Bookmarker tag: topic/female-subjugation (24 notes)

When she was gone Rickie Evers dropped his gold cigarette lighter on the floor and when he reached down for it he ran his hand up my leg, stroked the inside of my knee.

I took a bite of the Baked Alaska and said I wondered how they ever managed to do it. He picked his lighter up and told me I had Baked Alaska on my chin. When he wiped it with the big linen napkin his arm brushed my breast. I was embarrassed, I still didn’t even wear a training bra.

Bella Lynn came back from the powder room sauntering in her crooked seams, pretending not to notice all the men staring at her. The whole dining room had been staring at Bella Lynn and Rickie Evers throughout the meal. I think the Mexican busboy saw what Evers did when he dropped his lighter.

That was the extent of Maya’s objections. Gratitude was still a big part of her feeling toward Paul. Her first husband had left her when Sammy was nine months old and she was pregnant with Max. It had seemed like a miracle when Paul came along and loved Sammy and Max as well as her. She was determined to have a good marriage, to be a good wife. Still only nineteen, she had no idea what being a good wife meant. She did things like hold the hot part of the cup when she passed him coffee, offering him the handle.

[...] “I understand,” I retorted, “so if reputation doesn’t count and a woman of forty-three is free to act like a girl in search of a husband, if you yourself approve all this, you mean that I, too, could … ” ‘What do you have to do with it?” he immediately interrupted, in an irritated, reproachful tone. “How can you compare your case with Clara’s, mamma? You have a husband, two grown children … Clara is alone, and we all know the world of the cinema … ” He was lying the way one lies to a child, and suddenly I realized that it wasn’t the first time he’d spoken to me like that. He’s always done it, or at least for so many years that I’ve forgotten any other way he has of speaking. And as I answered him compliantly, admitting that my case is different, I, too, was lying, out of fear of him, of his judgment. He came over to me, caressed me. “You understand, right?” he said, and I nodded. But maybe because of the lie or maybe because in a confused way I sensed that he was right, I felt an uncontrollable sadness rising in me. I’m afraid that because my way of being seems natural to him it no longer has any value in his eyes. Rather, he admires Clara, who is so different from me and with whom I no longer have anything in common, not even our past as young wives, which today, with her present life, she denies, derides. I wondered if for Michele I’m still a living woman or already, like his mother, a portrait on the wall. So I am for my children. Certainly, so my mother is for me. I wished desperately to escape the evil spell of that portrait. “I’m afraid,” I was about to say, but he, ignorant of my thoughts, wouldn’t have understood.

I called Clara and told her I’d like to come see her, and she invited me to lunch, but we didn’t set a day. I said how grateful I was for what she’s doing for us, I repeated, “Let’s hope for the best.” She said that in reality she didn’t have much hope, but that I shouldn’t discourage Michele, because she was still intending to try several paths. “The script has an interesting beginning, don’t you think?” I answered vaguely. I didn’t want to confess that I don’t know anything about it. “Of course,” Clara continued, “it all has to be rewritten, but as it’s been corrected, it might work. The plot, of course, is very dark, very risqué.” I said, “Yes … yes … ” “That’s also its strength, its attraction, I don’t deny it,” she observed. “That man who says he’s a different person to every woman is very successful. And then when he goes to the street with the prostitutes, and the following scene, when he comes home and there’s his wife, who says, ‘I kept dinner warm for you’ … There are wonderful ideas, a great film could be made. But I’m afraid it won’t work, no producer is courageous enough. I advised Michele to lighten it, but he says it’s impossible and ultimately he’s not wrong. Its character is really in that fever, that sexual obsession.” Then she said, “Too bad,” and added that Michele would have had a lot of talent for the cinema, and repeated, “Too bad.”

When Michele came home I didn’t tell him I’d talked to Clara.

[...] Sitting down again, he said we’ll soon get used to Marina, she’s a good girl and he likes her. It’s true. He likes her because she’s pretty. He, like Riccardo, smiles when he sees her around, because she possesses that animal meekness that men take for sweetness. Not even what happened between them serves to make Michele suspicious: he thinks she’s an example of loving, female obedience that flatters him, too, because he’s a man. But I know what a different idea he has of a woman like Clara, for instance, even if he doesn’t talk about her or complain that she never called. [...]

