section one

SEXUALITY AND SUBJECTIVITY This Section will explore the concept of subjectivity in relation to the Politics of Ecstasy, and how the politics of masculine authority has established men’s sexual subjectivity in terms of a powerrelation over women. The psychology of the Erotomaniac - men who are defined by their desire to dominate and sexually manipulate women - will be examined, and death and necrophilia will be discussed as metaphors of the ways in which masculine sexuality objectifies and dominates women. The novels discussed in this Section may be interpreted as simply validating a phallocentric sexual politics, but it is equally possible to perceive in these narratives a critique of the patriarchal politics which they depict. A Post-Porn/Modern reading subverts the textual validation of phallic masculine sexuality, and allows other sexualities, especially those traditionally marginalised in the texts, to be explored. The textual readings offered here to not profess to be complete; rather, they are readings designed to identity and critique constructions of sexuality, and to reveal the similarities in sexual politics of a variety of texts. Authors who directly confront issues of contemporary sexuality have been criticised for constructing narratives which have been read by some critics as perpetuating masculine dominance in heterosexual relationships. When phallic masculinity determines what sexuality is or should be, then that masculine sexual politics inevitably determines women’s experience of sexuality and the construction of feminine sexual subjectivity. But read from a Post-Porn/Modern perspective, these texts destabilise masculinity’s sexual hegemony and create space for the production of a feminine sexual discourse, despite the authority of phallocentric discourse in fictional worlds. Angela Carter amongst others has been attacked for having a “fascination with violent eroticism”.1 Critics have argued that perpetuating the description of sexual violence is unjustifiable, even if such representations are created for critical ends. However, by employing images of violent eroticism, Carter is not necessarily endorsing the existence of sexual violence in the real world. She argues that through representations of masculine-perpetuated sexual violence she is able to critique the predominant masculine expressions of sexuality in our society. Carter states that the:

sexual relations between men and women always render explicit the nature of social relations in the society in which they take place and, if described explicitly, will form a

1

Robert Clark, “Angela Carter’s Desire Machine” in Women’s Studies, Volume 14(1), 1987, pp. 147-161, p. 158.

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critique of those relations, even if that is not and never has been the intention of the [writer].2

Although narratives such as Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being do not appear obviously critical of phallic masculinity, if read in relation to Carter’s theory as she outlines it here, then The Unbearable Lightness of Being’s apparent passive acceptance of masculine domination and feminine subordination in sexual relations itself constitutes a criticism of these pre-ordained sexual roles. Carter’s reading of the sexual relations between men and women reveals instances when women resist the hegemonic intrusion into their sexuality and subjectivity by men in narratives. This theme is made explicit through the examination of coercive heterosexual relations and sexual assault in novels like Blackeyes and The Passion of New Eve. The final part of this Section will deal with the very limitations of phallocentrism as it applies to masculine sexual identity. The male characters referred to feel that their experience of sex and their sexual identity is incomplete and unsatisfying compared to women’s sexual subjectivity and experience of jouissance, which they yearn to experience in order to attain a sense of subjective completion.

MASCULINE SEXUAL SUBJECTIVITY: EROTOMANIA AND THE SELF Constructions of sexual subjectivity are of crucial importance in the Sexual Revolution’s Politics of Ecstasy. The men depicted in the narratives of the Sexual Revolution are the men by and for whom the Revolution was created and perpetuated; they are sex maniacs or Erotomaniacs, men who see the world primarily through sexual difference and who live for sex. Erotomaniacs are heterosexual sadists who perform sex with cruelty and ignore the feelings and desires of their female partners. Erotomaniacs are the modern example of the Marquis de Sade’s “libertines”, men possessed by sexual demons3 whose desires run “counter to the desires of other people”.4 Erotomaniacs are becoming the focus of literary study, and the term itself is now used in narratives, for example by Milan Kundera in his last novel Immortality.5

2

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman, Virago, London, 1979, p. 20. Ibid., p. 149. 4 Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality, Ayers, Salem, 1984, p. 167. 5 Milan Kundera, Immortality, Faber & Faber, London, 1991, p. 374. 3

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Erotomaniacs exist in a textual space where the “normal” social relations between the sexes have broken down, where phallocentrism is taken to ridiculous extremes. In this textual space, desire and subjectivity are of fundamental concern. Desire in the Sexual Revolution is perceived and experienced by individuals as “a powerful, barely containable force”, while subjectivity “is constructed by the possibility of agency” in performing desire.6 In other words, it is only when the masculine individual is active in a sexual sense that the he achieves the status of subject. For Erotomaniacs, subjectivity is attained by the enactment of their desire to sexually dominate and objectify women, which effectively denies women the status of sexual subject. The phallocentric politics of the Sexual Revolution explicitly establishes men as subjects, and marginalises women as object/Other. Ferdinand Clegg, the Erotomaniac character in John Fowles’ The Collector, is a bland English Council clerk who wins a great deal of money which he uses to fulfill his sexual fantasy of kidnapping a woman and forcing her to become his sexual slave.7 According to Frederick Clegg, the sexual self is “some crude animal thing I was born without. (And I’m glad I was, if more people were like me, in my opinion, the world would be better.)” (13). Clegg denies that sexuality and sexual identity are central or essential concepts in the construction of subjectivity, and the reader comes to understand that Clegg’s denial of his sexual identity is abnormal. Clegg sees himself as sexually “normal”, and from this position describes and judges other people according to his perceptions of their sexual identity. For example, one of the men he works with has “a dirty mind and... is a sadist” (12). Clegg projects qualities of sexual “abnormality” like sadism onto others, when in fact these qualities more accurately describe Clegg himself. Clegg tells the woman he kidnaps, Miranda, that he works for a Mr. Singleton, an invented sex maniac employer. She doesn’t believe this story and queries; “Mr. Singleton is a sex maniac and he kidnaps girls and you help him?” (34). Miranda is naturally suspicious of Clegg, and although she thinks at first that he “can’t imagine himself killing or raping me” (194), she senses that Clegg wants her for sex, despite his initial denials. Clegg clearly knows what the concept “sex maniac” means and implies, and locates the character of the sex maniac (Mr. Singleton) with himself by association. This can be read as an unconscious acknowledgement on Clegg’s part of his “real” personality, his identity as an Erotomaniac.

