The quite ersatz notion of the complete life is essential to male notions of falling in love. Men do not hope to find a daughter in the way that women hope to find a new father, nor do they hope to find a mother. They hope for a woman who will be the ‘answer to it all’, ‘who can fulfil my needs for understanding, companionship and excitement’. Basic to the demand is an inflated notion of the capacity of the man in question for desire (need), excitement, companionship, and understanding. The man is the given: his mate must be equal to him, or adaptable. The exciting woman of fantasy is the one who creates the desire and releases virile potential by the mere sight of her, and the sight of all in the room gaping at her. One aspect of the fantasy is reflected almost invariably in behaviour in the pleasure which men get from being seen with a woman whom other men covet. The extent to which this pleasure may be developed is indicated by the extremity of the device invented by James Jones in Go to the Widowmaker to reveal Lucky Videndi’s superlative desirability and Grant’s security in holding her. Having refused to join a nude bathing party, she waits until the others and her husband are all out of the water and then
Lucky suddenly got up and walked down into the water. She lay down and half-crawled, half-paddled out a short distance, all of her under but her head…suddenly she stood up, her arms over her head in a classic ballet pose. She had taken off her suit and was completely nude. The water seemed to pour off her in slow motion as it were, and there she was in all her glorious sensuality, the lovely white breasts and lean rounded hips making the other, skinnier girls look mechanical and asexual. Her arms still up, and not quite knee-deep in the water she did a series of classic ballonné fouetté, a real pas de bourré directly towards them, all beautifully done. It was a movement which…gave the impression of opening the crotch up completely, and she must have chosen it deliberately. There was a hush of stillness from the shore…The champagne-coloured hair had not gotten wet and it flashed about her as she moved like white gold.17
It is small wonder that Grant is besotted with such a creature, especially as she has the added athletic grace of being able, when lovemaking, to put both feet behind her head. It is certainly some kudos to be able to need a woman like that. To make the point clearer, Lucky Videndi describes herself as an author-fucker, and the man she falls in love with is an author, so her continued presence by his side enhances his professional prestige. In Mailer’s words she is his entry into the big league. As long as we have these patterns of woman as challenge, we are dealing with subpornographic literature pandering to an impossible fantasy, which, because of the intimate relationship between potency and fantasy, has a tendency to obtrude into actual sexual behaviour. Women may be frigid because the requirements of romance are not satisfied but men too quail at the lack of excitement which domesticity affords.
Has anyone else a husband like mine? He was attracted to me because I am a long-legged brunette. Now, after six years of marriage, he feels like a change and pines for a bosomy blonde. He has not run off or been unfaithful. Instead, I now have a long, silky blonde wig, and a chest-expander for daily exercises.—V. Ladbrooke, Essex. P.S. If I get a guinea I shall put it towards a ‘pop-singer’ wig for him!
Petticoat, 15 November 1969
I cannot live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf.18
The Middle-Class Myth of Love and Marriage
The art of managing men has to be learned from birth. It is easier as you acquire experience. Some women have an instinctive flair, but most have to learn the hard way by trial and error. Some die disappointed. It depends to some extent on one’s distribution of curves, a developed instinct, and a large degree of sheer feline cunning.
Mary Hyde, ‘How to Manage Men’, 1955, p.6
Loveless marriage is anathema to our culture, and a life without love is unthinkable. The woman who remains unmarried must have missed her chance, lost her boy in the war or hesitated and was lost; the man somehow never found the right girl. It is axiomatic that all married couples are in love with each other. Sympathy is often expressed for those people, like kings and queens, who cannot be solely directed by Cupid’s arrow, although at the same time it is tacitly assumed that even royal couples are in love. In the common imagination nuns are all women disappointed in love, and career-women are compensating for their failure to find the deepest happiness afforded mankind in this vale of tears. But it was not always believed even if the normality of the idea persuades us that it must have been. The mere mention of Cupid’s arrow ought to remind us that there was a far different concept of love which prevailed not so long ago, a concept not only separate from pre-nuptial courtship, but quite inimical to marriage. Even in the brief lifetime of the concept of nuptial love it has not always been the same idea: many of the defenders of marriage for love in the sixteenth century would be horrified if they could know the degree of romanticism and sexual passion with which their ideal is now invested. Gradual changes in basic assumptions have obscured the traces of the development of the myth of falling-in-love-and-getting-married; demographic information about its early stages is hard to come by. Acknowledging all these uncertainties with due humility we may embark upon a speculative exploration.