I am a woman. I (i) long to be of service (ii) like domestic order (iii) am socially quite skilful—at organising lists of appointments etc (iv) can do basic cooking (v) feel an urge to fill gaps where otherwise chaos, awkwardness, discomfort (physical, emotional, social) might occur (vi) like to make practical demonstrations of love. All I need to attend to is that I keep enough of myself free for my work and the hours of private mental time this requires. I mean that my attention to him and his needs should not outweigh my attention to myself for work. ‘All I need’! This terribly hard thing, for a woman.

I think I am in the classic position of a woman artist who in order to maintain a marriage is obliged to trim herself so as not to make her husband feel—what? Something a man is not supposed to have to feel? This must be one of the reasons V is so against it when I have to do publicity. It’s also perhaps why he is encouraging to me about doing journalism. He is as generous as he can possibly be about my book and its success, but if I had success like that with a novel there’d be serious trouble—I don’t know what trouble exactly, but life would get tougher. Why are men so fragile? If he were getting more attention than I was, everyone would be at ease, it would be seen as normal and appropriate. Tilt it, and everything gets unhappy and shadowy. Maybe it’s true then. A woman artist who wants to develop as far as she can needs to live alone. He is a better novelist than I am—he can handle broader ideas, more characters etc—this is not the problem. The problem is that my success seems to get in his way. It somehow stops him from working.

What to do? I could accept without further complaint his demand for uninterrupted occupation of the flat. Work harder at cooking. Do less publicity. Pull my horns in. How dismal.

With a friend who is married to a painter I compared notes about our respective husbands and their demands. In his determination to deter visitors, hers has disabled the buzzer and made adjustments to the heavy street door of their house that make it impossible for her to get in, even with her key, without putting down everything she is carrying. Like me, she is expected to run the house, do the shopping and cooking, and keep the home fires burning, all this without being permitted on the premises during work hours. I saw in her face my unhappiness. We did not know whether, or how, we could go on tolerating their regimes, or what we could do to change them. When I was leaving she said, ‘I’m beginning to experience it as violence.’

V admires a pair of grotesquely high heels that Marilyn Monroe is wearing in a photo. I look at them and see two instruments of torture. He speaks at some length about how women who wear high heels are showing that they like men, that they’re prepared to ‘put up with a bit of discomfort’ to please a man. They are much more feminine than women who wear flat shoes or runners.

On the morning of Chip's conception she'd merely looked like she was shamming sleep, but on the morning of Denise's, seven years later, she really was pretending. Alfred in middle age had invited such venial deceptions. A decade-plus of marriage had turned him into one of the overly civilized predators you hear about in zoos, the Bengal tiger that forgets how to kill, the lion lazy with depression. To exert attraction, Enid had to be a still, unbloody carcass. If she actively reached out, actively threw a thigh over his, he braced himself against her and withheld his face; if she so much as stepped from the bathroom naked he averted his eyes, as the Golden Rule enjoined the man who hated to be seen himself. Only early in the morning, waking to the sight of her small white shoulder, did he venture from his lair. Her stillness and self-containment, the slow sips of air she took, her purely vulnerable object- hood, made him pounce. And feeling his padded paw on her ribs and his meat-seeking breath on her neck she went limp, as if with prey's instinctive resignation ("Let's get this dying over with"), although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence. She, too, kept her eyes shut. Often didn't even roll from the side she'd been lying on but simply flared her hip, brought her knee up in a vaguely proctologic reflex. Then without showing her his face he departed for the bathroom, where he washed and shaved and emerged to see the bed already made and to hear, downstairs, the percolator gulping. From Enid's perspective in the kitchen maybe a lion, not her husband, had voluptuously mauled her, or maybe one of the men in uniform she ought to have married had slipped into her bed. It wasn't a wonderful life, but a woman could subsist on self-deceptions like these and on her memories (which also now curiously seemed like self-deceptions) of the early years when he'd been mad for her and had looked into her eyes. The important thing was to keep it all tacit. If the act was never spoken of, there would be no reason to discontinue it until she was definitely pregnant again, and even after pregnancy no reason not to resume it, as long as it was never mentioned.