6 7

Cindy Patton, Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1986, pp. 116-117. John Fowles, The Collector, Pan, London, 1986.

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The influence of the Freudian case-history of the sexual subject is crucial in the criticism of Clegg’s sexual identity. Sigmund Freud theorised that by the revealing and examining the individual’s hidden sexual impulses and consequential behaviours, the individual’s character could be understood by the reader/analyst.8 Clegg’s subject-hood can be defined by the discontinuity between his morally acceptable social self and his sex-maniac alter-ego. This alienation of sexual and individual identity can be seen as one of the key features of erotomania; Clegg’s denial of the importance of sexuality in everyday life is one of the traits of his sexual monomania. Miranda directly confronts his false sense of moral or sexual decency, and his false sense of ‘respect’ for her. Clegg’s attempts to construct himself as sexless are revealed as a sham - he cannot deny his sexual urges. Freud argues that:

the man almost always feels his respect for the woman acting as a restraint on his sexual activity, and [he] only develops full potency when he is with a debased sexual object...9 This is certainly true of Clegg, whose difficulty is in defending his feigned “respect” for Miranda, while furthering his perverse sexual aims. Clegg says that “I don’t allow myself to think of what I know is wrong” (71), but then goes on to act out what he cannot think about. Clegg doesn’t want to think about or analyse his desire, for he knows ultimately that it is socially and ethically unacceptable. Miranda tells Clegg that “You’re breaking every decent human law, every decent human relationship, every decent thing that’s ever happened between your sex and mine” (107) when she realises that she will not be freed. Erotomaniacs like Clegg act on their desires despite knowing that they are wrong, because for them sexuality and self are not only alienated but at times in direct conflict. Clegg’s sexual potency is expressed through the power to objectify and debase women, to encode women as images which he can then manipulate. Clegg is constantly aware of Miranda as a woman, but not as a person, and she comments that “It’s a terrible thing that you can’t treat me as a friend. Forget my sex.” (67). But Clegg cannot forget her sex because he sees Miranda not as a subject in her own right but as merely an image of femininity which he can manipulate and control. For example:

8 9

Stephen Heath, The Sexual Fix, Macmillan, London, 1982, p. 87. Sigmund Freud as quoted in Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan (eds.), A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1992, p. 141.

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[Miranda] looked a sight, the dress all off one shoulder. I don’t know what it was, it got me excited, it gave me ideas, seeing her lying there... It was like I’d showed who was really master (87). The “reality” of Clegg’s sexuality is hidden behind his bland exterior. He needs to mask the shame and embarrassment he generally feels about sexuality behind displays of power and manipulation, and the only way he can deal with his sexual attraction to women is to remove their personalities, their individual consciousnesses, from their bodies. Clegg cannot relate to Miranda as a person, and so by removing the signs of her individuality from her body, he can safely satisfy his fantasies with an anonymous female image. When he takes sexually explicit photographs of Miranda, Clegg states that “the best [pictures] were with her face cut off.” (110). Without a face, Miranda is merely a female body, a decapitated corpse. Clegg specifically describes Miranda in terms of a static image, a photograph: Miranda “looked a real picture lying there...” (87). Clegg traps Miranda within the image, and for him, she has ceased to be person; she is merely a picture, a representation of femininity. After his failure with Miranda and her death, Clegg decides to capture another specimen of femininity to sexually experiment with. This time, his objectives are clear:

it would just be for the interest of the thing and to compare them and also the other thing, which as I say I would like to go into in more detail and I could teach her how... (283)

Of course the “other thing” is sex. Clegg plans to act out his fantasies in more detail, and with greater force, yet still cannot talk openly about sex. That Clegg continually relies on euphemisms like “the other thing” for sex shows the extent to which he distances himself from sexuality. Fowles reflects the horror of this situation with a degree of realism, whereas Anthony Burgess’ depiction of a similarly sexually abusive social order in A Clockwork Orange employs a futuristic setting.10 A Clockwork Orange is narrated in street slang by Alex, the leader of an adolescent gang, and represents a satirical examination of Western society’s sexual violence. In his anarchic home city, Alex and his gang attack vulnerable citizens, fight rival gangs, steal from and loot shops, and rape young women. Sexual intercourse is described by the youths as “the old in-outin-out” (34), and is seen only from a masculine point of view. For the youths, sexuality is limited to forced genital penetration performed purely for their own pleasure. Their idea of sexual activity is to 10

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, Penguin, London, 1972.

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do something “on” or “to” a girl; there is no concept of a girl’s or woman’s consent to or active involvement in sex. In A Clockwork Orange, like The Collector, images of women are as real to men as physical women, and are described in identical fashion. Women are described by Alex and his droogs in terms of their physicality, not their humanity; the youths state what they think of women’s bodies, as in “a young bit of sharp with real horrorshow groodies on her” (20). In another instance, Alex:

caught sight of an advert in the gazetta, which was on the table - a lovely smecking young ptitsa with her groodies hanging out to advertise, my brothers, the Glories of the Jugoslav Beaches (32).

