Luce Irigaray and Constance Chatterley: Woodland Refugees

Penguin Books (2011)

Illustration by Lucy McLauchlan

I. 

Connie, we are told in one of the early chapters of Lady Chatterley's Lover, was aware of a growing restlessness taking possession of her like a madness: "It twitched her limbs [... and] made her heart beat violently, for no reason."

In order to counter this restlessness, Connie would rush away from the house and from everybody and lie prone in the bracken: "The wood was her one refuge, her sanctuary."

II.

I thought of this when reading Luce Irigaray's claim that nature had saved her life and restored her health on many occasions, and that from early childhood the world of plants (and animals) has been her favourite (and most vital) dwelling place. 

Indeed, I can't think of a more Lawrentian (or, at the very least, Lawrentian-sounding) French feminist than Irigaray, who, like Lawrence, affirms the generative potential of the elements and the importance of living in emotional rhythm with the seasons: "the wheeling of the year, the movement of the sun through solstice and equinox, the coming of the seasons, the going of the seasons". 

That's Lawrence writing, but it could so easily have come from Irigaray's pen. And like the latter, Lawrence is an advocate of sexuate being: "men experience the great rhythm of emotion man-wise, women experience it woman-wise" and often expounds his thinking in terms that seem to blur the distinction between human life and vegetal being:

"We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep blooming in our civilised vase on the table." 

III.

Like Connie, Irigaray also seeks out human companionship in the woods in order to experience what she terms a more complete sharing. I don't know if, for her, that involves a phallic hunting out, but one assumes that it is about meeting another being beyond all shame and the reaching of one's ultimate nakedness.

Irigaray is disappointed that when she confesses her desire to meet a companion in the woods to her friends and colleagues most laugh and wrongly assume she's longing for some kind of caveman, or expressing a naive form of romantic primitivism. Such people, she says, not only exhaust her vitality, but show an underlying ignorance of and contempt for the subtlety of her thinking 

Again, whilst I'm not entirely sure about this, I imagine what she wants is to encounter someone who does for her what Mellors does for Connie, i.e., provide a transformative experience of otherness and an awakening into touch. She writes: "Sexuate desire is [...] an appeal for entering into relations with the other as a source and an embodiment of life different from ours, which calls for a sort of becoming [...]"

IV.

Lawrence famously opens Lady C. with a passage that suggests we are all living among the ruins and that our primary task, therefore, is to go round or "scramble over the obstacles", building "new little habitats". Irigaray also seems to arrive at a similar (essentially tragic though still hopeful) conclusion: 

"Our earth and all the living beings who inhabit on it are henceforth in danger and [...] we, as humans, must find a way to [...] return to our natural belonging and its suitable cultivation for the establishment of another manner of existing and coexisting [...]"  

The key, according to her, is to "open and reopen continuously the possibility of a new growth and horizon for life, for desire, for love, and for culture". She continues:

"Sometimes the vegetal world is our most crucial mediator; sometimes it is a loving and loved human different from us; sometimes past thinkers lead us on the way. However, we must clear up our own path alone, with the help of a star, of a grace, or the fecundity of a meeting with another human who longs to cultivate life, love, and thought through their sharing, and with building a new world in mind."

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 5, 20, 322-23, 

Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being, (Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 86, 97, 99

I'm not the first, of course, to note the similarity (at times) between Lawrence and Irigaray. Sue Reid, for example, has written some interesting work in this area. See her essay 'Enumerating Difference: Lawrence, Freud, Irigaray and the Ethics of Democracy', Études Lawrenciennes, 45 (2014), pp.125-140. Click here to read online.  

For a critique of Luce Irigaray's vegetal idealism, click here.

On Luce Irigaray's Vegetal Idealism

Columbia University Press, 2016

Cover image: Jessica Hines

I.

 

When Luce Irigaray first approached Michael Marder with the idea of co-authoring a book on plant life - or vegetal being, as philosophers like to say - one wonders what he was hoping for ...?

Actually, I know what he was hoping for, as Marder conveniently tells us in the epilogue to his half of the work: he was hoping that he and Irigaray might produce a work that would "open alternative horizons for relating to the vegetal world". 

What he doesn't tell us is whether he feels they succeeded in this - or whether he was as disappointed as I was with her feeble and all too human contribution; one that tells us a lot about her, but very little about the plants of which she speaks (and, arguably, exploits). 

II.

Irigaray writes of her disillusion with the intellectual world and academic establishment which, she says, has treated her unfairly in the past; she speaks also of her desire to see a new order in which plants and people can bloom and her book sales receive the kind of numbers they deserve.     

Following professional and personal difficulties - including a car accident - Irigaray discovered yoga and turned to the healing power of plants which, like her, were often overlooked, objectified, or seriously maltreated: trees, for example, are today nothing but a material resource at the disposal of human beings (what Heidegger calls a standing reserve).

To be fair, following publication of Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Irigaray was expelled from the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis, sacked from her university teaching post, and even snubbed by Simone de Beauvoir, but I'm not sure that these things attract the sympathy of plants - or indeed that they share her sense of being rejected and undervalued.

She likes sitting quietly with them - meeting them in silence - and that's fine. But when she suggests they like sitting quietly with her or exerting eco-therapeutic powers, then I'm more sceptical.

