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Ulysses by James Joyce: Penelope

of course hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do
(Molly Bloom thinking her husband, Leopold, should count his blessings)

he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part
(Molly angry at Bloom’s weird habit of kissing her bottom)

Im always like that in the spring Id like a new fellow every year
(Molly’s friskiness)

what else were we given all those desires for Id like to know I cant help it if Im young still can I
(Molly defends her natural urges)

compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf
(Molly compares a woman’s lovely boobs with a man’s ugly bits)

wherever you be let your wind go free
(Molly celebrates the joys of farting)

I bet he never saw a better pair of thighs than that look how white they are
(Molly’s body positivity)

God send him sense and me more money
(dismissing a boring old bishop she once heard deliver a moralising sermon, and sounding very like her irreverent namesake, Moll Flanders)

Lord the cracked things come into my head sometimes

‘Penelope’ is the 18th and final chapter of James Joyce’s novel, ‘Ulysses’. Here’s a reminder of the complete chapter numbers and names. (Note that the names given here are not printed in the published book, they were assigned in guidance and schemas which Joyce sent to supporters and have been used by commentators ever since; but you won’t find them in any published or online edition):

Part 1. Telemachiad

  1. Telemachus
  2. Nestor
  3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

  1. Calypso
  2. Lotus Eaters
  3. Hades
  4. Aeolus
  5. Lestrygonians
  6. Scylla and Charybdis
  7. Wandering Rocks
  8. Sirens
  9. Cyclops
  10. Nausicaa
  11. Oxen of the Sun
  12. Circe

Part 3. Nostos

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

Place in the sequence

As you can see, ‘Penelope’ is not only the final chapter but the third chapter of the third part of the novel, which is generally called ‘Nostos’, Greek for ‘The Return’, Joyce’s own name for it.

The preceding two chapters tell how (in ‘Circe’) middle-aged advertising salesman Leopold Bloom helped over-educated, drunk and depressed young Stephen Dedalus get away from Dublin’s red light district where he’d been involved in a fight with a soldier. In ‘Eumaeus’ Bloom helps Stephen to an all-night café down by the docks where he tries to restore him with a cup of (disgusting) coffee and a hot roll. In ‘Ithaca’ the pair leave the café and walk to Bloom’s home at 7 Eccles Street.

Here Bloom lets them in, makes Stephen a nice cup of cocoa and they talk about many things. Bloom offers to make up a bed on the sofa for Stephen and suggests all kinds of plans – that he could move in as a lodger and give his wife, Molly, Italian lessons, and maybe even join her as a professional singer in the music troupe Bloom fantasises about setting up and managing. But Stephen turns these offers down and, after the pair have gone for a pee in Bloom’s back garden, Bloom opens the garden gate and Bloom stumbles off into the night never to be heard of again.

Bloom re-enters his house, locks up, gets undressed interspersed with rummaging about in his drawers, looking at mementoes of his absent daughter and dead father, thinking about all kinds of subjects, not least extended fantasies about moving to a delightful cottage in the country. Then he finally gets into bed and thinks about the Central Event in the book which is that while he’s been out walking the streets of Dublin, his bosomy wife, Molly, stayed at home and was visited by the flash man-about-town and concert promoter Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan, who had sex with her.

All day long Bloom has been aware of their tryst, set for 4pm, so that he’s spent the book in a kind of PTSD hyper-self-aware state (which partly explains the super stream-of-consciousness style of the novel). But during the course of his ponderings, Bloom gets over it. He registers his own mixed emotions of jealousy and anger but circles, in the end, round to equanimity and, finally, tenderness. And in this sleep forgiving mood, he kisses Molly on her bare bottom.

Unfortunately, this has the effect of waking her up from her sleep. Now half awake, Molly quizzes her husband about where he’s been and he proceeds to tell her a pack of lies, saying he spent the evening at the theatre then went on to a restaurant for supper where a fellow diner, Stephen, injured himself performing a gymnastic feat and so he brought him home, here, to Eccles Street, to patch him up, and that’s why he’s come to bed late. And having recited this pack of lies which omits everything important which happened during the day and replaces it with a set of fabrications, Bloom falls asleep and hands the novel’s narrative over to his wife. And it’s here that the final chapter, ‘Penelope’, consisting of Molly Bloom’s long monologue, begins.

First a few more facts, then we’ll look in detail at Molly’s chapter.

Time

Each of the chapters of ‘Ulysses’ covers about an hour in the course of one long day, starting at 8am on Thursday 16 June 1904 and going through to the early hours of the following morning, Friday 17 June. (As Stephen remarks, ‘Every Friday buries a Thursday’.)

‘Ithaca’ takes place from about 2 to 3 am on the morning of Friday 17 June 1904. As Bloom lets Stephen out the back door of his garden, the bells of St George’s ring and the commentators tell me this marks 2.30 am. So assuming it takes Bloom about half an hour to lock up, get undressed, potter about and finally get into bed, ‘Penelope’ kicks off maybe around 3am in the morning.

Homeric parallel

Each of the chapters in ‘Ulysses’ is based on an episode from The Odyssey, the famous epic poem composed some 750 years BC by the ancient Greek poet Homer, which describes the ten-year-long voyage back from the Trojan War of the Greek hero Odysseus and his crew, and which features encounters with mythical creatures and legendary figures such as the giant Cyclops or the witch Circe.

In The Odyssey, Penelope is the wife of Odysseus who has waited 20 long years for her husband’s return, which we, the readers, know has been comprised of the ten years of the war itself, and then the ten years of Odysseus’s wanderings round the Mediterranean. During the last few years she has been fending off the horde of ‘suitors’ who have descended like locusts on her palace and are eating her out of house and home while they vie for her hand in remarriage, and so ownership of Odysseus’s kingdom of Ithaca.

Now the key point is that Penelope is every bit as cunning as her husband Odysseus, who is himself described as being the most cunning and many-minded of the Greek heroes. And so in her husband’s absence, Penelope has devised a series of strategies to put off the suitors. The most famous of these is that she tells them she must weave a burial shroud for Odysseus’s elderly father, Laertes, and cannot listen to their suits until she’s finished. For three long years she dutifully weaves the shroud during the day but then carefully unpicks it during the night, so that the task is never finished. Clever, eh?

Molly, her modern reincarnation in the novel, shares many of Penelope’s traits. 1) For a start she represents the final aspect of Bloom’s coming home, his nostos or return. Sure he arrived at his actual house in the previous chapter, but in a sense it’s only climbing into bed and kissing her that marks the completion of his odyssey and his final arrival Home.

2) As to the suitors, Odysseus arrives back at his palace but still has to dispel the suitors and take possession, but there no hordes of suitors in the ‘Ulysses’ version. There was one (Blazes Boylan) but he’s long gone. Instead Bloom arrives home at his house but needs, in some subtle psychological sense, to retake ownership by a) touching all his precious possessions and b) working through in his mind his responses to Molly’s infidelity to him – both processes which are itemised in ‘Ithaca’.

3) Where Molly most resembles Penelope is in her own cleverness, in being every bit as smart as her husband. Because the real point of this chapter is that at long last we get to hear her side of the story and it is significantly, and at all points, different from her husband’s.

Because the ‘Penelope’ chapter consists of a long, long interior monologue by Molly in which she passes in a chaotic review over all the key moments in her life, before and after her marriage to Bloom, mentioning and describing her parents, her girlhood in Gibraltar, incidents from her career, the umpteen times she’s been propositioned or molested or flirted with – but above all, hundreds of comments about Bloom’s character and habits which show him in a completely different light from the entire preceding narrative.

It does a number of things, this final chapter. It rounds off the whole novel by bringing Bloom’s odyssey to a conclusion. But it also gives the woman’s version of a world up to now dominated by men and men’s opinions. More specifically, it gives a completely different portrait of Bloom than we’ve hitherto had, portrayed in detail by someone who knows him intimately (really intimately) and whose version is often at drastic odds with what we’ve learned so far.

First a brief reminder of the key facts of Molly’s biography, then I’ll go through the monologue in detail.

Molly key facts

  • current name Marion ‘Molly’ Bloom
  • born Marion Tweedy, daughter of Major Brian Tweedy, of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers
  • Molly was born and raised in Gibraltar because that’s where Major Tweedy’s regiment was stationed
  • age 33
  • earns money as a soprano singer and is fairly well known around Dublin
  • been married for 15 years to Leopold Bloom
  • two children: a daughter, Milly, who just turned 15 yesterday, and a son, Rudy, who died in infancy, aged 11 days, a decade ago, since when the couple haven’t had sex

Stream-of-consciousness

The latter 5 or 6 chapters of ‘Ulysses’ differ from the first ten or so in each being dominated by one big formatting idea. Thus ‘Nausicaa’ is written in the style of a lady’s romantic novel and ‘Circe is in the form of a play. Molly’s chapter is another case in point: it is the book’s purest example of the invention (often attributed to Joyce) of the stream-of-consciousness. It’s 24,000 words long, filling 40 to 50 pages of the book versions and yet it contains of just 8 unpunctuated sections i.e the words flow seamlessly together with no punctuation at all for thousands and thousands of words. The final section alone contains 3,680 words and no punctuation.

Why the initial style is hard

Surprisingly, though, it isn’t as hard to make sense of as the densest of the ‘initial style’. Brainy young Stephen Dedalus’s thoughts in ‘Proteus’ 1) contain loads of learned references, including 2) quotes from theology and literature, 3) often in foreign languages and 4) the references are often cut off halfway through, clipped and abbreviated, sometimes down to just one word, and all chopped up by continuous full stops into tight little fragments.

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

It’s the combination of these four elements which makes the ‘initial style’, and Stephen’s stream-of-consciousness in particular, often so impenetrable.

Why Molly’s style is much easier

By contrast, all these challenging elements are missing in Molly’s thoughts. There are no fancy-ancy quotes or foreign languages or tight truncations; instead, a soothing flow of words:

theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot he noticed at once even before he was introduced when I was in the D B C with Poldy laughing and trying to listen I was waggling my foot we both ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter I saw him looking with his two old maids of sisters when I stood up

In one of the book’s many commentaries I came across the highly revealing fact that Joyce originally wrote the chapter out as traditional prose and then went back and took all the punctuation out. Once you know that, you can kind of feel your way towards the missing stops. Maybe ‘full stop’ is being slightly too dogmatic, but you can feel the ghost of the missing punctuation. In other words, the prose isn’t really endlessly flowing, it’s actually made up – once you get a feel for it – from relatively traditional units. So the excerpt above could be loosely punctuated thus:

they’re all so different – Boylan talking about the shape of my foot – he noticed at once, even before he was introduced – when I was in the D B C with Poldy laughing and trying to listen, I was waggling my foot – we both ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter – I saw him looking with his two old maids of sisters when I stood up

Not that difficult after all, is it? In fact, surprisingly easy. Obviously there are plenty of passages which aren’t quite as easy to silently punctuate into traditional prose as this one, but a lot are, and once you get used to reading it while looking for these sentence-like units, you develop the knack for recognising them and so extracting the sense, relatively quickly.

While reading ‘Ulysses’ I came across the RTE radio dramatisation of the novel which was made for the centenary of Joyce’s birth in 1982. You can listen to each individual chapter as a separate track on Spotify.

Listening to this radio production of ‘Penelope’, what you almost immediately realise is the obvious fact that, if you’re going to read this text (or indeed anything) out loud, you regularly have to stop for breath. And any sensible reader will tend to stop for breath at the natural breaks of sense, at the end of cadences or phrases. So listening to someone read out Molly Bloom’s soliloquy really brings out the ghostly punctuation which, as I’ve suggested, in practice still exists in the text. Reading it out loud tends to naturally reintroduce the invisible punctuation.

In addition, this (marvellous) reading also brings out the changes of tone and expression which are continually occurring throughout the text, as appropriate for different phrases, and this, too, helps to chop up what at first seemed like page after page of solid text, into what are in reality much more manageable, understandable phrases.

The ‘Eternal Feminine’

As to the reason for this endless flow – in the schematic charts and diagrams which Joyce made about the book, he said ‘Penelope’ took the sign ∞ representing infinity, supposedly because she represents the Eternal Feminine.

Personally, I shy away from this kind of talk because discussing the ‘nature of woman’, ‘female psychology’ and so on was problematic and controversial at the time, and has only become more mired in four generations of feminist theory, not to mention the worldwide swamp of social media.

If you do a quick Google search and read any articles or commentary about Molly and her monologue you will quickly discover how the entire subject is infested by experts who cite the received ideas of our age, that Molly is a ‘strong independent women’ who ‘expresses her own sexuality’ in ‘defiance of the patriarchy’ and countless other clichés. You can find thousands of feminist interpretations at the click of a button.

What I noticed in the two commentaries I’ve tended to have open beside me, is that because they both go on at length about feminism, sexism, the patriarchy and so on, they completely ignore many other aspects and details which are just as important.

Therefore in my summary I will try to stick closely to what the words actually say and not wander off into sweeping generalisations about The Female Mind, Female Sexuality, the Patriarchy and all the other high-level issues which so many commentators instantly jump to. Their approach takes us away from the words on the page, which are not only funny and surprising but are deliberately designed to 1) recap information about quite a few characters we’ve met previously in the book and 2) prompt us to rethink everything we thought we knew about her husband, Leopold.

Yes yes

In that spirit, looking at the actual words on the page, there’s an obvious aspect of the concept of the infinite, which is that this big chapter starts with the word ‘yes’ and ends with the word ‘yes’. This is an obvious manoeuvre by Joyce to bring out the Eternity theme.

Pondering this I conceived a Kafkaesque nightmare of a hypothetical reader who finds themselves somehow condemned to read the chapter forever, because as soon as they read the final ‘yes’ they are transported back to the first ‘yes’ and so spend the rest of their lives stuck inside an endless loop of Molliness.

Section lengths

Precise definitions of the section lengths vary slightly on whether you’re referring to the 1922, 1961 or Gabler (1984) edition. I used an online word counter to count the words in each section of the Planet Gutenberg online edition.

Section 1: 3,746 words (opens with ‘Yes because he never did…’)

Section 2: 4,404 words (opens with ‘theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot…’ and makes up what is supposedly the longest sentence in literature)

Section 3: 921 words (opens with ‘yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me thirsty…’)

Section 4: 2,208 words (opens with ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling…’)

Section 5: 2,378 words (opens with ‘Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning…’)

Section 6: 3,619 words (opens with ‘that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free…’)

Section 7: 3,230 words (opens with ‘who knows is there anything the matter with my insides…’)

Section 8: 3,680 words (opens with ‘no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no nothing in his nature…’)

Summary

As explained, I am going to avoid wading into the many high-level feminist debates raised by the soliloquy (there’s no shortage of people doing that) and instead try to focus on the exact words and what they tell us.

Section 1 (3,746 words)

Molly is surprised that Bloom has asked her to make him breakfast in bed tomorrow morning. This request doesn’t occur in ‘Ithaca’ so is a puzzle.

Quickly she moves on to a sharp assessment of one of the many other people who appear in the monologue, Mrs Riordan who we met as Dante, nanny to young Stephen Dedalus in ‘Portrait’. In a surprising coincidence we discover she lived as an old lady in the same hotel as Molly and Bloom and the latter used to take her for excursions in her bathchair. I find this one of the most striking things in the entire monologue.

But Molly is cross because Dante never left them any money in her will when she died. Also, she was very moralistic, down on bathsuits etc so Molly is glad she’s not like that.

She likes Bloom for his kindness that way, mind you he’s useless when he’s ill, and so are men generally, ‘weak and puling’, compared to women who have to hide it all. Remembering Bloom being in hospital after he sprained his ankle at a party, she does the first of many shrewish comments about other women using their wiles to get close to Poldy, in this case Miss Stack buying him flowers to get into his bedroom, the implication she had a fancy for him or they even had sex (?).

She suspects he must have had an orgasm during the day because he asked for breakfast i.e. it gives him an appetite. But she’s equally sure it’s not an affair, it’s not ‘love’, so speculates it might be with one of the prostitutes from nighttown, which leads her on to think about all the little bitches Bloom’s picked up on the sly, ‘if they only knew him as well as I do’. She knows that’s why she kissed his bottom, it’s a tell-tale sign and remembers the smell of other women on his clothes.

Just recently she came into a room where he was writing which he hurriedly covered up with blotting paper, poor fool (we know it was probably a letter to his penpal lover Martha Clifford though Molly doesn’t know her name).

She hated it when he had a pash for their scullerymaid, Mary Driscoll, the pair of them flirting under her nose (we know about Mary because she appeared among the many accusers in Bloom’s dream trial in ‘Circe’) and was outraged when Bloom suggested Mary eat Christmas dinner with them, and driven to distraction by her queening round the place (singing in the WC) until she confronted Bloom with an ultimatum, her or me, he chose her and so she gave Mary her week’s notice.

She remembers the last time Bloom came on her bottom, on an evening when they’d gone for a walk with Blazes Boylan and the latter had squeezed her hand. She imagines seducing some young boy, then remembers Bloom’s insistent questioning of who is she thinking about.

She seems to go on and think that now she’s had sex with Boylan, the first time is over, now it will become more routine. She wonders why you can’t just get people to kiss and hug you, she loves kissing.

I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you

Then thinks about having to go to confession, the silly euphemisms the priest uses, then that she was a bit attracted to the priest with his bullneck.

Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of incense off him like the pope

Thinking back to her afternoon sex with Boylan, she wonders if he was satisfied with her, she didn’t like him slapping her on the bottom:

I laughed Im not a horse or an ass

A flower he was wearing reminds her of a funny tasting drink she associates with an American she knew, can’t figure out if he slept with her. She associates it with a thunderstorm which put the fear of God into her, thinks about the end of the world, what could you do except go to church and pray, which reminds her that Poldy isn’t religious, refuses to go to church, says there is no soul, just grey matter inside us. Which circles back to memories of sex with Boylan that afternoon:

he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst… no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up…

With a little recrimination to God:

whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us or like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye

But then a surprising debunkment of Boylan:

still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me

Surely the second he refers to Bloom (‘the last time’) since we thought Boylan had only done it once. Interesting to note she’s describing coitus interruptus in the first part. Then a complaint about condoms (?):

nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure

Thoughts of contraception lead to the opposite, of large families like Mina Purefoy‘s whose husband keeps getting her pregnant so she lives in a swarm of children. She wonders about having a child by Boylan but then considers that Poldy has more spunk in him.

Then she remembers coming across him flirting with Josie Powell, the unmarried name of Josie Breen, who Bloom had a thing with, at a dance, which Bloom tried to justify then led to a stand-up row about politics, something about Jesus being a carpenter and the first socialist. But generally how she managed the rivalry with Josie, how she knew Bloom liked her better. But still she ponders how she would win Bloom back is he resumed his passion for Josie, in ‘his plabbery kind of a manner’. How she’d revive him by little touches, getting him to fold down her collar, whereas she’d go and confront Josie directly.

Remembers the night Bloom almost proposed when she was in the kitchen making a potato cake, and how Josie was always embracing her, Molly, in front of Bloom, as if it was Bloom, one among many women who flirted with him. Molly used to tease Josie with how close she was to Bloom, then after they got married she stopped coming round.

She wonders what life is like for her now, with her mad husband, Breen. Last time they met, Josie told her he sometimes gets into bed with his muddy boots on. At least Poldy always wipes his feet on the mat, always blacks his own boots, always takes off his hat when he comes up in the street. Whereas Breen is mad about this postcard he got with U.P. on it.

No she’d rather die than marry another man, mind you Bloom is lucky to have her: ‘hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do’, and thinking of women driven to distraction by their husbands she thinks of Mrs Maybrick who poisoned her husband with white arsenic for love of another man. She was hanged.

Commentary: although there’s a fair amount about Bloom and Boyland, and their penises and spunk, in fact the section can be seen as Molly comparing herself with seven other women, with their different beliefs, moral values, and experiences of love and marriage. Knowing Joyce I imagine with a bit of effort you could work each of them up into symbolising different types or categories.

Section 2 (4,404 words)

its all very well a husband but you cant fool a lover

She blames Bloom for having some new fad every week. She left her suede gloves behind in the toilet at the DBC Dame Street, Poldy suggested offering a reward. Boyle likes her feet, likes her crossing them, he liked watching her take off her stockings. But this segues into Bloom one time asked her to walk in the horses’ dung in the street, ‘of course hes not natural like the rest of the world’.

She remembers him saying she’d beat Katty Lanner (a real-life dancer). The tenor Bartell DArcy who kissed her in church, he liked her low notes. She thinks she’ll tell Bloom about it one day and show him the place where they ‘did it’ – surely she means had sex.

In particular Bloom ‘hes mad on the subject of drawers’, and stares at young girls on bicycles with their skirts blowing up to show their knickers as they ride. The time at a fair when a woman was standing against the sun and he stared even though he was with her and Milly. The hypocrisy of men who can go and get anything they like from anything in a skirt but insist on interrogating them (women) about where they’ve been and with who etc. ‘drawers drawers the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll to carry about in his waistcoat pocket’ (which of course links up with the subject of the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter where Bloom gets his rocks off watching Gerty show him her drawers).

The time they were in the rain and he begged her to lift her skirt a little and she touched his trousers ‘the way I used to Gardner’.

Bloom was always canny not like ‘that other fool Henny Doyle he was always breaking or tearing something in the charades’. Bloom sent her 8 poppies. But he could never embrace well ‘like Gardner‘. She hopes Boylan will come round again, on Monday, same time, 4pm.

She hates people calling at random times like the time Professor Goodwin found her flushed from cooking stew. We learn that Boylan sent ahead a gift of port and peaches (which we saw him buying in Thornton’s fruit and flower shop in ‘Wandering Rocks’.

She’s scheduled to go to Belfast with Boylan the following week; lucky Bloom is to go to Ennis to commemorate his father’s death, would be tricky being in rooms next to each other; if Bloom had sex with her, Boylan would know.

She remembers the time Bloom carried bowls of soup from the dining car along a moving train spilling them everywhere, and the steward locked them in their compartment in revenge. She hopes Boylan books first class tickets. Trains remind her of the nice workman who got her and Bloom their own compartment in the train for their outing to Howth.

She remembers patriotic concerts she did in support of the Boer War where she sang the Rudyard Kipling poem The Absent-Minded Beggar. This song is mentioned numerous times in Bloom’s thoughts earlier in the book. Funnily enough I devoted a blog post to it when I had my Kipling phase. She wore a brooch for Lord Roberts and had a map of the war. Which leads her to reminisce about ‘Gardner lieut Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt’ who fought in the war and apparently died there of enteric fever.

he was a lovely fellow in khaki and just the right height over me Im sure he was brave too he said I was lovely the evening we kissed goodbye at the canal lock my Irish beauty

She likes the army, after all she’s an army brat, her father was a major, so:

I love to see a regiment pass in review the first time I saw the Spanish cavalry at La Roque it was lovely… the Black Watch with their kilts in time at the march past the 10th hussars the prince of Wales own or the lancers O the lancers theyre grand or the Dublins that won Tugela

Interchangeable men I’ll note here where I’ve noticed it, that Joyce deliberately blends all the men in her life together under the one pronoun ‘he’. In consecutive phrases ‘he’ can refer to Bloom or Boylan or his or her father or various others. The implication (apart from Molly being dreamily half-awake) is that all men are the same. At a deeper level, maybe the implication is that all people are the same, that our identities are only skin deep, like name labels stuck on our chests at a conference which soon peel off.

She notes how Boylan’s father made money selling horses to the army and hopes he’ll buy her a nice present when they go to Belfast ‘well he could buy me a nice present up in Belfast after what I gave him’ i.e. sex. She’d love to go shopping with him. She’ll have to take her wedding ring off or risk being reported to the police (married woman with unmarried man) although:

O let them all go and smother themselves for the fat lot I care

She remembers that Boylan is heavy, hairy too, would be more convenient to have sex doggy position:

always having to lie down for them better for him put it into me from behind the way Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like the dogs do

She remembers Boylan was beautifully dressed but for the first ten minutes in a foul temper because he’d just lost £20 on the Gold Cup horse race which reverberates through the novel. He got the tip from Lenehan and that reminds Molly of sitting in a coach next to Lenehan coming back from the Glencree dinner (in ‘Wandering Rocks’ Lenehan remembers this journey, pressed up against Molly so he could feel the outline of her fine breasts: ‘His hands moulded ample curves of air’, which gave him an erection). Unsurprisingly she thinks Lenehan is a creep. At that social do she was aware of the Lord Mayor staring at her with his dirty eyes. Molly’s fate is to be eyed up and chatted up wherever she goes.

She wishes she had cutlery as fine as the ones at that dinner and reflects she could have stolen a few by slipping them into her muff. Shopping: she wants two new chemises and a kidfitting corselet as advertised in The Gentlewoman. Which makes her reflect she’s getting a bit tubby, needs to lay off the stout at lunchtime. Mind you, the poor quality of the booze they get from Larry O’Rourke.

She’s got one pair of garters Bloom bought her, and he got her some lovely face cream which made skin ‘like new’, she asked him to buy a new bottle (which we saw him do right at the start of his part of the narrative). She only has 3 sets of clothes and one at the cleaners.

She feels sorry for herself wearing such shabby outfits and remembers she’ll be 33 this September i.e. 32 now. Mind you take Mrs Galbraith, older than her and a fine looking woman though on the turn. She remembers watching Kitty O’Shea brush her hair in the house opposite in Grantham Street. (This peripheral contact with Kitty parallels Bloom’s brief encounter with Charles Stewart Parnell, recovering his hat after it was knocked off in a riot.)

In another parallel her thoughts drift to Lily Langtry, the Jersey Lily, widely known to be having an affair with the Prince of Wales. So these two women mirror Molly in having extra-marital affairs: one with the leader of the nationalist Irish, one with the future King of England.

In a real digression she remembers Bloom buying a volume of Rabelais for her, and her not getting on with its absurdity and obscenity. (We know from ‘Ithaca’ that Bloom thinks he can educate Molly by leaving good books around.)

Back to the Prince of Wales, she knows he visited Gibraltar the year she was born, planted some tree. Back to Bloom and she wishes he’d change job ‘and go into an office or something where hed get regular pay or a bank where they could put him up on a throne to count the money all the day’, instead he mooches round the house under her feet all the time.

Molly remembers going to Mr Cuffe to plead for Bloom’s job back after he was fired; Cuffe stared at her breasts (as more or less all the men seem to) and politely refused. What she remembers more is the shabby dress she had to make the visit in.

Bloom thinks he knows about women’s clothes but hasn’t got a clue and she remembers some terrible hats he thought she looked great in. Just like he’s rubbish at cooking, ‘mathering everything he can scour off the shelves into it’.

Section 3 (921 words)

Molly ponders her breasts, thinking maybe Boylan made them firmer by sucking them, which leads onto the breasts on the grand statues of naked women you see everywhere, the woman often hiding one breast behind her hand. Mind you not as silly as men’s bits:

compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf

And she remembers various men who have exposed themselves to her:

  • that disgusting Cameron highlander behind the meat market
  • that other wretch with the red head behind the tree where the statue of the fish used to be when I was passing pretending he was pissing standing out for me to see it with his babyclothes up to one side
  • theyre always trying to show it to you every time nearly I passed outside the mens greenhouse near the Harcourt street station

She remembers popping into a men’s toilet in the freezing winter of 1893 coming back from a party and teasingly thinks ‘pity a couple of the Camerons werent there to see me squatting in the mens place’.

Of men’s penises she thinks: ‘I tried to draw a picture of it before I tore it up like a sausage or something I wonder theyre not afraid going about of getting a kick or a bang’.

She remembers Bloom encouraging her to let herself be photographed nude when he lost his job to earn some money, which reminds her of the painting of a naked nymph they have above their bed, or the erotic photos he keeps hidden in his drawer (catalogued in ‘Eumaeus’).

She remembers him trying to explain the word metempsychosis which had cropped up in a book right at the start of Bloom’s narrative: ‘he never can explain a thing simply the way a body can understand’ and then he went and burned the bloody pan frying his kidney this morning. Sounds like any wife complaining about any husband.

Then she switches men and complains about Boylan biting her nipple till she screamed: ‘arent they fearful trying to hurt you’. She remembers having swollen breasts full of milk when Milly was born and Bloom (typically) saying she could rent herself out as a wetnurse. She remembers ‘ that delicate looking student that stopped in no 28 with the Citrons Penrose’ nearly catching her washing naked through the window.

As to her full breasts she a) got Dr Brady to write her a prescription and b) got Bloom to suck the milk out of them, they were so hard and painful: ‘he said it was sweeter and thicker than cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything.’

Just one more of his outrageous suggestions, she thinks she should write them all in a book titled ‘the works of Master Poldy’. He used to suckle her for an hour at a time, the big baby: ‘hey want everything in their mouth all the pleasure those men get out of a woman’.

Then a very explicit memory of the multiple orgasms Boylan gave her:

O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was here or somebody to let myself go with and come again like that I feel all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all

Though she had to restrain herself because you never know with some men, some men want you to remain coy and well behaved even while having sex. And she looks forward to more of the same with Boylan come Monday: ‘O Lord I cant wait till Monday’.

Section 4 (2,208 words)

Molly’s fourth sentence begins with her hearing a train whistle ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling’, the latest of Joyce’s hundred or so attempts to transcribe non-human sounds (the cat, the door, bells, gongs, clocks, the sea and many more).

Molly thinks of the men who work in trains, away from their wives at night. ‘Im glad I burned the half of those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about hes getting very careless’ – are these saucy magazines?

It was hot earlier, the rain shower was refreshing, she thought it was going to get as hot as Gibraltar. She remembers her father’s friend Mrs Hester Stanhope (a real-life historical figure) who sent her a nice frock from the B Marche Paris and her husband: they called each other Doggerina and Wogger, and she remembers a letter she wrote him.

She would give anything to be back in Gibraltar where life was free and easy. Take Edwardian clothes: ‘these clothes we have to wear whoever invented them expecting you to walk up Killiney hill then for example at that picnic all staysed up you cant do a blessed thing in them in a crowd run or jump out of the way’.

She hated bullfights, the horses all getting ripped open. She was good friends with Hester, who showed her how to put her hair up, she slept in her bed the night of the storm and they had a pillow fight in the morning.

She remembers blushing the first time ‘he’ looked at her, when she was with her father and Captain Grove: ‘he was attractive to a girl in spite of his being a little bald intelligent looking disappointed and gay at the same time’. ‘She’ gave Molly The Moonstone to read. Reminds her she doesn’t like books with Molly in the title like that Molly Flanders.

She’s hot and uncomfortable, the blanket is too heavy and her nightdress has ridden up so she moves around to get comfortable. She remembers the mosquito nets in Gibraltar, how long ago it seems. She remembers in detail the day the Stanhopes left, the dress Mrs S was wearing, then how terribly dull life was after they both left.

Ships remind her of guns booming whenever a dignitary arrived at Gibraltar like General Ulysses Grant (Ulysses – a small connection). She remembers old Sprague the consul dressed in mourning for his son (echoing Bloom) and then Captain Groves and her dad having endless yarns over whiskey in the evenings about imperial battles.

Boredom and trying to get a reaction reminds her of how she’d dress up and put her gloves on in the window for the benefit of the young doctor in the house opposite, in Holles Street, but he never got the idea. Men are stupid.

there was a nice fellow even in the opposite house that medical in Holles street the nurse was after when I put on my gloves and hat at the window to show I was going out not a notion what I meant arent they thick never understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster for them… where does their great intelligence come in Id like to know grey matter they have it all in their tail if you ask me

She thinks of recent letters and cards, including one from Milly, and a letter from a Mrs Dwenn in Canada who wrote out of the blue wanting to know the recipe for pisto madrileno (apparently the Spanish version of ratatouille). And one from Floey Dillon who wrote to say she was married to a very rich architect. And: ‘poor Nancy Blake died a month ago of acute neumonia well I didnt know her so well as all that she was Floeys friend more than mine poor Nancy.’

She thanks God Boylan has fucked her:

O thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me

But she hopes he’ll write her a letter, she’d love a real love letter, ‘I told him he could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan.’ It just makes you so happy: ‘true or no it fills up your whole day and life always something to think about every moment and see it all round you like a new world.’

Then she’ll write an answer from bed where he can imagine her. Need only be a few words, in fact the less the better, lets the imagination work. Not like here friend Atty Dillon who wrote long elaborate letters copied from The Ladies Letterwriter to the fellow that was something in the Four Courts. He ended up jilting her. ‘A few simple words’ is best.

This section ends with a sudden spurt of bitterness at the fate of women to be pursued and worshipped when young, and then dumped and ignored once they get old.

as for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit.

Note that it ends with a full stop, one of only two in the entire chapter.

Section 5 (2,378 words)

Section 5 opens with a similar passage to section 1 (intentionally?) in that it is a harsh character assassination of an older woman. In section 1 it’s Mrs Riordan (the Dante of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’). Here it is the elderly Spanish housekeeper of the Tweedy family in Gibraltar, Mrs Rubio. Molly condemns her as a:

disobliging old thing… with her switch of false hair on her and vain about her appearance ugly as she was near 80 or a 100 her face a mass of wrinkles

and also, as with Mrs Riordan, feels threatened by / despises the old woman’s religious zeal:

with all her religion domineering because she never could get over the Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the world and the Union Jack flying with all her carabineros because 4 drunken English sailors took all the rock from them and because I didnt run into mass often enough in Santa Maria to please her with her shawl up on her except when there was a marriage on with all her miracles of the saints and her black blessed virgin with the silver dress

So Molly dislikes her on account of 1) her age (she seems ancient to Molly, who is only 15); 2) her religious zeal (which clearly Molly has no time for); and 3) also a Spanish nationalist reason. Apparently the Spanish Mrs Rubio is still angry that the British seized a part of Spain with just ‘4 drunken sailors’. (Incidentally the number 4 seems to have no historical provenance: the actual capture of Gibraltar was, as you might expect, a bigger bloodier affair.)

So one morning this ‘disobliging old thing’ brings her a letter from Lieutenant Mulvey who is clearly a ‘beau’ of the 15-year-old Marion. This Mulvey followed her in the street one day, but instead of scaring Molly this just excited her and made her want to ‘pick him up’. Then he wrote her a letter making an appointment to see her, which thrilled her to bits, she kept it on her and was so excited that she wanted to move the hands on the clock forward to make the appointment come quicker.

Now who does this remind you of? Of Blazes Boylan of course, whose letter Molly received at the start of this long day, setting his arrival for 4pm. Direct parallel. History repeats.

Cut to Molly being out with this Mulvey who kissed her ‘under the Moorish wall’ and ‘he crushed all the flowers on my bosom’. She considered him her sweetheart. Given the graphic sexual details everywhere else, I was intrigued by the phrase:

I put my knee up to him a few times to learn the way

What way? Well, For the flirtatious lolz she told him she was engaged ‘to the son of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de la Flora and he believed me’.

Eventually he was posted away, in May (she remembers because she always feels like a new man in the spring: ‘Im always like that in the spring Id like a new fellow every year’). She knew precisely how far to flirt:

I had that white blouse on open in the front to encourage him as much as I could without too openly they were just beginning to be plump

They were at some place up on some mountain among entrances to ancient galleries of St Michael’s caves, a beautiful sunny day and far from anywhere, and:

he caressed them outside they love doing that its the roundness there I was leaning over him with my white ricestraw hat… my blouse open for his last day

Obviously he wanted to go further:

he wanted to touch mine with his for a moment but I wouldnt let him he was awfully put out first for fear you never know consumption or leave me with a child embarazada that old servant Ines told me that one drop even if it got into you at all

And remembers how she’s experimented with how it would feel to have a penis inside her by using a banana.

after I tried with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me somewhere because they once took something down out of a woman that was up there for years

You can see why sex-averse Virginia Woolf loathed this book, can’t you? I’d forgotten it was stuffed (so to speak) with so much sexual crudeness or candour (depending on taste). As to men, well:

theyre all mad to get in there where they come out of youd think they could never go far enough up

Back to Mulvey, she would have full sex but instead masturbated him to climax:

how did we finish it off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs I wouldnt let him touch me inside my petticoat because I had a skirt opening up the side I tormented the life out of him first tickling him I loved rousing that dog in the hotel rrrsssstt awokwokawok his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was shy all the same I liked him like that moaning I made him blush a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it

Yep, sounds like a penis alright. Amusingly, she can’t clearly remember Mulvey’s name, though this is consistent with her using the pronoun ‘he’ to refer interchangeably to many men (mainly Bloom and Boylan).

Molly darling he called me what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey was it yes I think a lieutenant he was rather fair he had a laughing kind of a voice

Lucky Jack Mulvey promised he’d come back for her and she promised she’d let him **** her, even if she was married. Twenty years ago it must be and he’s probably promoted and married and little does his wife know about his little sexual adventure with Molly Tweedy.

Far from anywhere she blew up the paper bag they’d brought biscuits in, then burst it with a bang which made all the pigeons take off. She wanted to fire his gun but he didn’t have one. HMS Calypso she thinks he was assigned to, because it was printed on his cap (note another sly Odysseus reference slipped in).

Cut to memories of some pompous old Bishop who delivered a sermon about the New Woman riding bicycle and wearing bloomers, which triggers her to think how funny she’s ended up with the surname Bloom. Her rival for Leopold, Josie Breen, used to joke that she was looking ‘blooming’ whenever they met, still better than names with bottom in them like Ramsbottom.

She doesn’t really remember her mother (who is a very shadowy figure in the whole book). Her name was Lunita Laredo and she was a Gibraltarian of Spanish/Jewish descent. A vivid memory of running down Williss Road and her boobs jiggling:

they were shaking and dancing about in my blouse like Millys little ones now when she runs up the stairs I loved looking down at them

She remembers the wonderful view from the Rock over the Straits to Africa. She was so infatuated with Mulvey, she kept the hankie the masturbated him into under her pillow for weeks, for the smell of it.

Mulvey appears to have given her a ring as a keepsake, ‘that clumsy Claddagh ring for luck’ that she then gave to another lover, Gardner, the soldier who went off to the Boer War where he died of enteric fever.

She has the impression of a moustache and for a moment thinks it was Mulvey’s but then realises she’s getting him mixed up with Gardner.

Another train whistles, reminding Molly of Love’s Old Sweet Song and her upcoming performance, which triggers a repeat of her scorn for the other singers:

Kathleen Kearney and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss That Miss Theother lot of sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics they know as much about as my backside

As the daughter of a soldier who’s lived abroad, Molly views herself as much more worldly than the daughters of bootmakers and publicans, ‘I knew more about men and life when I was 15 than theyll all know at 50’.

She reflects on her looks. Her father left her her English accent (raised among soldiers in garrison) but she has her mother’s eyes and figure. Let them get a husband and a lovely daughter and get a fine man like Boylan falling over her and swiving her 4 or 5 times. She thinks about the correct posture, neck and facial position to project her singing voice best, and considers which songs to sing: Love’s Sweet Song and Wind from the South but not My Lady’s Bower, ‘too long for an encore’.

She thinks she could have been a prima donna if she hadn’t married Bloom. She’ll dress to impress.

Ill change that lace on my black dress to show off my bubs and Ill yes by God Ill get that big fan mended make them burst with envy

And then she realises she needs to pass wind and shifts position in the bed, carefully so as not to wake Bloom. (Remember the reference a few lines earlier to the song Wind from the South? A Joyce joke). So she softly passes wind, in another joke doing so in synch with the whistle from another passing train.

Section 6 (3,619 words)

Molly starts by being happy at having passed wind and wondering if it was the pork chop she ate earlier which gave her wind, she doesn’t trust that butcher.

She remembers being a girl in Gibraltar, the freezing cold nights, which leaps to being much older and stripping and creaming herself for the pleasure of the medical student living opposite (mentioned above).

Which links into her hoping Poldy isn’t going to fall in with the medical students, squandering money and getting drunk, what do they find to talk about?

We get more specifics on Bloom’s request for breakfast, which wasn’t reported in ‘Ithaca’. According to Molly, he ordered: ‘eggs and tea and Findon haddy and hot buttered toast’ which leads onto how she enjoys hearing him clunking up the stairs with the rattling cutlery. Then onto the cat, licking itself but she doesn’t like its claws. (It strikes me as odd that the cat doesn’t have a name. Surely Joyce missed a trick, he could have given it an ironically Odyssey-connected name.)

Hunger: she thinks she’ll buy a nice piece of plaice, no cod, and some jam which flows into the thought of buying more and organising a picnic, which flows into memories of various outings, better at the seaside but not in a boat after he swore blind he could row and then got into so much trouble they nearly drowned, and the water flooding into the rowing boat ruined her shoes and the wind ruined her hat.

But the sea brings memories of Gibraltar, the smell of the sardines and the bream in Catalan bay all silver in the fishermen’s baskets.

She remembers all the grandiose plans Bloom made, saying he’d change their place into a musical academy, or a hotel, full of plans and schemes which all come to nothing.

he ought to get a leather medal with a putty rim for all the plans he invents then leaving us here all day

She gets scared being alone in the house at night and remembers a vagrant who got 20 years for murdering an old woman, she’d castrate men like that. She remembers the night she swore she heard burglars and she made Poldy go downstairs with a candle frightened out of his wits, making as much racket as he could to scare them off, of course there was no-one.

Then she’s unhappy the way Bloom sent their daughter, Milly, away to Mullingar to get a job at a photographer’s, she thinks because he sensed Molly and Boylan’s impending affair. She should have been sent to Skerry’s Academy to study for the civil service.

She remembers Milly becoming a handful ‘with her roughness and carelessness’, breaking a statuette, refusing to peel the potatos, and Bloom taken to explaining things out of the paper to her and Milly pretending to play along. Cunning, like her dad. She’s started flirting with the boys and reminds Molly of herself at that age. She’d started to go beyond bounds for example to the skating rink and she smelled tobacco on her clothes.

all the people passing they all look at her like me when I was her age

And being prissy at the theatre, insisting Molly not touch her, which makes her remember men who’ve ogled and rubbed up against her at theatres. Milly didn’t even want Molly to kiss her at the station when she was leaving well – in the same tone as she said Bloom will never find anyone else like her, Molly thinks good luck to her daughter to find someone else who’ll dance attendance on her when she’s ill, like her old Ma.

I think Molly says she didn’t have a climax till she was 22:

of course she cant feel anything deep yet I never came properly till I was what 22 or so it went into the wrong place (?)

Milly’s boyfriends including Conny Connolly and Martin Harvey. She thinks such devotion means a man’s a bit cracked in the head which reminds her of Poldy’s father, must have been cracked to commit suicide.

She thinks it’s Bloom’s fault for not getting a servant and instead having the two women in the family slaving away for him, apart from the useless cleaner they had, Mrs Fleming, sneezing and farting everywhere and you had to follow her round fixing her work, and the time she left a smelly old dishcloth behind the dresser.

All the friends Bloom brings back at all hours including Simon Dedalus, and his son who won all the prizes, what was he doing bringing him home, and why did he have to drop down into the area to get into the house, amazing he didn’t rip his grand funeral trousers, shame her old drawers weren’t hanging up for them both to see!

And we learn that Mrs Fleming, useless as she was, is now leaving them to look after her husband who’s got to have an operation.

Thoughts of the body circle round to Molly realising her period’s about to start, not surprising considering ‘all the poking and rooting and ploughing he [Boylan] had up in me’. Damn! That means she’ll be bleeding when Boylan next visits in just three days time (it’s Friday and he’s scheduled to come around on Monday). Menstruation she sees as a curse, out of action five days every three weeks, ‘simply sickening’.

She remembers the most embarrassing occasion when it came on when they were at the theatre, had been given a box by one Michael Gunn to see Mrs Kendal and her husband at the Gaiety, when it came on her and her struggle to concentrate with her husband yakking on next to her.

O patience above its pouring out of me like the sea

She’s very self-conscious about having sex in the bed with all the springs jingling so seems to say that when Boylan came round she put the quilt on the floor and a pillow under her bottom.

She thinks she’ll shave her pubic hair to look like a young girl again, that’ll surprise Boylan next time!

And during these thoughts she’s eased out of bed and is squatting over the chamberpot bleeding into it, hoping she won’t break it, thinking about rinsing it out and perfuming it in the morning, very self conscious about it making such a noise, and so the section ends.

Section 7 (3,230 words)

Molly continues menstruating on her chamber pot. She remembers encounters with a gynaecologist, Dr Collins, who she’d gone to see, worried about some discharges, during which she gets long medical words wrong like ‘omissions’ and is amused by the posh word he used for her bits, ‘vagina’: comedy at the expense of her illiteracy.

