Abstract
Pornography, Victorian sexual medicine, sexology, psychoanalysis, the whole contemporary novelistic, all turn on that question formulated by Freud as ‘What does a woman want?’, the question of ‘sexuality’, constantly and variously answered but always the same, the same story of the phallus and her orgasm, the Big O, preferably vaginal, the real thing; her sexual feeling denied, asserted, feared, patterned — ‘give her a pattern’ (the title of one of Lawrence’s essays). Woman = sex = orgasm. QED of the male position, the man whom men are supposed to be for their identity. What does a woman want? ‘What Marsha craved was a man, a real live, lascivious male.…’
‘I allow there have been many clever women, but a book written by a woman never makes the same impression on my mind as one written by a man.’
Madeleine Smith, letter to her lover Émile L’Angelier, whom she later poisoned when he threatened to reveal their liaison to her new fiancé, c. 1885
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Notes
‘I allow …’ Madeleine Smith, letter to Émile L’Angelier (circa 1885), cit. P. Hunt, The Madeleine Smith Affair (London: Carrol & Nicholson, 1950) pp. 83–4.
What does … Freud’s question, Was will das Weib?, occurs in a letter to Marie Bonaparte: ‘The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”’; cit. E. Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London: Hogarth, 1953–7) vol. II, p. 468. Or as Erica Jong puts it in the mouth of her heroine Isadora Wing: ‘What do you women want? Freud puzzled this and never came up with much.’ Fear of Flying, p. 30.
‘give her …’ D. H. Lawrence, ‘Give Her a Pattern’ (first appeared in the Daily Express, 19 June 1929, as ‘The Real Trouble About Women’), in Phoenix vol II, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (London: Heinemann, 1968) pp. 535–8. ‘What Marsha …’ Lundin, Women, p. 144.
‘For me the question …’ Hélène Cixous, La jeune née (in collaboration with Catherine Clement) (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1975) p. 151.
‘Even so …’ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) (St Albans and London: Granada, 1977) p. 99.
‘watch …’ F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978) p. 165.
‘Woman’sdesire …’ Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Seuil, 1977) p. 25. ‘it is the woman …’ Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, ‘Ecrire’, Sorcières no. 7 p. 14. ‘female pleasure …’ Michèle Montrelay, L’Ombre et le nom, pp. 80–1.
‘it is obvious …’ Hélène Cixous, ‘Quelques questions à Hélène Cixous’, Les Cahiers du GRIF no. 13 (October 1976) p. 20.
‘a feminine textual body …’ H. Cixous, ‘Le sexe ou la tête’, Les Cahiers du GRIF no. 13 (October 1976) p. 14.
‘the “I” …’ Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology (London: The Women’s Press, 1979) p. 327.
‘cannotdescribe itself …’ Luce Irigaray, ‘Woman’s Exile’, Ideology and Consciousness no. 1 (May 1977) p. 65. ‘auto-affection’ / ‘two lips’ Irigaray, Ce Sexe, p. 130 (‘I’m trying to say that the female sex would be, above all, made up of “two lips” … these “two lips” are always joined in an embrace’ ‘Woman’s Exile’, pp. 64–5). ‘neither subject nor object’ ibid. p. 132. Translations of French feminist texts, including one or two pieces by Irigaray, can be found in New French Feminisms ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). ‘the eschewing …’ Gillian Beer, ‘Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’, in Women Writing and Writing About Women (London: Croom Helm, 1979) p. 95. ‘the psychological sentence …’ / ‘of a more elastic …’ Virginia Woolf, ‘Romance and the Heart’ (1923), Contemporary Writers (London: Hogarth, 1965) pp. 124–5.‘the female …’ Ezra Pound, Canto XXIX, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1968) p. 149.
‘But women …’ D. H. Lawrence, ‘Do Women Change?’ (1929), Phoenix II, p. 541.
‘full self-responsibility …’ D. H. Lawrence, ‘Matriarchy’ (1928), Phoenix II, p. 552.
‘If the male orgasm …’ Jean-Louis Tristani, Le Stade du respir (Paris: Minuit, 1978) p. 36. ‘Feminine in its …’ Arnold Bennett, The Journals of Arnold Bennett ed. Newman Flower (London: Cassell, 1932) vol. I p. 6.
‘feminine forgetfulness …’ Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (1893) (London: Macmillan, 1920) p. 281. ‘the female elements …’ Holbrook, The Masks of Hate, p. 237.
‘the lovely henny surety …’ D. H. Lawrence, ‘Cocksure Women and Hensure Men’ (1929), Phoenix III, p. 555.
‘women are women’ Lawrence, ‘Do Women Change?’ (1929), Phoenix II, p. 538 (the title of the article on its original publication in the Sunday Dispatch answered the question: ‘Women Don’t Change’).
‘But Nancy appealed …’ Brigid Brophy, Flesh (1962) (London: Allison & Busby, 1979) pp. 44–6.
‘Study sensation …’ Kate Millett, Flying (1974) (St Albans: Paladin, 1976) pp. 539–40.
‘If they ask me …’ Adrienne Rich, ‘The Stranger’, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973) p. 19.
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© 1982 Stephen Heath
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Heath, S. (1982). VIII. In: The Sexual Fix. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16767-8_8
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