Male characters whose sexuality is based on the primacy of the phallus and the absolute power of the male gaze don’t care for “real” women; all they want to relate to is an image, a pseudo-woman that never stops smiling, and never says “no”. There is no recognition by Alex that these image-women are not real. Most male characters in texts like these seem unwilling or unable to distinguish between images and real women, and when they do, they often prefer the images. This visual inspection is usually the precursor to physical possession. Alex describes in these terms a woman whom he is about to rape: her “real good horrorshow groodies they were then exhibited their pink glazzies, O my brothers, while I untrussed and got ready for the plunge.” (22). Alex also watches members of a rival gang “getting ready to perform something on a weepy young devotchka they had there, not more than ten...” (16). Like Clegg in The Collector, Alex in A Clockwork Orange has dreams of violent, forced sex with women which he strives to realise: “there were devotchkas ripped and screeching against the walls and I plunging like a shlaga into them...” (29). When Alex sees a woman, the first thing he thinks is that he “would like to have her right down there on the floor with the old in-out real savage” (101). Alex has absolutely no compassion of his victims, and in his world it is accepted, even by the doctor trying to cure him of his love of violence and violent sex, that the “sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance...” (91). Alex like Clegg takes every opportunity to realise his sexual fantasies. After luring two girls to his bedroom and injecting himself with “growling jungle-cat secretion” (38), Alex says he:

felt the old tigers leap in me and then I leapt on these two young ptitsas [who] had to submit to the strange and weird desires of Alexander the Large which, what with the

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Ninth and the hypo jab, were choodessny and zammechat and very demanding, O my brothers (39).

Alex has no concept of consensual intercourse or of female pleasure. His sexuality is an extreme and bitter satire, an ironic depiction of the rigidity of phallic masculinity. Burgess shows that in the phallocentric textual economy of the Sexual Revolution there is little or no room for the expression of feminine sexual pleasure or jouissance. What is expressed in The Collector and A Clockwork Orange is the psyche of the Erotomaniac, an alienated masculine self defined by sexual violence. Erotomania destroys the textualisation of consensual sexual relations because Erotomaniacs do not communicate sexual desire as other characters do but abruptly take their pleasure without communicating or negotiating sexuality with their partners. It is this type of masculinity which Helene Cixous seeks to change. By removing the performance of aggression from masculine sexuality, men whose sexuality is continually constructed as phallic and dominating by the Politics of Ecstasy, will be able to express themselves sexually in a variety of ways. It is not masculine sexuality itself that is phallocentric - the Sexual Revolution’s representation and performance of masculinity sexuality makes it phallocentric.

NECROPHILIA AS SYMBOLIC OF THE SEXUAL STATUS-QUO Georges Bataille’s Blue of Noon describes the sexual acts and fantasies of its narrator Henri Troppmann, a man who becomes involved with women who share his taste for sadistic sexual practices.11 His favourite mistress is Dorothea, known as “Dirty”. Troppmann’s desire for Dirty is not hindered by his ‘respect’ for her, for unlike Ferdinand Clegg in The Collector, who can only respect a sexually pure or innocent woman, Troppmann respects Dirty for her “irredeemably debauched” nature (35-6), and while he does not forcibly debase his object of desire - Dirty debases herself willingly - he still requires a debased sexual object to become aroused. Sigmund Freud’s theory that a man may freely express his sexual potency only when with a debased female sex-object appears to be the basis of masculine sexual performance as defined by the Politics of Ecstasy, and can be read as the underlying basis of Troppmann’s sexual relationships.

11

Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon, Marion Boyars, London, 1986.

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Troppmann is also a self-confessed necrophiliac, and it is with Dirty when he comes the closest to fulfilling his erotic fantasies when they have sex in a candlelit graveyard:

where ranks of lighted candles were massed. We were fascinated by this chasm of funereal stars. Dorothea drew closer to me. She kissed me at length on the mouth. She embraced me, holding me violently tight... Dorothea opened wide, and I bared her to the loins. She in turn bared me. We fell onto the shifting ground, and I sank into her moist body the way a well-guided plow sinks into earth. The earth beneath that body lay open like a grave; her naked cleft lay open to me like a freshly dug grave... (143-4) The bed as sexual location is to Troppmann a “death bed” (2). He and Dirty make love literally in the bed of death. Troppmann explicitly identifies his lovers with death and decay. Another of his mistresses, Lazare, is “conspicuously filthy” (29): she is “attracted by death” (94) and “reeks of the grave” (95). It is for these reasons that Troppmann is attracted to her. Troppmann compares brothels to graveyards (76), and states that “my attraction to prostitutes... [is] like my attraction to corpses.” (38). Bataille links sex and death through the institution of prostitution, a central feature of the masculine sexual economy, which distances both the client’s and the prostitute’s identities from the immediacy of their sexual performance. Prostitutes and dead bodies are objects in Troppmann’s gaze, sexual objects to be defined not in their own terms, but in his. Troppmann’s desire can be read in terms of the alienation of feminine subjectivity, for both prostitutes and dead women are anonymous, defined by their bodies, they are not subjects but sexual objects. Dining at a restaurant with friends, Troppmann tells us that:

I dug the tines of the fork hard into [Xenie’s] thigh...[and] One of the tines, sharper than the others, had pierced the skin. Blood was flowing... I didn’t waste a second; she had no time to prevent my pressing two lips to her thigh and swallowing the few drops of blood I had just drawn (51). Troppmann desires from women signs of their mortality, which has for him great erotic significance. Because of his “perverted liking for corpses” (75), Troppmann is even aroused by the body of his mother: “In front of [her] corpse I was frightened and aroused. Aroused to the limit... I took off my pajamas. Then I - you understand...” (77). He leaves his terrified female confidant, Xenie (and his readers), to imagine the rest. Just as Troppmann provokes his horrified listener Xenie, who acknowledges that Troppmann leads “an abnormal sex life” (67), Bataille writes to provoke his readers sexually.