Which segues into the letters Bloom wrote her, quoting Keats and other poetry. She was so excited by him and the letters she masturbated 4 or 5 times a day. She was impressed by his high political talk about home rule and the Land League. She’s thinking all this while she’s still on the pot:

I better not make an alnight sitting on this affair they ought to make chambers a natural size so that a woman could sit on it properly

I think she says the Leopold kneels to masturbate, ‘I suppose there isnt in all creation another man with the habits he has’; and then bemoans his habit for years of sleeping upside down in the bed, with his head at her feet and his feet by her head. The posture reminds her of him taking her to see an Indian god all yellow in a pinafore on his side, presumably a Buddha.

She reaches for a napkin which she ties round her parts, then slips back into bed, noting how deeply Bloom is sleeping, and repeating her hunch it’s because he had an orgasm today, and wondering who with, and waspishly pointing out he can only get it if he pays for it these days.

She laments the many moves of house they’ve had to make due to Bloom’s inability to keep a job or progress, including Raymond Terrace, Ontario Terrace, Lombard Street, Holles Street and then the City Arms hotel with the toilet out in the hall and you could always tell who’d used it before you by the stink. Things are always just starting to shape up when he puts his big foot in it, getting dismissed again and again, from Thoms and Helys and Mr Cuffes and Drimmies.

St George’s bells chime, saying its 2am (?) can that be right?

She describes Bloom’s poor attempts at cunnilingus:

when I wouldnt let him lick me in Holles street one night… he does it all wrong too thinking only of his own pleasure his tongue is too flat or I dont know what he forgets that wethen I dont Ill make him do it again

She wonders if the woman Bloom was with today was Josie, then decides he doesn’t have the guts to risk it with a married woman, despite her Josie Breen’s) mad husband. She thinks Poldy having sex was ‘the fruits of Mr Paddy Dignam yes they were all in great style at the grand funeral’ i.e. all those men all got hammered and went on somewhere and Bloom paid for a prostitute (she thinks; we know that’s not at all correct).

They think they’re so grand, those silly men in their little funeral parade and she rattles off a list of the male mourners at Dignam’s funeral who we met in chapter 6, but Molly says they’ve never seen a military parade like she knew back in Gibraltar, now that was impressive.

She feels sorry for poor Paddy’s wife and orphans which leads into memories of a dinner and formal singing, thoughts of Ben Dollard the base baritone, 5 shillings admittance to the concert, and then praises Simon Dedalus’s voice, untrained but effective (and we remember Simon singing at the Ormond Hotel in ‘Sirens’), she remembers he was married to May Goulding but a widower now.

She remembers seeing Stephen as a boy of 11, 11 years ago, when she was in mourning for poor Rudy, ‘he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince on the stage’ (‘prince’ of course reminds us of Stephen’s recent obsession with Shakespeare, Hamlet and the lecture at the National Library).

Suddenly she realises Stephen was predicted in the tarot cards she played with this morning and goes back through the cards in detail. She guesses at Stephen’s age and hopes he’s not a lank-haired poet, briefly imagining seducing him. Bloom claimed he’s a professor, Molly knows he’s surely too young, and hopes he’s not a professor like old Professor Goodwin whose specialist subject is whiskey.

Which segues into poetry, she likes poetry, and random quotes from favourite poems. It would be a nice change to have an intelligent person to talk to (Stephen) and not have to listen to Bloom’s endless talk about Billy Prescott’s ad and Keyes’s ad and Tom the Devil’s ad.

Instead she remembers seeing lithe young men at Margate bathingplace lazing on the rocks or diving into the sea, if only all men were that fit and handsome. Then some more rudeness:

I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock there so simple I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white he looks with his boyish face I would too in 1/2 a minute even if some of it went down what its only like gruel or the dew theres no danger

If she’s never met the adult Stephen this must be a sort of sleepy fantasy Stephen of her imagination she’s imagining sucking off and swallowing. Quite staggeringly pornographic, isn’t it?

She resolves to throw the tarot cards again in the morning to see if they’re fated to be together and anyway she’ll read and study some poetry so as not to appear ignorant if they meet, while she’ll teach him about sex until he half faints, and then:

then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2 photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous

I’d forgotten that Molly has this quite graphic fantasy about Stephen. Remembering it sheds a whole new light on his character extending right back through ‘Portrait of the Artist’. What would happen if in the next few weeks Molly does meet Stephen, is taken by his strange intelligence and youth, while he sees sex sex sex in the older, voluptuous woman, and they ended up falling in love and eloping? Has anyone ever written a sequel to ‘Ulysses’ in which that happened?

Section 8 (3,680 words)

But then, what’s she going to do about Boylan? Thinking about Boylan makes her cross again at him slapping her on the bottom, such a peasant ‘he doesnt know poetry from a cabbage’. She criticises the way he just stripped off his shoes and trousers, might as well be an animal, he might as well have been an old lion. Well, maybe he was so excited because her boobs were so round and tempting. To be honest, they excite her sometimes, in fact she’d like to be a man:

I wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it

Men are lucky:

they can pick and choose what they please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different tastes

Whereas women are restricted and limited. Jealousy. Why can’t people remain friends while sleeping around? She’s glad she’s still young and excitable but frustrated that Bloom never touches her, never embraces her any more. Only kisses her on the bottom, where she has least expression, like kissing an inanimate object, one time he kissed the front door, she thinks Bloom is mad, ‘what a madman nobody understands his cracked ideas but me’.

A woman needs loving and cherishing:

a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love or loved by somebody

Sometimes she gets so sexually frustrated she fantasises about going down to the docks and picking up a sailor or maybe one of the dangerous looking gypsies from their camp in Rathfarnham, some stranger to ‘ride me up against the wall without a word or a murderer anybody’.

Men, eh? She remembers some fine KC giving her and Bloom a fish supper after winning a bet on a boxing match but later that night catching him coming out of a dingy alley (Hardwicke lane) followed by a common prostitute, then going back to his wife.

She is irritated with Bloom being such a big lump and tries to budge him over in the bed, and irritated at him expected to be waited on with breakfast in bed. A little feminist polemic:

itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them

Speaking of needing mothers she wonders what Stephen’s doing away from his books and home and study, keeping bad company now his mother’s died.

Which morphs into thinking about her son Rudy, going over the decision to bury him in ‘that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another’. She and Bloom have never been the same since.

Back to Stephen, she wonders why he wouldn’t stay the night (how does she know this, it feels like Joyce’s awareness bleeding into hers). Remember Hugh Kenner’s point that Molly never says something but she soon contradicts it? Well, barely a few phrases after her little feminist praise of women, the exact opposite:

I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy

She thinks Stephen could have slept on the sofa in the other room, mind you she’d have heard her filling the chamber pot, ‘arrah what harm’.

Dedalus, odd name. Makes her think of names of people on Gibraltar, she’s particularly tickled by a woman named Opisso, she’d die rather than have such a name.

small blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I dont feel a day older than then

For the third time she laments that Stephen didn’t stay, she’d like to give him Spanish lessons then he’d see she’s not so ignorant after all: quite the persistent thinking about clean-cocked young Stevie.

And it goes on: she thinks Stephen was tired, and needed a rest, and she’d have happily brought him breakfast in on the sofa. She’s really taken with having Stephen as a lodger:

supposing he stayed with us why not theres the room upstairs empty and Millys bed in the back room he could do his writing and studies at the table in there for all the scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in bed in the morning like me as hes making the breakfast for 1 he can make it for 2… Id love to have a long talk with an intelligent welleducated person

Which segues into needing to buy a new bed, and shopping triggers thoughts of going to the market early to get fresh fruit and vegetables, she’d love a fresh juicy young pear. And then another pornographic passage I can’t make out whether it starts about Stephen but it definitely becomes about Bloom, arousing him then making him feel guilty about Boylan:

Ill start dressing myself to go out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress

So she’ll let Bloom know that his wife has been well fucked and the mark must be of Boylan’s spunk, but what does ‘make him do it out in front of me’? Force Bloom to masturbate in front of her to shame him, to make it clear that if he masturbates and refuses to fuck her then she will be unfaithful, ‘its all his own fault if I am an adulteress’?

Supercrudely she says if he wants to kiss her bottom, he can kiss her hole, and she’ll get a £1 or 30 shillings out of him to go shopping with. She’ll buy some fine new drawers and let him masturbate onto her from behind:

Ill let him do it off on me behind provided he doesnt smear all my good drawers… Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head… Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest about yes… then Ill wipe him off me just like a business his omission’

She realise it’s getting late, they’ll be up in China, the nuns will be getting up soon, she should try and get some sleep. She’ll get up early go and buy some flowers to brighten the place up in case Bloom brings Stephen home again, I’m surprised how much longing for Stephen features in this last section.

She’ll clean the piano and they’ll have music, she’ll buy some cakes and has a passage thinking about her favourite types. Flowers,

I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violet

She dismisses Bloom’s highfalutin atheism, nature disproves it, and they all end up calling for the priest as they lie dying. Thoughts of God and nature line us up for the final passage in which she reminisces about the day she and Bloom spent outdoors on Howth hill.

the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life

What she remembers is genuinely liking him, but also her canny manipulation of him.

that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky

And Joyce gives her a magnificent passage recapping all her memories of her girlhood in Gibraltar, all the sights and sounds and words of the hot place, the castle and the multicultural society of Greeks and Turks and Jews and Arabs, and it ends with the famous magnificent climax:

and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Molly’s feminism?

If you summarise Molly’s soliloquy, it’s easy to speak in clichés about her being a strong independent woman or expressing her sexuality, as if that’s a fine and impressive thing like a speech or a declaration. But if you read it closely (and if you’ve read my summary) you’ll realise she’s far from being a role model for feminists, she’s far too bitchy and critical of other women for that, critical of old women and scornful of her rival female singers.

And ‘expressing her sexuality’ sounds fine in the abstract but when you read the detail of her thoughts (I’m tempted but won’t repeat the fruitier passages), again, it’s not necessarily such a fine and noble thing; it feels much muckier, messier, real and compromised than that, as actual sex tends to be.

Is Molly a male projection?

All the commentaries go on about Molly being a modern woman freely expressing her own sexuality and, having gone through it in this much detail, you can see how Molly is, indeed, staggeringly rude but totally honest and accepting of sex, the sex act, her own desires and fantasies, yes.

However, I could never forget that this whole thing is written by a man. I.e. is it just a man’s fantasy of how sexually frank and candid he’d like a woman to be? Is it purely a male fantasy to imagine a woman who goes to sleep fantasising about sucking a young man’s cock or having it done to her doggy fashion? Is Molly’s much vaunted sexuality in fact male projection?

In a sense, the most relevant criticism of Molly is what the woman Joyce based her on, his own partner, Nora Barnacle, thought of her, and Nora was famously unimpressed by Molly. (As, when I summarised some of the passages to her, was my wife.)

This is vanishingly tiny anecdotal evidence but it crystallises my feeling that Molly is a construct made of words, not always convincing, and the relentless dominance of sex fantasies… well, rather than capturing a woman’s thoughts, it just felt too relentlessly male to me.

Men, eh?

That said, I was struck by the number of thoughts Joyce gives his creation which diss or rubbish male sexuality:

  • theyre so savage for it
  • they want to do everything too quick take all the pleasure out of it
  • can you ever be up to men the way it takes them
  • only for the name of a king theyre all made the one way
  • arent they fearful trying to hurt you
  • arent they thick never understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster for them
  • they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools
  • I suppose he thinks I dont know deceitful men all their 20 pockets arent enough for their lies

All these sentences mocking men’s obsession with sex were written by a man. The steady stream of criticisms of the male sex, maybe that’s plausible in a woman’s passing thoughts? Or does it reveal a kind of self-obsession with masculinity on Joyce’s part? Is there something masochistic in Joyce the man writing quite so many passages slagging off men as sex-obsessed? Was it a form of self-critical therapy? Or was he simply bringing together lots of the criticisms you hear women say or women write about men, bundling them, along with much else besides, into Molly’s big boisterous character?

I’m not sure there’s any way of arriving at a conclusive answer, which is why I’ll note the questions but leave it at that.

Weaving contradictions

Hugh Kenner makes the point that Molly is a creature of contradictions, she doesn’t make a statement without somewhere else stating the opposite. Boylan is superb, Boylan is coarse. Bloom is inadequate, Bloom has more spunk in him than Boylan. The prospect of Stephen excites, then again he probably has long lank student hair. She’s proud to be a woman, she hates being a woman. She’ll bring Poldy breakfast in bed, she’ll throw it at him.

Kenner smartly compares this pattern of Molly stating then denying, with Homer’s Penelope weaving her shroud by day and unweaving it by night. Typically Kenner in being cute, insightful and amusing. I’ve written a blog post summarising Kenner’s book on ‘Ulysses’, coming soon.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

Related links

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Posted by Simon on February 16, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/16/ulysses-james-joyce-penelope/

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1928)

He suddenly drew her to him and whipped his hand under her dress again, feeling her warm body with his wet, chill hand. ‘I could die for the touch of a woman like thee,’ he said in his throat. ‘If tha’ would stop another minute.’

Warning: this review contains swear words, including the c word, as well as explicit descriptions of sexual anatomy and sex.

Forget its lingering reputation for sex and rude words, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is a masterly novel, packed with powerful themes and ideas, strong characterisation and wonderful nature descriptions – and at its core is a storyline of fabular simplicity. It is arguably Lawrence’s best, certainly his most crafted, conventional and accessible work. Every page springs new issues and symbols on the reader, as well as nature descriptions which are worth rereading and savouring for their startling vividness.

It was a grey, still afternoon, with the dark-green dogs’-mercury spreading under the hazel copse, and all the trees making a silent effort to open their buds. Today she could almost feel it in her own body, the huge heave of the sap in the massive trees, upwards, up, up to the bud-tips, there to push into little flamey oak-leaves, bronze as blood. It was like a tide running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky.

After the dense impressionistic epics ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’, after the ramshackle picaresque of ‘Aaron’s Rod’, the strange and incoherent ‘Kangaroo’, and the delirious nonsense of The Plumed Serpent’, Lady C feels like a wonderfully calm, sensible return to planet earth. Lawrence reveals himself as an author who can write something like a conventional novel, with normal characters having normal feelings and normal conversations. Their feelings last for more than a page i.e. they aren’t a bewildering kaleidoscope of everchanging moods, as in ‘Rainbow’ and ‘Women’. All the characters are easy to understand and sympathise with in a way not really true of any other Lawrence novel.

Brief plot

Presumably everyone knows the plot. Constance ‘Connie’ Reid marries Sir Clifford Chatterley in 1917 while he’s on leave from the war. But he returns a year later paralysed from the waist down and in a wheelchair. They live at the family estate of Wragby Hall beyond which is the grim coal mining community of Tevershall, the noise of the clanking trams, the lights and the sulphur smell permanently wafting over the house and grounds and what remains of the old woods.

Clifford hires a new gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Mellors is separated from his wife, Bertha Coutts, who ran off with a miner, and now tries to live a quiet, isolated life, just him and his dog, Flossie, living in the small cottage in the woods.

So we have these two damaged people, hurt in love and life, frustrated and unfulfilled. And the point of the novel is to show how they slowly fall in love and discover a new fire and meaning in life. A big part of this is their joint rediscovering the ecstatic side of sex. Neither were virgins but had only experienced partial or emotionally stunted forms of sex. Lawrence wrote the novel to showcase the supremely healing qualities of loving sex.

Arty families

But there’s a lot more circumstantial detail about the characters than I remember. For a start how arty they all are. Connie is the younger of two daughters of the noted painter and Royal Academician Sir Malcolm Reid (Hilda Reid and Constance Reid). The daughters are raised in a Bohemian arty set and are sent to Dresden to study art and music. Here the young ladies have passionate affairs with their fellow students, both of them loving their virginities.

Next, I’d forgotten that Clifford is himself a writer. He writes curious, very personal stories about people he had known, clever, rather spiteful, and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. They appeared in the most modern magazines and he gains a reputation and Connie, for a while, finds new enthusiasm for their marriage, by helping him with them. Clifford eventually wins real fame and is hailed as one of Britain’s finest young writers etc.

His photograph appeared everywhere. There was a bust of him in one of the galleries, and a portrait of him in two galleries. He seemed the most modern of modern voices. With his uncanny lame instinct for publicity, he had become in four or five years one of the best known of the young “intellectuals. (p.54)

Connie’s affair with Michaelis

This arty milieu explains why Clifford invites the Irish playwright Michaelis to stay at Wragby. Michaelis has been fabulously successful and makes a fortune from the States but has recently been dropped by English ‘society’ when they realised he was mocking them. Connie realises behind his cynical charm there’s a damaged boy, Michaelis plays the adorer and seduces her in her boudoir on the third floor. There being no risk that Clifford will suddenly walk in.

It is the first indication that the novel is going to be about the mechanics of sex for Lawrence describes Michaelis as climaxing quite quickly and Connie being disappointed until she realises a way to keep him hard inside her and wriggling about in order to achieve her own orgasm.

The physical desire he did not satisfy in her; he was always come and finished so quickly, then shrinking down on her breast, and recovering somewhat his effrontery while she lay dazed, disappointed, lost. But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep him there inside her when his crisis was over. And there he was generous and curiously potent; he stayed firm inside her, given to her, while she was active… wildly, passionately active, coming to her own crisis. And as he felt the frenzy of her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity, he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction. (p.31)

I get the point that she has to please herself but does it seem likely to you that he could remain hard and erect after climaxing, hard and erect long enough for her to pleasure herself against him? Lawrence was not only breaking taboos on the subject of sex and with his deliberate use of swearwords (see below), he was also writing at a time when there was little or no sociological study of sex. Only after the Second World War would begin the kinds of studies which are still ongoing and suggest that a very large percentage of women, perhaps as high as 75% of women, can’t climax from penile penetration alone, but need some other stimulation as well.

Anyway the affair with Michaelis happily continues for a while, carried on during her trips to London, and she is in high spirits which, in turn, inspire Clifford to some of his best writing.

The cronies

Friends of his from Cambridge come to stay, all so-called intellectuals, namely:

  • Tommy Dukes, a brigadier general in the British army
  • Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientifically about stars
  • Arnold Hammond
  • Berry, a brown shy young man

Connie nicknames them ‘the cronies’. We are shown Clifford and these pals engaging in empty, pontificating, after-dinner discussions about sex, regarded purely as an intellectual talking point, reduced to the idea that sex is not much more than a conversation between a man and a woman, in actions instead of words.

TOMMY DUKE: Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it’s natural for me to go to bed with her to finish it.

This entire scene is to demonstrate how cold-bloodedly cerebral these British intellectuals are, how they lack the root of the matter. Also how they simply ignore the woman’s role in any of this, for Connie sits there silent as a mouse while they drone on.

The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put another stitch in her sewing…. Yes, she sat there! She had to sit mum. She had to be quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the immensely important speculations of these highly-mental gentlemen.

Satire. Mockery. On a different evening the cronies get into a ‘discussion’ of Bolshevism which is disappointingly superficial. But maybe this is how people discussed things like this at the time. Maybe most people’s discussions of politics are superficial, anecdotal.

‘The Bolshevists aren’t really intelligent.’
‘Of course not. But sometimes it’s intelligent to be half-witted: if you want to make your end. Personally, I consider Bolshevism half-witted; but so do I consider our social life in the west half-witted…’ etc

Presumably this is Lawrence mocking the intellectual inanity of the pseudo-intellectuals of his day; but having struggled through the ‘political’ discussion bits of ‘Kangaroo’ I’m more inclined to think it’s Lawrence revealing his own shortcomings. But the most notable thing about this male banter is the swearing. The cronies freely say ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’, unprintable words in 1928.

People who encourage Connie to have an affair

As I mentioned at the start the novel contains a lot of information to process. Instead of the endless shapeshifting emotions described with such weird power in ‘The Rainbow’ et al, Lawrence gives his characters fixed and understandable positions. In fact there are quite a few secondary characters, and Lawrence worked hard to give each of them histories, characters and opinions.

Father One of the threads that emerges from this is the sympathetic voices who suggest Connie has an affair. Her father, the louche old painter, directly tells her he hopes her situation won’t lead to her becoming a ‘demi-vierge’ which, as far as I can make out, means a woman who flirts and behaves suggestively but doesn’t actually have sex with anyone. This is a bit obscure but indicates that her father is worried about the impact having no sex will have on a healthy woman in her 20s.

Sister Her sister, Hilda, comes to stay and says she needs taking away from Wragby, to life and sun and physical restoration.

Husband And then Clifford himself, on a walk with Connie into the old woods on the estate, himself says he would love to have an heir to the estate, someone to hand it on to. He spends some time distinguishing between the closeness and psychological intimacy of marriage and the casual, transient nature of all sexual connections. It’s worth quoting at length because it makes it quite clear that Connie isn’t some sex-mad hussy

‘What do the occasional connections matter? And the occasional sexual connections specially! If people don’t exaggerate them ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What does it matter? It’s the life-long companionship that matters. It’s the living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing… that’s what we live by… not the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one another. That’s the real secret of marriage, not sex; at least not the simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick to that we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.’ (p.47)

So all this leads up to Clifford’s surprising proposal that Connie should make herself pregnant by another man. Obviously a man of the right sort but he doesn’t specify who or where. In order to bear a son which they can raise as an heir to the estate.

‘If lack of sex is going to disintegrate you, then go out and have a love affair. If lack of a child is going to disintegrate you, then have a child if you possibly can. But only do these things so that you have an integrated life, that makes a long harmonious thing. And you and I can do that together … don’t you think?’

It’s an eminently rational and sensible position. You can see how Lawrence goes out of his way to make Clifford sympathetic, given the terrible hand he’s been dealt. But in the end this position falls short: Connie is dismayed by the way Clifford talks about the child as ‘it, it, it’, like a business proposition.

Anyway, it’s at this precise moment in their conversation that with timing that is heavily symbolic, almost comical, that Mellors the gamekeeper makes his first appearance in the narrative, emerging so unexpectedly from a side path that she alarms Connie. Clifford hails him and asks him to help guide Clifford’s bath-chair down the track through the woods and back towards the house.

Oliver Mellors

Mellors was gamekeeper at Wragby before the war (and so before Connie married Clifford). He fought in the war, Clifford thinks somewhere in India. On his return to Tevershall, Clifford was delighted to rehire him and he’s been in post 8 months before this, Connie’s first encounter with him.

He is moderately tall and lean, with light brown, almost fair hair, and blue impersonal eyes. (Incidentally, Clifford also has blue eyes. Connie has blue eyes. Her father has blue eyes. Improbably, the two gondolieri they meet in Venice had blue eyes. I realised a while ago that a disproportionate number of Lawrence characters have blue eyes.)

Mellors’ distinguishing features are his aura of aloneness and independence, and the hint of impudence or sarcasm in his polite responses. Connie thinks he must be 37 or 38. She herself is now 27 (p.73).

The impact of the war

In her memoir Frieda says after the Great War Lawrence was never the same again. But this was true of hundreds of millions of people and entire societies. The feeling of vast loss and the febrile partying of the young post-war generation are something he describes in numerous fictions. ‘Aaron’s Rod’ refers continually to the great changes wrought by the war. The callowness of jazz-mad youth is a thread in ‘The Virgin and The Gypsy’.

Meanwhile you just lived on and there was nothing to it. She understood perfectly well why people had cocktail parties, and jazzed, and Charlestoned till they were ready to drop. You had to take it out some way or other, your youth, or it ate you up. But what a ghastly thing, this youth! you felt as old as Methuselah, and yet the thing fizzed somehow, and didn’t let you be comfortable. A mean sort of life! And no prospect! She almost wished she had gone off with Mick, and made her life one long cocktail party, and jazz evening. Anyhow that was better than just mooning yourself into the grave.

And this critique broadens out or is connected to Connie’s feeling that not just Clifford but all the men of her generation are somehow neutered and ineffectual.

Poor Clifford, he was not to blame. His was the greater misfortune. It was all part of the general catastrophe.

She listens to the Cronies crapping on with their clever-clever theories and thinks how shallow they are. Her husband and Michaelis are rivals for literary success and yet she is just impressed by how hollow and dead their works are.

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life! (p.72)

And this spills over into their general uselessness at sex. She laments the fresh sensuality of the German lover she lost her virginity to before the war. Now that freshness seems to have gone.

Where would she find it now? It was gone out of men. They had their pathetic, two-second spasms like Michaelis; but no healthy human sensuality, that warms the blood and freshens the whole being. (p.74)

The great words are dead

In a passage which immediately draws comparison a similar passage in Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell To Arms’, Lawrence writes of Connie going ‘home’ to Wragby.

Connie went slowly home to Wragby. ‘Home!’ … it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn’t fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing. (p.65)

Events

Connie comes across Mellors washing himself in his garden and the warm white flame of his life, his living being, strikes her in the womb. Events lead to her bumping into him increasingly. On another occasion she’s walking in the woods when she hears voices and comes across Mellors and a little girl in floods of tears. It’s his daughter and she’s just seen him shoot a cat dead. He is being rough with the child and Connie, disgusted, calms the girl by giving her a sixpence and then offers to talk her home to her grandma’s cottage.

Mrs Bolton

Connie becomes so depressed she writes her sister, Hilda, to come and visit, and Hilda, sizing up the situation, insists on some changes. First and foremost she decides Connie must stop being Clifford’s slavey and arranges for a woman from the village, capable, 40-something and district nurse Mrs Bolton to move into Wragby Hall and to undertake Clifford’s physical needs.

(It is characteristic of this book that Mrs Bolton is given a lot of back story, a detailed account of how her husband died in a pit accident 22 years earlier, how hard she had to fight to get compensation, her struggles bringing up two children as a single mum and her determination to get an education and qualification to win herself the post of district nurse. It is easy to let the sensational aspects of the novel blind you to the sheer effort Lawrence made to pack it with very well-developed characters.)

A lot is made of Mrs Bolton shaving Clifford but even Lawrence can’t bring himself to describe the blunt realities of Clifford having to be helped to the toilet, having his bottom wiped etc by such an assistant. If you’re paralysed from the waist down how does your bladder work? Can you control it like an adult or do you need a nappy?

Clifford resents this ‘desertion’ by his wife but slowly falls into a voluptuous closeness with Mrs Bolton. It’s reassuring to be nursed. He teachers her the card games he used to play with Connie and even chess. And Lawrence is acute on how all this feeds Mrs Bolton’s desire to raise herself above the ruck of the mining class, to discover the cultural ‘secrets’ of the upper classes.

Her arrival has the unintended consequence of interesting Clifford in his own coal mines. Mrs Bolton is a source of endless gossip and stories about the villagers and this revives Clifford’s interest in the village, the colliers and then the mines themselves. Before the war he had been studying mine engineering, and now his interest revives. He asks to be taken down the mines and shown the coalface and becomes interested in the new idea of chemical works to exploit the by-products of mining.

All this leaves Connie increasingly to her own devices. One of her pastimes is walking in the old woods in the grounds. Here she comes across Mellors at the gamekeeper’s hut. It’s a convenient place, with a porch and eaves, to sit out of the rain if it’s raining. There’s a bit of bickering about providing her a key to the hut, which Mellors eventually offers up. He’s built a chicken coop there for brooding hens and Connie likes to come and feed them.

Chapter 10

Clifford becomes more and more interested in mine management. Connie sometimes feels like she might die. She feels constantly on the verge of fainting. Only visiting the hens and their chicks at the roost in the woods gives her any pleasure.

It is on page 121 of the Penguin edition, chapter 10, a little over a third into the text, that she comes to see the chickens one evening, and he shows her how to gently extract the tiny helpless chick from under its mother’s ruffled feathers, and she holds the helpless little mite in her hand, that she suddenly starts crying, for herself, for Clifford, for her entire forlorn generation.

And the sight of her tears makes Mellors reach out and touch then stroke her shoulders and he feels the old flame in his loins and he takes her silently into the hut, moves the furniture out of the way, gets a blanket out of a box and lays it on the floor, lays her on it, pulls down her pants and makes love to her, while she lies silent and numb.

Unlike with Michaelis, she doesn’t then do her wriggling thing. She has no climax. She is not really fully conscious. He helps her up and they adjust their clothes and he walks her down to the gate between the woods and the formal grounds of the house, and she asks if it’ll be OK for her to come again.

Walking back alone, Mellors is bitter. She has dragged him back into life. He had hoped to live utterly free and private, but now she’s dragged him back into ‘the world’. Why can he never free himself?

It was not woman’s fault, nor even love’s fault, nor the fault of sex. The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron.

Oh, if only there were other men to be with, to fight that sparkling electric Thing outside there, to preserve the tenderness of life, the tenderness of women, and the natural riches of desire. If only there were men to fight side by side with!

Incidentally, if Connie has voiced quite a few criticisms of how useless modern men are, Mellors has parallel, mirror thoughts about modern young women.

Poor forlorn thing, she was nicer than she knew, and oh! so much too nice for the tough lot she was in contact with. Poor thing, she … wasn’t all tough rubber-goods and platinum, like the modern girl… Somewhere she was tender, tender with a tenderness of the growing hyacinths, something that has gone out of the celluloid women of today.

(Some academic must have done a study of Lawrence’s use of modern materials in his prose. Here we have platinum and celluloid. I was very struck by his use, in ‘Kangaroo’, of radium in his descriptions of the ocean.)

She goes back to the hut next day, in the drizzle, and waits, but Mellors doesn’t come. She goes back to the house, has dinner with Clifford, but that evening has to sneak out the house and out to the hut again. Eventually Mellors shows up and they make love again. He warns her about the dreadful risk, about the inevitability that everyone will find out, Clifford will find out, but she doesn’t care.

Clifford has got a big strong man as a chauffeur and next day has him drive the couple out to Shipley Hall at Uthwaite, the estate of his godfather, Leslie Winter.

A few days later Connie walks towards Marehay to pay a visit to Mrs Flint who shows her her pretty little baby daughter. On the walk back she bumps into Mellors and he is seized with lust and leads her through trees into a dense part of woodland, lays her down and has sex with her. This is described in purple prose for over a page indicating for the first time the depths of Connie’s physical response to his sex, and she manages to climax at more or less the same time as him. Mellors comments that it’s very rare, simultaneous orgasms.

Back at the hall Clifford senses a new life in her but when she describes Mrs Flint’s baby, ascribes it to the general female glow around babies. He reads to her from Racine (the French playwright) but she doesn’t hear a word and goes to bed without kissing him goodnight.

Clifford occasionally has night terrors and can’t sleep this night, so he calls Mrs Bolton to come and play cards with him. She, as always, is flattered to be invited into the upper class ambience, but she also has noticed a change in Connie and, with feminine sympathy, thinks she must have a lover.

Meanwhile, Mellors also cannot sleep, sitting by the fire thinking back on his army career, when he was promoted to lieutenant and might have made captain. But then nearly died of illness and was happy to make it back to England and to disappear back into the anonymity of the working class.

He frets about the future of this affair, knows it can only end badly and in exactly the kind of misery he was enmeshed in with his first, unfaithful, wife. To staunch these thoughts he goes out and does his gamekeeper rounds, beating the bounds of the property, 5 miles in total. But his still can’t sleep and finds himself drawn to the hall, as the first light is showing stands in front of it. He doesn’t even know which room she sleeps in.

But, as explained, Mrs Bolton has stayed up late as well, and as she finally leaves a sleeping Clifford, looks out the window, she sees the figure of the gamekeeper standing on the grass watching the house and in a flash realises it’s him! He is Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She is pleased. She, herself, was a little in love with him, years ago, when he was a lad of 16 and she was a married woman of 26. He was always handsome and had a way with the ladies. She isn’t scandalised at all. She is pleased for her ladyship.

Chapter 11

Connie is sorting out the lumber of accumulated possessions at the house. She happily gives a massive old Victorian to Mrs Bolton.

Somehow rumour starts to go around that Clifford might be able to father a child after all. His seed may be extracted and implanted in Connie. Other people don’t know these details but the godfather, other visitors, even the vicar get to hear of it, so many people ask Clifford about it that he starts to believe it himself.

Field (the chauffeur) drives Connie across country to Uthwaite. This allows Lawrence to deliver an extended eulogy for the death of old rural England and its grand old houses which are being demolished one by one, drowned in a sea of mines and machines, and immediately built over as rude red-bricked housing estates, a tidal wave of ugliness.

She felt again in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of it all. (p.159)

A year after Connie’s visit, old Leslie Sharp died, his heirs immediately demolished the hall, cut down the beautiful avenue of yews. Connie is so alienated she wonders whether the colliers are even human or some kind of elemental sprites thrown off by the minerals they excavate.

A few days later Connie asks Mrs Bolton to help her plant out spring bulbs, and Mrs B tells her more about her love for her husband, killed in a mine explosion twenty years ago, describing love and fidelity in ways which make Connie think.

Chapter 12

On a beautiful spring afternoon she visits Mellor at his cottage. He’s just finishing lunch. It is a prickly encounter. She explains she’s accepted an invitation from Sir Alexander Cooper to stay at the Villa Esmeralda in Venice in July so she’ll be going away. She also explains that Clifford has accepted the idea of her getting pregnant by another man. Mellors jumps to the conclusion that she’s been using him and sarcastically says he’s flattered to have been of service. She’s offended and pleads she doesn’t mean it like that. She wants to be able to touch him as freely as he touches her, so (in a voice strangled with desire) he invites her upstairs but like squeamish, careful, cautious women everywhere she says no, not here, at his cottage. But she will at the hut.

So she leaves and goes back to the house for tea, loiters a bit, then leaves by a side door and walks to the hut. Finds him tending the hens and chicks. After a short exchange he asks if she wants to ‘go in the hut’, and she agrees. but even as he hoiks up her dress and kisses her breasts and then enters and ruts her, she feels completely detached oppressed by the absurdity of sex. Lawrence was and is condemned for being sex mad but really he was interested in the many and ever-changing moods we have about love and sensuality, and he’s an example of him very much not being pornographic.

This time the sharp ecstasy of her own passion did not overcome her; she lay with her hands inert on his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis. This was the divine love! After all, the moderns were right when they felt contempt for the performance; for it was a performance. It was quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humour, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance. Even a Maupassant found it a humiliating anticlimax. Men despised the intercourse act, and yet did it. (p.179)

She starts crying and he says don’t cry, it happens sometimes, that you’re not in the zone together. But her crying rouses him, makes him hard again, and he enters her again, and this time she is swept away as by a storm, described at some length. In fact they do it twice more, each time with a different feeling. At the end comes one of the passages which caused its prosecution for obscenity, so is worth quoting at length. She’s copying his dialect speech back to him and getting it comically wrong, when he suddenly says:

“Tha’rt good cunt, though, aren’t ter? Best bit o’ cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When tha’rt willin’!’
‘What is cunt?’ she said.
‘An’ doesn’t ter know? Cunt! It’s thee down theer; an’ what I get when I’m i’side thee, and what tha gets when I’m i’side thee; it’s a’ as it is, all on’t.’
‘All on’t,’ she teased. ‘Cunt! It’s like fuck then.’
‘Nay nay! Fuck’s only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt’s a lot more than that. It’s thee, dost see: an’ tha’rt a lot beside an animal, aren’t ter? even ter fuck! Cunt! Eh, that’s the beauty o’ thee, lass!’
She got up and kissed him between the eyes, that looked at her so dark and soft and unspeakably warm, so unbearably beautiful. (p.185)

Chapter 13

Connie accompanies Clifford on one of his rare outings to the woods. En route he explains his social theories i.e. the masses are always with us and need to be ruled with a form hand for their own benefit. This develops into the idea that if he is given a baby, a hair, it’s not the ‘blood’ or ‘class’ of his father that counts, it’s how he’s raised. Give Clifford any baby and he’ll mould him into a Chatterley.

All this is prelude to an almighty scene. It’s to do with Clifford’s bath chair. It chugs through the woods but on the return journey has to motor up a steep rise and it can’t quite make it. Clifford obstinately refuses Connie’s help and only finally gives in to her suggestion of calling for Mellors. When Mellors comes he turns out to be useless with engines and despite wriggling under the car and getting dirty, can’t figure out what’s wrong, as Clifford becomes more furious. He insists on making the poor knackered engine power itself but Mellors and then Connie both end up having to push to get it up the hill to Clifford’s rage. In his obsession to make it work he seems to have burned out the engine and Mellors and Connie end up pushing it all the way back to the house. Connie disgusted by Clifford’s behaviour, lets fly her contempt at him – ridiculing all his talk of being a lord and master and member of the ruling class when he can’t even get one little motor to work – and storms off to her bedroom.

At 9pm that night she changes into light tennis dress and shoes and slips out the side door of the house with the aim of spending the night with Mellors.

Chapter 14

She goes to Mellors’ cottage and he lets her in. Things get off to a bad start when she notices a wedding photo of himself and his separated wife, a very young looking couple, and asks why he ever married her. The answer is simple. He was an attractive lad and a number of women fell in love with him and acquiesced in having sex with him but he discovered the hard way that many women will agree to have sex with their man but don’t enjoy it, regard it as a trial they have to undergo to keep ‘their man’. After several women like this he wanted a woman who wanted to have sex and Bertha Coutts was common enough and randy enough to want to. So he married her.

Now he overshares a bit when he explains that Bertha was vexing in her own way because she never climaxed at the same time as him, but always had to make a big fuss and climax ten or fifteen minutes later. Once again I was a bit astounded. As I mentioned when this issue came up with Michaelis, it is a well-known fact (and has been known for generations, surely: I knew it in the late 1970s and ’80s) that the large majority of women cannot climax from penile penetration alone, but need some other form of stimulation, most obviously masturbation but these days including everything from cunnilingus to umpteen mechanical gadgets.

In the fiction Mellors is depicted as the knowledgeable one but his supposed knowledge is dire. He thinks Bertha deliberately didn’t come at the same time as him, and makes her representative of women as a whole. Here’s his overview of different types of women:

‘Only to my experience the mass of women are like this: most of them want a man, but don’t want the sex, but they put up with it, as part of the bargain. 1) The more old-fashioned sort just lie there like nothing and let you go ahead. They don’t mind afterwards: then they like you. But the actual thing itself is nothing to them, a bit distasteful. And most men like it that way. I hate it. But 2) the sly sort of women who are like that pretend they’re not. They pretend they’re passionate and have thrills. But it’s all cockaloopy. They make it up. — 3) Then there’s the ones that love everything, every kind of feeling and cuddling and going off, every kind except the natural one. They always make you go off when you’re not in the only place you should be, when you go off. — 4) Then there’s the hard sort, that are the devil to bring off at all, and bring themselves off, like my wife. They want to be the active party. — 5) Then there’s the sort that’s just dead inside: but dead: and they know it. 6) Then there’s the sort that puts you out before you really ‘come,’ and go on writhing their loins till they bring themselves off against your thighs. But they’re mostly the Lesbian sort. It’s astonishing how Lesbian women are, consciously or unconsciously. Seems to me they’re nearly all Lesbian.’

Presumably Lawrence prided himself on his knowledge of this subject, so this speech given to Mellors indicates a dire combination of ignorance and bigotry.

This cold-blooded bad temper leads to something like an argument and he goes to get dressed and go out for a walk but she calls him back and they have sex in front of the fireplace then go to bed and fall straight asleep. Next morning they wake in bed and make love again. He goes to his clothes but she makes him turn and show her his nakedness and described his cock and falls and light pubic hair as he get another erection and they make love again. Then she closely observes it a limp and shy after sex. There is no mention of one of the basic facts of straight sex which is what to do with the semen which tends to uncomfortably leak back out of a woman’s vagina, nor of any little hand washbowl which they could use to wash and clean their parts.

Instead he entertains her by speaking in the dialect and calling his pecker John Thomas and her lady parts, Lady Jane. She is now hopelessly smitten. She asks if she can come and stay with him, but he is realistic about the world and delivers a little speech which, I imagine, still offends feminists.

‘Dunna ax me nowt now,’ he said. ‘Let me be. I like thee. I luv thee when tha lies theer. A woman’s a lovely thing when ‘er’s deep ter fuck, and cunt’s good. Ah luv thee, thy legs, an’ th’ shape on thee, an’ th’ womanness on thee… Ah luv thee wi’ my ba’s an’ wi’ my heart. But dunna ax me nowt. Dunna ma’e me say nowt. Let me stop as I am while I can. Tha can ax me ivrything after. Now let me be, let me be!’ (p.220)

They get dressed and it kills her to have to go back to the big house, whose doors have now been unlocked so she slips inside and goes to her bedroom with no issue.

Chapter 15

Her sister, Hilda, writes to say she’ll become coming to collect her on 17 June to take her off for this holiday in Venice. Clifford isn’t happy, he is frightened by her going. Even though they don’t spend much time together, her presence in the house gives him the faith to carry on researching mine improvements etc.

Connie spends almost every day at the cottage or hut. She listens to Morrell’s long diatribe on how mankind is being dehumanised and neutered, every spark of real life being sucked out. While he describes how he would try to reform the miners, to sweep away all traces of industry and clean the planet and make men walk tall and proud again, she listens while she kisses his navel and cups his soft balls and plaits forget-me-nots in his pubic hair.

She is genuinely worried that, if he sees the future as the collapse of civilisation, he won’t want her to be pregnant, won’t welcome the child she so wants, and he refuses to commit himself unequivocally.

Throughout his gloomy stormy predictions of the end of humanity it’s been raining hard outside and suddenly she can’t stand it any long, strips off and goes running outside in the rain. Perplexed for a moment, Mellors quickly does the same and goes running down the path in the rain till he catches her and they dance with glee then he lays her on the ground and takes her hard and fast like an animal.

Back in the house they dry themselves on sheets and sit naked before the fire and he plaits flowers in her pubic hair while she talks about going away. She asks if he doesn’t want her to go but he merely mocks. Will she tell Clifford about them when she gets back? He, for his part, has spoken to a solicitor about getting a divorce from his estranged wife. Obviously he should have done it years ago.

After more bantz, he walks her back towards the house when they are both surprised to bump into Mrs Bolton come to look for them.

Chapter 16

Turns out hours have passed of violent storm and, for once, Clifford has noticed her absence and has been going berserk with concern about Connie lost somewhere out in the wild storm. He was all for sending the male servants (Betts and Field) to find her but Mrs Bolton, strongly suspecting Connie is with her fancy man, does everything she can to put him off, insisting Connie’s probably sheltering in the hut and calmly saying she’ll go to find her.

On the walk back to the house, Connie is cross with Mrs Bolton but knows she covered for her. Back at the house Connie outfaces Clifford’s angry concern by falling in with the story that she sheltered from the storm in the hut, lit a fire and lost track of time but goes one further by saying she stripped off and ran round naked in the rain. This seems so outlandish a confession that it overshadows Clifford’s doubts and he calls her mad, eccentric etc, and the scene moves on.

That night he reads her excerpts from the latest work by some great scientific-religious ‘intellectual’. The key passage is:

The universe shows us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the other it is spiritually ascending.

Which Clifford literally believes but Connie fiercely mocks. It suits him to think the body is wasting away and giving rise to some spiritual nirvana, but Connie (like her creator) believes reality is rooted in the physical. Clifford patronisingly says, well a woman couldn’t be expected to understand ‘the life of the mind’, to which Connie replies ‘life of the mind’?

‘No thank you! Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind-machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses.’ (p.244)

The life of the body was appreciated by the ancient Greeks but then was closed down by the over-cerebral Socrates and Plato, and then completely shut down by the Jewish Jesus. Only now, in Connie (and Lawrence’s) view, is it maybe reawakening.

(All this kind of thing is, as I’ve written so many times, just well-read tripe. It is wrong on two accounts: 1) in that it is so pathetically western-centric, treating the accidents of the European canon as if they represented ‘all mankind’, ignoring the traditions of India, China, Japan, all of Africa, all the non-western traditions; and 2) all generalisations about the development or evolution of ‘humanity’ are tripe. The technology changes but humans remain resolutely the same, in their fear, desperation, tribalism and violence. To anybody who talks or writes about the spiritual evolution of humanity, just mention Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump Islamic State, Reform UK, the Janjaweed. What spiritual evolution? Talk like that can only exist due to a wilful bourgeois blindness to the world as it actually is.)

Mrs Bolton helps her pack her things ready to go to Venice. On Thursday morning Hilda arrives in her two-seater car, as arranged. Connie promptly tells her sister all about Mellors. (Close female friendships or sisterhoods feature in many of Lawrence’s stories:

  • Ursula and Gudrun (Women in Love)
  • March and Banford (The Fox)
  • Yvette and Lucille (The Virgin and the Gypsy)
  • Hannele and Mitchka (The Captain’s Doll)

Hilda listens, understands but warns Connie she’ll regret it. As is typical with the novel, Lawrence goes out of his way to give more backstory and depth to Hilda by explaining that her attitude is coloured by the fact she’s getting divorced from her husband and so has a jaundiced view on the whole man-woman thing.

