Remembering Smell (13 page)

Her perfume is a throwback to that simpler time, before the Me generation took over and designer fragrances made the wearer stand out in a crowd. An analogy to food might be apt: Dunne wanted to create a perfume that would be to Calvin Klein's Obsession what tuna casserole is to a spicy tuna roll. Ellie was a hit. "A brand is always a story well told" is how one perfume executive described the scent's appeal. Dunne was so encouraged by the sales of her quietly elegant (down to the bottle) product, priced at $180, she spun out a slightly more glamorous version of it, Ellie Nuit.

Dunne's success was a bright spot in an otherwise troubled time for the perfume industry. Fragrance is suffering from the combined effects of a poor economy and people's paranoia about artificial scents invading their personal spaces. With perfume banned along with tobacco smoke in many office buildings, people seem to be getting the erroneous message that fragrance is toxic. If the actual chemicals in a scent don't make you sick, the power of suggestion will.

Scientists expect that culture will condition people to have a universal squinched-up-nose response to the smell of burning leaves—a scent that not so long ago was a pleasant trip down an autumnal memory lane for many—in the same way that cigarette smoke can cause nausea in some individuals. Such a reaction can be psychogenic, brought on by research that shows that long-term exposure is harmful. The same conditioning persuades a person to enjoy the smell of body odor if it's his beloved's body odor and they're making love. This liking is turned off once he's no tonger sexually aroused. How cultural conditioning and innate responses to inhaled chemicals collaborate to result in successful sexual partnerships is a complicated and mysterious process. Love and sex continue to mystify humans in spite of (because of?) our being obsessed with both. For whatever reasons, evolution has chosen to keep us in the dark. No one knows where the line is drawn between these two most basic instincts. Humans are eternally confounded by such questions as
Do I really love this person or is it just some mindless sexual attraction? Will the love
[or
the sex
]
last? How can I be trusted to choose the right mate ?

Poets have always known that the choice isn't really ours. Shakespeare never tired of this theme, and as a result we never tire of his plays. Composers too have long been inspired to concoct tales of love's labors lost (and found), none more bewitchingly than the nineteenth-century Italian Giuseppe Verdi.

O
NE OF MY MANY
resolutions after I became anosmic was to make better use of my ears. I'd been neglecting them. Scanning the Sunday
New York Times
for opera news in late March, I learned that Giuseppe Verdi's
II Trovatore
was being considered for the Metropolitan Opera's 2009 season.

The most popular of Verdi's operas during his lifetime,
II Trovatore
is seldom performed today. The trouble isn't the music but the ridiculous (to modern audiences) plot, which involves an olfactory misstep. The heroine, Leonora, is wooed in a dark garden by two singing brothers. One is her beloved Manrico and the other a notorious cad, the Count di Luna. "It's dark [and she's] working on smell, on the way her skin feels as the man gets close," artistic director David McVicar told the
Times
before opening night. "And here's [the singer playing Count di Luna] with his beautiful mane of silver hair," looking nothing like the singer playing Manrico. It should have been obvious to Leonora who was who. Yet she chooses the Count.

Verdi was born in 1813, more than a century before pheromones were discovered. To his contemporaries, it would have been clear that Leonora had made a serious moral error by trusting her nose. In the Age of Reason, olfaction was reviled because of its connection to base animal instincts; the theory of rationalism—"I think, therefore I am"—fit Catholic pedagogy like a glove. By the nineteenth century, both concepts were being challenged by the Romantic movement, which celebrated emotion and animal instinct. But their long partnership left behind a Victorian culture deeply ambivalent and squeamish about sex.

Olfaction hadn't always been held in such low regard. Throughout much of human history, the primal sense was at the top of the sense hierarchy precisely because it was anti-intellectual and seemed to convey transcendent spiritual messages.