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Troppmann’s sexuality is provocative not only for the nature of his desire but for his singleminded determination to fulfill his perverse sexuality. Troppmann is at one point aroused by his own sickness; the possibility of his own death, and tells Xenie to “get undressed. It’ll be like dying in a whorehouse.” (77). Accommodatingly, “Xenie stretched out alongside me - it was then she assumed the appearance of a dead woman.... She was naked.... She had the pale breasts of a prostitute.... Was I to die with a corpse at my side?” (85). Although aroused by his own illness, Troppmann does not eroticise his own death, but the images of women which he associates with death. Troppmann is drawn to the appearance of death in women like Xenie; he experiences death through contact with the flesh of the Other, with a body other than his own. Texts such as Troppmann’s fantasies that illuminate a sexual death wish do so by exaggerating the lived experience of the individual.12 It is this life in the face of death that Troppmann finds so arousing, and which defines his sexuality, for he is always in control, always alive, whereas his female partners are dead and thus totally objectified by Troppmann; they are absolutely passive. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being may be read as echoing the sinister sexual excesses of Bataille’s Blue of Noon. The Unbearable Lightness of Being perpetuates a monolithic masculine sexuality, especially in its the objectification of women, which like Blue of Noon includes the sexual objectification in male eyes of women as dead bodies. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a complex novel that follows the interconnected erotic relationships of an artist, Sabina; a doctor, Tomas; and a photographer, Tereza.13 Like Troppmann in Blue of Noon, Tomas is as an Erotomaniac; he is defined by Kundera as a “libertine” (22) in the Sadeian sense. Tomas is the product of a patriarchal world, a man obsessed by and possessive of women.14 Tomas concentrates on fulfilling his physical desires in order to avoid acknowledging his lovers’ subjectivity and the complex emotional commitments required by heterosexual relationships. Tomas’attitude to women and sex is summed up in this passage:

Of each erotic experience his memory recorded only the steep and narrow path of sexual conquest: the first piece of verbal aggression, the first touch, the first obscenity he said to 12

Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, (ed.) David Lodge, Longman, London, 1988, pp. 196-210, p. 198. 13 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Faber & Faber, London, 1985. 14 It could be argued that Tomas is Kundera’s textual persona. Throughout Kundera’s novels, male sexual prowess and infidelity is celebrated. The construction of a potent and dominant masculine sexuality is the primary consistency in Kundera’s novels - it is repeated more often than politic speculations and reflections on affairs in his homeland of Czechoslovakia - from The Joke to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, though I have to admit that Immortality has a very different sexual politics.

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her and she to him, the minor perversions he could make her acquiesce in and the ones she held out against (207).

Tomas remembers only the power struggles, the ways in which he initiates a woman into his sexual life and pleasures. His sexuality is driven by the need to perform, to always be in control. The pleasure he receives is determined by the extent to which he can debase his female partner. Tomas relates to women not as people but only as sexual partners, and acknowledges women’s subjectivity as merely an aspect of their sexuality. He states that sexuality is “a strongbox hiding the mystery of a woman’s ‘I’” (200), and by desiring women sexually, Tomas in effect captures their subjective identity. His goal is to possess women sexually, and the way he does this is to open the strongbox of women’s sexuality and reveal the prize - his lover’s subjectivity - within. For Tomas, the ultimate aim of sex is not merely pleasure but the capture of a woman’s identity. Tomas’ favourite lover is Sabina, the woman who understands him the best. Sabina loves Tomas for the commanding sexual role he plays: he demands that she “strip” for him, and she is aroused by this demand. In contrast, Franz, Sabina’s other lover, “would never command her, as Tomas had, to lay the mirror on the floor and walk back and forth on it naked... he simply lacks the strength to give orders.” (111). The Unbearable Lightness of Being perpetuates the patriarchal belief that it is this quality of sexual strength and dominance that attracts women to men. In another erotic encounter with Tomas, Sabina strips down to her lingerie and puts a bowler hat that belonged to her grandfather on her head. Sabina and Tomas are aroused by the incongruity of her image in the mirror, when:

suddenly the comic became veiled by excitement: the bowler hat no longer signified a joke; it signified violence; violence against Sabina, against her dignity as a woman... The lingerie enhanced the charm of her femininity, while the hard masculine hat denied it, violated and ridiculed it. The fact that Tomas stood beside her fully dressed meant that the essence of what they both saw was...[a] humiliation. But instead of spurning it, she proudly, provocatively played it for all it was worth, as if submitting of her own will to public rape... (87)

Kundera’s interpretation of this image explicitly defines the ways in which he views women and sexuality. Kundera introduces violent interpretations of events into heterosexual relationships when no actual violence occurs, and repeatedly humiliates his female characters. Kundera is primarily interested in what he calls “the aggression of love” (12), and automatically reads sexual love as

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aggression on the part of the male. When he combines sexuality and violence, that violence is always expressed by men toward women. Kundera allows only for masculine sexual activity and feminine sexual passivity. He believes that “physical love is unthinkable without violence” (111), but this does not have to be true - what Kundera is really saying is that within his sexual politics there is no space for a sexuality that does not depend on the traditional sexual roles of masculine domination and feminine submission. Kundera, like Bataille, introduces the concept of death and relates it implicitly to sexuality. Tereza dreams early in her relationship with Tomas that she is dead and surrounded by many other dead women who symbolise Tomas’many other lovers. In the dream Tomas had:

drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of [the women]: he kissed them all alike, stroked them alike, made no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza’s body and the other bodies (58).

