Intercourse (19 page)

One writer said that she had been “beaten bloody, ”
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and her confessor “heard it from Joan’s own lips that a great English lord entered her prison and tried to take her by force. That was the cause, she said, of her resuming man’s clothes. ”
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The English lord, said Michelet, “had bravely attempted to rape a girl in chains; and when he did not succeed, he had showered her with blows. ”
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She described “warders who are always throwing themselves on me trying to violate me. ”
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And Pierre Cusquel, a mason, who had talked with Joan twice, claimed that

she had not worn and was not wearing this male attire excepting in order not to give herself to the soldiers with whom she was. Once, in the prison, I asked her why she was wearing this male attire and that was what she answered me.
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She was attacked and beaten, at least once. It is inconceivable that she was not raped during the period she was in female clothing if the men, or a man, an English lord, determined that she would be raped. She was chained, no longer physically strong; no longer a witch, no longer a soldier; dressed female. They were armed. Any woman who can be badly beaten can be raped. She was not the great transvestite, unable to bear being out of male clothing for even a few days. She was a woman who was raped and beaten and did not care if she died—that indifference a consequence of rape, not transvestism. She put on male clothes again to protect her body, in shock, perhaps wanting to die but more likely not understanding the imminent danger of wearing them, not caring when told (and clearly, as has often been charged, set up by the soldiers or Inquisitors who left the male clothing in the cell for her). She never admitted to being raped—admitting to an attempt would be humiliation enough and reason enough to help her if her judges ever intended to—and being a virgin was still the only chance she had for mercy. Once raped, she was nothing, no one, so low, “the common level of women, ” precisely what the Inquisition wanted. After her heroic escape from being female, she was made twice female: raped and burned. The Inquisition, sentencing her to death for putting on male clothes again, said: “time and again you have relapsed, as a dog that returns to its vomit, as We do state with great sorrow. ”
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She had heard her voices again too at that same time, St. Catherine and St. Margaret, both martyred for resisting rape. The Inquisition deemed the voices demonic and declared Joan “a heretic, ” “an infected limb. ”
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She died fast, and when she was dead and her clothes had been burned away, “the fire was raked back, and her naked body shown to all the people and all the secrets that could or should belong to a woman, to take away any doubts from people’s minds... ”
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After death, then, she became female a third time: her naked body, including her genitals, shown to all the people. The fire was relit, and she was “soon burned, both flesh and bone reduced to ashes. ”
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Joan was burned in Rouen in 1431, in part because she heard voices and saw lights; the Inquisition repeatedly interrogated her on these phenomena and condemned her for them. A mere 412 years later, at the age of 22, three years older than Joan had been when she died, on his way home to Rouen, another person saw lights and heard voices:

Golden lights, blazing with indescribable intensity, began to flash before his left eye, and his whole brain seemed simultaneously to be bursting with a million multicoloured visions and scenes...
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The drama, the magnitude of the event, suggests a male ego at the center of the experience. There is nothing here so pedantic as learning how to get a sword or instructions on being pious, nor so demanding of discipline and responsibility as making war or crowning a king. Instead, there is sensation, feeling for its own sake, the intensity of a sublime, private ordeal. In Rouen, at his home, he experienced:

First the glow, the sounds; then terror, caused by the feeling of the ebbing away of his personality and the approach of annihilation; then the million thoughts, images, fantastic combinations of every kind crowding at once into his brain like blazing rockets in a flood of fireworks. He himself later described his visions as “seminal losses from the pictorial faculty of the imagination, ” or as combinations of “Saint Theresa, Hoffman, and Edgar Poe. ”
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He was not burned alive, although his father, a doctor, trying to treat him, did accidentally pour some hot water on his hand. Instead, he was put to bed, told to rest, not to get excited, not to consume coffee or wine or meat, not to smoke, and “to lead a perfectly quiet life... ”
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He was allowed to leave the university where he was studying law, which he hated; to retire to his family’s country estate, which he rarely thereafter left; and to write, painstakingly, books. From his affluent repose, he wrote what a current paperback edition of his masterwork hails as “the greatest portrait ever written of a woman’s soul in revolt against conventional society. ”
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The book is not about Joan of Arc. It is, instead and on the contrary, about Emma Bovary, a petite bourgeois whose great act of rebellion is to commit adultery. With this woman, called “my little lady”
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by her creator, the modern era begins: the era of the petite bourgeoisie seeking freedom. Female freedom is defined strictly in terms of committing forbidden sexual acts. Female heroism is in getting fucked and wanting it. Female equality means that one experiences real sexual passion—driven to it, not faking. There is an equation between appetite and freedom, especially promiscuity (as one form of appetite) and freedom. A romantic distinctly not in the traveling, lyric tradition of Shelley or Byron, indeed, a female romantic with lightness in the head and fragmented fantasies feverish on the brain, “she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women... who stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven... ”
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For Emma, Joan was such a comet, a figure of fantasy, in the ether, not ever having lived on earth in the framework of real human possibility. Emma’s mind, murky with religious and romantic fantasy, wanted “the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts. ”
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In her sentimentality, “she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries”;
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and in her effete impotence, “[s]he tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfill. ”
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Alternately agitated and bored, having a mind filled with fantasies rather than ideas or possibilities, having no purpose or commitment, having no action, no vocation, only the boring chores and obligations of domesticity, too self-involved to find either passion or emotion in commonplace human relations, including motherhood, she is incapable—to use the language of Iris Murdoch—of moral or artistic excellence, defeated because she is immersed in personal fantasy, “the chief enemy of excellence, ” “the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is outside one. ”
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Murdoch illustrates the distinction between fantasy and seeing with this example:

Rilke said of Cezanne that he did not paint “I like it, ” he painted “There it is. ”
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This, she concludes, “is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. ”
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Preoccupied with fantasy, Emma does not see or experience the world outside herself except as a deprivation of attention from her inner fog, and so she remains essentially untouched— by the husband who fucks her and by human possibility in the wider world of real events. Virginity is redefined through her, given a modern meaning: a woman untouched is a woman who has not yet felt sexual desire enough to be made sick by it, experienced sexual passion enough to crave it, and broken rules in order to be carnal; a woman fucked by her husband but feeling nothing, or not enough, no lust, no romance, no brilliance of sensation, is still a woman untouched. This new virginity of body and soul survives marriage, and marriage itself generates new, incoherent fantasies of romantic or sexual grandeur: “Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires. ”
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There is no freedom, no heroism, no ambition, no equality, outside the domain of sex experienced as carnal passion and also as the breaking of a rule. Danger is in the extremity of feeling and the risk of flouting convention; and the danger verifies the authenticity of the event, hidden from history yet having the significance of a male act of freedom inside history. The large, brave world of Joan becomes the tiny, suffocating world of Emma: and in it we still live. The old virginity—with its real potential for freedom and self-determination—is transformed into the new virginity—listless, dissatisfied ennui until awakened by the adventure of male sexual domination: combat on the world’s tiniest battlefield. It took Freud to call the refusal to fight on that little battlefield “repression” and to name the ambition to fight on the large one “penis envy. ” The cell door closed behind us, and the key turned in the lock.