Similarly, a lot of her metaphorical rhetoric seems deeply suspect to me; particularly when framed within the untenable (because naive and idealistic) language of vitalism and nature, with the latter embarrassingly portrayed as something not merely hospitable but positively benign. In Irigaray's imaginary forest, plants peacefully coexist and thus provide a model for mankind of natural belonging in a world without strife or competition.

As Irving Goh notes:

"In this regard, Irigaray ignores or forgets how trees and plants compete with one another for sunlight and water; how parasitic plants feed on and off others for their own benefit; how weeds threaten the well-being or even survival of other plants [...] and how certain plants have features like thorns or bladelike leaves that can pose serious dangers to humans and animals, or how some of them are toxic to humans and animals [...]"
       

In short, all of the violence, cruelty and obscenity of the natural world - that which gives it much of its beauty (and which always shines through our attempts to idealise it) - is simply overlooked by Irigaray. Has she never heard of la vengeance des fleurs?

I don't want to come over all dark ecological, but Irigaray needs to address the question of evil in relation to vegetal being, otherwise she's offering us nothing but a romantic fantasy that is humanistic at the very least, if not just another depressing example of anthropocentric conceit. Her reductive insistence on the innocence of plants not only robs them of complexity - the vegetal world knows nothing of sexuated difference - it ultimately makes them boring.

Again, I can't help wondering what Marder makes of all this; he must have grimaced on more than one occasion as he read through her text - must have asked himself if, in fact, she'd even read his work on plant-thinking. Irigaray is (outrageously) forgetful of the otherness of vegetal being on at least two occasions:

"The first is when she says that 'looking at a tree brings me energy, whereas looking at a manufactured object takes energy away from me' (46-47), forgetting that the very book Through Vegetal Being to which Irigaray contributes is no less a printed, that is, manufactured, object, not to mention that its manufacturing process undoubtedly involved trees at some point. The second instance is when she declares herself a vegetarian (23) without any critical consideration of her consumption of plant life as such, not recognizing, in other words, her violence toward plant life as the latter becomes her primary dietary source. In both cases, I think it difficult for Irigaray to defend 'a sharing without infringing on the life of the other,' especially if 'life of the other' concerns plant life (44-45)."
  
At this point, I can't help but let out a small sigh ... I so wanted to like this work by Irigaray and was prepared to overlook many aspects of her writing that I have, in the past, found irritating. But how can one in good faith turn a blind eye to issues such as these raised by Irving Goh, or to sentences like this:

"It was the vegetal world that ensured mothering care with the environment it arranged around me." 

Notes

Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being, (Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 215 and 21.

Irving Goh, 'Le rejet of Luce Irigaray in Through Vegetal Being', research article in Differences, Vol. 29, Issue 3 (Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 137-154. Lines quoted are on pp. 145 and 146-47. This essay can be read online via academia.edu: click here. 

For a reading of Irigaray's vegetal idealism in relation to D. H. Lawrence's work in Lady Chatterley's Lover, click here.

On Blaming the Victim

Cain and Abel as depicted in the  

Speculum Humanae Salvationis (c. 1360)

Whilst I'm aware of the dangers of victim blaming and of how it can be used to justify, mitigate, or excuse certain forms of discriminatory or criminal behaviour often perpetrated by those who are in a position of power or privilege, I'm afraid I do subscribe to ideas of contributory negligence and unconscious provocation and do think that the victim of a crime is always, in some sense and to some degree, complicit or partially responsible for what happens to them - even when it's a loved one who has just had her i-Phone and purse stolen from her handbag by some charming urban youth from the idyllic borough of Haringey ...

Indeed, I even find the following passage from Women in Love persuasive, if troubling in what it logically entails: 

"'No man,' said Birkin, 'cuts another man's throat unless he wants to cut it, and unless the other man wants it cutting. This is a complete truth. It takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee. And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.'" [33]

Gerald dismisses this as pure nonsense - as, I suspect, would the majority of readers keen to secure a clear distinction between guilt and innocence and who regard all victims from Abel onwards - with the exception perhaps of many rape victims and those who lead unconventional or high risk lifestyles - as beyond reproach (whilst, on the other hand, considering the ideal perpetrator of a crime as an entirely unsympathetic character, lacking in virtue, perhaps even a little monstrous or inhuman, carrying as they do the mark of Cain).

There are also - as indicated - political and philosophical reasons for rejecting what Birkin says here. Adorno, for example, identified the phenomenon of victim blaming as one of the most sinister features of the fascist mindset; i.e., the so-called authoritarian personality that holds any sign of weakness as contemptible. Ask any Nazi even now who's to blame for Auschwitz and they'll answer without hesitation: the Jews (The Jews made us racist! The Jews were asking for it!)

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen ad Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 33. 

See also: T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality, (Harper and Bros., 1950). 

99% is Shit

I remember once being told by a friend that he understood the phrase 99% is shit to mean that the only kind of commitment that counts is total commitment. Anything less than 100% was a sure sign of someone who couldn't be trusted and whose authenticity was in doubt.

It's a perfectly valid interpretation and reveals much about the fanatic mindset of those who took the seriously extreme call to arms issued by the Sex Pistols extremely seriously.

