Insight Editions · No. 189
The Bedtrick
Tales of Sex and Masquerade
Wendy Doniger
Wendy Doniger compares stories of sexual deception, mistaken identity, and bodily substitution across Indian, European, and other mythic and literary traditions.
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The Book in Brief
Wendy Doniger's The Bedtrick: Tales of sex and masquerade across myth and literature. Doniger maps the bedtrick: sexual deception by substituted bodies, across Indian, European, and other story worlds.
Argument map
| Ch | Title | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Front matter | ~252w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 2 | Preface: Why a Book about a Bedtrick? | ~6,824w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 3 | Introduction: Sex, Text, and Masquerade | ~5,422w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 4 | ONE: How to Commit Adultery with Your Own Spouse | ~19,892w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 5 | Approach One: Philosophy, or Love/Sex = Mind/Body? | ~5,837w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 6 | TWO: The Rape of the False Mother | ~10,361w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 7 | Approach Two: Psychology | ~6,177w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 8 | THREE: Waking Up in Bed with an Animal | ~10,996w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 9 | Approach Three: Zoology | ~4,784w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 10 | FOUR: The Lovely/Loathly Lady | ~21,770w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 11 | Approach Four: Feminism, or Women Are Good to Thin | ~8,543w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 12 | FIVE: The Cuckolds of the Heart | ~10,533w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 13 | Approach Five: Theology, or When God Has Lipstick | ~3,849w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 14 | SIX: Designated Hitters | ~21,998w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 15 | Approach Six: Law, or Loopholes in the Penal Code | ~3,332w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 16 | SEVEN: Color, Class, and Clout | ~17,199w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 17 | Approach Seven: Weapons of the Weak | ~2,496w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 18 | EIGHT: Cross-Cultural Cross-Dressing | ~18,644w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 19 | Approach Eight: Queer Theory and the Theater of De | ~3,161w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 20 | NINE: Incest | ~5,609w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 21 | Approach Nine: Sexual Rhetoric | ~7,248w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 22 | TEN: Real Sex and Fantastic Sex | ~25,113w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 23 | Approach Ten: Structuralism | ~3,600w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 24 | Conclusion: Carnal Ignorance and Carnal Knowledge | ~7,810w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 25 | Appendix: Bedtricks in Stith Thompson's Motif-Inde | ~983w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 26 | Filmography: Double Features: Bedtricks (and Relat | ~4,228w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
Front matter
Tales of Sex and Masquerade Wendy Doniger The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London Wendy Doniger (O'Flaherty) is the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School and a professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is the author of several books, including Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (1980), Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities (1984), and Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (1999).
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Bedtrick
Tales of Sex and Masquerade Wendy Doniger The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London Wendy Doniger (O'Flaherty) is the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School and a professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is the author of several books, including Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (1980), Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities (1984), and Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (1999).
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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2000 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2000 Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 ISBN (cloth): 0-226-15642-7 ISBN (paper): 978-0-226-15643-9 ISBN (e-book): 978-0-226-15644-6 54321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Doniger, Wendy. The bedtrick : tales of sex and masquerade / Wendy Doniger.
- (Worlds of desire) Includes bibliographical references and index. BL325.S42 D64 2000 29Ll'78357-dc21 99-050887 @ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. In memory of my father, Lester L.
Doniger (1909-1971), and for my son, Michael Lester O'Flaherty (b.
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Preface: Why a Book about a Bedtrick?
Why a Book about a Bedtrick? ~ TEXTS AND ApPROACHES 1 his is a book about the mythology of sex.
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Why a Book about a Bedtrick? ~ TEXTS AND ApPROACHES 1 his is a book about the mythology of sex. More precisely, it is about the story of going to bed with someone whom you mistake for someone else.
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It is in some ways a companion volume to (a double or shadow of) my book entitled Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. Though each is self-contained, they are complementary; to use the Cinderella metaphor,l each book drops the other's second shoe. Where Splitting the Difference deals with men and women who split in two, fragmenting in situations that only occasionally involve either mas- querades or sexual intimacy or both, The Bedtrick concentrates on pre- cisely those two issues; that is, where Splitting the Difference is about gen- der, and about splitting the difference, The Bedtrick is about sex-more precisely, about lying about sex-and about telling the difference.
And where Splitting the Difference deals, in a more or less classically philological way, with the historical development of texts within two specific and his- torically related traditions (ancient Greece and India, with a sideways glance at Victorian England and Hollywood), this book regards the entire world as its oyster and utilizes the irritating grains of sand consisting of a number of different methods to extract the string of narrative pearls. People who split or double in nonsexual ways (by being beheaded, for instance, or reified in mirrors) appear only in Splitting the Difference, but some of the people who split and double in order to play bedtricks over- lap and appear in both books, double dipping as it were: some of the hero- ines of the first two chapters of Splitting the Difference (such as Saranyu/ Samjna, Alcmena and Ahalya, and Eve White/Black) make a few cameo appearances in The Bedtrick.
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A dagger (t) or a double dagger (:j:) alerts the reader to the existence of other citations that consti- tute a context for the theme so marked, which can be located in the table of contents and/or in the index. A dagger refers to other citations in this book, and a double dagger to citations in both this book and Splitting the Difference. These three tools-the table of contents, the index, and the cross-references-are designed to help the reader use the book in a hypertextual way, to move from a particular instance of a theme to a place where it is more generally discussed.
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I have also noted from time to time themes and plots that correspond to Stith Thompson'st periodic table of motifs and tale types (see appendix). But overall I have chosen to arrange the chapters according to the nature of the bedtrickster: rejected spouse, raped spouse, god or animal, ugly or beautiful woman, sexual rival, partner of a legal surrogate, politically disempowered victim, gender-crosser, incestuous relative, realistic plotter. Each story can be read from the standpoint of the trickster (the person who plays the trick) or of the victim (by which I mean simply the dupe, the person who does not know that it is a trick, with none of the darker overtones of the word "victim").
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Readers may find sympathies with either side-or, indeed, with both sides. Bedtricks have many different mo- tives-people do it for love, for sex, for money, for revenge, to save their marriages, to protect themselves, to protect someone else, to gain infor- WHY A BOOK ABOUT A BEDTRICK? xv mation, to gain political power-the list could go on and on.
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And I have also included some texts of unconsummated bedtricks that are consummated in later interpretations; thus, for instance, Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergeract has no consummated bedtrick, but the kiss, as usual, stands for more, and the film version (Roxanne, 1987) connects the dots and consummates the act. So, too, the implicit bedtricks in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errorst and Twelfth Nightt were made explicit in contemporary productions8 in which the twin brother or Sebas- tian staggers out, more or less naked, from the house of the bedtricked woman (Adriana or Olivia); a contemporary production of Midsummer Night's Dream,t too,9 left no doubt in anyone's mind that Titania and Bottom became lovers.
(Shakespeare also depicted explicit bedtricks in All's Well That Ends Wellt and Measure for Measuret and a quasi bedtrick in Much Ado about Nothing.) The bedtrick is expressed by acts of different intensities according to different conventions in different cultures and periods. Each of the ten chapters is divided into two parts. The first part pre- sents the texts, generally beginning with an example taken from ancient Hindu mythology and then moving from India to the rest of the world, and from gods to humans.
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Where Saranyu/Samjna provided the seminal text (what Hindus call the bija-mantra) for Splitting the Difference, the pivot of this book is the story of Shiva, Parvati (Shiva's wife, here in the xvi PREFACE form of KalilGauri), and the demon Adi, a myth that seems to have ob- sessed me even more than the tale of Samjna, perhaps because Shiva is both my kind of god and my kind of guy: I touched upon this story in my first book, Siva: The Erotic Ascetic (1973), translated it in Hindu Myths (1975), and analyzed it in Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (1980)-always, as here, using different variants and devising different interpretations. In this book it provides a kind of thread, often involving Shiva: Shiva's rejected wife must masquerade to seduce her husband (chapter 1); the demon Adi masquerading as Parvati fools Shiva and be- comes the raped mother (chapter 2); Shiva's sexual rival attempts to se- duce Shiva's wife (chapter 5), who sends her servant in her place (chapter 6); the demon Adi becomes an animal (chapter 3) and a female (chapter 8), while Parvati reveals her fair (chapter 4) interior by sloughing her black (chapter 7) outer sheath; she curses her son when he comes between her and his father (chapter 9), and she is recognized by Shiva only during the sexual act (chapter 10).
Each chapter then cross-culturally contextualizes the Hindu story with variants of the theme from the Hebrew Bible, medieval courtly romances, Shakespeare, operas, or contemporary literature, theater, and cinema. The first part of each chapter emphasizes differences among variants of the theme and different cultural aspects of each theme, noting other stories of the same type in the same culture and dwelling upon some of the striking details that make each variant unique, even within its own culture. These sections do not have full conclusions; they present a body of materi- als' each piece analyzed in itself, but leave the broader interpretations for the final part of each chapter, which I have called "Approaches." The approaches present the shadow:j: of the text, the commentary, uti- lizing various disciplines: philosophy, psychology, zoology, feminism, the- ology, law, critical studies, queer theory, rhetoric, and structuralism.
Al- though each set of ideas and questions is assigned to a chapter to which it is particularly appropriate, all of the approaches are relevant to all ten chapters, to all variants of the stories of the bedtrick, a wide range of approaches to a wide range of genres, like Cyrano'st suggestion for vari- ous methodological critiques of his nose: aggressive, friendly, descriptive, inquisitive, kindly, etc. In this way I have tried to create the textual and methodological equivalent of the kind of "thick description" that Clifford Geertz has prescribed for anthropological fieldwork.
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I have, for instance, used structural analyses, Freudian terminology, and my own mild brand of feminist consciousness throughout the book, though I have also explic- WHY A BOOK ABOUT A BEDTRICK? xvii itly discussed each of these methods in one of the ten discrete sections devoted to approaches. These approaches, which embody ideas more than methods, are in- tended to raise the sorts of questions that might prove fruitful in drawing patterns of meanings from the stories in this book.
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Some of the questions are particularly associated with certain European or American disciplines, and some transcend or combine disciplines. But the ten approaches are not intended to summarize or even contribute to the disciplines upon which they draw. They ask the questions that the disciplines ask but do not give their answers, or cite all the scholars in those disciplines who have offered answers; they draw upon the more basic, classical formula- tions and leave it to interested readers to forage further in more sophisti- cated contemporary directions.
1o I claim no new insights into Lacan or Descartes; rather, I suggest that the texts of the bedtrick offer some an- swers to their questions, and I suggest some ways in which asking their questions enlarges our understanding of the bedtrick. I am poaching in these preserves, making commando raids to pick up any ideas I can find that shed light on the tricks played in the dark; I am using the theories that I know, the ones that I like, the ones that make sense to me for this problem.
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I am not trying to reconcile one discipline with the often warring methods of another, but I believe that it is possible to derive useful in- sights into a text from disciplines, or even schools within disciplines, that are not on speaking terms with one another. Nor do I mean to imply that my own disciplinary home, the history of religions, is necessarily more inclusive than the disciplines it draws upon, merely that some histo- rians of religions, such as myself, find eclecticism a fruitful point of depar- ture, or even of leverage.ll The questions will always take us back to the stories, which are greater than any of our ideas about them.
I start with the stories, and leave them without final conclusions, to give the reader a chance to conceive her own ideas about them before hearing mine; and I have tried to arrange the stories in such a way as to let them speak for themselves while also telling the story that I want them to tell. Readers impatient with this agenda, and those who want to cut to the chase to find out why they should bother to read the stories at all, can always skip to the conclusion of each chapter, then to the sections on approaches, and finally to the summary conclusion of the book.
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Some people (I confess to being one of them) read academic books (and menus) backward, as if they were written in Hebrew: a glance first at the bibliography, to see, among other things, if their own works xviii PREFACE are cited12 and what texts are used, so that if the book proves bankrupt of ideas, one can at least check out the assembled sources and develop one's own ideas about them. Such people will probably turn straight to the conclusion of this book right after finishing with the bibliography and the notes, and only then read the stories.
