Bad Penny

Penny Slinger: Exorcism: Inside Out

Richard Saltoun Gallery (London)

 

I. 

 

Sometimes, we need an artist to turn up like the proverbial bad penny in order to reintroduce a little magic, a little eroticism, and even a little horror into our otherwise safe, sexless, and disenchanted world. 

 

And so, step forward out of the shadows of the past Penny Slinger; a provocative London-born artist whose combination of surrealism and feminism into a queer gothic practice no longer shocks as it once did, but which nevertheless still excites, often amuses, and occasionally gives one the creeps. 

 

 

II. 

 

Her solo exhibition at the Richard Saltoun Gallery (London) - Exorcism: Inside Out - is composed of a number of photographic collages set against the backdrop of a spooky mansion house. The dark fairy tale elements remind one of Angela Carter, with a touch of Daphne du Maurier thrown in (all those birds and animal-headed people) [1]. 

 

We are informed that Slinger is attempting to integrate her own body into an archetypal landscape and  'engaging in a cultural exorcism that explores themes of fetishism and sexploitation from a feminist perspective'. 

 

And that's far enough, although, ideas of empowerment, self-actualisation, and sexual liberation now seem a little naive and old-fashioned and the art itself creaks with more clichés - or what her supporters would call timeless and universal symbols - than you can shake a broomstick at. 

 

Some might believe Slinger's images to be just as daring and challenging now as when they were first conceived, but, unfortunately, that's not the case. And, ultimately, what we are left with here are memories of exhilarating sixties radicalism inspired by Max Ernst; a sincere attempt to transform the outer world through inner dream and the politics of desire ... [2]

 

Notes

 

[1] The exhibition coincides with publication of Slinger's book An Exorcism: A Photo Romance (Fulgur Press, 2024); an extended version of her 1977 book An Exorcism, which has been withheld from UK publication for all these years after another work, Mountain Ecstasy (1978), was seized and destroyed by the British customs having been deemed to be pornographic.  

[2] For an alternative take on Slinger's exhibition, see Young Kim's review in A Rabbit's Foot (30 August 2024): click here.    

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 3: Hauntology

Le fantôme gris 

Mark Fisher (1968-2017)

 

 I.

 

"Conjecture: hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension." [a]

 

I suppose that's true; we're all familiar with a ghostly wail and the creaking sounds of a haunted house, for example. And it's amusing to realise that, as Fisher says, sometimes it's a question of hearing what's not there; "the voice no longer the guarantor of presence" [120]. 

 

Derrida's neologism thus "uncovers the space between Being and Nothingness" [120]; that spooky realm where objects that go bump in the night are real but not actual and Schrödinger's cat silently meows.    

 

Real ghosts - and ghosts of the Real: there's no need for a notion of the supernatural, which is what one of Fisher's favourite books and films [b] - The Shining - makes clear. Horror is already present within the world, within the everyday, within the family: home is where the haunt is ...  

And this word, haunt, is, says Fisher, one of the closest we have in English to the German term unheimlich. For just as the latter can switch from that which allows for the familiar (or homely) to the unfamiliar (unhomely) in the blink of an eye, so the former "signifies both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it" [125].

 

 

II. 

 

When I was younger, I used to love Angela Carter and read nearly all of her books, be they novels, short stories, or works of non-fiction. One book I particulary loved was American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (Vintage, 1994), which consists of nine tales, the first four of which are based on American folklore. 

I don't know if Fisher ever read or ever refers to Angela Carter in his work, but when I came across the following paragraph in Ghosts of My Life it reminded me of the above book by her:

 

"America, with its anxious hankerings after an 'innocence' it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story. The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World ... but here they are ..." [128]

   

 

III.

As a child of the 1970s, I grew up watching a lot (and I really mean a lot) of television. 

 

So when Fisher writes of "uncanny spectres entering the domestic environment through the cathode ray tube" [133] [c] - particularly in the children's programming of this decade - it was obviously going to pique my interest. 

 

And I have to admit, I love the idea of a TV set as a ghost box; that's certainly preferable to the idea of it being a device designed for the amusement of idiots - a boob tube as our American cousins used to call it.

 

I still watch a lot of television - and a lot of it is still British television from the 1970s. It's not just that it reminds me of my childhood, but that it has "a certain grain [...] that got smoothed away by 80s style culture gloss" [135] [d]. 

 

I like the voices and the faces (and the clothes) of the people in the 1970s. They may all be dead now - may just be ghosts in a machine - but they're my kind of people and make me feel at home. Nostalgia doubtless plays a part in this, but it's more than that - Fisher would say it's a longing for what he terms popular modernism and not so much a lost past as the promise of a lost future. 

