Dr. John, the “wrong” love interest who beguiles Lucy before she finds her better-suited mate, gives her illicit love letters, and Lucy furtively buries the letters under a pear tree: “I cleared away the ivy, and found the hole; it was large enough to receive the jar, and I thrust it deep in.” “I was not,” writes Lucy, “only going to hide a treasure—I meant also to bury a grief.” “Lucy compulsively conceals objects in boxes, drawers and desks . . . like Poulet’s patient, she must conceal her desires.”
Lucy Snowe signals to Monsieur Paul—the “right” lover—that she is ready to begin a romantic relationship with him by handing him her precious “box,” which “lay ready in my lap”: “And taking from the open desk the little box, I put it into his hand. ‘It lay ready in my lap this morning,’ I continued; ‘and if Monsieur had been rather more patient . . . —perhaps I should say, too, if I had been calmer and wiser—I should have given it then.’
“He looked at the box: I saw its clear warm tint and bright azure circlet, pleased his eye. I told him to open it.”
A clearer sense of pleasure and ownership in the vagina could not be imagined, even if Victorian social convention ensures that these scenes unfold through metaphor and allegory.
As the nineteenth century progressed, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—which started publishing their magazine The Germ in 1850—developed explicit iconographies for the vagina. This theme was vivid in the wildly popular paintings of Dante Rossetti, Christina Rossetti’s brother. Dante Rossetti often painted botanically incorrect, but anatomically correct, labial and vaginal pomegranates: his half-length portrait of Dante’s Beatrice shows the beauty holding up such a pomegranate—with a cut in the skin of the fruit, and labial folds open on either side of the cut—and the same labial pomegranates appeared in his woodcuts for his sister Christina Rossetti’s highly sexual epic of female temptation, “Goblin Market.”16 Just as the Pre-Raphaelites positioned themselves as social renegades and sexual dissidents, it is tempting to read their preoccupation with painting the vagina—indeed, graphically holding up and liberating the vagina from its usual repressed nineteenth-century context—as being part of their larger impulse toward social freedom and open creative expression.
In the 1860s, British women devoured genre novels called “sensation novels.” In this kind of fiction, the heroine was not passive and dutiful—as she was in classic Victorian male fiction, like Dickens’s novels—but was instead willful and determined. These novels gave readers many passages rich with sensuous description of these women’s “voluptuous” feelings. Sensation novels were seen by the culture at large as being extremely threatening to women—especially to girls and young women—because they were understood to be arousing to them sexually. “Reading novels”—especially “reading French novels,” which tended to be even more explicit about female sexuality and desire—surfaced as a metaphor for a gateway to moral perdition for women, described in terms very much like the terms used to warn young women away from masturbation. Indeed, women reading sensation novels and women’s masturbation were often cast in terms that virtually linked them together.
THE AESTHETIC VAGINA
As the 1880s and 1890s unfolded, aestheticism became an influential avant-garde movement, and aestheticist vaginas made their appearances. Illustrator Aubrey Beardsley used schematized vagina motifs as backgrounds for his lithographs for Oscar Wilde’s plays, such as his censored play about overwhelming, even murderous female sexual desire, Salome (1892), as well as Wilde’s folk tales. (There were even scary vagina motifs in this period as well: anonymous authors, including possibly Oscar Wilde, wrote the 1893 erotic novel Teleny, in which the vagina is portrayed at times as delightful, and at other times as being slimy, noxious, and monstrous.)
The 1890s, which saw massive shifts in terms of the education and social liberation of European and American women, also saw schematized vaginas, in the form of the iconic peacock feather motif and papyrus motif, which evolved into the art nouveau and art deco upside-down triangle motif. The peacock feather was represented vertically, as if an open vulva with the “heart” of the feather design the “heart” or what doctors would call “introitus” of the vulva.