As Count Orlofsky, patron of the bedtrick ball, sings in Die Fledermaus, in an aria that could be the school song for all the actors, tricksters, and victims in these stories about sex, "Chacun a son gout." Whenever I hear that aria, I feel that they're playing my song, methodologically speaking.
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Texts As Contexts
In some cases, I have provided a nonnarrative context for the stories I tell: some of the Hindu myths, for instance, may be explained by certain assumptions encoded in the caste system, and some of the narratives of the Hebrew Bible by considerations of the position of the Jews in the ancient Near East; American films reflect the attitudes of the cold war; European fairy tales refract early modern ideas about embryology; and so forth. But the meanings of these stories are not limited to their social con- texts.
I have tried to argue for the methodological assumptions underlying the broad comparative enterprise in a book, The Implied Spider, that be- gan life as the introduction to this book, The Bedtrick. Let me apply the arguments in The Implied Spider to the problem posed by The Bedtrick. Comparison takes a myth out of its historical context and supplies, instead, the context of other myths, often from other cultures.
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Frequently, the best way to understand a myth is by understanding how it differs from other myths in the same culture as well as from variants in other cultures. Such a supplementary context is needed because of the fragmen- tary nature of our understanding of myths, especially those embedded in ancient texts. When myths tell us what happened, they do not always tell us why the people in the story did what they did or how they felt about what happened to them.
To this extent, they remain open and transparent and can be retold, within one culture or in several cultures, with several very different meanings. Although well-told myths always have plenty of details to give them life and reality, they do not always have psychological details. Laconic texts leave us in the dark, where one thing looks much like another.
In the Hebrew Bible story of Rachel and Leah, t for instance, if we ask how it was that Jacob was fooled, how he mistook Leah for Rachel, we WHY A BOOK ABOUT A BEDTRICK? xix find that the narrative background remains opaque and leaves us with insoluble riddles. Later Jewish commentaries raise and answer some of these questions, but we can also seek unofficial commentaries outside the tradition of the original text.
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The comparatist can use the speculations found in similar stories told in other cultures to fill in what is not said in the text under consideration. In this way we may use a Hollywood film or a modern British text to discipline our own imagination of what might have been in the minds of Rachel and Leah.
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Did people at other times, and in other parts of the world, have the same ideas about sex and gender, desire and knowledge, that prevail in European and American society today? Would the author of the story of Rachel have felt like Angela Carter (let alone the directors of the Bette Davis films) about such things as sororal rivalry? And a related question: Did Freudt put our ideas about all of this into our heads (or, to use the currently hegemonic lingo, construct them)?
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Is the idea that the sexual act is both revelatory and concealing, for instance, just a modern European idea that we read back into ancient texts, or is it really present in those texts, too? If it is present in a muted form, how do we use the manifest content of contemporary texts to excavate the latent content of ancient texts? How do we know our questions are not projections (like the projections+ of lust that facilitate the bedtrick)?
To some extent, of course, they are projections; we cannot know what was in the mind of an author. But projecting other texts, rather than, or in addition to, our own ideas, into the text in question at least makes the projection more subtle and argues for an imaginary line drawn not just between our heads and the Bible but between the heads of the auteurs of the Bette Davis films and the Bible. This method puts the texts them- selves in conversation with one another,19 sometimes even in the intimate pillow talk of textual intercourse.
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Ultimately, we cannot know if an earlier author thought like a later one; but what either of them thought is always a human possibility, and we who have the advantage of hindsight may now bring those later possibilities explicitly to our reading of the older texts, acknowledging what we are doing. WHY A BOOK ABOUT A BEDTRICK? xxi Can we generalize about the human meanings that flesh out the ab- stract armatures common to many, if not all, of these stories?
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Our stories range from lighthearted comedy and farce (such as Angela Carter's twins, the Telugu loincloth story, and Some Like It Hot) through moralizing texts (such as the Jain and Buddhist stories in chapters 1 and 4) to the mise en abime of metaphysical and psychological confusion in the Japanese tale of The Changelings.t Other differences result from different cultural periods, different religious or secular contexts, different ideolo- gies. The bedtrick in the Hebrew Bible is primarily about the paternal inheritance of elder and younger brothers and about negotiating the boundaries of incest, while in medieval Christianity, it is about the tension between marital and extramarital love.
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In Shakespeare it is used to over- come the tension between monogamy and promiscuity and to explore androgyny and sexual jealousy; in nineteenth-century Germany and Rus- sia, it is about paranoia, particularly political paranoia; in nineteenth- century England, about the sexual threat of women and the terror of aging; and so forth. Intertextuality within each tradition allows each genre to reflect upon others and to intersect with them, producing potentially infinite crosscurrents and undertones. I leave it to each reader to pursue the streams of his or her own fancy further into whatever genres or con- texts strike a note of sympathy or leave questions unanswered.
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Though stories about bedtricks are told all over, some of the tricksters' motives, and many of their ways of getting caught and/or away with it, vary not just among cultures but among individuals. But comparison defamiliarizes what we take for granted. For example, this book will compare the story of Rachel and Leah in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 28) with Angela Carter's story of Nora and Dora (in Wise Chil- dren).
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Both stories are about a woman whose sister takes her place in the bed of her husband or lover. By comparing them, I am asserting a degree of generality: some of the problems that confronted Rachel and Dora are also being faced by contemporary British and American women. My act of comparison inevitably brings a third element into the field of play: my voice in addition to those of the Hebrew Bible and Angela Carter.
My selection of these stories rather than others, and my decision to high- light certain shared elements of them at the expense of other elements that are unique to each version, are particular to me, not merely to my time and place.
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The Uses Of Insomnia
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xxiii more detail than the European and American texts, in part because I know the Indian texts best and like them best but also because I assume that most of my readers know the European texts better and have better access to them. My second qualification to write this book is my insomnia, which began at roughly the same time as my interest in storytelling and accounts for a good deal of my knowledge of English literature (particularly Shakespeare) and all of my knowledge of B movies.
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I am not a scholar of films; I don't study the old silent ones or many foreign films, nor do I keep up with the latest Hollywood trends in horror and mutilation; I am an American Movie Classic buff. I watch films but do not read much about them besides Leslie Halliwell and David Thomson; for me films are primary texts, and all I can contribute to the study of films is their classical mythological context. I earned the red badge of bloodshot eyes watching the Late Late Late Show with my mother, and I sometimes feel that I ought to win the literary equivalent of the Croix de Guerre for sitting through not only the many truly terrible films about bedtricks on "late Thursday/early Friday" televi- sion but the advertisements for used cars and phone sex (some of which also offer doubles) that punctuate them-until, at last, the coup de grace is administered at dawn, to the appropriate military strains of "The Star Spangled Banner." (I also owe to my mother my love of opera,t whose plots share with B movies the dubious privilege of providing a happy retirement home for mythological kitsch.) The sorts of films I have concentrated on are the lowbrow popular movies that provide a rich compost for myths to grow in, the B movies that are (along with Star Trekt )27 the reductio ad absurdum of many myths, for Hollywood is as much a myth factory as it is a dream factory.
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The use of film cliches for the sexual act was wonderfully satirized in an old Monty Python skit in which, as a couple starts to make love on a bed, she sinks down backward and he bends over her as they fade out; then you see waves crashing, a train rushing into a tunnel, a silo rising, a silo falling, and so forth, until we see her sitting up angrily in bed saying to him, as he sits there operating a movie projector, "Are you going to show those films all night?" Films present unique aspects of the bedtrick because where texts (even those that assume the primacy of vision) are made of words, films (even "talkies") are made of images, inspiring new takes on the problem of representing two visually "identical" people. My basic comparison is between ancient India and contemporary America, particularly Hollywood; the two worlds of Sanskrit texts and B movies intersect in me.
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Like all of my other books, this is primarily a study of stories from ancient India, seen through the ideas of a contemporary American woman. It is intended to show what ideas about sex as truth and/or lie are and are not shared by contemporary Americans and people from other cultures, primarily ancient India. The Hebrew Bible and Greek and Latin literature provide the third circle of my texts.
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These three clusters of primary sources support the platform on which this book stands, and each is represented by enough texts to provide it with a literary, if not a social, context, a critical mass of texts that illuminate one another. The fourth circle, still within my own linguistic and cultural range, consists of German and French stories, some of which I grew up with (Viennese mother, Russian father) and others of which I sought for this project. WHY A BOOK ABOUT A BEDTRICK?
xxv To indicate how yet other cultures have imagined yet other variations on the central theme, I have also drawn superficially upon myths from cultures I know less well. These other cultures are not always contextual- ized here at all, even by other texts. This fifth circle, a non-weight-bearing wall of my narrational edifice, constitutes the smallest fraction of this book but includes all the rest of the world.
Like Bambi and his mother, I proceed with caution out of my safe Sanskrit-Hollywood-Hebrew- French/German thicket into this broader meadow of the wide world, a place where you can be shot down by a bad translation. (I inched out into this meadow at the very end of each chapter in Splitting the Difference, but I will stride boldly into it all the time here.) Here, like Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire, I am "dependent upon the kindness of strangers" (upon their reliability, for translations and contextualizations).
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Aside from stories from the Dravidian texts of South India and the Hebrew Bible, there is relatively little here from outside the language group known as Indo-European (Sanskrit, Greek, Norse, Celtic)-just a scattering of tales from Arabic, Inuit, Japanese, and Chinese texts, and an even thinner scattering from African, South American, Polynesian, Indo- nesian, and Native American sources (all in translation), narrative flotsam and jetsam from the ocean of my casual reading and viewing, carried to me by the strong current of my obsession. This uneven sampling reflects my weakness rather than any dearth of relevant stories; readers will surely be able to supply many other examples.
My collection of bedtricks, made into the collage (or, if you will, bricolage) of this book, is certainly not exhaustive, merely a selection of some of my favorites. The goal of this promiscuously comparative book is not, primarily, to display my own obsession with stories about bedtricks but to display the human race's obsession with the theme. Since part of my argument is simply that there are variants of this myth all over the xxvi PREFACE world, I have cited many, many stories.
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Then I thought of calling it "An Encyclopedia of Bedtricks" or "An Anthology of Bedtricks" or, in bad moments, "The Guinness Book of Bedtricks," for it ranges pretty widely, and I did try to arrange the stories systematically. But it would be presumptuous to claim that this book is an encyclopedia, for it is far too idiosyncratic in tone and taste to sustain the truth claims implicit in the title of "encyclopedia." My work to date was once described, by someone introducing me at a public event, as offering "a powerful anecdote" [sic] to certain lamentable trends in the field of the history of religions.
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This slip of the tongue is all the method to which I aspire here; I hope that The Bedtrick will indeed prove to be a powerful anecdote. I have three primary goals in this book, in steeply declining order of importance. First is to delight and amuse; my criterion of selection has been primarily aesthetic rather than ideological: I have chosen the best stories I know, those rich in human insights and memorable images.
Each chapter begins by telling some good stories, particularly stories not widely known in Europe and America, and by assembling clusters of vivid details. My second goal is to prove some points, such as the importance of the theme of the bedtrick, the fruitfulness of cross-cultural studies, the value of using many different approaches, and the existence of certain patterns in the ways that human beings have devised to deal with their sexual WHY A BOOK ABOUT A BEDTRICK? This I have attempted to do by the sheer number of examples, as well as by analysis and arguments in the approach sections.
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Third, I hope to dazzle the reader with my peculiar erudition, by juxtaposing nar- ratives that no one else would think of juxtaposing. I certainly do not expect every, or perhaps even any, reader to read the book straight through. Terence Cave, writing on a similar topic, speaks for me: Few readers will have the patience to read this book from end to end ....
