Showing posts with label the virgin and the gipsy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the virgin and the gipsy. Show all posts

25 Jun 2020

Don't Let D. H. Lawrence Rub You Up the Wrong Way

D. H. Lawrence beach towel by Asok Mukhopadhyay


If there is one modern author guaranteed to rub a lot of readers up the wrong way, it's Mr. D. H. Lawrence; the man who puts the friction in fiction. But, amusingly, he also takes every opportunity to do the same with his own characters as well, as illustrated in the following three scenes, drawn from  across the body of his work ...


I. Cyril and George in The White Peacock

In this, Lawrence's first novel, there's a famous pond swimming scene involving Cyril Beardsall and his friend George Saxton. The latter, who is already half-undressed by the water's edge, invites Cyril to fetch a towel and to join him. Eager to comply, Cyril does as he was instructed and then quickly strips off.

They plunge into the icy water and enjoy the "vigorous poetry of action" [222], Cyril pursuing George and eventually catching hold of him. Having being caught, George surrenders and floats on his back besides his friend, looking up and laughing, "and his white breasts and belly emerged like cool buds of a firm fleshed water flower" [see note 222:19 on p. 386].   

When they exit the pond, the two young men admire one another's nakedness and indulge in a bit of frottage:

"We stood and looked at each other as we rubbed ourselves dry. He was well proportioned, and naturally of handsome physique, heavily limbed. [...]
      As I watched him, he stood in white relief against the mass of green. He polished his arm, holding it out straight and solid; he rubbed his hair into curls, while I watched the deep muscles of his shoulders, and the bands stand out in his neck as he held it firm. [...]
      He saw I had forgotten to continue my rubbing, and laughing he took hold of me and began to rub me briskly, as if I were a child, or rather, a woman he loved and did not fear. I left myself quite limply in his hands, and, to get a better grip of me, he put his arm round me and pressed me aainst him, and the sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb. It satisfied in some measure the vague, indecipherable yearning of my soul; and it was the same with him. When he had rubbed me all warm, he let me go, and we looked at each other with eyes of still laughter, and our love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, either for man or woman." [222-23]


II. Jack and Mabel in The Horse-Dealer's Daughter

Our second scene is taken from one of Lawrence's best-known short stories and also involves a natural pond, two wet bodies, lots of rubbing, and the fetishistic presence of a towel ...

Mabel Pervin is a disturbed (and disturbing) 27-year-old woman with the face of a bulldog and a profound desire to join her dead mother. One afternoon, as dusk was beginning to fall and having attended her mother's grave, Mabel walks to a nearby pond. Unbeknown to her, however, she is being watched by a young doctor, named Jack Fergusson:

"There she stood on the bank for a moment. She never raised her head. Then she waded slowly into the water.
      He stood motionless as the small black figure walked slowly and deliberately towards the centre of the pond, gradually moving deeper into the motionless water, and still moving forward as the water got up to her breast. Then he could see her no more in the dusk of the dead afternoon." [145]

Instinctively, Jack runs to help; that is, to fish her out, not to gently hold Mabel under and thereby assist with the suicide. Rather bravely, considering he couldn't swim and already had a bad cold, he ventures slowly into the pond: "The cold water rose over his thighs, over his loins, upon his abdomen. The lower part of his body was all sunk in the hideous cold element." [145]

After one horrible moment when Jack loses his balance and goes under the water himself, he is able to grasp hold of Mabel's clothing and pull her out of the clutches of the pond. She is close to death, but he manages to resuscitate her. Then, wiping her face, he wraps her in his overoat and carries her home, laying her down on the hearthrug in front of the fire. She was breathing and semi-conscious, but not yet fully in the world.

