Vagina (23 page)

But he also argued, in his essay on penis envy, that men see the vagina as a primordial castrator; elsewhere he depicted the vagina as the dark matrix of Oedipal psychodramas. After Freud, the notion of the devouring, castrating vagina as a source of male neuroticism became influential throughout the twentieth century.

Others—doctors and psychologists—picked up the argument that the vagina and the clitoris have political and psychodynamic relevance. In Wilhelm Stekels’s 1926 book
Frigidity in Woman,
a chapter titled “The Struggle of the Sexes” assigns feminism the role of denying sexual pleasure to women; he believed that what he called female “sexual anaestheticism” was due to contemporary women’s desires to be dominant over men. He also saw women’s emotional and spiritual needs as being linked to their sexual responsiveness; a man must appeal to one kind of woman’s spirituality, he wrote, before she could reach orgasm, whereas the “modern” woman can’t reach orgasm unless she is treated like a “new woman,” which is, he noted, “Ibsen’s problem in Nora!” “With this requirement fulfilled,” he concluded, “every inhibition that stands in the way of her sexuality is released.”
¹⁹
It’s remarkable that, well into the twentieth century, women’s difficulties reaching orgasm were regularly assigned by authoritative commentators to women’s emotional instability—rather than to men’s seductiveness or technique.

But even as Freud and others were finding new terms—this time psychodynamic rather than medical—with which to control and sometimes condemn the vagina and clitoris, after the First World War, some women artists, dancers, and singers were looking for ways to liberate its meanings.

9

Modernism: The “Liberated” Vagina

Dear grey and white Janet . . . thank you for the bouquet. The pleasure is undescribable—like all enchantment and there is something sad about being unable to tell the secret of pleasure . . .

—Dolly Wilde to Janet Flanner

T
oward the end of the nineteenth century, women writers struggled to bring metaphors and narratives of female erotic desire, and even vaginal metaphors, into the light of day. Victorian women had referred to female sexuality in codes and allusions, but the female modernists, with their impulses toward breaking boundaries and establishing the new, began to articulate vaginal themes more directly.

In the first two or three decades of the twentieth century, a liberationist counterculture to reclaim female sexuality began in earnest. With modernism, women were making political, social, and artistic statements about their sexuality. From about 1890 to the 1920s, daringly many writers of marital advice literature began to decouple sex for women from reproduction. They decried male sexual selfishness and described techniques aimed at giving women more pleasure. Theodore van de Velde’s huge bestseller,
Ideal Marriage
(1926), bemoaned the marital unhappiness that arose from not knowing “the ABCs of sex” and repudiated the Victorian code of silence about these matters. The popularity of the book could also have been due to his championing in detail of cunnilingus, and the attention he gave to the details of how effectively to bestow on wives what he called “the genital kiss.”
¹

Gertrude Stein, in her volume of poetry
Tender Buttons
(1912), made oblique references to the “tender button” of the clitoris.
²
Her famous line “a rose is a rose is a rose” is actually much more erotic and complex when read in its original setting. The line derives from a prose poem in which the context of the “rose” seems sexual—indeed multiorgasmic—and the rhythms of speech echo that escalating faltering of breath and cadence of waves of intensity that are so characteristic of female arousal, and which women poets have sought to capture since the time of Sappho’s “thin fire”:

Suppose, to suppose, suppose a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

To suppose, we suppose that there arose here and there that here and there there arose an instance of knowing that there are here and there that there are there that they will prepare, that they do care to come again.

Are they to come again.

Here is another potential Steinian rose/vagina: “RED ROSES: A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot.”
³

Performer Josephine Baker, the African American dancer who was the darling of Parisian nightclubs in 1925, performed in a short skirt made of artificial bananas—a witty reference to her own sexual confidence, suggesting that one of “hers” was equal to any number of “theirs.” Her glowing, self-possessed persona—which safely cast assertive female sexuality as exotic and “other”—was a new kind of iconography for female sexuality: a seductress who was not mincing or half ashamed, but who was open with her body, secure in its pleasures. Choreographer Loie Fuller’s modern dance routines in the 1900s—in which she combined her innovative choreography with the movement of veil-like silks—caused a sensation in London and Paris. Contemporary critics interpreted her dance as a statement about female desire, as Fuller’s waving, rippling, sensuous, almost labial cloth vortices swirled across the stage, with Fuller herself twisting at their centers. Contemporaries saw Fuller, writes literary historian Rhonda Garelick, as beginning and ending her performances with “a deeply female, birth-like violence,” a “bleeding, floral wound”: “As she whirls around in a spiral of blood-red light, Fuller seems to have set the air itself on fire, violently opening up a distinctly feminine, even vaginal rupture—a bleeding flower—in the planar space around her.”
⁴

Painter Georgia O’Keeffe left her family’s farm in Wisconsin and built her own career and life as a young bohemian in Manhattan in the 1910s. She posed brazenly for her lover Alfred Stieglitz’s geometrical, water-spangled nude photographs, leaving the viewing public and the art-criticism establishment shocked and titillated. Her flower paintings, often read as studies in a vaginal aesthetic, appeared in the early 1920s, when O’Keeffe was being personally identified as a free-spirited “muse” figure to male American modernists and Greenwich Village rebels, and she was identified with that subculture’s interest in female sexual freedom. Both male and female art critics responded to her flower paintings breathlessly, claiming that the paintings were telling truths about female sexuality that no woman had dared to reveal before, even though her biographer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp makes it clear that O’Keeffe at least overtly denied these images’ sexual content. O’Keeffe distanced herself from the vaginal nature of the images, according to Drohojowska-Philp, because she herself felt that the highly sexualized image of her persona, promoted by critics, obscured the seriousness of her intention as an artist.
⁵