The topic is many-sided and the angles of approach varied. On the other hand, this is not just a collection of essays. It was written as a whole and some parts are not easily understandable without reference to others, not so much because the argument follows a single direct line, but because themes and images ...
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recur in different contexts, and without some knowl- edge of those contexts particular cases may seem arbitrary or fanciful. 38 The fabric of the bedtrick is such that the threads keep unraveling and doubling back on themselves, like the themes in a fugue, the twists in a Mobius strip. The appearance of arbitrariness therefore threatens this book perhaps even more than it did Cave's, and to counteract it I have devised the system of cross-references described above.
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The division of the text into small subsections is also designed to make the text browser- friendly. There were many more stories in earlier drafts, but I boiled them down, like the woman who prepared milk-rice for the Buddha when he ended his long meditation after achieving Enlightenment: she milked a thousand cows and fed the milk to five hundred cows; then she milked those five hundred cows and fed the milk to two hundred and fifty, and so on, until she fed the milk of sixteen cows to eight.
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Introduction: Sex, Text, and Masquerade
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Bedtricks
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And why does it matter so much? Why is this story told over and over again? Why do we find it compelling?
What deep human concerns does it respond to? How unique and unmistakable is one lover to another? Can you recognize your lover in the dark?
Can true love always tell the difference? Is it the body that is desired, or the mind? How does sex change if we do or do not know who our partner actually is?
In opera we have Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and COS! fan tutte, Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier and Arabella, Johann Strauss's Fledermaus, and Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and Gotterdammerung. There are the transsexual and transvestite bedtricks in contemporary theater (M.
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Butterfly, Prelude to a Kiss) and cinema (Some 2
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Introduction
9 The fact that the bedtrick is both tragic and comict-that the very word "tragicomedy" was first coined to describe a play about a bedtrick (Plautus's Amphi- tryon:j:)-is a paradox that accounts in part for the confusion in its critical reception. Johnson, damning the bedtricks in All's Well That Ends Wellt (in which Helena substitutes for Diana in Bertram's bed) and Mea- sure for Measuret (in which Mariana substitutes for Isabella in Angelo's bed), remarks, "The story of Bertram and Diana had been told before of Mariana and Angelo, and, to confess the truth, scarcely merited to be heard a second time." 10 Even critics of popular culture tire of it; Terrence Rafferty, reviewing the film Multiplidty:j: (1996), calls "the hero's anxiety that one or more of his doppelgangers will sleep with his wife (who's unaware of their existence)" a "not very compelling issue ...
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resolved in a protracted and mildly amusing farce climax."ll Yet the bedtrick contin- ues to compel audiences; though night-lights and pillow talk made the bedtrick harder and harder to take seriously after the seventeenth century, and though it strikes a contemporary reader as counterintuitive if not counterfactual, t "the irony of physical closeness and mental distance which underlies it persists in the modern understanding of sex." 12 Terence Cave encapsulates the paradoxt with regard to recognition scenes in gen- eral (of which bedtrick recognitions are a subspecies) as he attempts "to account both for the extraordinary popularity of recognition scenes in all t A dagger refers to a term or theme that occurs elsewhere in this book. A double dagger refers to a term or theme that occurs both elsewhere in this book and in the companion volume, Splitting the Difference.
For a fuller explanation of this system of cross-references, see the preface.
Ladder 21
Sex, Text, And Masquerade
Hub 343
Why is there so much fantasyt about the bedtrick if it happens so seldom in reality? The answer consists in a range of good, human reasons, which are encoded in the stories in this book. These myths imagine a situation in which a man or woman goes to bed with someone slhe is crazy about and wakes up to discover the astonishing fact that the body in the bed belongs to someone entirely different, someone hated or alien or just dif- ferent.
Now, this is not just a myth. It happens to all of us, all the time, for that 01' black magic, sexual passion, is transformative, at least trans- formative of our perspective; it changes our view of our partner. Some- times we go to bed with an animal and wake up with a god; that is, we go to bed relatively indifferent and wake up enchanted by sexual magic.
Cycle 344
On other occasions, we go to bed with a god and wake up with an animal; that is, we go to bed blinded by desire and wake up with our eyes relatively cleared by satiation. (My preliminary, unofficial opinion poll indicates that there is widespread disagreement about the prevalence of one model or the other.) Many myths are simply the narrative embodiment, sometimes an ex- aggerated embodiment, of metaphors,14 even cliches. English-speaking writers speak of something as "just a metaphor," but metaphor in India can be the strongest possible statement of causation.
Flow 345
The casual joke that people 4
Compare 22
Introduction
make so often at their own expense-"I went to bed with X and woke up with Y" -implies that sex is revelatory, that in the morning you know the truth, that Y is the real person: "Behold!" as the Hebrew hinneh is usually translated (as in "Behold! It was Leah!"), for which the modern equivalent is probably "Oh wow!" or some blasphemous exclamation. The mythology of the bedtrick unpacks the experience expressed in these and related cliches.
Ladder 346
Marriage made a new woman of her. He's a different person since he stopped drinking. He found himself in his new job.
All sexual acts are bedtricks in the weakest sense: you never really know everything about your partner, and afterward, if you become estranged, the sudden distance, the total loss of intimacy, sometimes seem almost unbelievable, mythical. Similarly, the most basic bedtrick occurs, not when you mistake Joan for Susan (or Steve for Sam, not to mention Joan for Sam or Sam for Joan), but when you mistake lust for love; the shadow area between the two, lust and love, t is where the bedtrick happens, and why it matters.
Compare 347
The myths in which the impostor is not who he or she seems to be is the strong form of the bedtrick, which dramatizes the weak form that occurs in more banal situations in which the impostor is not how he or she appears to be (ugly instead of beautiful, t unfaithful instead of faithful, out of love instead of in love, married instead of unmarried, and so on). Often a myth expresses the extreme case of a human situation; thus, the quandary of the copulating conjoinedt twins expresses the ex- treme case of any two people whose bed is crowded by the phantomst of other people, and the story of the French diplomat Boursicot, t who discovered that his lover of twenty years was not a woman but a man
Hub 23
Sex, Text, And Masquerade
5 (the plot that was fictionalized in M. Butterflyt), expresses the extreme case of morning-after disappointment, regret, or surprise. The bedtrick is not literally a universal theme, though it is demonstra- bly cross-cultural.
By asking profound questions about the interrelationships among sex and love, mind and body, identity and recognition, sameness and difference, illusion and reality, tales of the bedtrick offer a unique human probe into the ways in which these forces function in cultures, in stories, and in individual perceptions and individ- ual lives.21
Hub 348
Cycle 24
Telling The Difference
Contemporary Americans tend to assume that sexual intimacies, even in- timacies exchanged in silence and in the dark, are as highly individualized as fingerprints, that bodies as well as faces have distinctive physiogno- mies,22 that sex leads to an exploration of what is unique and distinctive about each partner. Yet many bedtrick stories seem at first to assume that if two people look alike, one cannot tell them apart (indeed, that in the dark one cannot tell anyone from anyone else).
Cycle 349
More than that: the stories often begin with the assumption that sex is an act in which the parties are interchangeable, that bodies can be changed without one's knowledge. But sometimes they go on to warn us that two people who appear to be identical are not in fact the same person, that we must strive to find other ways (the voice, t the scar, t memory, t the mind, t behaviort) to tell the two apart-and that sexual intimacy is the best way of all.
On this deeper level, the face proves to be a false image of sameness, and the stories warn us that we must go deeper to find the mind and soul beneath the face.
Flow 25
Introduction
Although many of the stories seem to begin by privileging vision, the fact that the reader or hearer always knows that people who look alike are not alike is a clue to the not-so-hidden agenda, which intersects with a primary agenda of our own time (particularly but not only as argued by feminists t ): to deconstruct vision. t And some bedtricksters do not look exactly alike (except under cover of darkness): sisters, brothers, close friends, sons and fathers, mothers and daughters, servants and masters, and so forth.
Flow 350
Thus, while some myths reaffirm sexual stereotypes, others challenge them. A gender asymmetryt is also at work here: men and women do not always feel the same about the power of sex to reveal either the distinct individualism or the sameness of partners in the dark. t Bedtricksters are doublers: sometimes they become the doubles of other people (who mayor may not exist), and sometimes they split them- selves into an original and a double.
But our double is not us: by defini- tion, it is where we are not, and therefore things happen to it that do not happen to us. The idea of the substitute presupposes the idea of the unique, the authentic, the true form of which it is a false copy. What is it, then, that makes us say of a masquerading double, "It is the same"?
Ladder 351
The judgment that two different things are the same is, after all, our basic way of making sense out of the chaos of experience, the principle underly- ing all of our cognitive and scientific understandings, from the taxono- mies of Linnaeus to the atomic periodic tables. When, therefore, we ask of doubles, "Is it the same? Is it the same person?" the answer is one of the many paradoxest that make people tell this story over and over again: "It is the same and it is not the same." If we choose to use a less dichoto- mizing word than "same," such as "similar," we might construct a contin- uum (or, better yet, a Venn diagram: a set of categories that interlock like chain mail), with various degrees of resemblance or what Witt- genstein called "family likenesses,"23 an appropriate image for actors in stories in which family resemblancet is often literally at issue.
Compare 352
The question of personal identity,
Ladder 26
Sex, Text, And Masquerade
7 within the texts, thus inspires a variant of the Passover question:25 Why is this person different from all other people? The texts in this book also inspire a related question: Why are sexual masquerades different from all other masquerades? This question requires us, from the very start, to stake out our turf.
For the territory of the bedtrick is bounded on all sides by another territory, populated by people who masquerade as others in nonsexual situations: doppelgangers, mirror images, exact replicas, shadows, twins separated at birth, the creator who creates his double, clones, snatched bodies, possessions, Silent Sharers, surrogates, ghosts, tricksters, and so forth. These sorts of doubles some- times appear as bedtricksters-Frankenstein's monster can replace him on the wedding night, brothers can replace one another in bed, and so forth-but many of them do not.
Hub 353
Literary insights into these more general doubles may prove illuminating for the specific sexual themes as well, but I have limited the scope of this study to bedtricksters. That is, I am not setting out to solve the puzzle of personal identity posed by the broader literature of the double; rather, I hope to show that the concealment of one particular double, a sexual double, can prove more profoundly reveal- ing than the masquerade of any other double. Tales of the bedtrick do not solve the basic problem of identity, but they provide a vivid and captivating way to approach the problem through narrative.
The stories of the bed- trick represent this tension between the urge to diverge and the urge to merge, between the desire to masquerade, to assume the identity of an- other in addition to one's own, and the desire to lose one's own identity through intimate union with the other. As Terence Cave remarks, "Recog- nition plots are full of epistemophiliacs: the knowledge they seek has the character, whether explicit or implicit, of an impossible or incomprehen- sible sexual knowledge."27 8
Cycle 354
Compare 27
Introduction
Therefore, my tentative answer to the question "Why are sexual mas- querades different from all other masquerades?" is that the sexual act is in itself the most "doubling" and "undoubling" of acts. Where all other doubles split into two, sexual doubles split and regroup into one. This confluence of the masquerade and the sexual act was literally embodied in David Ambrose's novel The Man Who Turned into Himself, about a man who is drawn into a parallel world inside the mind of a man who is very much like him in many ways, married to a woman almost exactly like his wife.
Flow 355
Sexual Lies And Sexual Truth
One reason for the great number of stories about bed tricks is that people are more deceptive about sex than about anything else. It could be argued that all forms of love are deluding, induding love of one's children or country. But sexual love is, I think, the most deluding form of love.
The evidence, in both real life and imaginative texts, not just that people lie about sex but that they often get away with it indicates that the victims lie to themselves as much as the tricksters lie to them; the victims, who fool themselves, are the ultimate tricksters. The lying of the trickster is the obviously false element in a bedtrick, but the lying of the victim, though less obvious, is often what sustains the mythology. Sexual fantasyt is very real; seducers lie, but victims fantasize; sexual fantasy is the ghost that gums up the machines of reason.