Tereza’s death dream can be read as self-objectification; she defines herself as mute dead flesh, as she thinks all women are in Tomas’ eyes, and thus unconsciously comes to understand the way Tomas views his sexual partners. Women are for Tomas little more than Clegg’s “specimens” in The Collector. Tomas, a doctor and surgeon, mentally combines his passion for surgery and his passion for women - he never puts down the imaginary scalpel he uses to sexually dissect women, for he “longed to take possession of something deep inside them, he needed to slit them open.” (200). Tomas is described by Kundera as an “epic” lover (201), a man “obsessed by the desire to discover and appropriate that one-millionth part... that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex.” (200). Tomas views women primarily as bodies to be possessed and invaded, to be cut open and dissected, which implies that Tomas views women not just as objects, but specifically as dead bodies. The death-images of women in The Unbearable Lightness of Being symbolises masculine subjugation of the female body and feminine subjectivity. Tomas’ imaginary scalpel is a tool which enables him to unlock the strongbox of women’s sexuality and thus possess women’s subjective identities. The death-symbolism in Blue of Noon and The Unbearable Lightness of Being can be read as the semiotic culmination of the objectification of women by men which strips women of their subjective identity. Women’s sexual selves are ignored and even deliberately repressed in the preceding narratives by men, who further their sexual aims and pleasures at their female partners’ expense. The type of masculine sexual subjectivity discussed above is parasitic of feminine sexual subjectivity; it is established when women’s sexuality and subjectivity are made subservient to

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masculine desire. The next part of this Section will further explore the masculine construction of feminine sexual experience and discuss narratives which represent women resisting the determination of their sex-lives by men.

THE CAPTURE AND ESCAPE OF FEMININE SEXUALITY Ian McEwan’s novel The Comfort of Strangers describes the heterosexual relationship of English lovers Mary and Colin, on holiday in Venice, who meet Robert, a wealthy resident, and his Canadian wife Caroline.15 Robert is an Erotomaniac who believes that:

Whatever they might say they believe, women love aggression and strength and power in men... And even though they hate themselves for it, women long to be ruled by men. It’s deep in their minds... They talk of freedom and dream of captivity (72). Robert can be recognised as phallocentric masculine sexuality personified; he is the symbolic oppressor, and the relationship between Robert and Caroline can be read as a conscious study in the construction of sexual difference. Sigmund Freud argues that:

the suppression of women’s aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially favours the development of powerful masochistic impulses, which succeed, as we know, in binding erotically the destructive trends which have been diverted inwards.16

Women’s masochism is therefore not “natural”, but rather the product of indoctrination. Robert defines Caroline as a masochistic sexual object, and she is brain-washed by him to the extent that she believes that “If you are in love with someone, you would even be prepared to let them kill you, if necessary.”17 Caroline personifies Freud’s theory. She has internalised the strong masochistic desires which Robert’s patriarchal authority placed on her.

15

Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers, Picador, London, 1982. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity” in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, (ed.) James Strachey, 24 Volumes, London, 1953-1974, Volume 22, p. 116. 17 Ibid., p. 63.

16

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As a result of this extreme conditioning, Caroline has not had the opportunity to develop her sexual subjectivity; she has had her sexual role and identity constructed by and forced on her by Robert. Caroline tells Mary that:

Robert started to hurt me when we made love. Not a lot, but enough to make me cry out. I think I tried hard to stop him. One night I got really angry at him, but he went on doing it, and I had to admit, although it took a long time, that I liked it... [when] Robert really began to hurt me. He used a whip. He beat me with his fists as he made love to me. I was terrified, but the terror and the pleasure were all one (109).

Caroline develops a taste for sexual violence, although she was not a voluntary initiate into this extremely violent sexuality which she practices with Robert. Due to the conditioning she has received, Caroline not only finds herself aroused by her own abuse - Caroline has internalised Robert’s desire and made it her own - she can only express herself sexually through the patterns of her own abuse: “Quite often I was the one to initiate it, and that was never difficult. Robert was longing to pound my body to a pulp.” (110). Robert’s desire culminated in a murderous sex-wish: Caroline says that “Robert confessed one night that there was only one thing he really wanted. He wanted to kill me, as we made love.” (110). Robert takes it for granted that Caroline’s body is to do with what he pleases, and only refrains from killing Caroline because he would then be without a willing and suitably submissive partner. Like Henri Troppmann, Robert in The Comfort of Strangers is aroused by his own ability to determine the mortality of his female partner. Robert and Clegg are similar in many ways - both destroy the potential harmony and understanding between men and women by asserting a desire to sexually dominate and violently abuse women. Miranda in The Collector says that the violence inflicted on her by Clegg is “all I hate and all I fear” (249), but for Caroline, this type of violence has become sexually arousing:

Instead of saying loving things into my ear, [Robert] whispered pure hatred, and though I was sick with humiliation, I thrilled to the point of passing out. I didn’t doubt Robert’s hatred for me... He made love to me out of deep loathing, and I couldn’t resist. I loved being punished... (109)

There is a conscious acknowledgement within Caroline that her sexual relationship is not “normal”, but she still loves the punishment she receives. Although Caroline is a woman who seems to thrive on pain and punishment, she also finds sexual pleasure by sharing some of the intimate details of her

