Frida Kahlo and D. H. Lawrence: Mexican Monobrow vs English Red Beard

Frida y Lorenzo (SA/2026) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and English writer D. H. Lawrence never met. 

 

For while he spent a significant amount of time in Mexico between 1923 and 1925, Frida was just a teenager then, even if already moving in the political and artistic circles of Mexico City [2].

 

But they could have met. And one suspects that if Lawrence had died in 1940 rather than 1930, they may very well have crossed paths at some point.

 

It's doubtful, however, that they would have got along ...

 

 

II. 

 

For while they moved in overlapping bohemian circles and shared close mutual friends, they were very different characters belonging to different generations, classes, and cultures, who held very different views on politics, religion, and sex: she was a Marxist atheist who liked to screw around; he wasn't and didn't. 

 

Oh, and Lawrence had been rude about her husband, Diego Rivera, judging his artwork as a failure that stripped the indigenous peoples of Mexico of their complex history and humanity by viewing them through an ideal political lens and turning them into little more than avatars of socialism [3]. 

 

Somehow, I can't imagine that would have endeared him to her ... 

 

 

III. 

It's ironic, therefore, that when Vogue published a review of Kahlo's solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery (NYC, 1938), the reviewer gleefully reported that people were discussing her paintings as "looking like D. H. Lawrence on canvas, all fertility and gore" [4]. 

 

This widely circulated quote permanently linked their names in art history, leading many to assume a personal connection between Kahlo and Lawrence which - as we have indicated - didn't actually exist. 

 

And so we are left to fantasise a meeting between them and overlook the likelihood that they would have detested each other. Indeed, it's easier to imagine her smashing a bottle of tequila over his head (or vice versa) than the two of them playing nice together or making whoopee. 

 

Having said that, I think it's highly likely that Frida Kahlo and Frieda Lawrence would - despite a 27-year age gap - have hit it off had they had the opportunity to meet ...

 

 

IV. 

 

Why do I say that? 

 

Well, for one thing, not only did they share the same name [5], but Kahlo was, in fact, half-German. And so, while Spanish may have been her primary language, Frida konnte Deutsch sprechen und schreiben [6] and would have been able to chat with the German-born Frieda Lawrence in her native tongue.

 

More than this, there were striking similarities in their temperaments and each fully embraced an unconventional lifestyle: Frieda Lawrence was defined by her fierce commitment to emotional honesty, sexual liberation, and the rejection of bourgeois conventions [7]. 

 

She would have admired Kahlo's unapologetic approach to both her art and her love life and found Kahlo's fierce intelligence, sharp wit, and dramatic flair captivating. 

And Kahlo, for her part, would surely have found Mrs Lawrence a kindred spirit - one who valued living with vital intensity and knew how to guard her own identity and freedom whilst married to an internationally famous artist. 

 

The fact that Frieda also spent many years living in Taos, New Mexico and was deeply immersed in the landscape and the culture of the American Southwest, would probably have intrigued Kahlo also.  

 

It's a shame that their mutual friend, Georgia O'Keeffe, never thought to arrange a meeting ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The image is based on a passport picture of Lawrence taken in 1921 and Nickolas Muray's iconic photo of Frida Kahlo wearing a traditional Mexican shawl (known as a rebozo in Spanish) taken in New York, in 1938, prior to her solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery. Visit  artsy.net to view the original colour portrait. 

 

[2] Kahlo was born in July 1907 - so was almost 22 years younger than Lawrence, who was born in September 1885. When she had her fateful accident on 17 September 1925 in Mexico City, aged eighteen, Lawrence had just turned forty and was on board a steamship bound for England. 

      Coincidentally, however, he had almost died in Mexico City himself earlier that year having contracted typhoid, malaria, and a severe bout of flu. He fell so ill that he entered the American Military Hospital and it was there that doctors officially diagnosed his advanced tuberculosis, bluntly informing his wife, Frieda, that he had less than two years to live. 

 

[3] Lawrence didn't produce a dedicated essay on Rivera; instead, his commentary is scattered across fictional works, travel essays, and private letters from his time in Mexico and New Mexico in the 1920s.

      His most sustained (if veiled) critique of Rivera is found in chapter III of The Plumed Serpent (1926): the protagonist Kate Leslie visits the University in Mexico City to look at some newly painted murals (a direct reference to the real-life murals Rivera and his contemporaries were painting on the walls of public institutions at the time). Channelling his own disdain through Kate, Lawrence describes the works as full of caricatures of wicked capitalists and saintly proletarians and notes that the Indians painted on the walls look like flat wooden symbols rather than living human beings. For Lawrence, Rivera was ultimately just another bourgeois bohemian engaged in lazy political posturing. 

      Finally, it is worth noting also that Frida Kahlo's extensive personal library is still preserved at her home turned museum - La Casa Azul - in Coyoacán, and while she owned a vast collection of international literature, Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent is not noted by historians or curators as a prized volume in her collection. 

      In fact, her friend, the American photographer Edward Weston - who also knew and photographed Lawrence during the latter's visit to Mexico City in 1924 - noted in his diary that the intellectual elite in Mexico at the time largely rejected Lawrence's novel as an inaccurate and exoticised view of their nation. 

 

[4] See Bertram D. Wolfe, 'Rise of Another Rivera', Vogue (1 November, 1938).

      Wolfe was an interesting figure: highly active as a communist, art critic and biographer, he later rejected Stalinism and became a fierce anti-communist intellectual. While living in Mexico in the 1920s, he befriended Rivera and wrote extensively on the Mexican mural movement. He also recorded conversations with Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo, which remain vital primary sources for researchers into her life and work. 

 

[5] Frida's father, born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo in the golden city of Pforzheim, moved to Mexico in 1891 (aged 19) and changed his name to Guillermo Kahlo. She permanently dropped the 'e' in her name in 1935 as a political gesture (naturally enough, she wasn't keen to be seen as half-German following the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933), although she also wanted, as an artist, to align herself closely with the people and culture of Mexico. 

 

[6] The multilingual Miss Kahlo also spoke French and English fluently and had familiarity with the indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl. Spanish was the main language used at home when she was growing up with her three sisters primarily because her mother, Matilde Calderón, was of Oaxacan and Spanish descent and did not speak German. 

 

[7] Frieda famously abandoned her children and her status as a professor's wife in England to run away with a penniless and relatively unknown young writer (Lawrence), in 1912.  

 

 

Thanks to Maria Thanassa for suggesting this post. 

 

 

Collecting Conkers in the Autumn

(SA/2026)

 

When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. 

                                                                       - D. H. Lawrence           

 

 

I. 

 

In so far as young children view the world with a deep sense of wonder they are instinctive philosophers, able to find even the most everyday object or occurrence extraordinary and worthy of attention. 

 

Apparently, this is driven by the biological mechanics of an actively developing brain processing external stimuli and attempting to make sense of the world and their experience of the world.    