It was true that Al had asked her to move the jars and magazines, and there was probably a word for the way she'd stepped around those jars and magazines for the last eleven days, often nearly stumbling on them; maybe a psychiatric word with many syllables or maybe a simple word like "spite." But it seemed to her that he'd asked her to do more than "one thing" while he was gone. He'd also asked her to make the boys three meals a day, and clothe them and read to them and nurse them in sickness, and scrub the kitchen floor and wash the sheets and iron his shirts, and do it all without a husband's kisses or kind words. If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn't need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.

To the boardinghouse a few years after the war came a young steel engineer newly transferred to St. Jude to manage a foundry. He was a full-lipped thick-haired well- muscled boy in a man's shape and a man's suits. The suits were themselves luxuriantly pleated wool beauties. Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earner, however, and she kissed him in the elevator. Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.

Cleaning Al's room in St. Jude she found a much- handled volume of Schopenhauer with certain passages underlined. For example: The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.

What to believe about Al Lambert? There were the old- man things he said about himself and the young-man way he looked. Enid had chosen to believe the promise of his looks. Life then became a matter of waiting for his personality to change.

While she waited, she ironed twenty shirts a week, plus her own skirts and blouses.

[...] "Folks," the tour guide urged, "just sit back and drink it in." But that which can be drunk can also drown. Enid had slept for six of the previous fifty-five hours, and even as Sylvia thanked her for inviting her along she found she had no energy for touring. The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture, she couldn't draw like Sylvia, she didn't read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A capacity for love was the only true thing she'd ever had. And so she tuned out the tour guide and heeded the October angle of the yellow light, the heart-mangling intensities of the season. In the wind pushing waves across the bay she could smell night's approach. It was coming at her fast: mystery and pain and a strange yearning sense of possibility, as though heartbreak were a thing to be sought and moved toward. [...]

'And I thought-Anna I wish I could explain it. It was really a revelation. I thought: I've been married to him for years and years, and all that time I've been-wrapped up in him. Well women are, aren't they? I've thought of nothing else. I've cried myself to sleep night after night for years. And I've made scenes, and been a fool and been unhappy and... The point is, what for? I'm serious Anna.' Anna smiled, and Marion went on: 'Because the point is, he's not anything, is he? He's not even very good-looking. He's not even very intelligent-I don't care if he is ever so important and a captain of industry. Do you see what I mean?' 'Well, and then?' 'I thought, My God, for that creature I've ruined my life. I remember the moment exactly. I was sitting at the breakfast-table, wearing a sort of negligee thing I'd bought because he likes me in that sort of thing-you know, frills and flowers, or well, he used to like me in them. I've always hated them. And I thought, for years and years I've even been wearing clothes I hated, just to please this creature.'

Anna laughed. Marion was laughing, her handsome face alive with self-critical irony, and her eyes sad and truthful. 'It's humiliating, isn't it Anna?'

'Yes, it is.'

'Have you, have you ever fucked a tart who's had a kid?'

'No.' He didn't hear and turned to me, mouth ajar. I shook my head.

'Well I—' he zig-zagged crazily, squeezed between a taxi and a newspaper van, and drifted two-wheeled up Queensway - 'well I fucking have. And it's no joke. Don't know you're there.'

Norman squalled to a roasted halt broadside a zebra-crossing, allowed a dumpy blonde to swank past, and whipped the car forward again, snicking the overcoat buttons and ironing the toecaps of two Siamese dotards.

'Like waving a flag in space.'

More lights. I wanted to ask Norman if he had read Swinburne, but he continued: Their guts flop too. Jen'll be okay for one, maybe more. No, fuck, I said she could adopt some, but - tarts like having babies! Their cunts', he flicked off the heater, 'turn to mush. Tits' - we pulled away - 'smell of bad milk. And they hang. Pancake tits.'