(This was during a time when we were both scornful of so-called plastic or part-time punks; the kind of people who play their records very loud and pogo in front of the bedroom mirror - but only when their mum's gone out.)*

As a matter of fact, however, when Sid Vicious spoke about 99% being shit, he wasn't quite thinking in such terms. Rather, he meant - more brutally - that the vast majority of people, including fans, are worthless. Thus, in the same interview, he would say: 'I’ve no interest in pleasing the general public, I don’t want to, because I think largely they're scum, they make me physically sick.'

Such violent contempt for the masses was, of course, a key feature of much modern art; the avant-garde were, by definition, a revolutionary elite who prided themselves on their own difference and superiority.** 

And the Sex Pistols - at least as conceived by McLaren - belong to this tradition (contra the Clash who even at the time were sneered at for being social workers and who would doubtless echo the cry We are the 99% which became a unifying slogan of the Occupy Movement in the summer of 2011).

As do the Cash Pussies, who released their only single, 99% is Shit, in April 1979, featuring snippets of an audio interview conducted a couple of years prior with the (recently deceased) Sex Pistols bassist.***

Notes

* The lines are from the single 'Part Time Punks', by Television Personalities, (Rough Trade 1980): click here.

** According to John Carey, Modernist art was primarily concerned not only with the exclusion of the masses, but with a denial of their humanity. See The Intellectuals and the Masses (Faber and Faber, 1992). Of course, it should be remembered that Carey's book is itself 99% shit.   

*** Perhaps not surprisingly, the band were conceived by an old art school friend of Malcolm's, Fred Vermorel, and his wife, Judy, and the track was produced by Dave Goodman, famous for his work with the Sex Pistols. 

Play: Cash Pussies, 99% is Shit, (The Label, 1979): click here. 

Kinderpost

Frank Meisler: Kindertransport - The Arrival (2006)

Photo by Stephen Alexander (2019)

I. Opening Remarks

Kindertransport - The Arrival is an outdoor bronze memorial by the Israeli architect and sculptor Frank Meisler, who was himself evacuated from the Free City of Danzig as part of the Kindertransport programme, travelling with a small group of other children to safety in England (his parents, arrested three days after his departure, were eventually murdered at Auschwitz).   

Commisioned by World Jewish Relief and the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), the work was installed on the forecourt of Liverpool Street Station in 2006 and commemorates the 10,000 Jewish children who escaped Nazi persecution and arrived in London during 1938-39.

II. Nazi Pigeons

Pigeons, of course, don't care about any of this; they'll shit on anyone's history. 

It would be mistaken, however, to assume the bird in the above picture is displaying an avian form of anti-Semitism - indeed, the pigeon (or dove) has an important role within Jewish religious mythology and is usually regarded as a symbol of hope (think of Noah and his Ark). The pigeon was also an acceptable sacrifice to God for those who couldn't afford a more expensive offering. 

The Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria may have found the birds a little overly bold and impudent, but, other than that, there's no enmity between them and the children of Israel.    

Having said that, it's true that the Nazis were also fond of pigeons - Heinrich Himmler was not only Reichsführer of the SS but also President of the German National Pigeon Society - and many trained birds were drafted into the Nazi war effort.

Indeed, so concerned were British secret services about the airborne threat posed by Nazi pigeons, that they became the subject of covert operations, with scores of pigeon lofts targeted for destruction in occupied Europe. MI5 even had its own trained force of falcons ready to intercept any Nazi pigeons that strayed into British airspace; they would patrol over the Scilly Isles and the Cornish coast for two hours at a time.

It's possible, therefore, that the pigeon pictured befouling the Jewish memorial is descended from a Nazitaube - though I would have thought this extremely unlikely and not something to be overly worried about; indeed, for me, of more concern, is the ominously glowing presence of the McDonald's logo in the background ...


III. Golden Arches

Instantly recognisable wherever you travel in the world, McDonald's Golden Arches probably shouldn't fill one with a similar sense of horror as that of a Nazi swastika - the stylised letter 'M' doesn't signify mass murder and malevolence - but, for some reason, it does.

Partly, that's due to the fact that even as I gobble down my Sausage and Egg McMuffin, I'm conscious of the true cost and devastating consequences of such deliciousness; for the natural environment and animal welfare, for example. Corporate capitalism isn't simply fascism with a smiley face, but neither is it the unequivocal force for good that its proponents like to claim and California über alles is just as troubling (in some respects) as the prospect of Deutschland über alles.

And partly, it's due to the influence of Jake and Dino Chapman upon my imagination. For everytime I see the Golden Arches, I can't help recalling their post-apocalyptic Nazi-McDonald's hellscapes (which is distracting, to say the least, when trying to reflect upon Meisler's work - even more so than the presence of a pigeon). 

In Memory of Gentleman Jack Sheppard

Jack Sheppard (1702 -1724)

Engraving by George White (1728) 

based on a portrait by James Thornhill (1724)

I.

I have to admit, I have reservations about memoralising the career of a petty criminal; such low-lives, always ducking and diving from the law, are rarely as charming in real life as we like to imagine them. Just ask the woman working at my local supermarket who was spat at and punched in the face last week after challenging a would-be shoplifter ...

Having said that, it would be churlish to deny the popular appeal of Jack Sheppard; a flash young tea leaf and audacious jailbreaker who captured the sympathy and affection of many a Londoner, both before and after his execution at Tyburn, aged 22, in November 1724.