 

However, as individuals move into adulthood, their brains undergo a process known as sensory habituation and, having turned the world into something known, they wonder less and less. This has the advantage of allowing them to focus on more important things than puddles, and shadows, and spiders' webs. 

 

And they stop collecting conkers in the autumn ... 

 

 

II.    

 

Having said that, there are some people like me who have defective brains. 

 

We never become cognitively efficient; never become habituated to the phenomenal world. Things, for us, are never conceptually stable; they remain vibrant and astonishing (we have stamped becoming with the character of being, as Nietzsche might say).  

 

And that's why people like me either become artists, or poets, or object-oriented ontologists - and why we continue to gather horse chestnuts in the autumn ... 

 

Reflections on Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory in Relation to Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts

 

Virginie Despentes: King Kong Theory 

Cover of the FSG Originals edition (2021) 

 

I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the frigid, the unfucked 

and the unfuckables, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh, 

and for all those guys who don't want to be protectors, for those who 

are not ambitious, competitive, or well-endowed. [1]

 

 

I. 

 

I have to confess, I don't know a great deal about the French writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes, other than that she likes to explore themes of gender, sexuality, and marginalisation and that her work is often labelled transgressive (i.e., that those marketing her books and movies want you to believe they have a certain edgy vibe). 

 

Probably her most famous fictional work is the 1993 novel Baise-moi, which she adapted for film in 2000. Because of its graphic mix of violence and explicit sex scenes, the movie received extensive media coverage - but not great reviews. It is sometimes considered an example of what critics like to refer to as the New French Extremity [2]. 

 

I'm afraid that when I come across any writing which seems to thrill with graphic depictions of rape and murder, I can't help recalling Lawrence's letter to Aldous Huxley in which he warned how this ultimately results in a feeling of profound boredom [3]. 

 

Still, that's just me - and I doubt very much I'm the target audience for this enfant terrible of French cinema and the literary world. 

 

 

II. 

  

When not writing fiction or directing films, Despentes produces cultural theory and feminist philosophy from a radical pro-sex and post-punk perspective. 

 

Her most famous contribution to such is the wonderfully titled 2006 book King Kong Theory - a work which, like Baise-moi, was shaped by her (not particularly pleasant) experiences as a teenaged hitchhiker and groupie and then, later, as a prostitute working in peep shows and massage parlours and walking the streets in low-cut tops and high-heeled shoes, not giving a shit about what people thought of her [4]. 

 

For Despentes, being gang-raped was the price she had to pay for living with total freedom: or living like a man, as she put it [5]. 

 

Or a giant gorilla ...   

 

 

III.  

 

In King Kong Theory, Despentes explicitly informs her readers early on that she is more King Kong than Kate Moss, by which she means "too aggressive, too loud, too fat, too brutish, too hairy, always too mannish" [6] to pass as a waifish and fashionable model of womanhood. 

 

Later, she expands on what it is to be a King Kong Girl: essentially, it's to be transgender and to trouble all binary distinctions; not just male and female, but also human and animal, primitive and civilised, good and evil. 

 

To become King Kong is not just to have an enormous appetite for bananas and destruction, but to realise one's potential for ultra-powerful, polymorphic sexuality and escape the confines of femininity (which she equates with bootlicking and the art of servility). 

 

Arguably, King Kong Theory owes a good deal to a number of earlier works, including Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1968). But it reminds me also of a more recent book, namely, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) and I thought it might be interesting to briefly compare and contrast these three texts ...

 

 

IV.  

 

With its use of aggressive, non-academic, and visceral language to critique patriarchal structures, sexual violence, and societal hierarchies, Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory is most comparable to Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. 

 

Both writers position themselves in the margins and address those excluded from conventional definitions of womanhood, respectability, or desirability. And both authors wilfully court controversy and reject mainstream feminist assimilation, opting instead to shock the reader into a new awareness of gender power dynamics. 

 

However, in terms of their political ideology, they diverge significantly: whereas SCUM girls seek the destruction of society and the elimination of men, King Kong Girls don't subscribe to such a separatist (and androcidal) revolutionary model. 

 

They seek only their own survival and autonomy whilst holding to the hope of building new relationships in a trans-future which liberates both men and women from the current forced masquerade of gender. For Despentes, feminism is ultimately a collective adventure. 

 

I think Despentes is a little less crazy than Solanas - she isn't going to shoot anyone (even if she promises to provide a gun for every girl) and King Kong Theory is rooted more in sincere personal memoir (with its mix of trauma and vulnerability) than razor sharp political satire. 

 

Ultimately, this makes it much less fun to read than SCUM, although, for those who like the kind of confessional writing (or autotheory) peddled by Despentes, King Kong Theory is more moving on a human level. 

 

And it is precisely this shift toward the deeply personal, structurally fluid world of autotheory that brings me to Maggie Nelson ...        

 

 

V.

 

By Nelson's own account, King Kong Theory was a direct inspiration on her book The Argonauts [7]. 

 

Both books are a very skilful blend of deeply personal memoir and critical theory used to dissolve traditional ideas - including mainstream feminist ideas - about gender, sex, and societal expectations and both writers refuse to separate the ideological from the biological. 

 

Thus, it is that their philosophical thinking is rooted in the messy reality of their own bodies, sex lives, and personal histories (interestingly, both authors identified as lesbians, but both became romantically involved with women who then transitioned to men) [8]. 

 

Despite sharing certain foundational similarities, there are contrasting structural differences between King Kong Theory and The Argonauts and their tone and style are very different. I wouldn't necessarily say that Nelson is the more gifted writer, but she's definitely the more lyrical and coolly analytic; less punk, perhaps, but more poetic and intellectual. 

 

Personally, as much as I like Despentes's use of a monstrous metaphor - King Kong - to describe polymorphic sexuality and a non-heteronormative way of being in the world, I think Nelson's mythological metaphor (borrowed from Roland Barthes) - the Argonauts' ship - is not only more subtle and sophisticated, but more useful for thinking about the continually changing nature of queer identity. 

 

In sum: Despentes's King Kong Theory is probably closer in anger and attitude to Solanas's Scum Manifesto than to Nelson's The Argonauts. But in as much as King Kong Theory blends personal memoir with gender theory and addresses queer marginalized lived experience, you'd have to say that it anticipates the latter work more than it recalls the former.  

 

 

VI.

 

A friend of mine asked which of the three books I would recommend for her fourteen-year-old daughter - which is a tricky question to answer. 

 

Liberal-minded people doubtless wouldn't hesitate to suggest The Argonauts as the most age-appropriate work and there is a lot to argue in favour of this. 

 

Maggie Nelson's book is a thoughtful, beautifully written piece of autotheory and for a teenager growing up in today's world, it offers a nuanced, empathetic, and highly relevant look at how we construct our identities and relationships. Whilst rich in fairly complex ideas, The Argonauts remains grounded in a real-world domestic situation and is written (for want of another word) with love [9]. 

