, in her continuing attachment to him, underestimates the danger of making him her confidant. Gradually, without fully meaning to, each locks sights on the other. Madame de Merteuil cannot help but take revenge on him for abandoning her. She picks away at his self-deceit, writing to him that his rejection of feeling only confirms its existence. The more he acts to prove that he has no love for Madame de Tourvelle, the more he confirms that he is in love with her. Valmont has always maintained that love is a fiction, and that, even for women, men’s “only assets are [their] performance and the most vigorous man is always the best” (276–7). But Madame de Tourvelle seems to be tied specifically to him, and with an intensity that is fascinating. Seeing Valmont fall in love

Libertine Ethics  113 with Tourvelle in a way he never had with her, Merteuil goads him into standing up for his libertine principles. She insists that Valmont must tell Madame de Tourvelle that he has become bored of her. He does so, and Madame de Tourvelle runs away to a convent, where she descends into mania and convulsions, and dies. It is then that Madame de Merteuil reveals the exact nature of her revenge: You know, you did love Madame de Tourvelle a great deal, Vicomte; you’re still in love with her, even; in fact you’re madly in love with her but because I thought it amusing to make you ashamed of your love you heroically gave her up. You would have given up a thousand women like her rather than be teased. Ah, to what lengths does vanity lead us! It was a wise man who described it as the enemy of happiness. (320) Merteuil shows up Valmont’s libertine stance as a weak self-deception. He thinks he is bold and free, and she shows him that he is influenced by repressed shame. In her punishment of him, she also indicates her own weakness. She is not free; she is still controlled by her love for Valmont. At the end of the novel, everyone is damaged, and no one is blameless. The two villains are removed from the scene, but society remains unchanged. This indicates the complexity of Laclos’ exploration of libertine promiscuity. Valmont and Merteuil, both promiscuous, are destructive and self-deceiving. But others at the margins of the novel are harmlessly promiscuous. What causes and enables cruelty is not promiscuity but inequality between men and women, between upper and lower classes, and between the experienced and the inexperienced. Laclos’ central idea is that neither chastity nor prolific sexual activity is good or bad in itself, except insofar as it expresses, or fails to express, fairness and fellow feeling. This is Laclos’ sexual ethic, and it is neither libertine nor repressive. Sex, as Valmont knew all along, cannot be separated from the social context in which it is experienced. If the encounter is between grossly unequal partners, then one of the partners is already a victim, and likely to be so in the sexual relation. Laclos does not hint at a progressive future, and a birth of social justice. But his least guilty characters achieve a kind of redemption. Cécile becomes pregnant by Valmont; she suffers a miscarriage and goes to live in a convent. Danceny learns of her loss of innocence, and while he does not condemn her, he can no longer want to make a life with her. But he does not switch his affections to another young woman. He enters the Order of the Knights of Malta. He too will lead a secluded life. At the end of the novel, the young characters are held in suspension, still alive but unable to accept life in society. They are compromised, and even “ruined,” but by rejecting the values of those around them, they achieve a kind of virtue. ***

114  Libertine Ethics Even as Laclos was writing Dangerous Liaisons, others were taking libertinism in different, and one might say, conclusive directions. Beaumarchais’s libertine, Count Almaviva, in The Marriage of Figaro (1778) is little more than a lecherous rake.21 Increasingly, the libertine is less witty, less of a strategist, less of a thinker; he is simply a sexually abusive, upper-class figure. The Marriage of Figaro is named for the lowerclass, attractive hero, and it is Figaro who will work things through to a happy ending. He ventures the thought that men like Count Almaviva are proud of their “wealth, rank, and high position” (192), but have done nothing to earn these things. Beaumarchais disguised his criticism of the French ruling class by setting the play in Spain, but his stratagem did not work. The play was banned, and then produced in an expurgated version in 1784. Beaumarchais turns libertine fiction into a socially progressive fable. We get a more troubling re-writing with the Marquis de Sade. I want to pause on Sade and suggest that he is of interest in himself but also because he draws out some of the problematic tendencies that were there all along in libertine writing. To offer one example from among many, he gives us a variant on the libertine novel in Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795). 22 He presents the by-now stock characters of dangerous man, libertine woman, naïve virgin, anxious mother, young lover. He also embraces the rationalistic, Enlightenment concern with nature, and how men and women ought to live in harmony with the stirrings of their bodies. But de Sade takes these elements in new, extreme directions. Philosophy in the Bedroom offers up, initially, at least, the possibility of a wondrous sexual and social utopia. He presents us with a happy group consisting of the charming Madame de Saint-Ange; her handsome brother, the Chevalier; his friend, the tall, good-looking libertine, Dolmancé; the 15-year-old virgin, Eugènie de Mistival, newly awakened to desire and eager to learn; and the simple young gardener, Augustin. It is hard to imagine a more generous, equable set of people. Although of different ages and classes, they take delight in serving each other. Each overcomes his or her prejudices in order to contribute to the others’ pleasure. The Chevalier prefers women, but he does not allow that to prevent him from penetrating Dolmancé and being penetrated in his turn. In the same spirit, Madame de Saint-Ange is willing to engage in any number of acts, with her brother, his friend, her protégée Eugènie, and the gardener. Eugènie herself puts her embarrassment aside and joins in enthusiastically. Augustin the gardener, like the Chevalier, is most aroused by women, but he too embraces the spirit of giving and receiving without prejudice. Sade’s characters make up their own joyous little world. This is promiscuity without remorse or limit, as the incestuous, inter-generational, cross-class entwinements multiply, shift, and re-combine. All “swoon” with pleasure, have tremendous “discharges,” and lose themselves in

Libertine Ethics  115 delirium. The giving, imposing, and losing of self are at the heart of the pleasure. In the intervals, each resumes his or her own self – a middle-aged aristocrat, a gardener, a convent-bred teenager – but during the frenzy a bodiliness takes over, and identity is left behind: “I am beside myself… I no longer know what I am saying, nor what I am doing… I’m dying… I am dead, exhausted… I am annihilated” (204). Eugènie is urged, “abandon all your senses to pleasure” (204), but all the participants achieve this state of abandonment, this paradoxical moment of loss and fulfilment. Social identities are never shared or exchanged. At the end, the Chevalier is still a Chevalier, and the gardener only a gardener. But during the sex there is an intense sharing and mutuality. They penetrate each other’s bodies with tongues, fingers, and penises, and as a result they achieve a sense of mutuality and freedom. All are thrilled; all are liberated. In Philosophy in the Bedroom, as its title promises, Sade poses as the good Enlightenment thinker. The proper place and meaning of pleasure, he would have us believe, has been obscured by a superstitious and coercive society. Rationality and education will right the situation. The goal of the encounters in Madame de Saint-Ange’s boudoir is that of leading the young Eugènie to the knowledge that will liberate her. If she can see the truth behind the way that society deals with sex and bodies, she will gain control over her own destiny. So, the other characters give her practical advice on, for instance, how to avoid pregnancy and on the different techniques for giving and receiving pleasure. She is brought to see how “false ethical notions” are deployed to confuse and govern young women. Is there anything more ridiculous, Madame de Saint-Ange asks, “than to see a maiden of fifteen or sixteen consumed by desires she is compelled to suppress?” Madame de Saint-Ange assures Eugènie, “your body is your own, yours alone; in all the world there is but yourself who has the right to enjoy it as you see fit” (221). Like Diderot and many other philosophes, de Sade grounds his arguments in an idea of nature. But his nature is very different to that of Diderot in the “Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage.” Diderot presents a nature that is essentially procreative; all that leads to reproduction is natural. De Sade uses his characters to propose a different idea. Dolmancé explains to Eugènie that procreation is “but a consequence of [nature’s] primary intentions,” and not the goal. After all, is not a plague a natural event? Are not famines and murders? Nature does reproduce, but after her own fashion. Nature is simply “matter in action,” and her law is that of “perpetual activity” (210–11). Her practice is an endless recycling, and the forces of destruction are a part of her plan. It is only vanity that causes humans to see their own destruction, or the failure to reproduce themselves, as a calamity. “We have,” Dolmancé argues, “stupidly imagined that every hurt this sublime creature endures must perforce be an enormity.” In fact, murder is one of nature’s recycling tools, and he who commits murder “does but alter forms.” The murderer “gives back to

116  Libertine Ethics Nature the elements whereof the hand of this skilled artisan instantly re-creates other beings” (230–31). This idea of creative destruction allows Eugénie and her new friends to subject others to appalling torture. De Sade reverses some of the popular Enlightenment readings of nature, but he retains the usual problem. For all that he offers to strip nature back to what it actually is, he credits it with a consciousness, with a human-like sense of intention, whether to procreate, or to murder and recycle. De Sade’s nature seems in other ways highly questionable, decreeing that women “attain happiness only by way of pain,” and that anal penetration for both sexes is an “unequalled joy” (202). We soon see that de Sade’s supposed liberation of the individual is no more than coercion under the sign of nature instead of under the sign of morality. Initially nature is an empowerment for the young woman. As noted, Eugènie is told, “no limits to your pleasures.” But no sooner is her freedom announced than it turns to servitude. Eugènie is only free to behave as de Sade believes nature tells her to behave. Nature, according to de Sade, has decreed “Woman’s destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the shewolf; she must belong to all who claim her” (219). In other words, had Eugénie refused Dolmancé or the Chevalier, or Madame de Saint-Ange, or the gardener, she would have been acting against her own natural being. She is not to be owned by any man, as if she were a slave; but nature causes her to be owned by all men. Nature has made men and women libidinous, and only a corrupt society leads them astray from this “perpetual activity.” As nature has made men stronger than women, clearly it is in nature’s plan that a man should force a woman to do his bidding. There are many other contradictions in de Sade’s supposed rationality. If all cruelty is permitted, why is it that some characters are never raped, beaten, or otherwise victimised, while others must suffer either torture or death? De Sade claims to accept endless recycling, but in fact he can only imagine static subject positions, in which his preferred characters always control, and his other characters are endlessly abused. His idea of character is, as Miller points out, tautologous: a victim is a victim “because he/she is victimised” (127). De Sade grants continuous pleasure to those heroes who embrace his vision. They are not to be recycled, but almost become nature and enact its processes. The defining problem at the heart of de Sade’s project is his claim to truth, logic, and the real. We have to care about these narratives, it would seem, because they are an unveiling of the indecent truths that society would hide from our eyes. But is it actually the case that a virgin of either sex, when suddenly penetrated in the anus by an exceptionally large penis, will pass from pain to pleasure quickly, and that he or she will, shortly after, be willing and able to have the act repeated? The more likely outcome is that he or she will not at any point experience pleasure, and even that he or she will require reparative surgery. The claim to truth and logic is a necessary part of de Sade’s fantasy. The

Libertine Ethics  117 universalising of his ideas and scenarios as the truths of nature is what makes them permissible and even important. It also makes them ethical. If his ideas are true, it is right to speak of them.23 De Sade represents an extreme version of a familiar libertine argument. His point is that, if we are to be ethical in sex, we must embrace the force of nature. But nature in de Sade, as in many other places, seems an arguable concept. The more evolved and unusual version of libertine ethics is that found in Laclos. His is not based on a new scientific idea of nature as final truth. Rather, he shows how people use the discourse of nature as justification. His implicit ethic is founded on an idea of social balance. There can be no ethical sex, he would have us believe, between the powerful and the powerless, between those who have knowledge and those from whom knowledge has been withheld. *** When Colette’s novel, Claudine Married, was first published in 1902, it was described on the front page of Le Journal as “a Dangerous Liaisons for the twentieth century.”24 The author of the review, Jean Lorrain, the poet, novelist, and journalist, presumed that the author was Colette’s husband, Willy, under whose name the book had appeared. Willy was hailed by Lorrain as a “modern Laclos.”25 There is, writes Lorrain, no villainous Marquise, but the “complaisant and voyeuristic husband” of Claudine Married has the peculiarities of Valmont. Further, the novel deals with unconventional sexual relationships (in this case, lesbianism and adultery). Readers of Lorrain’s review were tantalised with the question, in large capitals, “SHOULD ONE READ IT?” Lorrain concluded with involuted irony, it is “a novel husbands should not allow their wives to read, unless it is a book which wives don’t mind seeing their husbands read.”26 Why does Lorrain liken Claudine Married to Dangerous Liaisons? Colette’s characters, like those of Laclos, think about and pursue sexual pleasure with unusual boldness. The novel dwells upon the experience, the place, and the meaning of sex. Claudine Married and others of Colette’s works also bring Laclos to mind because they explore trickery and mutual betrayal. Then there is the question of nature. In Dangerous Liaisons, Laclos considers libertinism as the release of nature – a nature that society tries to suppress and manipulate. But as we saw, Laclos suggests that libertinism is not simply nature reasserting itself but a more complex affair of calculation, betrayal, and rage. At times, Colette explores a relaxed little master libertinism, with men and women who seek to make the most of the pleasure of the moment, without philosophy, fear, or remorse. As she wrote to a friend when, as a woman of 47, she was having an affair with her 16-year-old stepson, “Content yourself, I urge you, with a passing temptation, and satisfy it. What more can one

118  Libertine Ethics be sure of than that which one holds in one’s arms, at the moment one holds it in one’s arms” (Thurman 305). She, like one of her most famous characters, was willing to devote herself to “radiant youths and fragile adolescents” (Chéri 88). But Colette also reproduces the tensions we find in Laclos, showing how libertinism may be not so much a bold and truthful choice, as a reaction to intimate betrayals and grief. The short story, “The Hidden Woman,” captures in succinct form Colette’s interest in promiscuity. A doctor and his wife plan to go to a risqué event, a masked fancy dress ball. But the doctor wants to go to the ball without his wife, so he tells her at the last moment that he must make a visit to a patient who lives far away. He asks her, does she want to go to the ball on her own? The wife expresses disgust at the thought of the crowds, at “all those hands” (Stories 235–6). The very idea, she claims, makes her skin crawl. But she too is lying. Both husband and wife don their disguises and go to the ball, each assuming the other not to be there. The doctor, though, recognises his wife under her disguise and begins to follow her. He is convinced that she has come for a rendezvous with a lover. As she saunters through the hall, she is grabbed and handled by a man in a Byzantine outfit, then she slips into a writhing crowd like a knife “sliding into is sheath.” Shortly after, she is pinned against a wall by a man costumed as an “almost naked wrestler.” Moving on from the wrestler, she grasps a woman voluptuously by the throat, then leans over a panting young man and kisses his “half-open mouth” (237). By now the doctor has realised it is worse than he had thought. His wife is not there to meet one particular lover but to seize upon the many passing opportunities. She is “tasting the monstrous pleasure of being alone, free, honest in her native brutality” (238). It is because she is hidden that she can become her authentic self, a self that is “unknown, forever solitary and without shame.” In her disguise, she is “restored to her irremediable solitude and her immodest innocence” (238). Here we find several of Colette’s favourite words – “monstrous,” “brutality,” and “innocence” – that are placed, as she likes to do, in surprising conjunctions. Why is being alone a “monstrous pleasure”? How is the wife’s behaviour “innocent,” and what is the idea that Colette evokes with the comment that this innocence is “immodest”?27 These seeming paradoxes are central to Colette’s thinking about sex, and they help us to grasp her own version of libertinism. Let’s pursue the terms further in her novel, The Innocent Libertine (1909). The protagonist, Minne, is an adolescent girl who knows nothing of the world, but is fascinated by the lurid – and fanciful – accounts of gangsters and prostitutes in the newspaper column, “Paris by Night.” She is particularly excited by stories of a red-headed sex-worker who, if the columnist is to be believed, “inflames all the lustful desires of the shady male characters of the underworld” (12). 28 Minne is at that intermediate stage, like Cécile and her friends in Dangerous Liaisons, where she senses the power and

Libertine Ethics  119 importance of sex, but knows virtually nothing else about it. She, like Cécile, is desperate to learn, but because she is ignorant, and draws her knowledge from the blazing caricatures of newspapers and novelettes, she does not see any danger. She knows “neither fear nor pity” (25). As sex and cruelty are still only ideas for Minne, she explores them in her mind without limit. Like Eugènie in Philosophy in the Bedroom, she would happily torture the older, convention-bound women around her. She would like “a friend of mamma’s” who strokes Minne’s hair to be taken off by gangsters, who would “draw fatal signs with the point of a knife on her ugly bottom,” and “do a war-dance on her body and throw her into a lime-kiln” (26). With her fantasies of passion and cruelty, Minne shows that for Colette innocence is not sweet and trusting, but “hard” and “immodest.” Innocence is the self that has not learned by experience, that is still “pure” in the sense of uncompromised and uncompromising. Colette does not use “pure” in a moral sense, or in the sense of being “without harm.”29 Even though “The Hidden Woman” and The Innocent Libertine were written 20 years apart, there are the same uncomfortable tensions in both. The doctor’s wife takes pleasure in being “alone,” but that solitary pleasure is not aloneness as such, but an escape from the social identity of wife, and into promiscuous contact with strangers. She is restored to her “immodest innocence” in that her disguise takes her back to the autonomy that a girl may feel in the privacy of her imagination, but that a woman in Colette’s world will struggle to maintain. Autonomy is innocent and pure because it is before the fall into womanhood. It is immodest in that it is obedient to wishes and fantasies, without censorship. Colette uses Minne to explore the clash of this “innocent libertinism” with the demands of the social. Minne goes in search of her heroes from the “Paris by Night” column, and ends up spending the whole night out. She meets only with ugliness, terror, disappointment. Now compromised by her escapade, though still a virgin, she is pushed into marrying her cousin Antoine, who has loved her all the while. Minne still believes that love and sex are the “Great Adventure,” but she is unmoved by Antoine, and sets out on a series of affairs, looking for a “real” experience of passion. She has read the tawdry fiction in which heroines experience the “supreme spasm” and reach “unknown summits” of “sensation” (114). But however bold she is in chasing these summits, all she sees is a succession of male lovers experiencing this “ecstasy” and “swooning rapture,” while she herself feels little or nothing. Minne exercises freedom in pursuit of her own pleasure, but all the while she longs only to be “like other women” who, she supposes, are “struck by that divine thunderbolt” (118). Minne is a libertine not because she loves sexual pleasure and seeks to renew and diversify it; she is a libertine because she is searching unhappily for a sexual satisfaction that she has never had. She remains a

120  Libertine Ethics “lonely child whose frigidity kept her unfairly and absurdly pure after her lapses from virtue” (148). Colette, though, will engineer a brighter future. Minne one evening, out of gratitude, tries to please her husband by faking arousal. This causes Antoine to pause, and to study his wife, and then to continue with “curiosity.” He ends up carrying out an observation which is “better than his own pleasure” (187), as he learns how to please Minne. Sex, and the relations between men and women, emerges in Colette’s work as a zero-sum game. If Antoine surrenders to his own ecstasy, Minne feels nothing. If he dominates her, remaining “entirely lucid and in control of his body,” she “writhe[s] like a mermaid” and ends up gazing into his eyes and declaring herself to be “all yours” (187). The scene confirms Judith Thurman’s observation that Colette wrote about all the varieties of love except for “mutual love” (108). Although I have suggested continuities between “The Hidden Woman” and The Innocent Libertine, there is also a contradiction, and especially around promiscuity. The Innocent Libertine affirms the argument that we find before and after Colette that the promiscuous woman is she who has yet to find true fulfilment (or more plainly, orgasm). In “The Hidden Woman,” though, there is no sense that the wife is frigid or unfulfilled. Rather, she is “free, honest,” and “tasting … without shame” the various pleasures that are available to her. We have then the pleasurein-variety of “The Hidden Woman” and the pleasure-in-fidelity of The Innocent Libertine. This is, as we will see, a recurrent question for Colette. She wants so often to establish that monogamous love is complete, natural, satisfactory, and essential to a woman’s nature. Yet she is also drawn to the idea of desire as “innocent,” as only respecting its own impulses, wherever they may lead. It is this contrast that also places her at a distance from her eighteenth-century precursors.At the heart of the tensions in Colette’s work is her sense that heterosexual monogamy is always surrender for the woman, but that the woman must surrender if she is to be happy. The task for her heroines is not to find independence, but to find the right master. Yet surrender is also a trap, and leads to betrayal and even abandonment.30 A woman may decide, after many betrayals, that she only wants a man for passing intimacy and sex. As one protagonist claims, “I want nothing of [a man] but his tenderness and ardour” (Vagabond 126–7). But either the woman will fall in love and want exclusive possession of the man, or she will, like the doctor’s wife, awaken to her own desire as “uncontrolled covetousness” (Stories 152). Her work explores these two opposed possibilities, each of which has its problems, enslaved monogamy and free promiscuity. I want to pursue her exploration with the book that she considered her finest, and which is undoubtedly her most radical treatment of sexual behaviour, The Pure and the Impure (1941), and the series for which she was most famous in her own day, and in which she treats the theme over the longest range, the Claudine novels.

