Maiesiophilia

A pregnant Demi Moore photographed by 

Annie Liebovitz for Vanity Fair (1991) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

One of the most famous - and, at the time, most scandalous - scenes in D. H. Lawrence's 1915 novel The Rainbow, features newly wed Anna Brangwen dancing naked before the Unknown, whilst heavily pregnant:

 

"Big with child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting her hands and her body to the Unseen Creator [...] to whom she belonged.

      She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss. She danced in secret before the Creator, she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness." [2]      

 

One Saturday afternoon, alone in her bedroom before the fire, she again "took off her things and danced, lifting her knees and her hands in a slow, rhythmic exulting" [3]. When her husband Will enters and finds her naked in the shadows, he is somewhat startled, and advises that, if she's not careful, she'll catch a cold. 

 

Irritated by this stupid, sexless remark, Anna lifted her hands and began to dance once more, the firelight illuminating her body:

 

"He stood away near the door in blackness of shadow, watching transfixed. And with slow, heavy movements, she swayed backwards and forwards [...] pale in the dusky afternoon [...]

      He watched, and his soul burned in him. He turned aside, he could not look [...] Her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying [...] Her face was rapt and beautiful [...] [4]    

 

Will is unable to ever forget this vision of his pregnant young wife; if it aroused him at all, so too did it terrify him; for at that moment she was, in all her femaleness, beyond him. 

 

This is certainly an interesting scene to do with womanhood, sex and pregnancy - albeit one that Lawrence cannot help dressing up in religious language (just as, on the other hand, this self-professed priest of love cannot help eroticising his own metaphysics). 

 

One assumes that Lawrence's publishers (Methuen & Co.) must have known that this scene - along with several others - would cause them problems with the censors ...? 

 

And, sure enough, The Rainbow was prosecuted for obscenity, as a result of which around a thousand copies of the novel were seized and burnt and the book remained unavailable in Britain for the next eleven years (although editions were published in the United States). 

 

As one critic wrote in high moral outrage, when art refuses to 'conform to the ordered laws that govern human society [...] it must pay the penalty' [5].

 

 

II.   

 

In a letter written to Martin Secker in 1920, Lawrence reflects on the fate of The Rainbow, suggesting that the magistrates had acted in response to the hostile reviews the book received. He also informs Secker: "The scene to which exception was particularly taken was the one where Anna dances naked, when she is with child." [6] 

 

Thus, Lawrence was certainly aware that this scene was probematic - and I'm sure he knew why. For whilst Christianity has never taught that coition during pregnancy is a sin, many Church Fathers - including St. Augustine and Clement of Alexandria - seem, like Anna's husband Will, to be freaked out by the erotic aspects of pregnancy and the idea of fucking an expectant mother. 

 

The former, for example, spoke harshly about those husbands who approach their wives for sexual intercourse whilst they are with child, seeing this as a shameful lack of self-control [7]. As for the latter, he was more concerned about potential harms that might result, believing that it was necessary to protect the uterus once it had received the semen it desires and began the process of child formation. 

 

According to Clement, the womb closes itself up during pregnancy and no longer craves semen. Thus, any further act of coition at the man's insistence - and any new delivery of semen - is an excessive act of violence [8]. 

 

Beliefs such as these have continued to shape the thinking of many people, even whilst modern medical professionals insist that sex during pregnancy is normal, healthy, and perfectly safe for all parties concerned; including the unborn child, which is protected by the amniotic fluid in the womb and by the cervical mucus plug that forms shortly after conception.         

 

 

III. 

 

In conclusion ...

 

Whilst some women may experience a decrease in their sex drive whilst pregnant, others - like Anna Brangwen - never feel more sexually attractive and empowered than when big with child. 

 

Similary, whilst some men - like Will Brangwen - have a tokophobic aversion to seeing their pregnant wives dance round naked and ecstatically delighting in their womanhood and fertility, others veer towards maiesiophilia and are turned on by lactating breasts and an enlarged abdomen [9].      

 

Personally, I'm with Will on this one. It's not that I feel humiliated or nullified in my maleness by the site of a pregnant nude woman. Rather, I just find it slightly irritating when women like Anna (or Demi) get too full of themseves and believe that pregnancy - a biological function shared with all other mammals - is a miraculous state that gives them meaning or brings them closer to God. 

