Seductress (31 page)

Over the next decade she acquired two bracelets hung with rings from her lovers that were too heavy to be worn together. Yet throughout the philandering she remained—atypically for sirens—a steadfast, good mother. She bore a second child with Arthur Bertrand, son of Napoleon’s steward, before moving on to men with still closer ties to Napoleon: Emperor Louis Napoleon and his cousin Prince Napoleon or Plon-Plon. As usual, she juggled lovers concurrently.

Once while the three traveled by train through England, Louis awoke to see his mistress in Plon-Plon’s arms and diplomatically closed his eyes. Despite this brazen polyamorism, Rachel’s ex’s tended to remain on friendly terms with her throughout her life. She kept up a long correspondence with Dr. Vernon and stayed close to both Plon-Plon and Napoleon III, later tutoring the emperor on how to carry himself as a ruler.

By 1848 Rachel seemed impregnable. Deified as a “genius” and “goddess of love,” onstage and in person, she moved from triumph to triumph. She wrung an unprecedented contract from the Comédie Française, performed grandstand recitations of “La Marseillaise,” and reinvented herself as a romantic actress with brilliant results. She now played “
the
courtesan” in Victor Hugo’s
Angelo,
the unscrupulous siren Lady Tartuffe, and other sexy supremas like Adrienne Lecoureur.

On a Russian tour the czar presented her with a solid gold crown and coffer of diamonds and rubies. Her power over men, if anything, increased. Influential lovers, such as publishing giant Michel Lévy and the Comédie Française director, did her bidding, and martyrs stalked and implored her. “Speak my queen,” wrote one, “give me the word and I shall run as my hounds run when I whistle to them.”

Yet one hound refused to heed her whistle: her health. By twenty-nine she had begun to cough blood, and she slowly succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis. Disease, however, only threw her egoism and life lust into overdrive. “Watch me light a candle,” she exalted, “instead of cursing the darkness.” She pitched herself into a hectic round of love affairs and mounted an ill-fated barnstorm of America. Forced to compete with “Jocko, the Ape of Brazil” on Broadway, she played to half-full houses, collapsed onstage, and was carried home more dead than alive.

She died with the class of a high priestess. While a naval officer delivered marriage proposals at her feet, she contemplated eternity beneath the Egyptian pyramids. She passed her final hours in the gothic tower room of a Mediterranean villa facing a bas-relief of a grieving muse. She rouged her cheeks, sent back love letters encased in fruit baskets, and at the end cooled her feverish fingers in the jewels given to her by lovers and potentates. Just before she died, a photographer caught her in front of a statue of Cupid, her eyes averted from the camera toward the hereafter.

The future didn’t reward her gaze. As Rachel Brownstein documents in her fascinating biography, Rachel didn’t go down well with the Victorians. Alarmed by this “gypsy-like creature of lawless moods,” this apotheosis of female sexual
über
power, they trashed and vilified her. Biographers pelted her with every known Jewish stereotype and called her a beast, monster, drunk, lesbian, and a “male talent.”

Women were her loudest detractors. She defiled the sex, they carped, with her “sad selfishness” and “frightful skinniness.” Two female writers of the day lit into her with particular venom. George Eliot compared her with Melusina, the fairy of the French legend who changes into a serpent once a week, and Charlotte Brontë likened her to both a snake and a demon that “shook with the passions of the pit.”

They captured her exactly. Rachel was just that: a shamanistic entrancer, a demonic eruption from the deeps of history, and a serpentine embodiment of eternal life. Not your average Victorian church mouse.

But then everything about this tiny waif-woman was outsize and mythic. When she was going down for the count and knew she would die, she said confidently, “It’s not so easy to bury people of my race and distinction.” Perhaps in her fuddled state she confused herself with her stage heroines or perhaps she sensed her true significance, as a priestess of the resurrection rites and (what her votaries claimed) a “mouthpiece of the gods.” Or more accurately as the goddess, the supreme spellbinder and erotic force of creation.

 

The women who hated these
sorcières
weren’t just mustachioed Mrs. Grundys and village scolds; many, like George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and the ladies of Lyons and Restoration England, composed the female intellectual and social elite of their age. More than merely parroting the male party line, they had their reasons. Even the most successful women are subtly conditioned by gender stereotypes, the injunctions to modesty, silence, stasis, sacrifice, subservience, monogamy, and sexual purity.

Such self-constriction doesn’t come cheap. And the merry artist-sirens gave the raspberry to the whole con. They refused to pay the price and got off scot-free, got all the marbles, men, and power. In a flash they invalidated women’s lives and made the noble careers of muse-maids, art martyrs, stunted poets, and diva spinsters look like colossal wastes.

If women, however, could have seen past their broken noses, they’d have found a feminine identity beyond their fondest dreams. Female artists don’t have to give up anything. Art and erotic power belong together by divine decree. Creativity contains aphrodisiacal plutonium, implanted there in the religiosexual rites of prehistory. The passions aroused by these ancient rites never disappear from the collective unconscious; women have only to tap the she-shaman to reignite them.

The
sorcières
can instruct us, too
.
Although fortunate in talent, teachers, and opportunities, they in large part, made their own luck. As artists they put their own stamp on the seductress persona. Their double job of nourishing their talents and making it against tough odds added shiv to their style. They took life by the throat, tore off the trodden paths, and picked mentors and men who sustained and nourished their gifts. With the artist’s high “libidinal energy” and creative upkeep, they expropriated the male privilege of seraglios and support-wives, while giving as much inspiration as they got. Like all seductresses, they were originals but to the nth power, accentuating and flourishing their eccentricities. Criticism rolled off like water from a swan’s back.