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sexuality with others, particularly Mary, and through her use of sexual discourse finds a method of asserting her own sexual ideas despite the masculine constraints on her physical sexual activity. Caroline reconstructs her sexual experiences from her point of view, which gives her the subjectivity denied by Robert’s treatment of her. The text of Caroline’s abuse is a narrative that she shapes, rereads, reinterprets, and gains pleasure from. It is probably the only part of her sexuality that she is able to control and develop for herself. By expressing her fantasies, Caroline resists the dominant sexual order - patriarchy as represented by Robert - which has historically depended on women’s silence.18 Like Troppmann in Blue of Noon, Caroline in The Comfort of Strangers is aroused by narrating her sexual history and her fantasies, by sharing them, by the possibility of enacting them. Troppmann manipulates Xenie until she plays an unwilling role in his fantasies, and Caroline does the same thing to Mary, who begins to see with “total clarity the obscene precision of every moment... every nuance of a private fantasy”. (119). A part of Caroline’s sexual enjoyment is recognising the shocking impact that her words have on Mary - Caroline enjoys constructing a voyeuristic reader position for Mary, and gains pleasure from being able to construct her sexual subjectivity through discourse. Another portrayal of this two-sided feminine masochistic then rebellious role is to found in Dennis Potter’s cleverly conscious novel Blackeyes, which contains a witty and sometimes sardonic critique of established gender relations in Western society.19 Blackeyes describes the attempts by a model, Jessica, to repudiate the fictional characterisation of herself as “Blackeyes” in a novel called Sugar Bush which has been written by her uncle, Maurice James Kingsley. Potter uses the representation of Kingsley’s manipulation of the character Blackeyes in Sugar Bush to examine the ways in which men commonly construct women’s experience of life and sex. In describing Blackeyes, Kingsley regularly reduces her to the status of an “entranced automaton” (17), and forces upon the young woman “mute suffering and dumb ignorance” (155). Blackeyes in the eyes of the reader becomes a “zombie” (36), and Jessica is maddened that “Blackeyes had been given no mental volition” by Kingsley (155). Jessica’s life is literally deconstructed and reconstructed in Kingsley’s characterisation of Blackeyes in Sugar Bush, which destroys Jessica’s identity and sense of self. Jessica faces a constant attack on her autonomy as an individual due to her femininity: an attack which Potter shows to be based socially, through men’s behaviour towards her; and more importantly textually, through Kingsley’s denial of Jessica’s right to construct the narrative of her 18 19

Linda Singer, Erotic Welfare, Routledge, New York, 1993, p. 148. Dennis Potter, Blackeyes, Faber & Faber, London, 1987.

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own life. Jessica complains that events in the text of Sugar Bush are “rarely presented from her point of view” (2), and describes how she came:

to understand that women were so used to having their lives expressed in terms of male voices, male judgments, male desires, and the manipulative power of men, that they did not have the same hold on the substance of their beings as their oppressors... (63-4)

Jessica attempts to free herself from the fictional manipulation of her life in Sugar Bush by “dismantling [Kingsley’s] narrative [and] reclaiming herself” (4). She fights Kingsley’s “testosterone imperialism” (4) and strives to textually confine him the way he confined her in Sugar Bush. Before she dies, Jessica “reduce[s] him back into words”. She makes Kingsley “an object in his own story” (182). Jessica’s act reconstructs her as a subject in her own right, rather than as Blackeyes, the object of Kingsley’s invention. The idea of resisting masculine sexual demands gradually develops in Jessica’s mind. Jessica’s sex-life consists basically of her allowing the men she works for to have sex with her; her pleasure is deemed irrelevant because she is seen by everyone (including herself) as a passive object of beauty. When her first employer, Jamieson, takes her out for dinner, Jessica bluntly tells him that “I don’t have orgasms” (52). As Jessica’s sexual relationships are not structured to provide her with pleasure, this statement seems on the surface to affirm the marginality of her own experience to the men she has sex with. But there is more Jessica’s statement than that: her statement is provocative; it is designed to sexually humiliate Jamieson, and represents Jessica’s resistance to the patriarchal demands placed on her. Jessica refuses to pretend to be sexually satisfied by Jamieson and in so doing she demands that her sexual subjectivity be recognised and not ignored. Jessica begins to defy the men who use her body and her image. Another sign of her growing sexual independence is when, after fighting off a rapist at a party, Jessica’s fictionalised persona Blackeyes states bluntly “I am not a prostitute” (89), much to the confusion of the men around her. Potter comments wryly that “in the very careful enunciation of the sentence, a code had been broken” (89), the code of women’s passive acceptance of the abuse they suffer from men. This code of feminine passivity is being increasingly attacked and critiqued in narratives, many of which now construct feminine sexuality in terms of subjective autonomy. This heightened sense of feminine subjectivity is enacted by Jessica when she tears up her copy of Sugar Bush, and writes on one of the torn pieces of paper a list of the men who in the past clawed “so eagerly at her clothes and at her

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body” (182). Jessica inserts this list, designed to incriminate these men whom she so despises, into her vagina for the police to find after she re-enacts Blackeyes’ “fictional” suicide. It is ironic that Jessica’s life as represented in Sugar Bush is far close to the “reality” as described by Potter in Blackeyes than she would like to admit. Potter says in Blackeyes that Sugar Bush represents “a dramatically heightened paradigm to the plight of women subjected to the ruthless economic power and blatant sexual politics of... men.” (4). Although this comment is in itself extremely ironic - for Potter’s text appears to satirically deconstruct a “politically correct” gendered reading of Sugar Bush as well as the sexual relations prevalent in the multiple texts that make up Blackeyes - Potter also reveals the extent to which women are trapped and twisted by phallocentric textual strategies, specifically by the “codes” of representation in texts. Posters arguing for the castration of convicted rapists are seen plastered on the walls of Venice in The Comfort of Strangers (24). In addition, “a crude stencil in red paint... showed a clenched fist enclosed within the sign used by ornithologists to denote the female of the species” (278) is seen on the Venetian street-walls. Similar signs representing women’s anger and protest are represented more explicitly in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, a surreal novel about a young English man trapped in a socially decaying United States who is captured by an underground community of women and forced to endure a sex-change operation.20 Wandering the decaying New York streets in the novel’s opening, Evelyn sees on a wall the “female circle... with inside it, a set of bared teeth. Women are angry. Beware women!” (11). In The Comfort of Strangers, Blackeyes, and The Passion of New Eve, women resist the manipulation and misrepresentation of their sexuality and identity in masculine-orientated textual worlds. Women are shown to be not only asserting their sexuality in defiance of masculine systems of sexual regulation but are also semiotically seeking revenge for the injustices perpetuated against them by men. The issue of rape and sexual assault is being addressed more frequently in texts, and are thematically important concepts in relation to novels such as The Collector, A Clockwork Orange, and The Passion of New Eve. Characters like Ferdinand Clegg in The Collector believe that sexuality is expressed too openly and too often in society, and that the frank expression of sexuality is crude and obscene. This view of sexuality is echoed by critical writers such as Stephen Heath in The Sexual Fix. When Heath claims that “sexuality is without the importance ascribed to it in our contemporary society”, he means that sexuality as a part of life, and not just the Sexual Revolution’s representation

20

Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve, Virago, London, 1982.

