these stories, essential feminine qualities are subverted. The female fragility which evolutionary psychologists suggest appeals to men because it suggests youth and implies that the woman is not carrying another man’s child is in fact a hint that all is not well: here, she is so thin because her unnatural appetites need appeasing. And the nameless sorrow with which she moves the man, stressing her vulnerability, allowing him to take on the role of protector – as strong women still do around men they desire – is just one of her courtship ploys.
The very imagery of vampirism itself – or of the Knight left ‘so haggard and so woebegone’ – suggests the capacity of female beauty to drain the male body. Camille Paglia writes of the temporary impotence that follows desire and its consummation, ‘That women can drain and paralyze is part of the latent vampirism in female physiology.’18 And on the psychological level, this imagery of greedy women who drink the man’s lifeblood perhaps hints at the male fear that women want just that little bit more than men are willing to give.
Among the romantic poets Coleridge, in particular, seems to have been preoccupied with women’s capacity to ‘drain and paralyze’. In his notebooks he describes dreams in which he was pursued by ghastly female figures who attempted to mutilate or abuse him.
… was followed up and down by a frightful pale woman, who, I thought, wanted to kiss me, and had the property of giving me a shameful Disease by breathing in the face.
…the most frightful Dream of a Woman whose features were blended with darkness catching hold of my right eye and attempting to pull it out.19
Coleridge’s dreams of ‘frightful’ women are reminiscent of delusions sometimes experienced by men suffering from psychotic illness, when feelings of arousal are associated with the delusional presence of a woman – and the man’s response is felt as something dragged out of him, as an assault. The fantasy of the succubus, the medieval female demon who arouses men in the night against their will, probably had its origins in such delusions.
The purest expression of these fears of unnatural initiating women in Coleridge’s work can be found in his unfinished poem, ‘Christabel’, which Camille Paglia describes as ‘blatant lesbian pornography’.20
Geraldine is a beautiful witch or vampire, dressed in white silk, ‘surpassingly fair’ – the original lipstick lesbian, perhaps. She’s literally glamorous (glamour means magic or spell), and Christabel, the sweet and guileless heroine of the poem, is completely taken in by her enchanting surface. Christabel finds Geraldine moaning in the moonlight outside her castle, invites her in, and unwisely lets her share her bed. Geraldine undresses – revealing an unspecified witch-like deformity – ‘a sight to dream of, not to tell …’ and some vague and terrible sexual assault takes place.
Like the other voluptuous predators, Geraldine has a sob story – in her case, a tale of gang rape:
Five warriors seized me yestermorn, Me, even me, a maid forlorn, They choked my cries with force and fright, And tied me on a palfrey white.
But as with everything else about her, this is a fabrication: Geraldine herself is the rapist.
Geraldine has certain masculine qualities which are underlined for the reader of the poem and which are clues to her unnatural purposes, but which innocent Christabel doesn’t recognize. She looks rather than being looked at – always a cross-sex sign; she has a penetrating gaze – ‘her large fair eye ’gan glitter bright’; but sometimes her eyes shrink as small as a snake’s. And she is in total control: she tells Christabel to undress and get into bed, pretends to pray, then gets in too and pulls her to her.
O Geraldine! one hour was thine Thou’st had thy will!
It’s always men who ‘have their will’ of women: this is a way of describing sex that belongs exclusively to male experience.
The voluptuous predator connects with both the bad sexual woman and the man-trapper. Like Alex and Brigit, she is wicked. Like Mata Hari and Sofia the decoy, she has ulterior motives, sometimes of the most extreme kind: she wants blood. Above all, she is not what she seems. Her unfeminine sexual initiatives point to her unnaturalness. But the object of her sexual attentions, dazed by her loveliness, is blind to all the clues.
LIBERTINE WHORES: Those scandalous stages of my life
‘My maiden name was Frances Hill. I was born at a small village near Liverpool in Lancashire, of parents extremely poor and, I piously believe, extremely honest…’21
These words, from the first page of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure of 1748, inaugurated a new literary genre all about women who initiate and enjoy it. John Cleland’s two-volume story was a blockbuster of its time. This first prostitute confession was followed by a host of others, especially in France. Today’s pornography has its origins here. ‘Pornography’ actually means ‘the writing of prostitutes’.
In these books, the heroine briefly describes her childhood and adolescence, then comes to her main subject matter, her training and progress as a prostitute, depicted in a series of sexual encounters which are always graphically described, and in the case of Fanny Hill, highly colourful: John Cleland invariably describes genitals as roseate, rubied or vermilion. Unlike earlier English prostitute biographies, such as Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, which ended in misery and death, the story ends happily with the prostitute’s worldly success and contented retirement.
The heroine of these stories is always sensible, clever and sensuous. She makes a lot of money. In the French versions, she’s often a proponent of the anti-religious philosophy of the time. And she loves her work.
She is, of course, entirely a male creation. The first-person narrative is a confidence trick; it creates the illusion of a female subjectivity that is entirely absent. Though the woman appears to be speaking for herself, she tells us nothing about female sexuality. The use of the first person is an erotic device; as writer Lynn Hunt puts it, ‘The reader is provided with the vicarious pleasure of an encounter – be it only textual – with a prostitute.’22 Her sexual initiatives are contained within the male imagination: they express male desires. This is what makes her initiatives so very acceptable.
The ultimate libertine whore was created by the Marquis de Sade. Juliette is the heroine of his pornographic novel of 1792, Juliette ou les Prosperités de la Vice, the companion volume to his Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu. Juliette and Justine are sisters and polar opposites. Juliette is the archetypal whore, Justine the perfect virtuous courtesan. Juliette enjoys sex, Justine is abused. Juliette is knowing, Justine is innocent and guileless, her innocence a constant incitement to the sadism of others. Juliette is brunette, Justine is blonde: Angela Carter has Juliette as the original bold brunette – like Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford, and Justine as one of the many put-upon blondes down to Monroe, whose ‘dazzling fair skins are of such a delicate texture that they look as if they will bruise at a touch, carrying the exciting stigmata of sexual violence for a long time’.23 Juliette makes lots of money, Justine has to plead to be given shelter – invariably with dire consequences. And Juliette initiates; she is the subject of her sexual encounters: while Justine is passive, used, done-to. Even among prostitutes, it seems, there are madonnas and whores.
Juliette