The 1880s and the 1890s were a revolutionary period in Europe and America, as “aestheticism” and then “decadence,” both of which were movements that subverted or questioned social and sexual conventions, became sweeping trends. “New Woman” writers such as Kate Chopin in The Awakening, Olive Schreiner, and George Egerton (a woman writing under a male pseudonym) began to write about female sexual desire. The New Woman figure, which became a focus of public discussion, was seen as sexually emancipated, and thus as very sexually threatening.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the curtain of repression of female sexuality was being lifted slightly by the sexologists, including Richard von Krafft-Ebing, whose Psychopathia Sexualis appeared in 1886—though Krafft-Ebing placed “excessive” female desire in the category of “nymphomania” and argued that most well-bred women’s levels of desire should be “small”; “If this were not so,” he wrote reassuringly, “the whole world would become a brothel”17—and the more liberal Havelock Ellis, who wrote Studies in the Psychology of Sex in 1889.
THE FREUDIAN VAGINA
Sigmund Freud and his followers, of course, introduced a major shift in female sexuality and how the vagina was once again reunderstood. Though the Victorian conservative commentators saw the vagina as a mechanistic delivery system for reproduction, and had defined the clitoris as making women vicious and the uterus as making them crazy and unfit for higher education, Freud redefined the vagina in psychodynamic terms. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he introduced the clitoris-vagina dualism that so engaged the 1970s and still so affects us: “If we are to understand how a little girl turns into a woman, we must follow the further vicissitudes of this excitability of the clitoris,” he wrote.18 Before Freud, the clitoris and the vagina were seen, even if not always admired, as different aspects of the same sexual/reproductive system. Freud popularized the idea that there was a kind of quarrel between them in terms of female development, and that there are morally “better” and morally “worse” kinds of female orgasm. In his terms, “mature” women had vaginal rather than “immature” clitoral orgasms, a position with which his disciples would concur and extend into the mid-twentieth century—thus making many women of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations self-doubting along the way.
But he also argued, in his essay on penis envy, that men see the vagina as a primordial castrator; elsewhere he depicted the vagina as the dark matrix of Oedipal psychodramas. After Freud, the notion of the devouring, castrating vagina as a source of male neuroticism became influential throughout the twentieth century.
Others—doctors and psychologists—picked up the argument that the vagina and the clitoris have political and psychodynamic relevance. In Wilhelm Stekels’s 1926 book Frigidity in Woman, a chapter titled “The Struggle of the Sexes” assigns feminism the role of denying sexual pleasure to women; he believed that what he called female “sexual anaestheticism” was due to contemporary women’s desires to be dominant over men. He also saw women’s emotional and spiritual needs as being linked to their sexual responsiveness; a man must appeal to one kind of woman’s spirituality, he wrote, before she could reach orgasm, whereas the “modern” woman can’t reach orgasm unless she is treated like a “new woman,” which is, he noted, “Ibsen’s problem in Nora!” “With this requirement fulfilled,” he concluded, “every inhibition that stands in the way of her sexuality is released.”19 It’s remarkable that, well into the twentieth century, women’s difficulties reaching orgasm were regularly assigned by authoritative commentators to women’s emotional instability—rather than to men’s seductiveness or technique.
But even as Freud and others were finding new terms—this time psychodynamic rather than medical—with which to control and sometimes condemn the vagina and clitoris
, after the First World War, some women artists, dancers, and singers were looking for ways to liberate its meanings.
9
Modernism: The “Liberated” Vagina
Dear grey and white Janet . . . thank you for the bouquet. The pleasure is undescribable—like all enchantment and there is something sad about being unable to tell the secret of pleasure . . .
—Dolly Wilde to Janet Flanner
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, women writers struggled to bring metaphors and narratives of female erotic desire, and even vaginal metaphors, into the light of day. Victorian women had referred to female sexuality in codes and allusions, but the female modernists, with their impulses toward breaking boundaries and establishing the new, began to articulate vaginal themes more directly.
