Seductress (56 page)

151
She transcended her . . . :
Quoted in Folkenflik,
Extraordinary Woman,
27 and 19, and d’Andlau,
Madame de Staël,
25. Germaine defined happiness at one point as “the union of all contrary things” and elaborated further: It’s “hope without fear, activity without anxiety, glory without calumny . . . the good side of all conditions, talents, and pleasures, without their accompanying evils,” 18.

151
“One must adore . . .”:
Quoted in Herold,
Mistress to an Age,
460 and 234.

151
Sixty-eight percent of . . . :
In this study, women said they’d rather “raise babies, make dinner parties, and dress up” than have careers. Quoted in Erica Jong, “Are We Having Fun Yet?,”
Talk
(October 2000), 136. See also the “opt-out” trend: Lisa Belkin, “The Opt-Out Revolution,”
The New York Times Magazine
(October 26, 2003), 42-86 and Claudia Willis, “The Case for Staying Home,”
Time
(March 22, 2004), 51-59.

151
Dr. Barbara Kerr believes . . . :
Barbara Kerr,
Smart Women,
rev. ed. (Scottsdale: Arizona State University, 1994), 239; see 219-42 for her findings. For more support for her conclusions, see Marie Richmond-Abbott,
Masculine and Feminine
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992), 134-40, and Person,
Dreams of Love,
283 and passim.

151
Afraid that IQ . . . :
Dale Spender,
Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them
(London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 19.

151
The Rules
warns . . . :
Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider,
The Rules
(New York: Warner, 1995), 34, and Brenda Venus,
Secrets of Seduction for Women
(New York: Dutton, 1996), 77. Also see Brigitte Nioche,
What Turns Him On
(New York: NAL, 1989), 39; Helen Gurley Brown,
Having It All
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 208; Georgette Mosbacher,
Feminine Force
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 127-37; Tracey Cabot,
How to Make a Man Fall in Love with You
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 46, 125, to begin the list.

Arlene Dahl’s classic retroadvice is all too pervasive: “The successful female never lets her competence compete with her femininity. . . . Never upstage a man. Don’t top his jokes. . . . Never launch loudly into your own opinions on the subject.” Quoted in Harriet G. Lerner,
The Dance of Deception
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 49.

153
“A well-educated woman” . . . :
Stendhal,
Love,
186. Ovid thought women should learn two great languages well, as a bare minimum, and Robert Burton insisted that “the lineaments of the mind are far fairer than those of the body, incomparably beyond them.”
Anatomy of Melancholy,
631. Moderns such as Bertrand Russell and André Maurois make the same point, and the postmodern Jean Baudrillard sees seduction as a mind game for the intellectual elite.

Frymer-Kensky points out that “desire for learning is a lust,” 158, and Cathleen Schine observes in the novel
Rameau’s Niece
(New York: Plume, 1993) that “the desire to know is desire,” 117. Freud believed ideas were “acts of love,” and recently Bruce Weber wrote in the
New York Times
of the necessity of intellectuality in love relationships. “Learning is desirable,” he said, “not least because it enriches the emotions.” Quoted in Norman O. Brown,
Life Against Death
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 69, and
New York Times,
May 24, 2000, E1.

153
Literature teems with . . . :
Literature, which sounds the depths of love, has long featured smart seductresses. Aphra Behn’s femme fatale in
The Fair Jilt
speaks several languages, reads voraciously, and speaks with a “great deal of wit.” Two of Jane Austen’s smart sirens outshine their romantic rivals, and the enchantress Lyndall of
The Story of an African Farm
devours books and men with equal relish. Then there is Edgar Allan Poe’s prototypic scholar-vamp Ligea; George Meredith’s rapier-witted
Diana of the Crossroads;
and Madeleine Forestier of Guy de Maupassant’s
Bel-Ami,
whose fascinations, whose “lively intelligence and shrewdness” carry her to the command center of Parisian politics.
The Fair Jilt or the Amours of Prince Tarquin and Miranda
(London: Routledge, 1913), 87, and
Bel-Ami,
trans. Douglas Parmee (New York: Penguin, 1975), 234; and “The Desire Survey,”
Esquire
(February 2001), 78.