Hilda wanted no more of that sex business, where men became nasty, selfish little horrors. Connie really had less to put up with than many women, if she did but know it. (p.249)

(All these elements – Clifford’s ludicrous religio-scientific author and now Hilda’s sex aversion – are carefully, carefully placed so as to create foils for the novel’s pedagogical lesson, demonstrate ways to fail at securing a proper sexual-physical relationship designed to offset Connie and Mellor’s ideal way of doing it.)

Anyway, Hilda agrees to Connie’s ludicrous plan for spending a last night with Mellors i.e. the girls wave goodbye to Clifford and motor off to stay overnight at a hotel in Mansfield. But after dinner, Hilda drives Connie back to the entrance of a lane leading into Wragby woods and Mellors is waiting for them. He shows Hilda how to park the car so it’s concealed by bushes then walks the two sisters to his cottage.

Here he is, maybe, unnecessarily belligerent, for example insisting on talking in dialect when Hilda can’t really understand it, and calls Hilda dry and boney and undesirable, which isn’t tactful, while she says men like him ought to be ‘segregated’. He makes some supper (haven’t they eaten dinner) then escorts her back to the car and she drives back to her hotel and Connie and Mellors have their last night together. What is it like?

It was a night of sensual passion, in which she was a little startled and almost unwilling: yet pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness, but, at the moment, more desirable. Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder.

Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death.

In particular Lawrence deploys a telling phrase:

She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died.

Instead of which the shame died. I know what he’s describing: the burning beyond shame to realise it is alright, it is OK not to be embarrassed or ashamed of each others’ bodies and desires but to celebrate them for what they are and to revel in them.

Shame, which is fear: the deep organic shame, the old, old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can only be chased away by the sensual fire, at last it was roused up and routed by the phallic hunt of the man, and she came to the very heart of the jungle of herself. She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

The tremendous liberation in rising above self consciousness and shame: this is still the kind of thing you see being described and advocated by agony aunts in sex advice columns (to be honest, the main one I’m thinking about is the Guardian’s sex advice column, and it’s always about being at peace with your body, with what it tells you, how to give and take pleasure).

As to what exactly might be triggering the deepest oldest shames, we are not told. Sodomy? Fellatio? We are not told, in fact the text strongly implies against any form of sexual activity except the phallic. Lawrence here and in loads of other writings makes a cult of the phallus and here says how it was ‘the phallic hunt of the man’ which brought Connie to ‘the very heart of the jungle of herself’.

Anyway, all this burning beyond shame into self realisation emphasises another of Lawrence’s hobby horses, which is how wretched, shallow, mechanical and sordid most modern men are. In Connie’s view:

Ah God, how rare a thing a man is! They are all dogs that trot and sniff and copulate. To have found a man who was not afraid and not ashamed! She looked at him now, sleeping so like a wild animal asleep, gone, gone in the remoteness of it. She nestled down, not to be away from him.

Next morning they’re getting dressed when he’s startled by a knock at the cottage door. It’s the postman with a registered delivery. He cycles off but Mellors is paranoid that someone will see them and tell, and so takes her by a circuitous route to the end of the lane where Hilda, reliable, is waiting for them. He pushes her through a holly bush, stumbles down into and up the other side of a ditch and Hilda’s opening the car door and she’s in and they’re driving away before she’s really had time to say goodbye.

Chapter 17

On the drive to London, Connie continues to justify herself to Hilda. Once in London they are treated by their man-of-the-world father, Sir Malcolm, who takes them to fine restaurants and the opera. But predictably London seems full of dead people and, when they move on to Paris, it is no better, Paris:

weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig! (p.265)

They drive across France, through Switzerland and into Italy and on to Venice but the spectacular scenery doesn’t touch Connie. They garage the car and take a boat to Venice then a gondola to the Villa Esmerelda where they’re staying.

Lawrence gives a bitingly satirical portrait of Venice, a pleasure city overflowing with half-drugged sensation seekers, the Lido packed with pink, half-naked bodies, the evenings full of jazz dancers pressing their stomachs against each other.

With all the cocktails, all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on hot sand in hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in the warm nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was what they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the sun, a drug; jazz, a drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To be drugged! Enjoyment! Enjoyment! (p.270)

This is completely of a piece with all his other withering criticism of the younger generation, the post-war generation and its addiction to jazz and partying, the opposite of the isolated search for the self which Lawrence, of course, espoused.

Connie realises she’s pregnant, though this causes her surprisingly little upset. Lawrence doesn’t dwell on it, surprisingly. Instead he gives us the long well-written letters Clifford sends her. This informs her that Mellors’ wife has turned up (presumably triggered by his solicitor’s letter requesting a divorce) and broke into his cottage and installed herself there, so Mellors has fled to his mother’s place in Tevershall. Connie is desperate to know Mellors’ side of the story but they had agreed not to write during her Venetian trip.

Instead Mrs Bolton writes with a lot more detail of how his wife goes about telling everybody he’s been having fancy women at the cottage, she found a perfume bottle and gold-tipped cigarettes, a rumour confirmed by the postman who, on the occasion when he brought the registered letter, had heard voices coming from the bedroom window. All this is to show how you can’t escape the world which is made of other people, and how awful they are, how intrusive, prying and judgemental.

Worst of all, Bertha is telling everyone what a beast Mellors was to her in bed. This triggers Connie’s memories of his animal behaviour on their last night together (what does this mean? Does it mean sodomy? Or just sex ‘doggy style’?) and the thought that Mellors had done those things to Bertha before he did them to her, makes her feel degraded and dirty. It makes her want to break her connection with him, it almost makes her want to abort the baby.

An artist named Duncan Forbes has joined the house party at the Villa. He is sensitive, with integrity. Connie shares some of her secret with him and he is very forthright, declaring society always drags down anyone who is true to their sex. Society does dirt on sex. Society revels in the ‘hyena instinct of the mob against sex’ (p.276). This gives her the resolve to stick by her experiences and cherish what Mellors has given her, which is worth describing at length.

Connie had a revulsion in the opposite direction now. What had he done, after all? what had he done to herself, Connie, but give her an exquisite pleasure, and a sense of freedom and life? He had released her warm, natural sexual flow. And for that they would hound him down.

No, no, it should not be. She saw the image of him, naked white with tanned face and hands, looking down and addressing his erect penis as if it were another being, the odd grin flickering on his face. And she heard his voice again: ‘Tha’s got the nicest woman’s arse of anybody!’ And she felt his hand warmly and softly closing over her tail again, over her secret places, like a benediction. And the warmth ran through her womb, and the little flames flickered in her knees, and she said: Oh no! I mustn’t go back on it! I must not go back on him. I must stick to him and to what I had of him, through everything. I had no warm, flamy life till he gave it to me. And I won’t go back on it. (p.277)

Tenderness is worth defending, love is worth sticking up for.

Clifford writes a long letter describing how this Bertha Coutts has gone supernova, destroying the gamekeeper’s life, laying siege to him in his mother’s home, broadcasting their sex secrets to the entire village. Clifford has the educated aristocrats’ disdain for all this, saying the secrets of the marriage bed should remain secrets (‘it is a matter of their own personal squalor, and nothing to do with anybody else’) but he uses a high-falutin’ phrase which finally confirms my hunch:

Humanity has always had a strange avidity for unusual sexual postures, and if a man likes to use his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says, ‘in the Italian way,’ well that is a matter of taste.

When I Googled this it does appear to be sodomy. So Mellors had a penchant for sodomising his wife and this is the ‘shameful’ activity referred to on his and Connie’s last night together. (A bit more Googling informs me that this particular passage of cultural dressing-up proved beneficial in the 1960 obscenity trial, because the judge in the case simply didn’t understand the reference, as I didn’t, without the benefit of the internet.)

Clifford writes that he had to interview Mellors as his wife is in effect trespassing on Clifford’s land and there are questions whether Mellors can do the job any more. In fact things progressed to the stage where Mellors more or less quit and has trained up a fellow called Joe Chambers to replace him. When Clifford asks him whether rumours about women at the cottage are true, Mellors tells him to mind his own business; when he offers to pay him a month’s parting salary, Mellors tells him to keep his conscience money. He really is a difficult man. Meanwhile some kind of warrant has been taken out to arrest Bertha (for libel?) and so she’s disappeared.

A letter arrives from Mellors explaining that Bertha had identified Connie as Mellors’ lover, partly due to books of hers she found in the hut, and was broadcasting it to everyone. It was this that caused Sir Clifford to bring in the police and take legal steps against Bertha who promptly disappeared. Mellors is clearer that he and Clifford argued. Clifford said he was a disreputable character walking round with his breeches unbuttoned and Mellors replied well at least he had something between his legs worth unbuttoning them for. No surprise that he was sacked. He’s going to move to London and gives Connie the address.

What upsets Connie is that Mellors didn’t take advantage of the interview to proudly proclaim his affair with Connie, to announce it and defend it. Instead he shied away. But she realises this is to leave her free to chose, to go back to Clifford if she wants to. But she’s disappointed.

Chapter 18

Connie shares the train back to London with her father and tells him she is pregnant. He’s not shocked to learn it’s by another man, of course, as Clifford is impotent. And he’s secretly pleased his little girl has found a real man. But he advises her to go back to Wragby, specially if Clifford gave her permission. Then he will provide Clifford with the heir he wants, do the decent thing, but retain her freedom to love where she pleases. The traditional upper class solution.

In London there’s a letter waiting at her hotel and she goes to meet him at a rendezvous. Finally, after four weeks they are together. They painfully discuss the future. She tells him she’s pregnant but he is not pleased. He asks if she’ll go back to Wragby and give Clifford the heir he needs but she says no, she wants to be with him. But he has nothing, she’s the one with the private income, he doesn’t want to just be her concubine. But she defines the thing he has that makes him unique: he has the courage of his own tenderness.

She makes him take her back to his hotel, a small attic room where they strip and she asks him to take her and keep her, forever. He kisses her pregnant belly and mons Veneris and then slips inside her. Then more talk. He has to get divorced from Bertha. But that means 6 months of pure living or he will legally become the guilty party, guilty of adultery. Connie is appalled that this means they won’t be able to see each other during her entire pregnancy. The world is screwed up. Then again, he should have divorced Bertha years and years ago. He has mismanaged the situation.

Connie persuades her father to have lunch with Mellors at his club. A private room. Mellors dresses smartly. They talk about India (the role the colonies played in cementing class identity.) Sir Malcolm gets drunk and lecherous. He ends up talking dirty, hoping his daughter was a good fuck and betting Mellors has got a good cock on him. This is all pretty disgusting and there’s no practical outcome.

Next day he has lunch with Connie and Hilda. This is getting boring. To live in peace in the world as it is, they need to marry. In order to marry they both need to be divorced. Mellors must get his divorce from Bertha. More tricky is how Connie gets a divorce from Clifford. With her father and Hilda Connie has developed the idea of asking Duncan Forbes to agree to be cited as co-respondent: she could spend a night with him in a hotel or at his place, enough to work for legal purposes. Mellors asks why they can’t be honest and cite him? Because then he will never get his divorce from Bertha.

So there’s yet another meal, this time a dinner with Duncan Forbes, Mellors and the Reid sisters. Mellors manages to insult Forbes’ modernist painting, thus casting a pall. With angry self control, Forbes agrees to the plan on condition Connie will pose for her. Seems cheap at the price.

Chapter 19

Connie writes Clifford a brief letter saying she’s met another man, her old friend Duncan Forbes, the artist, and fallen in love and won’t be coming back to Wragby. Clifford has a kind of nervous breakdown and has to be nursed by Mrs Bolton. He becomes a man-baby, loving to be washed and cleaned and kissed by her and he, in a naughty boy way, slips his hand in her bosom to feel her boobs. And, with typically Lawrentian ambivalence, Mrs Bolton thrills to all this and yet despises it as well.

Surprisingly, out in the real world, Clifford becomes much more effective, an effective cut throat businessman.

And in this spirit he writes a tough letter to Connie saying she promised to come back to Wragby so come back she must and face him, or he will regard them as married till their deaths. Mellors says he’s getting his revenge, but he holds the legal whip hand, so…

She goes with Hilda. Clifford ignores Hilda who he blames. Connie hates every second inside Wragby Hall. She used to be its mistress and now she feels like its victim. Formal dinner. Only after Hilda retires does Clifford say he doesn’t believe all this nonsense about her being in love with Duncan Forbes.

So she comes clean, admits it’s not Forbes – she is in love with and pregnant by his gamekeeper, Mellors. Clifford is absolutely flabbergasted, shocked, and enraged.

‘My God, you ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!’ (p.308)

And Clifford simply refuses to divorce her for such a cad, such a scoundrel. Refuses. Connie tries everything but he won’t budge. Even if the child is legally his and legally becomes heir to Wragby. He refuses to budge.

Connie goes up to see Hilda who tells her to pack so she does and sends her stuff first thing to the station. She says goodbye to Mrs Bolton (who in many ways emerges as the most sympathetic character in the book) and drives off with Hilda.

And then the novel ends hurriedly like a damp squib. Connie goes back with Hilda to Scotland. Mellors gets a job on a farm. And the final pages amount to a long letter from Mellors to Connie. This last-minute swerve, this avoidance of a neat happy ending, is very characteristic of ‘modern’ novels of the 1910s and ’20s. There’s stuff about Mellors pursuing his divorce against Bertha and his encouragement that Clifford will eventually divorce her…

But what makes this concluding letter interesting is Lawrence uses it to preach against modern capitalist society. He has Mellors say his farm is in a mining district and the mines are experiencing a recession. And the trouble with modern society is the young are trained up to spend money, to live for shopping and jazzing, but what happens when the money dries up? They have no resources to fall back on. If only they had been trained to live they could get by with very little money, make their own clothes and furniture and entertain themselves. He sees a bad time coming:

I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out. There’s a bad time coming. There’s a bad time coming, boys, there’s a bad time coming! If things go on as they are, there’s nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses.

And, of course, the year after the book was published came the Wall Street Crash, leading to a decade of mass poverty, leading up to the unfathomable catastrophe of the Second World War.

Against all this he sets the little forked flame between him and Connie, the little forked flame to set against the great global catastrophe. Mellors is enjoying their chaste separation now, he feels clean and pure. In the spring (the letter is written in September) he will get his divorce and he and Connie will be able to reunite, in body and mind, as the new warmth revives the spring flowers.

So the novel ends on this tiny affirmation of life and defiance of the coming darkness. It is a profoundly moving and humanitarian conclusion and, in my opinion, mistaken.

Credit

‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1928 by Martin Secker. References are to the 1981 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

Related links

Related reviews

BERRY: But you do believe in something?
TOMMY DUKES: Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say ‘shit!’ in front of a lady. (p.42)

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Posted by Simon on March 10, 2025

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The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories by D.H. Lawrence (1928)

A Penguin paperback edition of 12 short stories by D.H. Lawrence.

  • A Modern Lover (1910?)
  • Strike Pay (1913)
  • The Border-Line (1924)
  • Jimmy and the Desperate Woman (1924)
  • The Last Laugh (1924)
  • Smile (1924)
  • The Woman Who Rode Away (1925)
  • Two Blue Birds (1926)
  • Glad Ghosts (1926)
  • In Love (1927)
  • None of That
  • Sun (1928)

The 1981 Penguin edition has a 4-page introduction written by Lawrence’s friend and critic, Richard Aldington. He gives dates of composition for the stories so I’ve rearranged them according to his chronology. Aldington’s introduction concludes with the point that:

Lawrence was quite aware that as a writer of short stories he was completely out of touch with the popular and high-paying magazines of the 1920s. Instead of trying to conform, he preferred to write newspaper articles for bread and butter, and to write his stories in his own way.

In Aldington’s view the stories fall into several groups. 1) The first two are pre-Great War, Edwardian. ‘Strike Pay’ is one of the belongs to the group of studies of West Midlands coal miners. 2) ‘A Modern Lover’ is the first embodiment of a theme Lawrence returned to in later stories, of the jilting lover who returns to his jilted love only to find she has gone off with another man. 3) There are four gruesome and uncanny stores:

  • ‘Smile’ – Matthew travels to the death bed of his wife, Ophelia
  • ‘The Border Line’ – the ghost of a woman’s first husband, killed in the Great War, takes her from her second husband
  • ‘The Last Laugh’ – the demonic appearance of the god Pan in mid-winter London
  • ‘Glad Ghosts’ – the ghost of a spurned wife haunts the inhabitants of a country mansion

Aldington relates the uncanny stories to Lawrence being persuaded by his wife to return from their ranch in New Mexico to England in late 1923. He rediscovered his hatred for England and its superannuated class system but, during the trip, went to stay with an artist versed in the occult, Frederick Carter. Maybe this influenced these four supernatural stories, which are a strange eruption in Lawrence’s oeuvre.

A Modern Lover (1910?)

The first embodiment of a theme Lawrence returned to, of the jilting lover who returns to his jilted love only to find she has gone off with another man.

Young Cyril Mersham returns to the Midlands countryside where he grew up after two years away in the big city to the south. Some of the nature description is lovely but, even for Lawrence, it’s generally overwritten, overdone.

Surely, surely somebody could give him enough of the philtre of life to stop the craving which tortured him hither and thither, enough to satisfy for a while, to intoxicate him till he could laugh the crystalline laughter of the star, and bathe in the retreating flood of twilight like a naked boy in the surf, clasping the waves and beating them and answering their wild clawings with laughter sometimes, and sometimes gasps of pain.

Cyril arrives at the farm where he used to be such a frequent visitor three years ago, and is greeted by the farm wife, the father, the two sons who’ve just come back from a day at the coal mines and strip and wash, and the daughter of the house, Muriel. He is invited to stay for dinner but nowadays he talks in the received pronunciation of the South, careful and ironic statements, and the more he talks the more he alienates the entire family from him. He is not the local man he was. After eating he is out of the way in the busy kitchen with men walking backwards and forwards with hot water and whatnot, so Muriel tells him to go and wait in the parlour.

In the parlour Cyril sits in the old chair, observes the watercolour paintings of his on the wall and photos of him on the mantlepiece. In among them he notices a photo of a stranger he doesn’t know. He remembers all the books he and Muriel read and discussed, but it is all over-egged.

There, by that hearth, they had threshed the harvest of their youth’s experience, gradually burning the chaff of sentimentality and false romance that covered the real grain of life.

Cyril priggishly pontificates at her, who is all hesitancy. Their manner of speaking is quite hard to follow but what comes over is how supercilious and patronising he is. Then there’s the sound of a bicycle bell and a different male voice outside. She looks at Cyril and he instantly divines it is her new boyfriend. Muriel tells him that he told her to find someone else and, well… she has.

Sound of the interloper’s voice in the kitchen, talking easily to the brothers. Obviously he’s quite at home. Then a brother tells him Muriel’s in the parlour and he walks in to confront Cyril, the former lover.

He is Tom Vickers. He’s some kind of electrical engineer at the mine. He crushes Cyril’s hand in his handshake. But Cyril is unquenchably superior. Fencing and sizing each other up. In his internal monologue, Cyril cites literary authors to make himself feel superior and affects a lazy drawl. But he has lost.

Lawrence’s weakest area is sometimes his dialogue: it feels like he’s trying to be witty and sharp but this isn’t his metier so that this would-be witty dialogue feels weak and contrived; in trying to portray Cyril as witty and dazzling, it mostly comes over as clumsy and pretentious. I take the point that that is precisely the character of Cyril that he’s trying to portray. As with a lot of dialogue in old books, I wonder if this is actually how people spoke 100 years ago…

Lawrence is better at describing the curdling atmosphere of the scene and describing Mersham’s stealthy method of bringing up old songs and subjects with Muriel and so slowly stealing her sympathies back from the interloper.

They both leave at ten and walk the cobbled track to the barn where Vickers has parked his bike. In a way, the most memorable thing about the entire story is learning that in those days, a bicycle lamp wasn’t electrical but was an actual flame, in a lamp, with a wick, which had to be carefully lit and the glass clicked shut.

Cyril admires the other man’s confident movements, as when he leans down to pump up his tyres. He fools himself that this is the kind of man a wife gets bored of after a while, but has to admit he’s attractive. Cyril waves goodbye as Vickers cycles off.

He goes back into the parlour and asks Muriel if she’d like to walk him part of the way back to his path home. Her father looks disapproval but that doesn’t affect to young couple. Outside it is the dark night and, because he is more restrained, Lawrence is more effective.

There was a strangeness everywhere, as if all things had ventured out alive to play in the night, as they do in fairy-tales; the trees, the many stars, the dark spaces, and the mysterious waters below uniting in some magnificent game. They emerged from the wood on to the bare hillside. She came down from the wood-fence into his arms, and he kissed her, and they laughed low together. Then they went on across the wild meadows where there was no path.

They have reignited their old flame. He even says they could get married, although he has no money. He seems to suggest that she will ‘come to him again’, suggesting sex. As if they’d made love before. But doesn’t want to seem to be coaxing of forcing. but she points out how it (sex) is different for girls. Very unreasonably, he gets angry at her reluctance. He claims to have given her ‘books’ – presumably about contraceptive techniques?

When she points out how they’d have to creep about in corners, suddenly all the magic and glamour of it disappears, and he just feels tired, and a gap opens between them which she, of course senses, and begs him not to feel cross with her. Robbed of the possibility of sex, he finds himself deflated and empty. He hasn’t the energy to kiss her goodbye or say anything fancy. She turns and walks away without saying a word, her white face disappearing into the gloom.

How many billions of men must have felt this rebuff, the woman they’re wooing’s definitive refusal of sex, which bursts their balloon, evaporating all their energy or interest – and how many billions of women must have spoken sensibly and wisely and then been heart-broken when their man abruptly went cold and walked away. The story gets better as it progresses and the further it gets from Lawrence’s cack-handed dialogue. In one sense it’s a trite scenario, but the final walk through the night woods creates a mood which makes the ending genuinely moving.

Strike Pay (1913)

One of his studies of the West Midlands miners he grew up among. A lot of information is packed into just six pages. The miners are on strike. The Union agent hands out strike pay to a roomful of miners who are in a boisterous bantering mood, joking about how much they each get paid. They go into town and join the other colliers loitering around. then four of them decide to walk to Nottingham, nine miles away, to watch the Nottingham versus Aston Villa football match.

On the way they stop at each village pub for a round. They come to a field where some of the pit ponies they work with have been liberated from toiling underground (for the duration of the strike). The more adventurous of the miners round them up and mount and ride them, larking about, falling off, getting on again. Eventually they resume their trek to Nottingham. But at the next pub Ephraim Wharmby, a shy young lad, realises he’s lost his half-sovereign (a sovereign = one pound sterling, so half a sovereign was ten shillings or modern 50p). They all rifle through his clothes and boots and go back to the pony field but can’t find it. Being good chaps they all pitch in and give him two shillings each of their pay (10p) and he doesn’t have to buy the next round.

The match is good and the lads go on to more pubs, along with thousands of other colliers, but Ephraim is miserable and opts to go home. When he arrives home there is a scene with his domineering mother, Mrs Marriott, who asks where the devil he’s been, while they’ve made lunch, and tea and dinner for him, all to wait and then be cleared away. Sheepishly Ephraim hands over all he has (4 shillings sixpence, after ha paid for his football ticket) which makes Mrs Marriott angrily ask if he thinks that’s enough room and board to support him and his wife, Maud. Under the haranguing, Ephraim turns from meek and apologetic to furious, and demands his tea. Mrs Marriott order her daughter (Maud) to refuse and flounces out, but she quietly gets her man his tea, he is her man, after all.

The Border-Line (1924)

Katherine Farquhar is another avatar of Frieda Lawrence, a handsome full-bodied woman of forty, twice married with two grown-up children.

Daughter of a German Baron she was, and remained, in her own mind and body, although England had become her life-home. And surely she looked German, with her fresh complexion and her strong, full figure.

Full of confidence, she is in Paris boarding the train to take her to visit relatives in Baden-Baden and to see her second husband, Philip, a journalist currently working in Germany. She remembers her first husband, father of her two grown-up children, Alan Anstruther, son of a Scottish baronet, and captain in a Highland regiment. They fought. Alan was obstinate. After ten years they ceased to live together.

Alan had a good friend, Philip Farquar, trained for the bar, went into journalism, small and dark with an air of knowing all the secrets, attractive to women. Philip is in awe of Alan’s solidity. ‘He is the only real man, what I call a real man, that I have ever met.’

Then the Great War broke out and Alan marched bluffly off to war. In spring of 1915 he was reported missing and never reappeared. Katherine didn’t mourn. Philip stayed in England working as a journalist and was a source of consolation and strength. In 1921, aged 38, she married him.

It was lovely at first but then a sense of loss and degradation afflicted her. Philip is clever and reassures her but she feels trapped. Sometimes the face of Alan, ‘the bony, hard, masterful, but honest face of Alan would come back’ to her. She sensed him with her on the cross-Channel ferry and his memory made her happy in Paris, where the story opens.

So she takes the train East, heading into Germany, and:

As she looked unseeing out of the carriage window, suddenly, with a jolt, the wintry landscape realized itself in her consciousness. The flat, grey, wintry landscape, ploughed fields of greyish earth that looked as if they were compound of the clay of dead men. Pallid, stark, thin trees stood like wire beside straight, abstract roads. A ruined farm between a few more wire trees. And a dismal village filed past, with smashed houses like rotten teeth between the straight rows of the village street. With sudden horror she realized that she must be in the Marne country, the ghastly Marne country, century after century digging the corpses of frustrated men into its soil. The border country, where the Latin races and the Germanic neutralize one another into horrid ash. (p.94)

She is travelling across the borderline. The train arrives at Nancy. She has to change here and catch a different train on in the morning. A German porter escorts her to her hotel, where she has dinner. Then she fancies seeing the cathedral. She gets lost and has to ask a French policeman the way, for Alsace is now occupied by the French. She used to love seeing it but now she experiences the cathedral as a huge looming mass, and is terrified by the sense that behind it ‘lurks the great blood-creature waiting, implacable and eternal.’

As she turns to leave the square she sees a man waiting by the post office and realises it is her first husband, Alan. As she goes to pass, he puts his hand on her arm. He says nothing, doesn’t look at her.

She knew that she was walking with his spirit. But that even did not trouble her. It seemed natural. And there came over her again the feeling she had forgotten, the restful, thoughtless pleasure of a woman who moves in the aura of the man to whom she belongs.

She realises nothing comes close to the fulfilment of being with your man:

As she walked at his side through the conquered city, she realized that it was the one enduring thing a woman can have, the intangible soft flood of contentment that carries her along at the side of the man she is married to. It is her perfection and her highest attainment… No matter what the man does or is, as a person, if a woman can move at his side in this dim, full flood of contentment, she has the highest of him, and her scratching efforts at getting more than this, are her ignominious efforts at self-nullity. (p.97)

She knows he is a spirit returned from hell but all the fear and dread you might imagine someone having when encountering a ghost are absent. Instead Lawrence envisions the whole thing solely in terms of fulfilling a woman’s primal need.

Now that she was walking with a man who came from the halls of death, to her, for her relief. The strong, silent kindliness of him towards her, even now, was able to wipe out the ashy, nervous horror of the world from her body. She went at his side still and released, like one newly unbound, walking in the dimness of her own contentment.

And the word ‘contentment’ is repeated throughout the passage.

At the bridge-head he came to a standstill, and drew his hand from her arm. She knew he was going to leave her. But he looked at her from under his peaked cap, darkly but kindly, and he waved his hand with a slight, kindly gesture of farewell and of promise, as if in the farewell he promised never to leave her, never to let the kindliness go out in his heart, to let it stay hers always.

She goes back to her hotel and undresses for bed, trying not to break the spell of completion.

If a man could come back out of death to save her from this, she would not ask questions of him, but be humble, and beyond tears grateful.

Next morning she goes out into the defeated and occupied town but it is hard and cold. So she catches the connecting train on into Germany proper. She crosses the Rhine, huge, sluggish and weary of race struggle. It is a profound geographical borderline between the Celtic and Germanic races. At the actual border, at Kehl, she feels that ‘the two races neutralized one another, and no polarity was felt, no life–no principle dominated.’ Lawrence gives brilliant descriptions of the watery, frozen landscape. After another long delay:

At last they set off, northwards, free for the moment, in Germany. It was the land beyond the Rhine, Germany of the pine forests. The very earth seemed strong and unsubdued, bristling with a few reeds and bushes, like savage hair. There was the same silence, and waiting, and the old barbaric undertone of the white-skinned north, under the waning civilization. The audible overtone of our civilization seemed to be wearing thin, the old, low, pine-forest hum and roar of the ancient north seemed to be sounding through. At least, in Katherine’s inner ear. (p.101)

At last the train arrives at Oos and her husband, Philip, is there to meet her. He is obviously ill and complains of being cold. And she, after her transformative experience at Nancy, the deep sense of completion she felt with the ghost of her first husband, finds Philip trivial.

As she looked at him she felt for the first time, with curious clarity, that it was humiliating to be married to him, even in name. She was humiliated even by the fact that her name was Katherine Farquhar. Yet she used to think it a nice name! ‘
Just think of me married to that little man!’ she thought to herself. ‘Think of my having his name!’
It didn’t fit. She thought of her own name: Katherine von Todtnau; or of her married name: Katherine Anstruther. The first seemed most fitting. But the second was her second nature. The third, Katherine Farquhar, wasn’t her at all. (p.101)

Also waiting there is her sister, Marianne, and they immediately gang up on Philip, denigrating him in German and bursting into giggle.

Both sisters stood still and laughed in the middle of the street. ‘The little one’ was Philip.
‘The other was more a man,’ said Marianne. ‘But I’m sure this one is easier. The little one! Yes, he should be easier,’ and she laughed in her mocking way.
‘The stand-up-mannikin!’ said Katherine, referring to those little toy men weighted at the base with lead, that always stand up again.
‘Yes! Yes!’ cried Marianne. ‘I’m sure he always comes up again! Prumm!’ She made a gesture of knocking him over. ‘And there he rises once more!’ She slowly raised her hand, as if the mannikin were elevating himself.
The two sisters stood in the street laughing consumedly. (p.102)

Which I’m sure Philip, feeling cold and ill, thoroughly appreciated. So they settle in, tea, dinner, chats. Marianne is five years older than Katherine. Her husband also was killed in the war but she has reached a place of equanimity and detachment.

She had now ceased to struggle for anything at all. She was a woman who had lived her life. So at last, life seemed endlessly quaint and amusing to her. She accepted everything, wondering over the powerful primitiveness of it all, at the root-pulse. ‘I don’t care any more at all what people do or don’t do,’ she said. ‘Life is a great big tree, and the dead leaves fall. But very wonderful is the pulse in the roots! So strong, and so pitiless.’
It was as if she found a final relief in the radical pitilessness of the Tree of Life.

This comes close to my view, or is the standpoint I would like to arrive at. Philip plays up to being weak and ill. To some extent it had always been his schtick, his brand. From his point of view, he saw the strong, manly, defiant types be exterminated by the million in the war while he kept his head down, and so he survived and won Katherine’s hand. ‘When the lion is shot, the dog gets the spoil.’

From Katherine’s point of view his weakness and dependency made a welcome change after Alan’s manly expectation of being obeyed and worshipped. But here, in defeated abject Germany, Philip comes over as abject and defeated and she realises she despises him, ‘the whimpering little beast’.

Katherine sees the abject poverty of the townspeople. In the evening they queue to get water from a hot spring since so many of them can’t afford coal or wood to warm their homes and she despises Philip for his self-pitying shivering. Let him shiver!

She goes for big bracing walks in the wild woods, deep in snow and feels the presence of her manly first husband, she wants to hug the big firm pine trees. But Philip staggers along beside her, short and sick and whining. God, how she despises him! Over there, in the reddish rocks, she is sure Alan is waiting for her but… She has to turn and take the panting Philip back to his sick bed.

Philip becomes so ill he is bed-ridden but Katherine continues her long walks in the woods. One day Alan simply walks out from among the rocks, striding proudly in his kilt, and puts his arm round her, and leads her to a secluded place, and makes love to her.

She yielded in a complete yielding she had never known before. And among the rocks he made love to her, and took her in the silent passion of a husband, took a complete possession of her. (p.104)

Obviously the word ‘possession’ has a double meaning, in the contexts of ghosts and spirits. I suppose it raises the question of whether Alan’s appearances to Katherine are ‘real’ or her hallucinations.

On her return she finds Philip really ill. She doesn’t care but out of duty stays with him and tends him. Next day she can feel Alan waiting among the rocks but Philip becomes hysterical at the thought of him leaving her and so she stays, sullen and resentful. As evening approaches it grows colder and colder and:

A very powerful flow seemed to envelop her in another reality. (p.105)

Alan is calling her, Alan has hold of her soul which a force which grows by the hour. She stays with Philip who goes downhill fast, at midnight rolling his eyes, and he begs her to hold him in his arms ‘in pure terror of death’.

And as she reluctantly works her arm down around his shoulders, on the bed, the door opens and Alan walks silently in. He walks to the bed and loosens the sick man’s arms from around Katherine’s neck and places his (Philip’s) hands on his chest. And Philip has last convulsions and dies.

But Alan ignores all that and draws her over to the other bed, where he makes love to her again:

But Alan drew her away, drew her to the other bed, in the silent passion of a husband come back from a very long journey. (p.105)

Commentary

Obviously a story like this drives a coach and horses through our modern notions of feminism and gender. Lawrence’s obsession with the notion of Man and Woman, and Husband and Wife, and the primeval power they exercise over each other, seem like they’re from the stone age. Certainly the story’s notion that a woman must submit to a strong manly husband would make any feminist throw up.

In my opinion, the best thing to do with this, as with most old literature, is to suspend judgement and give yourself to the experience, submit to the text’s descriptions, ‘ideas’, obsessions and opinions, no matter how contrary to modern belief.

There’s something to outrage a feminist or progressive reader on every page, yet it would be odd to balk at these ancient attitudes but swallow whole the bigger issue here, the idea that there are ghosts, there are spirits, that ghosts of the dead come back to visit us.

In fact this itself is contested within the story. an see that this is contested. The fundamental question is, Is the ghost of Alan real or Katherine’s (very powerful) hallucination and my opinion is, It doesn’t matter. The text is what it is.

If, for the duration of the story, you buy into the (obviously nonsensical) idea that the spirits of the dead come back to haunt us, why not buy into all the story’s other nonsensical or objectionable aspects and opinions?

Reading any literature is, in an obvious sense, submitting to someone else’s worldview for a while. What’s the point of doing it if that worldview isn’t different from ours, uncanny, alien, other, enlightening, illuminating and takes us to strange places, showing us actions and opinions we wouldn’t countenance for a second in our real lives? And so judging it by the value of our real lives is a problematic, arguably a blinkered and self-censoring, approach.

On this view, the more a text breaches modern morality, or vividly depicts old opinions, different worldviews, the better, as this exercises the muscles of the imagination and helps keep our minds open, open to the millions of things human beings have believed and valued.

Jimmy and the Desperate Woman (1924)

Jimmy plunged out into the gulfing blackness of the Northern night, feeling how horrible it was, but pressing his hat on his brow in a sense of strong adventure. He was going through with it.

A satire on the type of the squirming Oxford intellectual, a type Lawrence detested.

Jimmy Frith is 35. He’s just been divorced by his ‘very charming and clever wife’ of ten years, Clarissa. Jimmy is the editor of a high-class, rather high-brow, rather successful magazine, the Commentator, and his candid editorials bring him shoals of admiring acquaintances. Plus he’s handsome. The result? He meets loads of clever, sophisticated women when what he wants is to meet the ‘real’ people, the simple, genuine, direct spontaneous, unspoilt souls. In the opinion of his men friends, he was a grinning faun or Pan-person. In his own opinion, he was a martyred Saint Sebastian with the mind of Plato. He sought some unspoilt, unsophisticated, wild-blooded woman, to whom he would be a sort of Solomon of wisdom, beauty and wealth. She would need to be in reduced circumstances to appreciate his wealth, which amounted to the noble sum of three thousand pounds and a little week-ending cottage in Hampshire.

Then his magazine is sent a short vivid poem and accompanying letter from a woman in the North. He asks for another and a correspondence ensues. To his enquiries she explains that she is married to a coal miner who has a mistress, so is alone and misunderstood. She used to be a teacher. Now she writes poetry to relieve her heart. She is Mrs Emilia Pinnegar, 31, with a child of 8.

All these facts are by way of setting the scene for the meat of the story. This is that, after some correspondence, Jimmy decides to go and visit this woman. So he takes a train to Yorkshire, then undertakes a harrowing walk through a coal-mining town as dusk falls, eventually arriving at her poor cottage where she answers to his knock.

Mrs Pinnegar is not a pretty woman. She is tall, with a long face and a haggard defiant expression. Life has been hard to her. In his semi-realistic, semi-visionary style, Lawrence depicts Jimmy overcoming all the drawbacks, in his own internal thoughts, and then rashly inviting her to run away, to come and live with him in his house in St John’s Wood. Lawrence depicts the strange and visionary in the everyday.

He lifted his face, his eyes still cast in that inturned, blind look. He looked now like a Mephistopheles who has gone blind. With his black brows cocked up, Mephistopheles, Mephistopheles blind and begging in the street.

She is astonished by this mad invitation but he insists and she begins to accept it. She suggests he waits around to meet the man of the house, which he reluctantly accepts. The husband is on the afternoon shift at the mine and arrives home soon after 9pm, dirty and reeking of underground

Maybe that’s what all the fol-de-rol of the plot was for: to arrive at this confrontation between the bookish Oxford intellectual and the dirty but proud coalminer. He strips to the waist and washes himself, then his wife washes his back, then towels him dry. They both perform this daily ritual completely ignoring Jimmy who sits in a corner, noting the husband’s thin muscular physique.

Then the wife brings his dinner and Pinnegar sits and eats, at a right angle to Jimmy. He asks why Jimmy’s here and so begins a long, tense dialogue, which includes the blunt admission:

‘She’s told you I’ve got another woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I’ll tell you for why. If I give in to the coal face, and go down the mine every day to eight hours’ slavery, more or less, somebody’s got to give in to me.’ (p.122)

The husband and wife argue over his other woman, but when she says she wants to go with Jimmy, he visibly strips himself of all emotion, and agrees. It’s late. Jimmy leaves to take up the reluctant offer of the local pub, to sleep on their sofa.

Next morning, he returns to the cottage. In the daylight he sees how bad the woman’s skin is and bluntly thinks, ‘however am I going to sleep with that woman?’ but determines that he will. The husband is there, in a corner, reading the paper. He asks her to come with him now, but she refuses, saying she has things to sort out, she’ll come on Monday. Now she goes out with the child, leaving Jimmy alone with the surly husband.

They talk frankly, about the new government (‘something has to change’) and then the woman. The miner says something had to change and he regards Jimmy as the instrument of that change. Jimmy knows the cold, hard miner is dominating him and hates it.

On the train home, Jimmy at first feels exultant, like he’s had a great adventure. Back in London he goes to see his friend, Severn, who thinks he’s been an idiot. This prompts Jimmy to write a last-minute letter on Sunday night asking Emily to reconsider: does she really want to come (which, of course, signals his own reluctance)?

But the only reply is confirmation she’ll be taking the train next morning. Next morning Jimmy goes to Marylebone station taut with nerves. In the cab to his house he can more than sense the presence of the other man on her, he can feel him. It will be a battle. So the story ends:

As he sat in the taxi, a perverse but intense desire for her came over him, making him almost helpless. He could feel, so strongly, the presence of that other man about her, and this went to his head like neat spirits. That other man! In some subtle, inexplicable way, he was actually bodily present, the husband. The woman moved in his aura. She was hopelessly married to him. And this went to Jimmy’s head like neat whisky. Which of the two would fall before him with a greater fall–the woman, or the man, her husband? (p.130)

On a rational level, it is wildly improbable and doesn’t make any sense. But on the irrational, unconscious level Lawrence operates on, it is magnificent.

Two Blue Birds (1926)

This is a very high-spirited, amused, ironic story. A man and woman, in their thirties, are married and love each other but for the past four years or so can’t bear to be in each other’s company. So they live apart, he in London, she in the south of France with her latest lover. He has a secretary, Miss Wrexall, who adores him, would do anything for him. The wife thinks the arrangement is fine, she suggested she go to France, she’s the one having the ‘gallant little affairs’ but the thought of his dutiful and common little secretary is like grit in her eye.

Then he has his secretary’s mother and sister move in. They’re of the servant class: the mother is an excellent cook and the sister functions as a maid and valet de chambre. When the wife comes back from France she is horrified at how well the new household functions, and himself cock of the walk.

He had that air of easy aplomb and good humour which is so becoming to a man, and which he only acquires when he is cock of his own little walk, made much of by his own hens.

The servants are all flattery and submission and what would you like for dinner, Mrs Gee, but she hates them.

Spring visit

So on her next visit she needles him. Maybe being so well provided for might be bad for his work (for he is a workaholic)? But the narrative hovers at a generalised level, about their feelings, especially her conflicted feelings: loving him but not wanting to be with him; having affairs but not caring about the other men; hating the happy little domestic situation he’s arranged for himself.

She is Mrs Gee, ‘a broad, strong woman’ just turned 40. She schemes. Her hardness is brilliantly conveyed.

The garden was full of flowers: he loved them for their theatrical display. Lilac and snowball bushes, and laburnum and red may, tulips and anemones and coloured daisies. Lots of flowers! Borders of forget-me-nots! Bachelor’s buttons! What absurd names flowers had! She would have called them blue dots and yellow blobs and white frills. Not so much sentiment after all! There is a certain nonsense, something showy and stagey about spring, with its pushing leaves and chorus-girl flowers, unless you have something corresponding inside you. Which she hadn’t. (p.19)

This is the funniest Lawrence text I’ve read. Laugh-out-loud funny. The wife comes across him dictating an article to the secretary in the garden and is infuriated: is there nowhere to escape their happy little domesticity?

He was dictating a magazine article about the modern novel. ‘What the modern novel lacks is architecture.’ Good God! Architecture! He might just as well say: What the modern novel lacks is whalebone, or a teaspoon, or a tooth stopped. (p.19)

It is an article on ‘The Future of The Novel’, precisely the kind of thing Virginia Woolf wrote by the dozen but here, taken as the epitome of fatuousness.

The wife spies on the man complacently dictating to the compliant secretary when she notices two blue tits fighting at his feet. He notices, too, and waves them away, then the wife steps forward and there’s a tense scene, with the wife making ironic catty remarks to the secretary. Then stalks off, in her rather wolfish way.

Tea time arrives and the wife reappears as the sister serves the tea things. She asks the secretary (who was about to leave) to stay, and tell her sister (the maid) to bring another cup. Miss Wrexall runs off to change (for tea) into a chicory blue dress of the same shade as Mrs Gee’s except the latter’s is very expensive and fine. Two birds in blue fighting over their man. Like the two blue tits. And the two birds of the title. Humans becoming, and behaving like, animals, as in the novella The Fox.

Mrs Gee taunts them both, suggesting Miss Wrexall is not just the most perfect secretary but that maybe she writes the husband’s novels for him? Mrs Gee taunts the secretary for being so competent and proficient at shorthand and so on. The husband bridles. Miss Wrexall becomes agitated.

Sticking the knife in, Mrs Gee tells Cameron (the first time we’ve heard his name) that maybe he takes too much from Miss Wrexall. Her aim is to stain and sully their simple working relationship. Miss Wrexall bridles and says there is nothing inappropriate between them. Trying to reconcile, Miss Wrexall says there’s no need for Mrs Gee to feel left out.

‘Thank you, my dear, for your offer,’ said the wife, rising, ‘but I’m afraid no man can expect two blue birds of happiness to flutter round his feet, tearing out their little feathers!’ (p.26)

And with that parting shot she gets up and leaves. And that’s it. It’s an absolutely brilliant depiction of its subject matter, of the very complicated currents involved in marriage, separation, relationships, all tied up with the simple metaphor of the two birds.

The Woman Who Rode Away (1925)

The unnamed young American woman who’s the protagonist, a Californian girl from Berkeley, at 23 marries a little, wiry, twisted fellow from Holland, who’s made his fortune setting up and running silver mines in northern Mexico, in Chihuahua state.

It’s a bleak isolated location. Ten years pass. She bears him two children. The Great War knocks the bottom out of the silver market and the mines are abandoned while the Dutchman tries to switch to agriculture. They have occasional white guests (i.e. non Spanish or Mexican). One of these asks what lies beyond the hills that surround the ranch and the Dutchman explains about the neighbouring Indians: about the wandering tribes, resembling the Navajo, who were still wandering free, and the Yaquis of Sonora, and the different groups in the different valleys of Chihuahua State.