I am 39 and have been submitting to corporal punishment from my husband ever since we married 15 years ago. We have both treated this matter of punishment as a normal sort of proceeding. It was not until recently, when we saw some letters in ‘Forum’ that we realized there were people who had guilt complexes about spanking their mates.
Our ideas are quite simple. My husband happens to believe that in marriage the husband should be the boss. I agree with him and I recognize that wrong-doing should be punished. We both think that the simplest, most convenient, most effective and most natural way for a man to punish the faults of his woman is to spank or whip her; but not too severely, certainly not brutally.
Letter in ‘Forum’, Vol. 2, No. 3
It is by now commonplace to point out that in feudal literature romantic love was essentially anti-social and adulterous. The discussions of de Rougemont and his ilk are well-known, at least in their gist.1 The term ‘courtly love’ has become a cliché of historical criticism. The tales of Guinevere and Iseult were the product of the minority culture of the ruling class, at which the serfs and yeomen must have marvelled when they heard them recounted in song and folk-tale. They were the product of the feudal situation in which a noble wife was a wife only when her warrior husband was at home (which with any luck was seldom), otherwise she ruled a community of men, many of them young and lusty, with the result that they entertained fantasies about the unobtainable to whom they could not even address their advances. She exploited their servility, which was the original of chivalry, and may or may not have served her own lusts by them. To her husband she was submissive and offered him her body as his fief. Victorian scholars exclaimed in horror at the description of marital love given in tracts like Hail Maidenhad,2 and joyously acclaimed the Protestant reformers for bringing the first breath of ‘fresh air into the cattle shed’ of marital theory.3 The monkish author of the fourteenth-century tract Hail Maidenhad put it to the virgins he was addressing that if they really liked reading in Latin, illuminating manuscripts, embroidering (not antimacassars and guest towels but precious vestments and magical tapestries which are now among the finest art treasures of European museums), and writing poetry and music, then they were better off in the all-female society of a convent, where they were not surrounded by the bustle and brutality of a barracks, condemned to dangerous childbirth and the rough caresses of a husband too used to grappling with infidel captives and military whores to be aware of their emotional and sexual needs. He did not say but we might infer that the loves of clerks and nuns were more likely to be satisfying than the infatuation of young squires and the endless exacerbation of unfulfilled desire which is the whole motive force behind Provençal minstrelsy. Rabelais combined the elements
of medieval humanist fantasy of sexual and intellectual adjustment in his jolly secular monastery of Theleme.4 Rattray Taylor has listed the period as a matrist one, and however dubious his classification may ultimately be it is true that the influence of women upon the character of medieval civilization was great,5 and appears greater when we consider that all culture which was not utterly ephemeral was the culture of a tiny minority. It is perhaps significant that most of the women who made a valuable contribution to medieval culture were either religious or women living in celibacy within or after marriage, like Hilda, Queen Edith, the sainted Margaret, her daughters Matilda and Mary, and Lady Margaret Beaufort.
