Abstract
This chapter offers a conceptualisation of the ‘heterotopic hymen’. Reading Foucault’s essay ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1984) and Derrida’s ‘The Double Session’ together with Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007), Davies analyses the exceptionality of the hymen, which entails spatiotemporal indetermination. In relation to the hymen, Davies examines the exceptional time of the protagonists’ honeymoon night and its coextensive space, the honeymoon suite. His theory of the heterotopic hymen offers an exceptional way to read this membrane and rethink first-time sexual experiences as well as the spatiotemporality of the honeymoon and the disruption of exceptionality caused by a preoccupation with history.
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Notes
- 1.
Since an earlier version of this chapter was first published as ‘Hymenal Exceptionality’, in Ben Davies and Jana Funke (eds), Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (2011, pp. 89–108), a number of new critical works have emerged that also consider the temporal complexities of On Chesil Beach. See, for example, Matti Hyvärinen, ‘Travelling Metaphors, Transforming Concepts’ (2013) and Jill Marsden, ‘Impersonal Intimacies: Echoes of Bataille in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach’ (2013).
- 2.
For a subtle and nuanced consideration of the potential problems ‘for a male critic to use the term “hymen”’ (p. 95), and the way in which the logic of Derrida’s theory of the hymen itself is neither essentialist nor idealist and how indeed it works against male mastery, violence, and appropriation, see Peter Brunette and David Wills (1989) Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (pp. 95–8). As Brunette and Wills argue, ‘what is intended [in Derrida’s theory] is not simply a rehabilitation but a revalorization (one must try to give sense to the term without having it signify a new orthodoxy) that will point the way toward a different conceptualization process’ (p. 97, my emphasis). It is in this spirit that my reading of the hymen in this chapter is also offered.
- 3.
In 2009, RFSU (the Swedish National Association for Sexuality Education) published a pamphlet entitled ‘Vaginal Corona: Myths Surrounding Virginity—Your Questions Answered’. In this pamphlet, RFSU argues that instead of a hymen, every woman possesses a vaginal corona. However, despite criticising the use of phrases such as ‘“breaking the hymen” and “deflowering”’ (p. 12), the text still employs mythologising language when describing the corona, such as: ‘petals of a rose’ (p. 6);‘carnation-shaped’ (p. 6);‘jigsaw piece’ (p. 6); and ‘half-moon’ (p. 6). Furthermore, whilst RFSU stresses that ‘the vaginal corona isn’t a brittle membrane’ (p. 9), it still allows for the possibility of ‘minor ruptures in the mucous folds that hurt, and sometimes…a little bleeding’ (p. 9). Most significantly, RFSU claims that ‘what’s actually there, is the vaginal corona, consisting of elastic folds of mucous tissue, which can’t be ruptured by a penis or by any other object inserted into the vagina. When the mucous tissue is stretched, minor ruptures sometimes develop and may smart a little. These soon heal, usually within 24 hours’ (pp. 12–13). In relation to my argument, the concept of the vaginal corona could possibly be seen to alter the significance of first-time sex, but it would also allow for multiple and repeated ‘hymenic’ or ‘coronic’ spatiotemporal moments through repeated ruptures. Far from undermining the concept of hymenic exceptionality, then, the idea of the vaginal corona opens up the possibility of a freshly nuanced spatiotemporality. In contrast to the possibility of repeated coronic moments, the American television series True Blood features a storyline focusing on the pain and anguish caused by hymenal re-growth. In ‘Timebomb’ (episode eight, series two, directed by John Dahl, 2009), two virgins experience sex for the first time. Whilst the male human experiences the pleasure this entails, the female vampire is made to feel the pain often associated with first-time vaginal intercourse. Worse still, as a vampire, she repeatedly heals. In the storyline, she can never go beyond this painful experience and she is destined to be repeatedly subject to the physical pain that can accompany virginal intercourse.
- 4.
Michèle Roberts’s short story ‘Honeymoon Blues’ (2010) offers another example of a contemporary narrative that focuses on the spatial and temporal significance of the honeymoon. Told in fragmentary prose, the narrative focuses on the protagonist Maud’s return trip to her honeymoon hotel bedroom. It is many years after the honeymoon, and the reader later learns that Maud’s husband is now dead. In a trance-like, agitated state, Maud experiences both the anguish of her loss and the recollected moments from her honeymoon. In a passage that metanarratively characterises the story’s style, the reader is told how Maud ‘holds a thousand words inside her, all dancing up and down. Disorderly sentences. All the words ever spoken. All the words of her past long as a corridor big as a hotel. Inside her outside her. Bits of lost time flow back to her, envelop her. Wrap her up. The hotel feels abandoned, hushed. Held in a trance of silence. As though swathed in gauze’ (p. 83). Maud’s relationship to words appears exceptional, and the spatiotemporal metaphor of the corridor of her past accentuates the significant interrelationship of time and space in relation to the honeymoon. Sensitivity to sexual time is further evident in the narrator’s vignette of the traditional European siesta, a temporal break here occurring within the exceptional time of the honeymoon: ‘after-lunch siestas are euphemisms for sex. Sweat-perfumed sex, bump of the headboard against the wall, creak creak of the springs, crying out into the pillow so as not to disturb the guests next door’ (p. 90).
- 5.