 

Speaking of promises ...

 

 

IV.

I hate the promise of digital music: which, as Fisher says, is the promise of an "escape from materiality" [144] and the eradication of crackle - i.e., the sound of dust, dirt, and damage; the sound of static build-up; the sound of joy. 

 

The loss of crackle spells the death of pop. 

 

No wonder then that many artists still release tracks on vinyl and invoke the sound of the past and a "whole disappeared regime of [tactile] materiality [...] lost to us in an era where the sources of sound have retreated from sensory apprehension" [144].      

 

I don't care about keeping music live - but I do want to keep it analogue. For in an enchanted sound-world, crackle should not be excluded and the pleasure of placing a needle into the outermost groove should not be denied.     

 

 

V.

 

Is this true: 

"What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental [...]" [155]

 

I mean, it might be true - but I don't think it is. And where's the evidence for this claim, which, like so many of Fisher's other claims, is made without any real attempt to back it up.

 

I do tend to agree, however, that encounters with angels might prove to be "as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons" [155] [e], though I'm not sure that's because nothing could be "more shattering [...] and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy" [155].    

 

Actually, such angelic tranquility - an experience of what Rudolf Otto terms the numinous - might actually be very welcome in the world right now, even if it is "associated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness" [157].

For contrary to the idea that we should feel good about ourselves and always be positive, "the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace" [157]. As Fisher goes on to note: "There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us" - i.e., our own egos. 

As D. H. Lawrence would say, grace is the sinking of one's soul into the magnificent dark blue gloom, the glory of darkness; a willingness to be erased and made nothing; to be dipped into oblivion in order that we might be renewed [f].

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), p. 120. Future page references to this work will be given in the text.

      Of course, as Fisher later notes, hauntology doesn't just have a sonic dimension, there is also an important visual dimension; "the eerie calmness and stillness of photography" [152], for example, which is so good at capturing lost moments and presenting absences. Photography - the art of painting with light - also allows one a glimpse of a world that is radiant and not weighed down with darkness (although this is arguably a Gnostic quality rather than hauntological).      

[b] The Shining is a 1977 horror novel by American author Stephen King. It was adapted into a 1980 film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson as the writer Jack Torance. King hated the movie because of its deviations from his book (and the fact that Kubrick had rejected his screenplay, preferring to co-write his own with novelist Diane Johnson). 

      In his piece on The Shining (adapted from a k-punk post dated 23 Jan 2006), Fisher chooses to side-step "the wearisome struggle between King fans and Kubrickians" and treats the novel and the film "as a labyrinth-rhizome, a set of interlocking correspondences and differences". See Ghosts of My Life, p. 120. 

      I don't dislike the film, but can't say it's one of my favourites. And as I've never read the novel, I don't intend to say very much here about Fisher's interpretation of The Shining.

 

[c] One obviously thinks of the famous scene in Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982) when five-year-old Carol Anne (played by Heather O'Rourke) presses her hands to a TV screen displaying post-broadcast static and declares: "They're here" (referring to the spirits of the dead). 

 

[d] As Fisher writes elsewhere when analysing why it is programmes made today fail to capture this '70s grain: 

      "There must be some technical reason - maybe its the film stock they use - that accounts for why British TV is no longer capable of rendering any sense of a lived-in world. No matter what is filmed, everything always looks as if it has been thickly, slickly painted in gloss, like it's all a corporate video." - Ghosts in My Life, p. 76. 

 

[e] Fisher is making this claim on the basis of work by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his 1917 text (translated into English as) The Idea of the Holy.

 

[f] See the poems 'The State of Grace', 'Glory of Darkness', and 'Phoenix', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 591 and 641. 

To read part one of this post on Lost Futures, click here. 

 

To read part two of this post on the Return of the 70s, click here. 

 

The Tiger's Bride

Rachel M. Esposito: The Tiger's Bride

rachelmesposito.com

 

 

"Like the tiger in the night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until ... in sensual ecstasy, 

having drunk all blood and devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire ..." [a] 

 

 

I. 

 

I love the above lines from D. H. Lawrence. 

 

But Lawrence wasn't the only English writer to evoke the feline spirit and dream of becoming-tiger. Angela Carter also fantasised about entering into unholy matrimony with a tiger and losing her all too human skin, and it's Carter's short story 'The Tiger's Bride' that I'd like to look at here ... [b]

  

II.