The amorous character in the feudal castle was the young squire, not eligible for knight-service until he was twenty-one. His beardless youth and beauty were most often described as effeminate for he was long-haired, dressed in embroideries, skilled at musical performance with voice and instrument, and at dancing, and penning poetry. It was inevitable that a lad torn from his mother’s breast to serve first as page and then as squire should yearn for the affection of his liege-lord’s wife. The exigencies of adolescent flesh ensured that he would suffer sexual aches and pains and naturally he attached them to his beloved lady-image. It was a submissive, tearful, servile posture; once he attained his majority and came to know the permissive society of the battlefield, this compulsive feeling became more intellectual and less immediate as he became more manly, less effeminate and perforce less sexually obsessed. The situation was full of hazards. The lord’s wife was often closer to her fellow vassal in age and temperament; he was certainly more attractive to her physically than her gruff stranger husband. If she should fall from grace and compromise the legitimacy of her heirs the only outcome was disaster. Divorce was impossible, adultery was punishable by death be it the husband’s crime passionel or the sentence of the law. The community attempted to exorcize this deep fear by externalizing it. Stories of ill-fated passion were cautionary tales. Love was a blight, a curse, a wound, death, the plague. Sex itself was outlawed, except in desire of issue. The chastity belt and its attendant horrors are reminders of the intense pressure built up in such a situation. The body-soul dichotomy which characterizes medieval thought operated to protect the status quo. Servant girls and country bumkins were debauched without mercy, while the passion for the lady of the manor became exalted into a quasi-religious fervour. The literature of adulterous passion was, like the modern stories of obsession, fetishism and perversion, a series of vicarious peeps into a region so fraught with dangers that only a lunatic would venture there. Every young clerk learnt from his dominies what love was:
Set before thyne eyen howe ungoodly it is, how altogether a mad thing, to love, to waxe pale, to be made leane, to wepe, to flatter and shamefully to submyte thyselfe onto a stynkyng harlot most filthy and rotten, to gape and synge all nyght at her chambre wyndowe, to be made to the lure & to be obedyent at a becke, nor dare to do anything except she nod or wagge her head, to suffre a folyshe woman to reigne over the, to chyde the, to lay unkyndnesse one against ye other to fall out, to be made at one agayne, to gyve thyselfe wyllynge unto a Queene that she might mocke, knocke, mangle and spoyle the. Where I beseche amonge all these thinges is the name of a man? Where is thy berde? Where is that noble mynde created unto most beautyfull and noble thynges?6
But the more he strove to heed their teachings and disdain love, the more likely he was to be struck down unsuspecting by the bright glance of another man’s chaste wife, which is what happened one fateful day to Francesco Petrarca. The effect on European letters was to last five hundred years. Petrarch was, besides a genius, very astute and he understood pretty clearly the nature of his passion. He managed to integrate it into his whole philosophical system, sublimating it by a thoroughly conscious and meticulous process. Laura became the mediatrix of all love and all knowledge of which God himself is the only Begetter. Her death made the process easier. Love of Laura, the lady of the laurel, the topaz and the ermine, the white deer, the madonna, was his greatest cross and his greatest blessing. By bearing it conscientiously all his life he made it his salvation. In almost every sonnet Petrarch achieves a reconciliation between his joy and his pain, his body and his soul but his myriad followers were neither so intelligent nor so fortunate. Probably only Dante achieved the same sort of dynamic equilibrium with his Beatrice, consciously demonstrating it in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso when she takes over from Virgil and leads him to the beatific vision. For lesser men Petrarchism became a refinement of adulterous sensuality. One of the factors in the survival of Petrarchism was that Petrarch was not living in a feudal situation. Laura was not the wife of his lord but of a peer, the citizen of a city-state which was bureaucratic and not hierarchic in structure. He managed singlehanded the transfer of courtly love from the castle to the urban community in a form which enables it to survive the development of the mercantile community and centralized government.
With the breakdown of the feudal system came the corrosion of hierarchic, dogmatic religion. Medieval Catholicism had based its authority upon the filial station of the celibate clergy. Celibacy was incessantly promoted by edicts of the Church in favour of sexual abstemiousness not only in the clergy but even in the married. It would be tiresome, if shocking, to relate the prohibitions which the Church laid upon intercourse within marriage, before communion, during Advent and Lent and on rogation days and fast days, or the prurient interrogatories which priests were instructed to conduct in the confessional. Marriage was a station in life inferior to vowed celibacy and infantile virginity and the abstention of widows. Second marriage was not allowed a blessing in the Catholic rituals. It was considered better for a priest to have a hundred whores than one wife. Mystics and saints compelled to be married by their station in life, like Edward the Confessor, made vows of celibacy within marriage. The second-class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife.