Libertine Ethics  121 *** The first published version of The Pure and the Impure appeared in 1932 under the title, These Pleasures… or Ces plaisirs… The first title is a truncated version of a phrase that appears in the book, “these pleasures that we lightly call physical” (“ces plaisirs qu’on nomme, à la légère, physiques”). This earlier title is a fine example of Colette’s irony. We may lightly call sexual pleasure “physical” as a way of isolating and containing it as “only the body.” But “these pleasures” spill over and infuse everything.31 Our “lightness,” in this case, is studied and deceptive. Either that, or a sign of ignorance. The title for the final, revised version, The Pure and the Impure, presents us with more difficulties, as we will see. In The Pure and the Impure Colette explores the asymmetries of pleasure. The book opens with a woman faking an orgasm in an opium den, as she tries to please her much younger lover. He senses the lie and is enraged. As Thurman puts it in her commentary, there are those “who give pleasure but can’t receive it, or take it but can’t give it,” and even those most active and adventurous in sex are left feeling “obscurely cheated” (391). Colette develops the theme in a later episode in which she introduces a “celebrated lover,” a man who has set out to be a “Don Juan,” but who feels “exploited sexually” by the women he himself has pursued” (31). Like other Don Juans before him, this man is primarily motivated by vanity and not by pleasure. He is “obsessed with his reputation” (31), and resentful of the women who are able to deploy his vanity for their own pleasure. He begrudges them for the fact that, according to him, they “always got more out of it than [he] did” (50). This causes him to fall into what Colette calls “the neurosis that dishonours the voluptuary,” which is “the obsession with statistics” (29). He keeps track of the number of his conquests, and how many times he has performed in each encounter. It is as though, by counting, he can remind himself that he is a success, and not missing out. But the obsession with number only confirms that, finally, he is incapable of the deepest pleasure. Colette believes, like the Greeks, like Sade, like her contemporary Bataille, that the greatest pleasure lies in loss of control, a realm that lies beyond counting. She seems not to believe in balance, or in matched lovers. For Colette, true pleasure fits the model we saw in the earlier fiction, and as set out in abstract form by Bataille: it is surrender, loss of control, and related to death. True voluptuaries are not keeping count or asserting dominance; they are “flinging themselves in a great display of frenzy into an abyss” (102). Again as in Bataille, this “abyss” of pleasure is akin to, a precursor of death. As Colette writes, the hunt for pleasure is a “misplaced curiosity” which “persists in trying to find out … what lies beyond the grave” (102). But again Colette’s distinctive irony is present. She pauses to note a comic aspect, in that this extreme venture into the “abyss” is repeatable and therefore mundane. It is a habit “less tyrannical than the tobacco habit,” but a habit all the

122  Libertine Ethics same. Loss of self becomes a routine event. Colette imagines the voluptuary thinking through his or her day: “It’s four o’clock … At five I have my abyss” (102–3). If Colette picks up on terms and ideas that are associated with a longer tradition of libertinism, she is unusual in her interest in variations. Sade describes a variety of sexual practices, but he does not pause much to think about them. In contrast, Colette asks herself, what might be the psychological and ethical differences between male-female, femalefemale, and male-male relations? And she asks, does or might promiscuity feature equally in all these configurations? The answers are complex and perhaps surprising. Libertinism is always a near-synonym for promiscuity for Colette, and she writes that “Sapphic libertinage” is the only form of promiscuity that is “unacceptable” (118). For her, female-female relations, even when they are sexual, are not determined by sex in the same way as relations involving men. Moreover, female-female relations never amount to an acceptable permanent replacement for male-female relations. There is safety and pleasure for a woman in “her resemblance to the woman she loves and pities,” but this is still a case of “timid attainments” (117). The relation between two women is a “mutual attraction,” but it is “not basically sensual.” Rather, it is “a feeling of kinship” (117). Paradoxically, there may be more sexual enjoyment in this relation that is “not basically sexual” because a woman “finds pleasure in caressing a body whose secrets she knows, her own body giving her the clue to its preferences” (117). But the relationship is always vulnerable to intrusion by a man with all his “dazzling difference.” Two women are artificial like a “hothouse”; the man is like the surrounding climate – an unavoidable fact, even if “harmful” (118).32 Colette finds charm in the companionableness of female-female relations, but she celebrates and diminishes them at the same time: “It is this unresolved and undemanding sensuality that finds happiness in an exchange of glances, an arm laid on a shoulder, and is thrilled by the sun-warmed wheat caught in a head of hair” (119). “Sapphic libertinage,” then, is promiscuity that is “unacceptable” because female-female relations are only valuable as this affectionate pause, as a momentary escape from the essential relations between men and women, or between men and men. This belief leads Colette to assert – citing and dismissing Proust – that “there is no such thing as Gomorrah.” A type of love between women may occur at puberty, or in closed institutions such as boarding schools and prisons. But female-female relations, and the communities that form around them, will never “attract a great number or become an established thing that would gain the indispensable solidarity of its votaries” (139). Colette never quite explains why, if female-female relations are inessential or “shallow,” that also means to her that female-female promiscuity or “Sapphic libertinage” is “unacceptable.” The implication, perhaps, is that there is something misplaced and illogical in repeating with great

Libertine Ethics  123 frequency an act which is “inessential.” It is to parade a limited relation as having the same value as the truly important relations between men and women, and between men and men. Generally, Colette sees women without men as “monsters.” But if they are not libertine, she expresses affection and pity for them, whether they are lesbians, the elderly, or the unloved. Colette has some affection for the female-female couple – they are “monsters” that are loving and lovable. But the promiscuous lesbian is, to her, a distasteful aberration. “Sodom,” on the other hand, is “intact, enormous, eternal,” and Gomorrah by its side seems nothing more than its “puny counterfeit” (139). Men without women are “pure,” even if that purity is “the purity of the desert, the purity of the prison” (157). If female-female relations, like all mutual or reciprocal relations, seem to Colette to be spurious, inessential, there is a fierceness, an inequality, in male-male relations that Colette can respect as authentic. Men confront danger in seeking out other men, and “wear their youthful wounds like decorations” (165). Moving into culinary metaphor, Colette commands, “Remove from me everything that is too sweet!” She wants and can only believe in love that is “raw.”33 Women’s relations with other women are impure because they are compromised, managed, manufactured, produced and protected; they are variously sweets and hothouse plants. Again, then, “pure” is not a moral term for Colette, even if, arguably, she is making a moral judgement when she finds that female-female relations are either inferior or “unacceptable.” Male-female relations and male-male relations are not pure in a moral sense for her; they are pure in the sense that they are unequal, difficult, and therefore truthful to her perception of love and sex as always a meeting between mismatched forces. For her, as for the eighteenth-century libertines Laclos and Sade, terms such as “pure” and “innocent” are to be debated and re-signified. Like them, nature is central to her idea of sex and sexual behaviour, and the exploration of promiscuity is inspired by a re-orienting of the self around that nature. Colette claims to “come from a distant past” (172), and in this she signals her affiliation with an eighteenth-century nature, a fierce truth which accepts and even prefers the “arbitrary,” which puts “passion” before “goodness,” and “combat” before “discussion.” But she is not limited by older ideas, and certainly she does not adopt nature after the manner of Sade as an all-determining force. Nature is not an absolute tyrant with her, but something that can be negotiated. The abyss need not last, like Sade’s Sodom, for 120 days. It can be had at five o’clock, and then one moves on. *** The Claudine novels have been among the great bestsellers of French literature, and they are Colette’s attempt, over the greatest number of pages and the greatest number of years, to trace out the contours and the

124  Libertine Ethics consequences of her thinking about sex. Claudine begins as a country schoolgirl in Claudine at School (1900), who moves to Paris in Claudine in Paris (1901), gets married to a much older man in Claudine Married (1902), moves in louche literary circles and is admired by a fearful provincial in Claudine and Annie (1903), and is finally described thinking through her marriage and the sex lives of those around her in Retreat from Love (1907). In the first volume, the schoolgirl Claudine is fiercely virginal, but she is not innocent in the sense of unknowing about sex. Colette uses Claudine’s cat, Fanchette, to draw out the state of Claudine’s knowledge. Claudine watches the cat’s unembarrassed transformations when, “two or three times a year,” Fanchette is to be seen “with a swarm of tom-cats around [her].” Even in these “demented seasons,” Fanchette seems to be both lost in and outside of lust. She looks at Claudine as though to say, “Don’t despise me too much, nature has her urgent demands” (100). The country is a place of “peaceful immorality,” of an unreflective accommodation to “urgent demands,” wherever they may lead. Claudine’s closest companions, her father and the servant Mélie, are comic reminders of the ubiquity and volatility of desire. Mélie is full of lore and gossip about the neighbours, while Claudine’s father is a naturalist who is obsessed by his magnum opus on slugs. Both Mélie and the father are often heard singing “barbarous ditties” which make direct reference to genitalia. Mélie has a rhyme on walnuts: “Riddle-me-ree, riddle-me-reeks. Two pairs of buttocks in one pair of breeks” (284). The father sings hunting songs “at the top of his voice,” including: You should just see my thing, It would give you a start, It’s a fine rosy pink Like an artichoke’s heart. (291) This rural innocence, which consists in refusing or not knowing to be ashamed of sexual matters, becomes a point of contention between Claudine and her Paris cousin, the foppish homosexual, Marcel. When Claudine talks of Fanchette going “out of her mind” with lust and becoming pregnant, she sees that her “freedom in speaking about such things obviously made him uncomfortable” (222). Claudine feels she has to justify herself: Are you staring at me because I don’t talk respectably? Well, that’s because, down there in the country, you see cows and dogs and goats getting married very hastily and unceremoniously every day. Down there, it isn’t the least indecent. (222) Marcel is far from convinced, and he cites Zola’s novel about the brutal couplings of peasant life, La Terre (1887). His reading has led him to

Libertine Ethics  125 believe that country people “don’t always watch those things in a purely detached, practical way just as part of the job of farming.” Claudine voices her author’s disdain for Zola’s representation of peasant life, saying that the naturalist novelist does not in fact “understand the first thing about the country” (222). Colette uses Claudine’s transition from country to city to draw out the idea that while the country and the city may be equally sexual, there are crucial differences. She would have us believe that in the country promiscuity is not depraved; it is random couplings that have been dictated by instinct, and which serve the purpose of reproduction. These are inevitable events which are more to be laughed at than agonised over. But her heroine soon becomes aware that, in the city, every passing moment is infused with erotic potential and sexual danger. Her innocence is not threatened in the country, and her knowledge of Fanchette and “cows and dogs and goats” is no preparation for the problems and lures of the city. In Paris Claudine is followed on the streets by men. She is seen at every moment as a sexual opportunity. The city forces Claudine to perceive herself as a sexual being, even though she does not wish to do so. Further, she senses that this sexualisation is a threat to her freedom. Her aunt is appalled that Claudine travels across Paris unaccompanied, and in the public-intimate space of a bus. Claudine learns to see in her aunt’s horror and in other incidents that she is a sexual target, and to travel alone on public transport, even fully clothed, is in a sense to “expose” herself. Colette takes further the place of girls and women in this culture in the pairing of Claudine and her friend from school. Claudine had loved Luce sadistically in the country, giving her beatings and pulling her hair. Luce too moves to Paris, but finds herself in desperate circumstances. She becomes the mistress of her aged, overweight uncle. When Claudine looks at a photo of the uncle, she sees “a fat, almost bald man of about sixty, perhaps more.” She thinks that he has “a bestial look, with jowls like a Great Dane and big calf’s head eyes” (271). But at the same time, Claudine can see that Luce has passed from being hungry, dirty, and vulnerable on the streets to being well-dressed, with a modern apartment. When Luce seeks to re-awaken Claudine’s sadistic interest in her, Claudine rejects her, saying, “do you imagine I pick up an old man’s leavings?” (282) The cruelty of her relations with Luce at school was pure in the sense that it was an exchange that both had freely sought. Here, though, the uncle’s cruelty is dishonest; he has offered his niece a home in return for sex, and the precise nature of the exchange is obscured by comfort and respectable portrait photographs. Claudine’s encounter with Luce becomes a means for Colette to tease out further Claudine’s own purity in a promiscuous environment. Claudine’s knowledge of the sexual life of the country leaves her pure in the sense that she still has complete control over her sexual choices. She is

126  Libertine Ethics still a sexual subject, not an object. But how can she remain so in Paris? She may not be poor and alone like Luce, but she knows that she too must negotiate her way in this world of erotic encounter and exchange. She too is vulnerable and in need of protection; she too must find some accommodation with a world that perceives her in sexual terms. Her father is affectionate and caring, but distracted. In Paris, she needs “a Papa… a friend… a lover,” even if the word “lover” still makes her “clench [her] teeth.” But this need for a fatherly lover is not simply a reflection of the fact that young women are prone to exploitation, and need protection. It also takes us back to Colette’s idea of love as always conforming to a master-slave dynamic. When Claudine feels that she needs a “master,” she voices her author’s belief that autonomy for women is finally impossible and undesirable. Women without men are “monsters.” As Claudine thinks to herself, free women “are not women at all” (316). There is a logic to Colette’s and her character’s thinking. Single women did not have much access to power and experience; marriage to a knowledgeable, experienced man becomes a way of learning about the world. When Claudine imagines a suitable future master, she thinks, “he would know all that I don’t know” (335). If it is not exactly a way of becoming powerful, it is a way of connecting oneself to power. Colette was able to find her way into writing and publishing in part because she married Willy. Her own journey to professional independence was via that circuitous route of giving herself and her work over to her husband for a number of years. As for Claudine, she may not have to strike the same deal as Luce, but she will end up striking a deal that bears strong similarities: giving herself to a much older man, a man who can give her some measure of protection. In the event, Claudine marries the much older manabout-town, Renaud, and her plan is not quite the success she had hoped for. Renaud is charming and amiable, but he declines the role of master. She had “hoped so ardently” that Renaud would “curb” her, but she is left wondering, “Are you to remain your own mistress forever…?” (335) She is subjugated by sex and by his charm, but he does not capitalise sufficiently on his advantage to please her. Renaud is simply too interested in diverse pleasures to be domineering. Sex for him is “something gay and lenient and facile,” whereas it leaves her “terrified” and “ecstatic” at the “too-delicious pain” (335). She would prefer to feel “a little afraid of him,” and to “respect” him (336). But she must accept that he is much too vain, too open to the attention of others, to assert himself over her all the time. She must accept that she feels superior to him. The interesting complicating factor in the Claudine novels is that Colette uses them to witness and come to terms with the failure of her own model of sexual love. Rather than being subjected and happy, Claudine must continue to shoulder the responsibility for herself and her sexual identity. This is not all loss, but the gains are questionable. Through her relations with Renaud, she has “discovered the secret of giving and