In “Society Must Be Defended”, Foucault touches upon the concept of exclusive inclusion with regard to sex (as well as madness) when he argues:
there was no such thing as a bourgeoisie that thought that madness should be excluded or that infantile sexuality had to be repressed; but there were mechanisms to exclude madness and techniques to keep infantile sexuality under surveillance…. If we concentrate on the techniques of power and show the economic profit or political utility that can be derived from them, in a certain context and for certain reasons, then we can understand how these mechanisms actually and eventually became part of the whole… from the nineteenth century onward and subject to certain transformations, the procedures used to exclude the mad produced or generated a political profit, or even a certain economic utility. They consolidated the system and helped it to function as a whole. The bourgeoisie is not interested in the mad, but it is interested in power over the mad; the bourgeoisie is not interested in the sexuality of children, but it is interested in the system of power that controls the sexuality of children. (2004, pp. 32–3)
See also, Foucault, The Will to Knowledge (1998, p. 72).
- 6.
Discussing the celebratory purpose of the word in The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2007), Agamben explains that ‘the Greek term hymnos is derived from the ritual acclamation that was shouted out during the marriage ceremony: hymēn (followed by hymenaios)’ (2011, p. 234). On the etymology of the word ‘hymen’, also see Derrida and McDonald, ‘Choreographies’ (1982, p. 71).
- 7.
The figure of the caesura plays a significant and pervasive role throughout Agamben’s work. In his essay ‘The Idea of Caesura’ in Idea of Prose (1985), he specifically looks at this type of poetic pause in relation to the following lines by Sandro Penna:
Io vado verso il fiume su un cavallo
che quando io penso un poco un poco egli si ferma.
I go towards the river on a horse
which when I think a little a little stops. (Agamben 1995, p. 43)
Agamben characteristically reads Penna’s lines in terms of a spatial break and temporal suspension, arguing: ‘the parallelism between sense and metre is again reconfirmed by the repetition of the same word on either side of the caesura, almost as if to give to the pause the epic density of an atemporal interstice between two moments, which suspends the gesture halfway in an extravagant goose-step’ (p. 44). Agamben re-emphasises temporal suspension towards the end of the essay, claiming: ‘the rhythmic transport that gives the verse its impetus is empty, is only the transport of itself. And it is this emptiness which, as pure word, the caesura—for a little—thinks, holds in suspense, while for an instant the horse of poetry is stopped’ (p. 44). To observe the ways in which Agamben turns to, and makes use of, the caesura in his work on the state of exception, see, for example: State of Exception (2005a [2003], pp. 35 and 42); and Remnants of Auschwitz (2008 [2000], pp. 84–5 and 133).
- 8.
The importance of the ‘afterwardsness’ that follows first-time sex is more humorously depicted in Julian Barnes’s first novel, Metroland (1980). When Christopher, one half of the male friendship that is the main focus of the text, has sex for the first time with a French woman named Annik, he reflects to himself:
Afterwards (that was a word which meant so much as a kid, a word which, catching you unexpectedly out of a wash of prose, could bring you up short with a hard-on, a word which, above all others, I had wanted to be able to write about myself); afterwards, when the fan at the back of the skull had put down his rattle and tucked away his scarf and the terraces had gone quiet; afterwards, then, I slipped off to sleep murmuring to myself, ‘Afterwards…afterwards.’ (2009, p. 96)
- 9.
In ‘Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum’ (1978), Agamben considers the privilege awarded to the instant in conceptualisations of time from ancient Greece to the present. Consequently, he argues, ‘a critique of the instant is the logical condition for a new experience of time’ (2007a, p. 110).
- 10.
In Blind Date (2003), Anne Dufourmantelle explores the relationship between sex and a time that shares some of the same qualities that characterise the moment. In the first of three sections on jealousy, she analyses a
time that behaves as if it did not exist at all, time that has been given the lovely name instant. Between an instant and eternity, there is grace. Sex wants it, right away, now. Maximum intensity in ‘no time at all.’ Eternity procured by an instant of grace. Time canceled out or wholly given over. At once instant and aion, full time, accomplished time. Considered in this light, sex answers to our anguish at being in time through the rediscovered grace of instants miraculously spared from any duration. (2007, pp. 37–8)
For Dufourmantelle, sex is a response to our being in time, which gives the impression that sex can take us out of time. Indeed, she argues that ‘the realized instant stops time’ (p. 41). Dufourmantelle then, however, explicitly argues that ‘sex is in time, caught up in time’s glue from the outset: expectation, desire, delay, regret, avoidance, failure, pleasure, difference, caress, absence—everything speaks to us of time that passes too quickly or too slowly but that does pass; everything speaks of the lag that accentuates and figures the very space there is between you and me’ (p. 42). Ultimately, Dufourmantelle argues that sex and the temporal structure known as ‘kairos’ are one and the same:
sex is another name for the kairos, for that event of a pure present, of pure presence, which takes place only once and does not begin again, whose very pleasure lies in not ceasing to want to begin again, in being the repetition of the same gestures, the same rituals, the same minuscule words lodged in that place of desire where they encounter terror and surmount it, every time, imperceptibly. The other name for the kairos is that precise moment when desire ceases to be desire and comes undone as it becomes embodied. (p. 42)
For Agamben’s discussion of kairos in relation to pleasure, history, and a possible transformation of time, see ‘Time and History’ (2007a, pp. 114–15); for his analysis of kairos and the messianic, see, for instance, The Time That Remains (2005b [2000], pp. 68–9).
- 11.
See, for example: Al Alvarez, ‘It happened One Night’ (2007); Peter Kemp, ‘Review: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan’ (2007); Randy Kennedy, ‘Sex with Consequences’ (2007); Lionel Shriver, ‘Marriage Was the Beginning of a Cure’ (2007); Natasha Walter (2007); Patrick Henry, ‘Amsterdam. Atonement. Saturday. On Chesil Beach’ (2008); Dominic Head, ‘On Chesil Beach: Another “Overrated” Novella?’ (2009); Jane Miller (2009); and Lynn Wells, Ian McEwan (2010).
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Davies, B. (2016). Hymenality: On Chesil Beach . In: Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48589-2_2
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