Ladder 356
That the body could actually be a lie was argued by medieval European authors such as Albertus, in the thirteenth century, who described her- maphrodites and effeminate males as "liars, whose bodies and behaviors mislead."29 Fear of sexual fraud and imposture led to the persecution even of those hermaphrodites who were "not accused of sodomy or deliberate
Sex, Text, And Masquerade
Compare 357
Against this dual faction, however, more physiologically oriented stories argue that bodies don't lie, that there is a kind of naked, brutal honesty in the sexual moment of truth. In this view, though the outer trappings of the self may lie, at the eye of the sexual storm is another sort of eye that sees the truth, for some people their only truth. One might say that, at least in the era before pornographic films, the sexual act was the one area in which people were forced to be original, to be who they really were, if only for lack of some paradigm or stereotype to copy.
Many of these stories argue, echoing the familiar in vinot veritas, that there is surely veritas in coitu. The crude form of this assumption is that truth inheres in the physical act of sex; the more romantict form of the same paradigm seeks the truth in the more spiritual act of falling in love. t Some of our texts argue that sexual love is the most reliable criterion of personal identity: the one you love and desire is the one you know, and the one you know is the real one; sexual love is not just a way of knowing who your lover is but also a way of knowing who you are, through the mirrort of the one you love and who loves you.
Hub 358
Peter Steinfels may have had this in mind when he wisely remarked about sex, apropos of the 1998 Clinton scandals, "It puts the self at stake in a way that even death-defying activities like mountain climbing do not. Why else do people intuitively take betraying a spouse so seriously, and understand, even while reprov- ing, why someone would lie about it?"3l This line of thought supports monogamyt: it argues that if you want to stay who you are, you need to have-or at least to think you have-the same person in the bed beside you every night.
Cycle 359
Some cultures emphasize the lies of sex, some the truth. The myths of Hollywood and of everyday Hinduism, for instance, tend on the whole to argue for the truth of sex. Shakespeare and Christianity, Buddhism and the ascetic traditions of Hinduism, argue, on the whole, that sex lies.
But even in these cultures, and in many others, the two answers, yes and no, often coexist in tension within a single story. This, then, compounds the paradox of the double that is both us and non-us: the sexual act is 10
Flow 360
Introduction
simultaneously the most deceptive and the most truth-revealing, the most alienating and the most intimate, the most fantastic and the most real of human acts. I have always believed in both arms of this paradox and lived them in my conviction that sex was far more about truth than about power; and now I have written a book about them.
Ladder 361
Texttricks
We might briefly consider the relationship between text and experience. What is the link between telling texts apart and telling lovers apart? How can we build a bridge between the experiences of the characters within the stories and the experiences of those who read or hear the stories?
Compare 362
Besides being about the ways in which people in stories tell the difference between one person and another in bed, this book is about the ways in which storytellers tell the difference-tell about it in a story. The problem that is posed within the story (is this person the same as or different from the person he or she seems to be?) is mirrored on the methodological level by the problem posed by the analysis of the story (is this variant of the story the same as or different from the variant it seems to resemble?).
Or the Passover question again: Why is this variant different from all other variants? The problem of the double of the story is both the same and not the same as the problem of the double in the story. The paradox "It is the same and it is not the same" is itself a double that lives in two worlds, the world inside the text, where the fictional victims must analyze the fictional tricksters, and the world outside the text, where the readers, ourselves, who frame and follow the plot, must compare and analyze texts.
Hub 363
We can approach these two problems in similar ways, but not precisely the same way. That is, we may use stories that reveal the problems that arise when someone regards two individuals (in bed) as "the same" in order (perversely, perhaps, and certainly polymorphously) to demon- strate the advantages that arise when a scholar regards two different stories as both the same and not the same. We will discover again and again the profound difference, despite the apparent sameness, of certain stories that argue for the profound difference of people who appear to be the same.
Cycle 364
To assume that two stories with the same basic plot will make the same point about that plot is to fall victim to a texttrick. Like the problem of the same and the different, truth and falsehood pose a problem for both narrative and method. Stories, particularly myths, about sexual masquerades are doubly powerful because both the story and the sexual act are masqueraders.
The form and content, the
Sex, Text, And Masquerade
11 myth and the masquerade, converge: both of them are both liars and truth-tellers, two-edged swords. Masqueraders pretend, and stories pre- tend, and yet their pretenses ultimately provide a kind of truth that is otherwise unattainable, compelling us beyond all other sorts of more falsi- fiable truths. Here is another paradox: t the story lies and tells the truth.
Flow 365
On the other hand, one could argue that it is precisely the known quantity of the cliche plot of the bedtrick that makes it satisfying, filling: when the victim of the bedtrick finally recognizes the trickster ("Oh, it's Mariana!" or "Behold, it was Leah!"), the reader of the story recognizes the plot ("Oh, it's a bedtrick!"). So we must consider both the ways in which, within the text, the trickster manipulates the ambiguity that hedges the truth or falsehood of the sexual act and the related ways, outside the text, in which the storyteller manipu- lates the ambiguity of the truth or falsehood of stories about the sexual act.
Ladder 366
Compare 367
Introduction
identity-a realization that reifies our infinite (though never total) identi- ties. My texts, too, and in particular my uses of texts, are partial, fragmen- tary. My assumption that there is a text is pre- (or pre-post-) modern, but my assumption that there are multiple valid interpretations of that text, my use of texts from all levels of culture, and the fragmentary nature of my multiple approaches are postmodern.
More precisely, my structuralist method of bricolage,36 of putting myths together from the fragmentary rags and bones of the human imagination, is based upon my belief in an infinity of variants, in contrast with philosophical and psychological treatments that too often strive for, or claim, totality. We cannot, I think, make many statements that will apply to all the stories, but we can isolate several patterns that do seem to occur in many of them, patterns that transgress the borders of culture to offer us several shared alternative views of the confluence of sex and deception.
Hub 368
ONE: How to Commit Adultery with Your Own Spouse
edtricksters turn bedtricks to get into or out of someone's bed. That is, sometimes a person splits off a double in order not to be in the bed of someone who would force the bedtrickster to be there, but sometimes a person masquerades as a double in order to be in the bed of someone who would not want the bedtrickster to be there.
Hub 28
The Double-Back
edtricksters turn bedtricks to get into or out of someone's bed. That is, sometimes a person splits off a double in order not to be in the bed of someone who would force the bedtrickster to be there, but sometimes a person masquerades as a double in order to be in the bed of someone who would not want the bedtrickster to be there. If the wife of an unfaith- ful man imposes herself instead of some other surrogate between her man and the (real or fantasized) other woman, the two aspects of the trick- getting out of or into bed-collapse together, and the story turns into a double-back or switchback: the philanderer is tricked in such a way that he ends up in bed not merely with someone other than the intended erotic object but with the very person that he was trying not to sleep with, usually his wife.
Cycle 369
The two aspects become two episodes of one myth: the bedtrick- ster wants to be with one person and not to be with another, to disappear secretly from one bed in order to appear secretly in another. When the wife wishes to masquerade as her husband's mistress (or, rarely, the mis- tress as the wife), she wants to be with one man, but to be a different woman to that man. I have written elsewhere about double-cross bedtricks designed to get people out ofbed,:j: and we will encounter other examples of this pattern in chapter 6.
Let us consider in this chapter a group of double-back tricks that get the trickster into bed. There are two more dichotomies that we might do best to consider from the very start. The first is the distinction between accidental and intended, or unknowing and knowing, bedtricks.
Flow 370
Unknowing bedtricks occur when people who look alike are mistaken for one another without either of them intending this to happen. This is al- most always a family matter; it happens to twins (as in Shakespeare's Comedy ofErrorst) and to people fated to commit incestt (like Sophocles' Oedipus, t who did not know who his parents were and in ignorance 13 14
Ladder 371
Cycle 29
With His Own Goddess
She disguises herself as a mountain woman, a Shabari, in a story told in a Sanskrit text composed in South India in the late medieval period, a story that begins, as many Hindu myths do, with a visit from the wandering sage, gossip, and troublemaker Narada:
Compare 372
Flow 30
Shiva And The Mountain Woman
One day N arada came to visit Shiva and Parvati on Kailasa and said, "You two would have even more pleasure playing dice than making love." They began to play dice, and Parvati, with a trick, took everything from Shiva, even his loincloth, and she laughed at him, and Shiva's entourage turned their faces away in modesty. Then Shiva said, "The sages and gods are laughing at this joke. How can you do this, you, a girl from a good family?
If you have won, then at least give me back my loincloth." But she laughed and said, "Why do you need a loincloth, you hermit? You were naked enough when you went into the Pine Forest, begging and seducing the sages' wives, and the sages' curse cut off your 'loincloth.' That's why I took it from you in the game of dice." She said a lot of things like this to him, and he set his heart on going to a deserted spot in the forest.
Hub 373
But when Shiva had gone, Parvati was tormented by longing in separa- tion. She went where Shiva was meditating, but she took the form of a magnificent mountain woman, dark and slender, with lips as scarlet and 18
Ladder 31
Double-Backing Husbands
Marjorie Garber empha- sizes the advantages of the successful bedtrick played by a husband against a wife in her analysis of a play by Ferenc Molnar in which a husband disguises himself as a guard and seduces his own wife, who, as both men and women often do, later claims false knowledge, t that is, claims to have seen through the deception from the beginning. But Garber asks, "With whom has she been unfaithful? The only person he could bear to lose her to was himself." 18 In this reading, the husband is playing safe, having his cake and eating it, by offering himself up in place of another seducer.
Cycle 374
Here is a paradox, a particularly strong form of the double-bind: since the man who tries to get his wife to commit adultery with him wants it both to succeed and not to succeed, both the wife's fidelity and her infi- delity confirm his fantasies. The husband thus acts out his own divided wishes: on the one hand, that he should prove right in suspecting her and, on the other hand, that his suspicion should have no cause. Javier Marias tells the tale of a man who left his wife, Celia, and a few months later encountered and had sex with a prostitute who looked just like Celia, said her name was Victoria, and either was or was not Celia.
His ambiva- lence is excruciating: "The face was Celia's face, which I knew so well, and at the same time it wasn't .... She still looked too much like Celia for me to feel distrustful or to decide that it wasn't her. Anyway, it was her, even if it wasn't.
Flow 375
in this way every man is two men":
Compare 32
The Somnambulists
[The narrator, an elderly man who is alone, recalls how he had begun to suspect his wife of adultery one night when he had come home late and not gone to his bedroom but had discovered the next morning that some- one had left the toilet seat up and used the hand towel in his bathroom. Then one night he saw a bruise on her breast.] I saw that it had been made by a mouth, a mouth had bitten her, bitten her here, and left a 22
Ladder 376
Hub 33
Shattered
A man who has been in a terrible automobile accident wakes up horribly disfigured, without a memory or a face. His wife, Judith, shows him (and the plastic surgeons) photos of his face and tells him who he is: her hus- band, Dan Merrick, a wealthy man who lives in San Francisco. The sur- geons reconstruct his face according to the photos, and he begins to have memories of making love to Judith on a beach in Mexico.
But when he finds photos of her making love to a man whose face is different from his, he becomes jealous and disturbed. Ginny, his partner's wife, gets him alone and begins to strip, saying, How TO COMMIT ADULTERY WITH YOUR OWN SPOUSE "We were lovers." But when she kisses him, asking, "Do you remember?" he says, "Stop it. I don't remember," and pushes her away.
Compare 377
He learns from Ginny that he had treated Judith very badly, that she had been having an affair with a man named Jack Stanton, and that he had wanted a divorce. He thinks he has tracked Stanton down, but the person he is following turns out to be Judith in a man's wig and jacket, who says, "There is no Stanton; you shot him," and insists that she was playing the part of Stan- ton just now to convince people that Stanton was still alive, to protect him, Dan.