Fetching some blankets from upstairs, Jack warms them before the fire: "Then he removed her saturated, earthy-smelling clothing, rubbed her dry with a towel, and wrapped her naked in the blankets." [146] It's at this point that the tale takes a typically queer Lawrentian turn. For Mabel takes his actions as a sign that he loves her:

"She shuffled forward on her knees, and put her arms round him, round his legs, as he stood there, pressing her breasts against his knees and thighs, clutching him with strange, convulsive certainty, pressing his thighs against her, drawing him to her face, her throat, as she looked up at him with flaring, humble eyes of transfiguration, triumphant in first possession.
      'You love me,' she murmured, in strange transport, yearning and triumphant and confident. 'You love me. I know you love me, I know.'
      And she was passionately kissing his knees, through the wet clothing, passionately and indiscriminately kissing his knees, his legs, as if unaware of everything." [148]

Readers who are interested in knowing how this tale concludes can click here. The point is: be careful whom you choose to save and rub dry as such acts of intimacy can sometimes be misinterpreted (however innocent your intentions and even if you're a doctor upholding the Hippocratic Oath). 


III. Joe and Yvette in The Virgin and the Gipsy

Finally, we come to our third scene: a terrible flood at the vicarage that drowns the repulsive figure of Granny, but merely soaks to the skin the virginal Yvette and her saviour, the gipsy Joe Boswell ...

"The first wave was washing her feet from under her [...] She was barely conscious: as if the flood was in her soul. [...] Yvette felt herself gone in an agonising mill-race of icy water, whirled, with only the fearful grip of the gipsy's hand on her wrist." [69-70]

Somehow, miraculously, they get from the garden to the house; the water still heaving around their legs. Yvette manages to climb the stairs; "like a wet, shuddering cat" [70] and only when on the relative safety of the landing does she become aware once more of the sodden gipsy coughing his guts out.

They seek additional safety from the rising waters in one of the bedrooms. Worried that she'll die of the cold he orders her to take her clothes off and get into the bed. Yvette is clearly unconvinced of the necessity of this and says she prefers to stay sitting on one of the chairs. But the gipsy is insistent: "'No!' he cried. 'No! Take your things off and I rub you with this towel.'" [72]

(As readers will have gathered by now, in the Lawrentian universe there's always plenty of dry towels at hand.)

Then the gipsy decides to strip and rub himself dry also:

"Coughing, shuddering violently, he pulled up his jersey hem and wrestled with all his shuddering, cold-racked might, to get off his wet, tight jersey.
      'Help me!' he cried, his face muffled.
      She seized the edge of the jersey, obediently, and pulled with all her might. The garment cam over his head, and he stood in his braces.
      'Take your things off! Rub with this towel!' he commanded ferociously [...]
      And like a thing obsessed, he pushed himself out of his trousers, and got out of his wet, clinging shirt, emerging slim and livid, shuddering in every fibre with cold and shock.
      He seized a towel, and began quickly to rub his body [...] Yvette dimly saw it was wise. She tried to get out of her dress. He pulled the horrible wet death-grippin thing off her [...]
      Yvette, naked, shuddering so much that she was sick, was trying to wipe herself dry. [...]
      With his towel he began to rub her, himself shaking all over, but holding her gripped by the shoulder, and slowly, numbedly rubbing her tender body, even trying to rub up into some dryness the pitiful hair of her small head.
      Suddenly he left off.
      'Better lie in bed,' he commanded, 'I want to rub myself.'" [72-3]
      
  By now, his towel is wet and bloody, so he borrows hers. Then, at her request - "'Warm me!' she moaned, with chattering teeth" [74] - he climbs into bed with her and holds her naked body tight against his own: "The vice-like grip of his arms round her seemed to her the only stable point in her consciousness." [74] This, eventually, calms them both down "and gradually the sickening violence of the shuddering, caused by shock, abated, in his body first, then in hers, and the warmth revived between them" [74].

Do they have sexual intercourse? Who can say: though they do both pass away into what might very well be a post-coital sleep (or what Lady Chatterley's lover, Oliver Mellors, describes as the peace that comes of fucking).

When she wakes up, he has gone, leaving behind him nothing but a filthy blood-stained towel and "a great sodden place on the carpet" [76] where his wet clothes had been lying. She's a little disappointed at first, but wise enough to realise it was for the best.  