 

However, I'm not particularly liberal-minded and always feel instinctively drawn to that which is inappropriate ... 

 

And so I think I'd probably go with the SCUM Manifesto - even at the risk that this might be misinterpreted by a young mind and taken all-too-literally. King Kong Theory loses out simply on the grounds that I think it offers far fewer laughs and, ultimately, as Lawrence warned about obscenely graphic writing, it can become boring and a bit depressing after a while. 

 

And - to be perfectly honest - I'd rather my friend's daughter dreamed of becoming a thrill-seeking female intent on overthrowing governments, destroying the male sex, cracking jokes, and building a magical world rather than thinking about the grim reality of pornography, prostitution, and gang-rape.  

Ultimately, with its cynicism, nihilism, and dark humour I still think the SCUM Manifesto is more punk than King Kong Theory [10] - despite the gritty authenticity of the latter and its liberal use of expletives. 

  

Notes

 

[1] This is a composite quote from the opening section ('Bad Lieutenants') to Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory, translated by Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020). The original French edition, King Kong théorie, was published by Grasset in 2006. 

      Previous English-language editions, trans. Stéphanie Benson, were published by Serpent's Tail (2009) and The Feminist Press (2010). 

 

[2] As a noun, un baiser simply means a kiss. But as a verb, baiser means to fuck. And so Baise-moi is best translated in English as Fuck Me. In some markets, however, Despentes's film is known as Rape Me - a mistranslation with which she has expressed her displeasure in interviews.

      As for the term New French Extremity, this was first coined by critic James Quandt in 2004 in a piece complaining about the violent turn that French filmmaking appeared to have taken in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

 

[3] In a letter to Huxley written in October 1929, Lawrence writes: "If you can only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape [...] however are we going to live [...] it becomes a phantasmal boredom and produces ultimately inertia [...] and final atrophy of the feelings." See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 600. 

 

[4] See the section 'Sleeping With the Enemy' in King Kong Theory where Despentes discusses her time as a sex worker. She claims one of the things she found most difficult about the job was dealing with the loneliness and vulnerability of the men who were her clients. She positively contrasts sex work with heterosexual relationships in which, as she puts it, women are fucked for free.

 

[5] That's maybe an unfair (reductive) characterisation of Despentes's position. 

      In the section of her book titled 'You Can't Rape a Woman Who's a Total Slut', Despentes recounts her experience of being gang-raped in 1986 at the age of seventeen, and explains how she has processed the experience since. 

      Her account and response is more nuanced than I imply. She notes, for example, how women who have been raped are socially encouraged to blame themselves and harbour feelings of guilt and shame for not resisting (this is, in fact, one of her central arguments). Despentes also suggests that female rape fantasies do not indicate an inherent desire for subjugation, but are the result of a patriarchal system that conflates female sexuality with powerlessness and oppression.  

      At the same time, however, it should be noted that Despentes famously rejects the status of dignified victim and this rejection is crucial to her punk-feminist philosophy in King Kong Theory. She will not feel shame and she will not be silent and prefers to assert angry agency rather than ask for pity (or even demand justice in the traditional legal sense). She explicitly claims that rape did not destroy or defeat her, even if it did permanently change her and lead to her wider political awakening.

 

[6] Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory, trans. Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), p. 14. 

 

[7] Maggie Nelson generously provides a blurb for the Fitzcarraldo edition of King Kong Theory in which she writes: "I can think of almost no book I've enjoyed in recent years as much as King Kong Theory - in part for its content, in part for the ferocity of its style. [...] This book is a classic, and I'm grateful for it."

 

[8] Despentes dated Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado from 2005 to 2014; Maggie Nelson is married to the artist and writer Harry Dodge. The Argonauts largely chronicles their relationship and experiences with queer domesticity and family life. 

 

[9] I published a two-part post on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts back in April 2025. To access part one of this post (on pp. 1-74 of the book), click here. There is a link to the second part of the post (pp. 75-180) at the end of part one. 

 

[10] For a recent post on Valerie Solanas's place in the punk imagination - with particular reference to the history of the Sex Pistols, click here.    

 

 

Bonus: Frank Wynne reads from Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory (Fitzcarraldo, 2020 / FSG, 2021).

 

 

Reflections on Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères (1969) 3: La guerre! À quoi ça sert?

Monique Wittig (1935-2003) 

French feminist philosopher and author of 

Les Guérillères (1969)  

 Let the sun shine / the world is ours!

 

 

I.

 

Monique Wittig published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964 and it won her immediate attention both at home and abroad.  

 

But it's her second book, Les Guérillères (1969) - a landmark text in the lesbian feminist canon - that is our concern here [a]. In particular, the third part of this novel, having previously discussed the first two parts in two earlier posts: click here. This third part recounts the war fought between the two political classes (or 'sexes') that ends with the establishment of a lesbian sovereign state. 

 

For Wittig, as a radical lesbian writer, it's not just men who are the problem: heterosexuality is itself a political regime (and form of normativity) that must be overthrown, thereby dissolving the categories of man and woman. Feminists who failed (or refused) to see this and called for reform were, in her view, simply rearranging the furniture along straight lines.  

 

It all sounds very revolutionary, but I suspect Judith Butler was right to identify a lingering metaphysics of presence in Wittig's thinking - i.e., something that presupposes a pre-discursive and universal human subject (though defenders of Wittig argue that this is a misunderstanding of her work).   

 

 

II.

   

Part three opens with a couple of passages, worth quoting in full and discussing in detail, that certainly make one sit up and take note:

 

"Look at him, this cripple, who hides his calves as best he can. Look at his timid springless gait. In his cities it is easy to do him violence. You lie in wait for him at a street-corner one night. He thinks you are beckoning to him. You profit by this to take him by surprise, he hasnt even the reflex to cry out. Ambushed in his towns you chase him, you lay hands on him, you capture him, you surprise him shouting with all your might."  (60)

 

"The women say that they could not eat hare veal or fowl, they say that they could not eat animals, but man, yes, they may. He says to them throwing his head back with pride, poor wretches of women, if you eat him who will go to work in the fields, who will produce food consumer goods, who will make the aeroplanes, who will pilot them, who will provide the spermatozoa, who will write the books, who in fact will govern? Then the women laugh, baring their teeth to the fullest extent." (60)

 

Now, obviously, Wittig is not advocating violence against disabled men [b] or cannibalism (at least I don't think so). The passages are meant, one assumes, as provocative satire, subverting traditional gender roles and critiquing the arrogance and violence of the old carnophallogocentric regime that systematically oppressed women and consumed the flesh of animals.     

 

When Wittig refers to the man as a cripple to be chased and ambushed in city streets, or as something to be captured, cooked, and eaten, she is reversing the historical portrayal of women as weak and vulnerable targets in urban spaces and of animals as merely things to be hunted or factory farmed. She is asking men: How does it feel to be victimised? How does it feel to be preyed upon? 

 

The response to this encapsulates the conceited belief that society cannot function without male authority, labour, and leadership: that man is indispensable. 

