Intercourse (9 page)

chapter three

STIGMA

S
T
IGMA COMES FROM THE LATIN FOR “MARK,” THE GREEK for “tattoo”; its archaic meaning is “a scar left by a hot iron ” a brand; its modern meaning is a “mark of shame or discredit” or “an identifying mark or characteristic. ”
¹
The plural, stigmata, commonly refers to marks or wounds like the ones on the crucified Christ, suggesting great punishment, great suffering, perhaps even great guilt.

Inside a person, sexual desire—or need or compulsion—is sometimes experienced as a stigma, as if it marks the person, as if it can be seen; a great aura emanating from inside; an interior play of light and shadow, vitality and death, wanting and being used up; an identifying mark that is indelible; a badge of desire or experience; a sign that differentiates the individual carrying it, both attracting and repelling others, in the end isolating the marked one, who is destroyed by the intensity and ultimate hopelessness of a sexual calling. The person, made for sex or needing it, devoted to it, marked by it, is a person incarnated restless and wild in the world and defined by fucking: fucking as vocation or compulsion or as an unfulfilled desire not gratified by anything social or conventional or conforming. The stigma is not imposed from outside. Instead, it is part of the charge of the sexuality: an arrogant and aggressive pride (in the sense of hubris) that has a downfall built into it; a pride that leads by its nature—by virtue of its isolating extremity—to self-punishment and self-destruction, to a wearing down of mind and heart, both numb from the indignity of compulsion. In the electricity of the stigma there is a mixture of sexual shamelessness, personal guilt, and a defiance that is unprincipled, not socially meaningful in consequence or intention, determined only by need or desire. Isolation and intensity, panic, restlessness, despair, unbreachable loneliness even, propel the person; the price paid for the obsessed passion is an erosion of innocence: innocence being, in the end, only hope. The pleasure too is part of being marked; having a capacity for what Serafina delle Rose calls “the love which is glory. ”
²
In
The Rose Tattoo
by Tennessee Williams, Serafina sees her husband’s rose tattoo, which is on his chest, on her own breast after fucking, and she knows that she is pregnant, “that in my body another rose was growing. ”
³
The rose, in Christian symbolism a sign of carnality, is the brand the husband’s lovemaking leaves on the women he fucks, who are obsessed with him, who live for the sex they have with him. His mistress gets a rose tattooed on her breast, in fevered commemoration of his touch. His wife has a vision of a rose tattoo on her breast, his rose tattoo, but the vision is not ethereal:

That night I woke up with a burning pain on me, here, on my left breast! A pain like a needle, quick, quick, hot little stitches. I turned on the light, I uncovered my breast! —On it I saw the rose tattoo of my husband.
⁴

The meaning of the tattoo here is not that she is passively possessed; the brand is not intended only as a sign of sexual ownership. Instead, the stigma is mystically transferred to her by a magic that is both carnal and spiritual so that it signifies her essence, an active obsession, a passion that is both relentless and righteous, the whole meaning and praxis of her fierce character. In her memory she owns him through the sex they had, the sensuality and tenderness between them. As she says, deluded, to some women:

“Go on, you do it, you go on the streets and let them drop their sacks of dirty water on you! —I’m satisfied to remember the love of a man that was mine—only mine!
Never touched by the hand of
nobody!
Nobody
but
me!—Just me! ”
⁵

Her memory is dense with sexual feeling, a corrugated passion of fulfillment and longing:

I count up the nights I held him all night in my arms, and I can tell you how many. Each night for twelve years. Four thousand—three hundred—and eighty. The number of nights I held him all night in my arms. Sometimes I didn’t sleep, just held him all night in my arms. And I am satisfied with it.... I
know
what love-making was...
⁶

The mark is on her, not just superficially, but put into her skin with burning needles, and it is also a vision with its mystical component, a sign that she is pregnant, a holy woman who knows a holy fuck; she is the carnal embodiment of a Holy Mother, her devotion to fucking being religious in quality: “To me the big bed was beautiful like a religion. ”
⁷
She keeps the big bed of her marriage after the death of her husband, not changing it for a single bed as widows are supposed to do; it is another sign that marks her. The tattoo, which was on her breast only for a moment, is indelible in her experience, because the fucking was indelible in her experience, as a sensual obsession surviving her husband’s death, creating a monstrous desire for the sex; that desire—a combination of insatiable longing and lived sensuality, a memory almost physical in its weight and texture—is symbolized by the rose tattoo. She isolates herself in her house for three years, not dressing, sewing to make a living, with the ashes of her dead husband in an urn, serving as part of a religious shrine (with the Madonna); and her mourning is a prolonged sex act, lovemaking that never reaches a climax but becomes more and more fevered, a sexual obsession that is a passion sustained into near madness.

Alma in
Summer and Smoke
finds the meaning of life in

[h]ow everything reaches up, how everything seems to be straining for something out of the reach of stone—or human— fingers... To me—well, that is the secret, the principle back of existence—the everlasting struggle and aspiration for more than our human limits have placed in our reach.
⁸