I would remind such women of this crucial couple of lines from Lawrence:

 

"That she bear children is not a woman's significance. But that she bear herself, that is her supreme and risky fate: that she drive on to the edge of the unknown, and beyond." [10]

 

      

Notes

 

[1] This nude photograph by Annie Liebovitz of 28-year old actress Demi Moore, who was seven months pregnant at the time, certainly got people talking when it appeared on the cover of the August 1991 issue of Vanity Fair. 

      Many critics deemed it inappropriate; some even described it as indecent (despite the fact that Moore discreetly covers her breasts with her hand). Some retail outlets would only sell the issue once it was wrapped in plain paper, as if a pornographic magazine, much to Moore's bemusement. It has since been named as one of the most influential images of the 20th-century, although, interestingly, Liebovitz herself doesn't think it a particularly good picture.    

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 169-170. 

 

[3] Ibid., p. 170.    

[4] Ibid., pp. 170-171.

[5] James Douglas, writing in the Star (22 October, 1915), quoted by Mark Kinkead-Weekes in his Introduction to The Rainbow, p. xlvi.

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Martin Secker (16 January 1920), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 458-460. The line quoted is on p. 459.

 

[7] See Augustine, On the Good of Marriage, V.   

 

[8] See Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, II. X.

 

[9] Pregnancy porn may still be a rather niche interest, but internet searches for such have steadily increased during the last few years according to stats released by Pornhub, in 2017. Not all of this traffic comes from out-and-out pregnancy fetishisists, however; it also includes, for example, those men who simply like to fantasise about their own virility and gain arousal or gratification from the possibility (or risk) of impregnating a woman. 

      Somewhat surprisingly, Pornhub's data also reveals that women are significantly more interested in pregnancy-related porn than men; indeed, women in the 25-34 year old age group are the most likely to search online for such. See Lenyon Whitaker, 'Pornhub data reveals "pregnancy porn" searches are on the rise', Metro (15 May, 2017): click here.   

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 52. 

      In this same passage, Lawrence explicity denies that the purpose of sex is for the depositing of seed. Procreation, he says, is "merely a preservative measure" and the continuance of life in the flesh "only a minor function". 

 

 

Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargoyle on the Great Fire of Notre-Dame de Paris

croire aux ruines ...

I.

It's a shame that the fire at Notre-Dame only destroyed the roof and spire, leaving the towers and most of the building still standing. It would have been better for the people of France - better for all of us - if the whole thing had been razed to the ground.

I say this not as some kind of cultural barbarian or iconoclast, nor simply to be provocative; but, rather, as someone in agreement with D. H. Lawrence, who writes in one of his Etruscan sketches:

"We have reached the stage where we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realise that it is  better to keep life fluid and changing, than try to hold it fast down in heavy monuments. Burdens on the face of the earth, are man's ponderous erections."

Like Lawrence, I love to see small wooden temples, that are unimposing and evanescent as flowers. Buildings - particularly religious buildings - should aim to be modest and charming rather than grand and impressive, preserving the natural humour of life: "And that is a task surely more worthy, and even much more difficult in the long run, than conquering the world or sacrificing the self or saving the immortal soul."   

Lawrence continues:

"Why has mankind such a craving to be imposed upon! Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness."

Even Notre-Dame, if we're honest, standing in Paris for centuries on end, had become a colossal dead weight - stuffed full of priceless treasures and cultural artefacts, but dead treasures and dead artefacts, belonging to another time, another people.

And one suspects that those who claim to revere the past and seek to preserve it - along with those billionaires and politicians who are now pledging obscene sums of cash to rebuild the cathedral (whilst continuing to ignore the deprivation in many parts of the city and its suburbs) - do so simply because they are unable ultimately to face up to the challenge of modernity to make it new.   

II.

Lawrence, of course, was ambiguous (at best) on the question of cathedrals - from Lincoln to Milan - long before his trip to see the Etruscan tombs in 1927.

In The Rainbow, for example, his novel of 1915, Lawrence stages an amusing conflict between Anna Brangwen and her husband Will, in which she destroys his passion for Lincoln Cathedral with her own gargoyle philosophy ...

Will is physically excited by the cathedral and willingly allows himself to be transported by it to another world. But to Anna, it's merely a thing of the past and she rather resented his ecstasy, wishing he might curb his enthusiasm.