Essentially, 'The Tiger's Bride' was Carter's reimagining of Beauty and the Beast [c]: 

 

A beautiful young girl moves in with a mysterious masked figure, known as the Beast, after her father loses her to him in a game of cards. The Beast is eventually revealed to be a tiger masquerading as a man. Having fallen in love with him, the young girl agrees to become his mate and transforms into a beautiful tigress; the suggestion given that this is as much her true nature as it is his [d].  

 

Usually, this tale is discussed in the familiar terms of power, identity, and otherness; often from a feminist, psychoanalytic, or postmodern perspective [e]. There's nothing wrong with that, but neither is there much point in simply offering another analysis in and on the same terms and seen through the same critical lens.

 

And so, here, I'll at least try to say something vaguely novel, whilst, at the same time referring to work first presented at Treadwell's back in 2006 [f]. 

 

 

III.

 

Carter's perversely sensual fantasy of animal transformation raises one key question: is there a fundamental and non-negotiable human nature, or a fixed type of being that is uniquely human and therefore not open either to evolutionary change or magical metamorphosis? 

 

For essentialists of all kinds, the answer to this onto-theological question concerning being and becoming will be a very definite Yes. But for those who reject all such idealism and happily affirm shape-shifting and parahuman hybrids, preferring as they do to conduct their thinking in terms of constant mutation and change, the answer has to be No. 

 

Personally, my sympathies are with the latter; i.e. those who believe in the the dynamic and interchangeable nature of forms. I'm also sympathetic to those who, like Carter, put forward the shocking idea that even virgins born on Chistmas day might prove to be as amoral and as savage as any beast. 

 

Having been handed over by her father to the Beast, Beauty can't help wondering what the exact nature of his beastliness might entail and, prior to her first meeting with her husband-to-be, she recalls the stories her English nanny used to tell her when she was young in order to frighten her. She remembers too how she first discovered the secret of the sexual mystery from watching farmyard animals copulate. 

 

When Beauty first sets eyes on La Bestia she is struck by his size and crude clumsiness, as well as his odd air of self-imposed restraint; "as if fighting a battle with himself to remain upright when he would rather drop on all fours" [155-56]. For all that, he is not much different from any other man, although wearing a mask "with a man's face most beautifully painted on it [… and] a wig, too […] of the kind you see in old-fashioned portraits" [156]. 

 

The Beast has but a single demand to make of Beauty when she is brought before him; "to see the pretty young lady unclothed nude without her dress" [160]. Shocked and insulted, Beauty laughs scornfully at the request and tells him that if she is to be treated like a common whore then she expects not only to be fucked, but also given "the same amount of money that you would give to any other woman in such circumstances" [161]. 

 

This hurts the Beast and he sheds a tear, which, Beauty hopes, is one of shame. However, this doesn’t stop him from making the same request for a second time - with the same results: "Take off my clothes for you, like a ballet girl? Is that all you want of me?" [163], cries Beauty, and again the Beast is forced to shed a tear. 

 

Eventually, when one day out riding, the Beast decides that since she will not reveal herself naked to him then she must be prepared to see him undressed. As he starts to remove his human disguise and finery, Beauty's composure deserts her and she finds herself on the brink of panic as the Beast reveals himself to be: "A great, feline […] whose pelt was barred with a savage geometry of bars the colour of burned wood” [166]. 

 

Beauty can't help noticing the subtlety of his muscles, the profundity of his tread and the "annihilating vehemence of his eyes, like twin suns" [166]. She feels her breast ripped apart as if she had suffered a marvellous wound and she realises that since the tiger will never lie down with the lamb, then she, Miss Lamb, must learn how to run with tigers. 

Having come to this fateful conclusion, Beauty finally decides to strip: 

 

"I therefore, shivering, now unfastened my jacket, to show him I would do him no harm. Yet I was clumsy and blushed a little, for no man had seen me naked and I was a proud girl. Pride it was, not shame, that thwarted my fingers so; and a certain trepidation lest this frail little article of human upholstery before him might not be, in itself, grand enough to satisfy his expectations […]" [166]

 

Continuing with the narration of her tale, Beauty says: "I showed his grave silence my white skin, my red nipples, and the horses turned their heads to watch me, also, as if they, too, were courteously curious as to the fleshy nature of women." [166] 

 

Having finally conceded to his original request of her, the Beast informs Beauty that she is free to return to her father. But, of course, she now finds herself so taken with the Beast's inhuman nobility that she doesn't want to leave him. Rather, she wants to stay and learn how to feel happy in her own nakedness; for the idea of living without clothes still left her troubled and she rightly connected it to a loss of her humanity: 

 

"I was unaccustomed to nakedness. I was so unused to my own skin that to take off all my clothes involved a kind of flaying. I thought the Beast had wanted a little thing compared with what I was prepared to give him; but it is not natural for humankind to go naked, not since first we hid our loins with fig leaves. He had demanded the abominable. I felt as much atrocious pain as if I was stripping off my own underpelt […]" [168]

 

Still, despite the cost, Beauty gives herself to the Beast of her own accord. He, in turn, abandons his human disguise and no longer wore strong perfumes to mask his own distinctive animal scent. Beauty is still concerned about his ferocity and the fact that he might yet gobble her up, but perhaps, she reasons, his appetite need not mean her death. 