Libertine Ethics  127 receiving sexual delight,” and “the possession and use of it” gives her “the thrill of a child wielding a deadly weapon” (357). She makes use of this subsidiary or “childish” power by furthering Renaud’s erotic interests. When Claudine returns to her old country school with her new husband, she manipulates and kisses her favourite pupils for her own pleasure, but she knows that she is also grooming them for him. There will not be any sex between Renaud and the schoolgirls, but Claudine will induce them to kiss him. She enjoys the “intoxicating” power of bending them to her will. As she tells one of them, “I know those noes that mean yes” (355). If Renaud is not possessive enough to subject Claudine entirely to his own erotic demands, she makes a show of her erotic fidelity by persuading others to serve him. Colette uses the Claudine novels, which mirror in pale form the griefs, infidelities, and compromises of her marriage to Willy, to trace out the sexual possibilities within and beyond marriage. She will show us Claudine’s gradual move towards adultery, and as she does so she sets out her own ideas of fault and innocence. Claudine’s first adultery is “aesthetic.” While walking through a gallery, she looks at Bronzino’s “Portrait of a Sculptor,” and longs to touch his forehead and his “ruthless, undulating lip.” She wants to kiss “those eyes that looked like a cynical page’s” (379). Like the doctor’s wife in “The Hidden Woman,” who pauses appreciatively on the attractive figures at the masked ball, Claudine imagines the skin beneath the sculptor’s clothes, wondering if it is “the kind that darkens to the colour of old ivory under the armpits and in the hollows behind the knees,” and speculating on whether or not he would be “warm all over, even on the calves” (378). Colette is remarkable as a woman writing in the early years of the twentieth century who pauses to describe a woman’s detailed speculation about a man’s body. As Kristeva observes, this woman who “detested feminists” and thought a woman in love should obey has, all the same, a deep pride in her womanhood that is potentially revolutionary.34 In the event, Claudine’s adultery will be with a woman who is also Renaud’s mistress. But as her heroine’s sex life becomes more complicated and more compromised, Colette will still use her to voice an idea of the innocence that persists within a life of seeming compromise. This is most clear when Claudine and Renaud discuss the difference between male-male and female-female relations. Renaud is disgusted by his son, Marcel’s liaisons with other youths, but he is voyeuristically charmed by and encourages Claudine’s relations with his own mistress. When Claudine points out his inconsistency, he ventures the thought that Colette will explore again in The Pure and the Impure, that what women do together is “of no consequence” and only a “consolation” or a “restful change” (390). Indeed, in providing this “restful change,” female-female relations enable women to preserve the “taste for men” (390). Male-male liaisons, the implication is, are all the more repugnant because they are more real, more viable. So, Claudine learns

128  Libertine Ethics that adultery is determined by gender. She has had sex with Renaud’s mistress, but this does not make her an adulterer in his eyes. Claudine herself comes to a view that rehearses once again Colette’s the idea that innocence and purity are about following one’s own wishes, rather than about fidelity or infidelity, the maintaining or the breaking of a convention. As Claudine tries to explain to Renaud, “I take a lover, without loving him, simply because I know it’s wrong: that’s vice” (402). If, on the other hand, she takes a lover whom she actually loves, or whom she simply desires, then “that is just obeying the law of nature and I consider myself the most innocent of creatures.” Claudine sums up that vice is “doing wrong without enjoying it” (402). We seem to be close to the delighted sexual gourmandising of “The Hidden Woman” here, but we do not quite get there. Claudine remains married in the following volumes, but there are strong indications that Colette needs to move beyond her and the ideas that she has embodied. So, for instance, in the fourth volume, Claudine and Annie, Colette no longer wishes to view life so much through Claudine’s eyes. If she struggles to change Claudine, she can always abandon her, and in this episode she changes to the point of view of a new character, Claudine’s nervous, provincial friend Annie. In a sense, changing to Annie allows Colette to repeat the story of the fall into sexual knowledge. Although Annie is married, she is still a naïve and inexperienced woman. Claudine can make Annie fall in love with her, and she teases her while stopping just short of seducing her. One might say that Colette needs to create Annie because she does not know how to move Claudine’s story forward, but in creating Annie she still struggles to change the narrative. Colette cannot quite decide upon the failure of her alter ego’s marriage, much as she would not separate from her own husband until 1906. Shortly after 1906, she would kill off Renaud in the final Claudine novel. It is hard for Colette to sustain a meaningful life for Claudine as a character who is governed by love and by the search for a master. But nor will she project for Claudine a “Hidden Woman” identity. It is Annie who will push further. Annie comes to realise through looking at Claudine and her circle, and through looking at her own marriage to a priggish and unfaithful man, that her current life is not worth preserving. Colette writes powerfully and movingly about the apparent dead-end that Annie must then face. She will become a “monster” in her turn, pitiable, and contemptible. Annie reflects: … I can see with sad clairvoyance what this new life of mine will be like. I shall be the woman travelling alone who intrigues the hotel dining-room for a week, with whom schoolboys fall violently in love… I shall be the solitary diner… the lady in black, or the lady in blue, whose melancholy reserve frustrates and repulses the compatriots she meets on her travels. (560)

Libertine Ethics  129 In Retreat from Love Annie becomes a more fully-imagined version of the doctor’s wife or “Hidden Woman,” in that she embarks on many sexual adventures. The result, though, is not happiness so much as loneliness and disappointment. Finally Colette clings to an ideal of surrender and fidelity for woman, the same ideal that has failed her. She considers the idea of pleasurable promiscuity for a woman, but she and her characters still yearn to conform to the “natural” life of surrender and acceptance. This leads to a suspension for Claudine, whom Colette can neither abandon nor develop.35 Colette leads her characters through historical inevitabilities. Given their context, what choices do they have? Simone de Beauvoir set out in The Second Sex the parameters of girls’ lives as they moved towards womanhood. She argued that the process of becoming an adult and a woman is necessarily difficult, if not impossible. Through her girlhood, she is autonomous, but “now she must renounce her sovereignty.” De Beauvoir continues: Not only is she torn, like her brothers, though more painfully, between past and future, but in addition a conflict breaks out between her original claim to be a subject, active, free, and, on the other hand, her erotic urges and the social pressure to accept herself as passive object… Oscillating between desire and disgust, between hope and fear, declining what she calls for, she lingers in suspense between the time of childish independence and womanly submission.36 As we have seen, Colette tries to escape this bind by invoking an idea of nature, of country values, of inevitable and unembarrassing conjunctions which over-ride social constraints. But she cannot simply return to nature, nor can she imagine the promiscuous grazing of “The Hidden Woman” as a lasting solution to any woman’s problems. The invocation of nature becomes a way of declaring and maintaining the idea of female sexual desire, in the face of counter-forces. Like Claudine in conversation with Marcel, nature is a way of affronting those who would control her. This, in its turn, reminds us that for all the discourse of mastery and submission in Colette’s writing, she can only accept such submission as a phase that she herself has chosen.

Notes

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36 I am not the only reader to see how apposite de Beauvoir’s analysis is for thinking about the Claudine novels. Thurman quotes this passage (113).

Works Cited de Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron. “The Marriage of Figaro.” The Figaro Trilogy, edited by David Coward. Oxford: Oxford University PressWorld’s Classics, 2003. de Beauvoir, Simone. “Must We Burn Sade?” Marquis de Sade, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, edited by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. London: Arrow, 1990, pp. 3–64. Benabou, Erica-Marie. La prostitution et les moeurs au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1987. Byrne, Patrick. “‘Dans le temps où nous nous aimons, car je crois que c’était l’amour, j’étais heureuse; et vous, vicomte?’: The Pre-History of a Dangerous Liaison.” Modern Language Review, vol. 95, no. 3, July 2000, pp. 642–52. Cazenobe, Colette. “Le libertin et la femme naturelle.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, January–February 1987, 31–45. Cheek, Pamela. Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Libertine Ethics  133 Chernaik, Warren. Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Clark, Anna. Desire: A History of European Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 2008. Colette. Chéri, translated by Roger Senhouse. 1920. London: Vintage, 2001. ———. The Claudine Novels, translated by Antonia White. London: Penguin, 1979. ———. La femme cachée. Paris: Flammarion, 1924, p. 14. ———. “The Hidden Woman.” The Collected Short Stories of Colette, edited by Robert Phelps, translated by Matthew Ward et al. London: Secker and Warburg, 1984. ———. The Innocent Libertine, translated by Antonia White. 1909. London: Penguin, 1972. ———. Le pur et l’impur. Paris: Hachette, 1971. ———. The Pure and the Impure, translated by Herma Briffault. New York: New York Review, 2000. ———. The Vagabond, translated by Enid Macleod. 1911. London: Penguin, 1972. Crawford, Katherine. The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Cusset, Catherine. “Introduction,” in Feher, The Libertine Reader, pp. 749–65. ———, ed. Libertinage and Modernity. Special issue of Yale French Studies, vol. 94, 1998. ———. No Tomorrow: The Ethics of Pleasure in the French Enlightenment. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Dabhoiwala, Faramerz. The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution. London: Allen Lane, 2012. deJean, Joan. The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Diderot, Denis. “Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage.” Rpt. in Feher, The Libertine Reader, pp. 51–112. Duclos, Charles. Les Confessions du Comte de ***, edited by Laurent Versini. Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1969. Feher, Michel, ed. The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth- Century France. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Gillan, Robert. “Writing with Intent: Sex, Science and Morality in Four Major Novels of D. A. F. de Sade.” Textual Practice, vol. 28, no. 2, March 2013, pp. 243–65. Haslett, Moyra. Byron’s Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Hénaff, Marcel. “Supplement to Diderot’s Dream,” Rpt. in Feher, The Libertine Reader, pp. 52–75. Jones, Colin. The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon. London: Penguin, 2002. Kavanagh, Thomas. “The Libertine Moment,” in Cusset, Libertinage and Modernity, pp. 79–100. Kristeva, Julia. Les Mots/Colette ou la chair du monde, vol. 3 of “Le genie féminin.” Paris: Fayard, 2002. Kushner, Nina. Erotic Exchanges: The World of Élite Prostitution in EighteenthCentury Paris. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.

134  Libertine Ethics de Laclos, Choderlos. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, translated by David Coward. Oxford: Oxford University Press-World’s Classics, 1995. Lorrain, Jean. “DOIT-ON LE LIRE?” Le Journal, 29 June 1902, p. 1. URL: www.gallica.bnf.fr McAlpin, Mary. “The Rape of Cécile and the Triumph of Love in Les Liaisons dangereuses.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–19. McCallam, David. “The Nature of Libertine Promises in Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses.” Modern Language Review, vol. 98, no. 4, October 2003, pp. 857–69. Mesch, Rachel. “Sexual Healing: Power and Pleasure in Fin-de-Siècle Women’s Writing.” Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, edited by David Evans and Kate Griffiths. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008, pp. 159–72. de la Mettrie, Julien Offray. Man a Machine and Man a Plant. 1746. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. ———. Oeuvres philosophiques, edited by Aram Vartanian. Paris: Fayard, 1987. Miller, Nancy. French Dressing: Women, Men and Fiction in the Ancien Régime. New York: Routledge, 1995. Mitford, Nancy. Madame de Pompadour. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1954. Perry, Anouk. “9 questions que vous n’avez jamais osé poser sur les clubs libertins.” URL: madmoizelle.com Rank, Otto. The Don Juan Legend, translated by David G. Winter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Roulston, Chris. “Female Education and Sex Education in Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses.” Sex Education in Eighteenth-Century France, edited by Shane Agin. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011, pp. 191–205. Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de. Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, edited and translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. London: Arrow, 1965. Stephan, Philip. Paul Verlaine and the Decadence 1882–90. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974. Thurman, Judith. Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette. London Bloomsbury, 1999. Tirso de Molina. The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, edited and translated by Gwynne Edwards. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1987. Trousson, Raymond, ed. Romans de femmes du XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1996. Turner, James Grantham. Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England 1534–1685. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Verlaine, Paul. Oeuvres Poètiques, edited by Jacques Robichez. Paris: Garnier, 1969. Versini, Laurent. Laclos et la tradition. Paris: Librairie Klincksieck, 1968. ———. “Le Roman le plus intelligent”: Les Liaisons dangereuses de Laclos. Paris: Champion, 1998. Ward Jouve, Nicole. Colette. Brighton: Harvest, 1987.

5

The “Swarming City”

In the Paris police reports for 1798, a secret agent commented that it was “almost impossible to maintain good behaviour in a thickly populated area where an individual is, so to speak, unknown to all others and thus does not have to blush in front of anyone” (Benjamin 40). Alfred de Musset observes the same phenomenon in apocalyptic terms in The Confession of a Child of the Century (1836). Likening Paris to Babylon, he claims that the message that is “written on the walls in soot” is, “Be shameless!” (34)1 Half a century later, sexologist Richard von KrafftEbing would invoke Babylon again, while claiming that large modern cities were “hotbeds” of “low morality” (7). In the midst of the crowd, there were endless opportunities for doing what you wanted to do. The city was an endless parade of enticements, and the perfect place in which to hide from the consequences of your actions. New technologies enhanced the mood. On the buses, trams, and trains of the modern city, people were obliged to spend time packed closely together. The improved street-lighting led to bars and shops staying open late. Everywhere, at all hours, there were new occasions for people to mingle and to look at each other. Men and women developed the habit of “noctambulisme,” of walking the streets at night (Benjamin 38, 50). Edmond and Jules de Goncourt describe this night-wandering in their novel, Germinie Lacerteux (1865). Their protagonist, Germinie, is a Paris servant who becomes compulsively promiscuous, hovering between lit and dark spaces, looking for “the chance meeting, whatever the hazard of the pavement sets before a roving woman” (165). We seem to be heading here towards a relatively simple equation. The city is anonymity, and so it is an opportunity for illicit behaviour of various kinds, and especially for promiscuity. Strangers need not “blush” in front of each other. Their fear of exposure is reduced. They begin to act on impulse. But is the argument here that people had always wanted to be like this, and only the city makes it possible? Or is it that the array of opportunities in the city causes people to want more, and to want differently? In literary representations of modern Paris, the sense is that the city both creates and enables the desire for passing sex, but that this is also a return to a distant, “savage” condition. This is the paradox

136  The “Swarming City” observed by Paul Valéry, that the highly technologised modern city creates new opportunities for “primitive” behaviour. In Valéry’s terms, the city is a smooth, advanced “mechanism,” but it enables people to live in a “state of savagery” (Benjamin 131). Paris is a planned, logistical operation. It seems far removed from the messiness, instincts, and compulsions of human bodies. But over the course of the nineteenth century, people would come to see that sex and bodies too are a matter of logistics, networks, proximity, and rapid turnaround. Another paradox here is that anonymity proves to be a structuring of information, not a complete absence of it. That is to say, the literature presents promiscuity as the hidden and the secret, but also as part of a social spectacle. Illicit sex, if not taking place in plain sight, is always there to be detected and pursued. Promiscuity, in this writing, is the perpetual scandal, the secret which is no secret, the outrageous behaviour at which no one is really surprised. As in La Dame aux camélias, when the society ladies attend the auction of the sex-worker’s property, or like the doctor’s wife at the masked ball in Colette’s “The Hidden Woman,” the supposed secret is there for everyone to see. People may be anonymous in the modern city, but they are still part of a scene. Indeed, each person is a signboard of sorts, announcing his or her wealth, status, occupation, and availability. As Claudine learns in her journeys on buses and in the metro, she is part of the spectacle, something to be read or consumed, whether she wishes it or not. The modern city, for all its excitement, for all its obvious advances, is a moral problem. It is a “society of the spectacle” (Debord passim), a place of calculated show, in which older ideas of authenticity, of integrity, are thrown into doubt. In the city, the invitation is to exist in relation to others, rather than in relation to abstract values or commandments. In the traditional Christian order, the crucial measure was how one appeared in the eyes of God. In the theatre of urban life, there were endless opportunities to appear before and perform for other people. I want in this chapter to consider four texts which explore the spectacle of promiscuity in Paris: Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (1857), Émile Zola’s Nana (1880), Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), and Renaud Camus’ Tricks (1978). Each writer reflects on the progressive and the “savage” aspects of the city, and on the city as, in particular, posing sharp questions about sexual morality. Each thinks through the relations between the seemingly brilliant advances of Paris, and its equally obvious promiscuity. *** Baudelaire did not believe in progress. He saw it all around him, as Haussmann flattened the slums to put in the grands boulevards; as, in 1855, over five million people went to the Exposition Universelle to admire the displays of industrial and agricultural technology. This was a

The “Swarming City”

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period in which the “good Frenchman” could believe that “steam, electricity and gas” had magically taken him beyond old problems of good, evil, and the individual’s responsibility for his soul. For Baudelaire, this was “modern fatuity” (Exposition 126). Whatever the signs of rational advance, Baudelaire did not think that people could leave behind their impulses towards “degradation.” The modern city only multiplied the opportunities and the forms of that degradation. Baudelaire emphasised the promiscuous fervour of modern Paris, in spite of the cleaning up and rationalisation, in spite of the “steam, electricity and gas.” For him, the population density of Paris prompted a move towards “universal degradation.” He sounded a gleeful note: “At the play, in the ball-room, each one enjoys the possession of all” (“Squibs” 31). He continues: “The pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression of sensual joy with the multiplication of Number.” Truly launched into his theme, he claims: “All is Number. Number is in all. Number is in the individual. Ecstasy is a Number” (55). When we turn from his essays to the poetry, we find an exploration of promiscuity, of the “Ecstasy” of “Number,” but also a powerful sense that, within this world of shifting and beguiling appearances, older problems remain. Moreover, it is only the persistence of these older problems that gives life any meaning. Baudelaire announces his theme with the title of his collection. He twins the beauty of “flowers” with “evil.” There is a metaphysical note in “evil,” of the ageless, timeless forces of destruction, but also something else. The French word is “mal,” which contains the metaphysical and moral sense of “wickedness,” but also the more corporeal meaning of “unease” or “illness.” He begins his Flowers of Evil with an address “To the Reader”: Folly and error, stinginess and sin Possess our spirits and fatigue our flesh. And like a pet we feed to tame our remorse As beggars take to nourishing their lice. (5) His address is not “I” but “we.” He claims a fellow-feeling with those he sees, and he tells us that we are like him, and he is like us. He is drawn to this sense of contact, immersion, and propinquity, the relation of “beggar” and “lice.” Later he refers to “helminthes,” which are intestinal parasites. All the problems are biting into the skin, or already deep inside. He also refers to jackals, monkeys, scorpions, hounds, vultures, and snakes, “the infamous menagerie of our vices.”2 The reader, Baudelaire supposes, would like to disavow this world of animality, folly, error, stinginess, and sin, but the poet insists on our already being in the midst of, penetrated by, the writhing, swarming, grunting, crawling masses. Baudelaire loves the thought of the swarming mass, and the word swarm and its cognates appear no fewer than five times in his poetry. Paris is a “swarming scene” (183), a “swarming city, city of dreams” (178). The French word, “fourmillant,” is from “fourmi,” or ant, and