Afterword

Frottage - for readers who don't know - is not some kind of fancy French cheese (though it is derived from a French verb, frotter).

It is, rather, a term used within the fetishistic world of paraphilia to describe the act of rubbing any part of the body against the body parts of another and may be performed either naked or clothed, wet or dry. Individuals may engage in frottage either as foreplay in anticipation of penetrative sex, or as a form of sensual pleasure in and of itself. When frottage involves direct genital stimulation, it is sometimes referred to as GG rubbing.

Readers should also note that non-consensual rubbing up against strangers (such as on a crowded tube train) is frowned upon within the frottage community and they use the term frotteurism to distinguish this illicit pleasure from their own erotic activities.   

Finally, towel fetish is a genuine fetish, though not very common. In the above scenes, towels clearly play a significant role in the action and it wouldn't be outrageous to suggest that the self-confessed priest of love had a thing for absorbent fabrics used to dry naked wet bodies.     


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Horse-Dealer's Daughter', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

D. H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gipsy, in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

All page references given in the post refer to these editions.


9 Apr 2020

In Memory of Honor Blackman

Honor Blackman (1925-2020)
as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (1964)


I have to admit that I'm more of a Mrs Peel and Mary Goodnight man than I am a Cathy Gale and Pussy Galore devotee (it's a generational thing I suppose). Nevertheless, I was saddened to hear of the death of the English actress Honor Blackman earlier this week, about whom there were several things worthy of admiration:

(i) She retained her beauty and style long into old age ...

(ii) She was an East End girl (born in Plaistow) who always cheerfully identified as a Cockney ...

(iii) She played Mrs Fawcett in Christopher Miles's 1970 film adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's novella The Virgin and the Gipsy.*

(iv) She declined a CBE in 2002 on the grounds of staunch republicanism ...

(v) She called out her Bond co-star Sean Connery in 2012 for being a hypocrite of the first order: "I disapprove of him strongly. I don't think you should accept a title from a country and then pay absolutely no tax towards it. He wants it both ways. I don't think his principles are very high."**

Doubtless there are numerous other reasons to commend this talented and intelligent woman, but even this brief list demonstrates she was a good egg. 


* Thanks to James Walker for reminding me of this.

** From an interview with Nigel Farndale in The Telegraph (27 August 2012).


14 Jan 2020

Supermassive Maternal Bodies (With Reference to the Case of Old Granny Saywell)

Fay Compton as Granny (aka The Mater) 
in The Virgin and the Gypsy 
(dir. Christopher Miles, 1970)


I.

It's not only stars that can collapse and form black holes: there are elderly women at the end of their natural life - pushing, eighty, ninety, and beyond - who can also wilfully exert a gravitational pull so strong that nothing and no one can escape from it.

Who knows, perhaps these supermassive maternal bodies exist at the centre of every family (even when bed-ridden or endlessly sitting in an arm-chair); feeding off the energy of their adult children until the latter are burnt out and exhausted, or sent spiralling into depression and thoughts of murder. 


II.

We find one such malevolent matriarch at the dark heart of a family only nominally headed by the forty-seven year old rector, Arthur Saywell, in D. H. Lawrence's short novel The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930).

Granny, "who was over seventy and whose sight was failing," [6] became the central figure in the household after the vicar's wife had scandalously run off with a young man, leaving her husband with two young girls and an ageing parent to care for (a task in which he was helped by Aunt Cissie, a pale and pious woman, also over forty, who was "gnawed by an inward worm" [6]).      

They called her The Mater - granny, not Aunt Cissie - and she was "one of those physically vulgar, clever old bodies who had got her own way all her life by buttering the weaknesses of her men-folk" [6], particularly her son, the rector. Maternal instinct provided her with the great clue to his being and she was able to exploit and manipulate him to maximum effect - though always, of course, in the name of Love.*

With her delinquent daughter-in-law - She-who-was-Cynthia - out of the picture, The Mater "climbed into the chief arm-chair in the rectory, and planted her old bulk firmly" [6] into it, determined to never again be dethroned or to see her son remarry.