 

The story concludes with a very lovely and highly erotic scene that any zoophile or therianthrope must surely treasure; a scene typical of Angela Carter in that it profoundly disrupts "both our expectations […] and our customary moral and aesthetic response" [g]: 

 

"I squatted on the wet straw and stretched out my hand. I was now within the field of force of his golden eyes. He growled at the back of his throat, lowered his head, sank on to his forepaws, snarled, showed me his red gullet, his yellow teeth. I never moved. He snuffled the air, as if to smell my fear; he could not. 

      Slowly, slowly he began to drag his heavy, gleaming weight across the floor towards me. 

      A tremendous throbbing […] filled the room; he had begun to purr. […] The reverberations of his purring rocked the foundations of the house […] I thought: 'It will all fall, everything will disintegrate'. He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. 'He will lick the skin off me!' 

      And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shiny hairs. My earrings turned […] to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur." [169] 

 

 

IV.

 

What, then, are we to make of this zoosexual fantasy of transformation? 

 

Clearly, it challenges traditional moral understandings of the human, the animal, and the relationship that exists between them. Of course, some might dismiss it on the grounds that in being a magical as well as a sexual fantasy, it has nothing to tell us about the so-called real world. And Carter herself concedes that the tale, unlike the more respectable short story, makes no attempt to imitate life or faithfully record everyday experience. 

 

But for Carter, this is precisely the strength and importance of the tale; in transfiguring the mundane via the extraordinary, the tale challenges our usual assumptions and beliefs about the world and doesn't betray its readers into false certainty and common sense. Tales are always of the unexpected and set in a world wherein the rules governing the boundaries between the true and the false, or concerning identity, are not entirely suspended, but made far more fluid than in ours. 

 

As a matter of fact, Carter's reimagining of La Belle et la Bête is not actually all that radical. It's violence, amorality, and sexual content is found in many of the earliest folk versions that pre-date the more sanitized fairy tales written in the 18th and 19th centuries. Essentially, Carter is reviving an oral tradition in which girls and women are far from helpless or submissive; in which they are, on the contrary, shrewd, quick-witted, and highly skilled. 

 

But as significant as this aspect of the tale is, for me, what really fascinates is that it belongs to a tradition concerning metamorphosis or animal transformation fantasy. Carter too is clearly intrigued by the dialectic of continuity and change and to what extent our humanity is simply skin-deep; if not merely a matter of clothing. 

 

We are obliged to ask the following questions: In stripping naked, and in then stepping out of her very skin, has Beauty realised or lost an essential self? Has she been effectively raped and devoured, or sexually fulfilled via a becoming-animal? It's because such questions make many people uncomfortable - particularly as they are raised within a zoosexual context - that, strangely enough, the overtly bestial content of this and other such tales is often entirely overlooked. 

 

Indeed, it almost makes one wonder if the idea of sex between young girls and beasts isn't something inconceivable to them. But, probably, it simply shows fear; either the fear that our humanity is not so essential and determined after all, or the older, more irrational fear that bestiality will result in the birth of monsters ... [h]

 

 

Illustration by Aleksandra Waliszewska [i]

  

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 117.

 

[b] 'The Tiger's Bride' can be found in Angela Carter's astonishing collection of short fiction published as The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, (Golancz, 1979). 

      In this work, Carter doesn't so-much offer us her own versions of traditional fairytales, as reactivate the latent violence and sexual politics at the heart of such well-known stories as 'Little Red Riding Hood' and 'Beauty and the Beast'. Some have described Carter's writing style as a form of queer gothic feminism, although more usually it is considered to be magical realism. Concerns with female identity and female empowerment are pretty much present throughout, as are supernatural elements often involving metamorphosis. 

      The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories remains one of my favourite books by any author and I would encourage torpedophiles to read (or re-read) it. It can be found on the Internet Archive: click here. However, please note that page numbers given here refer to Angela Carter's collected short stories, published as Burning Your Boats, (Vintage, 1996). 