In the first two or three decades of the twentieth century, a liberationist counterculture to reclaim female sexuality began in earnest. With modernism, women were making political, social, and artistic statements about their sexuality. From about 1890 to the 1920s, daringly many writers of marital advice literature began to decouple sex for women from reproduction. They decried male sexual selfishness and described techniques aimed at giving women more pleasure. Theodore van de Velde’s huge bestseller, Ideal Marriage (1926), bemoaned the marital unhappiness that arose from not knowing “the ABCs of sex” and repudiated the Victorian code of silence about these matters. The popularity of the book could also have been due to his championing in detail of cunnilingus, and the attention he gave to the details of how effectively to bestow on wives what he called “the genital kiss.”1
Gertrude Stein, in her volume of poetry Tender Buttons (1912), made oblique references to the “tender button” of the clitoris.2 Her famous line “a rose is a rose is a rose” is actually much more erotic and complex when read in its original setting. The line derives from a prose poem in which the context of the “rose” seems sexual—indeed multiorgasmic—and the rhythms of speech echo that escalating faltering of breath and cadence of waves of intensity that are so characteristic of female arousal, and which women poets have sought to capture since the time of Sappho’s “thin fire”:
Suppose, to suppose, suppose a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
To suppose, we suppose that there arose here and there that here and there there arose an instance of knowing that there are here and there that there are there that they will prepare, that they do care to come again.
Are they to come again.
Here is another potential Steinian rose/vagina: “RED ROSES: A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot.”3
Performer Josephine Baker, the African American dancer who was the darling of Parisian nightclubs in 1925, performed in a short skirt made of artificial bananas—a witty reference to her own sexual confidence, suggesting that one of “hers” was equal to any number of “theirs.” Her glowing, self-possessed persona—which safely cast assertive female sexuality as exotic and “other”—was a new kind of iconography for female sexuality: a seductress who was not mincing or half ashamed, but who was open with her body, secure in its pleasures. Choreographer Loie Fuller’s modern dance routines in the 1900s—in which she combined her innovative choreography with the movement of veil-like silks—caused a sensation in London and Paris. Contemporary critics interpreted her dance as a statement about female desire, as Fuller’s waving, rippling, sensuous, almost labial cloth vortices swirled across the stage, with Fuller herself twisting at their centers. Contemporaries saw Fuller, writes literary historian Rhonda Garelick, as beginning and ending her performances with “a deeply female, birth-like violence,” a “bleeding, floral wound”: “As she whirls around in a spiral of blood-red light, Fuller seems to have set the air itself on fire, violently opening up a distinctly feminine, even vaginal rupture—a bleeding flower—in the planar space around her.”4
Painter Georgia O’Keeffe left her family’s farm in Wisconsin and built her own career and life as a young bohemian in Manhattan in the 1910s. She posed brazenly for her lover Alfred Stieglitz’s geometrical, water-spangled nude photographs, leaving the viewing public and the art-criticism establishment shocked and titillated. Her flower paintings, often read as studies in a vaginal aesthetic, appeared in the early 1920s, when O’Keeffe was being personally identified as a free-spirited “muse” figure to male American modernists and Greenwich Village rebels, and she was identified with that subculture’s interest in female sexual freedom. Both male and female art critics responded to her flower paintings breathlessly, claiming that the paintings were telling truths about female sexuality that no woman had dared to reveal before, even though her biographer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp makes it clear that O’Keeffe at least overtly denied these images’ sexual content. O’Keeffe distanced herself from the vaginal nature of the images, according to Drohojowska-Philp, because she herself felt that the highly sexualized image of her persona, promoted by critics, obscured the seriousness of her intention as an artist.5
The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, also a bohemian participant in the 1920s demimonde of Greenwich Village, “branded” herself consciously as an artistic advocate of female sexual freedom. She was among the first women to pick up the banner of transcendentalist, liberationist sexual advocacy that had been raised first by Walt Whitman sixty years before, in his 1855 publication of the scandalous prose poem, Leaves of Grass—though other male writers, from Walter Pater to Oscar Wilde, had developed this liberationist, mystical view of sexuality following Whitman. Millay famously wrote the female-liberationist quatrain, suggestively titled “First Fig” (1922), in her collection A Few Figs from Thistles:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!6
This caution-to-the-winds image of a rapturous and careless female sexual renegade, who makes her own choices and regrets none of her mistakes—because she welcomes the value of the experience—stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from the staid, victim-focused tradition of “seduction and betrayal” sexual narratives in Victorian women’s fictions. The female narrator who would willingly, even gladly, throw it all over—social role, identity, life itself—for the sake of, or in allegiance to, overt sexual passion was a long way from the demure sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning seventy years before, when female sexual passion had smoldered far below the surface of the language.