138  The “Swarming City” at one point the city is “une fourmilière” or an ant-hill (192–3). In the swarm there is the sense of inevitable contact, of bodies climbing over each other. Even individual movements and gestures can have this sense of many in one – kisses, for instance, are “swarming and deep” (233–4). But there is a distance too, the distance of one who can look at the scene and describe it. Baudelaire writes not of the sensation of being in the swarm, but what it feels like to look at it. He sees a city so densely and actively populated that he can never hope to keep track of all the individual movements. His eye is mesmerised by what it can see, but not follow in detail. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the swarm here is activity without evident order or hierarchy. It looks like chaos. But in fact there is always purpose or motive in the ceaseless activity. The two ideas, of swarming and looking, are explored further. Baudelaire gets a closer view, and when he does so, the swarming resolves itself into promiscuous sexual encounters. The city becomes a place of endless voyeuristic moments, as the poet sees or imagines all the couplings and combinations that go on around him. We see this clearly in “The Sun”: Through all the district’s length, where from the shacks Hang shutters for concealing secret acts, When shafts of sunlight strike with doubled heat On towns and fields, on rooftops, on the wheat, I practice my quaint swordsmanship alone, Stumbling on words as over paving stones, Sniffing in corners all the risks of rhyme, To find a verse I’d dreamt of a long time. (169) The sun’s rays are cruel, but away from those rays, behind closed shutters, are “secret acts” (the original French, “secrètes luxures,” is more obviously sensual [168]). Others engage in those pleasures, but the poet pursues a lonely phallic practice, what he calls his “quaint swordsmanship” (169). The speaker’s lonely swordsmanship might seem to allude to masturbation, but it is more specifically the writing of the poem. His voyeuristic watching, tracking, picturing what goes on behind the shutters, is joined with his writing. He stumbles in his search for the right word much as he might stumble “over paving stones” as he walks (169). The voyeur-poet is “sniffing in corners” for scenes of sex, but also for a rhyme (169). He is the lone searcher for the truth and unity of the poem, but at the same moment and in the same act, he is the depraved connoisseur of the squalid city scene. There is, though, another connection, between the sun and the poet. He writes of the sun: When, poet-like, he comes to town awhile, He lends a grace to things that are most vile,

The “Swarming City”  139 And simply, like a king, he makes the rounds Of all the hospitals, the palace grounds. (169) The poet, however much he is immersed in and drawn to the scene, is also above it and outside, beyond the shutters. Again like the sun, he is cruel in his harsh scrutiny, but he enriches all that he touches, and he touches everything. He does not attempt to say that the “vile” is not “vile.” But “vile” things are granted their place. The poem is an act of attention that is accepting, and that, in its very attention to the hidden and the shameful, allows that they too have a “grace.” Baudelaire shows sympathy and liking for the “universal degradation,” and he accepts it as a part of himself. This might seem to make him socially progressive, or at least tolerant. He is not insisting on a clear hierarchy, with fixed divisions and exclusions. But at the same time, he works within and reinstates the terms of a moralistic and aesthetic status quo. This ambivalence appears most obviously in his writing about women. Women in his world are promiscuous, the body, and evil. He begins one poem to an imagined lover, You’d entertain the universe in bed, Foul woman, ennui makes you mean of soul. To exercise your jaws at this strange sport Each day you work a heart between your teeth. Your eyes, illuminated like boutiques Or blazing stanchions at a public fair, Use haughtily a power not their own, With no awareness of their beauty’s law. (53) The woman’s motive here is not exactly pleasure or joy, but revenge upon life. She has been made cruel by “ennui,” by a sense of boredom and despair. She is a creature who devours men as part of an inevitable routine. There is some vengeful satisfaction in using up and casting out others as she has been used up and cast out. She and her lovers or customers are human enough to be aware of their degradation, but so much tools of nature that their acts are involuntary. The poet wonders why the woman is not ashamed or afraid, but it is because she senses nature’s “secret plans” working through her. She is part of a different kind of beauty, a “filthy grandeur,” a “sublime disgrace” (54–5). She is nature in action, and she also inspires the “filthy grandeur” that is the poem. Woman, as so often, is the body and sex. She damages the man, but she wounds him into creation. The next poem in the collection repeats the theme, and takes us back to legends of the “excessive woman,” specifically in the persona of Messalina. Entitled “Sed non satiata” (“But not satisfied”), Baudelaire is quoting Juvenal’s description of the “whore-empress.” Again the poet is drawn to the woman, but regrets

140  The “Swarming City” that he cannot satisfy her, cannot “break [her] nerve and bring [her] to [her] knees” (55). Woman here is the unthinking, hungry flesh, while man is intelligence, spirit, and aspiration. Woman can only degrade, whereas man can transform his degradation into Idea and Beauty. This is yet more clear in one of the poems that most shocked his contemporaries, “A Carcass” or “Une Charogne.” Baudelaire begins with a light, happy expression, the irony of which is soon revealed: Remember, my love, the object we saw That beautiful morning in June: By a bend in the path a carcass reclined On a bed sown with pebbles and stones… (59) Baudelaire brings the image of the female corpse into explicit relation with sex and promiscuity, in that the dead woman’s legs are “spread out like a lecherous whore” (59). This body, like the city, is swarming with life – flies and maggots – while a dog (gendered as a bitch or “une chienne” [60–61]) looks to make off with a part. With grim joy, the poet tells his horrified companion that there is life here, with the insects and larvae, and even beauty, in that the body with its teeming parasites makes a “strange music” (61). He tells her that she too will one day be like this “filth.” But in the midst of the decay, the poet insists upon the “divine essence” (63) to be rescued from the scene. He, through his art, can preserve what is lost; he is “the keeper of the corpses of love” (63). Indeed, he loves his companion proleptically, for the rotten carcass that she will become. Her loveliness and her fate belong ultimately to him and his poem. Woman in these poems is the flesh and desire, at once the host of, the motive for, the embodiment of the swarm. The poet is drawn fatalistically towards the compromises of the body, but still with a chance of a noble flight into art. Sex is compulsive and destructive. This is a theme he also explores in his prose. In “My Heart Laid Bare” he associates sex with torture. “Cruelty and sensual pleasure,” he maintains, “are identical, like extreme heat and extreme cold” (“My Heart” 74). Similarly in “Squibs” he writes that sexual love resembles “an application of torture or a surgical operation.” The controlling party may be a man or a woman: He or she is the surgeon or the executioner; the other, the patient or victim. Do you hear these sighs – preludes to a shameful tragedy – these groans, these screams, these rattling gasps? Who has not uttered them, who has not inexorably wrung them forth? What worse sights than these could you encounter at an inquisition conducted by adept torturers? These eyes, rolled back like the sleepwalker’s, these limbs whose muscles burst and stiffen as though subject to the action of a galvanic battery… (“Squibs” 33)

The “Swarming City”  141 This “insane ferocity” then relaxes into a “kind of death” (34). Indeed, the promise of sex is a promise of a “kind of death,” a release from the self, from habitual and unrelenting preoccupations. He asserts that “Love wishes to emerge from itself” (32). But this escape into post-coital exhaustion also leads to ennui, to melancholy, to a realisation that one has not escaped, and that one is “far from the sight of God” (229). It is useless, Baudelaire writes in “Condemned Women: Delphine and Hippolita,” to wish to “mix the ways of virtue and love” (242). If the two cannot mix, would it be possible to stop loving, and become virtuous? Baudelaire argues that all men are both “spirit” and “brute,” but it is the brute that is “really potent.” The more spiritual and cultured the man, “the less he fornicates” (Intimate Journals 97). But Baudelaire does not aim to transcend his desires. Rather, he will turn to one of the damned women and “obliterate” himself (245) on her breast. In the city, which is “crazed with lust to the point of cruelty” (788), he can only hope to find debauchery and death. Sex is the “dance of death.” We see this in his poem, “Danse macabre,” which he based on a statuette by Ernest Christophe of “a large feminine skeleton ready to get out for a ball.”3 She is a “noseless hetaera” (199) because, as a skeleton, she has no nose, but there is also the suggestion of the fate of many sex-workers in the period, when in the advanced stages of syphilis the nose may decompose and fall off. This skeleton-woman is full of desire; she wants to dance, and the frill of her dress is like a “lewd streamlet” (197). As the figure of desire, and of death, she will eventually dance with all. But Baudelaire uses the skeleton to offer the idea that sexual pleasure is an attempted escape from the knowledge of death: Can you dismiss the nightmare mocking you, With candle glow and songs of violins, And will you try what floods of lust can do To cool the hell that brands the heart within? (199) The poet sees the deathliness within desire, the “all-consuming serpent” that creeps along the trellis of the skeleton’s ribs (199). All the same, desire remains an inevitable fact. He asks: But who has not embraced a skeleton? Who has not fed himself on carrion meat? (199). Baudelaire argues that everyone has been fed on “things from the grave,” in the sense that desire is always a form of dying, and a wish to escape from the living death that is ennui.4 Baudelaire writes about Paris as the “swarming city,” and promiscuity is a recurrent feature of that “swarming.” In the modern, progressive city, Baudelaire sees multiplied opportunities for people to be depraved,

142  The “Swarming City” and to damn themselves. Paid-for, passing sexual encounters offer an escape and a confirmation that, in the midst of well-lit modernity, fallenness, death, and evil are still the presiding elements. But this depravity and damnation is also the creation of poetry, of transcendence. Is there a contradiction here, or a type of falsehood, in Baudelaire’s lamentations about damnation and fallenness, and his reassurance that the poet and poetry somehow escape? How, precisely, should we understand the metaphysical dimension of his poetry? Does he really invite us to see him as a metaphysical poet, and even as a Christian poet? For all the references to Satan, Hell, evil, and God, it is hard to see Baudelaire as a writer who sees promiscuity in an uncomplicatedly religious way. His references to Christ and Satan are no more binding, no more the sign of faith or conviction, than his references to Phoebus and Pan. Walter Benjamin held that Baudelaire adopted the “metaphysics of the provocateur” (14). Benjamin did not take Baudelaire’s Satan “too seriously,” seeing it as Baudelaire’s way of declaring and maintaining a “non-conformist position” (23). Baudelaire was an antagonistic figure who changed positions frequently, and in ways that were “abrupt and fragile” (13). Belgian writer, Émile Leclerq, saw Baudelaire as a poseur with “neither convictions, nor common sense, nor any sincere enthusiasms” (Pichois 325). But surely his metaphysical references serve his idea of life in the modern city. He is coming to terms with the horrors of modern life, which are also, on occasion, its pleasures, beauties, and heroism. Using evil and Satan is not simply a pose. Perhaps the poet’s wounded ego invokes a metaphysical frame of reference to aggrandise his sense of his own suffering. But even this is not adequate explanation. Rather, he sees in the city around him struggle, sexual compulsion, depredation, and the suffering of age and poverty, and he realises his own response to these phenomena – obsession, sadness, prurient glee, and shame. In his writing he offers sickening details, but he also offers the real as a kind of fantasy. The discourse of evil becomes a way of allowing that the real is too much to be encountered steadily. It has to be thrown into doubt, projected as a fantasmagoria, as part of an obscene morality play. The city, with its scenes of sexual excitement that are also nightmare, must be encountered honestly, and for that very reason, they must in the same moment be mythologised.5 *** Baudelaire immerses himself and us in the sexual underworld of the city, and insists that we all belong there. He explores the intimate correspondences between the promiscuous scene and his practice as a poet, and he ridicules the claims being made for science. In contrast, his nearcontemporary, novelist Émile Zola (1840–1902) sets himself up as a type of scientist or naturalist after the manner of Darwin. Zola claimed to be part of the progress that science was making possible. But he is a divided figure. He offers a new and interesting variation on the theme of

The “Swarming City”  143 city promiscuity, but he ends up resembling his melancholy predecessor in ways that do not fit with his declared intentions. This problem is very much in evidence in his Paris novel, Nana. But let’s focus for a moment on science and progress, and how Zola defines his role as a writer as both scientific and progressive. Zola’s most extensive statement of his values as a writer comes in a long essay, The Experimental Novel, published in 1880, the same year as the publication of Nana.6 In his essay, Zola explains that he aims for a “scientific truthfulness.”7 Citing the well-known physiologist, Claude Bernard, and Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Zola suggests that he follows in his fiction the same careful, disinterested practice of observation followed by Bernard and other scientists. Zola, like them, shows how there is a cause and effect in human behaviour, a “total determinism.”8 People act according to their racial and biological composition, and according to their social environment. They inherit a fundamental “temperament,” which they then act out. Zola gives the example of his great precursor in the French novel, Balzac, and La Cousine Bette (1846). In that novel Balzac shows how a man, Baron Hulot, lives out his heavily erotic temperament, even though he damages himself, his family, and society in the process (Le Roman expérimentale 1178).9 Similarly, Zola had written in the preface to the second edition of his earlier novel, Thérèse Raquin (1868), he aims to show characters who are “supremely dominated by their nerves and their blood, deprived of free will and drawn into every action of their lives by the predetermined lot of their flesh” (4). This leads him to propose that he does not make up his stories so much as note them down from the world around him. He is not so much creative as “meticulous” (4). He concludes of Thérèse Raquin: “I have merely performed on two living bodies the analytical work surgeons carry out on dead ones” (4). His other favourite metaphor is legal. In The Experimental Novel he claims in his writing to present not so much fiction as “trial reports” (“le procès-verbal” 1179); novelists should be seen as “examining magistrates” (“les juges d’instruction” 1180). For all Zola’s scientific and legalistic manoeuvring, he gives us strong reminders of Baudelaire’s fatally erotic Paris in Nana. He writes of the “carnal madness” that takes over the men of the city. Of his heroine, the sex-worker, Nana, he writes: “On rainy evenings, when the dripping city exhaled an insipid odour suggestive of a dirty bed, she knew that the wet weather and the fetid reek of the back streets sent men mad” (272). Nana is not herself afflicted with the same “madness” at this point; she knows, simply, that in the urban damp she will do good business. At other points, though, she comes to resemble the afflicted and fatal women of Baudelaire, a woman of the kind who would “entertain the world in bed.” She picks up passers-by out of boredom, explores same-sex experiences, and goes to watch “scenes of debauchery” in “infamous houses” (432). We might suppose, as others have done, that Zola’s claims to “scientific” and “legal” objectivity are his way of forestalling claims that, actually, he likes

144  The “Swarming City” to immerse himself and his readers in a heady, erotic stew. The prefaces in which he makes his “scientific” claims were written in the face of attacks in the press, in which it was suggested that he was an exploitative and degenerate writer. We might, along with George Holden, see Zola’s theories as cynical attempts to “impress a public easily over-awed by pseudo-scientific terminology.”10 Regardless, the flaws in his logic are clear enough. He does not merely observe; he does not dissect the body that already exists. His writing is always a selective and imaginative representation. Zola’s boldest justification for his work was that his kind of “scientific” fiction would enable social progress. His goal was to “penetrate into the why of things in order to become superior to things and reduce them to the state of correctly acting cogs in the machine.”11 To be a determinist, then, is not to be a fatalist. Once we have figured out the effects of heredity and environment, we can breed out destructive dispositions or temperaments, and make future generations healthier. In this way, we will “enter into a century in which all-powerful man will subjugate nature and use its laws to bring into being on this earth the greatest possible amounts of justice and freedom.”12 What this means with regard to sex is that healthy minded men and women will form stable monogamous relationships, which will lead to healthy children and families, and a strong France. Anyone who deviates from this, whether into promiscuity or same-sex relations, is causing the disintegration of all that is good and progressive. Men and women “were surely only put on earth to have children,” he argued, and when they fail to do so, they “kill life itself.”13 Zola explores his ideas of determinism at greatest length in the 20-volume cycle of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, which moves from Provence to the northern mining districts, with many of the volumes set in Paris. In tracing the Rougon-Macquart family across several decades, Zola can show how the talents and weaknesses of one generation show up in the next. There is Parisian promiscuity in several of the RougonMacquart novels, often involving men exercising their opportunities in more or less casual or opportunistic ways. Nana, though, is an unremitting treatment of promiscuity, focusing on a woman who rises from the slums via sex-work. Nana bears out Zola’s theories. The protagonist is from a family prone to drunkenness and brutality, tendencies which in Nana take a turn towards promiscuity and same-sex relations. She “is descended from four or five generations of drunkards, her blood tainted by an accumulated inheritance of poverty and drink, which in her case ha[s] taken the form of a nervous derangement of the sexual instinct” (221). Zola imagines here a kind of vengeance of one class over another. Nana “avenges” the pauper class from which she comes by “corrupting and disorganising Paris between her snow-white thighs” (221). Nana, though, is not a Machiavellian plotter, and this “vengeance” is more a kind of natural justice, as past cruelties must be paid for. Far from being

The “Swarming City”  145 a plotter, Nana is a “bird-brain” who takes enjoyment from lovers and possessions, but is soon bored, and never plans for the future. For all the money she earns, she is never far from being broke. Although Nana is manipulative, she is also, in a sense, innocent. She engages in sadomasochistic relations, pursues same-sex affairs, and acts on “monstrous caprices” such as hiring girls for sex, and going to watch orgies. She has no objection to one lover or client (the borderline is often blurred) getting into her sheets when they are still warm from a previous lover. Yet she remains innocent in the sense that she is only following her own nature. As one of her client-lovers comes to realise, Nana is “a liar, incapable of controlling herself, giving herself to friends or passers-by, like a good-natured animal, born to live naked” (427). If this is innocent, it is still, in Zola’s terms, depraved. Believing that we are “surely only put on earth to have children,” Zola sees Nana’s promiscuity, her same-sex lovers, all her non-procreative acts, as symptoms of her own and the nation’s degeneracy, the degeneracy that will lead to the fall of France. He is writing after the catastrophic defeat of the French at the hands of the Prussians in 1870, but he sets his Rougon-Macquart novels before that date. In this way, he can make it seem that Nana and her like are all signs of what is to come. The nation has become self-indulgent, reminiscent of “Roman decadence” (233). Sexual licence is the cause, and the Prussian victory will be the effect. Zola offers a number of issues over which we may wish to pause. First, although we have reason to believe that some of our characteristics or dispositions are determined by inheritance – our hair-colour, aspects of our personality, our disposition to some diseases and not to others – we might struggle to accept the neat patterns of determinism that Zola traces through his characters. Equally, we may not see same-sex relations, or casual sex, or role-play, as “depravity.” Zola wants to put severe constraints on sexual knowledge and sexual self-consciousness. We see this when Nana looks at herself naked in a mirror. She experiences a “passion for her body, an ecstatic admiration of her satin skin and the supple lines of her figure” (220). In looking at herself she is “filled once more with the depraved curiosity she had felt as a child” (222). This sexual or erotic self-consciousness, Zola would have us believe, is wrong. Deviation from a more-or-less automatic sex within wedlock, for the purpose of making children, is a symptom of inherited degeneracy. Zola seems nervous about female sexual awareness, and women’s desire. He writes of one character that she is “[s]uffering from the restless feverishness of a woman in her forties” (428). He writes of Nana herself as revealing “all the impulsive madness of her sex” (44). When women are sexual, it is dangerously so. The echo here is of Dumas fils. As noted in Chapter 2, Dumas fils too liked to see the fall of France in 1870 as linked to a failure to control women, and in La Dame aux camélias the good woman, Blanche, is totally pure, and only speaks “pious words.”