 

[c] La Belle et la Bête is a fairy tale written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740. It was rewritten and published in the form most people now know it by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756. Scholars have traced the origin of the story back over 4000 years, although, ultimately, it's impossible to know where or when a story was first told.   

 

[d] I will offer a closer reading of the text in Part III of this post.

 

[e] See for example a series of online articles by Ana Isabel Bugeda Díaz under the heading 'Postmodern Retellings 101', which includes a discussion of Angela Carter's 'The Tiger's Bride': click here. 

      The author cheerfully condemns Western dualism, anthropocentrism, rationalism, patriarchal society, the denial or exclusion of Otherness, etc. whilst speaking positively of desire, animality, emotional intelligence, and the need to subvert traditional narratives. Again, I've no problem with this, it's just that it now strikes me as formulaic and a bit old-fashioned.     

 

[f] I'm referring to the six-part series of essays Zoophilia (published as Vol. III of The Treadwell's Papers, Blind Cupid Press, 2010). In particular, I will be referring to the fifth of these essays, on animal transformation fantasy.  

 

[g] Caroline Walker Bynum, 'Shape and Story: Metamorphosis in the Western Tradition' (Jefferson Lecture, 1999): click here to read online.

 

[h] As a matter of biological fact, human-animal hybrids, or parahumans, cannot be bred sexually; attempts to mate a human and a chimpanzee have been made, but they inevitably failed. However, synthetic biology and genetic engineering does potentially open the way for a world in which such inter-species hybrids become possible.

     

[i] To find out more about this Polish artist visit Marta Lucy Summer's blog Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: click here.  

Notes on an Edwardian Woman's Underwear (With Reference to the Case of Mrs Johanna Keighley)

'And, oh, quick if you please

Let every lady get on her chemise!'

 

 

I.

 

D. H. Lawrence's unfinished and, until 1984, unpublished comic novel, Mr Noon [a] is not my favourite by a long chalk, but it does contain some amusing scenes, including one in which the eponymous hero, Gilbert Noon, is disturbed - though not quite discovered - in flagrante with his married lover, Johanna, in his room at the Wolkenhof, a small and respectable family hotel, where she is well-known, located as it is in the town where her parents, the Baron and Baroness von Hebenitz, have their home.

 

The lovers have just agreed to stay together and decided that they must write and inform her husband of this. She was wearing "a lovely dress of dull reddish cashmere" [151], but this is soon discarded. For although he is clearly anxious about the shitstorm that lay ahead for them once their affair was made public, she can't help noticing the "sombre fire of passion in his eyes" [151] and that's her cue to get naked: "She could soon abandon herself to passion and delicious pleasure" [152] no matter what trouble was in store.

 

However, just as he is enjoying her, and she him, there comes a loud knock at the door: 

 

"Johanna, in the arms of Gilbert, gave an awful start. He sat up and listened, with visions of husbands, police, incensed official Barons and what-not coursing through his mind.

      'Bang-bang-bang!' came the double knock. Whoever it was, they would have heard the voices of the guilty pair. The door-handle gave a little squeak of protest as the unknown horror tried it from outside. Luckily the door was locked.

      'Bang-bang-bang!' came the officious knock. And still dead silence in the room, where the guilty pair lay on the bed with beating hearts. 

      'See who it is,' whispered Johanna, pushing him from her.

      And then he saw her, in puris naturalibus, flee swiftly, white and naked, behind a curtain which hung across a corner, huddling there with her feet, and the tip of her shoulder, and then, as she stooped, that exquisite finale of Salome showing round and white behind the curtain [...]

      He was in no better plight than she: not a rag, not a stitch on him, and there he stood in the middle of the room listening to that diabolical knocking and vacantly watching the come and go of the exquisite tailpiece to Johanna, as she stooped to unravel her stockings.

      And why, under such circumstances, should she be putting on her grey silk stockings, and routing for her garters with rosebuds on them. Why oh why, in the shipwreck of nudity, cling to the straw of a grey silk stocking." [152-53] [b]

Eventually, wrapped in his double-breasted brown overcoat, Gilbert answers the door and deals with the hotel manageress who is looking for Johanna, denying all knowledge of the latter's whereabouts. When he closes the door, Johanna springs out from behind the curtain "in her grey silk stockings, rose-bud garters, and chambric chemise" [154]. 

 

Still wrapped in his brown overcoat, even though painfully aware of his thin hairy legs sticking out, Gilbert watched as Johanna, in something of a panic, performs a form of reverse striptease, pulling on her "lacey-white knickers, her pretty, open work French stays, her grey silk petty and her reddish dress" [154]. 