The picture of Emma is of a woman unfulfilled: “she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. ”
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Charles, her husband, had been happy after the wedding night, demonstrative, calling her endearing names: “It was he who might rather have been taken for the virgin of the evening before, whilst the bride gave no sign that revealed anything. ”
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Emma tried to find the passions and satisfactions she had read about in books—the meaning of the words
“felicity, passion
_}
rapture”
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—but instead intercourse was “one habit among other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony of dinner. ”
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But after her first adultery, “[n]ever had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. ”
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She had entered a new world: “She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. ”
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She felt the sensation she had dreamed of: “The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him. ”
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She had lusted in her heart before, for Leon whom she would have later; but Rodolphe was the first lover, the first man who had made her feel passion. He enjoyed her, then gradually became indifferent to her. To keep his attention—to get the sensation, like a junkie needing dope—she became more and more submissive: “she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe concealed his indifference less and less. ”
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She felt torn, partly regretting the affair because of the pain, partly wanting “to enjoy him the more. ”
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She felt “humiliation... turning to rancour, tempered by their voluptuous pleasures ”
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She experienced sexual submission: “He subjugated her; she almost feared him. ”
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Rodolphe knew how to use her: “He made of her something supple and corrupt... her soul sank into this drunkenness... ”
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She begged him to love her, to want her, to use her, to let her stay: “He had so often heard these things said... Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion that has always the same forms and the same language. ”
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Bored, he leaves her. She becomes sick, retreats again into a world of fantasy, wants to die, to go to heaven, be a saint, until Leon returns to Rouen and they have an affair there. The affair is extravagant and she takes many risks, including using her household money to finance a hotel room and gifts for her lover. But he too eventually becomes bored with her: he “dozed to the sound of a love whose delicacies he no longer noted. ”
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And Emma “was as sick of him as he was weary with her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. ”
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Still, she wanted the sex even more than she had before, the decadence of their mutual indifference increasing, as Rodolphe’s indifference had, her need:

Then, though she might feel humiliated at the baseness of such enjoyment, she clung to it from habit or from corruption, and each day she hungered [more]...
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She is in debt, she has borrowed money, pawned and sold her possessions; she is threatened by creditors; she wants Leon to get her money and run away with her. Leon stands her up, abandoning her, and she is left in the middle of her own real life: her husband destitute because of the money she has taken from him and borrowed from others. She tries to borrow money from her old lover, Rodolphe, but he refuses her. And, in the end, she kills herself. She is not repressed. Instead, she is corrupt and impoverished and abandoned. She dies by her own hand, no fantasy left that is consoling. She has been fucked, she has wanted it, felt it, craved it, lost everything for it; and from it she has nothing, she is empty. The first lover costs her her virginity; that is gone once she can feel and desire and pursue sex. The intercourse itself, the submission it engenders in her, the habit of being that it becomes, the need she has for the pleasure it gives her, changes her without giving her any capacity to see, to know, or to love. Fucking leads to the loss of illusion, especially the illusion that love, sex, and sensation are the same as freedom, as heroism. Emma’s fantasies cannot stand up against the crushing reality of male sexual dominance: the fucking, the boredom, the abandonment. Emma’s corruption is a descent into a sensuality that is greed. For her, for her lovers, pleasure is the exclusive goal of life and only pleasure is real or worthwhile. While still a virgin—married and fucked but still untouched in the carnal sense—Emma had only the impoverished inner life of fantasy. Then sensation consumed that inner life, meager as it was. She is left with nothing inside. Intercourse robs her of any privacy she has had, even privatized fantasy; and it robs her of all limits, social and ethical, in the real world. As Flaubert presents it, the corruption comes from the intercourse itself: what it means for her to want and to take sensation in sex with the sloppy self-indulgence of a drunk. This particular point is not about gender: it is not that her adultery has social consequences that are unfair because she is a woman. The men already embody the human consequences of this corruption. They are indifferent to human relations and incapable of empathy or understanding. The rest is gender. They have what Emma does not: each has an ego and lives in a wide world. Because they have the power that men have, they are able to take their pleasure where and when they find it, and each moves on when he is bored, no longer sufficiently amused. For her, each man is perhaps her only opportunity; she cannot make opportunities in her confined domesticity. To keep first the one, then the other, she will go to any length; and the submission charges the sex with humiliation and the humiliation with sex. The boredom too is intrinsic to the sex. Inevitable and terrifying, the men become cruel in their indifference; and to have them she still submits. Having them means that sensation will prevail over her own blank, empty life. Her self-destruction, including her death, is the final reckoning for what she has become: not because she is an adulteress but because she has no integrity, she is nothing. The suicide is her recognition that she has hit bottom. The men, having the world, have a deeper bottom to hit.