146  The “Swarming City” But with Zola as with Dumas fils there is perhaps something else involved in this fascination with the spectacle of the sexual woman. Contemporary reviewers assumed that Zola himself was prurient. It is a case, as Hannah Thompson suggests, of a “puritanical stance” which is undermined by its own lascivious attention to detail (63). Such an excitable puritanism is evident when he invokes legends of “man-eaters” (45), the “scarlet woman,” the “Beast of the Scriptures,” and a “lewd creature of the jungle” (223). At times, Zola’s “science” seems more a revival of ancient fears.14 If Zola pushes into service old myths about carnal and fatal women, he also explores a more modern idea of promiscuity in the city. Nana is at the centre of a new, urban erotic economy. Her great power as a seductress depends on her starring role at the Théâtre des Variétés. Nana is promoted as a sex object by the theatre manager, who insists on referring to his theatre as a “brothel” (21). She, who was cheaply available before her rise to fame, is now much more keenly pursued. When she is on stage, a “wave of lust” flows from her “as from a bitch on heat” (45–6), and the men respond. Their arousal is all the more intense for the communal setting. The competition from the other men affirms the value of the prize, and adds to the excitement. There is an intensified display and exchange of sex in Nana that Zola sees as definitive of Second Empire Paris. Nana represents the visibility, the accessibility of sex in Paris, and she is Zola’s classic instance of how this heavily eroticised urban society must decay from within. As an actress, Nana’s name is emblazoned on posters across the city, but everyone knows that she cannot sing, dance, or act. She embodies the intensified and consumerised mediation of sex, and her merits as a performer do not matter. But if she is modern sex, she also brings to mind earlier types of decadence, such as that mentioned in the Bible, and that of imperial Rome. Does this mean that Zola is closer to Baudelaire, in that he sees the failure of progress, and a repeat of age-old failings? He claims not to be conservative in that Baudelairian sense. He does not argue that humanity occupies a particular and eternal plane, from which it cannot improve. Zola, as we have seen, believed that improvement was possible. But he is more conservative than his scientific posturing would have us believe. If he sees his society as degraded and heading towards disaster, this assumes an altogether better starting-point. Paris is debauched, but it could be noble and fine, and perhaps was noble and fine in the past. If we keep tracing out the implications and the clues, we find that Zola is nostalgic, and laments the loss of old grandeur.15 This is most obvious in his signalling of how Nana undermines the established order. There is, for instance, her debut on stage as a barely-clad Venus among other ancient deities. The play is a musical comedy, and alongside Nana’s Venus, “Jupiter looked a fool, and Mars was too funny for words.” Zola himself is not laughing when he writes that “[r]oyalty had

The “Swarming City”  147 been turned into a farce and the Army into a joke” (38). This regretful sense of social promiscuity, of disorderliness, is apparent throughout. When Nana and her female lover, Satin, carry on their amorous play in front of several of Nana’s aristocratic clients, the narrator notes that this activity is taking place before men “with great names and their ancient traditions of respectability” (335). We are told on other occasions that the new freedoms are wrecking a valuable status quo – that “the fabric of ancient honour was cracking and burning on all sides,” that the aristocratic part of “the social fabric” is “cracking and crumbling” (222). We are invited to see that Nana’s influence, and by extension the force of urban promiscuity, are damaging a “great” and “honourable” class, a class that, the implication is, ought to retain wealth and power. We might wish for a more considered assessment of the usefulness, fairness and values of the old ruling class, but Zola does not provide it. It is of course ridiculous to suppose that the sexual use of the lower classes by the upper classes was new in the Second Empire, and that this would lead to the fall of the aristocracy and of France. Zola based his novel on notorious instances of aristocrats seeming to bankrupt themselves trying to satisfy the wishes of one courtesan or another, but shifts in the status and wealth of the older aristocratic families has a much longer and more complex history. Zola tends, as noted earlier, towards Biblical apocalypse. His Count Muffat reflects that the “great downward rush in the direction of fleshly madness” was “sweeping away the whole world” (230). While the thought is reported of a character rather than offered as the narrator’s truth, this is the thinking that informs the novel as a whole. Zola’s version of Parisian promiscuity is informed by his social conservatism, and his wish to believe in a secure ruling class. Zola also sees promiscuity in relation to economics, and again he reveals a conservative disposition. He offers a model of limited resources, and he shows how those resources might be conserved and put to good use, and how they are in fact being wasted. There is the scene at a supper-party where the guests are offered a series of extravagant dishes which they barely touch because they are not hungry. The party ends with drunk young aristocrats pouring champagne into a piano. Similarly, Vandeuvres, one of the young aristocrats, rapidly exhausts his fortune on race-horses and women, and finally commits suicide by locking himself in his stable and setting fire to it. The meaning is clear: Vandeuvres and his class are burning through their resources, and will be left with nothing. But we can see expenditure not as burning up so much as circulation and redistribution. Zola allows us to see glimpses of this alternative economic analysis. So for instance when a wealthy client gives Nana a country house, another sex-worker, Caroline Héquet, realises that Nana will tire of the property, and it will probably be sold hurriedly and at a great loss. Caroline herself will buy the house. Where Nana spends her money in

148  The “Swarming City” ways that make it irrecoverable to her, Caroline and her mother save, accumulate, and invest. Similarly, the idea of the Vandeuvres plot-line is that wealth is disappearing. But in most cases, one person’s expenditure is another’s gain. Zola sees this, and yet also refuses to admit it. For instance, in the scenes of race-track gambling, there is a description of a bookmaker who “had been an assistant in a draper’s shop, and who made three million francs in two years” (366). He is now surrounded by people who are “treating him with great respect” (366–7). How can it be, Zola seems to ask, that a mere draper’s assistant is now wealthy and being treated with respect? We may feel, though, that the bookmaker is as worthy a custodian of the wealth – and doubtless a much better manager of it – than the aristocrats who had inherited and gambled it. The same idea of circulation rather than loss is voiced by Nana herself. When a gift is broken, she says: “If nobody ever broke anything, all the shops would have to close” (413). It is a ludicrous and unhelpful comment, in that the lover who made the gift has taken great risks to do so, and now he sees it carelessly broken before his eyes. But Nana’s point holds, that she and the man are part of a rapidly developing economy based on production, consumption, and circulation. What seems like a loss may be part of a process of expansion. Zola’s point of view can seem, then, rather more nostalgic than scientific. Towards the end of his novel, in one of his most grandiloquent moments, he describes how the sexually and materially voracious Nana works her way through another client’s fortune: His inheritance was in landed property, horses, fields, woods and farms. He had to sell quickly, one thing after another. At every mouthful Nana swallowed an acre. The leaves quivering in the sunshine, the vast fields of ripe corn, the golden September vineyards, the tall grass in which the cows stood knee-deep – everything was engulfed as if in an abyss… Nana passed by like an invading army, or one of those swarms of locusts whose fiery flight lays waste to a whole province. (436) The analogy seems false and melodramatic. When property is sold, it is not “swallowed” or “engulfed as in an abyss” or otherwise destroyed; it passes from one owner to another. The imagery is, again, Biblical, of the abyss or bottomless pit of Revelation (20:1–3), and the plague of locusts of Exodus (10:12–15). This again draws attention to the fact that Zola’s point of view about promiscuity as a form of extravagance and a cause of extravagance, is fundamentally moral. We may lament with Zola that the labouring classes produce wealth that is then consumed by Nana and her clients, but we may also care more to see a different social model – one that does not exploit labourers in the first place – rather than worry that those with accumulated wealth are undermining

The “Swarming City”  149 their position. This same Biblical apocalypticism is where the novel ends. Nana contracts smallpox and dies horribly disfigured, an ending that seems to owe something to the Biblical Jezebel, and rather more to the Marquise de Merteuil of Dangerous Liaisons, who also must pay for her sins with smallpox. Zola is fascinated by city promiscuity, and he sees it in relation to modernity. He is interested in process, in how the sexual marketplace functions in terms of theatrical display and reproduction, and he is interested in tracing through the various forms and levels of promiscuity, from the squalid to the luxurious. Above all, he seeks to apply a scientific or analytical eye to the swarming scene. Yet his science often seems fanciful, governed by gendered moral fears, and by political and economic conservatism.16 *** Zola wrote about Paris with a sense of the degenerative forces that, he believed, were bred into French society, and that had led to the fall of the Second Empire in 1870. There is some hopefulness in his treatment, in that he had faith in science as a solution to social problems. If we move forward to Henry Miller’s Paris novel, Tropic of Cancer (1934), there is no such comfort. Miller is writing in the aftermath of the First World War, and during the economic slump of the late 1920s and 1930s. There are mutilated veterans in the streets, grim living standards, and a sense of Paris as having sunk into a slough of degradation from which it cannot emerge. Again, sexual promiscuity is the key signal of the state of the society. There are strong echoes of Baudelaire and Zola – Miller cites both writers on several occasions in Tropic of Cancer, alongside nods towards Apuleius, Petronius, and Rabelais. But there is not the mythicisation of Baudelaire, nor the attempted progressivism of Zola. What value is there in the swarming city, without these saving elements? There are moments of escape, of alternative possibilities, in Tropic of Cancer. But what we see above all in Miller is a shift towards the existential hero, the man whose value lies in seeing life without illusion. Miller’s narrator, a version of himself, and named Henry Miller, exists in an atmosphere that is “saturated with disaster, frustration, futility” (20). Society is rotten, and the only solution is a final cataclysm: “The age demands violence” (19). Miller also writes after the failure of his marriage.17 The sense is that everything is or should be passing through an end-game. All that is required now is the “coup de grâce” (33). But life has not ended, and the narrator finds himself in Paris. Further, however disillusioned he has become, he and all others still persist in being hopeful. To be human is always to “look for the miracle,” or rather, to “wade through blood” if “for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality” (102). There is more Baudelaire than Zola here. Life in Miller’s Paris, as in Baudelaire’s, turns on the privations and shame that people

150  The “Swarming City” will suffer, while haunted by transcendent possibilities: “Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable” (102). Miller does not take us towards Baudelaire’s metaphysical rhetoric – he does not write of Satan and evil – but he follows Baudelaire, not Zola, in seeing himself as thoroughly immersed in filth and corruption, rather than being apart from it. Miller even finds consolation in the sleaze of Paris; he is “inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything.” He resolves to accept his environment for what it is, and to act accordingly. As there is no alternative, he will “live like an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer” (103–4). He may be “spiritually dead,” but physically he is “alive,” and morally he is “free” (104). He will be a “hyena” (104), scavenging for money, food, drink, and sex. Miller offers modernity as the cause or inspiration for promiscuity. You may as well fulfil your animal self in this “jungle” (104). But over the course of Tropic of Cancer we see that his engagement with promiscuity and Paris is more complex. Certainly, he lives out the predatory adventures that he sees as appropriate to the place and the age. He drifts among a loosely associated group of expatriates whose sexual interactions take the form of battles for predominance. He envisages subjecting one friend to his will, predicting, “I will reem out every wrinkle in [her] cunt” (13). Another friend, on the other hand, is indefatigable and would “cut off your prick and keep it inside her forever, if you gave her permission” (15). Aside from the familiar Messalina-type woman, promiscuity also features as an unending, futile search for escape, for self-annihilation. The narrator’s friend, Van Norden, who refers to women as “cunts,” as in “a cunt by the name of Georgia” (107), understands sexual intercourse as an attempt at suicide and as a desperate bid for redemption: “For one second like I obliterate myself. There’s not even one me then… there’s nothing… not even the cunt. It’s like receiving communion” (135). For a moment he has a “spiritual glow,” but then he comes back to the world, to the sound of water running, and to a woman beside him who wants him to listen to “all that love crap” (135). Van Norden’s misogyny has a familiar dynamic, in that it is founded on the disappointment that neither sex nor the woman can become a transcendent, ideal point of reference. He is a Panurge figure who longs to find the virtuous, intelligent woman whom he could trust and to whom he could give control: “‘I want to be able to surrender myself to a woman,’ he blurts out. ‘I want her to take me out of myself. But to do that, she’s got to be better than I am…’” (135). In this desperate time and place, for Van Norden and for all men, women offer the hope of redemption, but finally they stand for absence, for the world as malign, meaningless. Looking at a vagina, the narrator experiences a “grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves [him] face to face with the Absolute.” Woman becomes the inexhaustible, indomitable tormentor

The “Swarming City”  151 who makes man realise his insignificance: “When I look down into that crack I see an equation sign, the world at balance, a world reduced to zero and no trace of a remainder” (249). He is also looking at death, at a “leper’s skull” (249). Woman is the means for a man to assert himself in the world, for the hyena to feed, but she also is unimpressible, indifferent, and annihilating. What lifts this beyond earlier writing of Paris and promiscuity, however, is that there is a psychological awareness here, a recognition on the part of the narrator that his version of woman is his way of managing his own psychic distress. He knows that his need for mastery is a vindictive projection of his vulnerability, that this mastery is founded in a nostalgia for prenatal oblivion: “A fear of living separate, of staying born. The door of the womb always on the latch. Dread and longing. Deep in the blood the pull of paradise. The beyond” (288). Miller’s Paris is a scene that is substantially defined by its sexual culture, which is one of promiscuity. But how, more precisely, does promiscuity emerge as something that is informed, or caused even, by the city? Is Miller’s Paris inherently a place of “swarming” and “rutting”? It is perhaps a minor discrimination, but Miller connects promiscuity more with the age and with any urban place than with Paris itself. All the activities to be seen in Paris can be traced back to founding scenes in “Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk” (76). This is true of the narrator himself, whose promiscuous life in Paris is the result of the earlier failure of his marriage. But Paris is the exemplary city, the city that “incubates” the tendencies that people bring with them, and Paris takes this sexual dysphoria into new territories: I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender. As soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the loose. In America she’d starve to death if she had nothing to recommend her but a mutilation. Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose eaten away or a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural homeliness of the female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male. (166) This specialisation is “peculiar to the big cities” because those cities exhaust the spirit and the body. It is in places like Paris that “the last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine,” and where, therefore, “added spice” is needed. In this sense, the men and women of Paris, with their mutilations and their diseases, are the “martyrs of modern progress” (156). But sex too is part of “the machine,” and perceived as a mass-production or an assembly-line. Miller develops the idea of sex as large-scale turn-over, with associated waste-products, when he writes that around the Gare Saint Lazare “there is a thick tide of semen flooding the gutters” (23). This is an intensive and extensive process of incitement, demand, supply, and, as one disfigurement or peculiarity displaces

152  The “Swarming City” another, of creative obsolescence. Paris is the place, above all others, where “the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is” (186), and sex is part of that gruesome industrial process. This commoditised and scaled-up sexual scene seems alluring at first sight, but it leads to disappointment. The promise of easy availability and fulfilment proves delusory. Paris is “like a whore,” who seems “ravishing” at a distance, but five minutes after the transaction the customer feels “empty, disgusted.” He feels “tricked” (211). The customer is a fool for thinking that the promise of joy is ever going to be fulfilled by someone who is putting on a moreor-less mechanical performance in order to generate some money. As one of Miller’s characters remarks: “At first it seems wonderful, because you have a feeling of being free. After a while it palls on you. Underneath it’s all dead; there’s no feeling, no sympathy, no friendship […] They think of nothing but money, money, money” (306). The corruption of the city, its decadence, is most fully symbolised in disease, and especially in syphilis and cancer. The narrator sees posters advertising syphilis clinics, and other posters warning people to protect themselves – “grinning skulls that greet you with ‘Défendez-vous contre la syphilis!’” (189). But there is no defence. In case we do not pick up on the metaphor, the narrator offers a poetic elaboration: No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon. (189) This, and the references to “bright venomous crabs,” gives us the clue to the title of the novel. The failures of the modern age, evident in all big cities, intensified in Paris, are refigured as a latitude or tropic, an unending and inescapable loop of disease.18 If Miller’s psychologisation of promiscuity distinguishes him from Baudelaire and Zola, he aligns himself with Baudelaire in his rejection of science and progress. Science is a “wallpaper” that the “men of science” have used to cover over “the world of reality”; further, this wallpaper is “falling to tatters” (170). He dramatizes this idea with the character of the young Hindu who has been sent to Europe to promote the ideas and reputation of Mahatma Gandhi. This young man has been “contaminated by the cheap idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous bathtub” (100). He believes in social, moral and political progress, in “love, brotherhood, bathtubs, sanitation, efficiency.” But the implication is that the “dirt” goes much deeper and is of a kind that modern sanitation cannot reach. The Hindu’s self-delusion is suggested by the fact that he looks in Paris for the sleaze for which it is famous. He seeks to learn about “the fucking business” (100), and pays the narrator to act as intermediary for him in a variety of brothels.