II. 

Sheppard was an East End boy who decided he didn't want to be a carpenter, preferring instead to make his money from skullduggery. It was a fateful choice: Sheppard was arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724 - suggesting he was either very unlucky or pretty fuckin' feckless as a criminal - and although he managed to escape four times, by the end of the year he was swinging from the gallows.

However, his death at such a tender age only helped establish his legend. An autobiographical sketch - thought to have been ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe - sold like hot cakes at his execution and there followed several plays based upon it, much to the annoyance of the authorities who were concerned that impressionable young rascals keen to play Jack the Lad would attempt to copy his behaviour.* 

In some ways, Sheppard makes an unlikely role model. For not only was he useless at evading capture by the law, but he was also physically unimposing; small in size and lightly built, Sheppard had a pale complexion and suffered with a slight stutter.

However, these things were compensated for by a winning smile and a quick wit that made him popular with both sexes in the taverns of Drury Lane, such as the Black Lion, where he met his future partner in crime Joseph 'Blueskin' Blake and the buxom young brass Elizabeth Lyon (aka Edgeworth Bess), who became his regular mistress.   

From being a good, hardworking young man with career aspirations, Sheppard now threw himself enthusiastically into an illicit lifestyle of booze, whores, and criminal activity. Whilst he soon progressed to burglary and highway robbery, his first recorded theft was that of two silver spoons pinched from a tavern in Charing Cross, so hardly the crime of the century.

As indicated, however, it was his talent for breaking out of jail that really captured the popular imagination, including an escape from Newgate Prison where he was awaiting execution having been convicted of theft at the Old Bailey. Sheppard managed to remove an iron bar from his cell window, climb through the small gap, then calmly walk past the guards dressed in the women's clothing that accomplices had previously smuggled in.     

Although he was soon recaptured and returned to the his cell at Newgate, he was now visited by the great and the good who were all keen to see for themselves Gentleman Jack Sheppard. When guards found files and other tools hidden in his cell, he was transferred to what we would now describe as a high security unit, clapped in leg irons, and chained to the floor.

Cheekily informing his gaolers that these measures were not going to hold him, Sheppard even demonstrated how he might use a small nail to get free. He was rewarded for this by being bound with still heavier chains and handcuffed. Sheppard, however, continued to make light of his predicament and, astonishingly, he got away once more - still wearing his leg irons!

This miraculous escape so amazed everyone that the belief grew that Sheppard must have had the assistance of the Devil himself. Whether that's true or not, Sheppard's final stint of freedom was shortlived, if admittedly spent in some style; having broken into a pawnbrokers on Drury Lane, Sheppard helped himself to a black silk suit, several rings, and a wig in order to enjoy a night on the Town, posing as a dandy highwayman with a girl on each arm.

He was arrested, for the final time, on the morning of November 1st, still dressed in his stolen clobber and still very drunk.

III.

This time, the authorities took no chance. Sheppard was kept under constant guard and loaded down with 300lbs of iron weights. A petition, signed by several prominent people, asking that his death sentence be commuted was ignored. Offered the chance to have it reduced by informing on his associates, Sheppard, to his credit, refused to grass.

On November 16th, he was taken to the gallows at Tyburn to be hanged. A joyous procession accompanied him through the streets of London; crowds were said to have numbered 200,000 (one third of the population at that time). Hopes of a daring last minute escape were thwarted when prison guards found and confiscated a pen knife hidden about his person.

After Sheppard's body was cut down, the crowd pressed forward to stop its removal by the authorities. When his badly mauled corpse was finally retrieved, it was buried in the churchyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

And thus ends the (really rather sorry) tale of Jack Sheppard ...

Though, as I say above, his posthumous legend has continued to grow. Sheppard now serves, for example, as a figure of inspiration for the punk fashion entrepreneur Joe Corré and his team at Child of the Jago: click here.

I mention this not because I particularly share Corré's sartorial sense or aesthetic vision - and I certainly don't subscribe to his (and his mother's) eco-political agenda - but for sentimental reasons (i.e., much the same sort of stupidity as those who champion Sheppard as a working-class hero or a potentially revolutionary figure of some kind).   

Notes

* Perhaps the best-known play that was at least partly based on Sheppard's life is John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728); Sheppard was the inspiration for the figure of Macheath.

Love Blinds: The Shocking Case of Jeanne Brécourt

"All is dust and lies. So much the worse for the men who get in my way. 

Men are mere stepping-stones to me. As soon as they begin to fail 
or are played out, I put them scornfully aside."

I.

Love is blind. But when a woman gets into her 30s and sees her looks are starting to fade and hair beginning to whiten, it's only natural that she begins to doubt the veracity of this expression ...


II.

Eugénie Brécourt was born in Paris, in the spring of 1837. She was fated to become one of France's most notorious women; a true femme fatale who broke many hearts and ruined the lives of numerous men, before finaly ending up behind prison bars ...  

Neglected as a child, she was adopted by a nobelwoman who took pity on her. Her parents, however, reclaimed their daughter when she was eleven and immediately put her to work selling gingerbread on the streets. At seventeen, the kindly Baroness found her a job at a silk factory and agreed to once more care for the young woman. She even stumped up a dowry of 12,000 francs when Jeanne decided to marry the local grocer.