 

Wittig thinks this laughable - although it might be noted that the dissident feminist Camille Paglia would absolutely agree that the modern world heavily relies upon men doing much of the most dangerous and dirty work and she would criticise Wittig for ignoring the fact that not only have men constructed the great cities, but the conceptual universe as well [c]. 

 

 

III.

 

I'm glad to discover that Wittig's neo-Amazons keep up the fine tradition of going into battle topless. Upon a given signal, "the women [...] uttering a terrible cry, suddenly rip off the upper part of their garments, uncovering their naked gleaming breasts" (61).  

 

Some of them, laughing as they do so, aggressively (and defiantly) thrust their breasts forward. 

 

Now, it should be pointed out that what I describe as a fine tradition is actually an ancient myth rather than historical military practice. Even the original Amazons, as fierce a tribe of female warriors as ever lived, probably wore standard protective clothing and armour and didn't go into battle with their tits out (and nor, for the record, did they remove their right breast in order to handle their weapons more effectively). 

 

I'm sure Wittig would be aware of this. And so, perhaps - being French and of a revolutionary disposition - she was thinking more of Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830) ... 

 

 

IV. 

Les guérillères paint their faces and their limbs in bright colours with war paint. They utter cries that are so truly blood-curdling that "many of their adversaries drop their weapons" (63) and run for the hills in great terror and confusion, attempting to block up their ears as they do so.  

 

And run they might: for the women delight in mass slaughter - they even have a death chant that calls upon the vultures to feast on the corpses they have supplied - and when on the rare occasion that they do take male prisoners, they strip them naked and make them parade through the streets so that they can be jeered and spat at. 

 

Having been publicly (and sexually) humiliated, they are then subjected to extreme torture, using the greatest possible violence: "The women stop their ears with wax so as not hear their discordant cries." (68) When dead, the bodies are flayed and the skins are tanned in the usual manner or put on public display in the sun.   

Paradise exists in the shadow of the sword ... the torture chamber and the mass grave [d]. 

 

 

V.

 

Somewhat strangely, considering their love of snakes commented on in part two of this post (fragment xii), Wittig's warrior women dream of the time when they can crush the head of the serpent who encouraged Eve to eat the apple. 

 

Personally, I think the Lawrentian idea of reconciliation is better. 

 

In a discarded passage from The Plumed Serpent (1926), the revolutionary leader Don Ramón instructs Kate Leslie to go tell her fellow Irish women that "the Cross is a Tree again, and they may eat the fruit if they can reach the branches [...] the snake coils in peace around the ankle of Eve, and she no longer tries to bruise his head" [e].   

 

Like Lawrence, I am of the view that peace needs to be made with the serpent and acknowledged as having its own being. Not crushed or cast out, denigrated or denied [f]. 

 

 

VI. 

 

Readers might be pleased to hear that eventually there is a peace and reconciliation between the sexes - that rather than maintaining a permanent separatist state, the women accept the young men into their new world beneath a honey-coloured sun (although only after they have put to the sword "all those who do not acknowledge their might" (81) and accept the radical dismantling of gender binaries).  

 

They assure the young men that they have been fighting for their future and their freedom too. Gathering at an outdoor celebration of music, food, language, and love, les guérillères say: "let there be erased from human memory the longest most murderous war it has ever known" (79). 

 

They express their wish that all survivors will "form a lasting alliance that no future dispute can compromise" (79). And that's got to be better, surely, than turning the earth into hell ...? 

 

After all, permanent insurrection - driven by anger and the politics of hate - gets to be a bit of a bore and if it's fun at first to be more barbarous than Attila the Hun, one can't help recalling Lawrence's words in a letter to Aldous Huxley: "if you only palpitate to murder" it ultimately produces inertia and an "atrophy of the feelings" [g].  

 

So - all's well that ends well, then? Not quite. For the New Order is marked by mass book burnings and a Year Zero ideology. I express my concern with these things in part one of this post (fragment xix). 

 

And I can't help wondering just how happy the young men with their smooth round faces really are living in a lesbian utopia, with its permanently mild climate and unchanging seasons, and all dressed (somewhat ironically) in identical little-boy blue clothing ...?

 

We are told that these young men with their shrunken loins and trembling with emotion are "full of grace and beauty" (87), but they have basically been emasculated and feminised. 

 

The war is over! The war is over! cry les guérillères. 

 

Yet one notices that they still dress in militant black and remain armed to the teeth with clubs, knives, rifles, and rocket launchers - and some continue to parade around bare-breasted, just to let the young men know they remain warriors still.  

 

Notes

 

[a] Considered a pivotal text by feminist and lesbian thinkers, Les Guérillères was originally published by Les Editions de Minuit (1969). David Le Vay's 1971 English translation has been used in numerous editions, including the Beacon Press edition (1985) and the University of Illinois Press edition (2007).

      Here, I am using the /ubu Editions e-book (2007). This free digital publishing project - created as part of UbuWeb - is an online archive for avant-garde writing founded by the American poet and cultural provocateur Kenneth Goldsmith. 

 

[b] I have to say, even when understood as symbolism designed to shock readers, using disability as a metaphor for weakness or vulnerability is problematic, relying as it does on harmful, real-world stereotypes about disabled bodies. For many contemporary readers, such imagery is offensive, regardless of the author's intent.

 

[c] In Sexual Personae (1990), Paglia outlines her belief that civilisation is an Apollonian fabrication i.e., a structure of order, geometry, law, and leadership created by men to defend against the chaotic, untamed forces of nature (the Dionysian or chthonic realm). Ever the provocateuse, Paglia famously argued that building civilisation had been left in female hands, we would still be living in mud huts. 

      Somewhat paradoxically, however, Paglia does not believe this is because men are stronger than women; on the contrary, she sees masculinity as fragile and in constant need of social reinforcement. 

      Readers might be interested in an article by Mark J. Perry published on the American Enterprise Institute's website (9 Sept 2018) discussing Paglia's view on the indispensability of men: click here.    

[d] The mutilated bodies of those men either killed in battle or in captivity, are thrown into a mass grave. The bodies of the many women killed are placed side by side in communal graves: "All the bodies have been mummified and treated with care for long preservation." (81)

 

[e] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 547.

 

[f] See the post 'Lawrence, Derrida, and the Snake' (17 July 2025), where I develop this theme with reference to Jacques Derrida's reading of Lawrence's poem 'Snake' in his 2009 book The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I., trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago University Press). 

 

[g] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton, Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 600. The letter has been dated by the editors as 28 October, 1928.

 

 

Reflections on Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères (1969) 2: Fragments of Myth & Memory

Blazing genital / the eternal circle is your symbol [a] 

 

 

Opening Remarks 

 

Having explored part one of Monique Wittig's novel Les Guérillères (1969) [b] in twenty fragments from a lesbian utopia, here we are going to reflect on (and summarise) part two. 

