Vagina (7 page)

Edith Wharton’s letters and novels, in particular, made me eager to pursue this line of inquiry. For most of her adult life, Wharton was married to the conventional, upper-class dilettante Teddy Wharton, a man to whom she was not suited. By her own account, and others’, their sexual life was almost nonexistent. But in 1908, she experienced a dramatic sexual awakening when she entered into an extramarital affair with the handsome, seductive, and provocative bisexual journalist Morton Fullerton. In her private love letters to him, published for the first time in the 1980s, she writes of this sexual awakening as threatening a dissolution of her self, a loss of her control. She writes—reverting to French, the language in which she addresses sexual pleasure—that his touch leaves her with “no more will”:
“je n’ais plus de volonte.”
⁷
She speaks of Fullerton’s sexual love as “a narcotic”—a metaphor echoed in the fiction by other women writers of this period. (Edna Pontellier, in
The Awakening
[1899]
,
also describes her lover Robert’s touch as “a narcotic”—a metaphor that would become more scarce after the Second Wave of the 1970s made such admissions of perceived dependency by omen on men politically incorrect.)
⁸

In one letter, Wharton describes a conversation with Fullerton in which, after she conveyed to him the effect on her of her having become orgasmic, he responded that she would write better as a result of that experience. Fullerton, as it turned out, was right: Edith Wharton did indeed do some of her best work after her sexual awakening. Interestingly, in
The House of Mirth,
published in 1905, there is virtually no language of physical passion in relation to her women characters, so their attachments and motivations seem incomplete.
⁹
Suppression is well expressed, but not fulfillment. Female sexual passion, however, in many manifestations, suffuses her
Summer
(1917) and
The Age of Innocence
(1920)
.

After 1908–10, Wharton’s prose becomes richer and more tactile; the world of pleasure and the senses enters into it more fully, as does a sense—a tragic sense, at that time, necessarily—of feminine longing for ecstasy, life, and sensation at all costs. The theme of a woman who is changed and awakened by her own sexuality—and who does not regret the consequences, though she suffers as a result—is consistent in Wharton’s fiction after 1908–10.

I looked at biographies of these and other great women artists, writers, and revolutionaries from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the early twentieth: Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Sand, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edith Wharton, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein—all women whose lives, letters, and choices, even at great risk or sacrifice to themselves, revealed their intense, often sexually passionate natures.
¹⁰

In life after life of this now-expanded circle of women artists, writers, and revolutionaries, the same arc appeared: a flowing of creative insight and vision seemed to follow a sexual flowering. One can often see a shift in perspective chronologically for these writers, artists, and revolutionaries: their palettes suddenly broaden, or possibilities of another world swerve into view.

George Eliot, after she began her illicit relationship with her lover George Lewes, wrote her first important piece of fiction,
Scenes of Clerical Life
(1857). Soon after Georgia O’Keeffe began a highly erotic relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, her daring experimentation with form and color, represented by her flower paintings, revolutionary for their era, began. As she wrote to him in 1917, conflating artistic and sexual excitement, “I feel as though I have lots to do
—lots
—and one thing to paint—It’s the flag as I see it floating—A dark red flag—trembling in the wind like my lips when I’m about to cry— [. . .] There is a strong firm line in it too—teeth set—under the lips—

“Goodnight—My chest is very sore and I’m tired—couldn’t sleep or eat for excitement down there—and hurt—and wonder—and realizing—”
¹¹

Emma Goldman’s radical critique of existing social norms intensified sharply after the start of her passionate affair with Ben Reitman in 1908. She also took stands that led to her arrest. Typical of such a muse, Reitman did not just seduce Goldman, he also offered her his “hobo hall” for her lectures, when she could not secure another forum. When Gertrude Stein met and began living with Alice B. Toklas—which allowed her to explore her inner life as a lover of women—her work leaped forward in terms of the level of its experimentation, as well as in terms of its sensuality.

Even recent women writers sometimes seem to make this connection—and sometimes in surprising detail: in “A Conversation with Isabel Allende,” which reporter Melissa Block conducted for National Public Radio on November 6, 2006, Block asked Allende about the genesis of the vividly realized seventeenth-century Spanish character Inés Suárez, heroine of Allende’s novel
Inés of My Soul:
“The first sentence just popped out of my womb,” Allende replied, to a perhaps startled interlocutor. “I wouldn’t say my head—but my womb. It was, ‘I am Inés Suárez, a townswoman of the loyal city of Santiago de Nueva Extremadura in the kingdom of Chile.’ And that’s how I felt. I felt that I was her and that the story could only be told in her voice.”
¹²

In the biographies I read, the lover is often a kind of muse figure—not always a staid partner, but often a man or woman who respects the creative artist or revolutionary intellectually, while stirring her erotically. For so many of the great women artists, writers, and revolutionaries, it seems, a sexual awakening coincided with risk-taking on other levels—social and artistic—and with other kinds of awakening: of mastery, expression, and creative powers.

I began to wonder: Was there, perhaps, some connection we were missing between freedom and creativity, and an awakening to women’s own most passionate natures?

Could something deeper, I wondered, be going on here?

THE TINY RAT-PLEASURE BRUSH

After my spinal surgery and its attendant restoration to me of joy, color, confidence, creativity, and a sense of connection between things, there was no way for me to ignore the fact that the injury to my consciousness that I had suffered before my operation had to be related to some physical causation, as the changes in consciousness correlated so strongly to injury to and recovery of my pelvic nerve. What had happened to me? And what did it mean? Was this cause and effect a freak of my own weird subjective neurology and biochemistry—or was this an insight potentially generalizable to all women?

