In Memory of Honor Blackman

Honor Blackman (1925-2020)

as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (1964)

I have to admit that I'm more of a Mrs Peel and Mary Goodnight man than I am a Cathy Gale and Pussy Galore devotee (it's a generational thing I suppose). Nevertheless, I was saddened to hear of the death of the English actress Honor Blackman earlier this week, about whom there were several things worthy of admiration:

(i) She retained her beauty and style long into old age ...

(ii) She was an East End girl (born in Plaistow) who always cheerfully identified as a Cockney ...

(iii) She played Mrs Fawcett in Christopher Miles's 1970 film adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's novella The Virgin and the Gipsy.*

(iv) She declined a CBE in 2002 on the grounds of staunch republicanism ...

(v) She called out her Bond co-star Sean Connery in 2012 for being a hypocrite of the first order: "I disapprove of him strongly. I don't think you should accept a title from a country and then pay absolutely no tax towards it. He wants it both ways. I don't think his principles are very high."**

Doubtless there are numerous other reasons to commend this talented and intelligent woman, but even this brief list demonstrates she was a good egg. 


* Thanks to James Walker for reminding me of this.

** From an interview with Nigel Farndale in The Telegraph (27 August 2012).

French Maid

F. H. Clough: The French Maid (1950s)

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French maid, for example ...

I.

Maids - including comely barmaids - have a long-established position within the pornographic imagination for complex reasons involving power and pleasure on the one hand, fantasy and fetish on the other. Indeed, I've written on the psychosexual aspects of this topic in an earlier post and readers who are interested can click here.

In this post, however, I'm specifically interested in the figure of the French maid as trope, stereotype, and soubrette; i.e., as an attractive young woman wearing a skimpy stylised outfit based on the typical uniforms worn in 19th century France. 

This costume - which is instantly recognisable - usually consists of a black dress with white trim and a full skirt cut well above the knee; a frilly white half-apron; a white lace headpiece; sheer black or fishnet stockings (preferably seamed); and high-heeled shoes. Optional accessories include a garter, a choker necklace, and a feather duster.   

Of course, maids - even in France - have never attempted to keep house dressed like this, but that's so beside the point that anyone who stops to raise this as an issue is an idiot. The pornographic imagination is not overly concerned with historical accuracy and the coquettish French maid ooh-la-la-ing her way through life belongs more to the world of burlesque and Benny Hill than domestic service. 

II.

Having said that, the French maid is not simply found in comedy and can sometimes move from sauciness to sadomasochism - as in Jean Genet's play Les Bonnes (1947), loosely based on the shocking story of sisters Christine and Léa Papin, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, in 1933.*

In the play, the two French maids - Solange et Claire - construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals when their mistress (Madame) is away. Their dark role-playing games always involve the murder of the latter. However, their concern with process rather than goal, means they always fail to ceremoniously kill Madame, thereby forever postponing the climax of their fantasy and delaying their own ultimate pleasure. 

The play was performed in London at the Greenwich Theatre in 1973, with Vivien Merchant as Madame, Glenda Jackson as Solange and Susannah York as Claire. This production was filmed in 1974, directed by Christopher Miles, who implemented many of Genet's theatrical devices for the movie.**

Promo photo of Susannah York and 

Glenda Jackson in The Maids (1975)

Notes

* This murder exerted a strange fascination over French intellectuals - including Genet, Sartre and Lacan - many of whom sought to analyse it as a symbolic form of class struggle. The case has since inspired many artworks and further critical studies. 

** The film, made for the American Film Theatre, was released in the US in April 1975, and shown at Cannes the following month (although not entered in the main competition). To watch the trailer, click here.

For a sister post to this one on French kissing, click here. 

For a sister post on French knickers, click here. 

D. H. Lawrence: The Hammer of Love

19th-century wooden poacher's priest

Image: Country Home Antiques

In a letter written to Sallie Hopkin on Christmas Day, 1912, Lawrence declared: I shall always be a priest of love.  

This self-description has proved very popular with his devotees and has served as the title for a critically acclaimed biography of the author by Harry T. Moore and a film of his life, based on Moore's biography, produced and directed by Christopher Miles. Personally, however, I have always rather regretted the phrase and the way in which it's been interpreted by those who insist on viewing Lawrence's work as a type of moral idealism - which, let's be clear, it isn't.       

For whilst Lawrence may have had a beard and been steeped in the language of the Bible, he wasn't a Christian and his understanding of love is radically different from the Love of Christ founded upon self-denial and self-sacrifice and invariably leading us to the Cross.

For Lawrence, this ideal model of love should be regarded as a disease that turns a healthy process of the human soul into something malignant. Altruistic values of pity and equality, which lie at the heart of Christian teaching - and the secular humanism that has grown out of such - are anathema to Lawrence; he believes that such ideals have to be abandoned, allowing us to know one another, as Richard Somers tells Kangaroo, at a deeper level than love.

When the latter lies dying in a hospital bed and insists that there is nothing more essential or greater than love, Somers silently refuses to agree. Not because love isn't an important part of life, but because it is only a part and can never become an "exclusive force or mystery of living inspiration". There is always something else. And this something else is power: that which love hates.   

To argue for love as an absolute - something universal and unbroken, binding all things into Oneness - results ultimately (and ironically) with a recoil into hate and war. Thus, whereas for Freud all that doesn't conform with Eros is permeated with a death instinct, for Lawrence - as for Nietzsche - it is Love with a capital 'L' that expresses a nihilistic will to negate life's difference and becoming.

Those who think that love is all you need fail to understand that you can, in fact, have too much of a good thing. It's because love cannot recognise limits that it ends in tears if allowed to progress too far; men cause or accept death not because they love too little, but too much, says Lawrence. It's important to always remember that above the gates of Hell - and every concentration camp - is a sign that reads: Built in the name of Love.

In sum: Lawrence didn't love Love or posit even his own rather queer model of Eros as his highest ideal, even if he declared himself to be a priest of such.

Indeed, we might even interrogate this term: for is it not possible that Lawrence - who had a penchant for gamekeepers and a familiarity with the tools of their trade - was punning on the word priest and thinking of himself not as a religious figure, but as a blunt instrument who would hammer home his own philosophy and knock the great lie of Love on the head once and for all ...?   

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Letters, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 492-3.

D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 134.