 

Again, let me confess from the outset that as much as I admire this text, it's one that I find difficult to follow at times due to its rejection of a linear structure. But then, of course, it wasn't written for me - lacking as I do a vagina and preferring fact and forgetfulness over myth and memory. 

 

 

Twenty Fragments of Myth & Memory 

 

(i) 

 

Part two opens with a story told by someone called Sophie Ménade - which simply has to be a pseudonym [c]. Her tale is an imaginative retelling of several older myths, including the biblical story found in Genesis of Eve and the serpent, and is designed to subvert ancient wisdom (inherently phallogocentric as it is). 

 

In Sophie's version of events, a naked black woman with a beautiful, glistening body walks through a colourful, vibrant orchard. She possesses a "hortative head of hair" (32) made of thousands of musical snakes that give her advice. 

 

Her favourite snake, Orpheus, does not tempt her toward sin or downfall, instead, he encourages her to eat the fruit in the centre of the garden and persuades her that all things which sparkle are good (even if all that glitters is not gold). 

 

I guess the idea is that we can trust our senses and should judge by the immediate, visceral experience of beauty as it is communicated to us - something that D. H. Lawrence would approve of, even if he speaks of things that glow rather than sparkle [d]. 

 

Sophie Ménade closes her address to the women by promising that, one day, they will have a clear understanding of a solar myth that will instruct them how to walk the earth as sun-women: 

 

"At these words the women begin to dance, stamping the ground with their feet. They begin a round dance, clapping their hands, giving voice to a song from which no coherent phrase emerges." (32) [e] 

 

(ii) 

 

Although they lead quite a hippie-ish lifestyle, the women are first and foremost warriors and live to make war not love and to demonstrate "their strength and their courage" (32) on the battlefield. 

 

The clue, of course, is in the word guérillères. 

 

(iii) 

 

Literacy is something else that matters greatly to these women: not a moment passes without one of them writing something in a great public register, or else reading aloud some passage. Interestingly, this is one of the main differences between Wittig's text and William Burroughs's novel The Wild Boys (1971) [f]. 

 

For although both books function as speculative, mythic fiction that uses experimental prose to narrate the violent overthrow of global heteropatriarchy by armed, gender-segregated combatants - and both authors believe that traditional narrative structures are inherently tied to oppressive systems of thought, meaning that language itself must be fractured - Wittig views language as a contestable area that can be reclaimed and rewritten, whereas Burroughs sees it as an alien virus used by the state to programme human behaviour. 

 

Ultimately, his goal is not to write a queer new language, but to destroy language entirely so as to achieve absolute silent consciousness. 

 

(iv) 

 

One of the women - Phiomèle Sarte [g] - loves to sing while squatting on her heels and swinging her breasts from side to side. When she finally stops singing, she falls face down on the floor, spent with joy and exhaustion, and has to be carried home to her bed. That, or left on the grass to sleep in the sun. 

 

One critic explains that this is a primal, ritualistic act that is all about reclaiming bodily autonomy and experiencing the kind of pleasure that the French call jouissance. The fact that, after she has collapsed, she is cared for shows the sense of community and mutual support among the women. 

 

Of course, that's a reading that insists on the novel as a utopian work of allegorical fiction. More literal-minded readers might worry that the woman is mentally ill and clearly needs medical assistance rather than being left to lie on the grass or dumped back home to sleep it off (they might even call this neglectful behaviour). 

 

(v) 

 

It seems that the glenuri are not the only strange creatures found in Wittig's novel ... 

 

Meet the julep - an animal "without head or tail that [...] spins on itself without uttering a sound" (33), so named because of its "predilection for rosewater" (35). Sometimes it is covered with scales; "at others it is covered with feathers" (33). It can sometimes emit a faint but unpleasant odour (a bit like garlic). 

 

The little girls have tried to tame them: "They put them on a leash to drag them behind them. But even pulling with all their might they cannot succeed in making the juleps budge." (35) 

 

Again, all of this means nothing to me, I'm afraid: I don't even find it particularly whimsical. 

 

However, I've read that some feminist scholars think that the julep is an allegorical symbol for the clitoris: that by representing the latter as an independent creature Wittig isolates it from old ways of thinking and establishes it as an autonomous site of female pleasure [h]. 

 

I'm not entirely convinced by this, but, in the absence of any better theory, I'm happy to accept it. 

 

(vi) 

 

This made me smile: 

 

"The women say that they perceive their bodies in their entirety. They say that they do not favour any of its parts on the grounds that it was formerly a forbidden Object. They say that they do not want to become prisoners of their own ideology. [...] For example they do not [...] say that the vulvas are like black suns in the shining night." (35) 

 

And the reason it made me smile is because this is precisely what they do and say ...! [i] 

 

Obviously, as a novel, Les Guérillères has no index. But if it did, the word vulva would feature at least ten times more than any other term. For as I said in the first part of this post, this is a book of aggressive vulva activism and cunt awareness - a space in which philosophers and insects quickly lose their way. 

 

Having said that, see fragment (x) below. 

 

(vii) 

 

The women are warned: Beware of dispersal! Do not abandon the collectivity! If I were one of their number, it's precisely at this point I would scat like a cat and sever all ties. 

 

(viii) 

 

Considering the women are meant to be happy holding hands, drinking, laughing, playing, etc., an awful amount of weeping goes on in Wittig's book. Particularly in the winter months when they roll in the snow and "sobs rack their bodies" (37). 

 

Sometimes, it is so cold that "the frost solidifies their tears" until they "shine and sparkle on their cheeks" (37). Which is strange, because I thought they were living on tropical islands in the equatorial region, where it would normally snow on the highest mountain peaks. 

 

Or is this a memory of an earlier time and place? I feel a bit lost. And a bit confused. And, to be honest, a bit bored. 

 

(ix) 

 

I don't know why, but the story of Adèle Donge and the meticulous embalming of her corpse (described in some detail), reminded me of the scene in David Fincher's Fight Club (1999) when the dead body of Robert Paulson is laid on the table and everyone begins to chant his name (even though in Project Mayhem each member is stripped of their individual identity). 

 

Her name is Adèle Donge ... Her name is Adèle Donge ... 

 

And it's a name heavily layered with historical, literary, and thematic meaning. For her surname is a reference to Marie Donge, the protagonist of Georges Simenon's famous 1942 novel La Vérité sur Bébé Donge. 

 

In the book, Mme. Donge is a desperate housewife who cannot take it anymore and so quietly and meticulously poisons her unfaithful husband with arsenic. By taking the surname and placing it into a setting of free, armed warriors, Wittig liberates the figure of the oppressed wife, transforming her from a domestic victim into a venerated, legendary figure of a sovereign female collective. 

 

As for the first name, Adèle, this derives from the Germanic word for noble. Now, of course, in a traditional patriarchal context, nobility is tied to lineage and male inheritance. But in Les Guérillères, it is earned on the battlefield and comes with death and the quasi-sacred ritual of her embalming. 