152
“Both males and . . .”:
Taylor,
Prehistory of Sex,
49.

153
Like Inanna’s lover . . . :
Wolkstein and Kramer,
Inanna,
24, 26, and 33.

156
We’re still haunted . . . :
Robert Southey’s letter to Charlotte Brontë, quoted in Joan Coulianos, ed.,
By a Woman Writt
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), xv; G. M. Hopkins, quoted in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
The Madwoman in the Attic
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 3. Renoir, quoted in Linda Nachlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,”
Women, Creativity, and the Arts,
ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona and Linda Ebersole (New York: Continuum, 1995), 62. Samuel Johnson, quoted in John Bartlett,
Familiar Quotations
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1941), 234. More recently William Gass commented that literary women “lack that blood congested genital drive which energizes every great style.” Gilbert and Gubar,
Madwoman in the Attic,
9.

156
Hence the sexual . . . :
Most psychoanalytically oriented philosophers trace art back to its sexual roots. For an overview, see Klaus Laemmel, “Sex and the Arts,”
The Sexual Experience,
ed. Benjamin J. Sadock, M.D.; Harold I. Kaplan, M.D., and Alfred Freedman, M.D. (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1976), 527-65.

Prominent exponents of this view include Camille Paglia,
Sexual Personae;
Herbert Marcuse,
Eros and Civilization
(New York: Vintage, 1962); Norman O. Brown,
Life Against Death;
and Jean Baudrillard,
Seduction.

See also Liam Hudson and Bernadin Jacot, who connect aesthetic and sexual rapture: “There exists a mechanism which enables us to fall under the spell of a work of art in just the way that we fall under the spell of a person. In the presence of the person by whom we are besotted, as in the presence of works of art, . . . our defenses collapse.”
The Way Men Think
(New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991), 147.

157
It was total theater . . . :
For scholarly reconstructions of these archaic rites, including drug use, see Richard Rudgley,
The Alchemy of Culture
(London: British Museum Press, 1993), E. O. James,
Seasonal Feasts and Festivals
(New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961); Curt Sachs,
World History of the Dance,
trans. Bessie Schonberg (New York: Norton, 1937); Neumann,
The Great Mother;
and Riane Eisler,
Sacred Pleasure
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).

157
Several scholars think . . . :
Neumann,
The Great Mother,
296, and Baring and Cashford,
Myth of the Goddess,
21.

157
Women, it’s conjectured . . . :
Women may well have executed the famous cave painting of horses and hunting scenes. Their handprints supposedly surround the Altamira murals that fill a low-ceilinged women’s quarter. Violetta Miguela asserts: “[C]ave art is a genuinely women’s art.” Quoted in Davis,
First Sex,
45. Davis cites as evidence the female “delicacy of line; their feeling of compassion for the hunted beasts; [and] the caricaturish depictions of the hunters—certainly not flattering to the male of the human species,” 45.

One Lascaux drawing bears an unmistakable feminine touch, a picture of a prostrate stick man with a hard-on beside a monstrous bison, the goddess’s avatar. In a comic wink at men’s utter sexual helplessness before the Feminine Principle, a bird’s head pops up below the scene like Groucho Marx’s duck.

Underneath a richly fretted Çatal Hüyük shrine, female artists were buried with their palettes in hand, the paints still fresh. Another student of cave art, Grace Hartigan, also believes women were responsible, quipping that they were making grocery lists. Phone conversation, January 2000.

One theorist, Le Roy McDermott, professor of art at Missouri State University, concludes, after studying the Venus figurines, that they were sculpted by women since the distortions suggest a woman looking down at herself. See the discussion in Husain,
Goddess,
11.

157
Like the earliest shaman-creators . . . :
Quoted in Robert Saltonstall Mattison,
Grace Hartigan: A Painter’s World
(New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990), 79.