Old Testament writings often linked earthly love and spiritual passion through olfactory metaphors, and fragrant herbs and oils remained central to the liturgy in early Christian churches. In the ancient world, fragrance (and sex) was highly esteemed. Cleopatra wouldn't have been seen, or rather smelled, in public without first having her daily full-body, scented-oil bath. Wealthy women wore hivelike appliances on their heads designed to waft sexually alluring scents; the fragrances were periodically replenished by servants. Aromatics were encased in priceless receptacles and "served" during religious rites.

In the earliest religions, human foibles were not portrayed in deeply negative ways. When people asked Greek and Roman gods for favors, they usually wanted a good rain or some golden elixir to fertilize the crops, not forgiveness for shameful thoughts. Tribal peoples still use strong earthy smells in their spiritual practices, which often involve drugs that induce smell-laden dreams they imbue with sacred meaning. Cultural anthropologist Constance Classen believes that dreams and odors have a lot in common: "Both are tangible and transitory. Both also can provide knowledge beyond that of the visible world, conveying essences hidden to the eye. In the modern West, odours are commonly thought to play very little, if any, role in dream-life. The Umeda, Ongee, Amahuaca, Desana and many other peoples know differently."

The message of Christianity changed as religion became an instrument of power. Everyone was a sinner, like it or not, and obedience to centralized papal authority offered the only hope of redemption. In the thirteenth century, mortification of the flesh promised rich rewards in the afterlife. As flesh was despised, so was smell. Christian ascetics practiced celibacy and slept on feces and mold to demonstrate their transcendence of the secular. The most extreme self-flagellators were canonized as saints. Poor hygiene and unsafe drinking water compounded smell's problems. Infectious diseases swept through the crowded cities of Europe. All these smells—from foul water to festering wounds—being both threatening and vile, became the scapegoats for illness caused by toxins as yet unknown. Convinced that the rancid smells themselves were the causes of illness, people took to wearing pungent scents to ward them off. Queen Elizabeth I is said to have worn a necklace of rotten apples, cinnamon, and cloves on the advice of the royal physicians.

The eighteenth-century naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, creator of the system for naming plants and animals by genus and species, failed in his attempt to create a workable taxonomy for odors, but he did guess correctly that sex was at the heart of every biological conundrum. When this put him at odds with the Church, he cloaked his suspicions in metaphor, implying that the flowers adorning the bridal bed were merely decorative, arranged by the "Creator" and "perfumed with so many scents, that the bridegroom and his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity."

The fact that odors stubbornly resisted classification provided still more proof that smell was a bad actor—disorderly, anti-intellectual, and sexually promiscuous. Enlightenment philosophers quashed any hope that reason might apply a counterforce to religious teachings, at least regarding smell. I smell, therefore I am? Not likely in the eighteenth century. The opening passage in Patrick Suskind's
Perfume
describes eighteenth-century France this way:

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.

The odors conspired in the public imagination to create a reputation for smell that was

straight out of the darkest days of paganism, when people still lived like beasts, possessing no keenness of the eye, incapable of distinguishing colors, but presuming to be able to smell blood, to scent the difference between friend and foe, to be smelled out by cannibal giants and werewolves and the Furies, all the while offering their ghastly gods stinking, smoking burnt sacrifices. How repulsive!

Educated elites responded as they always did in these wars: they said one thing and did another. Few of the pampered ladies of Versailles fretted over the sinfulness of their ways; what woman had time to think about that when she had a three-foot-high hairdo to keep from toppling into her glazed strawberries and a decolletage that needed constant freshening with sultry scents? In the eighteenth century, fashionable women anointed the cleavage with elaborate concoctions of their own devising. (One, called angel water, combined orange flower water, rose water, myrtle water, musk, and ambergris.) The breasts were elevated until only the nipples were concealed, and between the "hillocks," as the poet and writer Diane Ackerman termed this vision of heaving pulchritude in
A Natural History of Love,
were placed cut gemstones, just in case the scents and the push-up bra weren't enough to "waylay the eye" or "lure a wayward nose."