These artistic trends coincided with the latest iteration of vaginal motifs in art and architecture: the art deco papyrus was schematized into a repeated upside-down triangle, the icon for the exterior of the feminine pubis dating from humanity’s earliest visual art. These images were incorporated into buildings, wallpaper, household objects, and advertising posters. In the 1910s and 1920s, when “New Women” and then flappers began to rebel against the social and sexual mores of their mothers’ generations, the craze for Egyptiana in architecture, film, and furniture design also saw schematized triangle-pubis motifs everywhere.
A sudden explosion of accurate and sympathetic information about female sexuality now replaced the Van de Velde moralistic and inaccurate medical discourses of the Victorian period. Women were starting to be able to make love on their own terms for a very simple reason: technology. In the 1920s, reliable contraception became readily available: Marie Stopes opened her first birth control clinic in London in 1921, during the same era that Margaret Sanger opened her own clinic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.7 Casual sex became far less dangerous for women, simply because of advances in rubber processing, which led to the greatly increased availability and effectiveness of both condoms and diaphragms. Dr. Marie Stopes’s bestsellers Married Love, What Every Girl Should Know and What Every Mother Should Know also appeared in the 1920s. Women were learning from public, noncensorious sources accurate information about their own sexual responses, for the first time in Western history.
But not all male m
odernists moved as fast. They certainly saw sexuality as connected to creativity—but it was male sexuality and male creativity that interested them. Dr. Michael H. Whitworth, in an Oxford University lecture in 2011 on “Modernism and Gender,” quotes from Ezra Pound’s “Translator’s Postscript” to the 1922 edition of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love. Pound identified creativity as sexual and male: “the brain itself, is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense. . . . There are traces of it in the symbolism of the phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos. . . . Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.”8
For Henry Miller, similarly, the whole matrix of reality was a “womb” upon which he inscribes himself: “When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written . . . I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.”9 When modernist men own and inseminate the cosmos’s vulva with their ideas, the vulva and the womb are seen as positive; but when women, with their own ideas, seek to possess their own vulvas and wombs, those same organs degrade them. In Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1961), when women are creative, he tends to reduce them to “cunts” and to sexual appetites; Elsa, a visitor to his quarters, plays Schumann, and Miller writes, “A cunt who can play as she does ought to have better sense than to be tripped up by every guy with a big putz that happens to come along.” Or he describes women expatriate artists as “rich American cunts with paint boxes slung over their shoulders. A little talent and a fat purse.”10
Dr. Whitworth points out that the male modernists identified “the feminine as submarine, and the masculine as dry land.”11 In contrast to Pound’s and Miller’s dynamic images of erect masculine ideas, Pound, as well as T. S. Eliot, tended to characterize the work of female colleagues in wet, flaccid, or quivering negative vaginal metaphors: Eliot accused Imagist poet Amy Lowell, for instance, of a “general floppiness,” a floppiness that had, he argued, in terms of the literary movement of Imagism, “gone too far.” Dr. Whitworth notes that critic Conrad Aiken encouraged readers to “pass lightly over the . . . tentacular quivering of Mina Loy” in favor of the “manly metres” of Eliot and Stevens.12