This conversation lights a flame in the woman’s soul. Her husband goes away for a few days to Torreon so the woman gets her servants to saddle up a horse, packs some food and – rejecting offers to help or accompany her – sets off for the hills.

To cut a longish story short, after a while she bumps into three Indians. When she tells them she has rejected the white man’s God and wants to find out more about their gods, they nod to each other: this was prophesied; the white man has triumphed over the Indian because the sun and the moon are out of balance, but the wise men predict that when a white woman offers herself as a sacrifice, then the sun and the moon will be realigned.

So she agrees to travel back to their village where she is put up in a house without windows and, over the course of weeks and maybe months, we see her being subjected to various rituals, stripped and anointed, redressed in native costume, allowed to watch native dances and ceremonies, and above all, plied with a sweet drink which gives her hallucinations, makes her forget herself and instead see phantasmagorias and become acutely sensitive to sights and sounds.

Lawrence prepares us for the ending by having her think, repeatedly, ‘I have died, my old self is dead, I have died to my old life etc’. So she is perfectly prepared when the shortest day of midwinter arrives, and the Indians ritually strip, wash, anoint, redress her and lead her up to a sacred cave behind an imposing sheet of ice and there, as the sun moves slowly round to shine through the ice and illuminate the cave, they sacrifice her to their gods.

The actual act isn’t described. The story stops just at the moment before she is sacrificed, with a great sense of suspense.

They were anxious, terribly anxious, and fierce. Their ferocity wanted something, and they were waiting the moment. And their ferocity was ready to leap out into a mystic exultance, of triumph. But still they were anxious.

Only the eyes of that oldest man were not anxious. Black, and fixed, and as if sightless, they watched the sun, seeing beyond the sun. And in their black, empty concentration there was power, power intensely abstract and remote, but deep, deep to the heart of the earth, and the heart of the sun. In absolute motionlessness he watched till the red sun should send his ray through the column of ice. Then the old man would strike, and strike home, accomplish the sacrifice and achieve the power.

The mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race. (p.81)

In Lawrence’s later novels I noticed his frequent use of words he’s coined and ‘exultance’ is one of them. Standard English isn’t deep or vivid enough to convey the depth he wants to express.

The Last Laugh (1925)

E.M. Forster wrote stories about Pan, the mischievous Greek god of nature, associated with spring, fertility, merriment and sex but they were set in sunny Greece or a summer’s day in the English countryside. Lawrence has the bright idea of relocating all this to Hampstead, in north London, in the depths of winter.

So it’s a cold winter’s night when a slight man with a red beard says goodbye to two friends, a man and a woman, who are visiting, shuts his door and they go down into the street. When the woman calls goodbye Lorenzo’, we know this is a brief, sly self-portrait of Lawrence himself.

On into the snowy street go the man in his bowler hat and the young woman. She is Miss James (referred to simply as ‘James’) and is deaf. We learn this when the man says he can hear someone laughing. This prompts James to get out her listening machine, an elaborate device which needs to be switched on, and puts on her headphones. She can’t hear any laughter but then thinks she sees something in a little park with big black holly trees and old, ribbed, silent English elms, ‘a dark face among the holly bushes, with the brilliant, mocking eyes.’

They’re loud talking brings over a tall, clean-shaven young policeman. None of them can hear the laughter but they all feel… rejuvenated, enlivened. The girl finds herself attracted to the fit young policeman and starts to feel frisky:

She seemed to stretch herself, to stretch her limbs free. And the inert look had left her full soft cheeks. Her cheeks were alive with the glimmer of pride and a new dangerous surety… The second of ancient fear was followed at once in her by a blithe, unaccustomed sense of power.

This is something new for the girl:

Having held herself all her life intensely aloof from physical contact, and never having let any man touch her, she now, with a certain nymph-like voluptuousness, allowed the large hand of the young policeman to support her

Meanwhile the man in the bowler hat:

His voice, with curious delight, broke into a laugh again, as he stood and stamped his feet on the snow, and danced to his own laughter, ducking his head.

He thinks he sees something moving and sets off at a run down the hill. He comes to a halt in front of a house just as the front door opens and a woman comes down the path. She asks if he just knocked at her door and he says no. Mysteriously, magically, seductively, she says she’s always listening for that knock at the front door because you always hope… you always hope something wonderful will happen. She makes eyes at him and invites him in and he needs no second invitation. For some reason Lawrence makes her a Jewess. Maybe that is to emphasise her exotic, slightly unenglish sexiness. Into her house disappears the man with the bowler hat.

James and the policeman watch then turn away and walk towards the tube station. She feels a tremendous sense of exultation and power, so much so that she feels she could kill the policeman.

She was surprised herself at the strong, bright, throbbing sensation beneath her breasts, a sensation of triumph and rosy anger. Her hands felt keen on her wrists. She who had always declared she had not a muscle in her body! Even now, it was not muscle, it was a sort of flame. (p.139)

And then, making it absolutely plain that this is about the god:

Voices were calling. In spite of her deafness she could hear someone, several voices, calling and whistling, as if many people were hallooing through the air: ‘He’s come back! Aha! He’s come back!’ (p.139)

There’s a flash of lightning and she sees the face right in front of her. She and the policeman walk on towards her house, which is a little one in side street near a church but as they approach the church she sees the front door is open. From inside come more voices crying ‘He is back’, then piece of paper are whirled past them on the wind and then the big white sheet of the altar cloth. In case the reader hasn’t got it yet, Lawrence writes:

There came a bit of gay, trilling music. The wind was running over the organ-pipes like pan-pipes, quickly up and down. Snatches of wild, gay, trilling music, and bursts of the naked low laughter. (p.141)

The policeman is so scared by all this that he asks if he can come into her house to warm himself up. She says OK and he can make a fire in the grate but he mustn’t come upstairs, which is where she goes.

Cut to the next morning, and James in her studio looking at her paintings. She finds them ludicrous. The servant comes to ask if she wants breakfast and is surprised when James says there’s no need to shout i.e. she can hear. In fact everything feels different the morning after.

The air all seemed rare and different. Suddenly the world had become quite different: as if some skin or integument had broken, as if the old, mouldering London sky had crackled and rolled back, like an old skin, shrivelled, leaving an absolutely new blue heaven. (p.142)

The serving woman reminds her that there’s a man downstairs, the policeman. James is surprised that he didn’t let himself out the night before.

Now she thinks of Marchbanks. This is a young man she’s been jolly good friends with for two years. Not lovers, mind; none of that dirty stuff. Now, in her new world eyes, she thinks how ridiculous it is, all this man-woman nonsense and, to her surprise, she hears the low laughter, as if agreeing with her.

Only now is it made explicit that this Marchbanks is the man in the bowler hat she was with last night. Now she sees him coming down the side street to the house then entering. It’s their habit for him to come to breakfast. He asks him about staying his night with the Jewess. He left at dawn. She tells him not to shout when he speaks and he thinks she’s joking, doesn’t realise she can hear. She is, in fact, cured.

James now has the confidence to mock Marchbanks who doesn’t like it. She tells him she saw the face again, closer up, last night, and heard the laughter, but can’t tell him any more.

They go down to see the policeman and the story for the first time topples over into being a ghost story. The policeman hasn’t left because he has gone lame. James asks him to take his socks off and they discover that his foot has become deformed, curled itself up like the paws of an animal. Of course. He has started turning into a satyr. In her ear James hears the creepy laughter and then Marchbanks reels back as if he’s been shots.

She started round again as Marchbanks gave a strange, yelping cry, like a shot animal. His white face was drawn, distorted in a curious grin, that was chiefly agony but partly wild recognition. He was staring with fixed eyes at something. And in the rolling agony of his eyes was the horrible grin of a man who realises he had made a final, and this time fatal, fool of himself.

‘Why,’ he yelped in a high voice, ‘I knew it was he!’ And with a queer shuddering laugh he pitched forward on the carpet and lay writhing for a moment on the floor. Then he lay still, in a weird, distorted position, like a man struck by lightening. (p.146)

And the story ends abruptly with ‘faint smell of almond blossom in the air.’

This is a horror story, isn’t it? not a genre you associate with Lawrence.

Aldington suggests that Lawrence’s placing of himself at the start of the story somehow implies that he is a wizard capable of deploying the occult powers that follow. This includes deforming ‘his natural enemy’, the policeman (to understand this you need to know about the terrible persecution Lawrence suffered from the authorities and the police during the First World War; see the novel Kangaroo) and striking dead a personal enemy.

Smile (1926)

A very short story, 5 pages. The third-person narrator describes a man on a train south. He’s had a telegram announcing that a woman he is attached to somehow, Ophelia, is critically ill. She is in a hospice run by the Blue Sisters, in Italy. Unable to stay up all night at her bedside, he sits up all night on the sleeper train from France into Italy, as penance. He has a Christian frame of mind, in fact:

His dark, handsome, clean-shaven face would have done for Christ on the Cross, with the thick black eyebrows tilted in the dazed agony.

But by the time he gets to the hospice, the following evening, the Mother Superior tells him Ophelia is dead. She leans towards him sympathetically, but he recoils. When she places a hand on his arm he notices how shapely it is. When she stands he sees how full-bodied she is. She calls for a young nun to come and accompany him to see the body and he notices how shapely her hand is, too. So he’s taken to see the body. In the room is another nun. When she stands he notices her fine white hand against her bosom. Obviously he is super-aware of their femininity.

When Matthew (only now are we told his name) sees the body (we are only now told it is his wife), gives a grunt and then smiles. The three women (Mother Superior, a senior nun, the junior nun) are scandalised but smiles are infectious and one by one, they smile too.

The smile fades and he looks back over his marriage. Ten years during which she became restive and left him numerous times, only to crawl back. There are no children. The whole thing was a disaster. he’s filled with bottomless sadness.

Inexplicably he feels the dead woman digging him in the ribs, tempting him to laugh. To quell it he turns to the Mother Superior and snarks ‘Mea culpa’. The nuns step back from this strange angry man. But even as he makes for the door he has to hold back the smile and, as he passes her, is smitten by voluptuous feelings for the mature nun.

When he’s left the three sisters move closer, bend over the body and notice, they think, the ghost of a smile on the dead woman’s face. Did she see him? Did she catch the smile that infected them all?

Glad Ghosts (1926)

Long, 40 pages. It was the first fictional work he began after what proved to be his final trip to Europe, in the autumn 1925.

It’s a surprisingly accessible, chatty first-person narrator tells this long ghost story. It’s all about his friendship with the Honourable Carlotta Fell. They met when they were both at school together. She was attracted to him because he had a real feel for the thing, for It, but they were never lovers, never anything like. She affected to hate her own class but like all posh young people, got over it and married into it, to a Lord Lathkill, very handsome, officer in a Guards regiment. He sees them soon after they’re engaged when Lathkill jokes about ‘the Lathkill bad luck’.

They see each other now and then but then the war comes. Afterwards, he sees them again, learns that Lathkill was wounded in the throat, now his voice is husky. They have twins. The narrator visits and sees them asleep in their cots. How sweet. Then a little girl.

He travels. Then he hears about the disasters. The twins were killed in a car crash along with their aunt. A few months later the little girl dies of an illness. He’s abroad when he gets the news and toys with writing, but what could he say? Some time later he returns to England and sends a letter. Carlotta replies inviting him to their place in Derbyshire. He counter-replies asking to see her in London. Here he sees for himself the lines of suffering in her face, and how the stuffing’s been knocked out of her.

She really presses him to visit them in Derbyshire so he acquiesces. Lathkill meets him at the station and drives him to their dark, lifeless mansion. Here things kick up a notch. For the first time we learn the narrator’s name, Mark Morier (distantly echoing the Paul Morel of Sons and Lovers).

More to the point, we learn two key facts: this house has a ghost, a woman ghost, who is meant to bring good luck (unlike the bad luck which has so far blighted the couple) but this ghost is rarely if ever seen. And 2) that Lathkill’s elderly mother holds seances and that in one of these the medium unambiguously stated that the Lathkill ghost would return as and when a friend of theirs with two Ms returned. Lathkill and Carlotta both think ‘Mark Morier’.

That evening he attends an awesomely frigid and stony dinner: Carlotta and Lathkill, along with his witchy mother, and two other guests: a yellow liverish colonel, and his terrified silent wife, Mrs Hale. The stoniness of the dinner is magnificently conveyed.

Then the women retired and the men go to the drawing room to smoke and drink spirits. Here the terrified Colonel tells his story. He married young, a woman named Lucy who was 28 to his 20. She bore him three children who grew up and married, but then she died. And then she reappeared to him after death. She badgered him to remarry and even suggested the bride, one of their daughters’ friends, 28, the same age Lucy was. And yet after the second marriage, she has haunted him angrily denouncing him for betraying her, terrifying him away from sleeping with the new Mrs Hale. Hence the extraordinary frigidity of the couple at dinner time, the fear and sterility in Mrs Hale.

Then they go up to join the women for coffee and more stilted conversation. In the midst of it, the man suggest putting some records on and dancing, so they clear the furniture out of the way and there’s an extended description of the dance, of the narrator’s feelings of dancing with old Carlotta, and then with terrified Mrs Hale.

In the midst of the dancing they feel the room become very cold. Presumably it is the ghost. The Colonel had gone to bed but now he reappears in his pyjamas, saying the ghost of Lucy has reappeared to admonish him. This triggers a diatribe from Lathkill. He explains that he realises he has been living bloodlessly, like a ghost, he and Carlotta are both ghosts, the house is dead and sterile. But this evening he has realised they have to live while they are still alive.

He sits next to Mrs Hale and presses her hand to his breast. And he tells the Colonel that the only way to appease the spirit of Lucy is to take her to his heart and warm her. Did they have much sex when they were married? No, the Colonel admits; he didn’t think she wanted it and so had affairs with other women but left her alone. Now Lathkill, in his raised visionary state, tells him to open his chest to her, and the Colonel indeed undoes his dressing gown, unbuttons his pyjamas and exposes his chest. He delivers an astonishing paean to his mother, thanking her for creating him, a man of flesh and blood.

If this was a ghost story, a genre story, we’d meet the ghost. But it isn’t, it’s Lawrence delivering a sermon. The sermon is, unsurprisingly, about the importance of physical love i.e. sex but delivered by Lathkill, who’s gone into visionary overdrive:

We’ve almost become two ghosts to one another, wrestling. Oh, but I want you to get back your body, even if I can’t give it to you. I want my flesh and blood, Carlotta, and I want you to have yours. We’ve suffered so much the other way. And the children, it is as well they are dead. They were born of our will and our disembodiment. Oh, I feel like the Bible. Clothe me with flesh again, and wrap my bones with sinew, and let the fountain of blood cover me. (p.192)

The women react to these speeches in the same bizarre spirit, Carlotta bursting into tears, Mrs Hale sticking by Lathkill.

Eventually this bizarre and surreal scene comes to an end and Lathkill walks the narrator to his guest room. Here he strips and imagines stiff unhappy Carlotta stripping down the hall and fantasises about worshipping her with his body. Instead he remains chaste. Then he goes to sleep and has a visionary dream, a long fantasia which involves meeting the ghost in the heart of oblivion. Here’s what he dreams.

Women were not unknown to me. But never before had woman come, in the depths of night, to answer my deep with her deep. As the ghost came, came as a ghost of silence, still in the depth of sleep. I know she came. I know she came even as a woman, to my man. But the knowledge is darkly naked as the event. I only know, it was so. In the deep of sleep a call was called from the deeps of me, and answered in the deeps, by a woman among women. Breasts or thighs or face. I remember not a touch, no, nor a movement of my own. It is all complete in the profundity of darkness. (p.201)

There is no embarrassing next morning, he just gets up and leaves, Lathklill shaking his hand, Carlotta saying ‘At last it was perfect!’

What this means is made clear in the last page of the story, which consists of a letter Lathkill writes some time later to the narrator who is once again abroad. In the letter Lathkill announces that Carlotta has had a baby, with yellow hair, while just a few days later, Mrs Hale had a baby with black hair.

So what I think ‘happened’ is that the evening ended with Lathkill impregnating Mrs Hale and the narrator impregnating Carlotta. The three alienated and sterile people (Lathkill, Carlotta, Mrs H) were all rejuvenated and brought back to life, in real flesh-and-blood bodies. Colonel Hale was exorcised of his guilt and has gone off to farm pigs. Even spooky Lady Lathkill has, apparently, abandoned the other side and committed to ‘this side’, to life in the here and now. With the result that the dead house where the narrator noticed everyone spoke in hushed whispers, has been restored to life. And Lathkill loves his life and his home again.

Sex is the cure.

According to notes, Lawrence really struggled with this story, starting and finishing others while he wrestled with it and you can see why. Like so many of his works it falls into two halves: the opening is amazingly fresh and realistic, sounding like a normal writer, and even up to the frigid dinner party it makes sense. It’s when the Colonel confesses how he is haunted by the ghost of his first wife that the story crosses over to the other side of fantasy. The sudden cooling of the room as if a spirit had entered, the increasingly frenetic dancing, the men swapping their dancing partners as they are to swap sexual partners, and Lathkill’s visionary speeches to the Colonel, Carlotta and his mother, before plunging into the strange ending where the narrator appears to have sex in a dream. Or is he just repressing the reality of sleeping with another man’s wife? I prefer the dream opinion because that’s what Lawrence presents in his text, that’s what’s on the page, and that is what is such a weird and giddy escape from the banal world of adultery.

Social history note: Here as in other stories from the period, Lawrence talks about them putting some jazz on the gramophone. Imagine how evocative it would be if he only told us the precise track.

In Love (1927)

12 pages. A light comedy.

Two sisters: Henrietta and Hester. Hester, the eldest, 25, is due to get married in just a month’s time. Henrietta, the younger, is just 21. Hester looks worried about going to spend a weekend with her fiancé, Joe, on his farm in Wiltshire but she goes anyway.

Here she spends the day helping with the chores, helping the cook serve dinner etc, then the servants wash up an leave. Six months earlier Hester would have been comfortable with Joe, they’ve been friends for donkey’s years. But now there’s a constraint between themselves because he’s made the mistake of falling in love with her. He wants to cuddle and ‘pet’ and all that stuff, which she finds repellent. Wishes it had never happened, now. For some reason I’ve found more humour in this selection of Lawrence stories than in all his novels put together.

He was extremely competent at motor-cars and farming and all that sort of thing. And surely she, Hester, was as complicated as a motorcar! Surely she had as many subtle little valves and magnetos and accelerators and all the rest of it, to her make-up! If only he would try to handle her as carefully as he handled his car! She needed starting, as badly as ever any automobile did. Even if a car had a self-starter, the man had to give it the right twist. Hester felt she would need a lot of cranking up, if ever she was to start off on the matrimonial road with Joe. And he, the fool, just sat in a motionless car and pretended he was making heaven knows how many miles an hour. (p.151)

After enduring some ‘cuddling’ on the sofa, Hester asks Joe to play the piano for her and while he plays she slips out of the bungalow. She feels an immense relief to be out in the cool night under the moon but then the playing stops and she, on impulse, shimmies up into the weeping willow which hangs over the stream. Joe comes calling for her, but quietly and pathetically, making her despise him even more. More comedy:

She began to cry, and fumbling in her sleeve for her hanky, she nearly fell out of the tree. Which brought her to her senses.

She worries that she must be abnormal. All the other girls love this love stuff. Suddenly there’s the sound of a car which pulls up at the gate to Joe’s place. Hesta scrambles down out of the tree and runs over. It’s none other than sister Henrietta, and the car is driven by Joe’s brother, Donald, and in the back is Teddy, a second cousin.

They all swear they don’t want to interrupt the love birds, they’ve come to stay on an adjoining farm, but Hester insists they come in. When Henrietta and Hester enter Joe is, of course, furious, which the innocent younger sister doesn’t understand. Hester wants them all to stay but Henrietta can see they’re not wanted and, after warming her hands at the fire.

In front of her Hester and Joe have a flaring row. Joe wants to know why Hester just walked out like that and Hester claims she has a very good reason so… What is it, asks naive Henrietta. The impatient boys out in the car toot their horn. Henrietta yells out the door for them to wait half a minute and turns back to the couple who are at daggers drawn. Finally Hester spits it out:

Her face flew into sudden strange fury. ‘Well, if you want to know, I absolutely can’t stand your making love to me, if that’s what you call the business… I couldn’t possibly marry him if he kept on being in love with me.’ She spoke the two words with almost snarling emphasis… ‘Nothing can be so perfectly humiliating as a man making love to you,’ said Hester. ‘I loathe it.’ (p.159)

Joe goes red with fury then pale with shock. The girls comment on horrible men:

‘I don’t believe I could stand that sort of thing, with any man. Henrietta, do you know what it is, being stroked and cuddled? It’s too perfectly awful and ridiculous.’
‘Yes!’ said Henrietta, musing sadly. ‘As if one were a perfectly priceless meat-pie, and the dog licked it tenderly before he gobbled it up. It is rather sickening, I agree.’
‘And what’s so awful, a perfectly decent man will go and get that way. Nothing is so awful as a man who has fallen in love,’ said Hester.
‘I know what you mean, Hester. So doggy!’ said Henrietta sadly. (p.159).

To be precise, the sisters agree that men are awful. But then in a comic twist Joe announces that he never lover her either. He only proposed and did all the lovey-dovey stuff because it was expected of him. All of which he says with a sneer. Is he sincere, or just recovering from being rejected. Hester is surprised but Henrietta is appalled.

And he realises what a pig he’s been and repents, And Hester for the first time sees:

the honest, patient love for her in his eyes, and the queer, quiet central desire. It was the first time she had seen it, that quiet, patient, central desire of a young man who has suffered during his youth, and seeks now almost with the slowness of age. A hot flush went over her heart. She felt herself responding to him. (p.161)

So she decides to stay and Henrietta slips out to let the love birds alone. Moral: love is a complicated thing.

None of That

22 pages. First-person narrative. The unnamed narrator meets Luis Colmenares in Venice. He’s a Mexican painter in exile. Surprisingly their conversation is all about a world-famous bullfighter from Mexico, Cuestra, who retired when an American woman, Ethel Cane, left him half a million dollars, and who Colmenares saw the other day swimming in the Lido.

Colmenares says he knew Ethel Cane in Paris before the war, when she knew ‘everybody’, was married to a painter (who wasn’t darling?) and had a mania for collecting antique furniture. Then she came to Mexico, attracted by the violence of the revolution, and hooked up with Colmenares, as someone she’d know in Paris. She came in search of a special man but her can-do energy and independence put off Mexican men, who were used to respect and obedience. They danced with her and expected her to become their mistress but she had a catchphrase: ‘I’m having none of that!’

So she became bored and insulted Mexico, saying it was nothing but little boys with guns.

She had an imaginary picture of herself as an extraordinary and potent woman who would make a stupendous change in the history of man. Like Catherine of Russia, only cosmopolitan, not merely Russian. And it is true, she was an extraordinary woman, with tremendous power of will, and truly amazing energy, even for an American woman. She was like a locomotive-engine stoked up inside and bursting with steam, which it has to let off by rolling a lot of trucks about. But I did not see how this was to cause a change in the tide of mortal affairs. It was only a part of the hubbub of traffic. She sent the trucks bouncing against one another with a clash of buffers, and sometimes she derailed some unfortunate item of the rolling-stock. (p.210)

(Cf the comic comparison of Hester with a car in ‘In Love’.) Colmenares was in thrall to her and flattered by her attention but she never had any intention of becoming an item. She used him for his information about Mexican history and society etc. Colmenares explains that he sometimes thought she wanted to be made love to, but realised that was only with her external self. Deep inside she despised men (‘she was always hating men, hating all active maleness in a man. She only wanted passive maleness’), and only used them to try and ‘start something’, to be at the centre of something, to make something happen. He knew if he gave in to becoming her lover he would be chewed up and spat out and then the subject of humiliating stories told to others. So he felt a physical repulsion from her.

Anyway, the narrator prompts Colmenares to move things along and the painter comes to the bit where Ethel Cane meets the world-famous bullfighter, Cuesta. Well Colmenares took her to a bullfight. At first she was disgusted by the blood and killing but then Cuesta came on and performed like a god. When he kills a particularly demanding bull, Ethel goes mad and joins the rest of his intoxicated admirers. She cheers and he catches her eye and it visibly affects him, he is so distracted Colmenares worries he might make a mistake and be injured.

But he isn’t. Instead, later, Ethel asks whether Colmenares knows Cuesta (yes) and asks for an introduction. So Colmenares arranges for him to call round, dressed in his best, wearing a ponytail. He doesn’t speak any other language; Ethel speaks in French, which Colmenares translates. It’s a brief call but Cuesta takes to calling round regularly. He just sits there talking to the translator he brings, staring at Ethel all the time. He’s a pig, he’s an animal, when alone with Colmenares, he refers to Ethel in the crudest physical terms. He has no brains, no imagination, nothing fires him. Colmenares he’s not really even human.

Nevertheless Ethel is infatuated and asks Colmenares endlessly for his opinion. Suddenly she starts talking about killing herself. Mad with infatuation she doesn’t want her body to triumph over her imagination.

‘If my body is stronger than my imagination, I shall kill myself,’ she said… If my body was under the control of my imagination, I could take Cuesta for my lover, and it would be an imaginative act. But if my body acted without my imagination, I–I’d kill myself… If I can’t get my body on its feet again, and either forget him or else get him to make it an imaginative act with me–I–I shall kill myself.’ (p.220)

Colmenares tries to persuade both these people to walk away, Ethel to get on a train to New York and forget, Cuesta to stop tormenting her. But she is infatuated and Cuesta 1) thinks of her as a dish he wants to eat and 2) learns that she is rich, really rich, very, very rich. But neither of them want to be physical. Ethel takes herself too seriously to be so vulgar and Cuesta actually finds her pale whiteness repulsive.

Cuesta always goes to her house early in the evening, and for half an hour at most, claiming to be busy in the evening. But on his last visit, when Ethel asks why can’t he visit her for a full evening, he tells her she is welcome to come to her house at 11, when his evening business is finished. She is embarrassed and acts surprised that he is available so late. ‘If it’s a special occasion,’ he replies.

‘Come, then, at night–come at eleven, when I am free,’ he said, with supreme animal impudence, looking into her eyes.

A few days later Colmenares hears Ethel is ill. A day or two later it is announced she is dead. It was all hushed up but Colmenares knows she poisoned herself. In her will, she had left half her fortune to Cuesta. The will had been made some ten days before her death but it was allowed to stand and so he took the money.

The narrator complacently concludes that ‘Her body had got the better of her imagination, after all’ but Colmenares says it was worse than that. When Ethel and Cuesta retired to Cuesta’s bedroom, he handed over to a gang of his cronies who gang-raped her, telling them to be careful not to leave bruises or marks. The doctors at the inquest still found puzzling bruises but then another revolution broke out and the whole affair was overshadowed by larger violence. Mexico.

Sun (1928)

18 pages. Maurice and Juliet are Americans. They live in New York (East Forty-Seventh Street) where Maurice runs his own unspectacular but efficient business. He wears dark grey suits and parts his hair neatly. Since they had a little boy, Juliet has changed, becoming increasingly upset at her stifling life. The doctors recommend a break, in the sun, so she and her little boy take ship across the grey Atlantic and on to Italy.

Here she settles into a villa with a few servants. After a few weeks of lying dressed in the sunshine, she makes the decision to sunbathe naked and, after a little scouting round, finds a sheltered rocky place among cacti where she won’t be overseen. Lawrence describes her first occasion bathing quite naked and the wonderful feeling of coming back to life it awakens in her.

She slid off all her clothes, and lay naked in the sun, and as she lay she looked up through her fingers at the central sun, his blue pulsing roundness, whose outer edges streamed brilliance. Pulsing with marvellous blue, and alive, and streaming white fire from his edges, the Sun! He faced down to her with blue body of fire, and enveloped her breasts and her face, her throat, her tired belly, her knees, her thighs and her feet.

Back at the villa she tells her little boy to strip and, reluctant and scared at first, he quickly gets used to scampering round in the nude.

‘He shall not grow up like his father,’ she said to herself. ‘Like a worm that the sun has never seen.’

A month or more passes (January through February) with Juliet sunbathing every day. She turns golden brown. She takes her boy with him to the secret place. There are a few minor incidents, like the time she realises he is standing before a snake and has to very carefully make him back away, while the snake disappears.

Then one day, walking naked among the bushes she comes across the peasant from the next-door podere tying wood to his donkey. He straightens and sees her and they make eye contact.

Then his eyes met hers, and she felt the blue fire running through her limbs to her womb, which was spreading in the helpless ecstasy. Still they looked into each other’s eyes, and the fire flowed between them, like the blue, streaming fire from the heart of the sun. And she saw the phallus rise under his clothing, and knew he would come towards her.
‘Mummy, a man! Mummy!’ The child had put a hand against her thigh. ‘Mummy, a man!’
She heard the note of fear and swung round.
‘It’s all right, boy!’ she said, and taking him by the hand, she led him back round the rock again, while the peasant watched her naked, retreating buttocks lift and fall.

She slips her grey shift on and goes back to the villa, lies on her bed and fantasises about him. Next day she is down at the secret rocky place when the villa’s ancient housemaid, Marinina, shouts down to her. Her husband is here, all the way from New York. Then she shows Maurice down the secret path to the sheltered sun terrace.

He looks immaculate in a dark grey suit and she realises what a totally indoor man he is. He for his part is shocked to see her standing completely naked and averts his eyes as he walks forward. They don’t embrace or touch, but discuss practicalities. The little boy sees his Dad and isn’t that moved. When Maurice takes him in his arms, the boy demands that he removes his jacket.

Juliet announces she’s never going back to New York, she couldn’t bear it. He hesitantly acquiesces then, for politeness’ sake, she asks if he can come out here. To her disappointment he says yes, he can probably manage a month.

She ended on an open note. But the voice of the abrupt, personal American woman had died out, and he heard the voice of the woman of flesh, the sun-ripe body. He glanced at her again and again, with growing desire and lessening fear.

They have lunch. Now Juliet had noticed that the peasant had lunch at the same time every day, at the house over on the next podere or terrace. He has it now, with his wife dressed in black. Juliet arranges their lunch so that Maurice sits with his back to the view while Juliet can see across to the peasant and his heavy wife. Juliet fantasies about sex with him, to be taken and drenched in sunlight with such an elemental force, and then part without all that tedious talking and engagement, just being uplifted and transported. Whereas, her husband! She looks at him over the lunch table.

There was a gleam in his eyes, a desperate kind of courage of desire to taste this new fruit, this woman with rosy, sun-ripening breasts tilting within her wrapper. And she thought of him with his blanched, etiolated little city figure, walking in the sun in the desperation of a husband’s rights.

God. Suddenly she realises white worm-like Maurice will make love to her and she will get pregnant again with his child and bear it and be trapped in the same sunless place. When all she longed for was to be transformed by wonderful sun-drenched sex with the solid, silent man of the earth.

And the story ends with this bitter note of her being trapped.

Note: the phallus

Interestingly, there seem to be two significantly different versions of this story. The online version includes several mentions of the peasant’s ‘phallus’, namely when she stumbles across him silently working in a little gully and he turns round and sees her naked and she sees his intense eyes but then notices his ‘phallus’ growing erect in his trousers. And ends with Juliet comparing the peasant’s big penis favourably with her husband’s ‘little, frantic penis’. Whereas the words phallus and penis don’t appear in the Penguin paperback version. There’s no mention of this in Aldington’s introduction and no notes, so I’m guessing that even in 1981, Penguin had to be careful and chose to print a bowdlerised version of the story, maybe that Lawrence himself toned down to secure publication. But that the Planet Gutenberg online version, created in 2004, felt free to use the uncensored version.

In the Penguin version it’s only at the very end that we learn of Juliet’s sun-filled infatuation with the peasant, or the idea of the peasant, and it felt to me like it came out of the blue, though was quite a powerful bombshell to end on. In the online version the incident in the gully with the phallus occurs earlier and so establishes the theme of sex-with-the-peasant much earlier, which is then reprised at the end. We are more prepared for Juliet’s sense of lust lost at the end.

Both ‘work’ but to produce different flavours. If I was forced to choose, I’d prefer the censored Penguin version. This is because the effects of the sun on Juliet’s body and consciousness are reasonably subtle, as is the interplay of her with her little boy and how he gets used to playing naked. But when you read of a phallus engorging, let alone the comparison of two men’s penises, it doesn’t exactly move things into the realm of pornography, but it does undermine the subtlety of the other perceptions and descriptions. I think the censored version is slightly crippled in shape by having the sexual impact of the gully episode played down; but the benefit is that you pay more attention to Juliet’s changing feelings.

Credit

‘The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1928 by Martin Secker. References are to the 1981 Penguin Classics paperback edition, though most of the stories are available online.

Related links

The Planet Gutenberg version of this collection has slightly different stories, in a different order.

Related reviews

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Posted by Simon on March 7, 2025

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The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975 to 1998 @ the Barbican

Anyone wanting to skip my comments can go straight to the gallery of images, a third of the way through this review.

Barbican art is big

The great blessing and curse of the Barbican Art Gallery is that it’s so huge. It has four large open-plan spaces on the ground floor (which always house very large works or installations), three alcoves running off the side corridor, while the first floor gallery contains 8 more room-sized alcoves – so about 15 distinct spaces in total.

This sheer size explains why the Barbican’s art exhibitions are routinely epic in scope and scale, and this new one, ‘Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975 to 1998’, is no exception. It features nearly 150 works by 30 artists across the full range of media including painting, drawing. sculpture, photography, installation and film.

The dates

The exhibition takes its start and end points from two pivotal moments in India’s post-independence history – the declaration of the State of Emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975 and the Pokhran Nuclear Tests in 1998. As the curators point out, these 23 years were marked by social upheaval, economic instability and rapid urbanisation. But they’re also a kind of introduction into the way other parts of the world don’t follow our timelines. Neither 1975 nor 1998 are particularly significant years in British political cultural life. These key political moments, like much else in the exhibition, come from a different culture and history.

Woke

A couple more general points. Art exhibitions in general represent a kind of advance guard of wokeness and political correctness, and the Barbican is at the forefront of these up-to-the-minute discourses. Reading their wall labels and captions can feel like reading an omnibus of Guardian editorials. Thus I predicted before I went that there would be displays about feminist, LGBTQ+ and indigenous art, and I wasn’t disappointed. Here’s an example, a paintings by the overtly gay painter Bhupen Khakhar.

‘Grey Blanket’ by Bhupen Khakhar (1998) © Estate of Bhupen Khakhar

The free booklet

Talking of wall labels, this exhibition is a bit unusual in not having any. Most exhibitions feature a big wall label introducing each room and then captions for each particular work. Here’s there’s none of that. The curators have chosen to put all the text into a very nicely produced and surprisingly ample free booklet, complete with a Timeline of Social and Political Events in India 1975 to 1998, and a Glossary of Indian terms. All that indicates which work is which is a simple number printed on the wall or dais beside them. This makes the whole exhibition feel unusually clean and uncluttered, and the booklet feels like a very generous gift and memento.

Too dark to read

However there is a catch with the booklet concept, which is that the curators have decided to use very low light levels throughout the exhibition, apart from spots shining directly onto the works. Unfortunately, this makes it quite difficult, often impossible, for an old guy like me to read the handout, even with my glasses on, even leaning towards the artworks to try and get better light, and I can’t believe I’m the only one. Maybe they’ll adjust the lighting levels as the show progresses…

Installation view of ‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975 to 1998’ at the Barbican showing terracotta heads by Himmat Shah in the foreground and abstract paintings by Jagdish Swaminathan on the wall in the background (photo by the author)

Extraordinary variety

As to the works, the curators have gone to great trouble to ensure that there’s something for everyone.

Large At the large end of the scale there’s a shed-sized installation titled ‘House’ by Vivan Sundaram. This is close to a life-sized wooden figure standing at the centre of a rosette of agricultural tools (‘The Tools’ by N. N. Rimzon). There’s a hexagonal shelter formed from painted screens (‘Shamiana’ by Nilima Sheikh), a strange skeletal mannekin covered in purple velvet (‘Desert Queen’ by Anita Dube), a set of coloured ropes hanging from the wall (‘Untitled’ by Sheela Gowda) and a big colourful canvas suspended across the ceiling (also part of Nilima Sheikh’s ‘Shamiana’ installation).

Installation view of ‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975 to 1998’ at the Barbican showing the big painted canopy suspended from the ceiling by Nilima Sheikh (photo by the author)

Small At the small end of the scale there’s a series of lovely drawings of holy animals done in a kind of naive decorative style by Jangarh Singh Shyam; and a set of brilliant metal sculptures packed with strange humanoid figures cast in bronze by Meera Mukherjee.

For feminists there’s a room featuring a series of 19 black-and-white photos by Sheba Chhachhi featuring seven women activists from the 1990s (‘Seven Lives and a Dream,’); and an upsetting set of 12 A4-sized paintings by Nilima Sheikh following the life of Champa, a carefree teenage girl who was married off while still a child, abused in her new home, and then murdered for her dowry by her husband and in-laws.

Indigenous art There’s a lovely series of black-and-white photos by Jyoti Bhatt capturing indigenous artists at work on wall and floor paintings. This is next to a series of upsetting colour photos documenting the 1984 Union Carbide disaster by Pablo Bartholomew.

Gay 1 The first gay room features eight colour photos of gay men staged among famous Delhi landmarks by Sunil Gupta. Gupta’s was the only name I recognised since he at one point moved to New York and I’ve seen his photos of the New York gay community in numerous other exhibitions. The photos are given droll and sarcastic text captions. I especially liked the one which reads:

People operate here harassing people and intimidating them with beatings and extortion. Sometimes they just want a blowjob.

Yes, sometimes men just want a blowjob – if a gay man says that, it’s a bold declaration, challenging societal expectations and interrogating heteronormativity; if a straight man says it, not so much. One of the many reasons to enjoy queer art is the queer artist’s ability to be completely candid about sex in a way that a heterosexual male artist would be wise not to attempt…

Gay 2 The second gay room features paintings by Bhupen Khakhar. I admired the candid way these depicted that taboo part of human anatomy, the erect penis. Considering how much trouble they’ve caused to untold billions through all history, it’s remarkable how few erect penises you get in art of any kind. I didn’t really like Khakhar’s naive home-made style but I admired his willies.

Struggling to understand Indian art

This is a challenge. I have only a shaky grasp of British art, a reasonable understanding of selected spots of European art, and a loose hold on American art (despite it being everywhere) because even in art you think you know well, there are always hidden depths and meanings. There are always traditions and currents and precedents the artists were inspired by, or are reacting against, are reinterpreting, reviving, critiquing and so on. Nonetheless, as an inhabitant of the Euro-American world, I feel I have a reasonable grasp of its visual (dramatic, filmic and musical) languages.

But Indian art? Despite having been to 2 or 3 exhibitions of it, I’m all too aware that it comes from a world almost completely closed to me, a world of visual iconography, traditions, religions and political movements, local cultures and languages which are way beyond my experience or understanding.

Therefore it’s challenging, this exhibition, because so many of the works seem to be coming out of traditions or mixtures and updatings and reinterpretations of contexts and traditions which I have no feel for.

What’s more, a lot of the art is obviously very political, kicking off with responses to the state of emergency instituted by Indira Gandhi in 1975 and taking in war with Pakistan, the rise of communalism and incipient Hindu nationalism, the spectacular growth of India’s cities and comcomitant loss of many rural traditions, the rise of Indian feminism with campaigns against suttee, honour killing, femicide and so on. I can read long explanations about these things but found it very hard to really relate to them. Hard to become as involved as, presumably, an Indian visitor would be.

The exhibition is a big bold window onto an art world most of us are not very familiar with at all. There was plenty to enjoy but quite a lot which I felt was only so-so – clumsily naive paintings, abstract designs I felt had been done earlier and better elsewhere, installations I felt I’d seen before somewhere else … but then it crossed my mind that maybe I was wrong, maybe I was misreading it, maybe I’m a victim of my own ignorance. Hard to tell whether my taste is valid or just trapped in the parochial world of the Anglosphere… So I tried my best to give everything the benefit of the doubt and to let the art teach and educate me in how to see it, rather than viewing it through blinkered Anglophone spectacles…

Press gallery

The following are the official press images, accompanied by the curators’ original captions i.e. none of it is written by me. Why? To give you as much of the original source information as possible, to let you make up your own minds.

Speechless City by Gulammohammed Sheik (1975)

A forbidding glow pervades ‘Speechless City’. Foraging cattle and wild dogs huddle around abandoned dwellings in a town empty of inhabitants. Evoking the repressiveness of the Emergency era (1975 to 1977) and referencing the eruption of Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat from 1969 onwards, Gulammohammed Sheikh made this painting while teaching at his alma mater, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda (Vadodara). The desolate urban landscape suggests the aftermath of an unknown, terrible event. The work originally featured a fleeing figure, which Sheikh later painted out to create a scene devoid of people.

‘Speechless City’ by Gulammohammed Sheik (1975) © 2024 Gulammohammed Sheikh.
Courtesy of The Artist and Vadehra Art Gallery

Village Opera-2 by Madhvi Parekh (1975)

Madhvi Parekh’s oil paintings depict remembered landscapes from both her childhood village of Sanjaya, Gujarat, and her subsequent travels. She painted ‘Village Opera-2’ after attending an artist’s camp organised by artist G. R. Santosh in Kashmir in 1975. The copper pots she saw there inspired the black anthropomorphic figures at the centre of this work. Working first with oil paint, Parekh then used oil pastels to add small, vibrant creatures which resemble birds, fish, snakes and amphibians. The scene floats in a colourful net of dots and lines, patterns drawn from the folk crafts of Rangoli and embroidery that she had practised as a child. Initiated into art by her artist husband Manu Parekh, Madhvi Parekh began to paint only after leaving Sanjaya, and with memory as their subject, her paintings provide a way back to the idyll of village life. “I have never forgotten the sights and sounds of my village,” she says. “I carry them with me everywhere and, although they are often combined with elements I have imbibed in the city, they still endure.”

‘Village Opera-2’ by Madhvi Parekh (1975) © Madhvi Parekh. Courtesy DAG

This was, I think, my favourite piece in the show, possibly because it reminds me of Paul Klee. It was one of the very few pieces which seemed happy.

Dhakka by Sudhir Patwardhan (1977)

Sudhir Patwardhan’s large-scale paintings visualise the effects of urbanisation on the body of the individual city dweller and the landscape of the city. A practising radiologist till 2005, Patwardhan uses his art to articulate stories of social struggle. His emphasis on figuration is a result of his belief in the accessibility of art for all. In the late 1970s, Patwardhan painted solidly built individuals against a minimal background. ‘Dhakka’ shows a labourer straining to pick up his shirt, the title (which translates as ‘push’ in Hindi) emphasising the effort of this activity. Dignified but worn out, this subject embodies the difficult lives of the working class.

‘Dhakka’ by Sudhir Patwardhan (1977) © 2024 Sudhir Patwardhan. Courtesy of The Artist and Vadehra Art Gallery

Two Men with Handcart by Gieve Patel (1979)

Under a vibrant pink sky, time is suspended as two men pause in their labour for a relaxed chat. Behind them, lightly shaded windows and bricks hint at a dense metropolis under construction. In the 1960s, Gieve Patel, a self-taught artist as well as a celebrated poet, playwright and doctor, began painting urban landscapes inspired by his native Bombay (Mumbai). While he documented the rapidly changing nature of the city around him, his focus remained on its working-class inhabitants. Placing the labourers at the centre of this work, Patel interrogated the impact of India’s social and economic transformations on its people. The artist had believed his use of colour in this work was non-naturalistic, but then was surprised to observe a sunset bathing the entire city in a pink glow. “The problem of how to relate to the given colours of life is full of thrilling ambiguities and possibilities,” he commented in 1985.

‘Two Men with Handcart’ by Gieve Patel (1979) © Gieve Patel. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex. Museum Photography by Barbara Kennedy

Two Men in Benares by Bhupen Khakhar (1982)

Bhupen Khakhar, an accountant by training, was a self-taught artist who took to painting in the 1960s. His early works comprised portraits of tradesmen. In 1980, he began to address his homosexuality, which he had struggled with until then. In this dramatic painting, the intertwined nude lovers are set against a blue background with numerous vignettes unfolding around them. Such narrative representation reveals Khakhar’s interest in fourteenth-century Sienese painting, especially the work of Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Khakhar integrates the lovers into the quotidian reality of the hallowed city of Benares (Varanasi), with its holy men, small shrines and kneeling devotees. By staging this sexual tryst within a religious context, he knowingly props up the erotic against the sacred, and provocatively collapses the boundaries between private and public. First exhibited at Gallery Chemould, Bombay (Mumbai), in 1987, the painting had to be stored away just two days later for fear of protests from the Central Cottage Industries Emporium, in whose premises the gallery was located.