Europe eventually cleaned up its act. Odor was banished. By the Victorian age, legs were called "limbs," and neither smell nor sex was discussed openly. Women were tightly supervised and fully covered, their tiny waists cinched in with death-defying corsets that sent a mixed message. Smell was in the air but not in polite conversation. A researcher who did an informal literature search on the role of smell in fiction discovered (not to her surprise) what she regarded as a regrettable decline in olfactory references that began in the nineteenth century and persists today. She links this "deodorizing" to our modern obsession with tidiness. A clean house (and appearance) reflects a clean, chaste, and virtuous mind.

One who benefited from his own intuitive grasp of the downside of dualistic thinking was the neurologist- turned-analyst Sigmund Freud. Based on his work with female patients, Freud concluded that a fear of sex (manifested by repressed sexual desires and experiences) caused mental illness. Both sexes had the fear, he believed, but women were especially vulnerable. When Emma Eckstein, who happened to be extremely beautiful (and blessed with a prominent nose), sought his counsel, Freud saw an opportunity to test a radical notion involving mind-body connections that a close friend and colleague had developed.

The colleague, Wilhelm Fliess, was a medical doctor specializing in maladies of the ear, nose, and throat. Fliess had come up with a theory that the female nose controlled the sexual response and was linked to the genitals by some unknown pathway.

Eckstein had sought Freud's help for what a modern gynecologist would treat as a routine menstrual problem. Freud's suspicion of an underlying psychic disturbance was fueled by her revelation to him that she'd been sexually abused as a child. He made note to Fliess of her nose. Its size and shape suggested that she might be suffering from what Fliess called "nasal reflex neurosis." Fliess diagnosed the patient with the disorder; a misshapen turbinate bone in the nose was, he claimed, messing with the messages sent from the young woman's nose to her vagina. He removed the bone.

Did corrective surgery on her nose cure her? Alas, it did not. Not only did she fail to improve, but several weeks later she nearly bled to death due to Fliess's postoperative negligence (he had forgotten to remove nearly half a meter of surgical gauze). Freud was faced with a dilemma that some believe determined the future course of his career. The dilemma was this: he could disavow not only his friend Fliess but also his own budding theories about sexual repression—or he could blame the patient. Freud chose the latter option, accusing the young woman of inventing the childhood-abuse story and therefore causing the unfortunate results of the surgery. "Bleeding hysteria" was how Fliess and Freud later referred to the "condition" that almost killed Emma Eckstein. Given the ignorance about sexual function and the powerlessness of women at the time, it is hardly surprising that Freud's subterfuge worked.

To me sex has always seemed like a disconnect of a different sort: male versus female sexual appetites. I believe this discrepancy, while not universal, has to do with the two genders' different roles in species survival. Freud would have been bored silly by the simplicity of my argument that the male is a biological hard-ass ever looking outward to protect the family and find potential mates and that the female is hard-wired to keep her babies alive through behaviors now lumped together in the word
nurturing.

Gloria Steinem might also object. But hear me out, fellow feminists. Women typically have superior social skills (higher emotional intelligence) when compared to men, and men are more likely to follow logical reasoning to idiotic ext remes. Freud was a supremely logical fellow, after all. He possessed the classic male blend of logic worship, derring-do, and will to power. In his zeal to probe new scientific territory, he almost killed one of his patients. To save his reputation, he covered it up.

I forgive him, even though his ideas would strike the average person today as far more hysterical than Emma Eckstein's menstrual complaints or her claims of child abuse; in fact, they're borderline evil. But Freud was apparently just as skilled at repressing inconvenient truths as he believed many of his patients were. Someone has to go out on a limb to give us the benefit of hindsight. Science is all about risk-taking and testing hypotheses. I'm frankly tickled pink that more and more women are behaving like men. By that I mean, taking intellectual risks and betting the henhouse on a hunch.