The “Swarming City”  153 There is no progress and no escape, it would seem. Yet Miller takes refuge, surprisingly, in nature. He ends the novel with a vision of the French countryside, the Seine as it “gently winds through the hills,” and creates a sense of “golden peace” (317). This links back to an earlier passage on the natural hero in the figure of nineteenth-century U.S. poet, Walt Whitman. The future, the narrator tells us, “belongs to the machine, to robots,” but Whitman was “the poet of the Body and the Soul.” Europe has its museums “full of plundered treasures,” but America had in Whitman a “free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN” (241). Whitman is the frankly uncorrupted sensualist, his manliness defined as an uncomplicated ability to connect bodily life with a reassuring sense of man as nature. But elsewhere America as nature, and as innocence, is undermined. It is a nostalgic fantasy that the narrator ironises; America is “unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man woman or beast.” Rivers, hills, peace, Whitman, innocence, signify occasional naïve longings, and America “doesn’t exist,” except “as a name you give to an abstract idea” (210). Miller’s protagonist turns out to be a variant of the libertine, and specifically a “dangerous man.” The world, and women, have failed him, and this liberates him to follow his own selfish and vengeful interests. But this life without illusions is carried out in a spectacularly degraded environment. The disappointed expectation does not relate only to the failed marriage. Modern society in every detail is disappointing, and gives the narrator the right, the necessity even, to scavenge, hyena-like, for whatever he can use. *** Miller, for all his difference, is very much engaged with the Paris of the past, as he finds it in Baudelaire and Zola. I want to end this chapter by stepping into an altogether different Paris, and a different sexual regime, that described by Renaud Camus. Sadly Camus is now bestknown for his anti-immigration politics, and his desire to “make Africa leave Europe” (“Européennes”).19 The focus here, though, is on an earlier Camus, and his memoir, Tricks (1978). We might differentiate Renaud Camus from Henry Miller by looking at their respective uses of the word, trick. The word is most likely derived from the Latin tricari, meaning “to look for detours.”20 A trick is a proposition that is more or less than it seems, as in the “trick question” or a “card trick.” It is a strategy that is designed to deceive. Miller uses the word in this sense. As we have seen, he describes Paris as “like a whore” who is “ravishing” from a distance but who leaves the customer feeling “tricked.” Paris projects the image of passion and desire, but this hides a determination to get money. A trick, though, may be a good thing. It may be a neat

154  The “Swarming City” solution to a problem, the process of getting something to work. To do a trick is to perform a curious or a difficult feat, as in a magic trick that does indeed deceive, but in a way that is harmless and amusing. The word becomes familiar in U.S. slang from at least as early as the 1920s, and especially in the context of sex-work. “Turning a trick” is making money from sex, and the client was referred to as “a trick.”21 This sexual sense is taken up in gay culture, where it signifies an encounter with a stranger or near-stranger. A trick is a one-off event, although on occasion it may be repeated, and develop into friendship or romance. Trick, then, might have a sharp edge to it. It may carry the disdain that a sex-worker may feel for his or her client. It might also have a humorous aspect. The client is the machine which, if you know the trick of how to work it, will spit out money. Whether or not payment is involved, the word imposes a limit around the sex act. A trick is a quick, decisive performance, an act that is complete in itself, with little in the way of build-up or aftermath. To refer to a sexual encounter as a trick is to contain it, to make it an accomplished fact, a relatively insignificant event that is now done with. The French for a trick is un tour, but Camus gives the English word as title to his book. Tricks is a description of a series of encounters, most of them in Paris. Whatever resonances the word may have for others, Camus makes it clear that for him trick “has nothing pejorative in it” (xii). A few of his sex-partners might have inspired some irritation, but “almost all were the object of much affection, sometimes of more, and of gratitude” (xii). Nor does Camus wish to claim tricking as a sexual practice that is better or superior to other sexual relations. He is not a “champion” of tricking.22 Equally, there is no attempt at “defence” or “apology.” He is willing to admit that there may be something “banal” about his tricks (24). The book is unusual for the absence of the moral, aesthetic, or intentionally erotic elements that we might expect to surround and legitimise the telling of a sexual event. As he declares, the book is neither moral, nor aesthetic, nor pornographic. Nor is it a portrait of homosexuality. Camus notes that tricking is only practiced by “a minority of homosexuals” (xi). What he does not quite say is that Tricks is a distinctive book precisely because it is in many ways a banal account of banal events, but at the same time it makes a case that the sexual event is also, always, momentous. What then is left, if there is no moral, no aesthetics or erotics? Camus’ book is a series of accounts, usually of between five and fifteen pages, telling the where and the what. The encounters take place in typically metropolitan locales – a city park, a sauna, a sex club. 23 Some tricks are met on the street, in cafés or bars, and are brought home. There is physical detail, but the writing is not pictorial, and it is not expressive. Camus recounts what happened and where, but he does not invite his readers to immerse themselves in a fully-realised scene. The writing is quite flat. He does not attempt the “thick description” of realist writing, or a cinematic visualisation. He does not give us much in the way of fervour. He does not prioritise his or another’s feelings or responsiveness. A place is

The “Swarming City”  155 noted more than described. Names and brief physical descriptions are offered, and the narrator’s level of interest (whether or not the trick was really his “type,” if the trick was very attractive or only quite attractive). Camus also gives us the sexual acts, but again as a series of moves, not particularly as an attempt to draw the reader in, or to conjure up the sensations. So, for instance, he and his partner, Tony, meet a trick in some bushes in a Paris park: Tony squatted down to suck his penis. I squatted too. Tony and me passed his cock, which was quite small, from one to another. Then he squatted in his turn, between us, and tried to take both our penises in his mouth at the same time, while we kissed. 24 Camus is not moved to vary his vocabulary (so we have the repetition of “squatted” or “accroupi”). Nor does he venture into figurative language (so the penis remains “le sexe” or “la verge”). We often learn the basic facts about the trick – his name, his occupation, where he lives – but seldom more. The conversation before and after is given, whether this is barely a word or two, or, as on one occasion, a lengthy argument about a post-structuralist philosopher. If the mechanics of the sex are always given – usually minimally, of the “he sucks my cock, I suck his cock” (49) kind – the mechanics of other procedures are often given equal attention – the tasks before getting into bed, who uses the bathroom first, who finishes washing the dishes, how they arrange their bodies for sleep. There is no hierarchy between sex and not-sex. 25 Camus’s encounters are remarkable for what they are not: they are not “animal” or “brutish”; they are not “soul-less,” or an acting out of inadequacy, or an expression of alienation caused by modernity. They do not subjugate or objectify. Rather, there is often the sense of a shared task, and the focus is on the mutual effort to complete the task to the satisfaction of all parties. There is not the rivalrous rutting that surrounds Nana at the height of her success, nor the railing against futility that we find in Baudelaire and Miller. As Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to the first French edition, there is “an ethic of dialogue” (x). Camus gives us “the methodical conquest of happiness” (ix). Barthes allows himself an erudite frame of reference that Camus never uses. He suggests that the presiding goddess of Camus’s Tricks is Eunoïa, the Aristotelian figure of goodwill and kindliness (x). This is apt, in that each partner obliges the other as best he is able. This requires sympathy, and the mechanical descriptions often note the awkwardness that can occur when one participant tries to combine his pleasure with another’s. So Camus mentions trying not to ejaculate too quickly, but then trying to speed up “because I didn’t want him to have to wait, after he himself had ejaculated.”26 Similarly, there is the mild irony of having to get a partner to go slow because he is so good at pleasing the narrator that the pleasure will not last long enough for the narrator to draw the full measure of satisfaction

156  The “Swarming City” that he seeks. The focus is on the small, practical ways of enabling, prolonging, easing, or completing the event. It is not a search for romantic or metaphysical fulfilment, but a practical, helpful partnering, as though they were mending a wall together, or changing an awkwardly located light bulb. If Camus is neither “champion” nor critic of tricking, perhaps he places limitations around it. For instance, he acknowledges that he has perhaps selected an easy task. These encounters are “simple” and “easier to describe, doubtless, than serious love.”27 Then again, he does not indicate that we must see tricking and love in relation to each other. One might, it would seem, have both in one’s life. The limits of the tricking mode, and also of his writing about it, are more clearly signalled in a later event, a trick itself, which took place not in Paris but in a sauna in Los Angeles. It is the final chapter or trick of the “final and definitive edition” of the book, and it is titled – in English – “A Perfect Fuck.”28 Camus finds himself in a sort of labyrinth full of mirrors, and there are the usual manoeuvres of one bending down and taking the other’s penis in his mouth, and so on. But this encounter leads to an experience that is too complex and too specific for him to think he can do it justice in words. At every moment, the sensation changes, and yet every moment has the “same nearly intolerable keenness of pleasure.”29 The experience produces the paradox of “a delirium, but a calm and controlled delirium.”30 Here, finally, the experience defeats him as a writer; he can only indicate why he cannot reproduce the experience in language. But perhaps the “trick” of the book as a whole is that it acknowledges – without ever saying as much – that every encounter, however banal, common, repeated, is particular; that promiscuous sex with strangers may be good, bad, or indifferent, but it is always, also, momentous. These encounters, even the mundane ones, cannot be fully recaptured by Camus, and they cannot be truly experienced by those who were not present. But they are still worth recording as an otherwise unseen way of life, as a sexual contract which, however limited, is not full of the moral, social, and metaphysical spite that we see elsewhere. I do not wish to “champion” the trick where Camus refuses to do so. There is no claim that tricking is somehow free and democratic, while the promiscuity described by Baudelaire, Zola, Miller, is corrupt, depraved, exploitative. It is the case that the promiscuity described by those earlier writers does often involve exploitation. But tricking is not therefore pure in the sense of free of social contingencies. The modern city itself is the set of contingencies that makes tricking possible. It provides the locales, the demographic of large numbers of men with some money and time at their disposal, and a social regime in which tricking is variously tolerated, legally acceptable, ignored, unnoticed, or seen as inevitable. Equally, the seeming ease of tricking does not save the narrator from all sense of loss or difficulty. Camus offers tricking as a sexual mode that is interesting and beguiling, but one that has its anxieties, its frustrations, and its moments of boredom. It is always, though, strange in the sense of

The “Swarming City”  157 a realisation of unnecessary relation, of unnecessary commitment, even if the commitment is only to bringing each other to orgasm. There is something compelling for Camus, something magical even, and unsettling, in this placing the self in relation to a stranger. It is a decentralising, an opening to a sense of randomness and multitude, a plunge into an abyss, even if it is also banal.31 In this combination of the momentous and the banal, Camus gives a variation on Colette’s formulation quoted in the previous chapter, “It’s four o’clock… At five I have my abyss.” *** Camus never hints at the idea that his and his associates’ hundreds of sexual contacts are somehow heading towards or even causing the AIDS epidemic that was to begin a few short years after the experiences described in Tricks. He observes in a note to the German edition of 1986 that the book has acquired a historical character, because “the world it describes has largely gone.”32 Tricking has “had to be given up.” Perhaps, he hopes, the practice can adjust to “the disastrous new situation with indispensable precautions.”33 This contrasts with the writing by Baudelaire, Zola, and Miller, and with much of the writing in the other chapters in this book. There is usually the sense that promiscuity is going to produce disaster, or bring about righteous correction, whether by God, an affronted nature, or the Prussians. In the context of the present-day, it is a fact that promiscuous and unprotected sex leads to the spread of sexually-transmitted infections such as HIV. But Camus holds to the fact that the connection between promiscuity and HIV is neither absolute nor inevitable. The promiscuous person who takes appropriate precautions to protect her- or himself and her or his partners may have thousands of encounters and not contract or pass on HIV. The nearly celibate person who has one unprotected encounter – and that within a loving relationship – may become HIV-positive. Camus does not see HIV as not a force for justice or redress, and specifically a punishment for promiscuity. He knows that it is a virus that is transmitted under some circumstances, and not under others. We have seen that Camus is an exception. Elsewhere, promiscuity, whether heterosexual or same-sex, is often in itself taken as a sign of disease, whether of a physiological, social, moral, or political kind. Promiscuity is the sign of impending disaster. The last chapter, by way of conclusion to the book as a whole, takes up this idea of promiscuity as unsustainable, as inevitably heading towards the breakdown of the body or the body politic. In particular, the discussion is situated in the writing of north America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; in the context, that is, of a growing fear about sustainability more generally. How does promiscuity feature in writing when the entire world seems, via excessive use, to be headed towards the exhaustion and contamination of resources?

158  The “Swarming City”

Notes







The “Swarming City”  159 20 Littré dismisses the argument in favour of the Dutch trek, for to pull or to draw. The word probably enters English via the old French trichier, to cheat. 22 This is from the preface to the second French edition, and does not appear in the translated version. My source here, and for all quotes not from the English edition, is the final French edition, featuring 45 tricks (24). This untranslated edition is referenced hereafter as Tricks 1988, and aside from my translations, the original French is also given. 23 Most tricks take place in Paris, with a couple while Camus is travelling in the South of France and Italy. In the later version, he includes a number of incidents that took place in the United States. 24 See Tricks 1988, 290: Tony s’est accroupi pour lui sucer le sexe. Je me suis accroupi aussi. Tony et moi nous passions l’un à l’autre sa verge, assez petit. Ensuite il s’est accroupi à son tour, entre nous, et il a essayé de prendre nos deux sexes dans sa bouche en même temps pendant que nous nous embrassions. (290) 25 As Rifkin observes, the “integrity and consistency of his voice yields nothing to the old requirements to modulate either vocabulary or tone” (148). 26 Tricks 1988, 366: “... et alors que plus tôt j’avais fait de grands efforts pour no pas jouir, j’en faisais cette fois-ci pour jouir, parce que je ne voulais pas le faire attendre, après sa proper ejaculation.” 28 Tricks 1988, 455. 29 Tricks 1988, 458: “elles avaient toutes la même acuité presque intolérable de plaisir.” 30 Tricks 1988, 458: “un délire, mais un délire calme, maîtrisé.”



Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. “The Exposition Universelle.” Art in Paris 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, translated by Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon, 1965, pp. 121–43. ———. The Flowers of Evil, translated by James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. “My Heart Laid Bare.” Intimate Journals, translated by Christopher Isherwood. New York: Dover, 2006, pp. 61–112. ———. “Squibs.” Intimate Journals, translated by Christopher Isherwood. New York: Dover, 2006, pp. 29–59.

160  The “Swarming City” Beizer, Janet. “Uncovering Nana: The Courtesan’s New Clothes.” L’Ésprit créateur, vol. 25, no. 2, 1985, pp. 45–56. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, translated by Harry Zohn. London: New Left Books, 1973. Brown, Frederick. Zola: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995. Calonne, David. Henry Miller. London: Reaktion, 2014. Camus, Renaud. Tricks. Paris: P.O.L., 1988. ———. Tricks: 25 Encounters, translated by Richard Howard. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Chitnis, Bernice. Reflecting on Nana. London: Routledge, 1991. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Detroit: Red & Black, 1984. “Européennes: l’écrivain Renaud Camus en tête de liste.” Le Figaro, 9 April 2019. URL: https://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/europeennes-le-chantre-de-lathese-du-grand-remplacement-en-tete-de-liste-20190409 de Goncourt, Edmond and Jules. 1865; Germinie. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955. Houppermans, Sjef. “Les Mois d’été de Renaud Camus.” Lectures du désir: de Madame Lafayette à Régine Detambel et de Jean de la Fontaine à Jean Echenoz. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997, pp. 359–84. Kraff-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis. 1886. London: Rebman, 1910. Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. 1934. London: Harper Perennial, 2005. Minogue, Valerie. “Nana: The World, The Flesh and the Devil.” Nelson, Cambridge Companion, pp. 121–36. de Musset, Alfred. The Confession of a Child of the Century, translated by David Coward. 1836. London: Penguin, 2013. Nelson, Brian. “Nana: Uses of the Female Body.” Australian Journal of French Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, 2001, pp. 407–29. ———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Émile Zola. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Parkin, John. Henry Miller, The Modern Rabelais. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. Pichois, Claude, and Jean Ziegler. Baudelaire, translated by Graham Robb. London: Vintage, 1991. Pranchère, Jean-Yves. “Tragique ou futilité anti-moderne? Chateaubriand, Maurras, Renaud Camus.” Résistances à la modernité dans la littérature française de 1800 à nos jours, edited by Christophe Ippolito. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010, pp. 27–49. Rifkin, Adrian. “The Poetics of Space Rewritten: From Renaud Camus to the Gay City Guide.” Parisian Fields, edited by Michael Sheringham. London: Reaktion, 1996, pp. 133–49. Schehr, Laurence. The Shock of Men: Homosexual Hermeneutics in French Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Thompson, Hannah. “Questions of Sexuality and Gender.” Nelson, Cambridge Companion, pp. 53–66. Thum, Reinhard H. The City: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verhaeren. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Zola, Émile. Nana, translated by George Holden. 1880. London: Penguin, 1972. ———. Le Roman expérimentale. Oeuvres complètes, edited by Henri Mitterand, 15 vols. Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1960–7, vol. x, pp. 1143–414. ———. Thérèse Raquin, translated by Robin Buss. 1867. London: Penguin, 2004.