Lawrence writes:

"The cathedral roused her too. But she would never consent to the knitting of all the leaping stone in a great roof that closed her in [...] it was the ultimate confine [...] She claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than the roof. [...]
      So that she caught at little things, which saved her from being swept forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps on into the Infinite [...] the wicked, odd little faces carved in stone, and she stood before them arrested.
      These sly little faces peeped out of the grand tide of the cathedral like something that knew better. They knew quite well, these little imps that retorted on man's own illusion, that the cathedral was not absolute. They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church."

Understandably, Will is unimpressed with such thinking and has little or no time for the carved faces; his wife was "spoiling his passionate intercourse with the cathedral" and this made him bitterly angry:

"Strive as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned. That which had been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead matter [...]
     His mouth was full of ash, his soul was furious. He hated her for having destroyed another of his vital illusions."

Anna's nihilism, however, inasmuch as it's a counter-idealism, is an active negation of the negative and of nothingness. Thus, despite Will's initial anger and despair, gradually he became more responsive to the call of the gargoyles than to the perfect surge of the cathedral itself, realising that outside the cathedral "were many flying spirits" that could never be contained within the holy gloom.

"He listened to the thrushes in the garden, and heard a note which the cathedrals did not include: something free and careless and joyous. He crossed a field that was all yellow with dandelions [...] and the bath of yellow glowing was something at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.
      There was life outside the church. There was much that the church did not include. [...] He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs."

And so, my advice to the good people of Paris is this: either finish the job and demolish the rest of Notre-Dame, or leave it as a lovely ruin, roofless, and at the mercy of the elements.

See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'Sketches of Etruscan Places', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 32-33.

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188-89, 190, 191. 

Jamie Reid archive 

vam.ac.uk 

On Dirty Dancing and the Virtue of Female Narcissism 2: The Case of Anna Brangwen

Drawing by Alice Stanley of a pregnant Anna Brangwen 

dancing in the firelight, whilst her husband Will 

watches from the shadows 

As I said at the end of part one of this post, Connie's pagan rain dance in which she affirms her shameless love of self as a vital sexual being, is something we've encountered before in Lawrence's fiction, when a heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen dances naked in her bedroom, lifting her hands and body to an unseen deity:

"She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss ... she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness."

Arguably, this incident in chapter 6 of The Rainbow is more provocatively ambiguous than the one in chapter 15 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, but then the earlier novel is far more complex and challenging than the later work in almost every regard. There's certainly nothing joyous about Anna's dance and she's not doing it to entice and arouse a lover - quite the opposite in fact.

One late Saturday afternoon, following the first incident, Anna again "took off her things and danced". But this time she danced before her husband, Will. Only she danced in a manner that was not only beyond his comprehension, but as if choreographed to nullify him in his manhood. With firelight on her feet and ankles, but otherwise naked in the twilight, like a witch, she lifted her hands and began to make slow, strange movements:

"He stood away near the door in blackness of shadow, watching, transfixed. And with slow, heavy movements she swayed backwards and forwards, like a full ear of corn, pale in the dusky afternoon, threading before the firelight, dancing his non-existence, dancing herself  ... to exultation.
      He watched, and his soul burned in him. He turned aside, he could not look, it hurt his eyes. Her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying ... Her face was rapt and beautiful, she danced exulting ... and knew no man.
      It hurt him as he watched as if he were at the stake. He felt he was being burned alive. The strangeness, the power of her in her dancing consumed him, he was burned, he could not grasp, he could not understand. He waited obliterated."

Eventually, finding his voice with which to speak, Will demands to know what on earth she thinks she's doing. Anna tells him to go away and let her dance by herself. He sneers that what she's doing isn't dancing. But, nevertheless, this vision of her as a woman caught up in narcissistic ecstasy "tormented him all the days of his life".

What, then, is this queer and disturbing scene all about?

Lawrence seems to be exploring something of a pregnancy fetish whilst, at the same time, betraying elements of maiesiophobia; Anna's belly is significantly described not only as big and strange, but terrifying. And, to be honest, I can understand his - and Will's - male discomfort and sense of disconcertedness when confronted by the obscene sight of a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy.

