Intercourse (20 page)

Hitting bottom for Emma is classically female in form: the notary from whom she wants to borrow money will give it to her for sex. '“I am to be pitied—not to be sold, ”’
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she tells him. Desperate for help, she finds Rodolphe, “not seeing that she was hastening to offer herself to that which a while ago had so angered her, not in the least conscious of her prostitution. ”
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Rock-bottom is having a social inferior want to buy her; and a social superior turn her down, for money and sex. Rock-bottom is the behavior of prostitution, with or without the self-knowledge. Rock-bottom is being vulnerable enough to have a moneylender make the demand with death the only alternative to meeting it. A colleague of her husband wants the gravestone to read
Sta viator
(“Rest, traveler”); but eventually he settles on
Amabilen conjugem calcas
(“Tread upon a loving wife”). Indeed, she had been restless, never loving. As a young married woman

she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her...
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Romance was her suicidal substitute for action; fantasy her suicidal substitute for a real world, a wide world. And intercourse was her suicidal substitute for freedom.

For her creator, Gustave Flaubert, intercourse had been “always secondary. ”
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He held back, in brothels picking the ugliest prostitute and fucking her without taking his cigar out of his mouth; and to Louise Colet, his lover, he explained:

At times I have wanted to give pleasure to a woman, but the idea of the strange spectacle I should present at the moment of doing so made me laugh so much that all my desire melted under the fire of an inner irony, which sang a hymn of mockery and derision within me.
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The intercourse in his novel, however, did involve him. In a letter to Louise Colet, he wrote:

I am in full fornication, in the very midst of it: my lovers are sweating and gasping. This has been one of the rare days of my life passed completely in illusion, from beginning to end.... Now I have great pains in my knees, in my back, and in my head. I feel a like man who has been fucking too much (forgive the expression)—a kind of rapturous lassitude.
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He did not commit suicide, nor was he burned. He was charged with obscenity on the publication of
Madame Bovary
and later acquitted. His own virginity—the literal kind—was lost when the young master, nearly fifteen, forced himself on one of his mother’s maids. He experienced disgust and disappointment. There is no known record of what she experienced. Writing touched him; not much else did. As he wrote Louise Colet, who did not have the good sense to take it personally:

Brothels provide condoms as protection against catching the pox from infected vaginas. Let us always have a vast condom within us to protect the health of our soul amid the filth into which it is plunged.
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His privacy—“a vast condom”—was created by his will and his wealth, premised on the a priori reality of his physical freedom as a man; his fantasies were elevated to art; his visions were treated with bed rest. Emma, he had written somewhere after Rodolphe but before Leon, “now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated ”" So did he, choosing art over sex, “liberty in a world of fictions. ”
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He may have found distraction or the pleasures of male dominance in intercourse, but he found his freedom elsewhere.

For D. H. Lawrence, with whom we are doomed to be contemporaneous even though he was born in 1885, virginity was “her perfect tenderness in the body. ”
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Andre Brink, who writes in behalf of freedom in South Africa, imagines that in losing this “perfect tenderness” a woman wants to be hurt, to bleed:

... I tried to imagine how you would hurt me and cause me to bleed. I wanted to bleed, mulberry blood for you, for my own sake too: to know what it meant to be a woman, to be transformed into a person by you... It wasn’t even painful, with barely a show of blood.

“Is that all? ” I asked.
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Sophie Tolstoy, having been “transformed into a person” already, discovered another meaning in the word:

To-day I woke up for the first time with a sudden awareness of the beauty of nature; and my feeling was
virginal—I mean, without associations, without the recollection of anyone
through
whom I might have loved the beautiful nature of this countryside in the past. Some time ago I worked out a whole theory of the
virginal
attitude to
religion,
art, and
nature. Religion
is pure and virginal when it is not connected with all those Fathers... but connects my heart with God alone.
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Significantly, she found art virginal “when you love it for its own sake and without reference to the artist... ”
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Experience unmediated by male ego or interpretation is her idea of virginity. In the male frame, virginity is a state of passive waiting or vulnerability; it precedes and is antithetical to wholeness, to a woman existing in a way that counts; she counts when the man, through sex, brings her to life. In the woman’s frame, virginity is a fuller experience of selfhood and identity. In the male frame, virginity is virtually synonymous with ignorance; in the woman’s frame, it is recovery of the capacity to know by direct experience of the world. Parodying the male frame, Italo Calvino wrote:

We country girls, however noble, have always led retired lives in remote castles and convents. Apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas, gardening, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings, invasion, sacking, rape and pestilence, we have no experience. What can a poor nun know of the world?
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We live in the male frame; pinned there. Virginity is ignorance; and knowledge is being transformed by knowledge of a man, not just penetrated, the literal event. Virginity is in not yet having been subsumed: one’s being is still intact, penetrated or not.

Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
was written in 1897. D. H. Lawrence was still in adolescence and the world unknowingly tottered between the Victorian Age and the advent of Lady Chatterley.
Dracula
was a bridge between the two eras, a mediocre book but a surpassingly great myth, a parable of lust and death that buried the Victorians and let us children of the night rise from their graves.

In
Dracula, there are two virgins, Lucy and Mina. The young men who are their suitors may well be virgins too, but in human society men are rarely ontological virgins.