‘Two Men in Benares’ by Bhupen Khakhar (1982) © Estate of Bhupen Khakhar. Note the willies

India Gate by Sunil Gupta (1987)

Staged amongst famous New Delhi landmarks and some cruising sites, these constructed images present the complexities faced by gay men when homosexuality was still a punishable offence in India. Section 377, a colonial law enacted in 1861, criminalised homosexuality and was only repealed by India’s principal court in 2018. The series was realised in 1986 to 1987 through a commission awarded by The Photographer’s Gallery, London, and was for Sunil Gupta “about locating Indian cis men in an international gay landscape”. Born in New Delhi, the artist moved to Canada in 1969 at the age of fifteen. He relocated to the United States prior to settling in London. Accompanied by excerpts of conversations with his subjects, all voluntarily offered, the colour photographs reveal the sentiments of gay Indian men and their vulnerable, clandestine lives. Gupta ensured he had the consent of his subjects to print the photographs, with the understanding that the images would not be shown at the time in India. Finally, in 2004, Gupta exhibited ‘Exiles’ at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi as a belated, affirmative homecoming.

‘India Gate’ by Sunil Gupta (1987) from the series ‘Exiles’ 1987 © Sunil Gupta. Courtesy the artist and Hales London and New York

Construction Woman Washing Her Face by Sudhir Patwardhan (1998)

Sudhir Patwardhan’s graceful female construction worker as she raises her hands to wash her downcast face. Very economically, Khakhar and Patwardhan imbue simple gestures with tremendous power and emotion, demanding recognition for their subjects.

‘Construction Woman Washing Her Face’ by Sudhir Patwardhan (1998) © 2024 Sudhir Patwardhan. Courtesy of The Artist and Vadehra Art Gallery

House by Vivan Sundaram (1994)

Vivan Sundaram transitioned from painting and drawing in the early 1990s to embrace a broader, spatially oriented approach. ‘House’ portrays his reflections on the changing political landscape and communal tensions in India at the time. Held by a metal armature, the installation elaborates on the concept of refuge. A walled sanctuary cast in kalamkhush (paper handmade from khadi, the hand- spun, natural-fibre fabric promoted by Mahatma Gandhi during India’s anti-colonial struggle), ‘House’’s surface carries embossed emblems of the tools of labour and speaks to collective struggles against power. Alongside a mineral hue reminiscent of coagulated blood, the outer walls exhibit marks of brutality: scattered limbs, jagged outlines of weapons, and closed windows. Within, a pedestal bears a wide-brimmed vessel filled with water, and flickering through the transparent base of the bowl, a fiery video projection conveys an allegory of simmering injustice.

‘House’ by Vivan Sundaram (1994) from the series ‘Shelter’ 1994 to 1999. Photo by Gireesh G.V. Photo courtesy The Estate of Vivan Sundaram

Untitled by Sheela Gowda (1997/2007)

Alongside her explorations with cow dung, Sheela Gowda employed a range of everyday materials in her installations through the 1990s. ‘Untitled’ (1997/2007), made for the show ‘Telling Tales – of Self, of Nation, of Art’ at Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, is her first fully realised installation in which needle and thread are used. For this work, Gowda strung individual needles with threads varying in length from 40 to 133 centimetres. This labour-intensive process was very important for Gowda, who would reject a ball of thread if she encountered a single knot because “the process of threading empowers every inch” of the thread. She then anointed the threads with kumkum paste, and bound them together to form ropes, with a menacing head of needles at the end of each length. ‘Untitled’ comprises of eight such lengths of rope, which allow Gowda to configure and arrange them site-specifically. They travel viscerally along the wall and snake across the floor, intimating a transmuting body, an umbilical cord, intestines, trails of blood. Gowda has described the work as possessing “a very insidious sort of violence … the needles hang at the end almost passively but they have the potential for hurting.”

‘Untitled’ by Sheela Gowda (1997/2007) © Sheela Gowda. Courtesy Museum Gouda

Mild Terrors-II by C. K. Rajan (1991 to 1996)

Using only scissors and glue, C. K. Rajan composed the ‘Mild Terrors II’ series by pasting imagery from discarded popular magazines and dailies onto blank sheets of A4 paper. An erstwhile member of the Indian Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association, Rajan began work on these collages in 1991, the year India liberalised its economy to allow foreign investment. Made quickly and intuitively, the perspective of these small-scale collages is purposefully disorienting. They are replete with rescaled objects and discordant visual mash-ups. Rajan cannily juxtaposed outsized human torsos and limbs (often female) with consumer goods, and inserted them into urban or rural settings to create surreal scenes. They convey the ‘mild terrors’ that lurked behind India’s rapid entry into a global free-market system – the unreported uneven economic development, the social disparities, the displacements. It was a strangely transforming landscape, somewhere between pre-modern, modern and post-modern, captured strikingly in these unsettling collages.

‘Mild Terrors-II’ by C. K. Rajan (1991 to 1996) Courtesy the artist and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi

Installation gallery

The following are my own photos of the exhibition accompanied, where relevant, by the curators’ comments. (I forgot to mention that many of the pictures are displayed on stands made of raw bricks which give the whole thing a…what vibe? Building site? Or are these holey bricks intended to be a characteristic symbol of Indian street scenes?)

Installation view of ‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975 to 1998’ at the Barbican showing ‘Two Men with Handcart’ by Gieve Patel on a stand made of raw bricks (photo by the author)

The Tools by N. N. Rimzon (1993)

N. N. Rimzon, whose practice was already sculptural, began turning towards a more installation-based approach, as many other artists did in the 1990s. In ‘The Tools’, a figure stands in a state of meditation. Rimzon derived the pose from sculptures of devotees in temple architecture, symbolising non-violence and inner peace. The figure is encircled by iron tools, the broken parts of agricultural equipment. Tension forms between the figure and these mundane objects: strikingly incongruous, the implements threaten violence. ‘The Tools’ exposes the lurking hostilities of the early 1990s with the rise in communalism and the advent of globalisation. In ‘House of heavens’ (1996), on display nearby, similar themes recur. While the human figure is absent, the effects of human action are palpable. A house and an egg rest against each other, intimating the home as a space for solace, refuge and the continuity of life. However, this ideal is destabilised by the iron sword upon which the house precariously rests, signifying the disruptions caused by rising social tensions and their intrusion into people’s lives.

Installation view of ‘The Tools’ by N. N. Rimzon (1993) (photo by the author)

Shamiana by Nilima Sheikh (1996)

The double-sided painted scroll or ‘kanats’ (side screens) of this work centre on the journeys taken by women for devotion, love and celebration in the face of hardship. This nomadic theme is echoed in the installation’s form as a ‘shamiana’, a temporary shelter or gathering place often used as a marriage tent. Nilima Sheikh began designing sets for the feminist theatre troupe Vivadi in 1989. This influenced her painting, and she experimented with ideas of scale and new ways of engaging with viewers. ‘Shamiana’ allows its audience to move around and within the installation. From tender domesticity in ‘Before Nightfall’ to the tragedy of ‘When Champa Grew Up’, and then to a more hopeful paradigm in ‘Shamiana’, Sheikh invokes mythology and other vernacular literary traditions of the Indian subcontinent to explore human conditions of celebrating, mourning, protesting and offering shelter.

Installation view of ‘Shamiana’ by Nilima Sheikh (1996) (photo by the author)

Bronzes by Meera Mukherjee

Meera Mukherjee sought a modernism that would articulate an Indian national identity in the aftermath of British colonisation. Educated at the Delhi Polytechnic College and the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, she rejected their curriculums which adhered to the western canon of modern art. A grant from the Anthropological Survey of India provided the opportunity to work with Gharua craftsmen in Bastar in central India. She travelled widely, studying the metal-casting techniques of Dhokra artisans in West Bengal, Khoruras and Ghantrars in Odisha, and Sakya craftsmen in Bhaktapur, Nepal. This composite tradition informed Mukherjee’s own use of lost-wax casting, in which a wax model is used as a mould for molten metal. When cooled, the sculpture is finished by hand. Inspired by the devotion with which craftsmen attended sacred subjects, Mukherjee approached the ordinary with similar spiritualism. Small-scale and intricately detailed, Mukherjee’s sculptures elevate figures from everyday village life: labouring artisans in ‘Untitled (Smiths Working under a Tree)’, students in mass protest in ‘Untitled (Andolan)’, and religious devotees in ‘Pilgrims to Haridwar’. Configured in compositions at once rhythmic and organic, these figures from the contemporary world appear subject to larger, celestial forces.

Installation view of one of Meera Mukherjee’s bronzes (photo by the author)

Seven Lives and a Dream’ (1980 to 1991) by Sheba Chhachhi

Sheba Chhachhi’s series of nineteen black-and-white photographs follows seven women activists. Chhachhi became involved with the women’s movement when she returned to her hometown of Delhi in 1980 after completing degrees at the Chitrabani Centre for Social Communication, Calcutta (Kolkata), and the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Amidst a wave of protests against dowry-related violence, Chhachhi photographed her fellow campaigners, the tightly focused images emphasising their emotional intensity. While these images were initially intended for circulation within the movement, Chhachhi felt the need to move beyond documentary photography – a form in which ‘the power of representation’ always remains with the photographer. She also felt that the single image could not adequately capture the complexity of the women, whom she knew personally. Almost a decade later, Chhachhi invited the same women to collaborate on a series of portraits, in settings and with props of their choosing. Satyarani chose to be depicted on the steps of India’s Supreme Court, the location of her decades-long battle for justice for her murdered daughter. Many of the women were photographed within their homes, the private, domestic realm sitting alongside the public forum of street protests. The props – books, family photographs, typewriters, grain – allude to facets of the sitters’ identities, from which emerges an image of the movement that united women across class lines.

Installation view of ‘Seven Lives and a Dream’ (1980 to 1991) by Sheba Chhachhi (photo by the author)

‘When Champa Grew Up’ by Nilima Sheikh (1984 to 1985)

This series of twelve narrative paintings on handmade paper immerses the viewer in the life of Champa, a teenager. At first, she appears as an idealistic girl, her bicycle a symbol of independence. In the following images, however, she is married off while still a child and subjected to abuse in her new home. The series culminates in her dowry-related murder by her husband and parents-in-law. Nilima Sheikh knew the young girl in real life and deliberated upon how to represent her tragedy. The artist explains that she moved away from wall painting because she “didn’t want to trivialise Champa’s fragile story”. The vivid realism of Indian miniature painting, particularly in traditions from the Punjab hills, as well as in East Asian scrolls, informed her method of creating a narrative that unfolds laterally in the unbound series of images.

Installation view of ‘When Champa Grew Up’ by Nilima Sheikh (1984 to 1985) (photo by the author)

Jangarh Singh Shyam and Himmat Shah

Jangarh Singh Shyam did the lovely sequence of ink-on-paper drawings on the wall, featuring serpents, birds, crocodiles and stags, in stylised way which reminded me of illustrations of the nature poems of Ted Hughes. In the foreground is a set of sculpted heads in terracotta by Himmat Shah.

Installation view of ‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975 to 1998’ at the Barbican showing sculptures by Himmat Shah in the foreground and drawings by Jangarh Singh Shyam on the wall (photo by the author)

Participating artists

Related links

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Posted by Simon on October 5, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/05/the-imaginary-institution-of-india-art-1975-to-1998-barbican/

Revelations by Judy Chicago @ Serpentine North

Judy Chicago is an American art celebrity, a feminist superstar, a ‘trailblazing artist, author, educator, cultural historian’, a godmother of modern American feminist art.

Born Judith Cohen in 1939, Chicago struggled against the patriarchal condescension of the art world in the mid-1960s and eventually made a number of drastic decisions. The most striking was, in 1970, changing her name to adopt the city of her birth, thus erasing the gender-controlling aspects of going by either her father or husband’s names. She assembled collectives of women artists and founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno.

The Dinner Party

Her most famous work is ‘The Dinner Party’ which she began in 1974 and can be said to summarise many of her concerns and practices.

‘The Dinner Party’ is not a painting or sculpture but an installation made of multiple elements: most obviously it consists of a large triangular table on which are 39 elaborate place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women such as Sojourner Truth, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, Virginia Woolf and so on.

So it is 1) an unconventional object, not painting, sculpture or quite installation, 2) setting out to address one of Chicago’s central concerns, which is the erasure and omission of eminent women from history, secular history, religious history, art history, all of it created and written by men.

It’s also a characteristic piece in that it was 3) a collaboration which required a lot of assistance from collaborating artists and assistants. Over the 8 years of its creation some 400 women worked on it, mostly volunteers.

Participants gather in The Dinner Party studio, Santa Monica, CA, 1978. Courtesy the Judy Chicago Visual Archive, Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center, the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

‘The Dinner Party’ is also characteristic in that 4) it confronts women’s sexuality head-on by having all of the 39 plates being vulvar in shape i.e. based on the shape and pattern of a woman’s genitals, a pattern she came to call ‘butterfly-vagina’ imagery. Broadly speaking, this is consists of a vertical oval representing the vaginal opening, with the folds of skin surrounding it (the labia minoria, labia majora and so on [according to the anatomy diagram I’m consulting]) represented in different ways, from folds of fabric to entirely schematic geometric patterns. Each of the 39 plates is a variation on the butterfly-vagina motif but vulvar imagery re-occurs frequently throughout Chicago’s oeuvre.

Hildegarde of Bingen plate line drawing from ‘The Dinner Party’ (1977) by Judy Chicago © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, NY Exhibition prints courtesy of the artist

‘The Dinner Party’ is also typical of Chicago’s work 5) in emphasising crafts, such as crockery and the needlework and fabrics which ornament the table, in foregrounding crafts which have traditionally, in the male-dominated art world, been relegated to a position inferior to painting and sculpture.

It is also characteristic in yet another way, in that 6) it went on tour, rather like a rock band, being shown in 16 venues in six countries on three continents to a viewing audience of 15 million. The very fact that the publicity around it emphasises these stats indicates the showbiz, world tour aspect of Chicago’s practice and reputation.

In this exhibition at Serpentine North ‘The Dinner Party’ has an alcove to itself, which, alas, doesn’t show the table itself (which has come to rest as a permanent installation at the Centre for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York) but displays various resources about it. So there are print versions of the designs on each plate, along with early colour studies of the banners used in the finished work and sketchbooks that reveal the working process and components that led up to it. There are three video screens showing interviews with members of the studio, documentary footage and a film that takes visitors on a tour of the work led by Chicago herself.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing the alcove containing sketches and videos relating to ‘the Dinner Party’ © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jo Underhill. Courtesy Judy Chicago and Serpentine

Maybe the last way in which ‘the Dinner Party’ is characteristic of Chicago’s work is that 7) it was made a long time ago, begun in 1974, half a century ago. Arguably, it speaks to a particular time and place and stage in the development of feminism as an ideology or collection of positions which have been eclipsed and superseded. Far from being occluded from history, nowadays you can’t go into a bookshop, turn on TV or radio, without encountering books, plays, films, documentaries and no end of other information about women in history, science, the arts and every other sphere of human activity. Which doesn’t detract from its power as a concept and a work and as a piece of feminist art history.

It’s interesting to read The Dinner Party Wikipedia article for the contemporary critical response among women critics and artists and then among Black women, to get a feel for how endlessly contentious these subjects are, and how the fiercest opposition often comes, not from the famous Patriarchy, but from members of your own movement.

Atmospheres

Talking of art from a long time ago, the second of Serpentine North’s ‘alcoves’ (or brick-lined passages) is devoted to an even older piece, or concept for multiple pieces, the use of coloured smoke.

Between 1968 and 1974, Chicago explored the male-dominated field of pyrotechnics and carried out a series of immersive, site-specific performances collectively known as ‘Atmospheres’. In these works Chicago moved right outside conventional artistic boundaries to use smoke as a medium to create expansive drawings in space. According to the curators:

Chicago saw ‘Atmospheres’ as a “gesture of liberation” that marked the release of colour previously contained within the “rigid structures” of her drawings and paintings and freed her from societal expectations.

She used smoke machines, fireworks, road flares and dry ice to ‘transform and soften the landscape’ and, crucially, to introduce ‘a feminine impulse into the environment.’ This would later become a central concern.

By their nature ephemeral, Chicago documented the smoke pieces through video and photography which is why a dozen or so photos and several videos projected onto hanging screens record the performances.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing the alcove/passage devoted to ‘Atmospheres’ © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jo Underhill. Courtesy Judy Chicago and Serpentine

Apparently, 40-plus years later, Chicago was invited to recreate or develop the idea of pyrotechnic art so that alongside the 70s footage there are films of much more recent events where, in what look like big festival-style events, she set off smoke displays and what look like pretty standard firework displays, at night, in American and European cities, to the whoops and cheers of delighted crowds.

Comparing these movies from 2019 and 2020 with the original small-scale, delicate and evocative films from the 1960s shows you how far American or Western culture has fallen, how so much that was novel or strange has been sucked into show business at VIP prices, with little or no space for strange, eccentric, individual gestures and thoughts.

The footage of naked young women painted red and green dancing in the desert holding smoke canisters in their hands are powerful not only because of their youth and beauty, but because their mysterious gestures, designed to invoke women-only rites and rituals, along with the very grainy quality of the old 16mm footage, hark back to a lost age of innocence and optimism.

Then (sweet, amateurish and interesting)

‘Smoke Bodies’ from ‘Women and Smoke’ by Judy Chicago (1972) Fireworks performance performed in the California Desert © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo courtesy of Through the Flower Archives Courtesy of the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

Now (slick, professional and boring)

‘Purple Poem for Miami’ by Judy Chicago (2019) Fireworks performance commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami in conjunction with the exhibition Judy ‘Chicago: A Reckoning, 2018 to 2019’© Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, New York Courtesy of the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

‘Turning rebellion into money’ as the Clash predicted, 50 years ago.

Revelations

But despite The Dinner Party’s central place in Chicago’s oeuvre and biography, this exhibition is not about it. The exhibition is titled ‘Revelations’ because this is the title of a book Chicago started working on in the early 70s and added to throughout the period of the creation of ‘The Dinner Party’, but which only now, 50 years later, is finally being published.

The idea is that this book expressed fundamental feminist and religious beliefs which have underpinned Chicago’s practice ever since (at one stage it was titled ‘Revelations of the Goddess’). We are told that only recently has she found the time to revise and complete the book as a kind of illustrated manuscript, a little in the style of William Blake’s self-illustrated books. To quote the blurb:

‘Revelations’ draws on Chicago’s extensive research into goddess worship and women’s history, offering readers a radical retelling of mythological creation and sharing Chicago’s lifelong vision of a just and equitable world.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing a display case containing pages from the illuminated edition of ‘Revelations’ © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photo by the author)

Not only did she complete it, but got it published. This exhibition is timed and designed to coincide with the official publication of ‘Revelations’ by quality art publisher Thames & Hudson. Which explains why the show a) displays selected pages from the final book b) is laid out according to the central concepts of feminist theology which Chicago develops in the book and c) of course, copies are stacked high for visitors to buy in the exhibition shop (or on Amazon).

Apparently, if you download the app using the QR code supplied on the wall labels, you can listen to Chicago reading excerpts from the book which vary as you walk around the gallery.

Feminist theology

‘Feminist theology’ I hear you ask? Yes, for although Chicago rejects the patriarchy and man-centric male control of the art world, of politics and the world in general, she nonetheless appears to believe in God.

As far as I could tell, this god is female. God is a woman. In this respect her thinking amounts to a mirror image of male theology: there is a God, but she is a woman and therefore created Woman first and Man simply to be her clumsy helpmate. Crucially – and a point she comes back to again and again – the most fundamental act of creation is female because it is giving birth. Only women give birth, in a shattering and dangerous and exhilarating process which has been both ignored, suppressed, rarely mentioned and never portrayed in patriarchal art. Addressing this glaring omission explains why the exhibition includes series of works addressing God the (Female) Creator and why the entire exhibition opens with a big, a really, really big wide frieze depicting the creation myth according to Judy, complete with text explaining the all-female creation of the universe in cod Biblical phraseology.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing ‘In the Beginning’, her feminist creation myth (1982) © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photo by the author)

This focus on the true, female nature of creation also explains why, later in the show, there’s a series of works depicting childbirth – not in realistically messy detail, not in blood-spattered photographs – but stylised into the mythological cartoon style Chicago developed and perfected in the later 1970s and 80s. This series is titled ‘The Birth Project’ and includes a number of finished works alongside preparatory drawings and sketches. Pretty much all of them show the act of birth from the business end, facing directly between a woman’s legs so as to see the parted thighs, the opening vulva and anus, with the breasts like two hills in the distance and, often, no head in sight.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing ‘The Crowning’ (1983) © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photo by the author)

The correlation between the female body and landscape is no accident – in this vision, women make the world and so are the landscape.

Evolution from abstract to cartoon style

The exhibition actually starts back before ‘The Dinner Party’ or ‘Atmospheres’ with a set of her earliest works, which are far more conventional drawings on paper consisting of lightly drawn geometric shapes shaded with pastel colours.

These are very soothing and calming. They reminded me a bit of the Hilma af Klimt abstracts shown at Tate Modern last year, or of the visionary drawings of Emma Kunz shown here at the Serpentine 5 years ago but much lighter and less cluttered than either. Simpler, airier. Maybe more like Agnes Martin.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing early drawings from the late 1960s) © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photo by the author)

Placed next to them are drawings from just a few years later which demonstrate a far more assertive use of colour, with the structure of the shapes more obviously defined, using bolder colours and with the grading of the colours from intense to pale, creating a more dynamic effect.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing early drawings from the early and mid-1970s © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photo by the author)

The curators make the point that the entire exhibition has a strong emphasis on Chicago’s drawings and sketches, maybe half the pieces here are drawings, and this is also the pretext for some quotes by Chicago on the centrality of drawing to her practice, before she gets near to the later, larger, more finished works.

Anyway I’m sharing these early pieces to highlight the next step in her development which is to treat human beings in much the same abstract shadow style, showing only the silhouette emphasised by dark shadowing, and using bold colours which shade away into pastel hues, which has the effect of making the images dynamic and, at the same time, simplified and cartoony.

‘Wrestling with the Shadow for Her Life’ from ‘Shadow Drawings’ (1982) by Judy Chicago © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, NY Courtesy of the artist

There are a dozen or so images like this and I liked them, probably because I like cartoons, I like strong defined outlines which is why, for example, I worship Degas. The flexible distorted postures of the human figures also appealed because they reminded me of both Matisse and Picasso who, in different ways, did something similar to the human body, turning it into bendy dancing outlines (for example Matisse’s The Dance, 1910). Probably there’s a strong feminist message to this image, as to all the others, but after a while I stopped reading the wall captions and just enjoyed the pictures.

There’s a subset of these which appear to address how horrible men are, a series titled ‘PowerPlay’ (1982 to 1987) which, as the curators put it, ‘interrogate notions of power, social conditioning, and the construct of masculinity’ – or, as a normal person might put it, are entertainingly comic cartoons.

So, for example, we have an imagine of a muscly man grasping a steering wheel which has morphed out of a version of planet earth which is going up in flames – presumably showing how toxic masculinity has instrumentalised the earth and is driving it down the road to ruin.

There’s a comic image of one of her shadow silhouette man with his willy hanging between his legs, letting rip a flow of yellow pee onto the earth. Yes folks, toxic men pissing all over nature (presumably because women don’t pee or, if they do, it’s in a discreet, non-toxic and environmentally friendly kind of way).

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing shadow drawings of toxic men from the early 1980s © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photo by the author)

Simplistic images conveying a simplistic message: man bad. Destroy environment. Woman good. Save planet.

The environmental turn

Which goes to show that, like many older artists, half-way through her career Chicago’s work began to incorporate environmental and green concerns. Probably it was there from the start, as the green movement was born around the same time as feminism and was part of the studenty-60s counterculture rebellion climate which Chicago came out of. But whatever the history of her engagement with the issue, this exhibition goes on from the cartoon men to show work in which she consciously focuses on green issues.

One wall holds 13 or so smallish prints, from 2013 and 2014, of endangered animals outlined in white on a jet black background, and each one is given a text, written in Chicago’s characteristic cursive script, pleading with us to save the planet.

‘Stranded’ by Judy Chicago in ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

These, we are told, are all part of the #CreateArtForEarth campaign which Chicago set up along with the artist Swoon and Jane Fonda (of all people) who, apparently already runs an environmental campaign called Fire Drill Fridays.

Judge for yourself but these images all seemed to me to be, well, er, a little amateurish. At about this point in the exhibition the thought occurred that a lot of Chicago’s mid-period and later art depends quite heavily on the worthiness of the cause as much as, or more than, its aesthetic quality.

A tell-tale indicator of this is the increasing presence – you might say dominance – of text in the images. By the 2010s many, if not most, of the works here contain texts which ‘educate’ – or hector and harangue – the viewer, depending on taste.

Anyway, you too can contribute to #CreateArtForEarth just by posting on social media using the hashtag. You can upload anything, paintings, photos, sculptures, writings, poems, symbols, every little helps, and you can see how this matches the collaborative and co-operational mindset which I pointed out 35 years earlier in the heady ‘Dinner Party’ days.

I don’t want to come over as unduly cynical but as I read all this it did strike me as a prime example of ‘slacktivism’, whose dictionary definition is: ‘the practice of supporting a political or social cause by means such as social media or online petitions, characterized as involving very little effort or commitment.’ Uptick ‘Save the planet’. Like ‘End consumption’. There. That’s my contribution.

Anyway, the shadow cartoon style I highlighted earlier is combined with the environmentalism in one of the most successful pieces here, ‘Rainbow Warrior’ from 1980, named after Greenpeace’s activist ship. Another of her stylised naked women, apparently giving birth to the creatures of the sea. (The ‘rainbow warrior’ is, apparently, an ocean goddess from Inuit mythology, so it’s not just a whimsical image but an ethnographically accurate one.)

‘Rainbow Warrior – for Greenpeace’ by Judy Chicago (1980) in ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North. Collection of Paul and Rhonda Gerson © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, New York

Digression: 1930s posters

As I processed all these images of the human form simplified down to stylised silhouettes with the heavy use of shading and often multiple outlines as if echoing or mirroring the central one, plus the use of slogans or good causes – I knew I’d seen something similar before. It took me a while to realise they were reminding me of a certain type of poster from the 1930s, generally depicting armed struggle, the classical examples being from the Spanish Civil War, but sometimes Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR.

It tickled me that these images of muscle-bound, toxic male warriors are pretty much the last thing in the world Chicago would want to be associated with, but hopefully you can see the stylistic similarities. Not suggesting any kind of indebtedness, just the visual similarity.

Snapshot from Google Images showing cartoon figures relying on strong outlines, shadow, ‘echoes’ of silhouettes and simple colour palettes

What if women ruled the world?

The exhibition builds up to a finale in the very big, interactive and collaborative piece, ‘What if women ruled the world?’

The main product of this is a massive quilted banner covered in images and text, lots of text. It was a highly collaborative piece. Chicago formulated 10 or so ancillary questions to the main central one, such as [if women ruled the world] ‘Would men and women be equal?’, ‘Would buildings resemble wombs?’ and so on.

Rather mind-bogglingly the first person to answer all 11 questions ‘during a call to action at the ICA Miami in December 2022’ was Nadya Tolokonnikova, founding member of the all-women Russian punk band, Pussy Riot. Her prompt and enthusiastic response resulted in her being recruited by Chicago, an inveterate collaborator, in this new project.

In the end thousands of people replied, from all round the world, and these responses were ‘digitally threaded’ together to create the finished tapestry. Here’s my photo of it in the Serpentine which shows how it is made out of panels. At the centre sits an embroidered portrait-shaped rectangle containing the master question. If you look closely you can see how scattered around the rest of the quilt are long narrow ‘letterbox’ panels, which contain the 10 ancillary questions. And all the rest of the quilt is made up of smaller, letter-shaped panels containing answers contributed by respondents around the world, most of whom are represented by photos of themselves.

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing ‘What if women ruled the world?’ © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photo by the author)

You can see it in more detail, read more and watch the video, on the dedicated What if women ruled the world? website. (If you hover your cursor over the main image of the quilt it magnifies the individual panels so you can read the contributions and comments woven into it).

The exhibition here at the Serpentine includes, next to the main quilt, a set of decorated prints of each of the questions written out in Chicago’s attractive, cursive script.

A last-minute change

And with that you have completed your tour of the exhibition – laid out in Serpentine’s usual four long narrow galleries and 2 walk-through alcoves – and have arrived back at the massive frieze depicting her mythological depiction of the Female Goddess giving birth to the universe, which greeted us as we walked in the door.

But there is one last wrinkle. On the wall next to the quilt, Chicago has created a piece specially for this show. It uses what had, by the 1980s become her characteristic rainbow palette, using her trademark Prismacolor pens, across which is written a text in her (just as characteristic) cursive hand saying: ‘And God Created Life.’

Beneath this is a normal-sized print depicting God as a hermaphrodite, displaying the primary and secondary characteristics of both a woman and a man (i.e. a vulva and a penis).

Installation view of ‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ at Serpentine North showing ‘And God Created Life?’ (2023) © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photo by the author)

What??? Right next door is the huge frieze saying that God is a woman and created the universe using female techniques, body parts and substances (breast milk becoming rivers etc) and asserting that the fundamental act of creation, suppressed by millennia of patriarchy, is the unique ability of women to give birth. God. Woman. Universe.

But now, according to the curators:

Foregrounding a shift in the artist’s perspective from an inherently female position to an all-encompassing view, the exhibition culminates in ‘And God Created Life’ (2023). This is Chicago’s most recent work included in the exhibition and calls for an expanded and inclusive concept of God, one that is neither distinctly male or female.

Here, right on the very last wall, as it were on the last page of the book, in the last frame of the movie, with no further explanation, Chicago appears to revise and contradict pretty much everything the entire previous 50 years of her art was premised on. After spending 40 years telling us God is a woman now she’s telling us that…maybe our religious thinking should transcend the simplistic binary of male or female, for something less divisive and more inclusive…

It’s a weird curveball to throw right at the very end of the entire show and begs loads of questions which remain completely unanswered.

If you like vexatious questions about feminist mythology, God and the universe you can go away and worry about this puzzling turn of events at length. Or if, like me, you like pretty pictures and enjoy seeing how an artist’s style and ideas change and develop over time, then this a stimulating, often very beautiful, sometimes funny, sometimes a bit meh, but always interesting exhibition – with a mysterious sting in the tail!

‘And God Created Life’ by Judy Chicago (2023) © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York. Photo: © Donald Woodman/ARS, New York. Courtesy of the artist

And like all the shows at the two Serpentine galleries – it’s FREE! Go and enjoy, be inspired and, maybe, a little puzzled.

Related links

Other London exhibitions which featured Chicago

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by Simon on May 25, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in America, Art, Exhibition, Feminism
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Posted by Simon on May 25, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/25/revelations-judy-chicago-serpentine-north/

Happy Gas by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain

Sarah Lucas was one of the original Young British Artists who impressed and dazzled in their 1997 ‘Sensation’ exhibition. Born in 1962, Lucas was a youthful stroppy 35 at the time of that exhibition, and her works made an immediate impact for their laddish, in-your-face, disrespectful jokiness about sex and sexual stereotypes, which felt blunt and working class, lacking all bourgeois pretence.

Lucas was very photogenic and her most memorable early works feature herself in laddish, ‘yeah, so what?’ kinds of poses, taking the mickey out of sexual stereotypes, but also just looking winningly young and carefree. Several of these images have become popular postcards, the kind you find alongside countless images of Frieda Kahlo in arty shops in the boujee parts of any English town.

‘Self Portrait with Fried Eggs’ by Sarah Lucas (1996) NOT included in ‘Happy Gas’ @ Tate Britain

Happy Gas

This is a relatively small (just four rooms) retrospective of Lucas’s career, which features works across a range of media including sculpture, installation and photography.

‘Happy gas’ is the slang name for the nitrous oxide which kids these days snort out of those shiny metal canisters you see scattered round the streets. Like lots of the other everyday objects she puts in a gallery, this common-or-garden slang phrase acquires all kinds of new resonances and implications when turned into the title of an exhibition. The curators suggest it is just the latest in her many, many insistences on the intrinsic worth of English working class culture, its words and phrases, images and unashamed chav vitality.

Sara’s quotes

A distinctive thing about the exhibition is that all the captions and commentary are provided by Lucas herself. An important part of being a contemporary artist is having the right kind of thing to say (see the career of the extremely articulate Anthony Gormley). On the evidence of this show, Lucas has perfected the art of quotes-with-attitude. What she says is not only always interesting but highly flavoured; feels like it comes from the punky, ‘street’ attitude she’s embodied right from the start.

Her comments are also consistently funny, droll, in their blank factuality, in the way she accepts the glum seediness of working class life and makes it funny. Or is surreal in a wonderfully English, cup of tea, kind of way. Thus of one sculpture she writes:

‘Reasons for making a penis: appropriation, because I don’t have one; voodoo; economics; totemism; they’re a convenient size for the lap; fetishism; compact power; Dad; why make the whole bloke?; gents; gnomey; because you don’t see them on display much; for religious reasons having to do with the spark.’

Gnomey, lol.

Room 1

You open the door into a long wide gallery space and are immediately assaulted by the massive photo at the end. A ready-to-cook chicken is placed on the groin of a young (?) woman wearing sensible knickers. The gaping hole at the bottom of the chicken, where it is traditional to put the stuffing, is carefully situated above the woman’s vulva. It’s titled ‘Chicken knickers’ (1997).

I burst out laughing when I saw this, which was my reaction to lots of the rest of Lucas’s art, but I suppose there are still lots of people who are so uptight about sex that they might be offended.

Installation view of room 1 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain

In the foreground you can see two old wooden chairs, sitting on a plinth of grey breeze blocks. On one chair is a wax effigy of a dildo or penis, on the other a pair of false teeth. The work’s title is ‘The old couple’, from 1992, and it is a visual gag. Maybe the teeth have to be removed to allow the penis to get a good gumming. Or they are images of age and decay. As an older person I find it both a funny schoolboy gag and also touching. But note the presence of a) the chairs b) the concrete. We’ll come back to those.

Turning round you see the door you just came through has a lovely photo of the young artist in typically scruffy student clothes standing outside what appears to be a Men’s toilet and holding an enormous dead fish. Is this a riff on the feminist saying from the 1980s, ‘a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle’? The work’s title is ‘Got a salmon on’, from 1997. Is that a joke reference to having a hard-on?

The back wall of room 1 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain

More than anything else, it just looks like a typical crappy, derelict London street to me, with a scruffy student in front of a typically locked-up toilet.

Covering the entire right wall is a set of three enormous blown-up images of tabloid newspapers from the 1990s. Lucas doesn’t have to manipulate them in any way, they just are what they are, horrific, hilarious, messages from another time. Similarly, she hasn’t given them fancy titles but just used the headlines themselves, from left to right: ‘Pairfect match’, ‘Sod you gits’ and ‘Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous’.

Tabloid pages about boobs blown up to huge size and framed in room 1 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain

Let’s quote Lucas herself:

‘I didn’t give feminism much serious thought until my mid-20s. I came across a book by Andrea Dworkin called Intercourse and another called Pornography. I was drawn to the titles. And they… trawled through pornography and other atrocities committed against women. Fighting fire with fire… It caused a schism in my feelings towards men. At that point I started using tabloid newspapers. And really I didn’t have to add any comment. I just blew them up and put them in a gallery. And people, most of whom must have seen this stuff every day of their lives, felt in the self-conscious atmosphere of the gallery, that I was criticising them in some way. Maybe I was.’

I was talking about her super blunt use of language, at least in the works themselves. Thus, on the right in the second photo you can see a very funny sculpture of a mannekin’s hand and arm set at an angle over an old chair and attached to a machine which makes it perform a monotonous up and down motion is simply titled ‘Wanker’ (1999). This is related to the 2000 work ‘Max’s Wanking Armchair’, where a similar masturbating mannekin arm is coming out of an old armchair.

On the subject of language, there’s an easy-to-miss work on the opposite side to the huge tabloid pages, which is called Five Lists. It is simply five pieces of paper, each one containing a list of very rude swearwords. As Lucas explains:

‘When I compiled my Five Lists … I was spending summer in Rome. Impossibly hot and I had no equipment to speak of so I set myself the task of just pulling things out of my memory. It was 1990 so I must have been 27. I made five lists one for women, one for men, one for homosexuals, one for wanking and one for excrement – these seemed to be the main categories that swearing could be divided by in English. I saw the overlap. And the hatred. I was already aware, instinctively, since childhood, of a distinction between people swearing humorously or with venom and bile, I suppose we all are – but I hadn’t thought clearly until then about how whole classes of people had language stacked against them, including sexism and racism. I retaliated with Five Lists.’

The curators lament that ‘Casual or everyday language is still not often part of the description of contemporary art’, well, hmm, whose fault is that? Who curates art exhibitions? Could it be art exhibition curators? If you want to see the extreme opposite of Lucas’s plain speaking, visit the Barbican’s RE/SISTERS exhibition, where every caption is a festival of impenetrable critical theory.

Room 2

Walking through into room 2 is a stunning experience. The room is long and vividly and dramatically lined with enormous blown-up images of the (fairly famous) image of Lucas eating a banana. She looks stunning. The photos were taken in 1990 by fellow artist Gary Hume and bring out her cocky, confident street style, her androgynous haircut and well-defined features, her great sense of humour. Bananas.

Installation view of room 2 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain

But what are all these things on plinths along the middle of the room? These are what Lucas has come to call ‘bunnies’. They are tights stuffed with fabric, most often cotton wool, and then loaded with piles of comical boobs with bright pink or brown nipples.

‘I’ve been making Bunnies for a long while. The first one from the mid 1990s is in this show. I’m not constantly making them but it’s something I’ve returned to from time to time and they’ve evolved over the years. It struck me, quite recently, that they’re mostly very thin. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I had a sudden urge to make some fleshy ones. It must be a combination of the fleshiness and the saggy tits that make them appear old to you. The latter probably. It turns out, surprisingly you may think, that a saggy tit is very expressive.’

Point one, it’s surprising how many shapes you can arrange these stuffed tights and boob explosions into, and how expressive they can be. Most are funny, some are sad, I found one or two of the artfully staged ones deliberately erotic.

Point two, the bunnies are headless. Now this arises from a simple fact which is that they’re stuffed tights and tights aren’t intended to come up to the head. It may have a secondary spin-off, a feminist interpretation satirising the way men (allegedly) regard women as sex objects. But there’s another point which only dawned on me half way round, which is that the bunnies in the middle of the room are headless but the wall is lined with heads, versions of Lucas’s head. In some voodoo way the headless stuffed tights are completed by the banana-eating artist (maybe; from certain angles…)

Third point is that, like any artist, having stumbled across a form or genre, Lucas experimented with it. Thus the early bunnies are made from nylon stuffed with newspaper or cotton wool, but about half way down she begins to branch out into other material. Some are made of plastic but the most impactful ones are the ones which were, presumably made from tights and wool, but then cast in bronze. These have a completely different vibe from the fabric bunnies. Those are funny; these, by virtue of the material, are more statuesque, enduring, strange and challenging.

Bronze bunnies from ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain

Fourth point, chairs. Let’s talk about chairs.

Chairs

Chairs are everywhere. The first object in room 1 is an old chair, ‘Wanker’, the final object as you exit the exhibition is a swish modern armchair penetrated by fluorescent tubes. There are quite a few chairs in all four rooms and Lucas is aware of their importance to her work.

The purpose of chairs (in the world) is to accommodate the human body sitting. They can be turned to other purposes. Generally as a support for an action or object. Changing light bulbs. Propping open a door. Posing. Sex…The character of the chair lends mood and meaning to the sculpture. The progression of chair sculptures through the years adds up to a world populated by these characters.’

If you ignore the booby figures sprawling all over them, the chairs themselves amount to a kind of history of office chairs, or a Sargasso Sea of Lost Chairs. Millions of hours of office tedium redeemed by having ludicrous cartoon bodies in platform shoes exploding all over them.

‘I like the idea of using a particularly naff piece of furniture and exploring its inherent character or hidden elegance by working on it.’

Surprisingly, running deeper than all the overt feminist subject matter, one of the themes of the exhibition is the pathos of chairs.

Room 3

In contrast to the long grey concrete wall of room 2, the walls of room 3 are painted peach. This gives it a strong visual unity which compensates for the more scattered, varied nature of the exhibits.

Installation view of room 3 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain

In this installation view of room 3 you can see, from left to right:

1. The concrete cast of a TV with ‘THE LAW’ inscribed on it.

2. From this a spread of pink plastic like some spilled liquid extends as far as the concrete cast of a woman’s lower body sitting astride a section of concrete pipe. You can’t see it in this photo but wedged into her buttocks is a cigarette, sticking out at a jaunty angle.

3. Hanging over the pink plastic slick is a fashionable dangling chair covered entirely in the kind of stuffed-tights boobs she perfected for the bunnies. A boob chair (in fact titled ‘Mumum’, 2012).

4. On the wall you can see two photos of our heroine as poor student, one wearing just a t-shirt sitting on a toilet (‘Human toilet’ 1998), the other sitting (wearing jeans) with her legs apart and a skull placed at her crotch (‘Self Portrait with Skull’, 1996). Strong atmospheric images but not a patch on the banana ones.

5. Lastly, you can see an enormous concrete cast of a sandwich.

Concrete

I said we’d come back to concrete. The idea is that it is one of the most common materials of our age. Traditional art galleries are finished with luxury stone like the walls of the Duveen galleries that run through the centre of Tate Britain. It was not until the breakthroughs of modern architecture in the 1920s, particularly with the Bauhaus School of Art and design, that architects began to leave the raw material of construction revealed and unfinished, as an artistic (and political) statement (against bourgeois lies).

By the 1970s entire new towns were being built of concrete which was left unadorned as a statement of fashionable modernity. An entire architectural movement, brutalist architecture, was based on it, with a classic example being the concrete-lined Barbican centre in London.

Walls Anyway, in line with her interest in street detritus, fags and old chairs and yesterday’s newspapers, Lucas likes concrete. It appears in at least three forms in the exhibition. One, it absolutely dominates room 2, where the wall opposite the big blow-ups of her eating a banana are covered, floor to ceiling, with concrete grey panels. Part of the odd intensity of the room is it feels like you’re in an underground car park or a nuclear bunker.

Plinths Second appearance is in the plinths to most of the works. Traditionally, a plinth that a work of art sits on is as luxurious as the work, radiating bourgeois value. Well, as you might expect, Lucas confounds this tradition. Instead of smooth and pristine plinths, Lucas uses concrete breeze blocks to support many of her works. The breeze blocks are not precious or finished: they are basic, practical, uncovered building blocks.

Casts For decades Lucas has created sculptures in concrete, starting with a cast of a pair of her own boots in 1999. Thus it is that these last two rooms contain a number of incongruously enormous casts of pretty common or garden objects, namely a ham sandwich and, bizarrely, a gigantic concrete marrow.

These are striking and humorous but not as funny as some of the earlier gags. There’s an absolutely huge blow-up of a photo of her torso wearing a t-shirt with two frayed holes where the nipples go. Massive but, again, not as funny as many of her classic sex gags.

Au naturel by Sarah Lucas (1994) and NOT included in ‘Happy Gas’ @ Tate Britain (© Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London)

Room 4

After the ambient peach of room 3, room 4 is red. This is because it is entirely lined with 20 massive colour photos of Lucas smoking a fag in a red room or a room lit by red lights (‘Red Sky’, 2018).

Installation view of room 4 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain

The obvious thing about these photos is how much she’s aged. She is no longer the enormously winning gamin from the black-and-white banana days. She looks raddled and old. Smoking will do that for you. And time.

Centrepiece of the room is a burned-out car which has been sawn in two. Inside it’s all blackened carbon and ashes. Burnt-out luxury products are so ugly, so completely devastated.

Still, I wasn’t that impressed. A few days ago I was at the Imperial War Museum which, in its central atrium, has the wreckage of a car bomb from Beirut, much more impressive. Back in 1970 J.G. Ballard displayed a handful of cars smashed up in crashes at the ICA, sparking a mini riot. Fifty-three years later it feels like nothing new to see here. Except Lucas gives an old theme a wrinkle, which is to cover the entire front half of the car, and a chair which has been thrown clear, in carefully arranged cigarettes, thus turning them into a decorative objects.