Conclusion Used Up

The ecological problems of the planet – global warming, rising sea-levels, shrinking ice-caps, destruction of habitat and loss of species, plastics in the oceans, particulates in the air – might seem far removed from (and much more important than) human sexual behaviour. Occasional campaigners have tried to bring the two topics into constructive relation, asking how we might become “ecosexual.” Suggestions have varied from marrying ourselves to trees and streams, to thinking about environmentally friendly practices in the choice of lubricants and the disposal of condoms.1 But what useful connections are there, if any, between ecological exhaustion and the writing of promiscuity? In the Bible, God commands Adam to be “fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). The sense is that the earth and all its creatures are there for humans to exploit for their own purposes. Man, God declares, shall have “dominion” over “every creeping thing that creepeth on the earth” (Genesis 1:26). This is the anthropocentric tradition that, in the words of Lynn White, Jr., created a “mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects,” whether animals or plants or waters.2 Others have traced the same anthropocentrism to the Athenian philosophers. From Socrates onward, there has been an “undue emphasis on man as compared to the universe.”3 In the earlier, pre-Christian and pre-Socratic ages, the argument goes, the West followed “shamanistic nature religions.” Under ancient nature religions, the world was not an “instrument or a mere source of materials.” The earth itself was sacred, and not given over to man’s dominion, but shared by all creatures. Even inanimate forms such as clouds and mountains were seen as equal elements in the sacred “circle of life” (Sessions 140–41). But equally, we might re-read the Bible and note that Adam must “replenish” the earth (fill it up again, after the Latin plenus, meaning full). The point of view is still anthropocentric, but at least there is a sense of guardianship and conservation in God’s command. The sense in Genesis is of a functioning order that will continue to extend itself – to “multiply” – but that will remain in balance with the available resources. It is what twentieth-century economist Herman Daly would call “steady state economics,” where human life is enabled by “low rates

162  Conclusion: Used Up of maintenance ‘throughput’” (104). Daly was writing in an age, he believed, in which the importance of “replenishment” had been forgotten. He saw a “U.S-style high-mass consumption, growth-dominated economy” all around him, and he saw that this economic model was not sustainable for a “world of four billion people.” The world, he asserted, was facing “ecological scarcity,” and needed to assure replenishment by swapping the belief that “more is better” for “enough is best” (96). Where does sex come in? The Bible seems to put good management of the earth’s resources alongside the idea of monogamy. The founding unit of this good system is the couple, Adam and Eve. By contrast, God uses extraordinary natural phenomena to punish “unnatural lust” (Jude 1:7) and “abominable things” (Ezekiel 16:50). The most obvious case is that of the fire and brimstone that rain down on the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Occasionally, in the recent past, hurricanes have been explained as God’s anger at a high divorce rate or at the acceptance of homosexuality. Indeed, the AIDS epidemic in the west during the 1980s and early 1990s was interpreted by a number of U.S. religious figures as holy vengeance.4 The Edenic pairing offers us the image of a natural utopia; promiscuity invites apocalypse. Feminists, while not necessarily supporting promiscuity, have questioned the association of the malefemale pairing with a pristine natural world. They have argued that it is precisely the Christian patriarchal model that has encouraged men to tyrannise over women, children, and the environment. A sustainable future requires a move towards a gyn/ecology, to a recognition of and reverence for the Earth-Mother.5 In this conclusion I want briefly to trace out the notion of promiscuous sex as a form of dangerously accelerated consumption in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Is it the case that sexual promiscuity is understood as a form of consumerist greed and therefore allied to ecological exhaustion? If so, what is the logic here, and what the implications? I choose to explore this with reference to a small number of the most canonical of North American novelists of the period – Philip Roth, Edmund White, John Updike – and pausing more particularly on Margaret Atwood. I might have sought out more unusual sources and contexts here, but there is an obvious logic to the choices, in as much as the North American continent, and the United States especially, have been – for itself and for the world – the great example of a dynamic, successful, and free consumer society. The protagonist of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) is torn apart by the conflicts between his ideals and his desires. Alexander Portnoy is New York’s Assistant Commissioner for Human Opportunity, working long hours for a relatively poor salary in order to ensure housing rights and legal protection for the less privileged of the city. But he is also sexually greedy, obsessed with “fellatio and fornication,” and “dreaming about tomorrow’s pussy even while pumping away at

Conclusion: Used Up  163 todays!” (347) He loves and honours his parents, but is agonised by their limitations and the pathos of their lives, and he feels compelled to disappoint them. One in a long line of Roth anti-heroes, Portnoy defers to and worships women, and seeks to degrade them. His penis is his “battering ram to freedom” (300), freedom from an overbearing mother and freedom from obligations to the women who want to marry him. With his penis, he is able to momentarily subject and control women, and escape from his own ethical sensibilities. Similarly, his main girlfriend is drawn to the social heroism of Portnoy’s role as Assistant Commissioner but, according to Portnoy at least, this itself is a kind of greed, a desire to consume and display. She dreams of magazine coverage of herself, wife of the “Saintliest Commissioner,” photographed in Yves Saint Laurent pajamas and crushed-kid boots on a fur rug, “dipping thoughtfully into a novel by Samuel Beckett” (390). This imagined magazine coverage indicates the narcissism of the age, of needing to be seen in one’s performance of virtuous privacy. The girlfriend’s negotiation of greed and display is also brought back to promiscuity. She has a sexual fantasy of a room full of candidates for West Point seated at a table. She makes her way round the room, under the table, fellating each of them. This is the ultimate fantasy of consumer choice, in which everything, successively, may be had. Roth seems to use both Portnoy and his girlfriend to indicate the strengths and the weaknesses of the 1960s generation in the United States. They reflect a permissive and idealistic counter-culture that is willing to struggle for “Human Opportunity,” but they also represent a hedonistic gorging in which even their idealism is in part a way of fulfilling their appetites. This is the betrayal of Portnoy’s Jewish heritage. Jewishness is offered as renunciation, as fastidiousness. Portnoy’s mother is appalled at the “gorging” on different foods by non-Jewish Americans; she complains that the goyim will eat “anything” (333). Portnoy is haunted by his own willingness to get involved in the indiscriminate American feast. After he has watched a baseball match and had a taboo lobster dinner, he should feel that he has had his fill of proscribed pleasure, but he still masturbates on the bus, seated next to a non-Jewish girl, excited and terrified by the idea of ejaculating “all over that sleeping shiksa’s golden arm” (331). His falling away from the nobler traditions of self-sacrifice is also signalled by a reference to the battle to defeat slavery. Portnoy reflects, “I would wind up trying to free from bondage nothing more than my own prick” (452). Portnoy is a colourful instance of American abundance; he has a sense of its moral dangers, a sense that abundance is leading towards corruption and degeneracy. He is an example of the accelerated consumption of the twentieth century, a compulsive behaviour that will lead to exhaustion. He cannot find a way out. As he tells his psychologist, “I have to HAVE” (465). Edmund White explores the same idea from a homosexual

164  Conclusion: Used Up angle and in a calmer register. The narrator of his trilogy, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997), sees his and others’ promiscuity as a form of consumption. There is an acknowledged sense of “comparison shopping,” as men look for lovers with large penises (64). The narrator dreams of noble, romantic love, in which the lover is Parsifal and he is the Grail, but he comes to realise that in this fallen world, the lover is a “shopper,” and he is a “product” (146). When he hooks up with a couple who want him to fellate them, he sees himself as a quick-fix domestic item: “I felt like a home appliance one seldom buys but rents when needed, something like a rug-shampooer” (151). Sex is consumption, and most of the time, it is without any element of recycling. To have made love to someone is to have “had” them; it is a completed event, with the lover as a single-use item, like a wipe or a plastic cup. Over time, the narrator sees different values come to the fore. He sees how “younger gays identified my generation with unreflecting conformist machismo, with greed and consumerism, with white supremacy and sexism” (411). Like Portnoy, White’s narrator begins to see his seemingly subversive, libertine behaviour as a symptom of privilege. There is also a sense of unsustainability – that this pace of consumption cannot be maintained. But this is not yet clearly linked with ecological exhaustion. There is unease, a sense of having fallen away from finer modes and beliefs, but this is not fully joined up with broader ideas of consumption and exhaustion. We get a glimpse of ecological concerns in John Updike’s Rabbit trilogy. Harry Angstrom, the Rabbit of the series, has adulterous liaisons with a young runaway, a part-time sex-worker, a friend’s wife, and finally with his son’s partner. In the third volume, he tells a co-worker at his car-dealership: I figure the oil’s going to run out about the same time I do, the year two thousand. Seems funny to say it, but I’m glad I lived when I did. Those kids coming up, they’ll be living on the table scraps. We had the meal. (421) Harry is an American Everyman of his generation, taking what is available in sex, in business, in general consumption, without reckoning the consequences. He does indeed “have the meal” – he becomes obese and dies of a heart-attack at his holiday condominium in Florida. Roth, White, and Updike, three of the most prominent literary novelists of the latter part of the twentieth century, explore links between material abundance and sexual opportunism. They or their protagonists are haunted by the idea that they are decadent, and by moralistic fears that there may be an eventual price to pay. These writers are more or less contemporary with the foundational texts of the green movement: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962; Arne Naess’s essay on “deep ecology” in 1973; Francoise d’Eaubonne’s proposal for

Conclusion: Used Up  165 “ecofeminism” in 1974. But this is long before the widespread acceptance of global climate change. The campaigning movement Friends of the Earth was founded in 1968, but the idea of “environmental justice” only became familiar and widely accepted much later.6 I want to move forward in time and pick up this theme of promiscuity and ecology  – present almost only by implication in Roth, White, and Updike – as it is explored explicitly and insistently in Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” trilogy of the early twenty-first century. *** Atwood offers the thought that humanity is “a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be obsolete plastic junk” (Oryx 285). She describes a world in the not-too-distant future in which, in North America, at least, society has polarised. An educated, privileged minority lives in antiseptic company compounds, while the rest live in the dangerous and polluted “pleeblands.” The privileged tend not to leave their compounds, except for a bit of sexual slumming, or to get from one safe place to another in a sealed bullet train. The compounds that are the focus in Oryx and Crake (2003) are health and bioengineering ventures  – OrganInc and HelthWyzer. Their products are supposed to improve life and health, although secretly they also create viruses and spread them, so that OrganInc and HelthWyzer can then sell the cures. The earth has finally succumbed to extreme climate change and other forms of contamination: the sea-levels have risen, wiping out some areas, while others have become uninhabitably hot. The health compounds are especially active in genetic redesign, creating enormous “pigoons” – porcine hosts to human organs for use in transplantation – and “ChickieNobs,” which are sort of chickens but with only feeding holes and stalks with breast-meat, a genetic morphing that enables higher meat-production and an undercutting of the normal supply chains. There are also “wolvogs,” which seem to be happy domestic pets, but which tear apart any human who mistakes them for “man’s best friend.” Other genetic crosses seem randomly, dangerously fanciful – the “snats,” snake-rat crosses which have to be exterminated because they are too dangerous, and “rakunks,” which have the cuteness of skunks but without the smell. In a society in which the resources have been exhausted or contaminated, Atwood suggests that genetic modification is not likely to be a benign effort to maintain the quality of life for all. Rather, it will prove a further stage in the ruthless, financially driven exploitation that led to exhaustion and contamination in the first place. Atwood’s future is both utopian and dystopian. Some people live in comfort, as scientists demonstrate an extraordinary ability to manipulate

166  Conclusion: Used Up life-forms, while others live without rights in poisonous urban sink-holes. But the products of the scientists are monstrous, dangerous, cruel, and designed to enrich corporations. Also, most of the food substitutes are inferior and cause people to long for the “real” products that they can no longer get. This utopian/dystopian quality is also very much a feature of the sex and entertainment regimes of this world. Atwood imagines this in some detail, and especially through the experiences of two adolescent friends, Jimmy and Crake. They surf the net together, watching seemingly anodyne formats such as “Noodie News” but also accessing “animal snuff sites” in which frogs are squashed, and cats are torn apart by hand (93). There is also “hedsoff.com,” which “played live coverage of executions in Asia,” and “alibooboo.com,” with “various supposed thieves having their hands cut off and adulterers and lipstick-wearers being stoned to death” (94). The thrill of seeing cruelty visited on others is also evident in the porn that they watch. Amongst other formats, there is “HottTotts,” a “global sex-trotting site,” which claims to show “real sex tourists, filmed while doing things they’d be put in jail for back in their home countries” (103). Jimmy and Crake smoke weed and flip between executions and porn, with a sense that “it all came to look like the same event” (99). Sex, in Atwood’s imagined future, mirrors the violence and imbalances of the surrounding society, and, like the society with its genetic redesigns, sex too is a series of invasive and exploitative transformations. Sex is neatly blended into consumerism in the form of “prostibots,” sex robots located in the malls, that give hand-jobs as part of the shopping experience. In the pleeblands there are also sex-workers, including many that, in order to appeal to the transgenic exploitation of the age, perform as spliced beings. There is a bar, “Scales and Tails,” where women wear a “Biofilm Bodyglove” which protects them and their clients from sexually transmitted infections but also makes the women into human-reptile and human-bird splices (Year 8). All is under corporate surveillance in the form of Seksmart, which is managed by the policing authority of CorpSecorps. We might see Jimmy as Atwood’s Everyman. As an adult, he works in marketing for the corporations; his sex life involves sex-workers on occasion, but also a succession of “lovers” rather than “girlfriends.” He seems to be in control in his sexual exchanges, but he comes to realise that he too is something of a plaything for his succession of women, an “extra.” He is “not to be taken seriously, but instead to be treasured like some child’s free gift dug out of a box of cereal, colourful and delightful but useless” (Oryx 294–5). Jimmy, the narrator indicates, is a consumer, but he is also consumed by this slug-like society and destined to become another piece of obsolete plastic junk. The easy promiscuity of his life loses its interest, but he remains “addicted” to it anyway. He feels “jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was merely

Conclusion: Used Up  167 an inconsequential knob that happened to be attached to one end of it.” In this exploitative and compartmentalised world, Jimmy himself has become something of a “ChickieNob,” a competitive product with little value or presence for his lovers beyond his function as a sex-partner. The “Oryx and Crake” trilogy sets out a series of problems that Atwood has projected forward from her sense of actual life at the turn of the century: impending ecological crisis; increasing social inequity and polarisation; web-enabled breaking of taboos, especially in the areas of sex and violence. What makes the trilogy especially interesting – beyond the exuberantly grim comedy – is that Atwood tries out various solutions. For her this is more “speculative fiction” than “science fiction,” more a testing out of the current directions of travel than a “fantasy.”7 Her most obvious projected solution is that of reversal, represented by the movement of God’s Gardeners. They are a religio-ecological group that occupies unused pleebland spaces and practices vegetarianism, non-chemical agriculture, traditional herbal medicines, and handicrafts. The God’s Gardeners anticipate the “Waterless Flood” in which “all buying and selling will cease, and we will find ourselves thrown back upon our own resources, in the midst of God’s bounteous Garden” (Year 151). Their religion is modelled very clearly on Christianity, with various saints’ days, but their saints are people who worked to understand and protect the natural world. This is not a return to shamanistic nature-worship, but their hymns, prayers, and daily practice all grant an equal place for mammals, insects, plants, and all other aspects of the natural world. The Gardeners are not promiscuous, and they refer to intercourse, officially at least, with veneration, as “the generative act.” Humankind, they understand, has fallen from peaceful vegetarianism into a poisonous and omnivorous consumerism, and alongside this, in the sexual realm, humans have fallen from “seasonal mating” into “an incessant sexual twitching” (Flood 225). A more radical solution is that designed by Jimmy’s friend, Crake. He is a brilliant gene-splitter who works in a corporate compound. Unbeknownst to his employers, Crake is designing his own version of the Biblical flood, or indeed a version of the fire and brimstone that rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah. He designs the BlyssPluss Pill, which is inspired allegedly by the example of an “extinct race of pygmies or bonobo chimpanzee” that was “indiscriminately promiscuous” (Oryx 346). The pill will protect against all known STIs, and “provide an unlimited supply of libido and sexual prowess” (Oryx 346). Crake, though, has despaired of humanity and has decided that the earth must be depopulated. His BlyssPluss Pill has a time-released virus which will eliminate virtually all humans. In short, promiscuity is a prize symptom of decadence and depravity, and it is the search for fulfilment through promiscuous sex that will bring judgment and death. Crake has also designed a new race of beings – the Crakers – who have been genetically

168  Conclusion: Used Up engineered to survive the new climate. They are humanoid, but all beautiful, and many-coloured, and the men all have large penises. This new race will repopulate the planet without overpopulation, and to bring this about, Crake has ensured that they have sex differently. He has worked out that the ideal repopulation rate would involve each female giving birth once every three years, so he has engineered the women to go into heat once every three years, during which period she turns blue across her belly and buttocks. She then chooses four men to mate with, and they copulate until the woman is impregnated and her blue colouring fades. Among the Crakers, with their seasonal mating, there can be “no more unrequited love.” Moreover, there will be no prostitution, no rape, and no sexual abuse of children. There is the objection that this cyclical mating reduces people to “hormone robots,” but Crake’s thought is that “we’re hormone robots anyway” (Oryx 196). Does Atwood indicate that humans – and especially men – are prone to be promiscuous, and when they actually become so it is the emergence of an always-inherent decadence? Is the idea that promiscuity is never entirely benign, and even that male sexual desire is never entirely benign? There is, it would seem, a malevolence to male sexuality, but, also, it is via this malevolence that a kindly and monogamous impulse may be found. When the adolescent Jimmy and Crake are surfing porn and execution websites, they spend a lot of time on HottTotts. The children do not seem entirely real to Jimmy until one day they see a girl who looks directly into the camera. This is the moment that Jimmy first thinks that “what they’d been doing was wrong.” At the same moment he feels “hooked through the gills” by this one particular girl (Oryx 104). The girl – who will become the Oryx of subsequent volumes – evokes in the boys a mix of pity, erotic arousal, desire to know and to save. It is via the taboo experience that Jimmy discovers a moral sensibility. We see the same pattern with Atwood’s other hero, Zeb, who features in the final volume. He too has grown up with a violent virtual reality – he used to watch sites showing historic women such as Mary Queen of Scots being beheaded. When he shows the site to his brother Adam, the founder of God’s Gardeners, Adam tells him “That’s depraved.” Zeb replies, “Right! That’s the point! What are you, gay?” (MaddAddam 119) Heterosex, Zeb’s joke implies, is always a kind of victimisation. Zeb has enough empathy or moral feeling to hope that the decapitations are faked, and he asks himself if his fascination with them means that he is “callous” or a “psychopath” (MaddAddam 118). But his brother reassures him that he is not a psychopath because the sites make him feel “shitty and/or pervy.” Zeb later reflects, “Young guys have no taste as such in sexual matters - no discrimination. They’re like those penguins that shocked the Victorians, they’ll bonk anything with a cavity” (MaddAddam 167). The adult Zeb will fall in love with the older woman, Toby, even though many younger women are around him. It