I was very tired, and paid less and less attention to my appearance; I lost weight. And yet my editors and the audiences I encountered night after night liked me. Moving here and there, discussing with this and that person in a language that wasn’t mine but that I rapidly learned to manage, I gradually rediscovered an aptitude that I had displayed years before, with my previous book: I had a natural ability to transform small private events into public reflection. Every night I improvised successfully, starting from my own experience. I talked about the world I came from, about the poverty and squalor, male and also female rages, about Carmen and her bond with her brother, her justifications for violent actions that she would surely never commit. I talked about how, since I was a girl, I had observed in my mother and other women the most humiliating aspects of family life, of motherhood, of subjection to males. I talked about how, for love of a man, one could be driven to be guilty of every possible infamy toward other women, toward children. I talked about my difficult relationship with the feminist groups in Florence and Milan, and, as I did, an experience that I had underestimated suddenly became important: I discovered in public what I had learned by watching that painful effort of excavation. I talked about how, to assert myself, I had always sought to be male in intelligence — I started off every evening saying I felt that I had been invented by men, colonized by their imagination — and I told how I had recently seen a male childhood friend of mine make every effort possible to subvert himself, extracting from himself a female.

[...] What were my daughters and I doing in Naples? Were we there just to make Nino happy? Was I lying to myself when I portrayed myself as free and autonomous? And was I lying to my audience when I played the part of someone who, with her two small books, had sought to help every woman confess what she couldn’t say to herself? Were they mere formulas that it was convenient for me to believe in while in fact I was no different from my more traditional contemporaries? In spite of all the talk was I letting myself be invented by a man to the point where his needs were imposed on mine and those of my daughters?

[...] And she went on, but taking a self-mocking turn. She wove the praises of her own cleverness, slipping slowly from the luxuries that she had acquired by winning Solara to the solitude of her duties as a bride. Michele, she said, is never here, it’s as if I were getting married by myself. And she suddenly asked me, as if she really wanted an opinion: Do you think I exist? Look at me, in your view do I exist? She hit her full breasts with her open hand, but she did it as if to demonstrate physically that the hand went right through her, that her body, because of Michele, wasn’t there. He had taken everything of her, immediately, when she was almost a child. He had consumed her, crumpled her, and now that she was twenty-five he was used to her, he didn’t even look at her anymore. He fucks here and there as he likes. The revulsion I feel, when someone asks how many children do you want and he brags, he says: Ask Gigliola, I already have children, I don’t even know how many. Does your husband say such things? Does your husband say: With Lenuccia I want three, with the others I don’t know? In front of everyone he treats me like a rag for wiping the floor. And I know why. He’s never loved me. He’s marrying me to have a faithful servant, that’s the reason all men get married. And he keeps saying to me: What the fuck am I doing with you, you don’t know anything, you have no intelligence, you have no taste, this beautiful house is wasted, with you everything becomes disgusting. She began to cry, saying between her sobs:

As soon as we got to our apartment and closed the door we began to make love. At first it was very pleasurable, but the day reserved for me yet another surprising fact. Antonio, my first boyfriend, when he rubbed against me was quick and intense; Franco made great efforts to contain himself but at a certain point he pulled away with a gasp, or when he had a condom stopped suddenly and seemed to become heavier, crushing me under his weight and laughing in my ear. Pietro, on the other hand, strained for a time that seemed endless. His thrusting was deliberate, violent, so that the initial pleasure slowly diminished, overwhelmed by the monotonous insistence and the hurt I felt in my stomach. He was covered with sweat from his long exertions, maybe from suffering, and when I saw his damp face and neck, touched his wet back, desire disappeared completely. But he didn’t realize it, he continued to withdraw and then sink into me forcefully, rhythmically, without stopping. I didn’t know what to do. I caressed him, I whispered words of love, and yet I hoped that he would stop. When he exploded with a roar and collapsed, finally exhausted, I was content, even though I was hurting and unsatisfied.

As for Pietro, the condoms dulled his sensitivity even more, and it took him even longer to reach orgasm, which made him suffer, and made me suffer. Sometimes I made him take me from behind, I had the impression that it was less painful, and while he dealt those violent blows I grabbed his hand and brought it to my sex hoping he would understand that I wanted to be caressed. But he seemed incapable of doing both things, and since he preferred the first he almost immediately forgot the second, nor, once satisfied, did he seem to understand that I wanted some part of his body to consummate, in turn, my desire. After he had had his pleasure he caressed my hair, and whispered, I’ll work a little. When he left, the solitude seemed to me a consolation prize.