 

Before he can even blink, she is tying her shoe-laces and then had "only to poke her hair more or less under the dusky-lustrous feather toque, and fling the lace scarf over her shoulders, and she was ready" [154] to leave - which she does, with a quick goodbye, but not even a peck on the cheek for her lover. 

  

 

II. 

 

What I love about this scene - apart from the farcical elements which demonstrate that Lawrence had more of a sense of humour than many critics like to acknowledge - is the amount of detail we are given concerning Johanna's clothing, particularly her undergarments [c].

 

For whilst it's true that Gilbert notices her nudity and seems particularly fascinated with her posterior - which he finds exquisite - mostly he seems intrigued by her grey silk stockings and rosebud garters, not to mention her lacey-white knickers. This confirms Angela Carter's claim in 'Lorenzo the Closet Queen' that Lawrence was obsessed with the lingerie of his heroines, which he catalogues with a loving and fetishistic eye for detail [d].   

And so, readers of Lawrence's work familiar with Gudrun's brightly coloured stockings and Lady Chatterley's sheer silk knickers, can, thanks to the above scene, also claim intimate knowledge of Johanna Keighley's underwear, which will doubtless provide some of them with the greatest joy of all [e]. 

It is, I think, something of a shame that most women today, in this age of comfort and convenience, seem to prefer wearing snug-fitting cotton briefs from M&S, or hideous thongs, when they (and their male lovers) could have so much more fun putting on and taking off layers of elaborate underwear - there's a reason that the Edwardian period is also known as La Belle Époque ...      

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1984).  

      As the editor says in his Introduction: "This volume of the Cambridge edition of D. H. Lawrence is of unique interest; it presents for the first time a substantially new, largely unpublished text. Part I of Mr Noon will be familiar to readers who have consulted the volume A Modern Lover, published in 1934, and to those who have read it as collected in Phoenix II, published in 1968; but, Part II, which is more than two times as long, has never before been published." [xix]

      The material I quote here is from Part II. Page references given in the post are to the CUP edition. 

 

[b] The answer, of course, is because - like the Brangwen sisters - Johanna regards her stockings as precious; more so even than jewels. See note [e] below.

 

[c] I'm sure there will be readers not only unfamiliar with the actual items of undergarment worn by an Edwardian woman such as Johanna Keighley, but ignorant even with one or two of the terms used by Lawrence in the passage quoted from Mr Noon. For example, some might be asking: What's a chemise? The answer to this and other related questions can be found in the second part of an illustrated online essay on ladies' clothing fashions in 1908 by Gail Brinson Ivey: click here.        

      See also the post entitled 'Dressing The 1900s Woman - Edwardian Lingerie' (6 Feb 2020) on the excellent blog Sew Historically: click here.

 

[d] Angela Carter's essay 'Lorenzo the Closet Queen' can be found in Nothing Sacred, (Virago, 1992). I discuss this essay in a 2013 post which can be found here. 

 

[e] In Women in Love, Gudrun presents her sister with "three pairs of the coloured stockings for which she was notorious". As one might imagine, Ursula is rapturous to receive such a beautiful gift: "'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings'". 

      See D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 436. And see also my 2013 post discussing this scene, in which I examine why it is that - surprisingly - Lawrence condemns George Bernard Shaw as a crude and vulgar thinker for pointing out that it is often clothes that arouse our desire, not bare flesh: click here. 

 

On the Black Virgin and the Question of Racial Fetishism

Nigra sum sed formosa 

The statues and paintings of Mary created in medieval Europe are all fascinating, but none more so than those in which the Mother of God has dark skin; the so-called Black Virgins (or Black Madonnas), of which there are several hundred located in various churches and shrines, venerated by their devotees and associated with miracles by pilgrims who come to receive a blessing.     

If I'm honest, however, what really interests is not the significance of the figure within Catholic theology, or the pagan roots of her worship, but the sexual allure of black femininity for white heterosexual males. Obviously, this is a controversial topic - perhaps more so now than ever.

In the past, the concern was with miscegenation and only decadent individuals openly flaunted their love for women of colour and were excited by the idea of transgression. Today, mixed race relationships are more commonplace and relatively accepted, but there is now a real (and legitimate) concern with racial fetishism; that is to say, with the manner in which white men view the non-white women whom they subject to their eroticized and imperial gaze.

For women of colour are not merely objectified sexually, but racially stereotyped. Their exotic otherness is not so much exaggerated and distorted as it is invented within the pornographic imagination, before being circulated and sustained within wider popular culture (via art and advertising, for example).