Conclusion: Used Up  169 would seem his “destiny” as an “alpha male” to transmit his genes by “jumping the swooning nubiles that are his by right” (MaddAddam 89). But he has passed through his desperate, undiscriminating phase. He is no longer ruled by his genes. He, like Jimmy, evolves a different sexual self via this awareness of his potential for brutality. The survivors of the BlyssPluss Pill will disturb Crake’s plan by interbreeding with the Crakers, and it is hard to see what the future might hold. The main final story-line is the traditional heterosexual romance between Toby and Zeb, who both maintain their monogamous love for each other until their deaths. The happy-melancholic ending turns on the destiny of the straight, faithful couple, as the twinned nightmares of capitalist destruction and sexual opportunism recede into the past. Zeb and Toby become a latter-day Adam and Eve, surviving the fall and finding Eden in each other. Atwood tries to see where ecological recklessness might lead, and while her trilogy is not meant to reflect her sense of the most likely outcome, it is an imaginative projection of actual tendencies, and it raises genuine ethical questions. Her vision puts accelerated consumption alongside promiscuity. It is perhaps a sexually conservative vision, in that when almost all else is lost, the white heterosexual couple will be saved and will represent the continuation of the best that has been. But it is not an actively exclusive vision. Atwood grants a future to the horny young woman who is drawn to the Crakers for their good looks, their large penises, and their practice of group sex. Atwood seems to echo earlier writers who view promiscuity negatively and as the sign of a problem. A more precise observation might be that while she does indeed see certain sexual behaviours as cruel or egotistical, that does not diminish in any way her respect for sexual choice. The problem with the sex in her dystopian future is not promiscuity as such, but the prevailing culture in which sex, along with other social and cultural forms, is co-opted as part of a sinister market economy which will exhaust the planet. Should we try to know the future of sex, and of promiscuity in particular? Is it, like material exploitation, leading towards apocalypse? Is it part of an overvaluation of abundance, consumerism, and novelty? Is promiscuity like the slug that eats everything and leaves nothing useful behind? Of course there is no necessary link between promiscuity and ecological exhaustion. A person may have thousands of sexual partners and never get on an airplane or use an aerosol spray. That person may also, as Stefanie Weiss suggests, “go green between the sheets” and use organic lubricants and biodegradable condoms (130, 146). What has become evident through this book is that promiscuity – like other sexual behaviours – is not always the same thing, any more than marriage is the same from one age to another, or from one nation or religion to another. Our writers often see promiscuity as a form of decadence, of unfair and exploitative social arrangements. But at other moments it

170  Conclusion: Used Up signifies choice, independence, an exploration of life through pleasure. The argument here, as set out in the introduction, is not to make a case for or against promiscuity – there is no recommendation or warning for individuals or societies. I would argue, though, that freedom of sexual choice – including the choice of no partners or many partners – is in itself a fundamental element of a just, fair, and free society. One might also ask, to what extent is the guarantee of this right very likely to guarantee other rights? Is it possible to imagine a society in which, for instance, a woman has the right to conduct her sexual life as she wishes, but no other rights? If a gay or lesbian or trans or gender fluid person has the right to the sexual partner or partners of their choice, then their right to exist has been acknowledged. It is still possible to imagine that such people may face discrimination in the workplace or with regard to marriage and reproduction. But that right to sexual self-determination is an initial foothold which acknowledges the idea of personhood and autonomy. Promiscuity in itself is not freedom, and sexual freedom is not the only kind that matters. But if the right to make one’s own choices in relation to sex are taken away, what else might also go? And where those rights do not exist, how is that control part of a larger system of repression? By this reasoning, whether or not one wishes to be involved oneself, the existence of a fully consensual promiscuity between adults is a sign of social health, and not of decay.

Notes









Conclusion: Used Up  171 Ecology (1987), Andrew Dobson’s Green Political Thought (1990), Robyn Eckersley’s Environmentalism and Political Theory (1992), and Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993). In the UK, the topic featured in mainstream media in the early 1990s with the Twyford Down and Newbury Bypass protests.

Works Cited Allen, Peter Lewis. The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Atwood, Margaret. MaddAddam. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ———. Oryx and Crake. 2003. London: Virago, 2013. ———. The Year of the Flood. 2009. London: Virago, 2010. Daly, Herman. “Steady State Economics,” in Merchant, Key Contexts in Critical Theory, 1994, pp. 96–106. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. London: The Women’s Press, 1979. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow, 1970. Gabrielson, Teena, et al., ed. Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. McSpadden, Russ. “Sex, Art and Ecology in Coal Country: An Interview with Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle.” Earth First! 27/6/19 URL: earthfirst. org.uk Merchant, Carolyn, ed. Key Contexts in Critical Theory: Ecology. New York: Humanities Press, 1994. Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York: Routledge, 2003. Petro, Anthony. After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality and American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Potts, Robert. “Light in the Wilderness.” Guardian. URL: www.theguardian.com Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. Novels 1967–1972. New York: Library of America, 2005. Sandilands, Katriona. “Queer Life? Ecocriticism after the Fire.” The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 306–17. Sessions, George. “Ecocentrism and the Anthropocentric Detour,” in Merchant, Key Contexts in Critical Theory, 1994, pp. 140–51. Weiss, Stefanie Iris. Eco-Sex: Go Green Between the Sheets and Make your Love Life Sustainable. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2010. White, Barbara. “Acts of God: Providentialism, the Jeremiad and Environmental Crisis.” Writing and the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, edited by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells. London: Zed Books, 1998, pp. 91–101. White, Edmund. The Beautiful Room is Empty. London: Picador, 1988. Updike, John. Rabbit is Rich. A Rabbit Omnibus. London: Penguin, 1981.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes Achilles 26, 44 Adams, Carol J. 76 adultery 3, 25, 26, 33, 51, 84, 127 Aeschylus 28 Agamben, Giorgio 24 Agamemnon 26, 44 Alcoff, Linda Martin 19n17 Allah 2 Altman, Joel B. 47n33 animal rights movement 23 animals 23–47 anthrophagi 39 Aphrodite 25 Apuleius 1, 29, 31, 32 Aquinas, Thomas23, 45n3 Aristophanes 14, 15, 82–4, 91 Aristotle 24, 78, 96n2 Ars amatoria (Ovid) 54 Astrophil and Stella (Sidney) 13 Attwood, Nina 13 Atwood, Margaret 162, 165, 166, 168, 169 Bakhtin, Mikhail 96, 98n27 Ballard, J. G. 72n17 barbarism 4 The Barber of Seville (1775) 131n21 Barthes, Roland 155 Bataille, Georges 65, 66 Baudelaire, Charles 14, 15, 136–8, 140, 142, 149, 158n4 beasts of burden 25 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de 114 Beauvoir, Simone de 104 Bechuana 5 Beckett, Samuel 163 Benjamin, Walter 142

Bentley, Eric 97n12 Bergson, Henri 79, 80 Bernard, Claude 143 Bevis, Matthew 85, 97n12 Bible 2, 3, 23, 51, 54, 59, 70, 161, 162 Biblical apocalypticism 149 Biblical patriarchs 2 biodegradable condoms 169 biological kinship 3 Boas, Franz 5 Book of Kings (Bible) 51 Bougainville, Antoine de 105 Bowie, Andrew 85 Briseis 26 Bukowski, Charles 1, 7 Calonne, David 158n18 Calvin, John 102 Camus, Renaud 136, 153–7 cannibals 39 The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) 53 Capellano, Andrea 16, 33–5 Carson, Rachel 164 Casanova 101 Catullus 52, 53 Cave, Terence 95 Chaucer, Geoffrey 53, 54, 71n6 Chitnis, Bernice 158n16 Christian anti-sex policy 32 Christian asceticism 33 Christian patriarchal model 162 Clark, Anna 130n7 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle 14, 15, 17, 102, 117, 119, 121–3, 126, 127, 129; Claudine and Annie 124, 128; Claudine at School 124; Claudine in Paris 123; Claudine Married 117; “The Hidden Woman” 118, 136;

174 Index The Innocent Libertine 118, 120, 131n30; The Pure and the Impure 120, 121, 127; Retreat from Love 124, 129 comedy 75–98 comic actors 79 comic objects 75–98 communal bed-fellow 30 communal marriage 4 “Condemned Women: Delphine and Hippolita” (Baudelaire) 141 The Confession of a Child of the Century (de Musset) 135 The Confessions of the Count of *** (Duclos) 108 conjugal fidelity 5 1 Corinthians 7:1 32 La Cousine Bette (Balzac) 143 Critchley, Simon 85 Cusset, Catherine 107 Cybele 30 Cymbeline 37 Cyprian 33

English Protestant society 40 excessive indulgence 34 excessive woman 51–72 Exodus 10:12–15 148 The Experimental Novel 143, 158n6

Daly, Mary 170n5 La Dame aux camélias (Dumas) 55, 58, 60, 61, 64, 136 Dangerous Liaisons (Laclos) 101, 109, 112, 114, 117, 118, 149 Danse macabre 141 Dante 33, 34 deep ecology 165 Delany, Samuel 15 Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie 131n30 democratic morality 12, 18, 19n17, 77 Diderot, Denis 105, 106, 115 Dimock, Wai Chee 10 Dionysus 27 Diski, Jenny 72n17 Divine Comedy (Dante) 33 Dollimore, Jonathan 72n18 Don Giovanni (1787) 102 Don Juan 102 Don Juan ou le Festin de Pierre (Molière) 103 Duclos, Charles 108, 109, 130n13–130n16 Dumas, Alexandre 54, 58, 59, 62, 71n10, 146 Dworkin, Andrea 75–7

Gabrielson, Teena 170n6 Gaca, Kathy L. 32 Gandhi, Mahatma 152 Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais) 14, 81, 91 Gautier, Marguerite 55, 58 Genesis (Bible) 2; Genesis 1:26 161; Genesis 1:28 161 Germinie Lacerteux (Jules and Goncourt) 135 Gillan, Robert 131n23 Girard, René 60, 61 Goldberg, Jonathan 37 The Golden Ass (Apuleius) 1, 16, 29, 31 Gooder, Claire 13 graphic euphemisms 94 Greeks 2, 26, 32 Grigson, Geoffrey 90 Groneman, Carol 13, 71n5

Eagleton, Terry 40, 47n32 Eliot, George 6 Ellis, Havelock 5

The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (Stone) 36 Feher, Michel 106, 107 female-female relations 122 La Femme de Claude (Dumas) 58 Fijian 5 The Flowers of Evil (Baudelaire) 136, 137 Foley, Helen 82 fornication 51 fornix 51 Foucault, Michel 8, 9, 10, 11, 32 Fowler, Kendra 19n7 Freccero, Carla 11 Freud, Sigmund 60, 80, 81, 89; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious 80

Halliwell, Stephen 96n2, 97n7, 97n10 Haraway, Donna 24, 34 Helen of Troy 25, 44 Hemingway, Ernest 76 Herbert, Christopher 6, 18n7 Hippocrates 94 History of Scotland (Lang) 4 Hobbes, Thomas 78 Holden, George 144

Index  175 Holleran, Andrew 15 Hollinghurst, Alan 15 Homer 14, 16, 25, 26, 32, 76, 77, 86 Home to Harlem (McKay) 15 Horn of Plenty 92, 93, 95 horror: promiscuity and 5–6 Houppermans, Sjef 159n31 Howard, Richard 9, 10 Iliad (Homer) 14, 25, 26, 76 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 72n13 Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (Bernard) 143 Jacobson, Howard 79 Jagose, Annamarie 11 Jealousy (Millet) 66 Jeremiah (Bible) 38; Jeremiah 5:8 33; Jeremiah 13:27 33 John, Friar 95, 96 Kant, Immanuel 75 Kavanagh, Thomas 130n8 Kings (Bible) 2; Kings1, 16:31 51; Kings2, 9:30–33 51 Kinsey, Alfred 1, 3, 6 komasts 79 Koran 2, 3, 8 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 5 Kramer, Larry 15 Kristeva, Julia 132n31, 132n34 Kronos 2 Laclos, Choderlos de 109, 112, 113 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence) 76 Lang, Andrew 4 Late Archaic period 27 Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Bergson) 79 Lawrence, D. H. 76, 77, 170n3 Lectures in Ethics (Kant) 75, 84 Leiber, Justin 130n6 lesbianism, renaissance of 37 Les Fleurs du Mal (Baudelaire) 14 Lettres d’une Péruvienne (de Graffigny) 107 Levine, Caroline 10 Lewis, C. S. 33 The Libertine (Shadwell) 102 libertinism 14, 17, 101, 102, 104, 111, 117, 122; libertine clubs 101;

libertine ethics 101–32; “libertine moment” 106 Liddell, Henry George 97n16 Lombroso, Cesare 54 longue durée 10 Louis XIV 103, 108 Louis XV 106 Lowe, N. J. 97n5 Lubbock, Sir John 4 Lucius (The Golden Ass) 30, 31 Luke 20:35 32 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 14, 81, 83–6 Mackinnon, Catherine 25 McCallam, David 111 McGowan, James 158n2 McKay, Claude 15 McLennan, John F. 4 Macmillan, Kenneth 71n9 Macrobius 24 male-male liaisons 127 male mortality rates 4 Man a Machine (De la Mettrie) 105 Manon Lescaut (Prévost) 54, 55, 57–60, 64, 72n13, 104 manualisation 104 Marie, fille-mère (Delarue-Mardrus) 131n30 The Marriage of Figaro (1778) 114 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 104 Merteuil, Marquise de 109–13, 149 Mesch, Rachel 131n30 Mettrie, Julien Offray de la 105–6 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) 35, 37 Mill, John Stuart 77 Miller, Henry 14, 15, 136, 149–51, 153, 155 Miller, Nancy 107 Millet, Catherine 16, 55, 65–70, 72n17, 101 Minogue, Valerie 158n15 Mitford, Nancy 103 Mitterand, Henri 158n9 Molina, Tirso de 102 monogamy 4, 5, 45, 81 Moore, Oscar 15 Muhammad 2 Musset, Alfred de 135, 158n1 “My Heart Laid Bare” (Baudelire) 140 myth of Venice 41 Naess, Arne 164 nakedness 63

176 Index Nana (Zola) 136, 143, 144 Neill, Michael 47n28 Nelson, Brian 158n14 Noailles, Anna de 131n30 Norton, Thomas 1, 3 Nussbaum, Martha 76, 77 Nymphomania: A History (Groneman) 13 nymphomaniac 1 objectification 76, 77, 89 object-ness 96 Odyssey (Homer) 90 The Odyssey 25, 26 On Love (Capellano) 33, 34 ontological anxiety 24 organic lubricants 169 The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (Lubbock) 4 Oryx and Crake (Atwood) 165 “Oryx and Crake” trilogy 167 Othello (Shakespeare) 14, 44 oughtness 3, 6, 18 “over-sexed” identity 15 Ovid 54 Pain, Promiscuity, Purpose: From Mess to Ministry (Fowler) 19n7 Pasiphaë 33 peaceful immorality 124 Petronius 14, 15, 86 pets 25 phallic songs 79 Philebus (cinaedus) 30 Philippe, Duke of Orléans 103 Philosophy in the Bedroom (Sade) 114, 115, 131n22 Playboy (Nussbaum) 76 polyandry 4 polygyny 4 Pompadour, Madame de 103 pornography 76 Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth) 162–4 Prévost, Abbé 54–9 Priam, King of Troy 26 Priapus 86–89, 93 Primate Visions (Haraway) 24 Primitive Marriage (McLennan) 4 The Principles of Sociology (Spencer) 4 psychological realism 112 Psychopathia Sexualis (Krafft-Ebing) 5

Quartilla 88 queer critics 11 queer temporality 10 queer theory 13, 61 Rabelais, François 14–16, 90, 91, 94–6 Rank, Otto 103 Reay, Barry 13 Revelation 14:4 32 Revelation 20:1–3 148 Revermann, Martin 97n12 Rifkin, Adrian 159n25 Le Roman expérimentale (Zola) 158n11 Romans 2, 32 Rose, Mary Beth 36, 37 Roth, Philip 162, 164, 165 Rouillé, Antoine Louis, Comte de Jouy 72n11 Rubin, Gayle 12, 13, 18 Sade, Marquis de 101, 123 Saint-Ange, Madame de 115 Salisbury, Joyce E. 45n3 Sanchez, Melissa 13, 14 Sapphic libertinage 122 Saturn 2 Satyricon (Petronius) 14, 81, 86, 87, 89, 90, 94, 95 satyric plays 45n10 satyrs 27, 78 Sciortino, Karley 19n7 Scott, Robert 97n16 The Second Sex 129 second-wave feminists 12 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 60 Sed non satiata (Baudelaire) 139 Selve, Comtesse de 108 Sex Addiction: A Critical History (Reay, Attwood and Gooder) 13 sex negativity 12, 17 sex objects 75–98 sex-positive memoirs 13 sexual apathy 54 sexual appetites 41, 105 The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (Millet) 16, 55, 65–6 sex-work/workers 47n35, 51, 72n16, 81, 84, 102, 104, 108, 118, 136, 141, 143, 144, 147, 154, 164, 166 Shadwell, Thomas 102 Shakespeare, William 14

Index  177 Sidney 13, 14 Silent Spring 164 Slutever: Dispatches from a Sexually Autonomous Woman in a Post-Shame World (Sciortino) 19n7 sodometries 37 Sommerstein, Alan H. 97n11 Spencer, Herbert 4, 5 Stone, Lawrence 36, 46n24 Strong, Anise K. 52 “Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage” (Diderot) 105 Tahitians 5 Taylor, W. Cooke 4 tendentious joke 80 La Terre (Zola) 124 Thérèse Raquin (Zola) 143 “Thinking Sex” (Rubin) 12, 13 third-wave feminists 13 Thlinkeet 5 Thomas, Keith 45n5 Thompson, Hannah 146 Thurman, Judith 120 Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (Delany) 15 Tourvelle, Madame de 112 Traub, Valerie 11, 37 La Traviata (Verdi) 71n10 tricks 154, 159n23 Tricks (Camus) 136, 153

The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest (Tirso de Molina) 102 Trojan women 26 The Tropic of Cancer (Miller) 14, 136, 149, 150 Updike, John 162, 164, 165 uterine fury 53 Valéry, Paul 17, 136 Valmont, Vicomte de 110–13 Verdi, Giuseppe 71n10 Viau, Théophile de 103 Le Visage émerveillé (1904) 131n30 Voyage around the World (Bougainville) 105 Ward Jouve, Nicole 132n35 Ward, Matthew 131n27 Weiss, Stefanie 169 Welsh, Mary 76 White, Edmund 15, 162–5 White, Lynn Jr. 161 Whitman, Walt 153 Whore of Babylon 51–3 Williams, Craig 46n15, 86 Winkler, John J. 46n17 Wolf, Naomi 19n7 Wolfe, Cary 24, 45n2 Zola, Émile 124, 136, 142–9 Zupančič, Alenka 79, 89

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