Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (44 page)

We will never understand
Othello
unless we consider the significance of age as an element of Othello’s undoing. Iago understands to perfection that this paragon of power, this martial African who descends from chieftains, has a special Achilles’ heel: not only is he an outsider to Venetian culture—read: Venetian women, women he is unequipped to decipher—but he can be made to feel sexually anxious. Iago is of course the play’s “naturalist,” the man who tells Rodrigo that Desdemona “must change for youth,” that “her delicate tenderness will find itself abused, begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor,” and not only does Iago believe it, but he goes a long way toward persuading Othello himself to believe it, telling him straight out that there is something rank and foul and unnatural in Desdemona’s decisions and affections. He manages also to infer Cassio’s sexual superiority: “Although ‘tis fit that Cassio have his place, / For sure he fills it up with great ability.”

All this is washing through Othello’s mind—to the Senate, he has already acknowledged “the young affects in me defunct”—as he measures his own possible limitations in this department: “Haply, for I am black / And have not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have; or for I am declined / Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much—/ She’s gone: I am abused, and my relief / Must be to loathe her. O, curse of marriage! / That we can call these delicate creatures ours / And not their appetites!” Much is in play here: wrong culture, wrong age, along with a recognition that bodies—one’s own, that of one’s own wife—are not actually ownable at all. But it is also the plaint of a man on the far side of youth, a man who perhaps met on his wedding night (if indeed the marriage was consummated then, something much debated by scholars) those very “appetites,” possessing a kind of energy and violence unlike what he’d seen on the battlefield.

And perhaps there is a significant dose of misogyny in all this. After all, Shakespeare is utterly reversing the clichés of his own moment: rather than giving us a testosterone-larded African with genital power (which his audience would have expected), he limns an unforgettable portrait of an older man in trouble, prey to the brilliant if diabolic innuendo of his ensign, recognizing that prowess in one area does not mean confidence in another. This is a formula for disaster, and Othello will explode. But female sexuality has its card to play: it has been pointed out that the infamous handkerchief—the domestic implement given to Othello by his mother, then gifted to Desdemona, then thought to have been offered to Cassio, retrieved by Emilia, ending up in Iago’s hands, to serve as a specious “proof” of infidelity—with the embroidered strawberries connoted to the Elizabethan audience the very iconography of Desdemona’s sexual parts: nipples, clitoris. Ah, those “appetites” the male cannot control.

For Desdemona, innocent and pure though she is, has the courage of her own wants and feelings, loves Othello with enough strength and guts to challenge all male authority, notably that of her own father; after all, she has eloped with him. At first Othello is touched by her feistiness—yes, she is feisty; just listen to her claiming her “domestic rights” to the Venetian Senate, as well as speaking hard truth to her stunned father about priorities and duties—but soon enough her very boldness works against her (just as her “moist” hands do), testifies to her increasingly paranoid husband that she is wanton, is thrall to sexual hunger and excess, is a monster of deceit and appetite. Misogyny, yes; but also the uncontrollable fears of an older man confronting and imagining his own inadequacy, his helplessness and victimization. Revenge will be his response. Hamlet, beset by the same generalized anxiety about female desire, told Ophelia to get herself to a nunnery; Othello, a military man hit in his very vitals, will murder his woman.

The critical reception of
Othello
has been an up-and-down affair: it was long considered inferior to
Hamlet, Macbeth
, and
Lear
because its emphasis on domestic rather than dynastic crises was thought to be a lesser subject. Needless to say, its explosive mix of racial prejudice and sexual violence gives it an immediate interest for modern readers, and any American who remembers the O. J. Simpson trial will concur that Shakespeare touches on deep-seated social anxieties. To add age as motivational factor to this mix is not to diminish the play but to understand more fully what Othello is up against and why he goes down. “Jealousy” is our all-encompassing term for his plight, but the ticking male clock (and the vulnerabilities it opens onto) also parse these bloody events.