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of ‘sexuality’, is exaggerated in importance.21 Heath does not believe that sexuality is or should be central to our society, but as I have already argued, when discourses of sexuality proliferate through and pervade the media, sexuality is central to society simply because it is impossible to avoid “it”. The denial of the essential role of sexuality in the life of the individual has some repressive and dangerous consequences in relation to the issue of sexual assault. Denying that sexuality is central to subjectivity not only refutes the inestimable importance of sexuality to the individual but also means that sexual assault is trivialised in the eyes of readers. The essay “How Bad is Rape” by H. E. Baber in The Philosophy of Sex is an extreme example of arguments that are based on the belief that sexuality is of less than crucial importance to the individual. Baber states that:

For the standard person... for whom sexuality is a peripheral matter on which relatively little hinges, being raped, though it constitutes a serious assault on the person, does not violate [that person’s fundamental] interest[s].22

Baber assumes that for the “standard person” sexuality is an incidental part of life, yet offers no evidence to support this premise. Baber’s argument, contingent as it is on the concept of the “standard person”, falters at its very beginning for there simply is no “standard person”. At the same time, the evidence from the preceding novels strongly suggests that for some characters sexuality is what constitutes life itself and is their raison d’etre; sexuality gives their lives structure and meaning and is therefore a central feature of life on which everything hinges. So while it is reasonable to assume that for some people sexuality is on the whole peripheral, for others sexuality will be one of the most important aspects of their lives. We cannot take the importance of sexuality to any given individual for granted, and in any case, sexual assault has the effect of making issues of sexuality central to the victim. Survivors of sexual assault, whether they viewed sexuality as playing a central or marginal role in their lives prior to their attack, are forced by events beyond their control to directly confront sexuality in coming to terms with the assault on their physical and psychological selves, on their sexuality and subjectivity. Women are angry about the trivialisation of their experience of sexuality and sexual assault. The Passion of New Eve represents some of this anger, and several acts of revenge by women for the sexual insults and assaults they have suffered from men. Women in the novel are not just satisfied

21 22

Heath, op. cit., p. 2. H. E. Baber, “How Bad is Rape?” in Alan Soble (ed.), The Philosophy of Sex, Second Edition, Rowman and Littlefield, Maryland, 1991, p. 249.

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with asking men to discard their phallic power; they take sexual power and authority from men by force. For example, Evelyn is sexually assaulted by a woman while walking the streets of Now York City early in The Passion of New Eve:

One day, a woman in black leather trousers who wore a red armband printed with [the insignia of the angry women] came up to me in the street, shook back her rug of brown curls, reached out a strong, gnarled hand, coarsely mouthing obscenities as she did so, handled my cock with contemptuous dexterity, sneered at the sight of my helpless erection, spat in my face, turned my booted heel and stalked scornfully away (13).

This woman appropriates the traditional male role of the sexual aggressor. Evelyn realises that there is nothing he can do to defend himself from the physical intrusion of such women, who “practiced humiliation” seemingly at random. This sexual humiliation is Carter’s way of reversing traditional sex/gender roles. Evelyn’s masculinity, the basis of his sexual subjectivity and assertiveness, is threatened and attacked the way that Miranda’s sexual identity is in The Collector. Evelyn says that “bruised machismo takes longer to heal than a broken head” (17), acknowledging that the psychological consequences of sexual assault are significant, and that the consequences of sexual assault should not be underestimated or trivialised by dismissing sexuality as not an essential factor in the construction of subjectivity. Evelyn is the victim of several sexual assaults in his/her life. As a man he is “unceremoniously raped” by Mother prior to his sexual reassignment (64), and once Evelyn is surgically changed into Eve (itself a violent act of sexual assault), he (slowly developing psychologically into a she) is first threatened with forced impregnation from which she escapes, only to be captured and enslaved by the Erotomaniac poet Zero, who also repeatedly rapes her. Carter deliberately reflects events so that as Eve, Evelyn experiences all the sexual and social injustices he had inflicted on women. Eve’s sexual assertiveness and her attempts to struggle against Zero results in him tying her up. As Evelyn, she had done the same to Leilah (108). Carter makes a man suffer rape so that he can come to understand through experience the danger sex poses for woman in society. With the current threat of AIDS, the Sexual Revolution’s promise of safe, fun recreational sex, which was never a reality for women anyway, is no longer possible for men either. Heterosexual men now face the prospect of suffering from the consequences of sexual activity the way women have always done, have become sexually vulnerable in a way they have never been before, and are no longer in a position to achieve either domination or liberation through sex.