Angela Carter understands how this game works. In her short story, Black Venus, she describes the illicit affair between Baudelaire and his mistress Jeanne Duval (who was of mixed European and African origin), perfectly capturing the essence of the relationship and how, for the poet, this Creole woman symbolizes primitive sensuality and the promise of faraway lands.

Thus, when he's not asking her to take off her clothes and dance naked for Daddy except for the bangles and beads he loves so much - his eyes fixed upon the darkness of her skin - he's whispering like a madman into the ear of his pet:

"Baby, baby, let me take you back where you belong, back to your lovely, lazy island where the jewelled parrot rocks on the enamel tree and you can crunch sugar-cane between your strong, white teeth ... When we get there, among the lilting palm-trees, under the purple flowers, I'll love you to death. We'll go back and live together in a thatched house with a veranda over-grown with flowering vine and a little girl in a short white frock with a yellow satin bow in her kinky pigtail will wave a huge feather fan over us, stirring the languishing air as we sway in our hammock, this way and that way ... think how lovely it would be to live there." [10]

Jeanne recognises this pervy and racist fantasy for what it is: Go, where? Not there! Not the bloody parrot forest with its harsh blue sky which offers nothing to eat but bananas and yams and the occasional bit of grizzled goat to chew!

And many women of colour are rightly appalled by the way in which racism is smuggled into the bedroom disguised as something romantic and a form of positive discrimination. The young black feminist, Mysia Anderson, is quite right to say there's a history of oppression here that simply must be taken into account.

But, the problem is - for me, in my whiteness and heterosexual maleness - it still seduces. For ultimately, of course, it's a fetishistic fantasy designed to appeal to readers such as myself and not the black-thighed woman smelling of musk smeared on tobacco to whom it's spoken.

Thus, despite knowing better, I still find myself at the feet of a black goddess and still singing like Solomon about she whose beauty radiates from a skin darkened by the sun. 

Notes:

Charles Baudelaire's most famous work, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), contains several poems believed to have been written about (or inspired by) Jeanne Duval, including Sed non Satiata, Les Bijoux, Le Serpent qui danse, Parfum Exotique, and Le Chat.

Angela Carter's Black Venus was first published by Chatto and Windus (1985), but I'm quoting from the Picador edition (1986).

Mysia Anderson is a student at Stanford University majoring in African and African American Studies. Her online article entitled 'Avoid racial fetishism on Valentine's Day' was published on Feb 11, 2015 on stanforddaily.com and can be read by clicking here. 

The photo, by Barron Claiborne, was found on Lamatamu.com the site for "everything exotic", edited by Biko Beauttah.

 

Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy

The Company of Wolves, (dir. Neil Jordan, 1984)

One of Nietzsche's most daring strategies is to call into question the traditional privileging of the human over other animals and thus to place man back amongst their number. For Nietzsche, man is certainly not the high-point of evolution; rather, he is the most depraved of all beasts. Which is to say, man is the animal that has strayed furthest from its sound instincts.

It is only when the ideal of man as a divine creation made in the image of God is shown to be not only conceited but damaging, that individual men and women will be able to achieve a level of enhancement via a becoming-animal. There is thus what one critic terms a reverse anthropocentrism in Nietzsche's texts via which he naturalizes the human species and grounds not just his own thinking but all human culture in zoology.

Now, admittedly, there are times when Nietzsche risks simply allegorizing animals on the basis of a single characteristic or trait that he determines as either noble or base. However, what remains radical in his animal philosophy is the clear implication that socio-ethical behaviour - often held up as something uniquely human - can ultimately be located (if in a rather cruder form) amongst animals. He writes:

"The beginnings of justice, as of prudence, moderation, bravery - in short, all we designate as the Socratic virtues - are animal: a consequence of that drive which teaches us to seek food and elude enemies. Now if we consider that even the highest human being has only become more elevated and subtle in the nature of their food and in their conception of what is inimical to them, it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal." [Daybreak, I. 26]

Later, in the Genealogy, Nietzsche will examine how man’s evolution from the semi-animal, happily adapted to the wilderness, was a difficult and painful process involving either the suspension of natural instincts or their internalization. Proto-humans were reduced to their consciousness; "that most impoverished and error-prone organ" [II. 16] and forced to think and feel shame for the first time. And other creatures looked upon man with fear and pity as "the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal" [The Gay Science, III. 224].

Of course, what has happened has happened: our fall into consciousness and moral subjectivity, as well as our ever-greater reliance upon technology, is doubtless a fate that we will have to see through to the end. In other words, we will have to perfect our decadence and idealism before we can move towards a transhuman and noble future; i.e. the kind of future in which people pride themselves on their animal skills and attributes and understand that the sharing of traits with other species belongs to a primordial ethics.