Now he dreams of watching someone shoot a man who looks like himself, Dan, and when he wakes up he searches for Stanton's body until he finds a body that has been preserved in formaldehyde; it has his face, Dan's face. He realizes that, behind his reconstructed face, he is Jack Stanton. Shocked, he falls and hits his head, and now again he remembers mak- ing love on the beach, but this time he sees his face, the face of Jack Stanton, and he hears her say, "Jack, I love you." As Jack, he remembers clearly that she shot Dan and tried to persuade him to run off with her.
He had protested, "I'm out of your life," and in her furious resistance there had been a struggle in the car and an accident, in which she rolled free and he was disfigured and concussed. Now again there is a struggle in the car, but this time he is the one who rolls free; the car explodes, killing her. 23 At the end of the film we know that Jack will continue to masquerade as Dan in order to keep Dan's money.
Hub 378
But throughout the film he has been masquerading, unknowingly, as his wife's lover masquerading as her husband. Not only has he committed adultery with (the woman he thinks is) his own wife, but he thinks he has murdered (the man he comes to realize is) his wife's husband; that is, he thinks that he is her husband and murdered her lover, but he learns that he is her lover and that the murdered man was her husband. Jack, thinking that he is Dan, searches obsessively for Jack, just as Oedipust searched for the man who had caused the plague in Thebes, not knowing that he was that man, and as the heroine of Love Letterst (1945) offers to help her husband search for the woman he wrote to, not knowing that she is that woman.
Jack is unknowingly masquerading as his own victim and his own prosecutor; as Judith complains, when she has finally told him that he is in fact Jack, "You hired somebody to find out that you're a murderer." locasta might easily have spoken these words to Oedipus. "I don't get it," Dan keeps saying. "Why did she do all this?" Why indeed?
If you don't have your face or your memories, who are you?
Cycle 34
Flow 35
The Double-Play, Or Mixed Doubles
Two-which is to say four, two tricksters and two victims-can play at this game, when two tricksters perpetrate bedtricks in a double-play. Two men do this to their wives in Roald Dahl's "The Great Switcheroo"t and to their fiancees in Mozart and Da Ponte's opera Cosi fan tutte. A double- cross is added to a double-play in a film that is in many ways a double of Double Indemnity (1944) but owes even more to the story "The Great Switcheroo":t Consenting Adults (1992), in which a man named Richard, happily married to Priscilla, is persuaded by his neighbor Eddie, married to Kay, to participate in what Richard thinks is a double-play (wife- swapping without the knowledge of the wives).
Cycle 379
Eddie's argument follows the lines of that of the trickster in "The Great Switcheroo": "Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and, you know, just sort of, do it? Would they know the difference? They want exactly what we want.
In the heat of the moment, they'll love it. I'll bet you $1,000 we could pull it off. And who cares if we get caught?
Big deal." As things transpire, however, Eddie has hired a woman who resembles Kay to get into the bed that night, and then, after Richard has made love to the look-alike, thinking that he was fooling Kay, and gone home, Eddie murders the look-alike, so that he (and, secretly, Kay) can collect the insurance money. Thus, Richard, the would-be bedtrickster, is framed for the murder of Kay. This double-play twists into a double- cross at the end to introduce a third bedtrick (in addition to the two that each husband is supposedly playing on his wife), to make it a kind of triple-play-cross.
Flow 380
The film La regle du jeu (The Rules of the Game [1939]) explicitly in- vokes the plot of The Marriage of Figaro in various inversions, but with a tragic ending in a double-play: both a man and a woman are mistaken for their servants, and the man is killed by the maid's jealous husband, who mistakes him for her lover. Another sort of double-play, involving two men and two women, takes place in a story that Joseph Roth com- posed in 1939, his Tale of the lO02nd Night, about a Viennese cavalryman who takes as his mistress a whore who is a dead ringer for a certain count- ess the cavalryman had seduced and then tired of.
When the visiting shah 28
Ladder 36
The Double-Cross
When a person betrayst a sexual partner in one sense of the word, by infidelity, that partner may stage a counter-betrayal, or double-cross, by engineering a retaliatory seduction. A wife double-crosses her husband in this way in the old Brighton joke retold by Angela Carter:t [A boy said to his father,] "I want to get married to the girl next door, Dad." His father replied, "I've got news for you, son. When I was your age, I used to get me leg over ...
Ladder 381
This comic travesty of the tragedy of the Fam- ily Romancet (the tale of an adopted child who seeks his or her birth parents) pits the father's boastful infidelity against the mother's secret infidelity (or lie about a fantasized infidelity? The joke lies in the asymmetryt between the frivolity and openness of the man's act and the presumed shamefulness and secrecy of the woman's, as well as in her sense of revenge. In a variant of the double-cross, when someone attempts to betrayt a sexual partner either by infidelity or by pretending (through a bedtrick or a legal surrogation) to be someone else, the betrayed partner may retali- ate by bedtricking the trickster, sending someone else in place of the de- sired object, perhaps someone diseased or demonic, or just of a lower class.
Compare 37
Casanova'S Double-Cross
[Casanova crept into the room and made love for two hours, in darkness and silence, to the woman he found there. But the next morning, the baroness chided him for not coming to her in the night.] At last a dreadful suspicion came into my head that I had held within my arms for two hours the horrible monster whom I had foolishly received in my house . I concluded, then, that I had spent two hours with this abominable monster; and what increased my anguish, and made me loathe and despise myself still more, was that I could not help confessing that I had been perfectly happy.
Compare 382
Hub 38
Casanova'S Return
[While traveling home, Casanova encountered a woman, Amalia, whom he had seduced sixteen years ago. Now he was fifty-three and felt his age keenly. He smiled and was aware that the smile made him look younger.
Hub 383
He was no longer interested in Amalia, though she still found him attrac- tive and vowed, "In your arms I had my first taste of bliss, and I doubt not it is my destiny that my last bliss shall be shared with you!" She kissed his hands and said, "Tonight, I will kiss you on the lips." He, however, was fascinated by her young niece Marcolina, a highly intelligent young woman who argued with him about Voltaire but found him totally unat- tractive. He tried to enlist Amalia's aid, promising to sleep with her only if she got Marcolina to sleep with him, but Amalia could not persuade the girl.
Casanova asked himself, "Am I really so repulsive?" and then reassured himself: "No, that is not the reason. Marcolina is not really a woman. She is a she-professor, a she-philosopher, one of the wonders of the world perhaps-but not a woman." Then Casanova discovered that Marcolina was having an affair with Lieutenant Lorenzi, a young man who reminded Casanova of himself as he had been thirty years before.
Cycle 384
He bribed Lorenzi, who was desperately in need of money, to allow him, Casanova, to sleep with Marcolina in his place that night. Meanwhile, he plied Amalia's thirteen-year-old daughter 34
Cycle 39
The Roads Round Pisa
[A Danish nobleman named Augustus, who had left his wife because of her unbearable jealousy, met an old Italian noblewoman from Pisa (whom he mistook for a man at first, for she was bald without her wig) and learned her story: She had forced her granddaughter, Rosina, to marry an old, fat, and impotent man, Prince Pozentiani, though Rosina was in love with her cousin Mario. A month after the wedding, Rosina had suc- cessfully petitioned the pope for an annulment of her marriage on the ground that it had not been consummated.
Prince Pozentiani had ban- ished Mario from Pisa, but after the annulment Rosina had married Mario. Augustus now encountered Rosina's best friend, Agnese (and mistook her, too, for a man, for she was wearing men's clothing and traveling in disguise); the old Prince Pozentiani; and his dashing young friend, Prince Nino-a man known for his spectacular success with woman, such that any woman who had him for a lover never took another lover. An argu- ment arose, and Prince Nino challenged Prince Pozentiani to a duel.
Flow 385
But before the duel began, Agnese told Pozentiani that, a year ago, Rosina had asked Agnese, a virgin like herself, to take her place in her bedroom for an hour, between midnight and 1 A.M., and something had happened to her in that hour that had blighted her life ever since. When the prince heard Agnese tell this, he said, "Always we fail because we are too small. I grudged the boy Mario that, in a petty grudge.
And in my vanity I thought that I should prefer an heir to my name, if it was to be, out of a ducal house." He then begged Nino to forgive him, and he keeled over dead. Nino then spoke to Agnese:J "I had left you," he said, speaking alto- gether like a person in a dream, "and was going away, but I turned back at the door. You were sitting up in the bed.
Your face was in the shadow, but the lamp shone on your shoulders and your back. You were naked, for I had torn off your clothes. The bed had green and golden curtains, like my forerts in the mountains, and you were like my picture of Daphne, who turns away and is changed into a laurel.
Ladder 386
And I was standing in the dark. Then the clock struck one. For a year, I have thought of nothing 36
Flow 40
The Visitor
All this [expertise in bed], you will probably say, indicated clearly that my visitor must have been the older woman. True genius is a gift of birth. It has very little to do with age; and I can assure you I had no way of knowing for certain which of them it was in the darkness of that room.
Compare 387
Maddening it was not to know the true answer. It also humbled me, for, after all, a connoisseur, a supreme connoisseur, should always be able to guess the vintage without seeing the label on the bottle. [The next day, his host told him that he had another daughter in the How TO COMMIT ADULTERY WITH YOUR OWN SPOUSE house, who was concealed because she had leprosy.
The guest realized in horror that his bedmate may have been neither the mother nor the lovely daughter he had met but, rather, the leprous girl. The host reassured his guest:] "Calm yourself down, Mr. There's absolutely nothing in the world for you to worry about.
Hub 388
It is not a very contagious disease. You have to have the most intimate contact with the person in order to catch it."48 37 The lovely ladyt he thinks he has in his bed turns out to be loathlyt in the extreme; the trickster is tricked by the man he thinks he has cuck- olded (or whose daughter he thinks he has corrupted). His sexual pride is what blinds him.
Cycle 389
Apparently the mother and the first daughter (and the father?) collude together on the part of the other sister. That is, what if he had lied about the bedtrick just as Casanova had lied at Soleure?
The issue of aget substituting for youth is here doubled by the theme of ugliness substituting for beautyt to destroy a womanizer: after this, he hangs up his spurs.
Ladder 41
The Double-Back-Cross
In an episode in the Hindu corpus of divine marital squabbles, Shiva and Parvati trick one another into committing adultery with one another through two double-backs, first seriatim and then (in another variant of the myth) simultaneously. In a seventeenth-century Bengali variant of the myth with which we began this chapter, Parvati (here called Gauri or Chandi) takes the form of a dom (Outcaste) ferry woman:
Flow 390
Compare 42
Shiva And The Outcaste Woman
Shiva came and asked the ferry woman to carry him across. He fell in love with the dom girl at first sight and proposed to enjoy her. Gauri vehemently protested on the ground that she was a woman of low origin, whereas Shiva was a great god, as he himself said.
But finally Shiva pur- chased her beauty at the price of a diamond ring. After that Gauri revealed herself and berated Shiva for his licentious behavior. Shiva made a plan to humiliate Gauri for thus humiliating him.
Ladder 391
He became a mouse and chewed her bodice. Then Shiva in the guise of an old itinerant tailor appeared in his own house, [darned the bodice], and then refused to be satisfied until Chandi had allowed herself to be enjoyed 38
Hub 43
The Wife'S Device To Cheat Her Husband
[When a certain woman's husband was out of town, a young man tried in vain to seduce her, enlisting the help of an old woman, who finally broke down the wife's resistance. The wife sent the old woman to find the lover, but when the old woman failed to find him, she decided to find another man, in order to get the gold the wife had promised her. She found] a pretty fellow, young and distinguished-looking, to whom the folk bowed and who bore in his face the traces of travel.