For no matter how hard Demi Moore and other female celebrities have tried to make pregnancy seem a glamorous, sexy lifestyle choice, there's something monstrous about a woman becoming part-goddess, part prisoner - trapped, as Camille Paglia writes, in the "bulging mass of her own fecund body ... turgid with primal force, swollen with great expectations  ... weighed down by her inflated mounds of breast, belly, and buttock".

Having said that, I'm also fatally fascinated - like Lawrence, like Will - by Anna's dancing and admire her shameless self-affirmation. She knows that she - as Woman - is the great be-all and end-all; "the womb-tomb of mother nature", to quote Paglia once more.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 15.

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 6.

Camille Paglia, 'The Venus of Willendorf', in Free Women, Free Men, (Pantheon Books, 2017), pp. 38-41. 

To read part one of this post - The Case of Lady Chatterley - click here. 

For an interesting essay that explores some of the themes in this post in much greater depth and detail, see Marina Ragachewskaya, 'No Dancing Matter: The Language of Dance and Sublimation in D. H. Lawrence', Études Lawrenciennes, 44, (2013), pp. 187-204. This work can be read online by clicking here. 

On Dirty Dancing and the Virtue of Female Narcissism 1: The Case of Lady Chatterley

Marina Hands as Connie in Lady Chatterley 

(dir. Pascale Ferran, 2006)

One of the saddest moments in Lady Chatterley's Lover is when Connie stands naked before a full-length bedroom mirror and gazes upon her body, horrified to discover that it lacks any mystery or va-va-voom; that there's nothing to wonder at or yearn to touch, just insignificant substance. 

Understandably, this absence of any gleam or sparkle in the flesh makes her feel immensely depressed and hopelessly old, despite the fact she's only twenty-seven. Happily, however, thanks to her illicit relationship with a man who persuades her that she possesses the nicest woman's arse as is, Connie discovers the confidence to one day throw off her clothes and dance naked in the rain: 

"She ... ran out with a wild little laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy rain and spreading her arms ... with the eurhythmic dance movements she had learned so long ago in Dresden. It was a strange pallid figure lifting and falling, bending so the rain beat and glistened on the full haunches, swaying up again and coming belly-forward through the rain, then stooping again so that only the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him, repeating a wild obeisance."

Despite the fact that Connie is clearly twerking for her lover, ultimately, she's surely dancing for her own pleasure; full of the sensual narcissism which, according to Zarathustra, issues from the exalted body rejoicing shamelessly (and selfishly) in its greater vitality and virtue and around which the whole world becomes mirror.   

Of course, we've encountered this feeling of voluptuousness, power, and female pride in Lawrence's fiction before - in The Rainbow - when a heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen dances naked in her bedroom, offering her body to an unseen deity in rapturous triumph.

I'll discuss Anna's case in part two of this post ... [click here].


See:

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 15.

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 6.

Nietzsche, 'On the Three Evil Things', Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969).

On Nietzsche's Hypomania

Nietzsche Burst! Designed by by Rev. Shakes (2014) 

Available on numerous gift items from www.zazzle.ca

If there's one thing I hate, it’s being told to cheer up or to smile, by strangers possessed by a will to happiness; fascists of optimism and positive thinking, always looking on the bright side and finding strength through joy.

Nor, come to that, do I want eternal bliss or a perpetual feeling of euphoria and I don’t trust those who fantasise about elevated moods and this, regrettably, includes Herr Nietzsche, whose writing is at its least convincing, least interesting, and least readable when he indulges his poet's taste for ecstasy and utopian fantasy.

That Nietzsche should find the prospect of a future humanity embodying a single great feeling and resting on clouds something delightful, is deeply disappointing and depressing. Like Anna Brangwen, I prefer to let many feelings come and go - even negative ones - and to keep my feet firmly on the ground. I love those things which save me from being swept up into any Absolute and spit on the idea of man's perfectibility.        

If we need to get over our humanity, then it's for the same reason and in the same manner we need to get over an illness, or a broken heart. Ultimately, it's a question of recovery and convalescence, not transcendence or salvation. It takes time and it can be a painful process. It requires patience and perhaps a prolonged period of silent reflection; it's not something to excitedly sing and shout about (like a madman).

Sometimes, in his hypomania, Nietzsche seems to misunderstand his own project and betray his own attempt at a revaluation of all values ...


See: Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 288.