Perhaps the best way of understanding the Reformation is to connect it with the decline of the feudal system in those northern countries where it took place. In England its course seems to reflect pretty clearly the impact of lower-class values on upper-class culture. The poor do not marry for dynastic reasons, and they do not marry out of their community in alliances with their peers. Goings-on in the castle have never been based upon practice in the cottage, except when a lord decided to take unto himself a supermenial as he does in the story of Patient Griselda, told by Boccaccio in the thirteenth century and taken up by the Renaissance in a big way;7 possibly the fascination that this story of the lord who married a peasant girl had for the Renaissance throughout Europe was an indication of the rethinking about marriage that is insensibly and unofficially going on. Griselda, taken from her hovel, is installed as her lord’s humble and uncomplaining wife. Even when he takes a new, young and noble wife, she does not abate her servility, for she welcomes her and dresses her for the wedding, and a result wins her lord back. He of course claims he was testing her. The story reflects the general effect of the impact of lower-class mores on the attenuated and neurotic sexuality of the ruling class, albeit in a distorting mirror. When Adam delved and Eve span there was little point in lady-worship. Nostalgic and probably mythical accounts of marriage and giving in marriage in Merrie England are unanimous in their praise of the young folk who grow up working side by side in the tight-knit agricultural community. A boy made his choice from the eligible girls of his own village, lovingly steered by his parents and hers, indulgently watched during the permitted revels at Maying and nutting, pursuing a long courting process of token-giving and kiss-stealing, until there was space in his home for his bride, and need of a new hand in the butter and cheese making, the milking, the brewing, the care of lambs and chickens, at the spinning wheel and the loom. Books of husbandry listed the qualities he should look for in a wife—
health, strength, fertility, good-will and good humour as well as her proper complement of household skills.8 He respected her as a comrade and provided they were both healthy and strong they desired each other. The obsession of romantic love was simply irrelevant. Provided they agreed in age and social standing (a condition guaranteed by dowry and jointure) there was no obstacle except the tiresome caprice of the church laws against affinity, which had to be bought off by dispensations seeing as by the sixteenth century they disqualified nearly all the members of a village from marriage through either blood relationship or the imaginary ties of gossipry, the spiritual relationships incurred by baptismal sponsors.
By the sixteenth century this placid picture, which resembles the courting situation which still pertains in the extended kinship systems of feudal Calabria and Sicily, was broken up by the effects of enclosures, the increased exactions of the Church, and the rise of urban centres. Increased mobility, especially of the young men, increased the likelihood of marriage outside the known community. Changes in land tenure came to mean that a young man could not marry until his parents died and left him master of his own small property. By the seventeenth century a new pattern was established in England; late marrying was combined with betrothal followed by cohabitation. Peter Laslett found that parish registers showed christenings following hard on weddings, while marriage at thirty must be construed, in terms of the average life-span, as senile marriage.9 The Church had long since lost control of the parish and her own courts were inadequate to deal with the results of her unrealistic laws about affinity and kinship. Too many parishes were left without competent clergy, and common law marriage was on the increase. The religious reformers began to forge a new ideology of marriage, as public and holy, so holy that it had first been celebrated by God in heaven. It was extolled as the highest state of life and the condition of attainment of the status of citizenship and manhood. The increase in literacy and the advent of printing gave new scope to theory and literary example. The first tales of courtship and marriage found their way into written forms, now printed for the new, semi-literate readership. Much of this was didactic and set out ways and whys of marrying; some of it was cautionary, some escapist, and some direct polemic. Ballads appeared, containing the exempla of the marriageable girl; possibly based on old songs of wooing like Jone can call by name her cowes.
The Female Eunuch Page 21