Agnes Ayres: the American actress best known for
her role in The Sheik (1921) alongside Valentino
I have to confess that I rather like the sound of Virginia Bodoin, a character in one of D. H. Lawrence’s short stories.
And what I like most about this woman of thirty is not just that she is a bit odd and elvish with a very slight squint in one of her brown eyes, or that her hair was a natural tangle of curls – though for me these traits are attractive enough in themselves – but more, it’s that she carelessly undermines her own attempts at appearing prim and proper due to a quality which Lawrence describes as sluttishness.
And this quality is nowhere more apparent than in her feet: true, they were elegant; it wasn’t that. Rather it was the fact that she simply couldn’t resist kicking her shoes off at every opportunity, be it indoors or outdoors, even if this meant going barefoot, or displaying a hole in her expensive stockings.
There was, writes Lawrence, “a touch of gamine in her very feet, a certain sluttishness that wouldn’t let them stay properly in nice proper shoes”. This was the fetishistic secret of her charm and helped make her popular with men, two of whom, Henry and Adrian, fall madly in love with her. She was so stylish and had such a lovely, rather low but whimsical voice that enchanted the male soul. And yet she was ever so slightly queer and just a tiny bit sluttish.
How disappointing, therefore, that Lawrence sees fit to marry this intelligent, independent, thoroughly modern woman off to the Turkish Delight; an Armenian not only twice her age, but a fat patriarchal figure who, although happy to trade in the West and adapt himself to the commercial world therein, retains a traditional and tribal mentality.
Arnault loves Virginia, but he essentially thinks her a lost child who needs protecting; to be caressed and cared for – and fattened up! He also recognises her as someone who can help smooth his way into English society and provide him with a swanky London apartment. Thus, for multifarious reasons, he didn’t want merely to fuck Virginia: he wanted also to marry her and to “make himself master of her”.
Again, it seems to me a real shame that Lawrence should suggest that the only way for a girl to escape from a wilful mother - and from becoming a wilful woman in turn - is to give way to destiny and submit to male power and authority; to become, as Mrs Bodoin contemptuously puts it, the harem type ready to take up the veil once more and no longer be burdened with freedom.
One is almost tempted to regard this as a Lawrentian form of slut shaming ...
And what I like most about this woman of thirty is not just that she is a bit odd and elvish with a very slight squint in one of her brown eyes, or that her hair was a natural tangle of curls – though for me these traits are attractive enough in themselves – but more, it’s that she carelessly undermines her own attempts at appearing prim and proper due to a quality which Lawrence describes as sluttishness.
And this quality is nowhere more apparent than in her feet: true, they were elegant; it wasn’t that. Rather it was the fact that she simply couldn’t resist kicking her shoes off at every opportunity, be it indoors or outdoors, even if this meant going barefoot, or displaying a hole in her expensive stockings.
There was, writes Lawrence, “a touch of gamine in her very feet, a certain sluttishness that wouldn’t let them stay properly in nice proper shoes”. This was the fetishistic secret of her charm and helped make her popular with men, two of whom, Henry and Adrian, fall madly in love with her. She was so stylish and had such a lovely, rather low but whimsical voice that enchanted the male soul. And yet she was ever so slightly queer and just a tiny bit sluttish.
How disappointing, therefore, that Lawrence sees fit to marry this intelligent, independent, thoroughly modern woman off to the Turkish Delight; an Armenian not only twice her age, but a fat patriarchal figure who, although happy to trade in the West and adapt himself to the commercial world therein, retains a traditional and tribal mentality.
Arnault loves Virginia, but he essentially thinks her a lost child who needs protecting; to be caressed and cared for – and fattened up! He also recognises her as someone who can help smooth his way into English society and provide him with a swanky London apartment. Thus, for multifarious reasons, he didn’t want merely to fuck Virginia: he wanted also to marry her and to “make himself master of her”.
Again, it seems to me a real shame that Lawrence should suggest that the only way for a girl to escape from a wilful mother - and from becoming a wilful woman in turn - is to give way to destiny and submit to male power and authority; to become, as Mrs Bodoin contemptuously puts it, the harem type ready to take up the veil once more and no longer be burdened with freedom.
One is almost tempted to regard this as a Lawrentian form of slut shaming ...
See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Mother and Daughter', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. by Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Lines quoted on pp. 105 and 118.