Unfortunately, married life didn't suit Jeanne and after a rumoured affair with an army officer, her husband left her and she went missing ... When she reappeared, having apparently tried her hand (and failed) at acting, literature and journalism, it was as a prostitute calling herself Jeanne de la Cour.     

I don't know the secret of her deadly charm, but she obviously had something; one of her lovers committed suicide; another died by taking an overdose of Spanish fly; a third was taken to hospital in suspicious circumstances, where he, too, eventually died.

Brécourt was completely indifferent to their suffering and something of her attitude towards men can be gleaned from the quotation above with which I open this post; it's a libertine philosophy that has a distinctly Sadean feel to it.

To be fair, working as a prostitute had also taken a toll on Jeanne's health too and in 1865 she was obliged to enter an asylum, suffering from hysterical seizures and a loss of speech. Hospital records describe her as being of dark complexion, with very expressive eyes. Although clearly of a nervous disposition and prone to fantasy, she was also said to be agreeable.

After several months, she was discharged though advised by her doctors to spend time resting in the spa town of Vittel, in northeastern France. Here, Jeanne claimed the title of Baroness for herself and nursed a wounded pigeon back to health. She also determined to find a permanent benefactor who would secure her future, having no intention of ending her days destitute, which, alas, was the fate of many a woman in her position.

Enter Rene de la Roche ... 

III.

Roche was a wealthy young man who had the misfortune to meet Jeanne at a ball in Paris, in 1873. He quickly became infatuated by the woman 16 years his senior and by the end of the year they had entered into a fateful relationship ...

Whilst Roche was away on a six month trip to Egypt in 1876, Jeanne went to visit a fellow prostitute with a lover who was blind not only to her moral shortcomings, but who, being visually impaired, incapable also of witnessing the very obvious signs of her physical decline. This got Jeanne thinking and on Roche's return to France she hatched a plan to deprive him of his sight.

Jeanne managed to persuade an old friend from her childhood days to help her, having told him (falsely) that Roche was the son of a man who had done her wrong. As arranged, Nathalis Gaudry carried out the diabolical assault in January 1877, throwing sulphuric acid in the face of the innocent victim.

Roche completely lost the sight of one eye and that of the other was significantly damaged; he was also, of course, terribly disfigured. Just like the injured pigeon, Roche was now made dependent upon Jeanne's loving care and, initially, neither he nor anyone else suspected her role in the matter.

Jeanne undertook the duty of care with every appearance of genuine devotion. Roche was consumed with gratitude for her untiring kindness; thirty nights she spent by his bedside and it was his wish that she alone should nurse him.

Gradually, however, his friends and family became suspicious and increasingly concerned by Brécourt's behaviour; frustrating, for example, their attempts to see or communicate with him. Eventually, the police were alerted and opened an investigation. Despite brazenly informing them that they would never find any evidence against her, they did just that and six months after the attack, both she and Gaudry found themselves standing in the dock.

Brécourt was defended by one of France's top criminal lawyers and her case aroused great public interest. Several famous faces and well-known writers sat in the public gallery to observe and record the proceedings. She was, if you like, the Roxie Hart of her day - although, unlike Roxie, Jeanne wasn't acquitted.

Having been found guilty, she was, rather, sentenced to fifteen years penal service; her accomplice got off with just five years jail time, having pleaded guilty but with mitigating circumstances - namely, being under the spell of a woman who was part-witch, part-seductress. He told his interrogators that he was madly in love with Brécourt and would have done anything she asked: Ses désirs sont des ordres!

What, if anything does this case teach us? I'm not sure. Some might cite it as evidence that the female of the species is more deadly than the male, but that's just a piece of sadomasochistic fantasy, isn't it?

Note: readers interested in this case might also find the following two posts to their tastes: the first in memory of Cora Pearl and the second in memory of Laura Bell: click here and here respectively.

 

Ding Dong! In Memory of Laura Bell (Queen of London Whoredom)

Detail from a portrait of Laura Thistlethwayte (née Bell) 
by Richard Buckner (1871)

"She had a small doll-like face, piquant and provocative, big blue eyes, a strawberry-and-cream complexion, 

cascades of glorious golden hair, the most shapely pair of shoulders in London, and a soft, persuasive voice. 

She was, in short, well-armed for her attack upon male susceptibility."

Irish-born beauty Laura Bell is a famous example not only of a good girl gone bad, but a bad girl discovering religion and becoming an ardent preacher against vice. I'm not sure which is the most interesting of these moral phenomena; the fall into sin, or the adoption of Victorian values and bourgeois conventions. Let's investigate ...    

Bell was born in Dublin, in 1829, but grew up in the village of Glenavy, Co. Antrim. As a bored teenager with something of a wild streak, she decided to leave home and find work as a shop girl in Belfast, supplementing her meagre earnings by also working as a prostitute. Finding that she derived more pleasure - and certainly made more money - from whoring rather than retail, Bell decided to move to Dublin and establish herself as a courtesan. Among her illicit lovers was the famous surgeon and author Sir William Wilde (father of Oscar).

