Narcissisma.
Friday October 26, 2001
Who is, of course, the pride of Pomona; Pomona, Pomona says she looks like me, but she will look like you when I’m set free.
The question I keep swirling back to today is, “Why sisters?” (Or, of course, its corollary.) Unfortunately, I’m short a copy of Idols of Perversity, by Bram Dijkstra, which is a dark and misanthropic (and even misandrist) reading of Victorian art that’s interesting and thought-provoking even when it’s over the top and beyond the pale (sometimes especially then); he has some interesting things to say about mirrors and narcissism and the unhealthy views of women in that time, and the society women kept, and thus of expressions of homoeroticism and homosociability among women by male artists. —I (naturally enough) tend to disagree, or have reservations, with some of the conclusions he draws, but still. Interesting things are said, and it peeves me not to be able to quote him or answer him or even refresh my notoriously fallible memory as to what, exactly, he did say.
So it’s not that I want to tackle this head-on or anything. But I do keep poking it like a sore tooth; it just won’t let go. So: to deal with this particular question, one must of course tackle a larger one, first: “Why lesbians?” —Or, to be fair, or at least more precise, what is the attraction that homoerotic contact between women holds for (at least some) men? Dark and pessimistic though Dijkstra may be, he at least helps explode one of the more simplistic notions running around out there: that it’s merely the idea of two women marking time as best they can till the Male Gaze can nip in between ’em. It would be disingenuous to deny this plays any part at all in the attraction of lesbian chic—this is, of course, a culture still dominated by the aforementioned male gaze, and a gaze that, furthermore, finds the female form more attractive than the male; it’s also a culture that’s bequeathed to women from the musty and dank basement of the collective unconsciousness the role of Other, with all the sensual, somatic, passionate, emotional, even animalistic eroticization that (sometimes) implies; and, being a simple-minded lot, it’s all too easy for the male gaze to imagine that everyone partakes of the basic idea that women are, y’know, sexy. (I don’t agree with a lot of Andi James’s points, but one should always play scrupulously fair with one’s Devil’s Advocate.) —But that’s just a small, small part of what’s going on here.
There is, as well, the basic attraction of transgression—and it’s easier and thus more attractive to imagine two people crossing a line one will never cross oneself than a line one might, someday, cross, or be suspected of crossing, or of having crossed. (Though not nearly so celebrated, or mocked, or even acknowledged—see above re: male gaze, domination thereof—there is a corresponding attraction among [some; many; perhaps even most, sometimes, every now and again, deep down inside] women to the idea of two men getting jiggy with each other.) Of course, there’s also the appeal of the untouchable, the impossible; for someone who’s a little trepidatious at the whole idea of sex, and sexuality, and, you know, touching somebody else, it can be comforting to imagine a situation which by definition doesn’t—can’t—involve him at all. —Hence the immaturity so frequently associated with the idea in pop culture, perhaps.
Readers who’ve been around for a while might start noting more than an echo of the idea of self-destruction, self-dissolution, abnegation—being “naughted in the belly of the whale Annihilation.” Well. You can’t help but internalize some of the Zeitgeist flitting about as you grow up, and men who’ve grown up during the past thirty years or so (some; many; perhaps even most, sometimes, every now and again, deep down inside) have had to deal with the demonization of male desire. —Not that I’m saying this is in any way a large part of our popular culture; no. But it is there. Men are aggressive; men are dangerous; all men, after all, are potential rapists. Or so we’re told. Who else makes up the patriarchy, hmm? Add to this the fact that lust and desire are aggressive, dangerous, destabilizing emotions (whether male or female, but that’s beside the point at the moment)—how much safer, yes, but also nobler, sweeter, more pure, to imagine a love without that nasty internal demon, negating it, destroying it, dissolving it, naughting it away—
(It’s instructive, to change gears for a moment, to read Buffy the Vampire Slayer in this light: note how all of the male characters who’ve entered the circle of friends have some sort of demon they must rather physically do battle with, whether it’s vampirism, lycanthropy, or a dark and dangerous past. —With the notable exception of “I-guy” Xander Harris, whom Whedon has noted on more than one occasion is the closest to who he was in high school, and not that this explains Willow and Tara at all, though it may explain Whedon’s occasionally overly sentimental treatment of their relationship, not that I’m complaining; it’s the best such depiction on mainstream TV, not that I watch ER. But lord, am I digressing.)
Sisters, right?
Right.
(Change the subject much?)
Well, there’s a double dose of transgression, to start with—but it’s incest without all the sticky squickiness of “seed” and pregnancy and suchlike that inexplicably (to me, at any rate) litters most such fantasies. (All right, yes: it’s quite explicable. But I don’t like it, and so I dismiss it from my essay: poof!) Sisters—and, we can allow, cousins—are also stripped of the other main trope of incest fantasies: they rarely play out dominance games that either perversely reinforce or defiantly subvert the “normal” hierarchies of “normal” families. (I won’t go so far as to include brothers—though I do allow they may well share this congeniality, there’s something about male aggression, or perceived male aggression, that makes me think brother tales have enough of a dollop of competitiveness and aggression to keep dominance and submission a prominent theme—and anyway, there’s the question of who buggers and who’s buggered to settle. —And, thanks to the vagaries of taste, brothers are beyond my purview: poof!)
No, the thing about sisters is (mirrors, and sensuality, and soma, and passion, and emotion, and eroticization)—
Narcissism.
Twins, yes. But beyond that—it’s about an Ouroboric knot of love and lust and desire that does its best to deny the whole of the world outside; about being in love with someone “closer to me than anyone else ever could be,” and yet not so much about being in love with them as with having someone who is so in love with you, so focussed on you because you are someone who is so in love with them, so focussed on them, that the loop repeats and folds in on itself and recurs, ad infinitum. QED. It’s an epitome of adolescent love, which all of us who’ve survived it must admit is wholly (well, almost wholly) narcissistic: I’d die if you. I love you so much I. I’m going to burst. Explode. I. It’s defiant and angry and frightened and so very sure of itself and so very self-absorbed and so fragile and evanescent and doomed, and all of this hooraw has about as much to do with reality as—well. Any other erotic fantasy, I imagine.
(Who, me? Where am I in all this? See that guy, there, in the black coat? His eyes maybe a little sad? Buffeted by gales and warmed by wildfires he feels only vicariously, if that? Standing there, on the sidelines, where the novelists and voyeurs hang out? “And I alone am spared to tell the tale,” if that is, indeed, the fucking quote I’m looking for? A generous prince and patron indeed, who smiles so wistfully to see his dish sauced with a biting something of fragility and non-perpetuity? —Bastard.)
I— I, uh—
Of course, I’ve gone and done exactly what I hate: tackled it head-on, tried to explain it all straightforwardly, lay it out as if this is how it is, as if something so snarly and paradoxical could be anything but lopped in half, undone, come apart, when approached with such direct and brutal force. As if this is why I write what I write, or some of what I write; as if this is anything but rank self-justification, the foulest odor any writer can give off. To think someone could even imagine he could explain or even begin to understand his own erotic fixations. —You could always just pretend this is another prank I’m playing. You could, you know. More wool pulled over your eyes. There never was a cat, or a cradle, and it’s just a massively silly shell-game to try to justify having rented Sister My Sister, which was, for the most part, deathly dull, and not at all interested in even pretending to try to imagine why—
Why?
Narcissisma, Narcissisma
Narcissisma is the pride of Pomona
Pomona, Pomona says she looks like me
But she will look like you
When I’m set free—