Lucy is the old-fashioned girl, surrounded by suitors, pretty, flirtatious, coy, ornamental; and Mina is the New Woman, a defender of women’s equal capacities in partnership with men: she will learn to type (a man’s job at the time, the typewriter considered heavy machinery) so that she can type her husband’s notes and papers and be his equal partner in work. Her feminism is witty and cheeky. She writes in her diary:

Some of the “New Women” writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the
^i;
New Woman” won’t condescend in the future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! There’s some consolation in that.
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Modern versions of the story, especially films, concentrate on Mina; but the book concentrates on Lucy. She is the prototypical female with no ambition other than marriage. She has no ambition, no substance, except that she is female in the best sense: compliant, ignorant, a virgin picking a husband. She has three marriage proposals, and all three men are in love with her: they are not looking for equal partners; they feel sexual desire for her. She feels sexual desire for Arthur, so she chooses him and rejects the others. Dracula the vampire has begun his seduction of her; but she stays physically a virgin in the conventional sense past her death. The place of sex is moved to the throat; and the meaning of sex is in draining her body of all its blood. Her virginity is a “perfect tenderness in the body, ” and the spilling of her blood is not a ritual of the first time but of every time. A literal virgin, and certainly ignorant, she knows nothing and wills nothing until after she herself appears to be dead and has become a sexual predator: then she has an appetite for blood, an appetite for life, never mediated or more than temporarily sated. In life, still human, her purity is suspect despite her virginity. Her choice of the suitor for whom she has sexual desire suggests already that she is not entirely good, despite the endless sighs of characters remarking on how good Lucy is. During her long affair with Dracula, when he comes and drinks her blood and she submits and is mesmerized and presumably feels ecstasy, her blood is replenished by those trying to save her life. Arthur is away; and so others give blood— her former suitors and Professor Van Helsing, the expert on vampires who is trying to outwit the vampire. When Arthur gives blood, he claims that the transfer of blood means that they are really married. The other men determine not to tell him that they too have been married to Lucy in the same way.

Arthur believed that ‘“the transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride. ’”
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By this standard, Lucy had been had and had and had: by all the men and Dracula, who as part of the ritual of conversion had his victim drink his blood, thus becoming an eternal predator.

Once decapitated with a stake in her heart, no longer a vampire, Lucy was “as we had seen her in life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity. ”
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Her virginity is returned to her; and it is Arthur who has accomplished this: “It made me shudder to think of so mutilating the body of the woman whom I had loved. And yet the feeling was not so strong as I had expected. ”
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Lucy’s virginity brings her many accolades but no strength or power or protection. Over the great stretch of the book, her blood is slowly drained out of her body—and her dying is watched by the men as if it were prolonged foreplay—each degree of her paleness is an event—Dracula takes the blood from her and they put theirs into her—she is close to death but not yet dead—more beautiful when awake and then, as she advances toward what should be death, more beautiful when she sleeps and looks dead.

Mina is a physical virgin as the story opens, engaged to Jonathan, who is away on business, trapped actually in Drac-ula’s castle in Transylvania. Set upon by female vampires, left to them by Dracula, Jonathan escapes and ends up in a hospital suffering from violent brain fever. Mina leaves Lucy, who is already on the decline (Dracula has made his way from Transylvania to England in the meantime), and goes to Jonathan in the hospital, where they are married.

She is a partner, a wife in a posture of attempted equality; and that is the form of her continuing virginity—she is untouched by sex in that she is not carnal, not greedy for sex or sensually submissive. Her integrity is intact. She has self-respect and compassion. She has learned typing and shorthand to participate in her husband’s work; she memorizes the train schedules to help him, to expedite his way. She is active, always anticipating his needs but without servility; she regards herself as one who works with him; she wants to participate in a life of the mind and a life of work, not leisure. She has the status of a virgin because of her relative equality with her husband in marriage: she is not possessed, tamed, debased, brought down by sex; she is untouched. She proves, according to Van Helsing, an old-fashioned moralist, "'that there are good women still left to make life happy—good women, whose lives and whose truths may make good lesson for the children that are to be. ’”
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Van Helsing acknowledges "'her great brain which is trained like a man’s brain... ”’
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Yet, as the men try to find Dracula, they exclude Mina from their efforts. Hearing the story of Lucy’s apparent death and real death, it is Mina who connects that train of events with Jonathan’s experiences at Dracula’s castle. Having provided this crucial information, she is then left out of all further discussions. She is socially defined as female by being segregated out of the search. This social definition of her as female isolates her from dialogue and knowledge; and it also makes her more physically vulnerable because she is physically alone. It genderizes her as marriage itself did not:

They all agreed that it was best that I should not be drawn further into this awful work, and I acquiesced. But to think that he keeps anything from me! And now I am crying like a silly fool, when I
know
it comes from my husband’s great love and from the good, good wishes of those other strong men.
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She is second-class, is treated as second-class, recognizes it, and accepts it, all for the first time. Socially defined as female, she is vulnerable as a female.

The irony, of course, is delicious as Jonathan Harker gazes on his sleeping wife and congratulates himself on protecting her:

I came tiptoe into our own room, and found Mina asleep, breathing so softly that I had to put my ear down to hear it. She looks paler than usual.... I am truly thankful that she is to be left out of our future work, and even of our deliberations. It is too great a strain for a woman to bear.
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