Her name means “soul” in Spanish; her symbol is the stone angel named “Eternity” that is in the center of the public square. She is different from everyone around her, even as a child of ten having “
a
quality of extraordinary delicacy and tenderness or spirituality in her...
She has a habit of holding her hands, one cupped under the other in a way similar to that of receiving the wafer at Holy Communion.
”
⁹
As
an adult, her speech has an exaggerated elegance that sets her apart as someone who has affectations; she has a nervous laugh, a premature spinsterish-ness. She is concerned with art and literature and higher things. Loud noises shock her. She is a hysteric who swallows air when she laughs or talks and has palpitations of the heart. John, the dissolute doctor whom she has loved since they were both children, diagnoses her as having “a
Doppelganger
and the
Doppelganger
is badly irritated. ”
¹⁰
The
Doppelganger
is the sexuality hidden inside of her. She is marked by it, however deeply it is hidden. But she is also marked, stigmatized, by her purity, the intensity of her soul, her refusal to be diverted from it. Each is the same energy to different ends. “‘Under the surface, ”’John tells her, “'you have a lot of excitement, a great deal more than any other woman I have met. ’”
¹¹
She is not being disingenuous when she says that she wants more than the physical sex—pedestrian by the standard of her soul—that he is offering: “Some people bring just their bodies. But there are some people, there are some women, John—who can bring their hearts to it, also—who can bring their souls to it! ”
¹²
He challenges her to show him the soul on a chart of human anatomy: “It shows what our insides are like, and maybe you can show me where the beautiful soul is located on the chart. ”
¹³
In the sad ending, he has come around to her way of thinking, as he puts it, “that something else is in there, an immaterial something—as thin as smoke... ”
¹⁴
But Alma has abandoned the ambitions of her soaring soul; she wants sex with him, an intense connection of physical passion. Denied by him, she ends up wandering late in the nights to the stone angel in the public square, taking little white pills and picking up traveling salesmen. Whether ethereal or promiscuous, she is an outsider because of the intensity and purity of her longing. She wanted absolute love—by definition, an uncompromising passion— and this great ambition, so outside the bounds of human possibility, ends up being met by strangers and pills. The strangers and the pills provide the intensity of sensation, the absorption in feeling, that her soul craves. She wanted a passion larger than what she perceived as mere physical sex, a passion less commonplace (less vulgar); and though Williams frames her as a model of repression, suggesting by the formula of the play that sleeping with John would have done for her all along, in fact the character he created is too immense and original for that to be true, John too small and ordinary. She ends up lonely, wandering, desperate, not only because she misplaced the passions of the body in the soul but also because the passions of the soul dwarf the capacities of the body. So she has two addictions: men and pills. Ethereal or promiscuous, she is stigmatized by the awesome drive behind her desire, the restlessness of her soul on earth, the mercilessness of her passion, hardest on her, leaving her no peace. Chaste or promiscuous, she is sexual because she is pure and extreme, with a passion larger than her personality or her social role or any conflicts between them, with a passion larger than the possibilities in her life as a minister’s daughter or, frankly, as a woman anywhere. Her desire is grandiose and amoral, beyond the timidity she practices and the conscious morality she knows. She is stigmatized by her capacity for passion, not unlike artistic genius, the great wildness of a soul forever discontent with existing forms and their meanings; but she, unlike the artist, has no adequate means of expression. She would have to be, perhaps, the stone angel transmuted to flesh and still be named “Eternity. ” In the last scene of the play, both she and the stone angel are in the public square. She, being flesh, needs and takes the man. The stigma, finally, is in that alone: the old-time weakness of the flesh; needing and wanting alive like exposed nerve endings, desire being coldly demanding, not sloppy and sentimental. She is both vulnerable and calculating in need, a shadow haunting a public walk and a predator stalking it, picking up what she needs—inside the strange fragility of her human desire, someone genuinely as cold as a stone angel.

This stigma of sexuality is not sexual vigor or beauty or charisma or appetite or activity that makes one stand out; nor is it a capacity for passion that makes one different. This being marked by sexuality requires a cold capacity to use
and
a pitiful vulnerability that comes from having been used, or a pitiful vulnerability that comes from longing for something lost or unattainable—love or innocence or hope or possibility. It is often pathetic, not noble, because the consequences to a human life of sex desired and had are often pathetic, reducing the person to pathos. Being marked by sexuality means that experience has effects—that one is marked where one has been touched, and the mark stays; that one is not new, nor is one plastic and rubber, a blow-up doll for sex. The stigma is not a sign of being blessed, chosen, by and for sex because one is a sexual athlete or a sexual actor and therefore stands out, vigorous and beautiful, devoted to sex, impervious to its costs. Being marked means that the sex has costs, and that one has paid. It means having human insides, so that experience—all experience, including sexual experience—has a human resonance. The stigma is being set apart not by a vocation for sex alone, but also perhaps by a vocation for human consequences—loss, suffering, despair, madness.

In
A
Streetcar Named Desire
, Stanley Kowalski is a sexual animal, without self-consciousness, without introspection. The playwright describes Stanley:

Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. Branching out from this complete and satisfying center are all the auxiliary channels of his life, such as his heartiness with men, his appreciation of rough humor, his love of good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer.
¹⁵

He is the prototypical male animal, without remorse. Each act of sex or act of animal exhibition of virility is nature, not art; in the realm of the inevitable, brute force, an ego that functions as part of the body’s appetites.

Having been beaten by him, his wife Stella waits for him, wanting him. She defends her willingness to accept the beating to her sister, Blanche Du Bois, who wants her to rebel: “‘But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark—that sort of make everything else seem— unimportant. ’”
¹⁶
The wife, raised to be refined, wants the animal passion of her husband, not anything else that she has had or could be. All her past of sensibility and taste means nothing to her against the way her husband uses her in the dark. Blanche argues against the lowness of Stanley’s character and calling and for aspirations of her own, closer to tenderness:

He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There’s even something—subhuman—something not quite to the stage of humanity yet!... Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is—Stanley Kowalski! —survivor of the stone age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you—you
here—
waiting
for him! Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night!... Maybe we are a long way from being made in God’s image, but Stella! —my sister— there has been
some
progress since then! Such things as art— as poetry and music—such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make
growl
And
cling
to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching....
Don’t—
don’t hang back with the brutes!
¹⁷
[first two ellipses mine; third ellipsis Williams’s]