Not only did the silver-haired Mater tremble with hate at the thought of She-who-was-Cynthia, so too did she secretly despise her granddaughters, Lucille and Yvette; "children of that foul nettle of lust" [7]:

"Her great rival was the younger girl, Yvette. Yvette had some of the vague, careless blitheness of She-who-was-Cynthia. But this one was more docile. Granny had perhaps caught her in time. Perhaps!
      The funny thing was, Granny secretly hated Lucille, the elder girl, more than the pampered Yvette. Lucille, the uneasy and irritable, was more conscious of being under Granny's power, than the spoilt and vague Yvette." [7-8]
   
So, Granny - The Mater - was not a warm, kindly soul: she only pretended to be. And gradually, having left school and returned home, the girls realise that under her "old-fashioned lace cap, under her silver hair, under the black silk of her stout, short, forward-bulging body, this old woman had a cunning heart, seeking forever her own female power" [8].

Nor was it physically pleasant to be around the old woman, particularly at meal times when Granny - who loved a bit of pork - would quickly devour her special dishes of "beef-tea and rusks, or a small savoury custard" [10], half-spilling the food as she did so. "The girls ate with repulsion [...] Yvette's  tender nose showing her disgust" [11]

And, of course, when you live with the old - as with cats - the rooms are never fresh, no matter how many windows you open; everything smells of Granny and cabbage and "degenerated comfort which has ceased to be comfortable and has turned stuffy, unclean" [10]. Home is where the heart is, they say, but it's also where you'll find that awful domestic sordidness which is so fatal to any joy in life.  

No wonder poor Lucille and Yvette can't stand being at the rectory, The Mater presiding from her arm-chair "with her stomach protruding, her reddish, pendulous face, that had a sort of horrible majesty" [13] like Queen Victoria, or an old toad.

What the girls minded most, however - even more than her gross physical complacency - "was that, when they brought their young friends to the house, Granny was always there, like some awful idol of old flesh, consuming all the attention." [14]

But what could be done? You couldn't actually say to poor old Granny: "'lie down and die, you old woman!' She might be an old nuisance, but she never really did anything. It wasn't fair to hate her" [17].

Having said that, Yvette can't help imaginging Granny being strangled by a wolf-like gipsy woman, putting an end to her horrible persistence and parasitic agedness.** Fortunately, however, it doesn't come to this - The Mater meets her Maker after a terrible flood washes her away, the waters advancing upon her "like a wall of lions" [69] roaring.

Her gipsy lover, Joe Boswell, saves Yvette - but poor Granny has no one to pull her to safety; she is last seen in the hallway "her hands lifted and clawing, as the first waters swirled round her legs, and her coffin-like mouth was opened in a hoarse scream" [70].

The next time Yvette sees her, Granny is bobbing up "like a strange float, her face purple, her blind blue eyes bolting, spume hissing from her mouth" [71]. The gipsy also looks at her with contempt and thinks her not deserving of help: Lebensunwertes Leben, as some would say ...

Even, surprisingly - but, then again, not so surprisingly - Aunt Cissie is there to cry out at the end: "'Let the old be taken and the young spared!'" [77]


David James Gilhooly:  
Frog Queen Victoria (1989)


Notes

* It's important to note that The Mater exerts her malevolent will over other women too and not just the men-folk within her circle. Thus, Aunt Cissie - her daughter - is also a victim:

"Aunt Cissie's life had been sacrificed to The Mater, and Aunt Cissie knew it, and The Mater knew she knew it. Yet as the years went on, it became a convention. The convention of Aunt Cissie's sacrifice was accepted by everybody, including the self-same Cissie. She prayed a good deal about it. Which also showed that she had her own private feelings somewhere, poor thing. She had ceased to be Cissie, she had lost her life and her sex. And now, she was creeping towards fifty, strange green flares of rage would come up in her, and at such times, she was insane.
      But Granny held her in her power. And Aunt Cissie's one object in life was to look after The Mater." [8]