To the seductress’s queen bee personality, they added creative punch and foxfire. Even more than other sirens, they were full-souled self-actualizers with the androgyny, élan, and goddess aura that made men compare them to deities. But as descendants of the priestesses of holy madness they threw wonder dust on the flames—artistic delirium—and were the lady galores of the seductress tribe, all excess, glitz, and italics.

In their seductive siegecraft, they led with their art. Their love potions, idiosyncratically brewed as they were, were laced with the belladonna of shamanistic magic. On top of the usual blandishments of ego inflation, maternal nurture, and intimacy, they laid on the voodoo of their artistic
spécialité.
They brought theatrical spectacle or dance, for example, to the bedroom; they spoke the cabalistic word spells of ancient ritual; they created erotic obstacle courses with the tools of their craft and raised the bar with the numinous self-sufficiency of their calling.

Few were beauty pageant material. Yet they becharmed themselves beautiful through the necromancy of their art. For them, clothes, makeup, ornament, and setting took on the religio-magical significance of dramatic rite. Their homes weren’t designed to make men comfortable, but, like cave temples, to displace and transport. Their parties were strictly primitive—festivals of collective release and delirium.

Yeats said artists had to choose between life and art. Too smart for this ruse,
sorcières
fused both seamlessly. Their careers stoked their love lives and vice versa. They weren’t waylaid by muse-artist, love-career dualisms but easily appropriated the and/both holism of the goddess. They were great artists and lived in excelsis, swathed in happiness and male devotion.

They may rile us for reasons beyond their gender blasphemies and enviable lives. They often trample values we hold sacred: home, motherhood, honesty, modesty, community spirit, to begin the list. But what can you expect from avatars of the divine wonder-worker? They’re in the business of ecstasy and transformation. They dredge up the great goddess from the archaic depths of the psyche with their artistic diablerie and shake us to the roots of our being. They put us under their mythic spell, loosen our moorings, swell our loins, and lead us elsewhere—beyond self, safety, and civic responsibility.

No wonder patriarchy has been at such pains to punish
sorcières
and keep art out of female hands. Combined with women’s other seductive charms, creative magic can blow men and culture off the map. Jean Baudrillard makes an absolute correlation between seduction and art; they’re both, he says, works of “black magic” and mind-theft to another reality. This work, by rights, is a woman’s, the original mage and creatrix, the deity’s mistress of spells, who with her conjurer’s trunk of brushes, words, musical instruments, masks, and dancing shoes can hijack men to seventh heaven, have her way with them, and “foil all systems of power.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Machtweiber:
Seductresses in Politics

 

 

 

No people who place a woman over their public affairs prosper.
—MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET

 

Where a woman reigneth . . . there must needs Satan be president of the council.
—JOHN KNOX

 

—SEIGNEUR DE BRANTÔME

 

Personal and institutional power has been wielded by women without their becoming . . . anything less than women.
—WOLFGANG LEDERER

 

 

 

C
atherine the Great lies nude in her royal bed as her favorite horse (with heart-shaped shoes) is lowered by block and tackle onto her tumid loins. Cleopatra, after an all-night orgy with slave boys, summons them the next day and poisons them with sweetmeats. Butch-monarch Queen Christina charges into Versailles in filthy breeches and puts the ladies to flight with her foul obscenities. We all know the stories. No good comes of female political power. When women rule, hormones run amok and men head for the hills. As John Knox said four hundred years ago, nothing is viler, more sexually repulsive than women who “bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire.” They’re “repugnant to nature.”

We’re still under the pall of this pernicious myth. Women walk on eggshells in public office, afraid of alienating male affections, being too sexy, too dykey, unaware that female leadership is not only the most natural but also the most seductive phenomenon on earth. Men of course don’t want us to know this, which explains the propaganda. Catherine the Great and Cleopatra never stooped to horses or slave boys, and Christina never renounced men for stormtrooper machismo. (She had a long affair with a charming Italian cardinal.) All three were magisterial rulers, and the first two, crack seductresses.

Their combined success is the heart of the trouble;
Machtweiber
(siren-politicas) packed too much clout and were too disruptive of patriarchal domination. They resurrected an archetype beyond the strength of man to resist—the Queen of Creation who fascinates and overwhelms the libido against every precaution.

For aeons before the rise of modern civilization, mankind worshiped a mythic imperatrix who incarnated the erotic energy of existence and ruled the universe. Sex goddess and supreme governor, she inspired men to adoration, awe, obedience, and holy hard-ons. She’s the way nature first intended it: a ruler-seductress with men and nations at her command.

Some women in Western history, undeterred by the thicket of No Trespass signs, have stormed the halls of state and reclaimed their ancient birthright. Exercising the divine right of queens, these
Machtweiber
triumphed politically and romantically. Seduction has always been a mainstay of men in public life; it builds rapport, engineers consent, and creates the charisma necessary to lead.

But women deliver a double whammy when they seduce in the service of government. They echo the archaic fascinations of the mythic Great Goddess. Their magnetic characters—wholeness, vitality, grandeur, and color wheel multiplicity—elicit unconscious memories of the divine All Woman; their management style, her Seductive Way.

By mixing sex and politics,
Machtweiber
potentiated their power and magnified their sway and influence. They were glamorous, showy commandas who shred every stereotype and render the old models of female leadership obsolete. They give us political shimmy room. The staid, asexual chief of state persona is a real perversion of nature, a power drain to women and an offense to the divine scheme.