Having successfully learnt all the tricks of her trade - and still only twenty years of age - Bell decided to head to London and try her luck amongst some of the richest and most powerful noblemen in Europe. Eventually, she would be known as The Queen of London Whoredom and ride daily around Hyde Park in a gilt carriage drawn by two white horses, with a young pageboy wearing a black and yellow striped waistcoat sitting proudly behind her. She wanted to cut a figure as a woman of sex, style, and substance and this she certainly succeeded in.      

It was whilst in the Royal Park that she met the Nepalese Prime Minister, Jung Bahadur Rana, who was immediately captivated by her and installed her in a beautiful house in Belgravia, showering Bell with outrageously expensive gifts during the three-month period they spent together.* Before he returned to Nepal, he presented Bell with a diamond ring and the promise that he would always be there for her should she ever need his assistance.

When Bell wrote to him in 1857, asking that he send forces to help the British crush the Indian Mutiny, it was probably not quite what he'd had in mind. Still, a promise is a promise - and Bell enclosed the diamond ring with her letter to remind him of it - so he duly sent troops. One wonders what other woman - apart from Queen Victoria - could've stepped into world political history in such a decisive manner at this time ...? 

I'm not sure when (or why) Bell chose to quit her lucrative and adventurous life as a courtesan; perhaps after she married Capt. Augustus Frederick Thistlethwayte in 1852 and moved into a new home in Grosvenor Square. Or perhaps after she found old time religion in 1856 and started referring to herself as God's Ambassadress.

From this point on she mostly hosted evangelical tea parties for high society (rather than orgies) and wanted to save London's prositutes (rather than reign over them)**; eventually forming a very close and long-lasting friendship with William Gladstone, who also had a thing for rescuing fallen women.

Because there is no God - or, if you prefer, because God is a cunt with a cruel sense of humour - just when Bell was at her most righteous and telling everyone who would listen about His Love, her husband - who liked to sermon the servants by firing his pistol into the ceiling - accidently shot and killed himself, leaving her a heartbroken and lonely widow for her final years.***

Bell died, seven years after Thistlethwayte's fatal accident, at her home in West Hampstead, in 1894. Many of those who knew her at the end of her life had no idea of how notorious a figure she'd been in her prime and most obituaries made only veiled references to her life as a prostitute, stressing instead her charity work and kindness to animals. 

Notes

* To give you some idea of just how outrageously expensive these gifts were - including the house in fashionable Belgravia - it's believed that Rana spent in the region of £250,000 on Bell during their brief affair; that's £21 million in today's money, making her one of the most expensive rides in history. 

** Having said this, there's evidence to suggest that Bell may have continued to have the odd affair; including one, for example, with the artist Edwin Landseer (best known for sculpting the lions in Trafalgar Square). 

*** Actually, this isn't quite the case; Bell's marriage was not a happy one and she and her husband had largely lived separate lives; she hosting lavish parties in London, while he spent his time hunting in Scotland. One of the main bones of contention between them was the fact that Bell liked to spend way beyond her means and had no concept of living sensibly on an allowance. By 1870, she owed her creditiors £25,000, much to Thistlethwayte's chagrin.

Those interested in the lives of famous 19thC prostitutes might like to read a sister post to this one on Cora Pearl: click here. See also 'Love Blinds: The Shocking Case of Jeanne Brécourt': click here.

    

In Memory of Cora Pearl (La Grande Horizontale)

Emma Crouch (aka Cora Pearl) 
(1836 - 1886)

The story goes that, ignoring her grandmother's warnings about taking up with strange men, the young Cora (then known by her birth name of Emma Crouch) one day accepted the advances of an older gentleman who approached her on the street and persuaded her to go with him to a gin palace, where he proceeded to get her drunk and then take her virginity.

She was around nineteen at the time and later confessed that this encounter left her with an instinctive horror of all men. However, it also left her with five pounds in her pocket - which was a significant sum in 1856 - so she decided not to return home, but rent a room for herself in Covent Garden and embark on a career in the sex trade.

Emma soon made the acquaintance of Robert Bignell, proprieter of a notorious West End music hall, The Argyll Rooms, that was a known haunt of prostitutes (it even provided private rooms for those punters who weren't interested in the legitimate entertainment provided).

A keen observer of the world around her, Emma quickly realised that the life of a common prostitute was a hard and often tragic one - certainly not something she desired for herself. Thus, she determined that she would only provide her services to a select group of protectors with the financial means to keep her in a life of splendour. 

Her involvement with Bignell ended after they took a trip to Paris together. Emma immediately fell for the City of Light and after he returned to London she decided to stay on in the French capital. It was at this time that she adopted the fanciful pseudonym Cora Pearl and set about refining and broadening her skills as a courtesan (under the watchful eye of a pimp, Monsieur Roubisse, who set her up in suitable quarters and taught her the rules of the game).  

By the early 1860s, Cora was one of the most celebrated prostitutes in Paris. Her first lover of real distinction was Victor Masséna, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling. The same age as Cora, he was besotted by the English beauty and happily supplied her with money, jewels, servants and even a private chef. He also bought her a horse (to whom, it was said, she was kinder than to him) and Cora soon became an accomplished rider.

Whilst she accepted the duke's devotion and generosity for five years, she was also sharing her favours with other notable figures, including the heir to the throne of the Netherlands (William, Prince of Orange) and the half-brother of Emperor Napoleon III (Charles, Duc de Morny).  