But note: it’s not that this interaction and exchange hasn’t continued in the modern era of the farm animal and household pet - it has, and this has significantly contributed to modern man’s taming. What we need to do, then, is dynamically interact with animals other than those reared purely for slaughter and profit, or oedipalized cats and dogs.

In other words, as Angela Carter knew all too well: we should seek out the company of wolves and consent to becoming the tiger's bride; not just herd sheep and marry the boy-next-door!

Angela Carter and Lorenzo the Closet Queen

Portrait of Angela Carter by Tara Heinemann in which 

she brings out the almost spectral beauty of the subject

Used with permission

Since her death in 1992, there has, I think, been a marked falling off of interest in the work of Angela Carter amongst readers and critics - even those of a feminist persuasion. Tastes change and her writing now seems a bit too gothic and too queer; the language used is just too rich in an age of austerity (i.e. meanness and fear).

Of course, she still has her fans and loyal supporters and I might even be numbered amongst them, for her books meant a very great deal to me in my youth. But the fact remains that she's now a somewhat less mainstream and thus more marginal figure than she used to be and this is unfortunate, as she is not only a great novelist and teller of tales, but a brilliant journalist and critic.

Her study, The Sadeian Woman, for example, remains one of the best exercises in cultural history and sexual politics produced by an English author and her pieces collected in Nothing Sacred (Virago, 1992) also deserve to be read and re-read; not least of all the essay 'Lorenzo the Closet Queen', which combines two of her great loves and two of my own obsessions, namely, the novels of D. H. Lawrence and the sociology of fashion. 

In the above, Carter offers an all-too-brief sartorial critique of Women in Love - a novel which, as she amusingly says, is "as full of clothes as Brown's". She also argues that if Lawrence catalogues the wardrobes of his heroines with such a loving eye for detail, he does so in order to convince his readers that he possesses a "hot line to a woman's heart by the extraordinary sympathy he has for her deepest needs, that is, nice stockings, pretty dresses and submission" [208].

This, she says, is a piece of literary fraudulence. And yet, as she goes on to add, Lawrence at the same time clearly enjoys being a girl and has a genuine and somewhat touching (if pathologically fetishistic) interest in female apparel. Lawrence, she writes, "is seduced and bemused by the narcissistic apparatus of femininity", even if he only wanted to be a woman "so that he could achieve the supreme if schizophrenic pleasure of fucking himself" [209].

As I noted in an earlier post, Lawrence is particularly fascinated in Women in Love by the thought of brightly coloured stockings and they become a kind of leitmotiv running throughout the novel. Carter writes:

"Stockings, stockings, stockings everywhere. Hermione Roddice sports coral-coloured ones, Ursula canary ones. Defiant, brilliant, emphatic stockings. But never the suggestion the fabric masks, upholsters, disguises living, subversive flesh. Lawrence is a stocking man, not a leg man. Stockings have supplanted legs; clothes have supplanted flesh. Fetishism.
      The apotheosis of the stockings comes right at the end of the novel, where they acquire at last an acknowledged, positive, sexual significance. ... Indeed, the stockings appear to precipitate a condition of extreme erotic arousal in Gudrun; she touches them with 'trembling, excited hands'." [209-10]

The question is, what is Lawrence playing at in this scene of camp ecstasy and girliness? Carter is in no doubt:

"I think what Lawrence is doing is attempting to put down the women he has created in his own image for their excessive reaction to the stockings to which he himself has a very excessive reaction indeed, the deep-down queenly, monstrous old hypocrite that he is." [210]

This seems a bit harsh: but deadly accurate. Lawrence allows himself the "licence to mock the girls for parading about in the grotesque finery he has forced them to don" [211]. He is at once fascinated by female dandyism and the seductive allure of fashion and repulsed by it. If he depicts Gudrun as a kind of whore, then Hermione is turned into a terrifying witch figure by the exotic, aristocratic and self-conscious strangeness of her dress.

Whilst Baudelaire loved women for their unnaturalness, Lawrence hates them for it and many of his female characters end up like drag queens, defined and confined by their own clothing. Carter concludes that for most of the time in Women in Love, Lawrence is like a little boy dressing up in his mother's clothes and attempting to fool us into thinking he writes with the hand (and the eye) of a woman:

"The con trick, the brilliant, the wonderful con trick, the real miracle, is that his version of drag has been widely accepted as the real thing, even by young women who ought to know better. In fact, Lawrence probes as deeply into a woman's heart as the bottom of a hat-box." [214]