157
“I believe,” she . . . :
Quoted ibid., 100.

157
“A powerful sexual . . .”:
Interview, March 15, 1999.

157
Critic John Myers . . . :
John Bernard Myers,
Tracking the Marvelous: A Life in the New York Art World
(New York: Random House, 1981), 127.

158
She seduced and subdued . . . :
Quoted in Whitney Chadwick,
Women, Art, and Society
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 326.

158
“Macho?” Grace laughs . . . :
Telephone interview, May 23, 1999.

158
She shares her . . . :
Quoted in Mattison,
Grace Hartigan,
136.

158
It actually means . . . :
I’m indebted to professor Carlos Johnson for this insight.

158
The eldest child . . . :
Cindy Nemser,
Art Talk: Conversations with Twelve Women Artists
(New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1975), 152.

159
“After sex with . . .” :
Interview, March 15, 1999.

159
“Going to New York” . . . :
Ibid.

159
She “lived like . . .”:
Nemser,
Art Talk,
152.

159
Once when she . . . :
Interview, March 15, 1999.

160
The same year
Life . . . :
“Women Artists in Ascendance,”
Life
(May 13, 1957), 74.

160
For years the pair . . . :
Frank wrote a number of poems to Grace, a line of which is engraved on his tombstone: “Grace/to be born and live as variously as possible.” Grace in turn painted Frank in two major works and collaborated with him on a series of painting-poems.

160
As soon as Grace . . . :
Interview, March 15, 1999.

160
Realizing that she’d . . . :
Quoted in Mattison,
Grace Hartigan,
54. Quoted in Brad Gooch,
City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 359.

160
Around the same time . . . :
Interview, March 15, 1999.

160
“Known for bolstering . . .” :
Ibid.

161
“It didn’t suit . . .” :
Ibid.

161
“When I envision . . .”:
Ibid.

161
“Sure, I had . . .”:
Ibid.

161
“When I think . . .”:
Ibid.

161
Not coincidentally, cave . . . :
See Robert Jourdain, who explains how archaeologists concluded the presence of music at the early ceremonies via the resonance within the artistic epicenters of caves.
Music, the Brain and Ecstasy
(New York: Avon, 1997), 305. Also see Rudgley’s comprehensive account of Stone Age music in “The Song of the Stalactites,”
Lost Civilization of the Stone Age,
201-08.

161
Instead of the first . . . :
Sophie Drinker,
Music and Women
(New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1995 [1948]), 63.

162
The sex goddess . . . :
Wolkstein and Kramer,
Inanna,
17.

162
In early-twentieth-century . . . :
Quoted in Jessica Douglas-Home,
Violet: The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse
(London: Haverill Press, 1996), 319.

162
A bizarre, impish . . . :
Quoted ibid., 24 and 106.

162
Little known today . . . :
Quoted ibid., 75.

163
People called her . . . :
Quoted ibid., 117.

163
Costumed in lace-garlanded . . . :
Osbert Sitwell,
Noble Essences
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), 287, and quoted in Douglas-Home,
Violet,
306.

163
The trio took . . . :
Douglas-Home,
Violet,
53.

163
She sat on . . . :
Ibid., 57.

164
“God how he . . .”:
Quoted, Ibid., 164.

164
At the same time . . . :
A number of prominent lesbians, such as Ethel Smyth and Radclyffe Hall, courted Violet, and she might have reciprocated their affections, perhaps physically. This is in keeping with the widespread bisexuality and androgynous propensities of seductresses. In a photograph of Violet with her amorous triad, Adelina sits confidently on the left, her arm cocked in a jaunty akimbo.

164
No “humdrum constraints” . . . :
Douglas-Home,
Violet,
92.

164
At night her . . . :
Quoted ibid., 116.

164
Violet “did what . . .”:
Ibid., 92.

164
With her “intensely . . .”:
Sitwell,
Noble Essences,
281.

164
Bill of course . . . :
Quoted in Douglas-Home,
Violet,
119.