The portrait of Blanche DuBois in Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
—fragile, affected, desperate, neurotic, slated for sexual execution—is among the most arresting things in American theater. It would seem as though all of Williams’s wounds and fears were packed into this doomed woman: her young first husband was gay, and her denunciation of him caused his suicide; her profound need for civility, gentility, and tenderness was quashed by reality, so it went “inside” to become the generative source of ever-greater evasions and disguises and manic acts. Blanche is death-haunted: by the blood on her hands, by the fantasyland of decorous conventions she holds on to, by a past that cannot be hidden or faced.

And by the clock. Blanche lives by a code of southern gallantry and female charms, and she is destined to die by it. She cannot bear too much light. As she tells Stella, “And so the soft people have got to—shimmer and glow—put a—paper lantern over the light.… But I’m scared now—awf’ly scared. I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick.… I’m fading now!”
I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick
. Here is sexual anxiety writ large, and it speaks volumes about the brutally eroticized setting in which women may find themselves obliged to perform and give their measure. In her desperate last play for a man, her doomed tryst with Mitch, she acknowledges that her “youth was suddenly gone up the water-spout” and that she needs peace and kindness. Perhaps her most sublime moment comes when she faces Stanley head-on at play’s end—minutes before being taken sexually (raped?), though she cannot know this—and speaks her truth/fiction about womanhood:

These lines may seem crazed and exaggerated—after all, Blanche comes to us (as well as to Stanley) as a lush who has been drummed out of town for her more-than-loose behavior with all manner of men, both young and old—but it represents the idealist code that Tennessee Williams wants more than anything to believe in: a kind of love that outlives entropy, that recognizes a beauty that is of the mind rather than the body. Aging as increase, not loss, as a different kind of beauty: how to make this stick?

I have especially wanted to bring Blanche into the argument because she is
not old
. Yes, she is fading (as so many of us are). But even Stanley finds her plenty appetizing: “maybe you wouldn’t be bad to—interfere with.” Not old, but too old nonetheless. Gender is the key here. Blanche DuBois lies about her age, says she is Stella’s younger sister, claims she is twenty-six, even though all parties know it to be a sham. Her great tragedy is that she is no longer in her prime, that she still must compete in the sexual game even though her charms are not what they were, will not sustain direct light. Williams’s play positively crackles with libidinal energy, as we see in both the hungry, panting, pawing, moaning couples onstage: Eunice and Steve, as well as Stella and Stanley. His New Orleans is a place first and foremost of fornication, of fornication’s rights and power. And by that standard Blanche DuBois fails the test. Yes, she is sexually hungry—the film version of her final encounter with Stanley shows arousal—but her plaint is about the passing of beauty, about the tragedy of seeming old when you can no longer pretend to be twenty-six. I said “gender,” because this is all too often woman’s fate. Men get away with murder on this front, it seems to me: Adonis or not, potbellied or not, even toothless, lame, and bald to boot, the (American) male seems forever green, unindicted, still able to pass the test, still a candidate for the bed. Mitch, inarticulate, ungainly, overweight, and sweating, is still a catch.

But Blanche hides from the light. Blanche’s elaborate yesteryear fantasies of courtesy and valor and refinement seem like a retreat into medieval courtly love, given how utterly alien the New Orleans scene is to such niceties. I believe that entire genteel code that Blanche subscribes to—defined by her urging Stella: “Don’t—don’t hang back with the brutes”—is cued to the passing of time and its despotic power against women. “Without your love, it’s a honky-tonk parade,” she sings in the bathtub, and the play suggests she’s right: the kind of love she posits is one that includes but transcends the body itself, whereas the raw lust of the play is one of coupling bodies, of smashing lightbulbs as part of the copulating fun, of honky-tonk parade. Belle Reve was doubtless never the haven of beauty and manners that Blanche says, but it does function as a beautiful dream,
un beau rêve
as the French has it, and Williams understands that life wrecks these dreams.