What, one might ask, was the secret of her charm?

Obviously, she had sex appeal. But she also understood the importance of style; Cora always dressed in a manner designed either to shock, seduce, or scandalise and liked to dye her hair in a bright range of colours. Her make-up too was bold and striking and her face powder was tinted with silver or pearl in order to give her skin a shimmering transluscence.

I'm tempted to describe her as a proto-punk; the sort of woman who would cause a sensation at a masquerade party attended by the elite of Parisian society by turning up naked and saying she was the new Eve; or surprise her dinner guests by having herself served as the main course on a huge silver platter, garnished with parsley, and inviting those assembled to tuck in.  
 
Always happy to display her physical charms to an appreciative audience and known for her outrageous theatricality, it's not surprising to discover that in 1867 she accepted the role of Cupid in Offenbach's operetta Orpheus in the Underworld. Again, many members of the French nobility were present for the opportunity to see Cora performing semi-naked on stage.

She was, during the years 1865-1870, at the very peak of her success: she had several beautiful homes; her clothes were made for her by the English fashion designer Charles Frederick Worth (the father of haute couture); and she had a jewellery collection said to be worth over a million francs. Gifts from her suitors became increasingly extravagant and she cleverly pitted one against the other in a game of potlatch.

It was said that to spend just one night with her would cost 10,000 francs and there was even a popular drink inspired by her legend, called des larmes de Cora Pearl. She was literally the toast of Paris. But of course, nothing - least of all such glittering success - lasts forever and in 1872, now aged thirty-seven, Cora's luck ran out thanks to l'affaire Duval ...      

Alexandre Duval was an exteremly wealthy young man who became obsessed with her, squandering his entire fortune on sustaining their illicit relationship. Alas, when the money ran out, she lost all interest in him. Unable to accept what had happened with good grace, he went to her home carrying a loaded pistol and intent on killing her. The plan - and the pistol - backfired, however, and Duval was seriously wounded. The subsequent scandal obliged the authorities to take action and Pearl was (temporarily) expelled from Paris.

Essentially, the times had changed in France. Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War saw the old order collapse and the establishment of the Third Republic; aristocratic privilege declined and bourgeois values were in the ascendant. Cora was forced to liquidate her fortune and whilst not exactly destitute, by the early 1880s her financial situation was serious enough that she was obliged to return to common prositution (taking a small apartment on the Champs-Elysées).

Any money she made was soon gambled away and Cora died in the summer of 1886, shortly after publication of her memoirs, the central motif of which had been je ne regrette rien. Touchingly, one of her former lovers agreed to (anonymously) pay for her funeral costs. And, if it were up to me, I'd put her picture on the new £50 note ...


Note: those interested in the lives of famous 19thC prostitutes might like to read a sister post on Laura Bell: click here. See also 'Love Blinds: The Shocking Case of Jeanne Brécourt': click here.

Notes on Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder (Part 3: Vegetal Existentiality)

Michael Marder (2011)

II. Vegetal Existentiality

The existential domain (of time, freedom and wisdom) is usually reserved for man alone. But if plants were also to have some experience of these things, then their "ethical and political status [...] will need to be revised in order to reflect their purchase on life [... and] the positive dimensions of their ontology" [90].

(1) The Time of Plants ...

Time, as Boy George once said, won't give us time. But time makes plants, like lovers, feel they have something real and if we are to have a close encounter with vegetal being "we will need to rethink temporality as the mainspring of the plant's ontology" [94].

Unfortunately, however, time is one of those questions in philosophy that I cannot get my head around and feel little inclined to try and do so now. Readers who want to understand vegetal temporality and the manner in which plants "spatially express time" [96] in depth will have to read Marder's work for themselves (I suggest you brush up on your Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger first of all).    

Having said that, I suppose the key point is that time is not proper to the plant itself but derivative from the other; "whether this 'other' is a part of the organic world or a synthetically produced chemical mix, whether it pertains to the temporality of nature or to that of culture" [101]. The downside of this is that it makes the plant naturally vulnerable; "its potentialities are left vacant for infinite appropriation by anything or anyone whatsoever" [101] - it's a natural born victim of circumstance and agro-capitalist technologies.

What this means - and this presents a real challenge to all those who talk about the exploitation of nature - is that  "techno-cultural and economic phenomena do not negate a preexisting 'natural' condition but interject themselves into the place of the plants' other" [102] and thus determine ontophytology.

This isn't to say that "the positing of the human and capitalist temporalities in the place of the plant's hetero-temporality" [102] isn't exploitative or non-violent, but it's hard to imagine the plant cares as long as it flowers and comes to fruition. That isn't quite Marder's conclusion - he still thinks it important to resist this subsumption - but he recognises the futility of appealing to its nature in order to do so, "since the potentialities of the plant are never completely its own" [102].

Ultimately, the plant is not just non-contemporaneous with us, it's not even contemporaneous with itself, in that it's a "loose alliance of multiple temporalities of growth [...] and in that it does not relate to itself, does not establish a self-identity" [104]. Again, that's why it's forced to obey the time of the other and why Marder finds himself up an ethical junction.

How does he get out? By reversing into ethical assertion: "The hetero-temporality of vegetal existence is the most telling instantiation of the ethical injunction for openness to the other." [107] I'm reminded of something I once wrote in my Illicit Lover's Discourse: "The polymorphously perverse nature of the Prostitute explains her generosity of spirit and openness to all."