About four months after I had mostly recovered from spinal surgery, I was invited to speak to a group of brilliant young women at a university. To conceal identities, I will place this event in rural Canada, and locate it at a state university. Many were biology or neuroscience students, and they had decided to put together a conference. Their goal was to have some conversations about the issues they might face as women when they left the school setting and entered the “real” world.

It was a warm, breezy day as we gathered to talk in the living room of a cottage on an old farm. There were deep soft couches covered in scarlet fabric, faded crimson rugs, and baskets of dried flowers in the massive fireplaces. Through the windows, the honeyed sun poured in: we could see a deep-green river valley before us, and beyond it, the blue, mounded hills.

After a conversation about their projects and their future lives, we all decided to go for a walk in the warm bright air. One of the young women, who knew the area, led us on cow paths and through hedges, over muddy bends in the dirt road, and then up and over a hill. As we crested the hill, I saw that it was as if we were in another ecosystem. The domestic coziness was suddenly far away. Wild gray-green fields dropped away from all sides, and a strong, steady wind blew. I decided to put directly before them what my puzzle was.

“I think that there might be a connection between the vagina and the brain that most of us don’t fully understand. I’m finding that there may be some relationship between female orgasm, and confidence and creativity. There may also be a relationship between the vagina—and orgasm—and the ability to see the connections between things.”

The young women were silent for a moment. Then one young woman, an historian, spoke up. “That is absolutely true for me,” she said definitively. “When I have really good sex. But I mean,
really
good sex”—everyone laughed, quite aware of the difference—“I feel like I can do anything. I feel great about myself. My confidence goes through the roof. And I am not always like that. But also it shows up in my work for a while afterward: I see things I did not see before, connections I might have missed. I do feel more of a sense of mastery about my perceptions.”

Another young woman, a political scientist, agreed: “It makes me feel invincible. It makes me feel like running a marathon. Totally happy about myself.” There was the silence again, the silence of intense thinking.

“I used to work in a lab where my job was to give female rats sexual pleasure,” said a young scientist. She had a mischievous smile.

“What??” we all exclaimed.

“It’s true!” she laughed. “I had a tiny brush.” She made a gesture with her fingers, as if painting a tiny point in the air. “After a while it is just part of the job.”

“I didn’t even know female rats could experience sexual pleasure,” I marveled, struck by my own ignorance.

“All female mammals have clitorises,” she explained, in the calm tone of a scientist for whom this was interesting, but also just another data point. “They all have clitorises,” she repeated. A cow tilted her head and glanced quizzically at the creature to her right. (Indeed, I was to learn that two-thirds of mammalian clitorises are on the anterior wall of the vagina—like the human G-spot; at that time I had no idea that mammals generally had clitorises.)

It was quite a remarkable moment. A fog had started to drift in over the rounded hills that extended away from us; the wind was softly blowing. The women were talking quietly about orgasm, insight, and energy. I was amazed that I had never known that fact, obvious though it should have been.
All female mammals
were designed by the process of evolution to experience great sexual pleasure.

“Female rats, when they want sex, go like this.” She held up her hands like little paws and arched her back. We all laughed. It was a gesture I would learn later was called “lordosis.” She described the lab and its results further, and I agreed to find out more about it.

We talked for a while longer, but the wind grew too strong for us. We drifted back at last to the cozy fire, the chintz, and the teapot, a little sorry to leave that slightly wild, slightly inexplicable moment—when the wind, the grass, and the animals had all seemed a part of what we were learning about ourselves: that we and our specific feminine pleasure had a firm place in the natural order of things.

I was sorry for the moment to end, but buoyed by the young women’s curiosity, and their openness to discovering if what excited them in their intellectual work was part of other kinds of excitement that they had, until then, understood, in isolation, as physical.

THE ONSTAGE ORGASM

In the next few months, other women, from many different backgrounds, confirmed to me that they, too, had experienced a connection between their sexual well-being and their confidence levels and creative lives.

One evening I attended a crowded premiere party in New York City, where I was surrounded by film and theater professionals. The noise was deafening. Standing at the crowded bar, I introduced myself to a statuesque woman in her early forties who was waiting next to me. She was radiantly elegant; she wore red lipstick, pearls, and a black cocktail dress that evoked the flapper era. She told me that she was an actress—she had had a role in the film we had just seen—and she asked me what I did for a living. I told her that I was a writer, at work on my next book. She asked what it was about. “It’s a book about the vagina,” I said. She smiled. Her pupils dilated.

By this point, it had happened often enough that I was aware that many people had immediate, probably measurable physical reactions when they asked me this question and heard the word
vagina
in my response. Some, both men and women, smiled immediately: beautiful, heartfelt smiles. Others looked frightened or disgusted, as if I had suddenly produced from my handbag a trout and placed it on the table before us, or had held it up for discussion. Still others, usually men, burst out laughing, angrily and inadvertently, usually to their own embarrassment.

Given the actress’s dreamy smile, something suggested to me that I could go ahead. “Actually, right now,” I confessed, “I am trying to figure out a possible link between female orgasm and creativity.”

The actress turned pale and self-conscious. “I can’t believe you said that,” she said. “I want to tell you something. It’s something I’ve never told anyone.” She took a deep breath. “I’m a Method actor.” I knew that Method actors use visualization to act “from the inside out”—that is, they invoke the consciousness of the character whose role they are playing, to experience and then express that character from within, rather than “acting” as if they are that person. “When I start to rehearse a role and go deeply into the character, my orgasms change. They start to become more, more . . .” She was gesturing with her wineglass, as if at an imagined cosmos, at a loss for words.

“Transcendental?” I asked.

“Exactly. Ask my boyfriend. And then”—she looked around, to make sure no one was listening—“I find it a heightened erotic state for me to be in character, performing.” She looked around again, but soldiered on, wishing, it seemed, to get this insight on the record. “I have had an orgasm while I was onstage. Just from being in that heightened creative condition.”