Installation view of room 4 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain, showing , showing ‘This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven’ (2018)

I like ruined industrial objects but this didn’t do it for me, somehow.

Cigarettes

Talking of cigarettes, the curators have organised the show around themes (bunnies, plinths, language, concrete) and cigarettes is another recurring theme of Lucas’s work. I’ll quote the curators:

Cigarettes have featured in Lucas’s work since her 1997 exhibition ‘The Law’, and she has gone on to create several series of cigarette-coated objects. In the final room of the exhibition, we see the climax of this theme in ‘This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven’ 2018. A Jaguar car, covered in cigarettes, is split in two. The action of cutting the car in half is a destructive act. Lucas said, “When I first started using cigarettes in art it was because I was wondering why people are self-destructive. But it’s often destructive things that makes us feel most alive”. Self-portraits of the artist such as ‘Red Sky’ 2018, displayed as wallpaper here, show her surrounded in an almost ethereal or ghostly cloud of smoke. In her ‘Muses’ series, she places phallic cigarettes in the orifices of body casts of her friends.

What I liked more than the chopped up car was more of the concrete casts. As you can see in the general view photo, there’s another giant, blown-up cast of a sandwich, this time with a shiny new metal toilet placed on it and a cast of someone sitting on that.

Scattered around this final room are four or five other casts of women’s groins and legs, presumably items from the ‘Muse’ series, all of them featuring an (unsmoked) cigarette wedged into their bum cracks.

Regarding these casts of naked women, Lucas is quoted as saying gallery goers don’t on the whole like casts or images of vulvas.

‘Funnily enough vaginas seem to shock people more than a penis. Especially the plaster casts of real ones. I’ve seen people approach some of the Muses and, when they’re close enough to get the vagina into focus, about turn and walk away. Which is an experience on a par with or maybe opposite to, finding out the meaning of the word ‘c**t’. I remember, as a child, being quite baffled by this word which I’d heard bandied about a lot and definitely understood enough to know it was out of the question to ever use it in front of adults and was, seemingly, the harshest and worst term of abuse available in four letters. And I had one myself. Shocking.’

This is agreeably fighting talk but nothing on display matches it in confrontation. Instead there’s just half a dozen concrete casts of herself or women friends, taken from the waist down, and neither foregrounding nor hiding their front bottoms which are just there as part of the rest of their bodies.

I didn’t feel these had any ‘edge’ or subversive value whatsoever. On the contrary, I found them sweet and lovely. They looked like the kind of casts kept at art school for young artists to assiduously sketch and draw.

The only novelty was the chairs, the way these casts are arranged on common or garden office-type chairs, as in the arcade of bunnies.

This one (pictured below) gave me a powerful burst of nostalgia: I’m sure that at my school or at one of my early office jobs, the place was full of these dull, institutional, grey-metal-piping chairs with the cheap moulded wooden bottom and back. Far more than any ‘shock outrage’ at barely visible moulds of vulvas, I was moved by these further instances of ‘the pathos of chairs’.

Installation view of ‘Pauline’ (2015) in room 4 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain

Tits in space

As I keep emphasising, Lucas’s thing is straight-ahead, unambiguous street vulgarity. The first exhibit is titled ‘Wanker’ and, when you’ve finally had enough of the red room, its broken car and fanny casts, you emerge back into the corridor containing the ticket checker and the shop, to find it completely covered in patterned peach wallpaper.

What is the pattern? It’s two of her cigarette boob sculptures, cut out and arranged as repeating pairs across this very striking, dominating peach wallpaper. And Lucas’s name for it? Something subtle? Something intellectual, maybe using a foreign language to evoke multiple layers of meaning and resonance? If you think so even for a minute, you don’t know our girl and you haven’t been paying attention. She calls it ‘Tits in space’.

The lobby to Lucas’s ‘Happy Gas’ exhibition, entirely covered with the ‘Tits in space’ wallpaper

This title made me laugh but I laughed even more when I discovered that this wallpaper is on sale to members of the public, to you and me. A roll of ‘Tits in space’ 10 meters long by 52 cm wide will set you back a princely £480. I think it would look perfect in the downstairs loo, don’t you?

Summary

Obviously the curators, most of the reviewers and Lucas herself go along with the feminist view that her art ‘subverts’ this or that gender stereotype or sexist convention. Here are the curators’ own words:

  • Her everyday language (which forms the narrative of this exhibition) is humorous and accessible, but inflected with a feminist edge as it subverts patriarchal traditions of writing about art.
  • For many feminist artists, textiles have been a shorthand for ideas and experiences imposed on women, as well as an opportunity to subvert them.
  • Using ordinary objects in unexpected ways, she has consistently challenged our understanding of sex, class and gender over the last four decades.
  • Lucas creates a unique visual language which she uses to challenge stereotypical notions of identity and gender.
  • Breaking boundaries with humour and daring, Lucas shows us the whole spectrum of what it means to be human.

If you think a chair with a dildo on it or sculptures made out of stuffed tights or blown-up tabloid newspapers from 30 years ago are really ‘subverting’ patriarchal power systems, then you’re welcome to your optimistic beliefs.

I take a different view. As with all the YBAs, I’m still as thrilled and excited as I was by their exuberance and energy and irreverence as when I first saw them 25 years ago. They seemed then, and still seem to me today, to be saying ‘fuck off’ to all kinds of polite conventions about what art is, how it should be displayed, and how you can talk about it. It was a punk rebellion against stifling conformity.

What this retrospective tends to show is that, although some of her approaches have hardened into mannerism (I wasn’t that impressed by the car, the concrete sandwich or marrow), there’s still plenty which is irreverent, in-your-face and funny. Her best works consist of jokes which are still very amusing, gags which still make you laugh (well, make me laugh, anyway).

In the world as it is today, I personally think this is more of an enduring achievement, more something to be celebrated, than all the curatorial clichés about ‘subverting the patriarchy’. Laughter is good for everybody’s mental and physical health. This exhibition is a tonic.

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by Simon on November 4, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture
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Posted by Simon on November 4, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/04/happy-gas-sarah-lucas-tate-britain/

An Outline of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud (1940)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Background

Freud was allowed to leave Austria by the newly installed Nazi authorities in early June 1938. The unfinished manuscript of ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ bears the date July 1938, so scholars think that he began to write it either while waiting for permission to leave Austria or soon after his arrival in England. By early September he had written 63 sheets of notepaper but broke off to undergo a serious operation for the spreading cancer of his jaw and he never resumed work on it.

The manuscript was discovered among his papers after his death in September 1939. The editors of the Pelican Freud Library point out that although it might be unfinished, it is not incomplete. The final chapter is shorter than the others but appears to complete the prospectus laid out in the preface.

Almost all Freud’s previous works (for example, the Introductory and New Introductory Lectures) were aimed at the general public. The Outline, the editors explain, is not. It is more like a refresher course for established students of psychoanalysis with the result that the style is clipped and many matters alluded to only briefly, on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with sometimes quite detailed aspects of the theory.

The work is in three parts. Part one describes the structure of the mind, its division into id, ego and superego, and the pressure of the external world. It lays out the nature of the two great categories of primal drive – the sexual urge to procreate (Eros) and the organism’s wish to cease stimuli and excitation (the death drive or Thanatos).

In part two, Freud discusses the technique of psychoanalysis, what its aims are, how it works.

In part three, Freud (briefly) situates psychoanalysis within the broader realms of philosophy and psychology, before recapping the theory.

Preface

The teachings of psychoanalysis are based on an incalculable number of observations and experiences and only someone who has repeated these observations on himself and on others is in a position to arrive at a judgement of his own upon it.

Part 1. The mind and its workings

Chapter 1. The psychical apparatus

The oldest part of the psyche is the id. It contains everything inherited at birth, which means the instincts. The id develops an outer layer to mediate with the external world, the ego. The ego has the task of self-preservation. As regards external events it does this:

  • by storing up stimuli in the memory
  • by avoiding excessively strong stimuli (through flight)
  • dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation)
  • learning to bring about change in the external world to its own advantage (activity)

As regards the internal world the ego performs its task of self-preservation by gaining mastery of the instincts, deciding which ones will gain satisfaction and when, or vetoing them altogether.

It is guided in these decisions by tensions caused by (internal and external) stimuli: raised tension is experienced as unpleasure, lowered tension is experienced as pleasure. The ego strives after pleasure and to avoid displeasure. A foreseeable increase in unpleasure leads to anxiety. From time to time the ego retires from its job of mediation into sleep, which appears to be necessary to rest the body and brain.

The long period of human childhood leaves behind a precipitate of parental strictures, the superego. The ego has to satisfy the demands of 1) the superego, 2) the id and 3) external reality. The superego is formed not only from the strictures of the specific parents but from the family, national and racial demands, as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu; and then, along the way, incorporates material from teachers and other authority figures.

The id is the forces of nature, of heredity; the superego, the broad forces of culture and environment; the ego is formed as a result of the accidental experiences of the individual.

Chapter 2. The theory of the instincts

The general theory of instincts is not well understood. Insofar as instincts replace each other and displace energy onto each other there may be thousands of instincts. To be simple, psychoanalysis discriminates two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct, elsewhere referred to as Thanatos. (Contrasting instincts of self-preservation and preservation of the species, between ego-love and object-love, fall within the realm of Eros).

Eros sets out to bind things together and preserve them; Thanatos seeks to tear things apart and destroy them. Thanatos tends ultimately to an inorganic state, hence it is also known as the Death Drive.

The two instincts can combine or oppose. Thus eating is an act of killing something for our satisfaction; sex incorporates aggression with reproduction. A surplus of the destructive instinct turns the lover into Jack the Ripper; a deficit, into a peeping Tom.

The two instincts exist alongside each other in the childish ego-id. The death instinct is easily detected when directed outwards in aggression; when the superego is constructed, the death instinct is attached to it and can operate self-destructively against the organism itself. Holding back aggressiveness can be just as detrimental as restraining sexual desire.

The libido is detectable in the primary infant state of pure narcissism when the ego takes itself as object. As the child develops it projects libido onto external objects. Throughout life the ego remains the reservoir of the libido from which libido is sent out to cathect (or charge) objects and to which it returns. Only when the subject is completely in love is the majority of the libido cathected onto the object which takes the place of the ego.

The nature of the libido has been deduced from its behaviour in the form of the sex instinct. This aspect of the libido develops out of the contributions of a succession of component instincts which are variously attached to different erotogenic zones.

Chapter 3. The development of the sexual function

The traditional view has it that human sexual life consists in bringing your genitals into contact with the genitals of someone of the opposite sex, with accompanying phenomena such as like kissing and touching. This activity is supposed to start at puberty. How does the traditional view then deal with the fact that:

a) some people are attracted to people of their own sex with similar genitals?
b) some people seek sexual satisfaction but ignore the genitals or other people altogether (called ‘perverts’)?
c) some children take an early interest in their own genitals (called ‘degenerate’)?

In contrast to the evident failure of the traditional theory, psychoanalysis has discovered that:

a) sexual life doesn’t begin at puberty but soon after birth
b) it is necessary to distinguish between sexuality and genitality, the former vastly outcompassing the latter
c) sexual pleasure can be obtained from many zones of the body and that these often only imperfectly overlap with the organs of reproduction

Childhood sexuality develops to a peak in the fifth year and thereafter falls into a lull during which much is forgotten: the latency period.

The onset of sexuality in man is therefore diphasic, first occurring in infancy, falling into latency, and re-efflorescing in puberty. The latency period seems to play a vital role in the process of acculturation unique to man, the passing on of traditional wisdom and knowledge to the next generation.

The first stage of childish development is the oral phase of suckling; the continuation of sucking after the baby is fed is evidence of the separation of pleasure-seeking and physiological need. This – the separation of strict physical need from the enjoyment of physical pleasure – is the justification for describing the baby as ‘sexual’.

Elements of sadism are present in the baby biting the nipple. This sadism is expanded in the next stage, the anal-sadistic phase, where biting and defecation become sources of pleasure.

Finally comes the phallic period when the child detaches sexual pleasure from bodily functions altogether and associates it with playing with its penis or clitoris. The little boy playing with his penis obscurely associates this pleasure with his mother; he wants to be the sole object of its mother’s attention and to do away with the father who keeps taking her away. This is the Oedipus Complex. The little girl, as and when she comes to see or hear about a boy’s genitalia, perceives the absence of a penis as a loss and conceives penis envy. The childish turning away from sexuality which this produces in women often lasts a lifetime.

These developmental phases do not develop in a simple pattern but overlap, often becoming fixated at particular levels. With the onset of puberty these earlier patterns return to influence sexual behaviour. Some early pleasures become focussed on traditional genital activity; some remain in residue as types of foreplay; some become the object of perverted sexual practice; some are repressed, or employed by the ego in forming character traits, and the energy of still others are sublimated into higher and socially acceptable cultural activity.

These discoveries mean that:

a) the phenomenology of the subject has to be examined from a dynamic or economic point of view
b) the aetiology of later mental illness is to be found in the patient’s early life

Chapter 4. Psychical qualities

What is the psyche? Behaviourism says there isn’t one, that we observe and quantify each other like machines.

Traditional psychology says there is a psyche and that it is synonymous with consciousness. Consciousness is hard to define but we all know what we mean by it. A psychology which confines itself to consciousness studies the difference between perceptions, feelings, thought-processes and wishes. But it is clear to self-reflection that these processes are not as continual, as transparent or sequential as earlier philosophers, for example John Locke, thought.

What are we to make of the gaps, the blanks, the dysjunctions in attempts to describe our mental life which trouble the ‘continuous consciousness’ model of the old view?

Psychoanalysis shifts the whole playing field by saying that the overwhelming bulk of psychic life is unconscious. It cannot be known (as the workings of chemistry or physics in the brain cannot be experienced) but its activity can be deduced and general laws governing its behaviour worked out by observation.

Some things out of consciousness become conscious easily; they originate in the pre-conscious, a kind of ante-chamber to consciousness and can be readily accessed. But the lion’s share of mental activity is unconscious and therefore can only ever be inferred or deduced from other evidence

Preconscious material makes its way into our conscious mind with little effort, but unconscious material can only be reclaimed for consciousness by a great effort. One is aware of resistance to its extraction. Sometimes unconscious material forces its way into consciousness and dominates it – as in psychotic illness. Sometimes preconscious material can be subject to repression and become inaccessible – as when we lose our memory.

Animals may well function with just an ego-unconscious. In men this happy state is complicated by the existence of speech which links perceptions to mnemic images and residues of perception, or memory. We don’t operate in a permanent present; we accumulate a huge weight of experiences.

In human beings, since the invention of language, internal events, thanks to being verbalised, can acquire a kind of reality which rivals outer perceptions. To test which is coming from where the ego develops methods for reality-testing. Errors which easily arise due to the new situation – where we mistake internal psychic experiences for ‘reality’ – are called hallucinations or dreams.

The inside of the ego is largely preconscious, with a thin layer of consciousness monitoring outside perceptions and an inner stream of consciousness. The id is entirely unconscious. What the nature of the physical processes are which make the biochemical changes which the mind is capable of perceiving remain a mystery.

Chapter 5. Dream interpretation as an illustration

A model mind is one in which the frontiers of the ego are safeguarded from the encroachments of the id by effective repression, and in which the superego and the ego work together as one. To find out how these forces work together we should see them malfunctioning and an easy way to begin is with dreams.

Everyone dreams. In dreams our experiences are hallucinatory, surreal, bizarre, nonsensical – everything we believe the unconscious to be. Dream interpretation distinguishes between the manifest content, what we remember of the dream upon waking, and the latent content, the real message of the dreams.

In a dram unconscious material has forced its way past the slumbering defences of repression into the preconscious; here it is scrambled by the Censor in such a way as not to disturb the sleep which the human organism requires. In other words, dreams enable refreshing sleep to occur because, although we are more vulnerable to raids from the unconscious, the censor steps in to distort the latent content of the impulse.

Dreams can originate from either suppressed wishes deep in the unconscious or from preconscious traces of the day’s activities to which deeper unconscious urges attach themselves.

Evidence that dreams are indeed the irruption of the repressed are:

a) dreams contain a high degree of material forgotten or inaccessible to waking consciousness
b) dreams partake of linguistic symbols derived from earlier stages in the subject’s development
c) dreams often repeat scenes from childhood which are repressed in waking life
d) dreams incorporate memories not accessible to the individual, possibly memories from the origins of the race

But Freud has called dream interpretation ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ because dreams make accessible to us the bizarre laws to which unconscious life is subject. These include processes of distortion called condensation and displacement.

The deduction from dreams is that the unconscious is desirous of expending its energy regardless of object. The dream is the guardian of sleep because it fulfils this rude instinct, this pressing unconscious wish, in the shape of a fantasy.

Anxiety dreams, which seem to disprove the thesis that dreams are fulfilments of wishes, happen when the instinct overpowers the Censor and is threatening to storm the ego in the full ugliness of its naked lust. The only option open to the ego is to wake up, switch defences up to full, and stuff the repressed material back into oblivion – but at the cost of an all too palpable effort (sweats, adrenalin, anxiety etc).

Part 2. The practical task

Chapter 6. The technique of psychoanalysis

A dream, then, is a psychosis which remains under our control. By contrast other mental illnesses are less controllable. They may come about when the urgings of the id unbalance the ego, or when the superego makes impossible demands, or when both gang up on the poor ego.

In analysis the analyst comes to the ego’s aid with a promise to reinforce his mechanism of defence in return for the subject giving us the complete honesty and candour we need to examine the unconscious. [N.B. it is this bolstering of defences which was pursued in the work of ego psychology developed by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud].

Psychotics who have completely abandoned contact with reality are beyond the terms of this pact and cannot be treated by psychoanalysis. But there is another class of psychiatric patient who still has enough contact with reality to undertake the pact required to carry out therapy – ‘the vast number of people suffering severely from neuroses.’

The therapeutic pact If the neurotic gives us his full story in full candour we will help rebuild his ego. Sounds like the role of the master-confessor from the olden days of religion? Yes, except for the all-important distinction that a psychoanalyst can learn from the patient what he does not know himself, which Christian confession can never do.

In order to do this the psychoanalyst must extract everything whatever that comes to the patient’s mind, no matter how trivial. It is from this material that the analyst deduces the unconscious urges which are dominating the patient.

But the analyst will meet resistance. And after resistance, transference. The patient will begin to project onto the analyst all the feelings evoked by their memories of childhood, for example, the ambivalent love-hate feelings which every child projects onto its first authority figure, the Father.

Transference has the advantage that the analyst can then act with the authority of the father and the patient may make great efforts to please Daddy. Plus, the analyst has the advantage of seeing a key period from the patient’s life acted out in front of them rather than inconclusively reported by a confused patient.

Unfortunately, transference has a negative side as the repressed anger and defiance of the patient, also, can be projected onto the analyst. Worse, the repressed erotic wish for the parent of the opposite sex can emerge in the shape of the patient falling in love with the analyst.

If the patient thinks these are real experiences, it’s tricky; the analyst has to disabuse them and make them see that these are just repetitions of childhood feelings. Once transference is acknowledged, the patient can begin the process of rebuilding, of broadening the area of control of, the ego.

The second part of the cure is the overcoming of resistances. The ego, threatened from within and without, expends a lot of energy clinging to certain anti-cathexes, resistances to repressed material. It is the job of analysis to embolden the ego, to give it the power to regain mastery over its whole domain and not to feel threatened and embattled (anxious, hysterical, neurotic or obsessive).

As resistances to the expression of forbidden material are overcome, welcome mental energy is liberated for the ego to redeploy across its kingdom. When the analysis has progressed this far, two factors now become evident. The first is Guilt, which is the shape taken by resistance in the superego, which expends energy punishing the ego. The superego insists that:

The patient must not become well but must remain ill because they deserve no better.

The analyst has to make the unreasonableness of this self-punishment clear to the patient. The second factor is a complete takeover of the ego by the will to destruction, the death wish, which often leads to suicide.

Chapter 7. An example of psychoanalytic work

One fundamental discovery of psychoanalysis has been that neurotics have the same pathology as normal people, they have the same innate disposition as normal people, the same experiences, the same problems to solve. They are simply people who find this framework of requirements too much, resulting in misery, anxiety, symptoms.

On closer investigation, it appears that almost all these neuroses have their origin in childhood. Hardly surprising when you consider the primal power of the id and the vulnerability of the still-developing ego, feeble, immature and incapable of resistance.

The ego copes with excess stimuli from the external world with flight; with excess stimuli from the internal world with repression, attempts at mental flight, denial and rejection. It later turns out that these have been paid for at the cost of full development, and that the libidinal energy devoted to holding these instincts back, permanently cripples and disables the ego; stunts its proper development.

Why has evolution permitted such an apparently costly mechanism to afflict the young animal? Because it’s a small price to pay compared to the epic task which the ego has to achieve in its first five years:

In the space of a few years the little primitive creature must turn into a civilized human being; he must pass through an immensely long stretch of human cultural development in an almost uncannily abbreviated form. This is made possible by hereditary disposition; but it can never be achieved without the additional help of upbringing, of parental influence which, as a precursor to the superego, restricts the ego’s activities by prohibitions and punishments and encourages the setting-up of repressions.

Thus, the influence of civilisation is among the determinants of neurosis. It is easy for a barbarian to be happy – he gives way to all his basest desires, represses nothing and so has no neuroses. For a civilised man it is a long strenuous journey, with many pitfalls.

The central role of sexuality in this developmental journey has been proved by psychoanalysis time after time:

The symptoms of neuroses are either a substitutive satisfaction of some sexual urge or measures to prevent such a satisfaction; usually some kind of compromise between the two.

Why should this be so surprising? The one essential role of every organism is to reproduce; preparation for reproduction is crucial; and yet in the rise of civilisation no instinct is more thoroughly repressed than sexuality. Given such strong opposing forces why be surprised that so many people fall victim in one way or another to illness caused by the repression of their innermost desires?

Central to the child’s experience is the Oedipus Complex. Freud approaches it via a developmental history of the child.

The child’s first erotic experience is sucking at the breast, the primary model of gratification (‘Love and hunger meet at a woman’s breast’, The Interpretation of Dreams, page 295). Initially breast and baby are one polymorphously perverse substance.

Soon the breast is differentiated and becomes cathected (i.e. charged) with conflicting feelings of love and hate (tiny aggression is shown by biting the nipple) in the oral phase. Soon the breast forms itself into the whole of the mother who pampers and plays with the child, prompting a galaxy of feelings, gratifications and frustrations, pleasures and rages.

Thus the mother is the first seducer, the prototype of all later love-relations.

At three and four, in the phallic stage, the baby boy is aware of the pleasure given by playing with his penis and shows it off proudly to his mother. He associates this pleasure with her and wants to possess her, according to the prompting of obscure feelings. If the child shares the Mother’s bed and then Daddy comes home and he is returned to his cot, the feelings of little Oedipus can be imagined. Rage and hatred and lust and desire seethe in the toddler mind. Eventually the mother or father tell little Johnny to stop playing with himself or being so stubborn or bad tempered and all these injunctions are accompanied by the explicit or implicit threat to deprive the boy of the source of his greatest pride and pleasure, his penis.

This is the castration complex and is the most terrifying experience of a small boy’s life. It echoes down the ages in the Greek myths where successive gods castrate their father, and in the age-old practice of circumcision by which pubescent boys submit to authority, in both Judaism and Islam.

In response to this terrifying fear the child suppresses its masturbatory activities and sublimates them into fantasies. It fosters resentment, defiance and fear of the father and practices a total renunciation of the mother or slavish identification with her, in order to be spared by the Father.

It is precisely because this ‘nuclear complex’ paves the way for so many strategies of defence that psychoanalysis calls it the founding moment in the development of human character. All these seething feelings are repressed in childhood, go underground during the latent phase. But then they return in new guises at puberty that explosive period of sexual and egoistic efflorescence, with the arrival of full-blown sexual awareness. The revival of repressed material with the onset of puberty plays a large role in determining character.

On this model girls are born inferior. Their lack of a penis leads to penis envy. Their attempts at masturbation are failures, hence a general turning away from sexual life in girls and women.

They may try to introject the masculinity they lack and become lesbians. They may turn to hatred of the mother who brought them into the world without a penis and so turn their love toward the father. In this narrative the girl’s attempt to be like their father and to incorporate his penis-authority is finally sublimated into the wish to take the mother’s place, to bear Daddy a baby. Once formulated, this wish may, like the boy’s forbidden fantasies, be repressed into the unconscious but, with the onset of puberty, the wish is revived but directed outwards, so that the young woman goes off to attach herself to the first suitable male who reminds her of Daddy.

Part 3. The theoretical yield

Chapter 8. The psychical apparatus and the external world

Ultimate reality is itself unknowable. All we can know is reality as mediated by our sense perceptions and ‘known’ as it is perceived by our organ of knowledge, the mind.

Thus, in describing the workings of the mind most psychology, and most ordinary people, have to work with concepts which are largely metaphorical, concepts like height, depth, width or more advanced concepts like time, like cause and effect, which have no physical, tangible ‘reality’. We have imposed them on ‘reality’ because they provide us with a working model, a way of getting on with the real world.

Psychoanalysis is no different. It invokes metaphorical concepts like the unconscious, the repressed, the libido and so on. We can never know exactly what these things ‘are’. Possibly, we will one day be able to correlate them to specific physical, biochemical changes in the brain. In the meantime we use them because they provide a workable explanation of the many other phenomena we observe in the mind.

To recapitulate: the id is the realm of unconscious drives; it is ruled by two broad instincts 1) the desire to fulfil every instinctual wish 2) the equal and opposite drive to reduce tension. Ultimately, the second wish is pushing for the cessation of all tension and stimuli (‘Nirvana’). The two broad streams of instincts are assigned to two broad categories: the desire for pleasure, of which sexual pleasure is a subset, fall under the heading of Eros; and the wishes for all stimuli to cease fall under the death instinct.

Mediating between the id and external reality is the ego. The ego attempts to control the instincts of the id such that they can be fulfilled at the most propitious moments in the external world. Sometimes desires which threaten the ego’s function have to be entirely repressed and the ego has to expend energy doing this. The id is driven exclusively by desire for pleasure, the Pleasure Principle, while the ego is driven by a desire for safety, the Reality Principle.

Most of the ego is preconscious. Occasional strands of association, images and verbal residues, drift across the part of the psyche which is capable of self-reflection, often puzzling or even bewildering us.

The ego develops and separates itself off from the primal id at a price. Its autonomy is always contingent and subject to disruptive incursions from ‘below’, from the unconscious, and to a constant stream of punitive demands from ‘above’, from the superego. And the ego is constantly under attack from the terrifying forces of external reality.

No wonder the ego often cracks under the strain and has a ‘breakdown’. It is at this stage that psychoanalysis sets out to trace the fissures, the cracks of the breakdown, back to their earliest origins in childhood. And, once the repressed material has been dragged into the light of consciousness, the patient can acknowledge the long buried childhood experiences which are at the root of the problem and begin rebuilding new, better ego defences with which to face the world.

Chapter 9. The external world

Guilt is the punitive action of the superego upon the ego. The superego is the concentrate of injunctions laid upon us by our first objects, the parents. Thus the psyche has three parts:

  1. the deep inner world – the id
  2. a special part of the outside world introjected or brought inside – the superego
  3. a bit that mediates between outer and inner – the ego

The superego is the heir to the Oedipus Complex. Its intensity has nothing to do with the actual strictness of the real-life parents, but is a function of the intensity of the Oedipal feelings which the child had to repress.

It is a dim perception of this sense of a planting-from-outside which has led theologians to account for conscience as being implanted in us by a higher cause, God.

The superego is initially based on the residue of the Oedipus Complex, but attracts to itself all the teachings of the parents, of teachers and authority figures, general social morality and the accumulated wisdom of the past…

[Here the manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence. The editors of the Pelican edition end the text with ellipses…Quite poignant.]

Comment

This is Freud’s most concentrated theoretical exposition of psychoanalysis, rich in new insights and cross-connections and very persuasive, especially where he gives a bit of wider context, mentioning (albeit briefly) psychoanalysis’s position vis-a-vis philosophy and other psychological theories i.e. it goes deeper than both, far, far deeper.

The passage describing the actual process of psychotherapy is the clearest, most persuasive summary of how the analytic therapy works which I have read.

Possibly it is so effective because he largely eschews the florid metaphors he is so prone to in the rest of his work (analysis as archaeology etc) and also because he doesn’t waste time going off on one of his rants against religion or into a long digression on a literary text (Gradiva, Hamlet etc).

Instead, he bases the theory on the basis of a materialist, biological interpretation of the human organism and human mind,  stopping to consider what the evolutionary reason or advantage for this or that mental strategy might be – and this gives it more scientific weight and authority than almost anything else I’ve read by him.

If you were going to read one work by Freud, maybe this is the one; it’s barely 70 pages long in the Pelican Freud Library paperback.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1986.

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Three Essays on Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Introduction and overview

Freud’s aim was to show the ubiquity and the strangeness of sex and use the sex instinct, massively expanded and redefined, as the basis of an entire new theory of human psychology.

According to historian of psychoanalysis Frank Sulloway, Freud found the sex instinct most suitable as the central vehicle or basis for the new and emphatically physiological type of psychology he wanted to devise, because it is a) so strong and b) so flexible.

In these three ground-breaking essays on sexuality, Freud set out to widen the concepts of sexuality, the sex instinct, libido, so as to encompass a much broader sphere of activity than ever previously imagined in order to make them underpin almost every aspect of human nature.

In Freud’s psychology people’s characters are like complicated family trees, all descended from the same one huge fountain of libido which is channelled and rechannelled into ever-smaller rivers and streams.

It is these rechannellings, the repressions and redirections and reaction-formations and sublimations and so on which come to make up your character – a collection of habits based on infantile pleasures, of disgust or shame (reaction-formations) or heroic ambition (sublimation) or guilts and anxieties (the neuroses).

Thus the Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality (1905) is Freud’s second most important book after The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Essay 1 begins with a detailed look at the state of Victorian knowledge about homosexuality and perversions, because they reveal:

  1. the infinite malleability of the sex instinct
  2. how easily the sex instinct can be rerouted away from its ‘proper’ channel of ‘normal’ sexuality
  3. how even ‘normal’ sexuality is in fact built up of a network of pretty weird behaviour (Freud’s most striking example is kissing, which doesn’t make any sense the more you look at it)

In Essay 2 Freud shows that sexuality is not only present but vitally important in the life of infants and children. This idea was the biggest single cause of opposition to Freud’s theories in his lifetime, from Church and State, from commentators and populist politicians, and from decent people everywhere. It still is.

Freud is not very much interested in ‘love’. Love is the psychological effect of the ‘overvaluation of the sexual object common to almost all manifestations of the libido’:

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

For Freud sex and love are interchangeable terms. He contrasts the overvaluation of the love-object found in the Western tradition with the more relaxed approach of the ancient world:

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The Greeks held Bacchic orgies and had a god, Priapus, dedicated to the male organ; by contrast we in our time appear to fear the penis more than ever and instead reverence the idealised object of libido, the dream partner of the opposite sex (or the same sex), and the institution of Marriage.

And despite all the rhetoric from feminists and LGBTQ+ activists about interrogating and subverting this, that or the other stereotype and convention, we still appear to be in thrall to the narrow concept of finding ‘love’ in a faithful, monogamous, committed relationship, every bit as much as our Victorian forebears – very narrow and limited compared to the polymorphous, open and pluralistic attitudes of the 30 or so ancient Roman authors I read last year.

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY (1905)

This long work sets out to show the importance of sexuality in all human achievements, to establish a wider-than-usual definition of sexuality, and to prove the existence of infantile sexuality.

Freud’s recurring tactic is to make the ordinary, the everyday, look strange; to look again without conventional blinkers at things we think we know, and to show that our attitudes are complacent, superficial and contradictory.

1. The sexual aberrations

Popular opinion credits two universal instincts, Hunger and Sexuality. Sex is supposed to set in at the time of puberty and manifest itself in irresistible attractions between adults of the opposite sex with the ultimate end of genital sex, itself with the purpose of reproduction (as taught in Christianity and most of the other world religions).

Let us call the desired one the sexual object, the act towards which the instinct tends, the sexual aim.

(1) Deviations in respect of the sexual object

If popular opinion is true and God made sex solely for reproduction, how do we account for homosexuals?

(A) Inversion

Behaviour of ‘inverts’. For a start there are different types:

  • a) absolute inverts, totally repelled by the opposite sex
  • b) amphigenic inverts i.e. bisexuals
  • c) contingent inverts, depending on circumstances

Some inverts accept their condition as natural; others feel it a torment. Some were gay as far back as they remember; for others, homosexuality cropped up at puberty; others only ‘come out’ as adults, sometimes after they’ve followed a straight career with wife and kids.

Nature of Inversion

The first observers thought inversion the result of nervous degeneracy because it was first found among mental patients studied in asylums.

Degeneracy

But then it was late-Victorian fashion to blame anything you didn’t understand on ‘degeneracy’: criminals are degenerate, the working class is degenerate, Africans are degenerate etc.

Freud defines degeneracy in rigorous Darwinian terms as the actual impairment of an organism’s efficiency and survival probability. In these, practical, terms inversion is not degenerate. Not only is it found in people otherwise perfectly normal, but it is found in people ‘who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture.’

Innate character

Some gays insist homosexuality is absolutely innate. But the existence of the late-developers or of contingent homosexuals argues against this. Far from being innate, much evidence suggests that homosexuality is acquired:

  • the case of many ‘inverts’ in whom an early impression left a permanent gay after-effect
  • later influences and life experiences which have fixed contingent gayness e.g. the army, prison, monastery etc

Almost all ‘inverts’ will be found to have been subjected to some experience like this (for example, public school). But on the other hand, so were many people who went on to be perfectly hetero. So it remains hard to say whether homosexuality is acquired or innate.

Bisexuality

Havelock Ellis says a clue might be that homosexuality is a form of psychical hermaphroditism, a mental equivalent of having the organs of both sexes.

Richard von Kraft-Ebing says that the brain contains female and male brain centres which are activated by a ‘sex gland’. (It wasn’t only Freud who was having batty, speculative ideas at this time.)

Whoever is right, it seems that most authorities accept the idea of an innate bisexuality in everyone, and that ‘inversion’ owes something to early disruption of development.

Later, Freud would write:

It is well known that at all times there have been, as there still are, human beings who can take as their sexual objects persons of either sex without the one trend interfering with the other. We call these people bisexual and accept the fact of their existence without wondering much at it … But we [psychoanalysts] have come to know that all human beings are bisexual in this sense and their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form.

Sexual object of inverts

Popular opinion holds that ‘inverts’ simply desire the qualities of the opposite sex. An inverted man is like a woman in desiring the qualities of the opposite sex, of masculinity, in his sex object.

But what about gays who love pretty boys, boys who demonstrate all the qualities of a girl, being beautiful, hairless, young and coquettish?

What about transvestites who do a good trade dressing up as women for gay clients? In ancient Greece older men regularly looked after shy, young, girlish boys.

So the sex object is a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one for a woman (in the same way that a symptom is a compromise between a wish and reality).

Psychoanalysis’s explanation is thus: in his childhood the future ‘invert’ passes through a brief but intense attachment to a woman (normally his mother). After leaving this behind he identifies himself with this woman and take himself as his sexual object. Invoking infantile narcissism, ‘inverts’ identify themselves with a woman and set out to find a boy whom they can mother and love as their mother loved them.

The situation will be exacerbated by the absence of a strong father. Think of Oscar Wilde and his imperious mother; of W.H. Auden’s father away at the Front while his mother dressed him in girl’s clothing; of the plays of Joe Orton.

So, says Freud, being gay is being in endless flight from women.

But, Freud emphasises, this isn’t weird. Psychoanalysis has established that everyone makes homosexual object choices in their unconscious mind; that the freedom to range wide over male or female objects is found in childhood, in primitive societies, in early history and in the ancient world, and is the original basis of sexuality.

It is only as a result of later, Victorian social restrictions that people are forced into one fixed, standardised and regimented mould, heterosexual or homosexual, or their modern equivalent which demands that people be in monogamous committed couple relationships.

In reality a person’s final sexual orientation is not decided until after puberty, and then only as the result of innumerable obscure influences. That there is a multiplicity of determining factors is indicated by the extraordinary range of sexual practices and attitudes to be found in mankind.

Thus psychoanalysis regards so-called ‘normal’ sexuality as achieved only under intense pressure and great restriction of the original wider options for pleasure. In fact it’s so-called ‘normal’ sexuality, the genital attraction between man and woman, which is historically problematic and just as much in need of explanation as any other form.

Sexual aim of ‘inverts’

No one single aim can be laid down for the sexuality of ‘inverts’, as it can for the ‘normal’ behaviour of straights; there is too great a variety.

Conclusion

We have been in the habit of regarding the link between the sexual aim and the sexual object as more solid than it is. In fact the object appears to be no more than soldered onto the instinct, and which aim takes which object is a great deal more problematical than previously thought, because the sexual instinct is more free-flowing and independent than we previously suspected.

(B) Sexually immature person and animals as sexual objects

Light is thrown on the sexual instinct by the fact that it permits of so much variation in its objects and such a cheapening of them.

That children can be the objects of sex, or even animals, tells us about the vicissitudes of the sex instinct (along with rapes, sexual assaults and perverse murders). It seems as if the sex instinct will do almost anything to achieve satisfaction.

The impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher activities of the mind… In the process of human cultural development, sexuality is the weak spot.

(2) Deviations in respect of the sexual aim i.e. perversions

Popular opinion says the sexual aim is the union of the genitals in copulation which leads to the release of sexual tension. But a moment’s reflection tells you that, even in ‘normal’ sexuality, people kiss – bringing together two parts of the digestive system – for pleasure. And most people linger to some extent over intermediate stages, such as looking and touching. So the seeds of ‘perversity’ are all around us.

Perversions are sexual activities which either:

  • extend in an anatomical sense beyond the parts of the body designed for sexual union
  • linger or halt at the intermediate stages on the path to sexual union

(A) Anatomical extensions

Overvaluation of the sexual object

The first and prime perversion of sex from its object is the overvaluation of the object i.e. ‘love’. For all practical purposes ‘love’, for Freud, is this (potentially pathological) overvaluation of the love object.

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated with (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

This sexual overvaluation is something that cannot easily be reconciled with [society’s] restriction of the sexual aim to union of the actual genitals and it helps to turn activities connected with other parts of the body into sexual aims.

Once a sexual object has been chosen, the ordinarily effective higher activities of the mind – judgment and civilised restraint – all too often go out of the window. In most people this results in crushes, infatuations, sometimes in grands amours: once the libido sees an opening, it tends to pour forth like a flood.

How the subject (carried away by powerful libido) and the (perhaps reluctant) object cope with the situation is the theme of most of Western literature from Hero and Leander to Madame Bovary.

(I can see an evolutionary explanation for all this which Freud doesn’t mention, which is that: having made a sexual choice, overvaluation follows from a) opening the floodgates of an instinct otherwise fiercely repressed b) to ensure a strong libidinal attachment to the woman who you’re planning to impregnate – so it is a blind Darwinian instinct designed to make the impregnator bond with their mate  and remain to look after their offspring; but, as all of human history tells us, this often clashes with the other biological imperative affecting men which is impregnating as many women as possible, hence the many men who eat, shoot and leave.)

Sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth

Freud proceeds with his agenda of making everything about sex and love look strange and uncanny.

The use of the mouth as a sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together.

Why do people find kissing acceptable and cunnilingus or fellatio disgusting? Freud here points to the purely conventional, culturally-determined nature of our feelings.

Has ‘disgust’ (a powerful reaction-formation) played a large part in forming our cultural conventions – or is it simply a product of the increasing self-repression which characterises us in the West (unlike other contemporary civilisations, primitive cultures and the cultures of the ancient world, which were and are much more liberal in their sexual practices)?

Freud seems to think the ancients were more honest in this, as in so much else.

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The progress of civilisation seems to require a steadily increasing restriction of the sexual instinct, bought at the price of a growing sense of disgust. Hence the genitals of men and women, worshipped by the Greeks as holy, are now banned as dangerously corrupting.

There is no doubt that the genitals of the opposite sex can in themselves be an object of disgust and that such an attitude is one of the characteristics of all hysterics.

One thinks of John Ruskin (allegedly) driven into paroxysms by the discovery on his wedding night that, unlike the Greek statues which he adored, his wife had pubic hair. Or, more up to date:

Indecent exposure, sometimes known as ‘flashing’, is a serious sexual criminal offence, which carries a custodial sentence of up to 2-years at its most severe. (Old Bailey solicitors)

Does ‘disgust’ drive the repression of sexuality i.e. is disgust natural, a ‘God-given’ reaction of the ‘God-given’ conscience to the spectacle of fallen sexuality? A question related to: is conscience ‘God-given’ and so universal? Or is ‘conscience’ created by culture and therefore morally relative across different cultures? Morality and disgust on the one side, pragmatism and sexual libertarianism on the other.

Or is disgust an entirely material, biological reaction-formation to the compulsory repression of sexuality enforced by a coercive society, no God or morality required?

Sexual use of the anal orifice

People who think sodomy is disgusting because we defecate through the anus are as correct as women who say the penis is disgusting because men urinate through it or men who think the vulva is disgusting because women menstruate through it.

Which is to say, all these opinions are correct in their own terms, but missing the point. These organs can (clearly) be put to various uses. Should they be? Or should they be restricted to their ‘God-given’ purposes? But then who is to say what their correct usage is? A bunch of old men wearing purple dresses in the House of Lords? Imams and rabbis? Agony aunts? TV shows. Gender studies lecturers? Where is the authority for this?

Significance of other regions of the body

What seems to be common to all human sexuality is:

  1. overvaluation of the sexual object
  2. a versatile ability on the part of the sexual aim to use any part of the body as the sexual object for gratification

Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object: fetishism

In fetishism the sexual instinct replaces the primary object (the genitals) and the overvalued secondary object (the person attached to the genitals) with unlikely tertiary objects – parts of the body, locks of hair, feet – or linked objects, such as underwear or other items of clothing.

A certain amount of fetishism is habitually present in normal love, especially of those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented.

A lock of your true love’s hair. Or as Goethe put it in Faust:

‘Get me a kerchief from her breast,
A garter that her knee has pressed.’

These objects can justifiably be likened to the fetishes of primitive peoples. Inscribed in fetishes is a primitive symbology, comparable with the symbolism of dreams. For example, the foot is an age-old symbol for the penis. Fur is linked to the hair of the mons Veneris. The shoe or slipper is a symbol of the female genitals (as in Cinderella) into which the male foot neatly slips, and so on.

(B) Fixations of preliminary sexual aims

Appearance of new aims

External factors (danger, unavailability of a sexual object, risk of disease) tend to fix libido at the preparatory activities. Truly, every normal aspect of ‘love’ carries the seeds of a perversion.

Touching and looking

Seeing is an evolutionary derivative of touching. A look can be as exciting as a touch.

Both seeing and touching are ‘ordinary’ parts of ‘normal’ sexual activity – unless lingered over, or unless they become ends in themselves, in which case we have voyeurism/exhibitionism and various types of masturbation.

Freud thought exhibitionism the result of either wishing for a reciprocal showing of the other person’s genitals; or a triumphant assertion against the Castration Complex: ‘Look, I’ve still got my willy!’

He doesn’t seem to take into account the sadistic urge to offend or scare women, a kind of sublimated form of rape, visual rather than physical rape.

The power of vision is shown by just how upset some women can feel, how physically defiled, just because a strange man showed them his penis. I’m not downplaying the offence or upset caused.

The concealment and revelation of the sexual parts of the body go hand in hand with the rise of civilisation and progressive sexual repression. It is unlikely that the Greeks had strip clubs; instead they had orgies, the real thing. We have strip clubs because of the immense repression to which our sexuality has been subjected.

For Freud the concept of ‘beauty’ itself originates in sexual excitement but is sublimated away from the genitals onto the body as a whole, which is perceived as ‘beautiful’, a concept or feeling which can then  be transferred onto other types of object, and then onto objects created and enjoyed for their ‘beauty’ alone i.e. works of art.

This explains why women are more often the object of art than men – even in women painter’s paintings – because men are more sexually predatory than women. And why the sight of the genitals themselves is rarely ‘beautiful’; all pleasure has been sublimated out of them leaving only the reaction-formation of ‘disgust’.

Sadism and masochism

These were given their names by Richard von Kraft-Ebing (Viennese) in the 1890s, after the Marquis de Sade (French) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Viennese) As with the other perversions, a moderate amount of sado-masochism is generally regarded as ‘normal’:

The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness – a desire to subjugate. The biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position.