It's insatiable promiscuity that bring the world's of vegetation and vice together. And it's "monstrous growth and immoderate proliferation" that have always been "unspeakably terrifying for philosophers" who have always sought to establish the proper limits of desire and police these limits "against potential transgressors" [107-08], whether they have green leaves or black fishnet stockings.  

(2) The Freedom of Plants ...

Contrary to what the Cockney Rejects insist, not only is there freedom for human beings, there's also freedom for plants, says Marder, thereby challenging a metaphysical tradition which would foreclose this latter possibility.

Admittedly, it's difficult to think of freedom in relation to a being devoid of selfhood and literally rooted to the spot. But perhaps if we think of freedom in terms of insouciance and indifference, for example, then the plant might be said to be freer than any of us. But can a plant be free in the ontological sense of being other than it is? Let's find out ...

Part of the problem when it comes to thinking about the freedom of plants, is that nature has been so thoroughly tamed: "Vegetal torpor is the aftermath of civilization; it is what remains of plant life after its thorough cultivation and biotechnological transformation ..." [128]. Marder continues - and I think this is a true and important observation:

"If upon encountering a plant, we fail to be impressed with the exuberance of its growth and uncontrollable efflorescence, this is because its current conceptual framing is the outcome of a long history that discarded and invalidated numerous interpretative possibilities for our relation to 'flora'." [128]

In other words, the plant is given a fixed metaphysical shape and in this way made into something that can be stuck in a pot and put in the corner of even the most respectable living room. Even Heidegger is happy to keep plants lodged in their own environment, denying them a place within the clearing of being (i.e., world).

Marder rightly interrogates such thinking and considers the freedom of the plant in relation to our own freedom. But again, that's not easy when vegetal being is so dissimilar to human (and animal) being. Plants are, in a sense, closer to being gods. For both gods and plants like to play in a carefree manner, whereas man prefers to work and to worry. Only when at his most imaginative, does man become playful like a plant; "imagination is the echo of vegetal freedom in human beings" [146].

In order to let the plant flourish in us, we need, therefore, to give free reign to the imagination (or aesthetic play-drive) and abandon ourselves to art as Dionysian intoxication; "'seizing on what is new and startling [...] what is violent and wild'" [146], as Schiller once described (and denounced) it.

Having said that, we must at the same time "be on our guard against the all-too-prevalent idealist illusion that vegetal life is the realm of purity and innocence. The plant's ontological indifference and lack of concern bespeak its freedom from conscience, but it is an anthropomorphic projection alone that codifies these qualities, as well as everything connected to play, in terms of innocence and lightheartedness." [146]  

I have to admit, I'm pleased to hear Marder say this - though isn't it just as much of an idealist illusion to still speak of the struggle for emancipation and to posit vegetal life an important role in this (once plants have been liberated, of course, from "the political and economic conditions responsible [...] for their oppression" [149])?   


(3) The Wisdom of Plants ...

Whilst frequently borrowing from Derrida throughout this work, here Marder admits that his reflections on vegetal intelligence "ought to be taken as a footnote to Nietzsche's provocative suggestion" [151] in The Will to Power about the sagacity of plants being a good starting point for the revaluation of all values.  

In a sense, we're moving from ontophytology to epistemophytology; although, when it comes to plants, being and thinking are so closely bound together that in order to discuss the latter you need to reckon also with the former.

What soon becomes clear is that one needs to overstep "the bounds of the conventional theories of knowledge" [152] towards a postmetaphysical thinking that is "fluid, receptive, dispersed, non-oppositional, non-representational, immanent, and material-practical" [152]. Marder describes it as the non-conscious intenionality of vegetal life.

Again, I'm not entirely sure I know what that means - even after reading Marder's explanation - but it amuses me to think that this idea might irritate some followers of Levinas.

And I do like the idea of plants having memories, which, as temporal beings, I suppose is a reasonable expectation (albeit these memories will be imageless, or non-representational). Further, recent findings in molecular biology seem to confirm that plants can retrieve information stored in cells. Whereas we might remember the things revealed by the light, they, plants, physically remember the light itself (they might not have minds, but they certainly have bodies). 

Memory, then, is a primal quality - before consciousness - and is found in mimosa as well as man. It's a key component  "of the vibrant and multidimensional intelligence of plants" that can be mapped on the "ever-shifting continuum of sensibility-irritability" [156] (plants might not feel much, but just enough to know when they are getting pissed-off and to ensure their survival).     

Importantly, any attempt to think plant-thinking must always remember that vegetal being revolves around non-identity; "understood both as the plant's inseperability from the environment wherein it germinates and grows, and its style of living devoid of a clearly delineated autonomous self" [162].

No wonder their thinking is so restless and agitated! No wonder that becoming-plant is so difficult! What it ultimately requires of us is something we are not easily convinced to do: close our eyes and affirm the darkness, "while refraining form the indiscriminate repudiation of light" [178].

Notes

Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, (Columbia University Press, 2013). All page numbers in the above post refer to this wok. 

To read part one of this post, on encountering plants and ethical offshoots, click here.

To read part two of this post, on vegetal anti-metaphysics, click here.