[She went up to him and asked him if he would like some] meat and drink and a girl adorned and ready. [When he agreed, she brought him to his own house and knocked at the door. The wife] knew him and guessed how the case 40
Compare 392
Cycle 44
The Double-Back-Cross-Play
In the second of two versions ofthe story we are about to consider, demi- gods masquerade as humans or humans masquerade as demigods, only to end up with their own partners in what we might call a double-back- cross-play: as in a double-play, two people simultaneously play bedtricks on two other victims, but as in a double-back, they end up in bed together. The first variant, from a Jain Sanskrit text composed by a monk named Siddharshi in 906 C.E., is just a double-play: both the husband and the wife engineer bedtricks, but they do not end up together.
For clarity, I will put the names of the ce1estials in capital letters: "CLEVER" TRICKS "NAIVE" A prince named Mugdha ["Naive" or "Infatuated"] was married to a prin- cess named Akutila ["Not Crooked" or "Not Tricky"]. They were deeply in love. One day when they were picking flowers in different parts of their garden, a demigod [gandharva] named KALAJNA ["Knower of Timing," i.e., someone who knows what to do at the right moment] and his wife, a celestial courtesan [apsaras] named VICAKSHANA ["Clever"], flew over the garden.
Hub 393
KALAJNA feU madly in love with Princess Akutila and VICAK- SHANA with Prince Mugdha. KALAJNA thought he could trick Akutila; he descended from the sky to where she could see him but his wife, VICAK- SHANA, could not; then he used his divine powers to turn himself into a How TO COMMIT ADULTERY WITH YOUR OWN SPOUSE magical duplicate of Mugdha, and he persuaded Princess Akutila to join him in a bed of flowers in a plantain bower. Meanwhile, VICAKSHANA used her powers to turn herself into Akutila's look-alike and persuaded Mugdha to go with her to a bower of creepers.
But they went to the very same plantain bower where Akutila was with KALAJNA. Both couples looked at each other in astonishment. They could not see a speck of difference between them.
Prince Mugdha thought, "I have become two through the grace showered on me by the Blessed Goddesses of the Forest. My wife has also become doubled. This is a great cause for rejoicing." The king, too, Mugdha's father, regarded himself as lucky to have two sons instead of one and two daughters-in-law instead of one.
Cycle 394
And Akutila was delighted, as she thought, "I have become two." But KALAJNA used his supernatural powers to find out who the second woman was; he realized, "Oh no, it can't be, it is my own wife VICAK- SHANA!" Then he got mad. He thought, ''I'll kill that evil man. She is immortal, so I can't kill her.
But I will make her so miserable that she will never go near another man again." When he had made up his mind to do this, his Fate ordained it to be otherwise. Fate made him think, "That was wrong of me. I must not torment VICAKSHANA.
After all, I was no better. I did exactly the wrong deed that she did .... " And VICAKSHANA thought, "My goodness!
Flow 45
That's my husband KA- LAJNA, who now looks like this other one. How could it be anyone else?" She became ashamed of herself, thinking, "How can I be with another man when my husband is right here?" She also became jealous at the thought that her husband had another woman. They both stayed there like that.
Flow 395
One day a Jain monk came there and preached the Jain doctrine. When KALAJNA and VICAKSHANA heard the teaching, they were overcome by remorse at their wrongdoings. There emerged from both of their bodies a hideous woman whose body was made up of red and black atoms.
Ladder 396
Horri- fying to behold, she stood far away from them all, her back to the group. KALAJNA and VICAKSHANA wept and fell at the feet of the monk and begged him to help them cleanse themselves of their sins, but he said, "Good people, do not despair. None of this was your fault ....
It is the fault of that woman who has come out of your bodies .... She is called 'Thirst for Sensory Pleasures' [Bhogatrishnal." At that moment out of the bodies of all four of them emerged three children, one white and two black and hideous, representing Righteousness, Ignorance, and Sin. The Jain monk said, "When Ignorance is in their bodies, creatures can- not distinguish between a woman they may approach and one who is off-limits to them." The humans became ordained, and KALAJNA and VICAKSHANA thought, "See how fortunate these people are.
Compare 397
Ladder 46
The Definitive Loincloth
A celestial courtesan [apsaras] named RAMBHA was married to a demigod [gandharva] named NALAKUBARA. A human courtesan named Kalabha- shini had fallen in love with NALAKUBARA, while a human poet named Manikandhara had fallen for KALABHASHINI when he saw the beauty How TO COMMIT ADULTERY WITH YOUR OWN SPOUSE of her feet.:j: The sage Narada told Manikandhara that Kalabhashini was more beautiful than a heavenly courtesan; and Narada said to RAM- BHA, "Perhaps someday NALAKUBARA will meet a woman who looks like you." Now, Manikandhara had generated dangerous amounts of inner ascetic heat, and Indra, king of the gods, sent RAMBHA to seduce him in order to dispel that heat.
But as Manikandhara and RAMBHA were making love, she said, "NALAKUBARA, leave me, I'm tired," using the wrong name, the way men usually do. Then Manikandhara left her for a moment and used his ascetic power to take the shape of NALAKUBARA; in this new form, Manikandhara-as-NALAKUBARA returned to RAMBHA and continued to make love to her. Meanwhile, Narada had given Kalabhashini the power to take any form, since he wanted to use her to humble RAMBHA.
Hub 398
When RAMBHA had gone off to seduce Manikandhara, leaving NALAKUBARA alone, Kalabhashini used her magic power to take the form of RAMBHA. But Kalabhashini-as-RAMBHA came into the vicinity not ofNALAKuBARA, who was still alone, but of RAMBHA and Manikandhara-as-NALAKUBARA. At that moment, RAMBHA was distracted by a deer and went away, leav- ing Manikandhara-as-NALAKuBARA alone.
Kalabhashini-as-RAMBHA ap- proached Manikandhara-as-NALAKuBARA, and they began to make love. But then RAMBHA returned and interrupted them. There were now, in one place, one RAMBHA, one Kalabhashini-as-RAM- BHA, and one Manikandhara-as-NALAKuBARA.
Each of the two women claimed to be RAMBHA, and as a test each asked the other, "Tell me some- thing about NALAKUBARA." Kalabhashini-as-RAMBHA knew some of the story and told what she knew, baffling Manikandhara-as-NALAKUBARA, who still could not tell which was RAMBHA. Then RAMBHA said, "Come to the world of the gods and let us settle this before Indra." Kalabhashini-as-RAMBHA, however, who didn't have the power to go to the world of the gods, lamely argued that she did not wish to bother Indra with their trifling squabble.
Cycle 399
Manikandhara- as-NALAKUBARA then realized that Kalabhashini-as-RAMBHA was Ka- labhashini, but RAMBHA still didn't know that he was not NALA- KUBARA. Exposed, Kalabhashini-as-RAMBHA was humiliated and went away, and Manikandhara-as-NALAKuBARA said to RAMBHA, "Let's make love." Meanwhile, the heavenly courtesans told NALAKUBARA that RAMBHA was making love with Manikandhara, and he went there. Now there were one NALAKUBARA, one Manikandhara-as-NALAKuBARA, and one RAMBHA, who was thoroughly confused.
Manikandhara-as-NALAKU- BARA said that NALAKUBARA was a demon. They began to fight and 43 44
Sicily And Naples
Ferrando (1), king of Naples, wooed Felicia (2), daughter of Alberto, marquess of Durazzo, but then he switched his affection to Calantha How TO COMMIT ADULTERY WITH YOUR OWN SPOUSE (3), daughter of the king of Sicily. Felicia thought that Ferrando had come to her in the night, constrained to secrecy by his engagement to Calantha, and had "filled her arms," seduced her and impregnated her, but in fact Ferrando's favorite, the evil Ursini (4), who was in love with Felicia, had perpetrated a bedtrick that Felicia never uncovered.
When the king of Sicily broke off the match with Calantha, war broke out, in which Ferrando killed both Alberto and the king of Sicily; Calantha es- caped, dressed as a soldier. Felicia came, masquerading as a page named Sylvio, to the court of Ferrando, and her brother, Frederico (5), also came to that court, masquerading as a Moor named Zisco, with a clubfoot; neither knew of the other sibling's survival. Calantha, too, came to the court of Naples, engaged, against her will, to marry Ferrando, though she was sick with grief for her father.
Flow 400
All of this happened before the play begins. Ursini realizes that Zisco is Frederico, but not that Sylvio is Felicia; he thinks Felicia is dead and soliloquizes: "I loved her once, Till 1 enjoyed her, but she's lost; so is her memory" (1.6). Ferrando insists on the wed- ding, but before he can consummate it, Felicia-as-Sylvio tells Calantha her story, still believing that Ferrando had impregnated her.
"Our wrongs and sorrows," says Felicia, "have made us just so like one another, That each seems th' other's counterfeit." Each confesses to the other that Fer- rando had killed her father, taken her dowry, and "mocked me with the title of a Queen," yet, each confesses, "I am lost in passion." Felicia offers to take Calantha's place on the wedding night, since Felicia has already lost her maidenhead (to Ferrano, she thinks), and Calantha still has hers. Meanwhile, Frederico-as-Zisco, believing a rumor that Ferrando had had Felicia raped and murdered, offers to help Ursini in his plot against Ferrando; he tells Ursini, lying, that he himself was the Moor that Fer- rando had hired to ravish and kill Felicia.
At this, Ursini says, "And canst thou do't again?" Zisco: "Bravely." Ursini then tells him that he has arranged matters so that Frederico-as-Zisco can ravish and kill Calantha that very night. Frederico-as-Zisco agrees to do it, "An she were my mother." But Felicia takes Calantha's place, and it is she that Frederico-as-Zisco rapes and murders; he then stabs Ferrando. When Calantha comes to gloat over Ferrando as he dies, Frederico-as-Zisco discovers he has killed his own sister, Felicia.
Ladder 401
Ursini now confesses that it was he, not Ferrando, who had seduced Felicia; when Frederico- as-Zisco asks him why Felicia had not recognized him, Ursini says it was dark, and "I dissembled so the Prince in voice and feature." Fred- erico stabs himself, Calantha stabs Ursini, and, as he dies, Ursini stabs Calantha.
The Double-Bind
The double that stands for oneself (like the double of the victim in Rene Girard's sacrifice scenario)65 is simultaneously the other "I" that achieves what 1 cannot otherwise achieve, the one who obtains the object of my sexual desire for me, and the other "I" that is my rival, that takes that same object away from me. This is the paradox of the double-bind: bedtricksters usually believe that they will be loved only if they cease being who they really are, a situation well captured in the original title of a film about a bedtrick: Hollow Triumph (1948, later known as The Scart).
Compare 402
This double- bind also applies to a woman who is possessed: she can say, "I am not myself,":j: and assume the power of another voice, t but the trouble is, it is not her own voice; someone else speaks for her, or she for someone else. In the renditions of the myth of Amphitryon:j: by Kleist and Moliere, when Jupiter masquerades as Amphitryon he wants to be loved for him- self, not for the sake of Amphitryon, that is, as Alcmena's lover as well as her husband.
He wants Alcmena to say that the lovemaking on his night was better than ever, and she won't say it. In Giraudoux's retelling of the story, Jupiter-as-Amphitryon asks Alcmena, "Far and away our most delightful night together, wouldn't you say?" But she replies, "That remains to be seen. Don't you remember our wedding night, dear hus- band ...
Hub 403
That was our most beautiful night."68 This is not what Jupiter wants to hear. ("All right, our most beautiful. But this was still the most delightful," he insists.) When a bedtrickster pretends to be someone else who actually exists, it is usually someone of whom the trickster is already jealous from the start.
But the bedtrickster who pretends to be someone nonexistent gradu- ally becomes jealous of his or her own creation. This quandary crops up in a 1993 episode of Star Trek, "Second Chances," in which Commander William Riker of the Enterprise (in a red shirt) encounters a double of himself (Lieutenant Riker, in a yellow shirt) that had split off eight years ago (during a transporter malfunction, the usual source of doubles on Star Trek) and had been existing alone on an isolated planet ever since.