The play ends with Blanche being institutionalized as Stanley and Stella resume their passional life. What is being carted away is more than Blanche DuBois: it is the entire dream of beauty and sensitivity and refinement that she clung to. The animal regime of the play will not countenance it. She begins by fading, and she ends by being incarcerated. I want again to say: this is a woman’s fate. It is a fate that can be seen everywhere as women fight against the clock, as they are bombarded by media and songs and advertising about ways to trick time, ways to seem twenty-six forever, ways to stay in the game. How much of life is taken up by our war with time? By our fateful and coercive contract with beauty? With beauty as the indispensable ticket for love? At what point does growing old begin for women versus for men? Strindberg located it in menopause, but Blanche DuBois’s nightmarish fate suggests that it begins much, much earlier.

If growing old can sometimes entail sexual anxiety or the advent of a postsexual life phase, it is by no means the case that the old routinely hang fire. Life and literature are filled with instances of active oldsters, and that is fine. But let there be a great difference in age between partners, and these matters are apt to receive a different coloration. We know that traditional patriarchal societies confer substantial sexual rights to males even into old age, whether in Western or other cultures. Older women’s sexual rights seem a more vexed issue, often subject to (male) censure. One feels that nature itself is of the party here, seems to want the young to mate with the young, so as to produce the fittest offspring. All the ingredients of a plot are in place here: how to curb the lust of the old, so as to keep procreation on track and coerce the old into withdrawal. Once again we see the injunction to exit the stage, and once again we see that these matters are rarely simple or easy to take for the old.

The story of lusting old men has been told forever, and almost always for laughs, not tears. It is the staple item of comedy in Molière, where invariably an old male trying to hold on to power has designs on the damsel of the play, only to be predictably, often hilariously, sometimes movingly, undone by nature’s own plot of proper mating: the young belong together; the old should have the decorum, if not the wisdom, to bow out of this game. One sees this most vividly in his
L’école des femmes
, where Arnolphe’s lust for the young girl he has brought up and maintained in utter ignorance, covetously saving her for marriage with him, runs afoul of reality: Agnès, devoid of learning though she is, is instructed by her own senses about the sexual attraction of the young and its natural corollary, the dearth of appeal of the old. She blossoms and, by play’s end, displays considerable pluck as she asserts the “rightness” of her feelings. But Arnolphe follows a different trajectory, one of increasing desperation as his control project runs into ever more trouble. It is as if Arnolphe were progressively blinded, Agnès progressively sighted. This is love’s egalitarian work.

It is also literature’s work. The old in Molière are
not
wise, fall ever further into mania and obsession, become increasingly pathological and disturbing figures. And the young grow in self-awareness and self-possession, becoming ever more aware of the stakes of the game, of biological and social seriousness underneath the plot of errors and deceptions and self-deceptions leading finally to seeing clear.
L’école des femmes
can be seen or read in the course of a few hours, but those few hours trace a remarkable evolution in each of the principal figures: the maniacal old man and the naive maiden each undergoing a transformation in front of our eyes.

All this would simply be funny—which is how Molière must have initially seen it—but it moves into something darker as Arnolphe genuinely suffers from his desire. There is one late moment where he is begging the girl to consent to his needs, and he simply explodes with hunger:
“Sans cesse, nuit et jour, je te caresserai, / Je te bouchonnerai, baiserai, mangerai”
(“Constantly, night and day, I will caress you, fondle you, kiss you, devour you”). This irruption of
tu
into the man’s otherwise formal speech, this unstoppable display of unseemly, eruptive appetite, is harsh medicine for the man speaking it, and his next lines have an almost tragic ring to them, for they could have been written by Racine:
“Jusqu’où la passion peut-elle faire aller?”
(“How far can passion move us?”) And, not unlike Racine, Molière understands to perfection how desire reveals us to ourselves. This was true for Romeo and Juliet, for Des Grieux, for Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre, for Duras’s girl protagonist. But whereas love opened a door for them and propelled them through, it is destined to close one for Molière’s older man, to educate him into sentience and then to dispose of him, so the young can mate.