 

Her body is preserved like that of an ancient Egyptian queen and revered by her sisters, just as Bob Paulson was turned into a martyr and accorded posthumous status by his brothers-in-arms. In other words, in both Wittig's novel and Fincher's film, we witness the creation of a new sovereign mythology achieved through mourning and remembrance. 

 

(x) 

 

To be fair to the women, they do, at some point, realise that it's just as silly to worship the cunt as it is the phallus and that they must "examine the principle that has guided them" (44) and not exhaust themselves in symbolism or become trapped by their own anatomy. 

 

If you really want to rediscover the body and what it can do, then one must listen to Artaud: lose the organs and reject the metaphysical overcoding and bio-functional organ-isation of the body into the organism [j]. 

 

(xi) 

 

The feminist rejection of the domestic life and of work which has traditionally been regarded as suitable for them is celebrated in a huge bonfire of various objects and machines, including sewing-machines, typewriters, knitting-needles, ironing-boards, saucepans, brooms of every bristle, vacuum cleaners, washing-machines, etc. 

 

"They heap them on to an immense pyre to which they set fire, blowing up everything that will not burn. Then, starting to dance round it, they clap their hands, they shout obscene phrases, they cut their hair or let it down." (45) 

 

While part of me smiles, the problem with this kind of action is that it's so easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater - but then, les guérillères probably don't care too much about that; they want to be Amazons, not mothers, and reject the biological and social reduction of women to mere reproductive vessels. 

 

If they do become pregnant and are obliged to eventually give birth, they view the latter as another kind of bloody battle and see the baby not so much as a bundle of joy but as something that has been captured. 

 

(xii) 

 

Torpedophiles will know that I have had a long interest in the strangely erotic relationship between women and snakes - see the post titled 'Ophidicism' (18 August 2013), for example. 

 

And so, I was happy to discover that some of Wittig's warrior women enjoy coiling snakes around their bodies and engaging in ancient pagan practices that involve putting lips to scales and ritually kissing serpents. 

 

(xiii) 

 

The women decide to produce a new (post-patriarchal) dictionary in which the word hate has been redefined as a form of vital energy. 

 

Now that's something I would support: for like William Hazlitt, I'm of the view that there's a real pleasure to be found in hating things - that hate is more than merely a reactive form of love and that, ultimately, it's hate, not love or truth, that will set you free [k]. 

 

(xiv) 

 

Great gatherings of uniformed women all marching in unison - possibly even more depressing than great gatherings of uniformed men all marching in unison. 

 

I hate great gatherings. I hate uniforms. And I hate the sight of people marching. 

 

And the sight of horses wounded and maimed by war is simply heartbreaking - far more so than the sight of human combatants bleeding or missing limbs. 

 

(xv) 

 

Les guérillères mourn all women who are victims of male violence and who have been hanged, beheaded, or "broken alive on the wheel in a public square" (50). 

 

As far as they are concerned, all these women are daughters of Eve and to the one who asks the nature of their crime they answer: "It was identical with that of the woman of whom it is written that she saw that the tree of the garden was good to eat [...] and that it was the tree requisite for gaining understanding" (50). 

 

(xvi) 

 

Flags are flown and trumpets sounded: let the war against men commence! The women laugh and shout and spit blood in the midst of battle, stepping over the bodies of fallen comrades: 

 

"The women say they have learned to rely on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say that they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning." (52) 

 

They say a lot of things. But I say (after Foucault) that they should beware of the fascism ingrained in their own behaviour and idealism that causes the love of power and violence, the desire for Year Zero. 

 

(xvii) 

 

"They say that it is better to die than to live as slaves." (57) 

 

That's true, some famous figures (and former slaves) including Frederick Douglass, Samuel Sharpe, and Harriet Ann Jacobs have all agreed on this point, arguing that when a person is legally and economically reduced to the status of property or livestock, then the only way they can affirm their humanity is by consciously choosing their own death (the ultimate expression of free will). 

 

But I don't think this should be allowed to pass without at least some resistance. For such idealism - which often seems to equate death with a form of escape and freedom - very often has fatal consequences not just for those who subscribe to it [l]. 

 

Critics of this supposed noble truth - one that is ironically born of slave morality - point out that equating death with freedom is, at best, a logical fallacy and often betrays a religious mindset. For death is not the gateway to the freedom that awaits in the afterlife. Death is the stripping away of all essence and agency; a festive return to the material realm. 

 

Further, many historians point out that staying alive under oppression is its own form of defiance and that survival allows for the possibility of future rebellion, the preservation of culture, and to act as a historical witness. 

 

(xviii) 

 

A stylised performance that mimics combat movements, a war dance was traditionally used to prepare for battle, celebrate victory, or honour spiritual and tribal values. 

 

Wittig's warrior women begin their dance by stepping forward lightly, moving in a circle, holding hands and carefully observing the music. 

 

But, as they become more ecstatic, they leap about like young horses, stamping the ground and beating out the rhythm of a dance dedicated to the goddess Minerva: "Their violence is extreme. They crash into each other with bravura. No one can restrain them." (61)

 

(xix) 

 

This is the sort of paragraph that one might have expected to see Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood used on a shirt design for SEX or Seditionaries, or that Jamie Reid might have incorporated into a piece of artwork for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, describing the Sex Pistols: 

 

"They say that they foster disorder in all its forms. Confusion troubles violent debates disarray upsets disturbances incoherences irregularities divergences complications disagreements discords clashes polemics discussions contentions brawls disputes conflicts routs débâcles cataclysms disturbances quarrels agitation turbulence conflagrations chaos anarchy." (57) 

 

(xx) 

 

I'm not a pacifist. But I don't like those who glorify modern warfare and thrill to the thought of exterminating their enemy. And so, I don't much care for this from the very end of part two of Les Guérillères: 

 

"Their favourite weapons are portable. [...] There is every kind of rifle. There are machine guns and rocket-launchers. [...] The objective is not to gain ground but to destroy the greatest number of the enemy [...]" (58) 

 

I refer readers to the end of section (xvi) above re fascism and would remind them also of what Nietzsche says about honouring one's adversary - not seeking their annihilation. 

 

Having a worthy enemy should be a point of pride; their strength forces you to raise your own game and overcome your own weaknesses. Ultimately, it might be the case that not only does one find one's best enemy in one's best friend, but one locates one's best friend in one's best enemy. 

 

The true warrior does not seek to humiliate or crush an opponent, but happily engage in struggle with them. Unfortunately, it seems that in war as in love, woman is more barbarous than man ... [m] 

 

 

Notes 

 

[a] In her 1969 novel Les Guérillères, Monique Wittig uses the recurring letter 'O' as a powerful graphic and poetic device to primarily symbolise three things: female anatomy and sexuality (the vulval ring); a new point of origin free from old values that enables women to completely reinvent language, culture, and society (the mathematical zero); the unity of the lesbian sisterhood and community of warrior women (the circle of trust). 