The red and yellow shirts that distinguish the two Rikers are like the loin- cloths that distinguish the Telugu poet and the demigod. Deanna Troi and Commander Riker (red) had been in love eight years ago, but he had 50
Cycle 404
Love Letters
During the war, a soldier named Allen and a young woman named Vir- ginia who have never met fall in love through love letters that he writes to her on behalf of his friend Roger Morland. (Allen refers to her as "a kind of pinup girl of the spirit.") When Roger returns and marries her and she discovers what a bounder he is, there is a fight; he is killed and she goes mad, loses her memory, and calls herself Singleton.
Flow 405
Allen is told that both Virginia and Roger died in a tragic accident, which no one will talk about. He meets Singleton and does not realize at first that she is Virginia Morland, though eventually a mutual friend tells him the truth and warns him never to speak to Singleton about her past: "Ifher memory ever came back, it should come back gradually, from within, of her own accord. If anyone told her of her past now, the shock would be so terrible that she'd probably lose her mind." Singleton is haunted by the memory of another man whom she had loved, who had written wonderful letters, and she fears that Allen, too, is still in love with someone else, someone she doesn't know, named Virginia Morland ("I'll help you find her," she says, cheerfully).
They fall in love, but Singleton's guardian warns Allen that he is proposing to marry two women, Virginia and Singleton, and that only one, Singleton, can give her consent; how could Singleton give How TO COMMIT ADULTERY WITH YOUR OWN SPOUSE Virginia's consent? And what if Singleton turned back into Virginia Mor- land?
Ladder 406
Then Allen quotes from one of his letters to her, and she realizes that he is the author she seeks. Now she remembers everything, but she does not, as he had feared, hate him for his deception. They live happily ever after.
Compare 407
53 If Roxanne imagines what might have happened if Roxane had slept with Christian and then found out that Cyrano had written the letters and chosen him instead of Christian, Love Letters imagines what might have happened if Cyrano had married Roxane after the death of Christian. Allen lies to Singleton as Cyrano lied to Roxane; people lied to one an- other most appallingly all the time in films of that era (remember Dark Victory [19391?), but of course for noble reasons.
Still, amnesia main- tained in this way is a kind offalse ignorancet on the part ofthe amnesi- ac's manipulative partner. Singleton sleeps with Allen only after the onset of her amnesia, so that there is no basis for comparison to jog the sexual memory. But, as in Cyrano de Bergerac, the words in the letters do the job of the magic awakening kisst-the pleasures of the textt substituting for those of sex.
Hub 408
In many of these stories, amnesia makes a person into his or her own imaginary rival. A delightful inversion of this situation is provided by a genre ofIndian texts in which stupidity prevents a husband from realizing that he really does have a rival, in which the mythology of the magical sexual double is invoked to sustain a straightforward case of adultery. This happens in a Sanskrit text dated to the fifteenth century:
Cycle 409
The Husband In The Mango Tree
In a certain village there lived the wife of an honest man; she was beautiful and clever but in love with another man. One day she went to their place of assignation in the mango grove and there gave herself to her lover. But at that time her husband happened to come to the mango grove.
Flow 410
When the wife's lover saw the husband approaching, he got up with a great flurry and stood modestly concealed. When the wife saw her husband, she cried out, "What I want is to eat a mango." "Then I will bring some for you," the husband replied. But she said to him, "My desire is to climb the tree myself and then to eat the mango." "Then do so," he replied.
When she ascended the tree she looked down at her husband and cried 54
The Husband'S Shadow
[A merchant had a pretty wife who was carrying on an affair with the king. The husband became suspicious and said:] "Look here, woman. You seem to be fornicating in my absence." ...
Being still suspicious, he ap- pointed a man to guard over his wife, but the man was a nitwit. As soon as her husband was safely out of sight, she sent for the king. He came to her in a hurry and spent time with her.
Ladder 411
After he left, the nitwit asked her, "Who is that man who came and went just now?" She said, "Oh, that is my husband's shadow." "What is a shadow?" he asked. "A shadow is what you see in a mirror. Look for yourself," she said.
He looked into a mirror and said, "Oh, that, I know that." On another day, when the king and the merchant's wife were sleeping together, the merchant returned home from his travels and banged on the door. The king got up in a hurry, jumped the backyard fence, and vanished. When she then opened the door for him, her husband was full of suspicions.
He called the nitwit and questioned him. "Did anyone come here when I was gone?" "No, sir. Only your shadow came and slept with the mistress.
No one else." "My shadow? What do you mean by 'shadow'?" "Come here, sir," said the nitwit, and took him to the mirror. He showed his master his shadow and said, "Look there, that's the shadow I mean." The merchant laughed.
His doubts about his wife were cleared. How TO COMMIT ADULTERY WITH YOUR OWN SPOUSE "Oh, that shadow? It's all right if that shadow comes to see my wife.
You don't have to stop him," he said. Now his wife could sleep with her lover whenever the merchant was away. The nitwit didn't ever report it again.75 55 The "shadow"* is a reflection or image, the subject of an extended ancient Indian mythology of bedtricks.
Compare 412
Approach One: Philosophy, or Love/Sex = Mind/Body?
These stories play out the tension between love and sex or lust and desire or between different sorts of desire or between dutyt and desire. The intimacy of sex is different from that of love and different again from the intimacy of marriage.
Compare 47
Sex And Love
These stories play out the tension between love and sex or lust and desire or between different sorts of desire or between dutyt and desire. The intimacy of sex is different from that of love and different again from the intimacy of marriage. All of these texts are about sex, and some are also about love.
Hub 413
Falling in love is, of course, not at all the same thing as falling into bed; but the relationship between lust and love is complicated by the widespread belief (never, to my knowledge, tested scientifically) that sex is best when you're in love. Andrew Lang, the Indo-Europeanist, disdained the bedtrickster hero- ine of All's Well That Ends Wellt as "the thief, not oflove, but oflust."IOO And in writing about Shakespeare's bedtricks, John Wain writes: "The 64 ApPROACH ONE mindless drive of lust, like the animal rush for survival, does not pause to recognize its object ....
Love feeds on recognition and knowledge of the loved person; lust, by contrast, is blind; its patterns are laid down in advance and it feeds on whatever approximates to those patterns." 101 This is a true enough summary of the Romantict view, which defines the dif- ference between sex and love precisely on the grounds that love, unlike sex, can see the truth. Bowden adds a wise note of caution: "Wain's statement is not true of the bed trick in general.
Cycle 414
Flow 415
Indeed, these stories are generated by precisely that problem, by the ways in which love and sex masquerade as one another and thus both force and enable lovers to masquerade in bed; they are about the ways in which people mistake sex for love, about the tension between ways of knowing someone through the mind and heart (love) or through the body (sex). (Indeed, the Sanskrit word manas means both mind and heart, the organ with which one both falls in love and calculates the position of the planets.) Many stories seem to begin with the assumption that love/sex = mind/body or, perhaps, sex/body = love/mind.
But this Cartesian assumption (which is not limited to cultures that know Descartes or always present in those that do) does not remain static; it is challenged, inverted, subverted, and, sometimes, reinstated after all. The myths nego- tiate the territory carved out by this paradox: we may assume that love is in the mind, sex in the body, but the myths often teach us that sex is in the mind, love in the body. It is common to argue that you get to know people through love rather than through sex, but people in various cultures tend to mix up sex and .
Ladder 416
love as ways of knowing. Thus some texts argue that you do know people through love and that you do not know people through sex (regarded as PHILOSOPHY, OR LOVE/SEX = MIND/BODY? 65 inferior to, and indeed opposed to, love); others, that you do not know people through love and that you do know people through sex (regarded as embedded in the body, which is closer to the essential self).
Compare 417
Still others muddy the waters by regarding sex as caused by or causing love, or love as a form of desire, lust, or sex. Classical Indian texts, for instance, distin- guish sex (kama) from love (prema), but different genres disagree as to which of these a woman experiences with her husband and which with her lover. Bedtricks usually work quite well on the people who are not erotically attached, but are merely officially or physically attached, to the person who creates the surrogate; the one who cannot tell the difference is usually not the true lover but someone who does not care about and therefore does not really notice the other person; indifferencet breeds contempt and conceals difference.
Hub 48
The bedtrickster is, like the letter in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," so obvious to the traditional partner as to fall beneath any notice at all. 105 The husband's indifference, however, seems at odds with the point of many of these stories-namely, that it is precisely the man's powers of discrimination, the difference between his despised wife and his coveted mistress, that inspire the bedtrick. Presumably, if all women were as one to him, the one he happened to be married to would have sufficed, if only for reasons of convenience.
Instead, his urgent consciousness of the difference between women, specifically between his wife and his mistress, has made him stray from the garden path of monogamy. The sexual surro- gate may be created precisely because the person in love cannot tolerate the embrace of anyone other than the beloved-the one who knows the difference. All the effort that people take in setting up the masquerades that abound in these myths, the elaborate devices and ruses and tricks, is necessary because only that person's body, the body that one is not allowed to have, will do, rather than the body to which one has sexual 66 ApPROACH ONE rights.
Hub 418
Against this background, the ease with which the husband is ulti- mately deceived by the bedtrick becomes still more perplexingI06-an- other paradox. t Unlike the jaded husband, the true lover notices the woman and recog- nizes her; he can tell the difference. In The Marriage of Figaro, t the de- voted Figaro recognizes Susanna's voice and is not fooled, but the promis- cuous count does not recognize the voice of the countess and is fooled.
Cycle 49
Desire, Duty, And Domination
Our myths express different attitudes toward the uniqueness or inter- changeability of a sexual partner. Hindu social theory recognizes three goals that each individual (male) should satisfy in a lifetime: kama, dharma, and artha. IOB These might be translated into English as "desire," "duty," and "domination." Our stories often express a conflict between desire and either duty or domination, which gang up on desire by re- garding marriage as a matter of property rather than sex.
Cycle 419
Traditional con- cepts of marriage or traditional marriage partners are keyed to concepts of duty and domination (social, religious, and/or political) and do not value individualism as an element of eroticism as do stories that privilege desire; the official partner seeks not the personality but the persona of the woman in bed. Stories about duty emphasize those basic human mo- ments, indeed almost animal moments, that are the same for all bodies; they are reinforced by biologicalt attitudes ("I must make sure myoff- spring survive"), which may be subdivided into male ("I need to put my sperm in lots and lots of places") and female ("I need a male to stay and protect my young"); or, again, male ("I have one person for children and PHILOSOPHY, OR LOVE/SEX = MIND/BODY?
67 another for pleasure") and female ("I must marry the man my father chooses for me"). Desire, too, has many faces, some inclining toward lust, some toward love. Spiritual or Romantict desire focuses on one person and applies equally well to both male and female ("One person is everything to me" and "I must choose the one person I fall in love with").
Flow 420
Stories keyed to spiritual desire emphasize the more cultural moments where not the body but the head does the remembering-the moments of personality, edu- cation, logic, and, above all, speech, when, like French structuralists, we identify ourselves with our heads. But the all-cats-are-gray variety of de- sire sides with duty in disregarding the individual; like the official partner, the husband in the grip of pure animal desire seeks not the personality but the body of the woman in bed. Moreover, "I am unique" argues against an assumed "You are all alike," and vice versa.
Ladder 421
Desire for an individual is expressed in all the cultures I know-the Bible (Jacob for Rachel), ancient India (Nala for Damayanti:j:), etc. But Romantic love, it has been well argued, is largely a construction of post- Enlightenment European culture. Enlightenment attitudes, like Roman- tic, may apply equally well to both male and female ("I must choose some- one who shares my ideals").
Even those myths that do seem to value the individual argue that the reason it is essential to know the individual identity of the lover is that only by knowing the identity of the person we love, and by whom we are loved, do we know who we are; and this implies that our individuality lies, again, not in ourselves but in others, that it is socially constructed.