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MASCULINE SEXUAL LACK AND THE DESIRE FOR PLURALITY Despite the authority and violent power of the masculine sexual psyche as represented in these texts, the male sexual self, especially that of Evelyn in The Passion of New Eve, is shown to be a fragile persona masked by the self-construction of dominance. When Tomas is confronted by a sexually aggressive woman in one of his casual encounters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he loses his psycho-sexual authority, and has to force the woman down onto her bed so he can regain his dominant position in the sexual relationship. Tomas’ sexual dominance is fractured by the assertion of feminine desire: the subversive quality of feminine sexuality resists the phallus wielded by Tomas, and reveals the fragility of his aggressive role. Male characters lack connection between self and sexuality - they express their sexual subjectivity by denying women that same quality, and yet look to women to sexually fulfill themselves. Phallocentrism is revealed by Post-Porn/Modernism to be a self-defeating and self-contradictory discourse. The men that have been defined as Erotomaniacs in the texts discussed thus far have one thing at least in common - they all act possessively towards women and desire to possess women’s bodies. This desire can be read as the need to acquire what they lack - a coherent sexuality that is capable of communicating and reciprocating desires, a sexuality that can be expressed in diverse and multiple ways which are simultaneously pleasurable and “safe”. The unitary phallic sexuality enacted by Erotomaniacs lacks a sense of fluidity, change, and development. Their phallic sexuality uses the language of sexuality not to communicate but to dominate, and allows no space for men to develop a sexual subjectivity independent of patriarchy. Multiple feminine sexuality however allows women to develop a sexual subjectivity through the use of sexual discourse to express and communicate desires and pleasures and to resist, as Caroline in The Comfort of Strangers and Jessica in Blackeyes demonstrate, the masculine constructions of and limitations on their sexuality. Evelyn in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve is an Erotomaniac of sorts who expresses the phallic desire to possess women’s bodies. He is intimidated sexually by women, especially by the sexual possibilities of his lover Leila’s body. After one night of strenuous sex, Evelyn recounts that:

when I was exhausted and she was not, still driven by her carnal curiosity, she would clamber on top of me in the middle of the night... and thrust my limp cock inside herself... while I came to life in my sleep. Waking just before she tore the orgasm from me, I would, in my astonishment remember the myth of the succubus, the devils in female

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form who come by night to seduce the saints. Then, to punish her for scaring me so, I would tie her to the iron bed with my belt (27).

Evelyn punishes Leilah for taking a sexually active role. He is scared of her capability to so easily usurp his false masculine dominance and terrified that she impulsively acts on her desires. His masculine sexual identity is intimidated and threatened by acts of feminine sexual assertiveness; Evelyn can only reconcile his sexuality and subjectivity by refusing to allow Leilah to openly express her sexuality. In McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, Colin is aroused by the multiple sexual possibilities of Mary’s body, but at the same time feels threatened by her sexual capacity and imagines her as restrained and dead. In one of their shared sexual fantasies:

Colin invented for Mary a large, intricate machine, made of steel, painted bright red and powered by electricity; it had pistons and controls, straps and dials, and made a low hum when it was switched on... Once Mary was strapped in, fitted to tubes that fed and evacuated her body, the machine would fuck her, not just hours or weeks, but for years, on and on, for the rest of her life, till she was dead and on even after that... 81)

Colin can envisage women’s sexual pleasure only when masculine power exists simultaneously to control it. He cannot accept that Mary can be a living independent sexual subject apart from him, which would symbolise the inadequacies he sees in his own sexual identity and his experiences of sexual pleasure. Colin expresses the masculine desire to experience jouissance:

Colin said that he had long envied women’s orgasms, and that there were times when he felt an aching emptiness, close to desire, between his scrotum and his anus; [and] he thought this might be an approximation of womanly desire (79).

It is not Colin’s body itself that is limiting, but the way in which he perception and uses of his body to express himself sexually. Men are jealous of women’s multiple orgasmic capacity because monolithic masculinity severely limits the ways in which the masculine body is supposed to perform. To conclude this examination of some of the theoretical implications of the ideology of the Sexual Revolution textually, it can be stated that while phallic masculinity represents itself as the dominant sexual ideology socially, its authority is not absolute and its politics are threatened by an assertive feminine subjectivity and sexuality and by the inherent limitations of phallocentrism itself. Dominance is a dead end for masculine sexuality: men must free themselves from the gender

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stereotypes and social expectations which define the roles they play within heterosexuality by resisting and abandoning the power of the phallus. Helene Cixous would argue that men, instead of vainly envying women’s diffuse and multiple sexuality, should endeavour to develop new desires and identities by finding new ways of relating sexually to women and to themselves. The challenge to literature is to find ways to textually encode a multiple and diffuse masculine sexuality. It is difficult if not impossible to clearly distinguish between the sexual politics of the “real world” and of fictional worlds, just as it is difficult to maintain a sense of perspective in relation to Cixous’ theories of sexuality and writing and the ways in which her ideas relate to the sexual politics which define the lives of “real” people. I have tried to develop a degree of continuity in distinguishing between fictional worlds and the “real world”; however, as the theoretical perspectives adopted here are clearly applicable to both frames of reference, such an obvious division between the two cannot be so simply achieved. The gender essentialism in the “real world” which I hoped to avoid altogether may be all too obvious in this and the next Section, and my readings which establish certain texts as ideologically positioned in relation to contemporary sexual politics may not in fact critique and resist phallic masculine sexuality at all, but may function complicitly with this ideology. Ultimately, this issue can only be resolved by the reader. We stand as this point at a paradigmatic cross-roads in the sexual ideologies of our culture as it is represented in literature. Phallocentric masculine sexuality in the fictions of the Sexual Revolution ends with the rise of the ideology of epidemic sexuality, for while the Sexual Revolution guaranteed the safety of heterosexual men if no-one else, AIDS threatens everyone and does not discriminate: contemporary sexuality now symbolically represents the possibility of disease and death to every sexually active individual. The threat of the AIDS epidemic and its panic sexual logic leads us into the textual realm of Post-Porn/Modernism, beyond the Politics of Ecstasy, where sexuality is excessive, parodic and essentially unproductive,23 where new sexualities and textual strategies are inscribed and performed to account for the radical changes in sexual politics brought about by the AIDS epidemic.

23

Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (eds.), Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1987, p. 96.