 

[b] Considered a pivotal text by feminist and lesbian thinkers, Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig was originally published by Les Editions de Minuit (1969). David Le Vay's 1971 English translation has been used in numerous editions, including the Beacon Press edition (1985) and the University of Illinois Press edition (2007). 

      Here, I am using the /ubu Editions e-book (2007). This free digital publishing project - created as part of UbuWeb - is an online archive for avant-garde writing founded by the American poet and cultural provocateur Kenneth Goldsmith. 

 

[c] I say this because the name 'Sophie Ménade' is simply too good (too convenient) to be true; the forename being the French spelling of the Greek word for wisdom [σοφία] and the surname meaning a wildly excited (possibly violent) woman who is either divinely inspired or a little bit crazy. It comes from the Greek term μαίνομαι (maínomai), which is where the female followers of Dionysus took their name from. 

 

[d] See Lawrence's essay 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 192, where he rejects the folk wisdom of base-born proverbs that denigrate beauty and cause us to doubt our own senses. "If you can't trust the impression which things make on you", he writes, "you are a fool." 

      See also the article 'Sex Appeal' in the same volume, pp. 143-148, in which he writes of beauty as an experience. 

 

[e] Again, one can't help but be reminded of Lawrence who also speaks of women in a time to come who belong neither to men nor their children nor even themselves, but to the sun. See D. H. Lawrence. 'Sun-women', in The Poems Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 456. 

 

[f] I recently wrote a post titled 'Dancing in the Rain' (3 Sept 2016) which discusses Burroughs's Wild Boys novel in relation to the song by Duran Duran. 

      One day, I will write the comparative study I promised on Wittig's novel and Burroughs's book. While their violent revolutionary fantasies share much in common and both works read like ancient epic poetry or future tribal histories rather than traditional novels, their ultimate political destinations represent two entirely different poles of radical separatism. 

      In brief, Wittig celebrates the total destruction of phallocracy to liberate the female body and construct a world based on collective sisterhood (which eventually incorporates men who surrender their patriarchal power). Burroughs's utopia, on the other hand, is an exclusively male, homoerotic universe that eliminates women completely (his future world relies on cloning, not sexual reproduction). She wants an egalitarian society free of sex and class dynamics; Burroughs envisions his wild boys one day abandoning the Earth and mutating into alien space beings. 

 

[g] A name that playfully suggests this woman is a lover of songs with existential meaning. In Greek mythology, Philomela is an Athenian princess who after some great tragedy befalls her is transformed by the gods into a nightingale. And Sarte ... well, I probably don't need to explain the cultural and philosophical resonances of this name (even when missing an 'r'). 

 

[h] Feminist theorists have been keen to posit the clitoris as a highly sensitive and complex organ that challenges religious, social, medical, and literary frameworks that have traditionally ignored, denied, or downplayed female pleasure. 

      One might recall Lady Chatterley's lover, Oliver Mellors, raging about the clitoris (or what he calls the beak). In his phallocentric view, a mature woman should only achieve orgasm through vaginal penetration by the penis. Clitoral stimulation is, in his opinion, an immature, inferior, and even unnatural way for a woman to derive pleasure. See chapter 14 of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). 

 

[i] This claim that the women do not "say that vulvas with their elliptical shape are to be compared to suns, planets, innumerable galaxies" or that the cunt "is the primal form which as such describes the world in all its extent, in all its movement" is repeated on p. 37. But despite this insistence, I still think that this is what many of the women believe. 

 

[j] See Antonin Artaud's 1947 text (performed as a radio play) Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of God), in which he declares that there is 'nothing more useless than an organ' - even our sex organs. See also Deleuze and Guattari's development of Artaud's thinking in Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). 

 

[k] See the post 'And Hate Shall Set You Free' (15 Aug 2025). And see also the much earlier post 'Torpedo the Ark Means: I Hate Everything' (15 Nov 2014). 

 

[l] Indeed, it might be argued that this is often a luxury belief; that romanticising death over slavery is often an attitude held by those who are not actually facing the immediate reality of being killed. 

      The American Founding Father, Patrick Henry, for example, did not die violently, nor did he ever have to choose between literal death or slavery. Instead, he lived a relatively long and prosperous life and died peacefully at home. When he delivered his famous 'Give me liberty, or give me death!' speech at the Second Virginia Convention in March 1775, he was speaking rhetorically and using slavery as a political metaphor (his actual objection was to British rule and the imposition of taxes by the Crown - and it might also be noted by those who appreciate a little irony that he himself was a major slaveholder). 

 

[m] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche's line from Beyond Good and Evil (1886): "In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man." Trans. from the German by R. J. Hollingdale in the Penguin edition (1990), IV. 139, p. 101.

 

 

To read the third and final part of this post, please click here. 

 

 

Depigmentation: Notes on How Schopenhauer, D. H. Lawrence, and Frances Cress Welsing Constructed Whiteness

Schopenhauer, D. H. Lawrence, and Frances Cress Welsing 

 

Forced into a strange world, Caucasians are almost an abnormality; 

analogous to white mice, or at the very least grey horses. 

 

 

I. 

 

The tragic case of Jason Arday is unfortunate for many reasons - not least because it gives reactionary morons the opportunity to sneer at those with an interest in critical race theory and how whiteness as a conceptual identity is constructed and functions within modern society as a cultural and political norm. 

 

This is not an area of research with which I'm overly-familiar. But it does interest and, from what little I have read, it seems to me that there's a good deal of fascinating (and important) work being carried out. 

 

Indeed, if I were a postgrad student today looking for an idea to develop into a doctoral thesis, I would be tempted to examine how Schopenhauer's thinking on skin colour influenced later authors, including D. H. Lawrence, and how it relates also to pseudo-scientific theories to do with race, such as the one advanced by the American psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing in 1970. 

 

Without attempting to provide a detailed proposal for such a project, I'd like to briefly touch on one or two points here that might be central to the above ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Seeking to explain why it is that blonde-haired, white-skinned persons are physically drawn to dark-haired, brown-skinned people - a sweeping claim asserted without any empirical or statistical evidence to support it - Schopenhauer develops a speculative evolutionary theory rooted in his own philosophy of the will (i.e., the unconscious drive he posits as underpinning all reality). 

 

His argument is that sexual attraction is no more a free personal choice than anything else in this life and that it rests upon the instinctive desire not only to procreate, but to ensure that biological deviations from the original human type are balanced out in the offspring. As he believes whiteness to be an example of such a deviation - almost an abnormality - it is perfectly natural, therefore, that white people seek out partners of colour. 

 

Schopenhauer concludes his thinking on that exotic plant that is the white man by insisting that in no region of the world is the latter indigenous - "not even in the vicinity of the pole" - and that consequently "a white man has never originally sprung from the womb of nature, and that thus there is no such thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every white man is a faded or bleached one" [1]. 

 

 

III.