Many types of sexual relationship which are regarded as ‘normal’ contain a high amount of aggression; sadism becomes an actual perversion when pleasure is derived from violence alone.

Masochism is sexual excitement aroused purely by receiving pain or humiliation. Later in his career, after he’d outlined the new theory of the superego, Freud distinguished between purely physical masochism and moral masochism, the desire to be found guilty of sins, to be punished for them and so on, an internal submission of the ego to the overbearing superego which plays such a large part in religious life.

Freud thinks masochism is secondary, a deflection of primary sadism – which the subject is too weak to inflict onto others – back onto the self. Masochism is for weaklings; or for the weakling part of even strong people.

The history of human civilisation shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct.

But nobody really knows why. Some people think aggression is a development of the primal desire to eat, to master objects by putting them in the mouth – an instinct seen in children and in the holy meals at the centre of many religions. Others think there is some intimate biochemical link between pleasure and pain.

Suggestive for Freud’s bisexual thesis – the mingling of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in all of us – is Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing’s agreement that masochism and sadism are often found in the same person.

(3) The perversions in general

Variation and disease

Medical men first identified perversions in the insane and perversion was blamed (like homosexuality) on ‘degeneracy’. What Freud has shown is that the perversions are implicit in even ‘normal’ love.

No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘perversion’ as a term of reproach. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble problems as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms.

On one side the liberal Freud, on the other a vast army of censorious Christians, trying to draw precisely that line, trying to tell people exactly just which type and forms of ‘love’ are permissible and which aren’t, from the Pope to Mary Whitehouse.

For the Moral Majority it is always other people who are degenerate, other people who are the helpless prey of, for example, homosexual men in the homosexual age of consent debate.

Freud is saying, if you only look at the acts themselves you may be tempted to define them as unchristian or degenerate, pathological or perverted etc. But if you look at the instinct which carries so many people to such lengths, it is the same instinct and it is in all of us – it is what our minds are made of.

The mental factor in perversions

Despite the sometimes disgusting ends to which the love instinct is put, all these behaviours are to some extent idealisations of the libido, in the sense of abstractions of it away from its normal role.

The omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its aberrations as these. The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality.

Two conclusions

Every individual plays a double existential role:

  1. to reproduce, to pass on its genes and preserve the species
  2. to preserve itself while it does this

Sometimes the two purposes clash and this is the basis of Freud’s psychology, the clash between the unconscious libidinal drive to have sex, all the time, with everyone and everything; and the rational ego’s struggle to redirect this blind drive into socially acceptable forms which help the individual survive and help it be at peace with itself. So the origins of any person’s sexuality must be looked for in two places: in the history of the species and the accidents of the individual.

Our study of the perversions has shown us that the sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the limits that are regarded as normal; and if they develop within the individual before the sexual instinct has reached its full strength, no doubt they then determine the course of its development.

These forces, which act like dams upon sexual development – disgust, shame and morality – must also be regarded as historical precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human race. We can observe the way in which, in the development of individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as though spontaneously, when upbringing and external influence give the signal.

In the second place we have found that some of the perversions are only made intelligible if we assume the convergence of several motive forces. If such perversions admit of analysis, that is, if they can be taken to pieces, then they must be of a composite nature. This gives us a hint that perhaps the sexual instinct itself is no simple thing but put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions.

(4) The sexual instincts in neurotics

Psychoanalysis

Here Freud reiterates his belief that all the psychoneuroses are based on sexual instinctual forces and that the psychoneuroses can only be investigated using the method perfected by Josef Breuer and himself – psychoanalysis. He gives a useful summary of the famous cathartic method:

By this I do not merely mean that the energy of the sexual instinct makes a contribution to the forces that maintain the pathological manifestations (the symptoms). I mean expressly to assert that that contribution is the most important and only constant source of energy of the neurosis and that in consequence the sexual life of the persons in question is expressed in these symptoms. The symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient!

The removal of the symptoms of hysterical patients by psychoanalysis proceeds on the supposition that those symptoms are substitutes – transcriptions, as it were – for a number of emotionally cathected mental processes, wishes and desires which, by the operation of a special psychical procedure (repression) have been prevented from obtaining discharge in psychical activity that is admissible to consciousness.

These mental processes, being held back in a state of unconsciousness, strive to obtain an expression that shall be appropriate to their emotional importance – to obtain discharge; and in the case of hysteria they find such an expression (by means of the process called conversion) in somatic or bodily phenomena, that is, in hysterical symptoms [cf Anna O’s inability to drink water, choking sensation etc].

By systematically turning those symptoms back (with the help of psychoanalysis) into emotionally cathected ideas – ideas that can now become conscious – it is possible to obtain the most accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of these formerly unconscious psychical structures.

Findings of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has shown that:

Symptoms represent a substitute for impulses the source of whose strength is derived from the sexual instinct… The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression in excess of the normal quantity, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with in the form of shame, disgust and morality), and what seems like an instinctive aversion on their part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.

In the case of someone predisposed to hysteria, the onset of his illness is precipitated when, either as a result of his own progressive maturity or of the external circumstances of his life, he finds himself faced by the demands of a real sexual situations. Between the pressure of the instinct and his antagonism to sexuality, illness offers him a way of escape. It does not solve his conflict but seeks to evade it by transforming his libidinal impulses into symptoms.

(See Jensen’s Gradiva, written two years later, which is a textbook example of hysteria as the self-deluding flight into illness. The archaeologist Norbert’s escape from the reality of an emotionally demanding sexual situation – his awakening love for Zoe – into delusions about the light-tripping woman on the antique frieze whom he names ‘Gradiva’, and then Norbert’s actual fleeing to Italy, to Pompeii, to escape the sexual situation, only to meet Zoe magically transformed into the woman in the frieze –– from the heart of the reaction-formation returns the repressed. In the novel Norbert is then cured through love, by the redirecting of his libido – unhealthily cathected onto the Gradiva-delusion – back to the reality of his flesh-and-blood love, Zoe, by the love object herself.)

Neurosis and perversion

Moreover, neurotics’ symptoms, upon psychoanalysis, often turn out to be conversions not just of ‘normal’ sexuality, but to include what are called the perversions i.e. neurotics’ unconsciousnesses are often raging with perverse wishes deflected into symptoms. Hence Dora’s persistent cough is a (transmuted) wish for oral sex with Herr K.

a) The unconscious life of all neurotics shows inverted impulses, fixation of the libido on persons of their own sex.

b) The unconsciouses of neurotics show tendencies to every kind of anatomical extension of sexual activity, particularly oral and anal.

c) An especially prominent part is played by the fact that the instincts involved are component instincts. Thus the perversions often come in opposing pairs: exhibitionism and voyeurism; the active and passive forms of the instinct for cruelty.

It is through such an opposition, a component tying together of libido and cruelty, that the transformation from love into hate takes place, the transformation from affectionate into hostile impulses.

(You can see here the embryonic shape of Freud’s later division of all the instincts into Sex instincts and Death instincts, Eros and Thanatos which would formulate nearly 20 years late, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.)

(5) Component instincts and erotogenic zones

If we trace back the positive and negative aspects of the perversions (masochism/sadism, voyeurism/exhibitionism) they appear to derive from component instincts which themselves admit of further analysis.

When sexual excitement derives from a particular organ or area of the body we refer to that as the erotogenic zone.

Thus, under the right circumstances, the anus or the mouth can become an erotogenic zone. Or the surface of the skin in touching. Or the eye itself in voyeurism where, through the eye alone is felt excitement comparable to that of sex in a ‘normal’ person.

(6) Reasons for the apparent preponderance of perverse sexuality in the psychoneuroses

But just because neurotic symptoms often contain a perverse wish doesn’t mean that neurotics are closer to perverts than to ‘normal’ people. Neurotics are normal people whose libido, either because of innate predisposition or due to accident, has been dammed up.

Most psychoneurotics fall ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon them by normal sexual life. Or else illnesses of this kind set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty.

Where the constitution is predisposed to illness maybe no external factor will be required. On the other hand, a great shock in real life may tip a robust constitution into neurotic illness.

Might there be a link between the perversions wished for by the neurotic’s unconscious, between the erotogenic zone it highlights, and innate constitution?

In a word, can you define personality types by predisposition to a particular perversion/erotogenic zone? (This is what Freud does in the following essay, about childhood sexuality, defining and describing the oral, anal types and so on.)

(7) Intimations of the infantile character of sexuality

“By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts. It is not only that neurotics in themselves constitute a very numerous class, but it must also be considered that an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations and ‘normality’….

Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the ‘normal’ constitution…

There is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life. What is in question are the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct. In one class of cases (the perversions) these roots may grow into the actual vehicles of sexual activity; in others they may be submitted to an insufficient suppression (repression) and thus be able in a roundabout way to attract a considerable portion of sexual energy to themselves as neurotic symptoms; while in the most favourable cases, which lie between these two extremes, they may by means of effective restriction and other kinds of modification bring about what is known as ‘normal’ sexual life.

Thus the germs of our character, the way our sexual instincts will be channelled, are probably laid down in childhood. In the next essay Freud looks at the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality until its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life.

Essay 2. Infantile sexuality

Neglect of the infantile factor

In Essay 2 Freud sets out to smash the popular opinion that children have no sexual feelings; that sexual feelings only set in with puberty. On the contrary, all the literature, and a chat with any nurse, will tell you that many babies play with their willies or fannies and suck various bits of themselves, but these stories are generally only mentioned as exceptions and monstrosities.

Why do we not remember our sexual feelings from our own childhood years?

Infantile amnesia

We definitely behave lively in every respect during childhood, giving every evidence of feeling joy, love, rage, delight. Why do we forget so much of this? Freud says that under analysis patients often remember events from their earliest years. Therefore the memories are stored somewhere – but are repressed from everyday access. Why? Nobody knows.

(1) The period of sexual latency in childhood and its interruptions

Based on a) scattered reports of the so-called exceptional behaviour of infants in the literature and b) the memories of neurotics revealed by psychoanalysis, Freud will sketch out a theory of infantile sexuality.

Freud thinks of the sex instinct as being innate in the child; that it grows as the child grows; that it is overtaken by suppression at the age of 5 or 6; then it revives and develops further at puberty, developing in a pattern of fits and starts. Childhood sexuality only emerges into the light of observable day in the third or fourth year of life.

Sexual inhibitions

It is during this same period that the mental forces are built up which are later to impede and block the flow of the sexual instinct – feelings of disgust (at an object), feelings of shame (at oneself) and moral and aesthetic ideals (as it were, objective guidelines we build for ourselves).

Reaction formation and sublimation

These are the two methods by which these dams are erected to prevent the return of repressed material into the conscious mind.

Sublimation is a widely reported phenomenon, the diverting of instinctual sexual energies into ‘higher’, more socially acceptable ones.

A reaction formation is:

a defence mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency

Freud thinks that reaction formations are the result of a series of unpleasurable experiences, either of internal unpleasure (excessive playing with the genitals leads to unpleasure) or external tellings-off, which create, as it were, a psychological allergic reaction to the erotogenic zone and experiences in question. Told off for touching his winkle enough times and the small boy genuinely come to believe it is dirty and disgusting.

[A digression on Freud’s final theory of sexual development

A lot later, Freud was to elaborate and fine-tune the notion that the human infants evolve through a set number of stages, namely:

  • polymorphous perversity – undifferentiated pleasure in the whole body
  • oral phase (0 to 1 year) – the infant gets most of their pleasure from their mouth, for example eating and thumb-sucking: if an infant’s oral needs aren’t met it can develop an develop oral fixation which continues into adult life
  • anal phase (1 to 3 years) – controlling bladder and bowel movements, potty training, when successfully accomplished leads to praise from parents and a sense of achievement and independence; but if parents take an approach that is too lenient, Freud suggested that an ‘anal-expulsive personality‘ – could develop whereby the adult has a messy, wasteful, or destructive personality, while if parents are too strict, he believed this could lead to an ‘anal-retentive‘ personality which is over-strict, rigid, and obsessive.
  • phallic stage (3 to 5 years) – focus of the libido is on the genitals and children begin to discover the difference between boys and girls
    • in boys this gives rise to the Oedipus complex as boys view their fathers as a rival for the mother’s affections: the Oedipus complex describes these feelings of wanting to possess the mother and replace the father. But at the same time the little boy worries that his father will punish him for having these feelings, a fear Freud termed castration anxiety
    • other Freudians suggested the term Electra complex to describe a similar but mirror set of feelings experienced by small girls, namely the wish to be possessed by their father and rid of their mother, accompanied by parallel feelings of guilt and anxiety
    • Freud, however, believed that instead of the Electra complex, girls experience what he notoriously called penis envy i.e. the wish to be a boy, the lack of a penis forever leaving girls feeling inadequate. Even in Freud’s own day female psychoanalysts deplored this idea, and female followers have denied it and overwritten it ever since]
  • latency phase (6 to puberty) – the superego or conscience gains in power, the libido and memories of all those early physical pleasures are suppressed; instead boys or girls enter school and become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests; a time of exploration in which the sexual energy repressed or dormant, still present but sublimated into other areas such as intellectual pursuits and social interactions
  • genital stage (11, 12, 13 onwards) – at puberty the libido becomes active again and teens develop a strong sexual interest in the opposite sex: if all the previous stages have been successfully navigated, the person becomes a rounded, balanced individual]

Freud therefore thinks that the development through the oral, anal and phallic stages is partly achieved by the erection of these reaction formations which act as ‘dams’ or road blocks saying ‘No Going Back’.

That this may be the origin of feelings of ‘shame’ and ‘disgust’ is an interesting theory to ponder; that this process is the basis of all civilised morality, as Freud claims, was clearly a provocative thing to say, and which sparked much outraged opposition to him and his theories.

Interruptions of the latency period

Not all children’s sexuality goes underground at about five years old. There may be all sorts of exceptions, single strands of sexual pleasure continuing into the latent period.

(2) The manifestations of infantile sexuality

Thumb-sucking

This emerges early and often persists into adolescence. Sometimes accompanied by the rubbing of an erotogenic zone it can act as an introduction to masturbation. Because it is accompanied by pleasurable rubbing, and sometimes even by orgasm-type physical reactions, Freud makes thumb-sucking the prototype of infantile sexuality.

Auto-erotism (coined by Havelock Ellis in 1898)

Infants initially derive pleasure from their own bodies. Sucking thumbs or lips or any other part of the body is a repetition of the initial oral activity, sucking at the breast.

No-one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as the prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

As the child grows it experiments with enacting the sexual pleasure of sucking when the breast is absent: sucking any part of its own body, taking itself as a source of pleasure. In later life the pleasures of lingering kissing re-enact this primal sexual experience. In some children there is a constitutional intensification of the labial region (lips):

If that significance persists, these same children will grow up to become epicures in kissing, will be inclined to perverse kissing or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking. If, however, repression ensues, they will feel disgust at food and will produce hysterical vomiting.

Thus, for Freud, entire character types and types of adult behaviour can be traced right back to earliest childhood behaviour.

(3) The sexual aim of infantile sexuality

Characteristics of erotogenic zones

Erotogenic zones are a moveable feast. Particular parts of the body seem predisposed to resonate with sexual pleasure (the genitals, lips, nipples, anus, the surface of the skin generally) and if an infant, in its auto-erotic stage, chances on one of these to suck or play with, that part easily becomes the model of sexual pleasure, of reassurance etc in later life.

Any part of the body can acquire the same susceptibility to stimulation as is possessed by the genitals and can become an erotogenic zone.

It is hard to think of a view more contrary to the popular, conventional view that a) infants have no sex life and that b) sex appears only at puberty and is exclusively confined to the genitals.

The infantile sexual aim

Although all the body is susceptible to sexualisation, certain zones seem predisposed to be especially erotogenic, generally zones which are physiologically designed for other activities and pleasures which the child can then repeat by auto-erotic stimulation: the lips for eating, the penis for peeing, the anus for defecating can all be co-opted by the libido.

(4) Masturbatory sexual manifestations

Activity of the anal zone

Psychoanalysis of patients has revealed the surprising extent to which the anus is not only a source of pleasure in infancy but retains its pleasurable power throughout life.

Children who are making use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent muscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stimulation of the mucous membrane. In so doing it must no doubt cause not only painful but highly pleasurable sensations.

One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty its bowels when he is put on the pot and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defecating.

Faeces come to have another important meaning for the child.

They are clearly treated as part of the infant’s own body and represent his first ‘gift’: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment and, by withholding them, his disobedience…

The retention of the faecal mass, which is thus carried out by the child intentionally to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed as a weapon in his relation to the people looking after him, is also one of the roots of the constipation which is so common among neuropaths.

Activity of the genital zone

The glans of the penis in boys and the clitoris in girls:

The anatomical situation of this region, the secretions in which it is bathed, the washing and rubbing to which it is subjected in the course of a child’s toilet, as well as accidental stimulation, make it inevitable that the pleasurable feeling which this part of the body is capable of producing should be noticed by children even during their earliest infancy, and should give rise to a need for its repetition.

Girls often masturbate simply by rubbing their thighs together. Boys tend to use hands.

The preference for the hand which is shown by boys is already evidence of the important contribution which the instinct for mastery is destined to make to masculine sexual activity.

Second phase of infantile masturbation

In this early essay Freud posits three periods of sexual activity: a first phase of infantile sexuality; a second phase flourishing around the fourth year; then the eruptions of puberty.

The second phase of infantile sexual activity may assume a variety of different forms which can only be determined by a precise analysis of individual cases. But all its details leave behind the deepest unconscious impressions in the subject’s memory, determine the development of his later character, if he is to remain healthy, and the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after puberty.

Return of early infantile masturbation

The return of infantile sexuality at around 4 and 5 years is determined by all sorts of factors, internal and external. But Freud is careful to mention the external factor of infantile seduction (or child abuse, as we would say) as a way many of his patients recall being jolted, as it were, into sexual life, and made aware of the erotogenicity of the genitals.

Polymorphously perverse disposition

In and as a result of sexual abuse, children can be induced to all manner of perversions thus revealing, for Freud, an innate disposition to polymorphous perversion.

The same, he asserts, is true of many women, as witness the large number of prostitutes who can accommodate any type of sexual taste for their clients.

It becomes impossible not to recognise that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic.

[At one and the same time this notion is typical of Freud’s throwaway sexism, but also of the immense tolerance and acceptance of a huge variety of sexual predilections implicit in his theory.]

Component instincts

Exhibitionism, voyeurism and cruelty are all apparent as perversions in potentia in children. Small boys proudly display the thing which gives them so much pleasure and which they pee through, their penis, which thus symbolises at least two types of infantile ‘mastery’.

Looking is the child’s earliest way of relating to the world. Once it has established its own erotogenic zones it is curious to see them in others: voyeurism.

Cruelty comes relatively easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at other people’s pain – namely a capacity for pity – is developed relatively late…

It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role…

Children who distinguish themselves by special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity arising from erotogenic zones…

The absence of the barrier of pity brings with it a danger that the connection between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts, thus established in childhood, may prove unbreakable in later life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions show that early beating on the buttocks can easily be linked with erotogenic pleasure and form the basis of a fusion of the instincts of sex and cruelty in later life.

(5) The sexual researches of childhood

The instinct for knowledge

At the same time as children reach an early peak of sexuality (3 to 5 years) they display an instinct for knowledge. For Freud this is a sublimated form of the instincts for mastery and of seeing, voyeurism.

Psychoanalysis has shown that the first problem to awaken the childish thirst for knowledge are sexual problems, where do I come from? why does my wee-wee make give me pleasure?

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Freud gave this typically grandiose title to the core question of infancy: where do babies come from?

Sex differences aren’t important at this stage since boys assume all babies have penises.

Castration complex and penis envy [this section was added in 1915]

Only painfully do boys realise there’s a whole category of person who doesn’t have a penis and become petrified that they too might lose their mighty weapon. This he calls the castration complex.

The discovery that girls don’t have one gives many boys an enduringly low opinion of girls. For girls, the discovery that boys have this toy which they can play with induces in them penis envy and an enduring sense of being second-rate. Penis envy culminates in the girl’s wish to be a boy.

[The whole concept of ‘penis envy’ is probably the single most outrageous example of Freud, despite being a revolutionary on one level, nonetheless often reinscribing the sexist prejudices of his Victorian times in a new language.]

Theories of birth

All children speculate about where babies come from, especially if their mother is pregnant again. The central feature of most theories is that the baby is got by eating something (as in many fairy tales) and delivered through the anus.

Sadistic view of sexual intercourse

Many children see or overhear their parents making love. Children feel intense curiosity about it. It seems to have to do with some joint activity involving peeing or defecating. But many children pick up on the apparent violence involved (hard physical movements, screaming) and this is another way in which cruelty may attach itself to a child’s fantasy world and resurface in a person’s adult attitudes to sex.

Typical failure of infantile sexual researches

No matter how subtle the sexual theories of children they are invariably wrong; for how could they know about semen and ovaries? But the whole attempt is important to Freud as a symbol of the growing independence of the child. These researches:

constitute a first step towards taking an independent attitude in the world, and they imply a high degree of alienation of the child from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence.

(6) The phases of development of the sexual organisation

Infantile sexual pleasure is the opposite in every way of ‘normal’ adult sexuality. It is essentially auto-erotic, and its component instincts are generally disconnected and scattered over all manner of activities: this is the meaning of polymorphous perversity.

Compare and contrast with adult sexuality aims at genital contact with some external object.

Pregenital organisations

I.e. sexual patterns before the instinct settles on the genitals:

1. The oral or cannibalistic phase: the aim is the incorporation of the sexual object, to eat it, to master it by ingesting it and stimulating the mucous membranes of the lips at the same time.

This is the origin of cannibalism in primitive peoples; of the primitive relic of a holy meal found in most religions; and of the higher intellectual activity of identification with a hero figure.

The primitive and intellectual functions are brought together in the Eucharist where we eat the body of Christ at the same time as we acknowledge Him lord and master.

2. The sadistic-anal phase: it is at this early stage that the sex instinct can be seen dividing into the active-passive division which characterises all later sexuality: the masculine drive to mastery, of defecating at our own time and pleasure; and the feminine pleasure derived from the anus; a sadistic and a passive pleasure intermingle.

Ambivalence

This duality is the basis of later ambivalence, a word coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler (Bleuler was a prolific coiner of neologisms; he also invented the terms ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoid’ and ‘autism’).

Ambivalence became central to Freudian theory. It describes the holding of contradictory feelings, classically love and hate, towards the same object. Thus the child can both love but be terrified by their father.

Phallic phase

Freud distinguishes one last phase of infantile sexuality, where a love-object has emerged but the instinct in both boys and girls focuses on the penis alone, when boys develop pride in their penis and girls develop a painful sense of lack of penis, giving rise to penis envy (see comments above).

Diphasic choice of object

To summarise, Freud can claim that, completely contrary to the popular view, the distinctive thing about human sexuality is:

  • that it is present, in various forms, in infants from the earliest time
  • that it develops through a series of stages
  • that each of these stages carries the risk of arrest or error which deforms the child’s feelings and emotions around libido
  • that infantile sexual choices and activity are progressively repressed by reaction-formations (guilt, shame) by the age of about 5
  • that the entire set of experiences goes underground during the latency period (5 or 6 to puberty), is repressed and forgotten
  • that it resurfaces in a more explicitly sexual mode at puberty but with shapes and flavours conditioned by those earliest experiences

These infantile longings become the basis of later ‘affectionate’ feelings:

Their sexual aims have become mitigated and they now represent what may be described as the ‘affectionate current’ of sexual life. Only psychoanalytic investigation can show that behind this affection, admiration and respect there lie concealed the old sexual longings of the infantile component instincts which have now become unserviceable.

(7) The sources of infantile sexuality

These conclusions have been reached by the psychoanalysis of adult patients and the observation of children. Sexual excitation in children seems to arise from:

a) repetition of satisfaction achieved in normal organic processes (sucking, defecating)
b) through external stimulation of erotogenic zones
c) as the expression of fundamental instincts

Mechanical excitations

Children love swinging and being thrown and caught. Psychoanalysis has shown the recurrence of these sensations in adult dreams i.e. that they lay down patterns of the earliest pleasures, for example, fantasies of flying, air blowing against the skin and genitals.

It is well known that rocking is habitually used to induce sleep in restless children. The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or another in his life wanted to be an engine driver.

It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways and, at the age at which the production of fantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement.

In the event of repression, which turns so many childish preferences into their opposite, these same individuals, when they are adolescents or adults, will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey.

Muscular activity

Many patients report their first memories of sexual excitation when romping, fighting and playing with playmates. Organised games are done at school to keep the body healthy and divert adolescent attention away from sexuality: Freud says what this is doing is channel sexuality back into one of its specific components.

Affective process

Powerful emotions have sexual effects. Terrified or anxious children may touch their genitals for reassurance. The erotic aspect of terror, fright and so on may become intimately associated with sexuality so that adults find fear and terror thrilling; either in real life, in fantasies of rape or masochistic punishment; or in imaginary worlds of books or the cinema.

Pathways of mutual influence

If the taking in of food gives rise to sexual pleasure then the reverse may be true. If healthy sexuality accompanies healthy eating, then disturbance of sexuality may lead to disturbance of nourishment. Thus a sexually disturbed hysteric may cease eating.

We can speculate about a whole network of pathways by which sexual instincts may be channeled both towards basic organic functions (for example, eating) and also rerouted towards higher functions (that is, sublimated, into thinking, planning, deciding).

Essay 3. The transformations of puberty

Infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse and auto-erotic, finding pleasure as it learns to control and play with its own body.

The latency period sees the repression of sexuality in the name of various reaction-formations and sexuality’s sublimation into all kinds of games and fantasies.

With puberty the genitals become active and the subject actively seeks a love object outside itself. The new sexual aim of genital union appears and all the scattered erotogenic zones with their sex impulses become focused on, and subordinate to, genital union. Hopefully.

‘Normal’ sexuality consists of the uniting of the affectionate current (the sublimated remains of childhood sexuality) and the sensual current (mainstream libido).

So proper human sexual development is the coming together of affection/love and sex/pleasure, focussed on the genitals, to produce the ‘normal’ healthy adult. But, as always, there can be all kinds of hiccups along the way.

(1) The primacy of the genital zones and fore-pleasure

At puberty the sex organs grow and become ready for use. They can be excited in three ways:

  1. excitation of the erotogenic zones from outside
  2. from the organic interior
  3. from mental life, the storehouse of impressions and ideas

Sexual excitement is felt in two ways:

  1. perception of a mental tension of an extremely compelling type
  2. physical preparation: erection of the penis, lubrication of the vagina

Sexual tension

How come sexual excitation is perceived as both pleasurable but also as an unpleasurable tension?

The mechanism of fore-pleasure

Touching or seeing clearly give rise to a) pleasure in themselves b) a perceived raising of sexual tension.

It is as if the fore-pleasure derived from stimulating the erotogenic zones is designed to increase the incentive to move onto the act of sexual union.

Initial pleasure thus disguises increasing tension (unpleasure) so you are led relentlessly on towards copulation, the aim of the entire organism.

The whole pattern leads up to orgasm and the release of the appropriate sexual substances. It would seem that orgasms are designed to extinguish libido, if only temporarily. They are the height of pleasure, the abrupt release of tension by the blood thronging the penis or clitoris rushing back into the body as the scrotum or vagina undergoes a series of muscular contractions perceived as pleasurable.

And this release of tension takes you right the way back to square one i.e. normal bodily function; the overwhelming compulsion towards sex evaporates, the rational mind returns to full control.

Freud divides the two stages into fore-pleasure and end-pleasure.

A distinction similar to the fore-pleasure offered by the telling of jokes which prepare you for the greater release of libidinal pressure (laughing).

[He uses the same division in his essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming to describe the fore-pleasure afforded by aesthetic or formal literary techniques which prepare the way for the deeper pleasure of sharing unconscious fantasies (tales of damnation and salvation, risk and adventure, Ian Fleming and Barbara Cartland).]

Dangers of fore-pleasure

But fore-pleasures are clearly yet another balancing act; the incentive of pleasure must be balanced by an increase of tension which successfully propels you towards sex. If the yield of orgasmic pleasure doesn’t live up to the growth in tension, you may become stuck at the fore-pleasure stage.

Obviously enough, you may be predisposed to this through any number of accidents which emerge in infancy. Extreme attachment to various types of fore-pleasure, to a particular erotogenic zone or to the mental equivalents of them (stimulation of the anus – masochism/inversion) may develop into full-blown perversion.

But these very complex combinations will have some influence over the shape of even the most healthy adult sexuality.

Not only the deviations from normal sexual life but its normal form as well are determined by the infantile manifestations of sexuality.

Again, if this is an accurate account of the growth of sexuality, it shows that it will be very hard to police, to draw a hard and fast line between ‘normal’ and perverse.

Freud is making the controversial claim that ‘the normal’ is built on ‘the perverse’ and most of its activities contain the seeds of perversity.

(2) The problem of sexual excitation

Part played by the sexual substances

Maybe sexual tension is produced, in men, by the accumulation of semen in the testicles? Kraft-Ebing thought so. But if so, how can this account for sexual excitation in children and women?

Importance of the internal sexual organs

Arguing against that theory, observation of castrated men shows that sexual excitement continues to operate with no semen at all.

Chemical theory

Freud speculates that the key role is played by substances released by the sex glands. In his day there was no convincing biological theory of sex.

The discovery of the class of chemicals called ‘hormones’ (at around this time, 1905, in England) paved the way to our present understanding of how sex works.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that even today one of the great mysteries is: Why Sex? And, as Steve Jones says, If Sex, why only two sexes?

(3) The libido theory

Libido is:

a quantitively variable force which serves as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation

A kind of electricity. Freud imagines that libido is distinguished from the other main instinct, hunger, chemically. Libido is a chemically unique force. Psychoanalysis has shown that libido is derived not just from the genitals but from all sorts of organs, including the skin.

We thus reach the idea of a quantity of libido, to the mental representation of which we give the name of ego-libido, and whose production, increase or diminution, distribution and displacement should afford us possibilities for explaining the psychosexual phenomena observed.

Psychoanalysis can only observe ego-libido as it becomes attached to objects i.e. becomes object-libido, as it is attached to, detached from, swapped around various objects (for example, images, fixations, words and ideas) directing the subject’s activity towards sex. For the act of sex, in particular orgasm, results in the temporary extinction of libido.

Psychoanalysis observes the outflowing of libido from the ego and its return thereto.

The ego acts as a psychic reservoir for libido.

In the earliest phases every ego is narcissistic, that is, focusses libido on itself (during the auro-erotic stages of infantile sexuality). Only later does the ego develop the ability to project energy onto external objects and Freud (or his English translators) label these object-cathexes.

The slightest damage to the organism (for example, illness) results in a return to infantile narcissism, as do psychic wounds.

Narcissism is also evoked by particularly self-contained objects, by aloof women, by cats, and by babies (see Freud’s 1914 essay On Narcissism).

In later editions of the Three Essays Freud attacks Jung for watering down libido to make it mean psychical instinctive forces in general.

But the whole point of having a distinct sexual instinct, chemically differentiated from all other instincts, whose special operations can be studied through observation and analysis, in fact all Freud’s efforts and theories, are destroyed if you thus throw out the distinguishing sexual element of libido theory.

(4) The differentiation between men and women

Libido is masculine i.e. active, in character.

In levels of autoerotism and masturbation boys and girls are similar, though girls develop the reaction-formations of shame and disgust more easily than boys (i.e. mental forces which damp down their libido).

Freud suggests three meanings of masculine and feminine:

  • passive versus active personalities
  • biological i.e. defined by sex organs
  • sociological i.e. observing the actual behaviour of men and women

Freud uses masculine and feminine to denote active and passive. To say libido is masculine means it is, in this value system, always active. As to the sociological aspect:

Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense. Every individual, on the contrary, displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to their own and to the opposite sex and shows a combination of activity and passivity…

Without the fundamental idea of innate bisexuality I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women.

Leading zones in men and women

The clitoris is what little girls masturbate, as boys the penis. Both become erect i.e. engorged with blood during excitation. But Freud thinks that at puberty, whereas boys receive a fresh wave of sexual excitement, girls undergo a profound sexual repression; this takes the form of moving their chief erotogenic zone from the clitoris to the vagina.

The ‘normal’ woman has thus repressed her masculine active organ (the clitoris) in the name of vaginal excitation designed for sex and procreation:

The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty which, as it were, puts away their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria.

[This is, of course, complete rubbish. Women retain their chief sexual excitation through the clitoris. The rediscovery and widespread publicisation of clitoridal sexuality was one of the great achievements of the feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was well aware that many women cannot orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone but need clitoral stimulation as well and I think (I hope) this has now become common knowledge. Thus Freud’s theorising away of the clitoris, along with all his theories about the inevitable inferiority of women, are the grossest example of his simply recasting the patriarchal prejudices of his time in a new language.]

(5) The finding of an object

[Expanded in the 1915 essay On Narcissism.]

A person may love:

1. according to the anaclitic (attachment) type:

  • the woman who feeds him
  • the man who protects him

2. according to the narcissistic type:

  • what he himself is
  • what he himself was
  • what he himself would like to be i.e. an idol
  • someone who was once part of themselves i.e. a baby

Suckling at the breast is the prototype of all pleasure and love.

From 1915 Freud introduces the idea of narcissism into his theory. The physical pleasure of suckling at the breast is now accompanied by the psychic pleasure of self-love, the earliest attachment of libido to the ego, the ego to itself, as it grows and comes to consciousness.

After puberty all love objects will partake of these two earliest loves; all love objects will have an element of narcissism and of attachment (cupboard) love.

The finding of a love-object is always a refinding of this original pleasure. A recapturing of what we once had. Falling in love is always a return to lost happiness.

The sexual object during early infancy

Everyone’s first love is for their mother. Freud goes further to say everyone’s first sexual object is their mother. Mothers stroke and kiss and caress babies, thus awaking the erotogenic zones and sex instincts. There is nothing perverse in this. The mother is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child how to love. Later in life, the former baby will itself stroke and kiss and caress a love object. How else does it learn to do this except by unconscious recall of its own childhood caresses?

Infantile anxiety

Infantile anxiety is caused by the loss of the person the infant loves. They are afraid of the dark because in the dark they cannot see the person they love. An infant who turns his love/libido into anxiety when it cannot be satisfied is behaving exactly like an adult neurotic.

The barrier against incest

‘Normal’ development means the transmutation of the early sexual attachment to the mother into ‘affection’ i.e. aim-inhibited libido. One of life’s great tasks is overcoming this love and learning to reattach it to socially acceptable objects.

This happens partly due to internal psychic development but is hugely reinforced by social and moral pressures. In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud writes about the fundamental taboo against incest which is, in his view, the beginnings of society and morality.

Nonetheless, incest remains a possibility in the unconscious mind, in dreams and fantasies.

Puberty is particularly rich in fantasies as the adolescent tries out various combinations of object and experiments with its new strong feelings obsessively in the mind, before attempting to put them into practice.

Some fantasies are particularly common: the adolescent’s fantasies of overhearing his parents having sex; of having been seduced in infancy; of having been threatened with castration; fantasies of life in the womb; and the so-called Family Romance, the fantasy of being the abandoned child of rich beautiful parents – a rationalisation of infantile perception of parental omnipotence.

In overcoming renewed childhood sexual fantasies about his parents the adolescent also has to make the crucial break with them; to rebel against parental authority, particularly the father.

Some people never make it and remain in thrall to their parents. Many women never properly escape and remain as loving and passive as they were in childhood. Girls have a tendency to rebel against their sexual destiny, against sexuality itself and to flee into exaggerated affection for siblings or parents. To become virgin carers.

It falls to some men to become the complete rebels against authority which are required by the furtherance of the race.

After-effects of infantile object-choice

These powerful loves of childhood cast a pall over the rest of our lives. Women often look for older, more mature, authoritative husbands who are quite obviously father-substitutes. Men, even more often, are looking for the unconditional love of their mothers.

Prevention of inversion

It seems that the presence in our childhood of the same sex parent as a figure of a) resented authority and b) sexual rivalry, contributes to our early love for the opposite sex parent, all of which is motivated by the hormones at puberty.

But if the family unit is disturbed, if one of the parents is lacking, this is a powerful accidental stimulus to homosexuality (innate predispositions aside).

SUMMARY

* Neuroses are the mirror image of perversions: both represent aberrations from normal sexuality. Neurotic symptoms are generally a reinvoking of infantile perversions, at least in fantasy and transferred symptoms, as libido flees an unbearable sexual situation.

* Perversions are the fixation of the libido onto particular components of sexuality at the expense of normal heterosexual genital union.

A disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.

* Any departure from established sexuality is therefore an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism, a regression.

* The sexual instinct is put together from various factors and, in the perversions, these components fall apart.

* ‘Normal’ sexuality integrates these instincts and submits them to socially-condoned genital aims.

* Children bring sexuality into the world with them. After an efflorescence of sexuality from ages 2 to 5 the sex instinct undergoes a repression, entering the latency period. Sexual feelings continue during this period but rerouted:

a) to develop secondary characteristics such as affection and friendship (aim-inhibited libido)
b) into ‘reaction-formations’ to sexual activities, which are now perceived as dirty, shameful, disgusting and so on, into a predisposition to receive moral education. These reaction-formations will be critical in establishing the channels along which libido can flow after puberty; too strong and they will react badly to the arrival of puberty and real sexual situations, causing all sorts of havoc, not least the flight into illness which characterises neurosis.

* Children develop through three phases: oral (breastfeeding), anal-sadistic in which ambivalence emerges, and phallic, part of which is the Oedipus complex. Then it is all buried in the latency period.

* The diphasic onset of sexuality i.e. in two stages, allowing for a latency period during which the socialising process can get going, seems to be a precondition for humanity’s civilised achievements. But, being so long and precarious, the latency period also explains mankind’s predisposition to neurosis and mental illness, and to the various failures and perversions of the sex instinct.

* The perversions of infancy, the finding of pleasure in erotogenic zones, returns with puberty but subordinated, as fore-pleasures, to the great act of copulation itself.

* Children find their first sex object in the opposite sex parent but this lust is repressed and redirected by the primeval psychological taboo against incest.

Factors interfering with development:

Every step on this long path of development can become a point of fixation, every juncture in this involved combination can be an occasion for a dissociation of the sexual instinct.

Constitution and heredity

Nature/nurture, which comes first? Imponderable. Except to say that in families with a predisposition to sexual failure, the men will tend to be perverts, the women, “true to the tendency of their sex to repression”, will become negative perverts i.e. hysterics.

Further modification

Whatever the hereditary predisposition, it is clear the sex instincts undergo further modifications:

Perversion: at puberty the libido may find the genital zone too weak for the tasks asked of it, and so revert to fixation on earlier infantile perverse zones.

Repression: the instincts in question are repressed and travel underground until they can find their expression disguised as hysterical symptoms. They can have perfectly normal sex lives but accompanied by psychological problems.

Sublimation: excessive sexual dispositions can be redirected into socially acceptable fields, thus yielding greater psychic efficiency and providing a strong evolutionary advantage. Maybe this is the reason why sublimation is the basis of much human mental life.

Reaction-formation: the building up during the latency period of strong counter-forces to perverse instincts, abetted by education which is designed to channel sexuality into ‘normal’ ends.

What we describe as a person’s character is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognised as unutilisable.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality were first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1977 as part of ‘On Sexuality’, Volume 7 of the Pelican Freud Library.

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Posted by Simon on June 19, 2023

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Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire @ the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum

The Freud Museum is located at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX, a six or seven minute walk from Finchley Road tube station.

It’s the house which Freud’s English colleagues and supporters bought for him and his family to come to after the Nazis annexed Austria and Freud’s lifelong home town of Vienna in March 1938, forcing him to flee the country.

Freud himself was already very ill with the throat cancer which would kill him 18 months later in September 1939. But after his death Maresfield Gardens remained the Freud family home until his daughter, Anna Freud, herself a pioneer of child psychoanalysis, died in 1982. The house opened as a museum four years later.

It’s a fascinating place to visit at any time, light and clean and airy, with a comprehensive bookshop at the back, opening into a modest, leafy London garden.

But the centrepiece of the museum is the ground floor where Freud recreated the study from his house in Vienna and which has been lovingly restored to how it was in his time. You can see the desk where he wrote so many great works, his bookshelves packed with leather-bound volumes of psychology, history and literature.

Freud’s desk at the Freud Museum, London (photo by the author)

You can see the famous couch, smothered in dark patterned rugs, where his patients came and lay and free associated their thoughts, projecting their hopes and fears and fantasies onto the inventor of psychoanalysis, who sat quietly listening.

Freud’s couch at the Freud Museum (photo by the author)

So far, so Victorian, in décor and furnishings.

But maybe the most striking and unexpected aspect of the room is the astonishing number of antiquities scattered everywhere. There are half a dozen or more glass cases packed with ancient statuettes and figurines, vases and jugs, there are busts on platforms and stands, lined up along shelves all round the room, and a double row of small antique figurines on his desk right in front of him, in his field of vision every day as he either wrote or listened to his patients.

Freud was an obsessive collector of ancient figures and antiquities all his life, building up a collection of several thousand by the time he died, and literally hundreds are stacked on shelves, in cases, on mantlepieces and stands. Everywhere you look, in every direction, hundreds of ancestral presences sit silently, looking out at you with a cold timeless regard, from very angle.

Another view of Freud’s study, showing desk (in the foreground), shelves and glass cases packed with antiquities

And that’s what this exhibition is about. It’s a small but powerful exploration of Freud’s lifelong fascination with archaeology and antiquity and the role they played in his writings, his practice, in his deepest formulations of the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis which he invented and developed through 40 intensely productive years, and in the successive models of the human mind which he developed, refined and publicised.

Freudian reservations

Let me explain my position regarding Freud. Very like the other two world-shattering geniuses, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, Freud’s influence is so enormous and all-pervasive, so underpins almost everybody’s modern notions of human nature and our behaviour in the world, that it’s more or less irrelevant whether most or all of it is ‘true’ or not.

The various versions of his theories and the hundreds of insights they generate have provided mental maps, sociological constructs amounting to an entire worldview which we all now inhabit, thronged with insights, phrases and terminology (Freudian slip, the unconscious, the ego, being repressed, ‘anal’ behaviour, Oedipal conflict) which are freely used in newspapers, magazines and conversation.

With regard to the psychoanalytical method – the talking cure – my understanding is that many scientific trials have been undertaken to assess the efficacy of psychoanalytical therapy compared with other depth psychologies, with more orthodox psychiatric treatment, with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and with drugs. But the attempt is problematic for quite a few reasons. For a start no two people are alike so what works for one patient might simply not work for another. It’s impossible or very challenging to set up a double-blind, controlled study.

For another thing, Freudian psychoanalysis doesn’t necessarily aim at a fixed outcome. CBT may cure a symptom which is preventing you from living your life happily, but Freudians would say it’s only addressed a symptom, not the underlying cause. Freudian psychoanalysis can be open-ended, can indeed last the whole of the rest of your life – which leads cynics and critics to attack it as a money-making scam, hooking the vulnerable into an endless sequence of sessions, at an exorbitant fee.

I was offered and took depth therapy on the NHS in my 20s, and know lots of people who’ve had extended psychotherapy of one sort or another. It didn’t cure me of anything but it certainly helped to be listened to, at length, discussing issues and memories which became quite painful to recall.

Nut even then, in the 1980s, there were lots of varieties and schools and flavours of psychotherapy and my understanding is that the range of practices and theories underlining them has continued to grow. But my understanding is that Freud invented the paradigm of counselling, of extended therapy which aims to dig deep to resolve deep psychological problems, on which all other schools of therapy are based.

Another line of attack is the number of scandals which have come to light about abusive analysts, drunk analysts, power-mad analysts, and so on. The analyst-analysand (therapist-patient) relationship does give the therapist an unprecedented amount of power to steer and control the emotional lives of the very vulnerable. But my understanding is that this kind of thing, like the abuse of power in many other positions (in the church, in sports coaching) can be reported and handled by the relevant professional bodies as well as the police and legal system.

Another line of attack comes from feminists who, right from the start, pointed out the hair-raisingly sexist nature of almost everything Freud wrote and protested his engrained view of women as biologically, physically and mentally inferior to men. You can’t deny it, it’s there on almost every page, along with entire essays dedicated to proving women’s inferiority. Feminist Freudians have tried to overwrite concepts like the notorious ‘penis envy’ which he thought girls and women suffered from, but  in this and many other concepts and assumptions, Freud remains rebarbatively sexist.