And she told me things that disturbed me profoundly. She told me that not long before, in that very house, Michele had gotten drunk one night and told her how many women he had been with, the precise number: a hundred and twenty-two, paying and free. You’re on that list, he said emphatically, but you’re certainly not among those who gave me the most pleasure. You know why? Because you’re an idiot, and even to fuck well it takes a little intelligence. For example you don’t know how to give a blow job, you’re hopeless, and it’s pointless to explain it to you, you can’t do it, it’s too obvious that it disgusts you. And he went on like that for a while, making speeches that became increasingly crude; with him vulgarity was normal. Then he wanted to explain clearly how things stood: he was marrying her because of the respect he felt for her father, a skilled pastry maker he was fond of; he was marrying her because one had to have a wife and even children and even an official house. But there should be no mistake: she was nothing to him, he hadn’t put her on a pedestal, she wasn’t the one he loved best, so she had better not be a pain in the ass, believing she had some rights. Brutal words. At a certain point Michele himself must have realized it, and he became gripped by a kind of melancholy. He had murmured that women for him were all games with a few holes for playing in. All. All except one. Lina was the only woman in the world he loved—love, yes, as in the films—and respected. He told me, Gigliola sobbed, that she would have known how to furnish this house. He told me that giving her money to spend, yes, that would be a pleasure. He told me that with her he could have become truly important, in Naples. He said to me: You remember what she did with the wedding photo, you remember how she fixed up the shop? And you, and Pinuccia, and all the others, what the fuck are you, what the fuck do you know how to do? He had said those things to her and not only those. He had told her that he thought about Lila night and day, but not with normal desire, his desire for her didn’t resemble what he knew. In reality he didn’t want her. That is, he didn’t want her the way he generally wanted women, to feel them under him, to turn them over, turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them. He didn’t want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last. He wanted her not to screw her—that word applied to Lila disturbed him. He wanted to kiss her and caress her. He wanted to be caressed, helped, guided, commanded. He wanted to see how she changed with the passage of time, how she aged. He wanted to talk with her and be helped to talk. You understand? He spoke of her in way that to me, to me—when we are about to get married—he has never spoken. [...]

“You should leave your wife more time.”

“She has all day available.”

“I’m not kidding. If you don’t, you’re guilty not only on a human level but also on a political one.”

“What’s the crime?”

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.”

I waited in silence for Pietro to respond. My husband reacted with sarcasm.

“Elena can cultivate her intelligence when and how she likes, the essential thing is that she not take time from me.”

“If she doesn’t take it from you, then who can she take it from?”

Pietro frowned.

Olga’s youth, like that of many intelligent women, was marked by contempt for her sex. In the early days of her abandonment she recalls a figure from her childhood in Naples, a neighbor who lost her mind with grief after her husband left her. Every night the neighbor sobbed loudly. Olga’s mother and her friends whispered in pity, calling her “the poverella” — the poor thing. “The poverella was crying, the poverella was screaming, the poverella was suffering, torn to pieces by the absence of the sweaty red-haired man.” As a child Olga was disturbed, disgusted, by this woman. “A grief so gaudy began to repel me. I was eight, but I was ashamed for her.” Girls — imperious, unforgiving, not yet women — still believe in the choice to be otherwise. In high school, Olga reacts similarly to a novel assigned by her French teacher:

I made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed to me sentimental fools: I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts. I was young, I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced. And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno. I said it breathlessly, all in one gulp, which was something I never did, and my teacher smiled ironically, a little bitterly. She, too, must have lost someone, something. And now, more than twenty years later, the same thing was happening to me.

Becoming the poverella was Olga’s greatest childhood fear. That she should become this woman who despite her character, her intelligence, her work, constricts her existence to the shallow contentment of marriage — this is the betrayal. “What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life,” Olga thinks. The novel she hated in high school is the one she now begins to write in her head, though it contains touches of the “vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno” she admired. For a moment she narrates her movements in the third person — then stops, fearing madness. “Don’t regress, don’t lose yourself, keep a tight grip,” she reproaches herself. “Above all, don’t give in to distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He’s gone, you’re still here.”