  

One of the people most influenced by this line of thinking was the young D. H. Lawrence, who would go on to develop his own (idiosyncratic and slightly crackpot) racial philosophy in which whiteness is viewed not only as an unattractive skin tone, but a malevolent form of ideal being responsible for the destruction of the natural world and the triumph of money and machinery. 

 

According to his former girlfriend Jessie Chambers, Lawrence was obsessed with Schopenhauer's work in the period he was writing what would become his debut novel, The White Peacock (1911). She may have been the one to borrow a copy of the German philosopher's essays from the local library, but it was Lawrence who read and re-read the book and left annotations in the margins. 

 

And one day, as she recalled in her memoir published five years after Lawrence's death, whilst arguing with her and her brother on the subject, Lawrence declared that "white skin is not natural to man" and that therefore, for him, "a brown skin is the only beautiful one" [2]. 

 

As Laura Ryan says, for Lawrence "dark-skinned peoples were closer to the 'blood-consciousness' he prized, while whites, too much consumed by their minds and anaesthetised by the deadening mechanisation of the industrial world, were doomed" [3]. 

 

This is an idea that Lawrence holds on to in one form or another throughout his life and writing career; we find it in the early novel Women in Love (finished in 1916 but not published until 1920); we find it in the mid-period novel The Plumed Serpent (1926); and we find it in his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). 

 

In the latter, for example, during an extraordinary rant about the women he has known, Mellors tells Connie that the only modern women who "'really 'come' naturally with a man'" are black women - although, as he then adds, black women don't ultimately appeal to him as they seem "'a bit like mud'" to his white sensibility [4]. 

 

This echoes what Lawence also told Jessie many years before - namely, that while he finds blackness beautiful, he doesn't automatically desire it; in other words, he could separate attraction and aesthetic appreciation [5]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

I'd like now to show how Schopenhauer's writings on human pigmentation connect to the idea of whiteness as a mutation or genetic deficiency in the work of Frances Cress Welsing ... 

 

If Lawrence's racial philosophy can be described as idiosyncratic and slightly crackpot, then Welsing's pseudo-scientific ideas to do with melanin set out in her 1970 essay 'The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism' [6], can fairly be characterised in far harsher terms. 

 

An expanded version of the above was later included in her controversial collection of essays, The Isis Papers (1991), where she asserts that white supremacy is driven by a fear of genetic annihilation and that racism, therefore, is a defensive reaction on behalf of defective albino mutants long-ago expelled from Africa to the biological superiority of people with high levels of melanin [7]. 

 

I kind of wish I was making this up - and some readers will think I am making this up. Unfortunately, that's not the case: these claims were not part of some outrageous satire, but made in all seriousness. Welsing also suggested that the human immunodeficiency virus was a form of biological warfare unleashed on the black majority by white people and that the latter were also responsible for drug use and homosexuality amongst African Americans. 

 

All of this feels quite a long way from Schopenhauer and yet, as we saw earlier, his philosophy does at times lend support to such thinking. Like Welsing, for example, Schopenhauer argues that black is the authentic colour of humanity and that whiteness is a biological deviation from such. 

 

However, Schopenhauer viewed this loss of colour purely as a physiological effect shaped by climate rather than a genetic deficiency and his scathing critique of whiteness as an identity tied to ethnonationalism [8] has more in common with later critical race theory than to Welsing's racial essentialism which (thankfully) plays no part in mainstream debate today [9]. 

 

Ultimately, Schopenhauer and contemporary theorists agree that building an identity around skin colour - black or white - is ultimately foolish and even Lawrence quickly realised after spending time in Harlem and reading black fiction that the negro is just another modern, urban American very little different from the white man and that even his most cherished illusions concerning "the eternal negroid soul, black and glistening and touched with awfulness and with mystery" [10] are a lot of stuff and nonsense. 

 

 

V. 

In sum - and to return to where I began - I think the argument made by black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and yes, Jason Arday, that racism is not a black issue but a white problem, is a strong one which deserves serious critical consideration. 

 

In other words, the gaze needs to be shifted from the victims of racism to the creators and beneficiaries of racial hierarchies. I know that many white people are made uncomfortable by terms such as white privilege and white bias and often don't wish to see how whiteness operates as an unspoken, invisible norm against which all other races are judged. But, frankly, that awkwardness can't be helped and shouldn't be apologised for. 

  

Notes 

 

[1] The crucial passage by Schopenhauer in which he considers human complexion, is located in the section of The World as Will and Representation titled 'The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes' (Vol. III, Book IV, Chapter XLIV). 

      Click on the link provided to read online courtesy of Project Gutenberg, who have based their EBook on the three-volume sixth edition of Schopenhauer's classic study trans. R. B. Haldane and John Kemp (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1909). Schopenhauer's text originally appeared in German as Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818-19). An expanded second volume was added in 1844.

 

[2] See Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 111. This memoir was originally published in 1935 by Jonathan Cape Ltd (London). 

 

[3] Laura E. Ryan: 'You are white - yet a part of me': D. H. Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance (PhD thesis submitted to The University of Manchester, 2019), p. 39. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 204. 

      As Laura Ryan (2019, pp. 39-40) says, this exchange "illustrates Lawrence's othering of the black female as simultaneously representative of the 'real sex' both he and Mellors prize and a kind of degraded sexuality". In other words, in just one short statement Lawrence manages to both praise and denigrate "the presumed ultra-sensuality of black women", thereby betraying his ambivalence on the racial question (and romantic ideas of primitivism) more widely. 

 

[5] That seems (on the surface at least) a rather non-Lawrentian thing to do - something that enforces the mind/body split that he elsewhere seeks to overcome. 

 

 [6] This essay can be found in The Black Scholar, Vol. 5, Issue 8 (1974), pp. 32-40 (published online 14 April 2015). 

 

[7] Melanin is the natural bodily pigment that gives colour to skin, hair, and eyes.  

      I'm not a biological anthropologist, but I know a man who is and he tells me that lighter skin pigmentation is actually an advantageous evolutionary mutation allowing adequate synthesis of vitamin D by early human populations who had migrated out of Africa into regions with much less sunlight. 

 

[8] Schopenhauer famously hated tribalism and nationalism, even though he still maintained  Eurocentric, deeply racist beliefs that Africans were intellectually inferior that were very much in line with the pervasive biases of 19th-century European philosophy. 

 

[9] Just to be clear on this point: whilst the Cress Theory examines whiteness, it does so from a completely different perspective to contemporary CRT. The former relies on the belief that race dictates behaviour and is biologically determined. In contrast, the latter relies on the understanding that race is a fictional, legal, and political category - something socially determined but not essentially fixed - that was invented in the 17th and 18th centuries by the ruling class in order to justify slavery and colonialism.  

      Further, contemporary studies also focus on institutional advantages and systemic biases (i.e., questions to do with power) rather than the physical presence or absence of melanin. 

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of Nigger Heaven, by Carl Van Vechten, Flight, by Walter White, Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos, and In Our Time, by Ernest Hemmingway', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 308.