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, also a bohemian participant in the 1920s demimonde of Greenwich Village, “branded” herself consciously as an artistic advocate of female sexual freedom. She was among the first women to pick up the banner of transcendentalist, liberationist sexual advocacy that had been raised first by Walt Whitman sixty years before, in his 1855 publication of the scandalous prose poem,
Leaves of Grass
—though other male writers, from Walter Pater to Oscar Wilde, had developed this liberationist, mystical view of sexuality following Whitman. Millay famously wrote the female-liberationist quatrain, suggestively titled “First Fig” (1922), in her collection
A Few Figs from Thistles:

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!
⁶

This caution-to-the-winds image of a rapturous and careless female sexual renegade, who makes her own choices and regrets none of her mistakes—because she welcomes the value of the experience—stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from the staid, victim-focused tradition of “seduction and betrayal” sexual narratives in Victorian women’s fictions. The female narrator who would willingly, even gladly, throw it all over—social role, identity, life itself—for the sake of, or in allegiance to, overt sexual passion was a long way from the demure sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning seventy years before, when female sexual passion had smoldered far below the surface of the language.

These artistic trends coincided with the latest iteration of vaginal motifs in art and architecture: the art deco papyrus was schematized into a repeated upside-down triangle, the icon for the exterior of the feminine pubis dating from humanity’s earliest visual art. These images were incorporated into buildings, wallpaper, household objects, and advertising posters. In the 1910s and 1920s, when “New Women” and then flappers began to rebel against the social and sexual mores of their mothers’ generations, the craze for Egyptiana in architecture, film, and furniture design also saw schematized triangle-pubis motifs everywhere.

A sudden explosion of accurate and sympathetic information about female sexuality now replaced the Van de Velde moralistic and inaccurate medical discourses of the Victorian period. Women were starting to be able to make love on their own terms for a very simple reason: technology. In the 1920s, reliable contraception became readily available: Marie Stopes opened her first birth control clinic in London in 1921, during the same era that Margaret Sanger opened her own clinic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
⁷
Casual sex became far less dangerous for women, simply because of advances in rubber processing, which led to the greatly increased availability and effectiveness of both condoms and diaphragms. Dr. Marie Stopes’s bestsellers
Married Love,
What Every Girl Should Know
and
What Every Mother Should Know
also appeared in the 1920s. Women were learning from public, noncensorious sources accurate information about their own sexual responses, for the first time in Western history.

But not all male modernists moved as fast. They certainly saw sexuality as connected to creativity—but it was
male
sexuality and
male
creativity that interested them. Dr. Michael H. Whitworth, in an Oxford University lecture in 2011 on “Modernism and Gender,” quotes from Ezra Pound’s “Translator’s Postscript” to the 1922 edition of Remy de Gourmont’s
The Natural Philosophy of Love.
Pound identified creativity as sexual and male: “the brain itself, is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense. . . . There are traces of it in the symbolism of the phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos. . . . Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.”
⁸

For Henry Miller, similarly, the whole matrix of reality was a “womb” upon which he inscribes himself: “When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written . . . I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.”
⁹
When modernist men own and inseminate the cosmos’s vulva with their ideas, the vulva and the womb are seen as positive; but when women, with their own ideas, seek to possess their own vulvas and wombs, those same organs degrade them. In Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
(1961), when women are creative, he tends to reduce them to “cunts” and to sexual appetites; Elsa, a visitor to his quarters, plays Schumann, and Miller writes, “A cunt who can play as she does ought to have better sense than to be tripped up by every guy with a big putz that happens to come along.” Or he describes women expatriate artists as “rich American cunts with paint boxes slung over their shoulders. A little talent and a fat purse.”
¹⁰

Dr. Whitworth points out that the male modernists identified “the feminine as submarine, and the masculine as dry land.”
¹¹
In contrast to Pound’s and Miller’s dynamic images of erect masculine ideas, Pound, as well as T. S. Eliot, tended to characterize the work of female colleagues in wet, flaccid, or quivering
negative
vaginal metaphors: Eliot accused Imagist poet Amy Lowell, for instance, of a “general floppiness,” a floppiness that had, he argued, in terms of the literary movement of Imagism, “gone too far.” Dr. Whitworth notes that critic Conrad Aiken encouraged readers to “pass lightly over the . . . tentacular quivering of Mina Loy” in favor of the “manly metres” of Eliot and Stevens.
¹²

When the male modernists actually did write about female sexuality or about the clitoris and vagina, they did so in responses that showed an emerging Freudian dualism: their responses ranging from a chilly awe—as in Samuel Beckett’s reference to “The great grey cunt of the universe”—to D. H. Lawrence’s seeming amazement at the transcendental potential of female sexual ecstasy, as in the love scenes in which Mellors awakens Lady Chatterley’s vaginal responses, to irritable resistance, as in Lawrence’s description of New Woman clitoral “beak pecking” in another lovemaking scene in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928). But in addition to the anxious male response to the clitoris and the sometimes admiring male description of vaginal sensuality in this era, a new place on the spectrum appeared, established first by Henry Miller: the dismissable, contemptible, pornographic “hole.” In its not-important-ness, it differed from Tertullian’s hellish snakepits of sin; it is the modern pornographic vagina: something tawdry, that simply doesn’t matter.