Then there’s the earliest and most unimaginative argument against Freud, that his obsession with sex, sexual drives, libido, anal eroticism, fetishism and so on prove that he himself was a sex maniac, a pervert, and so discredit the theory. You can see why a one-sided reading of his earlier theory, especially the early focus on the sexuality of children, would trigger this attack. But, for me, it betrays ignorance of the wider context of the theory which, especially in its later, expanded form, is just as interested in aggression, anger, depression, group psychology, and spends a lot of time exploring the idea of the conscience, the part of the mind which holds us to high standards and punishes us for our failures.

And most powerful of all is the accusation that, although many of his patients in the 1890s told him they had suffered real, physical sexual abuse as children, he was so disturbed by its apparent ubiquity that he couldn’t countenance it, couldn’t accept it; and that one of his central claims – that children fantasise about sexual activity (sex with the parent of the opposite sex, while hating the parent of the same sex, the insight he named the Oedipus complex) – was a denial of the reality of child abuse; that  Freud made what we now regard as the cardinal sin when treating child abuse, which is to refuse to listen and refuse to believe what his patients were telling him.

If true, this was obviously shameful for a physician, sworn to help his patients; but, more powerfully, successive critics have argued that this rejection of actual real-world abuse compromises his entire theory, leading to the accusation that the entire theory is based on a self-serving lie. His rejection of the fact of child abuse and transformation of it into the realm of infantile fantasy may be the most difficult accusation to counter and one which resonates to this day.

So I hope I’m aware of the battery of arguments which can be brought against Freud the man, against his theories, against his personal attitudes, against the inefficacy and/or luxury nature of his type of therapy, of the disproveability of the efficacy of the talking cure, along with plentiful historical examples of its abuse.

But, in my opinion, although many of these attacks deserve to be taken seriously, especially the final one, none of them can really dent the incalculable impact, for good or ill, which Freud has had on the vast shared set of values, ideas, concepts, phrases and ideas which we call Western culture.

Ancient figurine of the sphinx, central player in the legend of Oedipus, symbolising for Freud, as for generations of thinkers before him, the riddle of human existence, but which Freud boldly (arrogantly) thought he had solved

Until Freud’s time most psychologists, most philosophers and lawyers and, following them, most people thought of the human mind as basically Rational, a thinking machine which is aware of its own thoughts, can order and control them, home to Reason which guides our behaviour to rational, definable ends.

If people behaved irrationally then experts directly involved with human nature, such as philosophers or theologians or lawyers, developed explanations and excuses for this falling away from Ideal reason, ideas of possession by outside forces, or temporary madness and so on, notions which explained away people’s irrational behaviour in such a way as to preserve the basic premise that man is the Rational Animal.

In the Christian tradition which dominated western thought for a thousand years, and which in fact predates Christianity, going back through Stoic philosophy for centuries before Christ (cf Cicero and Seneca) – in this immense tradition, human beings have been endowed with reason by the Creator of the universe and, although this spark of Divine Reason may sometimes be clouded by ‘passions’ or frenzy or extreme emotion or drink or drugs, these are temporary aberrations from the basically rational soul which God has given each of us.

Freud’s theory blasts this model to smithereens. By the 1890s there had been plenty of secular thinkers, especially in the life sciences which were swiftly converted to Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection, but no-one who undermined the old models of a God-given, rational mind so completely.

For Freud the mind is a battlefield, a site of endless conflict between conflicting psychological forces, drives, urges, instincts, wishes, dreams, fantasies, angers, anxieties and many more. His fundamental insight was that the human mind, far from growing into a stable, mature and reliable tool for managing our way through the world, is a dynamic, ever-changing site of tremendous psychic conflict.

Because – second big idea – the majority of mental activity is unconscious. We are only dimly aware or not aware at all, of the tremendous forces, urges, drives and so on which motivate us every waking moment and haunt us in our dreams. Why do so many people behave so irrationally? Why are so many people in the grip of compulsive behaviour which they know is self-destructive (smoking, alcohol, over-eating, drugs, risk-taking, outbursts of psychopathic anger or helpless despair) yet feel powerless to change?

Because we are driven by tremendously powerful unconscious forces which we repress and prevent ever emerging into full consciousness.

As Freud stumbled deeper into these discoveries in the 1980s, trying to make sense of what his clinical patients were telling him, engaging in the slightly dubious ‘self analysis’ of his own dreams and memories and feelings, and corresponding with his friend and intellectual confidant Wilhelm Fliess, he threw again and again used metaphors around the idea of having to dig down below the level of conscious thought, having to excavate layer after layer to get down to the basic fears, anxieties and so on which seemed to be driving his patients.

“Thus it came about that in this, the first full-length analysis of a hysteria undertaken by me, I arrived at a procedure which I later developed into a regular method and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city.”
(Studies on Hysteria, 1895)

Again and again Freud referred to the work he was doing with his patients to try and rediscover their childhood memories in order to free them of their adult illnesses, and the parallel work he was doing on himself, digging deeper and deeper into his own repressed memories, as forms of archaeology.

And it’s this, the meeting place between Freud’s continua use of the metaphor of excavation and archaeology, and the ancient objects derived from the actual practice of real world archaeology which Freud obsessively collected and packed into his study and invoked in his writings from the start to the end of his career as a thinker and writer – which this exhibition addresses and explores. Which it excavates.

The exhibition

The exhibition space is upstairs. It’s only one room but, considering the ideas whose origin it describes and investigates went on to transform all human culture and to underpin how almost everyone alive today conceives of human nature and of themselves, it feels like it contains an entire world. An atom bomb of ideas.

Installation view of ‘Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire’ at the Freud Museum, showing three of the six themes and their display cases, being Oedipus, Charcot and Dreams. Note the small number of items on display. But it isn’t the number of artefacts, it’s the ideas behind them that fill the room.

Exhibition structure

The exhibition selects twenty-five key objects – antiquities, figurines and statuettes, books and prints – each normally hidden from view, extracted from the clutter of Freud’s study for special attention and investigation at close range, to illustrate how Freud’s collecting was bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis.

The exhibition is divided into six themes, which I’ll briefly list here then explore in greater detail:

  1. Oedipus:
  2. Charcot
  3. Dreams
  4. Gradiva
  5. Totem and Taboo
  6. Moses

1. Oedipus: the riddle of desire

Inevitably the narrative must start with Oedipus who gave his name to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus Complex. This is in fact just one part of the process of growth and maturing which Freud thought all boys go through. At around the age of 5 all boys have grown enough, and experienced enough pre-pubescent sexual feeling, to sense that they want to be very close to their mother and come to resent their father’s possession of her. In the unconscious mind, the boy wants to have sex with his mother and kill his father. Freud introduced the idea in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and coined the term in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910).

The Oedipus story is super well-known ad previous thinkers had interpreted it and its symbolism. Freud used it to dramatise what he saw as a universal condition, a universal experience of all growing boys which they have to completely suppress in order to mature properly, but whose repression leaves its marks on the adult and, in some men, is constantly threatening to return, so that it has to be staved off with harsh mental defences which sometimes result in florid mental beliefs, patterns and behaviour.

But early on in the myth of Oedipus he has to solve the riddle put to him by the sphinx and so the story had another significance for Freud: for trying to excavate down into the psyche of each patient could also be described as solving their riddle.

Objects on display

On display from Freud’s collection are six objects connected with Oedipus, three vases, a statuette, an amulet and a print of Ingres’ classic painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.

2. Charcot: from iconography to archaeology

Jean-Martin Charcot was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology. Freud went to study with him in Paris in 1885 (when Freud, born in 1856, was 29). Charcot used hypnosis to treat patients who displayed physical symptoms with no organic cause, a class of patients categorised as ‘hysterics’. His work made the subject of ‘hysteria’ a popular one for doctors interested in psychology across Europe. A book was published containing comprehensive descriptions of Charcot’s work and numerous prints of his hypnosis of hundreds of patients.

A Clinical Lesson at the Salp​etri​ere​. Print of engraving by E. Pirodon after the oil painting by Andre Brouillet​ (​1888​)

But this stuff about Charcot is really here because Charcot was about the surface. There was a fair amount of showmanship in Charcot’s demonstrations, made to auditoriums full of admiring students, and Freud came to dislike the way Charcot exaggerated the patient’s superficial symptoms in order to cure them.

In reaction against Charcot, Freud set off in the opposite direction. His cures would be conducted not in public but in private; they would not be wonder cures achieved in one flashy demonstration, but the result of sustained engagement over a prolonged period of time. And above all they would not work by bringing florid symptoms (hysteria, weeping, sobbing, moaning, screaming) to the surface of the human mind, but quite the opposite, entail a systematic, extended, and ever-deeper excavation down through layer after layer of the human psyche.

Which is why the exhibition places next to the Charcot print a copy of the big leather-bound volume of Ilios, the huge work in which the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann described his discovery of the legendary city of Troy (in western Turkey). Freud was going to be an archaeologist of the human psyche.

3. Dreams: decoding the way to the wish

From ancient times through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dreams were given a special place as omens, as warnings from the gods, as indicators of good or bad fortune for the dreamer, and thousands of books had been written interpreting the universal symbolism of dreams. In 1880s and 1890s scientific circles the view was the opposite: that dreams are the meaningless by-products of physiological processes of the mind.

In his breakthrough book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposed a middle way: that dreams do have a meaning, a symbolic purpose, but that they are not universal to mankind. Each dream has a meaning which is specific to the dreamer. Each dreamer’s mind selects images which symbolise individual and specific hopes, fears etc.

Each dream is a wish fulfilment but what exactly the wish is, and how it is converted into particular images, can only be established by lengthy, in-depth excavation down through the layers of the conscious mind and into each patient’s unconscious.

The display case shows an ancient wine jug, a bust and a warrior figurine. The Interpretation of Dreams includes scores of Freud’s own dreams. In one of them his wife Martha gives him a drink from an Etruscan cinerary urn like the one on display here. The urn represents satisfaction of a basic instinct (thirst) but also symbolises the wished-for return of an object like it which he had given away then regretted.

It’s a fairly simple demonstration of the way we humans give objects multiple everyday or conscious meanings, and then how images of the objects are recombined in the unconscious to emerge in strange combinations, accompanied by sometimes haunting, sometimes terrifying, sometimes blissful emotional feelings, in our dreamlife.

4. Gradiva: tracing the pathways of archaeological desire

Gradiva plays a special role in the history of Freud’s writing about writing i.e. about literature, which he was to come to have such a seismic influence on. In 1907 he published his first full-length analysis of a literary text, a novel by the German writer and poet Wilhelm Jensen titled Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy which had been published in Vienna in 1902, so it was quite a current work.

Straightaway the word Pompeii should alert us to the fact that the book is going to play straight into Freud’s fascination with ancient ruins. Freud refers to the relevance of Pompeii, where secrets had been long buried and were now being excavated and restored to the light, to his own concepts of psychoanalytical therapy, in his letters to Fliess in the mid-1890s, and he actually visited Pompeii itself in 1902.

In this novel the hero, Norbert Hanold, who is studying archaeology, ‘falls in love with’ (becomes obsessed with) an ancient bas-relief of a young woman striding along in a Roman toga.

Cast relief of ‘Gradiva’​ (​1908​)

Since the relief was found as part of the excavation of the buried city of Pompeii (just recently being unearthed) the hero decides to travel to Italy, and to the archaeological site, to find this woman, or her spirit, or her reincarnation.

So you can straightaway see how the novel is about a man in the grip of a delusion and a compulsion, psychological territory Freud was striving to make his own during the later 1890s and early 1900s.

In the end, after failing to find the modern avatar of the beautiful statue anywhere in the real world and after some painful self-analysis, Hanold comes to realise that who the woman reminds him of is a childhood friend who lives opposite him back home, returns, tells her of his love etc.

For Freud the novel is rich in confirmations of his theories. The hero had youthful erotic feelings for this neighbour but his strict upbringing forbade him from acknowledging them. Instead he repressed them and sublimated them i.e. redirected his psychic energy into the socially acceptable medium of studying archaeology and ancient history.

When he came across the bas relief as part of his studies, he was seized, possessed by something about it which he couldn’t define. Well, that’s because he had completely repressed his childhood longing for his sweetheart. the feeling remained but divorced from its source. So the bas relief became what Freud calls a compromise formation i.e. a real-world object which can ‘satisfy’ his libidinal drive and desire, but in a socially acceptable mode (i.e. a perfectly natural part of his adult studies).

The obsession he develops with it, however, obviously goes beyond the bounds of the ‘normal’ and this is like the patients who came to see Freud, people in the grip of obsessive, compulsive, neurotic thoughts or behaviour which they couldn’t explain and couldn’t shake off.

It also plays right into Freud’s hands that the hero is depicted as having numerous florid and bizarre dreams, thus allowing Freud to apply the insights he’d recorded in The Interpretation of Dreams to show how Hanold’s dreams were continually urging acknowledgement of his real-world love, but were blocked from doing so by the forces of repression and so emerged in complex combinations of symbols and imagery.

And the way the heroine, Zoe, cares for Hanold after his breakdown, slowly coaxing him back to health and to accept his love for her, is comparable to the psychoanalytic method Freud had devised, the famous listening cure.

Objects on display

On another level, the novel is about the journey of a repressed north European to the warm south which has, for centuries, symbolised release into and acceptance a world of sensual pleasures which we uptight northerners deny ourselves in order to function in our advanced capitalist economies.

The excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii had unearthed a surprising number of explicitly sexual objects, specifically depictions of the erect penis, often with wings, a magical object worthy of veneration or kept as a lucky charm or amulet. The fact that this is still regarded as shocking or bizarre shows you how far we are from the ancient world’s frank acceptance of the facts of sex.

Six phallic objects and amulets from various cultures of antiquity, part of Freud’s collection. You are free to regard these as sinister, sexually suggestive, funny (as I do), or as examples of the ancient world’s frank acknowledgement of the importance of sexuality in human life, which had to be censored, suppressed and policed in industrialised, capitalist societies. At the same time, this or any other view you have is quite obviously a projection of your own personal ideas, memories, associations and patterns of thought onto simple, cold, inanimate objects, and it is this power of mental projection onto objects which it is part of the aim of the exhibition to both explore and to demonstrate.

5. Totem and Taboo: the search for origins

Another criticism of Freud is that he quite early on strayed beyond his area of supposed expertise i.e. psychology (theory of the mind) and psychiatry (practical cure of mental illness) into subjects quite beyond his speciality. And it’s true. He not only produced a substantial body of literary and art criticism (essays and book-length studies) but did the same in anthropology and theology.

In 1913 he published Totem and Taboo. It was partly a response to his protegé Carl Jung who was rebelling against Freud’s insistence on the centrality of repressed sexuality and the Oedipus Complex in all human development. Therefore it ups the stakes by asserting that the Oedipus Complex is not only a part of the normal development of every boy, but explains a founding event in actual, real-world history.

Freud asserted that the founding event of ancient societies was an actual parricide, where the sons of the chief rose up and killed him, then claimed access to the queen or women of the harem. A sexual rebellion. But, crippled by guilt at murdering their father, the sons then set about repressing all memory of it, denying and blocking anything which would indicate their great crime. And this is the origin of the compulsive taboos which contemporary anthropologists observed in so many ‘primitive’ societies.

Freud then goes on to make the grandiose claim that this Primal Event was the foundation stone of all religion, morality, society and related art.

Objects on display

On display are copies of ‘The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion’, the hugely influential compendium of myths, legends gathered from all round the world by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, which influenced a generation of writers and thinkers. A two-volume edition had been published in 1890 but Freud owned the twelve volumes of the third edition, published serially from 1906 to 1915. His copies, some of which are on display here, are covered with pencilled notes and he incorporated much material from the book into Totem.

Amusingly, Freud sent a copy of Totem and Taboo to Fraser, who didn’t deign to reply.

The curators don’t mention this but my understanding is that almost every aspect of Totem and Taboo has been disproved. It very obviously represents a kind of imperial ambition by Freud to move his theory out of the world of private practice and discreet papers written for specialist journals, and stake a claim to making major discoveries in history, anthropology, the origins of religion, morality and so on.

Although the specific claims made about ‘primitive’ societies being comprehensively rejected by actual anthropologists, Freud successfully made a new myth about himself and his role as explainer of everything. It was the kind of grandiose ambition which drove one-time followers like Jung, and others like Adler and Rank, to secede from the official psychoanalytic movement and set up their own variations.

A digression on Freud’s sociological writings

This world-claiming ambition, this tendency to stray way beyond his area of expertise and set himself up as a master explainer of society is evident in many of Freud’s later works. In The Future of An Illusion (1927) he sets out to disprove religious belief by rewriting every religious belief and practice in terms of psychoanalytic terminology (repression of sexual urges, ‘sublimated’ into love of an all-powerful father, accompanied by a world of obsessive-compulsive rituals and ceremonies).

In 1930’s Civilization and Its Discontents Freud applies psychoanalysis to sociology, arguing that modern, mass, industrial, capitalist societies need to enforce widespread suppression and control of people’s libidinal urges, not just to sex but to express other needs and drives, and it is this systematic repression of human needs which makes so many people unhappy in modern society. In many ways this turned out to be Freud’s most influential work, because it influenced social reformers and would-be revolutionaries, especially in the utopian 1960s.

Anyway, this final display is about Freud’s deepest foray into myth, legend and so on as he took on the roots of Christianity and, behind it, of Christianity’s parent, Judaism.

Freud was a Jew who accepted his secular inheritance but rejected the religious aspects of Judaism. Running alongside the obsessive references to archaeology throughout his writing career, which this exhibition focuses on, was Freud’s parallel obsession with denying and debunking religious belief and practice at every opportunity.

There are quite a few Freudian explanations of this noticeable obsession. One is that he was guilty about rejecting the religion of his forefathers and so spent his entire life trying to deny its reality. A subtler one is that Freud didn’t so much deny the reality of the Jewish religion as attempt to rewrite it in his own terms. In his imperial way, he attempted to overwrite religion, to write it away. Coming from a different angle, you could say that this ‘obsession’ was a response to the lifelong anti-semitism which he and his family and Jewish friends and colleagues suffered on an almost daily basis, in personal encounters but also in the press and culture of turn of the century Vienna.

Everyone mentions the fact that from 1897 to 1910 Vienna was run by the unusually powerful mayor, Karl Lueger, who oversaw the transformation of the city into a modern metropolis but at the same time exploited populist and anti-semitic feeling, legitimising widespread and semi-official antisemitism which some historians think established a model for the psychotic racism promoted by Adolf Hitler who was, of course, Austrian and an impressionable teenager during Lueger’s time in office.

You can take your pick of interpretations or mix and match all of them and this, also, is a Freudian idea which he called over-determination. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud speculated that individual dream images or narratives can operate on multiple levels or be representing more than one wish or drive. Same with the symptoms his patients presented with. Overdetermination occurs when a single-observed effect is determined by multiple causes any one of which alone would be sufficient to account for the effect.

Thus I routinely describe historical events as ‘over determined’, such as the First World War, for which historians have proposed a vast number of causes. The Freudian notion of over-determination i.e. multiple cause for one event, frees you up, allows you to accept a number of different explanations, allows you to experiment with apportioning different levels of responsibility for different events.

It’s an example of the way Freud’s theory gives conceptual definition to the complexity of life, motivation, simple and complex events which we all know are multi-levelled and multi-motivated. Freud’s theory provides a theoretical underpinning for this multiplicity of viewpoints, about anything.

6. Moses: the return of the repressed

Freud’s last published work was not a grand summary of his theory (although he was working on one, which remained unfinished). It was the long, densely argued and eccentric work of religious sociology, Moses and Monotheism. In it he applies the Oedipus story to the entire history of the Jewish people, his people, in an attempt to dethrone the founder of Judaism, Moses. It was itself a nakedly Oedipal attempt to overthrow the father and assert his (Freud’s) moral and intellectual independence.

For Freud makes the scandalous assertion that Moses was not himself Jewish. Freud argues that Moses was in fact an Egyptian prince, but one who followed the heretical teachings of the pharaoh Akhenaten. From what we can tell, Akhenaten, the tenth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, who ruled from 1353 to 1336 BC, attempted to overthrow the Egyptians’ traditional polytheism i.e. belief in a large and florid pantheon of gods, and replace it with worship of the One True God.

Tasked with overseeing the Israelite captives in their slave tasks, this Egyptian prince, Moses, tried to impose Akhenaten’s strict monotheism on them but they rose up and, as in the classic Oedipal narrative, murdered their father figure. But, like all good Oedipal actors, they then couldn’t cope with the guilt of their deed and repressed it, wiping out all memory of the historical event, and instead reinventing Moses as one of their own and a wise and good teacher.

Following the basic model of the mind he had postulated as long ago as 1897, Freud speculated that knowledge of their collective murder kept threatening to leak out and so the Jews, as a people, instituted a comprehensive system of taboos and restrictions, the most famous being not to eat pork, but there are hundreds of others. As time went by these taboos were expanded and elaborated until they dictated almost every aspect of everyday life, as well as a host of religious rituals.

This last display takes Moses and Monotheism to be not only the climax of Freud’s career as a writer but of his vaulting ambition to establish a psychoanalytical version of human history, society, and the origins of religion and morality. Like Totem and Taboo there’s something slightly mad about this book, disreputable about its theories and the interpretations which Freud applies to history and strain to breaking point. It’s absurd. But there’s also something awe inspiring about the man’s grandiose ambition.

If you stop thinking about it as a serious piece of archaeology or sociology and consider it as simply a piece of imaginative writing, the ambition and the ingenuity with which Freud attaches his theory to every aspect of Jewish history, theology and practice are dizzying.

Objects on display

A small statuette of the Egyptian god Amon-Ra, who Akhenaten promoted as the one true God. A print of Rembrandt’s famous painting of Moses coming down from the mountain holding the tablets of the law. An edition of the Philippson edition of the German Bible. And a small hannukah lamp, associated with domestic Jewish ritual.

The end wall and right-hand wall of the exhibition, showing the section about Gradiva (at the end) and Totem and Moses, on the right

Objects and meanings

The title of the exhibition includes the word ‘objects’ because among Freud’s many insights is the way all of us project wishes, desires, anxieties onto all the objects around us all the time. We not only relentlessly anthropomorphise the world – that’s level one psychology; we also personalise the world by investing all manner of objects around us with value and meaning. And these meanings alter over time, over very short periods as our moods or memories change, as events invest them with new auras of meaning, some of them over lifetimes.

In other words, all the objects around us are invested with some measure of significance, we can’t stop ourselves. And so the exhibition’s attention to the objects which Freud a) collected obsessively b) positioned all around him in his working environment c) described, discussed, referred to and invoked endlessly in all his writings from start to finish is both an ‘exploration’ of the significance of some of the objects, but also the evocation of all kinds of associations and feelings in us, the visitors.

H.D.’s interpretation

Freud arrived in London before his belongings. When these arrived, especially the crates containing his carefully wrapped antiquities, his friend and former patient, the American poet H.D., sent Freud a bunch of gardenias with a note ‘to greet the return of the Gods’.

HD is also represented by a short but powerful quote on the main introductory wall label. Here she is recorded as noting, in her memoir of Freud and her psychoanalytical treatment, what we’ve already observed, that his rather staggering array of figurines, statuettes and antiquities were intimately bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis. But she goes on to say something more. She has the insight that they helped Freud to ‘stabilise the evanescent thought’ that was continually at risk of dissipation.

This is a new and powerful insight. I’ve already mentioned the idea of ambivalence, which follows from Freud’s dual structure of the mind (conscious mind struggling to repress all kinds of unconscious urges). Once developed, this explains how we can all have ambivalent or contradictory feelings about objects, because there is so much going on in the unconscious which we’re not aware of, and because the human psyche’s tendency to project these feelings, moods, anxieties, desires onto all manner of inanimate objects around us.

So much for ambivalence. And so much for the notion that Freud used the antiquities to inspire his ideas about excavating and archaeology. It’s a typically voodoo, Freudian, psychoanalytical insight, one which appears absurd on the surface but slowly makes more sense the more you ponder it, that the figurines littering his desk and study, also in some sense, limited and controlled his thought.

Because if there’s one thing about Freud’s achievement as a writer, it’s that he was so very fecund with ideas. From the initial insights around 1900 were to spring an exploding, ever-ramifying, ever-more complex system or network or matrix of ideas and insights and categories and theories and terminology which he never ceased developing and refining, and which he consciously amplified and spread beyond psychology into disciplines far removed from his area of expertise, as this exhibition makes abundantly clear.

So maybe the figurines not only inspired his writing (and his treatment) but also brought him back to the thing he started writing about, focused things back on the project in hand. They were instruments of inspiration and control.

Who’s to say whether this is ‘true’ or not, but by this stage, hopefully, you have joined me in not being so concerned about the truth of a lot of this so much as its interpretive and, above all discursive power. It enables the imagination. Psychoanalysis’s uncanny combination of scientific phraseology applied to ideas which sometimes seem acute, sometimes way off beam, sometimes suck you in and make you see the world in a completely different way, this all leaves the pragmatic world of truth values far behind as we go romping through a wild and shaggy, dense and huge, huge and fascinating imaginative realm.

Three figurines from Freud’s collection. Which one – smooth elegant Egyptian, primitive fertility figure, or happy dancer – do you identify with, and why?

Digital archive

The exhibition is accompanied by a digital multimedia resource, containing video recordings, podcasts, photos of rarely seen objects from the collection, and a list of suggested reading.

Related links

The Freud Museum has had a previous exhibition specifically on the theme of archaeology:

Related books

The Museum has produced a comprehensive catalogue for the exhibition, with essays expanding the themes raised in the wall labels. But, unsurprisingly, there also turn out to be quite a few book-length academic studies of Freud’s fascination with antiquity and obsession with collecting:

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by Simon on June 12, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Archaeology, Biography, Psychoanalysis
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Posted by Simon on June 12, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/12/freuds-antiquity-object-idea-desire-the-freud-museum/

A Hard Man is Good to Find! @ the Photographers Gallery

‘The many men, so beautiful…’
(from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

A Hard Man is Good to Find! charts over 60 years of gay photography in London from the 1930s to the 1990s.

You don’t have to be naked to be butch, you don’t even have to be gay to be an object of gay attraction. Vince Man’s Shop catalogue, Spring/Summer 1957 edition, featuring model Sean Connery, photo by Bill Green. Courtesy the Alistair O’Neill Collection

Homosexuality illegal and legal

For the first half of the period homosexuality was a criminal activity which was severely punished, with the threat of exposure hanging over hundreds of thousands of gay men, and making them susceptible to blackmail and intimidation. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised gay sexual activity but left in place many forms of legal and social discrimination and so gave rise to the gay liberation movement which campaigned for full social equality.

Personal note: In 1978 I joined the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, enjoyed going on marches, signing petitions and spending time at Windsor’s only gay pub. Through all this I discovered that I am not gay but discovered a susceptibility to gorgeous men, hunky men, specially young working class men, the kind that you used to see doing labouring jobs with a wonderfully carefree physical exuberance, the kind of young bloke photographed in the 1960s by Anthony C. Burls (see below).

The Obscene Publication Act remained in force

Anyway, back at the exhibition: it brings together more than 100 photos of men’s bodies, taken with a distinctly gay or queer sensibility. The thing to really understand is that throughout the period, from the 1930s till well into the 1980s, despite the 1967 law about homosexual acts, risqué images of male nudity – taking them, owning them, distributing them, publishing them – remained a criminal offence under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.

A lovely boy. John Hamill by John S Barrington (about 1966) Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

A secret history

All this explains why, as the tools of photography became cheaper and more widely available, from the 1920s and 30s onwards a clandestine visual culture emerged. During the 1930s stunning images of athletic male physiques could be associated with the general social trend towards hiking and healthy outdoor activities. During the Second World War photographers were encouraged to take photos of our brave boys looking butch and manly. After the war publishers gained more confidence but were still liable for arrest and confiscation of stock. It was only really in the later 1960s that, along with so many other social movement, gay men felt increasing confidence in depicting their lifestyles and objects of desire openly.

Throughout the period there is a continual interplay and overlap between licit and illicit ways of visualising the male body: the naked athlete trope ultimately derived from statues of ancient Greek and Roman men. Images of tough soldiers could walk a narrow line between being heterosexual propaganda and gay adoration. Young men sunbathing could be following European models of health and fitness. Models and precedents from heterosexual art and culture were continually being subtly reworked, the borderline between legal art and illegal ‘obscenity’ shimmered and wavered within individual images, different definitions of desire fight in single photographs.

Anyway, the repression gay photos were liable to be subject to at any moment explains why a good deal of this visual culture was underground or hidden. Some gay publications were subscription only, others were available as a sideline in otherwise ‘respectable’ book and art shops. In the 60s and 70s more magazines and specialist shops came out of the closet.

The male nude as fine art. David Dulak by Angus McBean (1946) Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

London locations

The exhibition takes an interesting approach which is to divide the photos, and the gay magazines and bookshops which distributed them, by area of London. Thus it’s divided into sections which deal with Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Marylebone, Portobello, the Serpentine and Euston.

Highgate

Apparently Hampstead Heath is London’s most renowned cruising spot for gay men. Young artist Keith Vaughan bought a Leica camera and set up a dark room in his bedroom. Aged just 21 he then made a n album of photos of gorgeous young men at Highgate Men’s Pond in the summer of 1933.

Highgate Men’s Pond Album by Keith Vaughan (1933) Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries

John S. Barrington trained as an artist at St Martin’s School of Art. In 1938 he persuaded two men he’d met on the Charing Cross Road, dancer David Dulak and his friend Vik, to accompany him to Highgate Men’s Pond so he could photograph them nude – and thus began a long career as a ‘physique photographer’. Dulak was later photographed by Angus McBean, see two photographs above.

John Mckay made studies of ballet dancers and performers.

Between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks

I.e. Pimlico, an area of boarding houses and rented rooms, an enclave of queer life. Angus McBean opened his photographic studio on Belgrave Road in 1935.

Montague Glover had served in the First World War where he was awarded a medal. He went on to practice as an architect with photography on the side. His military career gave him easy access to the barracks where he recruited like-minded Guards to return to his studio or rented rooms and pose in less than full uniform. Squaddies available for gay sex were known as ‘a bit of scarlet’.

In the 1950s Basil Clavering ran a cinema on the Charing Cross Road but he also built a photographic studio in the basement of his house on Denbigh Street, Pimlico. Here they recruited military men to pose in genuine uniforms and also act out various scenarios, some kinky, some humorous. He and his partner John Charles Pankhurst, invented the ‘storyette’, a series of stills, as from a movie, which told a story, often saucy, sometimes featuring corporal punishment.

Just doing the housework. Storyette EX FJSS print, 1950s by Basil Clavering (aka Royale). Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

The Serpentine

In the 1950s British bodybuilding magazines catered for two audiences, straight bodybuilders and a gay readership. As well as the obvious photos and articles, in their back pages these magazines offered discreet mail order services for ‘original physique studies’. This section features the work of mail order publisher William Domenique (trading as Lon of New York) and gay erotic artist Bill Ward.

Paul Hawker came from Bristol, moved to London, and took photos of young men preening and parading at the Serpentine Open Air swimming pool, another well-known gay haunt. He is represented by some of the photos he took of his friend, body builder Spencer Churchill. Apparently Churchill was one of the first to adopt the American fashion for denim workware jeans as regular casual clothing.

Spencer Churchill, 1951 by Paul Hawker. Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

Marylebone

‘The City of Quebec’ pub in Marylebone is supposed to be London’s oldest gay pub. It opened in 1946 and was popular with gay RAF men. Bill Green learned photography and wrestling in the RAF and in 1946 set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, soon establishing a name for ‘physique photography’. He advised beginners to use a little oil to help highlight the contours of male musculature.

In 1954 Green opened a men’s fashion boutique in Foubert’s Place, Soho. In 1956 his assistant, John Stephen, opened another fashion store. According to the exhibition’s curator, Alistair O’Neill, Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, these sparked ‘the peacock revolution’ in men’s fashion. They helped turn Carnaby Street into the centre of modern fashion.

Artist Patrick Prockter also had a studio on Manchester Street. He took photos as preparatory studies for paintings, especially of his boyfriend Gervase Griffiths. He cultivated an artistic circle which included painter David Hockney, fashion designer Ossie Clark, and physique model Peter Hinwood. The veteran photographer Cecil Beaton was attracted to this young group of openly queer men. The exhibition includes sets of colour photos of Griffiths on a beach, and two by Beaton which are among my favourites, not because they’re nude, camp or gay – simply because they’re beautiful.

Photo of Gervase Griffiths, titled ‘Narcissus of 1967’ by Cecil Beaton

Earl’s Court

This was the location of BDM publications, set up by Alexander McKenna and partners, which published a range of styles, from the lifestyle magazine ‘Jeffrey’ to more explicit titles such as ‘Hung Heavy’, ‘Taste of Beefcake’ and ‘Leather Studs’.

Notting Hill

Became known after the war for its combination of bachelor housing and growing immigrant community. In the early 1980s ceramics artist Emmanuel Cooper picked up a set of negatives at Portobello Market. It turned out to be a set of studies of nude or partially clothed young men with an obvious queer vibe taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. Cooper titled it ‘The Portobello Boys’ and arranged for its publication. They are surprisingly homely, unguarded, intimate studies of everyday life.

One of the Portobello Boys, hopefully only fiddling with his zip. The Portobello Boys, early 1960s. Courtesy The Bishopsgate Institute Special Collections and Archives

Euston Road

Martin Spenceley photographed young men in Euston in the 1980s, scouting for Teds, punks and skinheads, persuading them to pose by cheekily lying that he worked for Vogue America. David Gwinnutt started taking photos of the post-punk gay scene as an art student. Patrick Prockter introduced him to his generation of artists.

Thomas Mervyn Horder (Baron Horder) was the chairman of Duckworths, the literary publisher in in the 1950s and 60s. He also had a sideline as a physique photographer under the pseudonym Larry Knight, publishing in specialist magazines with titles like ‘Grecian Guild Pictorial’ and ‘Der Kreis’.

History of the posing pouch

In line with the unwritten law that absolutely all exhibitions these days must either be about America or feature Americans, there’s a little annex off to the side of the main gallery which gives an amusing history of the posing pouch. In this version of the story this skimpy little piece of fabric, barely enough to cover a man’s meat and two veg with the thinnest of fabrics going round the waist, was invented in America.

It developed from the aim of American gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as legally possible. In 1945 Bob Mizer started the Athletic Model Guild, a model agency for bodybuilders for the film industry. In 1951 he launched a quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial. For his photoshoots Mizer developed the skimpiest possible garment which dwindled down to the posing pouch. The exhibition explains that the earliest versions were sewn for him by his mother who, nonetheless, strongly disapproved of his sexuality.

Original 1955 posing pouch as sewn by Bob Mizener’s mum (or mom)

We are told that the shape and tan colour of the pouch was often lightly drawn on photos over the willy of nude models in order to avoid prosecution if the parcel they were distributed in was stopped and searched by the authorities; but that the happy recipient could then easily, in the safety of their own home, rub the little patch off and glory in the sight of total male nudity!

Slightly spoiling the effect, there is a small mention of the photographic evidence that this kind of super-minimalist covering was, in fact, being worn by sunbathing men in London in the early 1930s. Still. American has to be shoehorned in somehow.

Mixed media

It’s not just photos. Within each part of London the curators identify gay photographers who lived and worked in that area, but also includes catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications to show how the photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared. In the 1970s publishers of gay photos send out catalogue sheets like this one to customers, who then ordered full-sized body shorts and prints of the guys they fancied.

Which one would you send off for? 1970s catalogue sheet by John S Barrington. Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

White Brixton

Anthony C. Burls was an interesting character. In the 1960s he ran a coffee shop at the World’s End in Chelsea, got odd jobs working at funfairs, and attended a gym in Brixton. In all these settings he asked working class men if he could photograph them and the result is a series of full length, mostly fully clothed studies which I think I liked most out of the exhibition. He named the series ‘The Londoners: Official reports’, including not just the photos but the man’s job description and a pen profile. His first business address was Studio 200 on Railton Road, also home to the South London Gay Community Centre.

Back to John S. Barrington. In the later 70s he set up the 252 Gallery on Brixton Hill, which included photographs but also drawings and sculptures. He sent out catalogues listing his many gay models and categorising them by race as well as arranging them by head and masked torso. They’re included here as an interesting example of the taxonomy of desire.

Black Brixton

Rotimi Fani-Kayode lived in Brixton from 1983 to 1989. His work explores the paradoxes of the Black queer experience. He’s represented by a work called the Golden Phallus.

The Golden Phallus by Rotimi Fani-Kayode ( 1989) © Rotimi Fani-Kayode / Autograph ABP

Guy Burch was director of the Brixton Art Gallery from 1985 to 1988. Artist, writer and curator, he’s represented by photo study drawings and collages.

Frank B came to prominence for his performances which involved blood letting, performed in the late 1980s in gay fetish clubs and is represented by photographic invitation cards to a private screening of a 6-minute art movie.

Ajamu X is an artist, curator, archivist and activist whose work explores ‘the nuances of intersectional experience as a Black British queer man’. He is represented by contact sheets which show him playfully wearing a white cotton bra and panties.

Thoughts

To be quite honest this exhibition wasn’t quite as sexsationally fabulous as I was expecting it to be. A lot of the images are quite small, many are only on contact sheets of 20 or 30 tiny, tiny images which I had to lean right up to in order to see properly. Take the contact sheet of 40 or so images of Black artist Ajanu X who is, unexpectedly, wearing a white bra and panties in various states of disarray. Funny and sexy but tiny, each image only an inch square or less.

I enjoyed the staggering physiques of some of the Greek athlete-style photos from the 1930s and 40s. I liked the couple of photos by Cecil Beaton of Gervase Griffiths lazing by a fountain or posing among cow parsley in some field, because they were so redolent of a kind of Pink Floyd 1960s.

I liked Anthony C. Burls’ set of photos of the rough, dirty, tough-looking young men you get working at  funfairs and such, swaggering among the dodgems in tight jeans, unbuttoned shirts and rocker brylcreemed hair.

There were several sequences of young men, obviously soldiers, in full uniform and then various stages of undress, hanging out together. There was a whole set of young blokes around the house, sitting, reading, smoking, half dressed or with their cocks hanging out their trousers, the Portobello Boys. Mildly interesting, but I went to an all-boys school and shared houses with blokes at university; admittedly we didn’t spend social time with our willies hanging out of our trousers – at least not when sober.

Overall, I think the interest is not so much in the images, per se, as in their variety, and also in the extraordinary density and complexity of the clandestine networks of gay photographers, subjects, printers, publishers and distributors which the wall labels describe and explain. That’s interesting social history.

And then, when you lay the complex mesh of legal and cultural and visual parameters over the images you get, as it were, another layer of complexity beyond the images themselves; you get to see them as varying visual strategies and approaches and sublimations of very powerful male urges of desire and sexuality.

Two learnings

I don’t think I’d ever noticed the phrase ‘physique photography’ before, but here it kept recurring and being explained as a style of photography which goes beyond the passive idea of the ‘nude’ to celebrate a kind of effortful, muscular, athletic masculinity. Think body-building.

Stunning example of ‘physique photography’. Indian bodybuilder Monotosh Roy shot by Bill Green (Vince) in the 1950s

Related to it was a comment in a wall label right at the end making a simple but devastating point that, as LGBTQ+ culture gained confidence in the 1990s, photographers, publishers and consumers felt more confident in producing and consuming gay pornography.

The point being that the delicate balancing act, the hints and subtleties of the preceding decades, the self-imposed restraint which made ‘physique photographs’ walk such an exciting fine line between factual depiction of male anatomy and objects of lust from the 1930s to the 80s – all this tended to be swept away as gay art gained confidence in the 1990s. Now artists could depict explicit photos of erect penises and men doing all kinds of things with them to other men. Obviously delicacy and subtlety continue in a thousand flavours, but the era of constrained delicacy and obligatory subtlety came to an end with the arrival of explicit gay pornography.

Bodybuilder in Bra by Ajamu X (1990)

A note on nomenclature

The introduction explains that ‘queer’ is now the accepted academic term for non-normative sexualities but the curators acknowledge that it used to be a term of abuse (as it was when I was growing up) and so older visitors might be offended by its use. At the same time, they acknowledge that the more factual, legalistic term ‘homosexual’, which older visitors might be comfortable with, is ‘problematic’ for the younger generation.

The need for this note prompts the reflects the ongoing (and, I imagine, eternal) struggle human beings have to make sense of the disruptions, embarrassments and irrational instincts of sex which we find ourselves saddled with.

Willies

Having been to hundreds and hundreds of exhibitions curated by feminist curators and read thousands of wall labels written by feminist curators, I have had the notions of toxic masculinity, of the poisonous affect of the male gaze, of the evils of male sexual attention, of male sexual harassment, and the unspeakable terror of seeing a penis from which some women, apparently, never recover, drummed into me again and again and again. Even the shamefully biased mega-exhibition about so-called ‘Masculinities’ at the Barbican didn’t include one single image of a penis for fear of offending sensitive visitors.

It was, therefore, rather disorientating, gave me a sense of vertigo, to walk into a pair of rooms absolutely flooded with this object of terror and fear – showing a proliferation of penises, peckers and plonkers, willies and winkles and weenies, cocks and tools and todgers.

Like all the other ‘banned’ part of the human anatomy, like women’s breasts and, more so, vulvas, if images of penises are strictly rationed and you only occasionally see one, it can all too easily be overloaded with lust and desire. Whereas if you freely see scores, then hundreds of them, in all their variety and humanity and mundaneness, quite quickly you get used to the sight, and then a bit bored.

From a visual point of view penises obviously come in two states, flaccid and bored or aroused and erect. Presumably this is, or was, in the period under study, the threshold between images which could be justified as art or at least decorative (flaccid) and pornography (erect).

Anyway, it’s worth mentioning that I don’t think there’s a single erect penis in the show. Maybe this is because the exhibition itself had to tread a fine line and the inclusion of erect penises would have crossed that line (? I don’t know the law on the matter). Maybe because pretty much all the photographers on show here used the flaccid/erect distinction as a simple rule of thumb (were there legal precedents under the Obscene Publications Act regarding the exact angle of arousal of the member? Again, not being a lawyer, I don’t know.)

For whatever reason, no erections at all are on display here and probably over half the images didn’t show penises at all (e.g. all the athletic, posing pouch-style photos; or a lot of the fully dressed soldiers or fairground workers; or just the many portraits which focused on faces) and all the ones that did include a penis showed it only as a slack, slumping, limp willy.

These kinds of images captured what I imagine is most men’s attitude to their penises; on rare and special occasions it may be roused and primed for action, but most of the time it’s just another part of the body which you barely think about unless you have to pee, or you inadvertently squash it while riding a bike or some such activity. Ouch!

In this respect a lot of the photos seemed (to me) to be surprisingly stripped of the urgency of sexual desire (lust) and instead conveyed quite a homely, almost domestic vibe of what it is to be a young man, to be naked and to lark around with other men. I’ve been to scores and scores of exhibitions making polemical points about women’s bodies, depicting them from every angle and analysing in immense detail the way women’s bodies are depicted in all sorts of media and the never-ending iniquity of the male gaze, as a matter of burning social and political importance.

This exhibition is a rare opportunity to look at scantily clad bodies without feeling a soupcon of guilt; and and space where the visitor can just accept and enjoy the sight of the male body, in all its variety, for what it is.

Catalogue sheet 3, 1949, by Bill Green (Vince). Stephen Cartwright collection

Last thought

This exhibition triggers nostalgia for an age before the internet: talk of photography as an activity restricted to a talented few, of hard copy magazines and subscriptions, of mail order catalogues, of the extraordinary lengths you had to go to to get sight of a photo of a naked man – all this consigns the entire exhibition to a past which is rapidly retreating.

For now we have 1) smartphones and 2) the internet. 1) More or less everyone has access not just to cameras, but to extremely high-quality cameras and amazingly sophisticated image manipulation softwares. Everyone’s a photographer these days. 2) And any image of anything, alive or dead or ever conceived, can now be accessed at the touch of a screen, including as many naked bodies, male, female or whatever, as your hard drive can cope with.

This entire exhibition bespeaks not just a world of repression and restraint, but of rarity and difficulty. Now nothing is rare and everything is available. Soon the subtle aesthetics of constraint and tact described in this exhibition will seem as dated and historical as the pictorial conventions of Georgian England.

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by Simon on May 24, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, Photography
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Posted by Simon on May 24, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/24/a-hard-man-is-good-to-find-the-photographers-gallery/

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