** And, later in the story, Yvette openly admits her true feelings for Granny:

"It was Granny whom she came to detest with all her soul. That obese old woman, sitting there in her blindness like some great red-blotched fungus [...] her Yvette really hated, with that pure, sheer hatred which is almost a joy." [63]

"The look Yvette most hated, was the look of that lower jaw pressing relentlessly up, with an ancient prognathous thrust, so that the snub nose in turn was forced to press upwards [...] The will, the ancient, toad-like obscene will in the old woman, was fearful, once you saw it: a toad-like self-will that was godless, and less than human! It belonged to the old, enduring race of toads, or tortoises. And it made one feel that Granny would never die. She would live on like those higher reptiles, in a state of semicoma, forever." [63]

Again, this seems harsh - until, that is, you have first-hand experience of such old people oneself ...  

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin and the Gipsy', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 5-78. All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.


18 Nov 2017

Jews of the Wrong Sort: Notes on D. H. Lawrence and Anti-Semitism

Honor Blackman as Mrs Fawcett in The Virgin and the Gypsy 
dir. Christopher Miles (1970)


An angry email arrives in my inbox (not for the first time):

"Dear Stephen Alexander,

I was extremely disappointed to find the expression 'Jews of the wrong sort' appearing in one of your recent posts (Orophobia, 16 Nov 2017), without any word of commentary or any condemnation of this racist phrase borrowed from D. H. Lawrence, a well-known antisemite. This kind of indiscretion brings shame on you and what is, in many respects, an excellent blog."*    

There are several things I'd like to say in response to this ...

Firstly, like Sylvia Plath, I'm someone who writes and identifies as a bit of a Jew, as I make clear in an early post where I reveal that key influences on my thinking include Jacques Derrida, Malcolm McLaren, and Larry David: click here. I'm certain that, for some, these three figures would also represent Jews of the wrong sort, i.e. provocateurs who gaily deconstruct the metaphysical illusions and sentimental ideals by which the majority choose to live.

Secondly, Lawrence - if it is in fact Lawrence speaking in The Captain's Doll and not an anonymous narrator offering either an indirect rendering of the thoughts of the protagonist or their own (ironic) commentary - is, like me, clearly in favour of sardonic individuals who seek to curb the enthusiasm of Bergheil romantics, such as Hannele, and encourage the difficult descent into the what Heidegger terms the nearness of the nearest (even if this risks a fall into gross materialism).

Thus Lawrence's attitude with reference to this question, as to many others concerning race, is ultimately complex and ambiguous (sometimes outrageously inconsistent) and The Captain's Doll is a text that remains highly resistant to any final interpretation.

Personally, I would argue that, for Lawrence, Jews of the wrong sort are people very much of the right sort. That is to say, very much his sort (just as they are my sort). And this is so because his status as an outsider obliged him to identify with groups and individuals whom society often holds in contempt; not just Jews, but also Gypsies, for example.

Thus, in The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930), it's clear where Lawrence's sympathies lie; with a 36-year-old Jewish woman, Mrs Fawcett, who has abandoned her husband and two young children in order to be with a much younger man; and a good-looking traveller, called Joe Boswell, who takes a shine to the 19-year-old daughter of an Anglican vicar.

It's the narrow domesticity and mean-spirited authority of the familial regime that imposes moral restrictions on life in the name of propriety, which Lawrence despises and mercilessly lampoons throughout the novel. He instinctively sides with all those who are, due to their marginalization and difference, implicitly opposed to such. This makes him a far more radical figure than many of his critics wish to concede ...            


See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin and the Gipsy', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones, and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Ronald Granofsky, '"Jews of the Wrong Sort": D. H. Lawrence and Race', Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana University Press), Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter, 1999-2000), pp. 209-23. 

Judith Ruderman, Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
 
*Note: The author kindly gave me permission to quote from her email, but asked that she remain anonymous.