Compare 422
Thus the whole emphasis on choosing the lover at all (even going by Enlightenment criteria) is, as a whole, anti- Enlightenment, in that it situates the identity of the self as dependent on the identity of the other: "Some day my prince will come" (even if he is a prince with a Ph.D. This is one of the reasons rationalists (Hume, Kant, not to mention Plato) hate mythologists: my- thology is seductive, and traditional mythology undercuts the primacy of the individual.
Hub 423
So here is another paradox: certain myths assume both 68 ApPROACH ONE that we and our lovers are individuals and that it is essential to find ways to tell the true lover from the false one, but that we are not individuals, because our identity depends upon the identity of our lover. Part of the fascination that the bedtrick has for us moderns stems from the sort of obsessive interest that people often have in the previous (or subsequent) spouses or lovers of their spouses or lovers.
Flow 50
This obsession is a form of narcissism: "What of me is mirrored in him/her that she/ he should find us both attractive?" Since most European or American readers are victims of Romantic illusions that make them want to be unique to those they love, they find it deeply disquieting to encounter a double of this sort, to discover a chorus line of ex-lovers/spouses, who not only resemble one another unto twinship but often also share unusual behavioral traits. Such a discovery can be truly mortifying, for it implies that the entire group functions as nothing but a storehouse of inter- changeable parts.
Ladder 51
Compare 52
Hub 53
Cycle 54
Flow 55
TWO: The Rape of the False Mother
The myth of committing adultery with one's own wife may be a married man's fantasy, but the wife may have fantasies of her own,l and she may view this same plot either as one in which she seduces him or as one in which he rapes her. These various points of view may be expressed in a single myth,z and this complex pattern may be applied to stories about goddesses, women with magical powers, and human women, though the mechanisms by which the tricks take place and the theological implications are certainly different in each instance.
Ladder 56
Sexual Violence In Ancient India
The myth of committing adultery with one's own wife may be a married man's fantasy, but the wife may have fantasies of her own,l and she may view this same plot either as one in which she seduces him or as one in which he rapes her. These various points of view may be expressed in a single myth,z and this complex pattern may be applied to stories about goddesses, women with magical powers, and human women, though the mechanisms by which the tricks take place and the theological implications are certainly different in each instance.
Cycle 424
Let us, as we did in chapter 1, begin with gods and then descend to the human. The myth we considered at the start of chapter 1, the seduction of Shiva by a Parvati whom he mistakes for someone else, is the inversion of a series of myths we are about to consider, the seduction of Shiva by someone whom he mistakes for Parvati, often retold in the same texts that tell the stories of Shiva and Parvati that we considered in chapter 1.
Flow 425
Ladder 426
Compare 57
The Rape Of The False Parvati
One day the god Shiva teased his wife, the goddess Parvati, about her dark skin; he called her "Blackie" [Kalil and said that her dark body against his white body was like a black snake coiled around a pale sandal- wood tree. When she responded angrily, they began to argue and to hurl insults at one another. Furious, she went away to generate inner heat in order to obtain a fair, golden skin.
Her little son Viraka, stammering in his tears, begged to come with her, but she said to him, "This god is a woman-chaser when I am not here, and so you must constantly guard his door and peep through the keyhole so that no other woman gets to him." While she was gone, a demon named Adi took advantage of her absence to attempt to kill Shiva in order to avenge Shiva's conquest of his father, the demon Andhaka. He took the form of a serpent to slip past the gaze of the guard and entered Shiva's bedroom through a chink.
Compare 427
Then he sloughed the serpent form and took on the form of Parvati in order to make love with Shiva. The fool took an illusory form, more charming than can be imagined, perfect in all its limbs, complete with all the signs of recognition, and with various ornaments and clothes. But he placed a tooth as hard as a thunderbolt, with a sharp tip, inside the vagina of the form that he assumed, planning to kill Shiva by deluding his wits.
When Shiva saw Adi in the form of Parvati he was satisfied, and he embraced the great demon, thinking him to be Parvati because of the perfect detail of "her" limbs. Then he asked, "Is it truly you, and not some imitation, Parvati? Did you come here because you knew how empty my home was without you?" When the demon heard this he smiled a little, realizing that Shiva thought he knew him by means of the signs of recognition, and he said to the god: "I went to generate inner heat because you called me 'Blackie' [Kalil, but there was no sexual pleasure for me there, and so I have come to you." When Shiva heard this, he smiled, but he began to have some doubts in his heart, thinking, "She was angry, and knew that I was angry, and it is her nature always to keep her vows.
How could she have come back without getting what she wanted?" Then he searched for a sign of recognition, and he did not see the mark of a lotus made with a twist of hair on her left side. Realizing that this was the demon's magic power of illusion, he hid his feelings beneath his facial expression and, still smiling, placed upon his own penis a weapon with a sharp tooth. He killed the demon, who then resumed his true form.
Hub 428
When the goddess of the wind told Parvati that Shiva had been se-
Hub 58
The Rape Of The False Mother
duced by another woman, she became furious; in her tortured mind she pictured her son and said, "Since you abandoned me, your mother who loves you so, and gave women an opportunity to be alone with Shiva, therefore you will be born among humans to a mother who is a heartless, hard, numb, cold stone." Her anger came out of her body in the form of a lion, with a huge tongue lolling out of a mouth full of sharp teeth. Then the god Brahma came to her and granted her wish to have a golden body and to become half of Shiva's body, in the form of the androgyne.
Cycle 429
She sloughed off from her body a dark woman, named Kali, who went away to live in the mountains, riding on the lion. Parvati, now in her golden skin [Gauri, "The Fair" or "The Golden"], went home, but her son Viraka, who did not recognize her, stopped her at the door, saying, "Go away! A demon in the form of the goddess entered here unseen in order to deceive the god, who killed him and scolded me.
So you cannot enter here. The only one who can enter here is my mother, Parvati, who loves her son dearly." When the goddess heard this, she thought to herself, "It wasn't a woman; it was a demon. I cursed my son wrongly when I was angry." She lowered her head in shame and said to her son, "Viraka, I am your mother; do not be confused or mistaken in your mind.
Flow 430
Do not doubt me, my son, or be misled by my skin or my limbs; Brahma made me golden. I cursed you when I did not know what had happened. I cannot turn back my curse, but I will say that you will quickly emerge from your human life, with all your desires fulfilled." The goddess then returned to Shiva, and they made love together for many years.s 71 Parvati is a woman divided against herself or, rather, a woman forced by her husband to divide herself into two polarized halves.:j: The creation of a double is her solution to the problem of her husband's womanizing; insulted and rejected, she walks out on her unfaithful, hypercritical hus- band, as she does in most of the stories about their quarrels.
Ladder 431
She does not stay away for long: eventually she sends back a more acceptable form of herself, her explicit double, the golden goddess. But before this hap- pens, another double, the demonic false Parvati, replaces the true Parvati in Shiva's bed in a double-cross t that is also half of a double-cross-dress. t (The other half occurs in another myth, in which Shiva takes the form of Parvati to foil the amorous demon Bhasmasura.
t) Ostensibly, this double is an agent entirely separate from Parvati, the demon Adi; but we may also read it as an unconscious projection t of Parvati herself, created, just as yet another double, the lion, is created, out of her mingled anger and desire. That is, the bed trick perpetrated by 72 CHAPTER Two the demon Adi in the form of Parvati, a double-cross, becomes a double- back if we allow a reading in which Parvati herself becomes the demon.
Compare 432
The transformation of a wronged woman into an angry goddess is a para- digm that we will encounter again in the myth of "The Brahmin Woman and the Outcaste Man."t Here, the demonic false Parvati is created out of her resentment of Shiva's apparent revulsion for her dark skint and her suspicion of his womanizing-a double problem that inspires many bedtricks-but also out of her frustrated desire for him. The energy of Shiva's mild abuse ofParvati (his philandering and cruel teasing) is esca- lated into a a sexual act that intentionally kills the partner-what some would call sexual violence and others, rape.
Hub 433
Cycle 59
Yet another transformation occurs when Adi, in order to seduce the man there, takes not a male anthropomorphic form but a female (more precisely, theamorphic) form, the form of the man's wife, changing both his species and his sex. (An- other version of the story makes this double shift explicit when it specifies
Flow 60
The Rape Of The False Mother
Cycle 434
Yet we must assume that the demon's outer form is still black, since the woman he imitates is the form of Parvati as Shiva last saw her, still with her dark skin. At first the demon's bedtrick works, but ultimately the impostor is exposed, first by his words, which the real Parvati would never have spoken, and then by his lack of a certain twist of hair, a kind of cowlick, which functions in many Indian stories like a unique fingerprintt or birthmark.
t The disguises of the demon are mirrored by the disguises of the god- dess, his alter ego. By setting her son as the guard, Parvati is utilizing yet another standard motif (the guardian of the bedroom door:j:)l0 and transforming it, too: since the son has been (as she thinks) asleep, she curses him to have (in a human rebirth) a mother who is asleep, an inani- mate (jada) stone, a mother as heartless and cold in physical form as she herself has just proved to be in spirit.
Flow 435
(Being turned to stone is also a punishment for an excessively sexual woman in Hindu mythology.:j:) The abandoning mother not only ignores her son's pitiful pleas as she goes away but even throws his words back in his face when she curses him, accusing him of abandoning her by failing to restrain his father's sexuality. In another version of this myth, Viraka pleads with her as she leaves, saying: "I will follow you; you are my mother, full of love for your child.
Ladder 436
If you abandon me, I will not be able to bear Shiva's cruelty; a son is a vessel to receive his father's cruelty in his mother's absence."ll But it is his mother, not his father, who proves to be the cruel one. The chopped- off, negative Kali, the one who cursed her son, is banished to the liminal area of the Vindhya Mountains (the southern region that composers of the ancient Sanskrit texts in the northwest of India regarded as beyond the Hindu pale, the place to dump things that you did not want in the story anymore), together with the lion, whose toothy mouth recapitulates the demon's vagina den ta ta.
Compare 437
Hub 438
Ladder 61
In one telling, Yama says, "I do not think she can be my mother, for a mother does not behave badly even toward badly behaved sons," and his father says to the shadow, "Surely you are not the mother of these [children). You are some Samjna or other who has come here. For how could a mother curse even a bad child?" 17 In a closely related variant, it is also Yama, not the Sun, who notices the difference: "Daddy, no one has ever seen such an amazing thing, a mother who stops loving her son-like a cow that rejects her calf-and gives him a curse.
Compare 62
The Rape Of The False Mother
Cycle 439
The theme of the abandoning mother, the wife of the Sun, resurfaces in a transformation in a myth that is central to the great Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, composed between 300 B.C.E.
Hub 63
The Abandoning Of Karna
When the princess Kunti was still a virgin, before she was married, she was given the boon of invoking a god whenever she wanted to have a child, and she tried out her boon on the Sun god, merely out of curiosity. The Sun god split himself into two, so that he came to her but still went on shining in the sky. As soon as Kunti saw him, she begged him to go back, pointing out that she was still a child, but he insisted on having her, threatening that if she did not give in to him, he would bum to death "your foolish father, who does not know of your misconduct." Kunti gave birth to a son, Kama, but to conceal her own misdeeds, she threw him into Horse River [asvanadyam] , lamenting, "Fortunate is the woman from whose breast you will drink.
Flow 440
What dream will she have?" Then she retumed to the palace, sick with sorrow and with fear of awakening her father. Kama was retrieved from the river by a charioteer, whose wife, Radha, adopted himY Many years passed, and Kama became an unri- valed warrior. On the eve of the great battle, Kama bitterly berated his mother for abandoning him.
Kunti, who wished to get Kama to fight on the side of her legitimate sons, insisted that he was her son, not Radha's, and a voice from the Sun in the sky affirmed, "Kama, Kunti is right; do what your mother says."
Ladder 441
Compare 442
The psychological power of the Samjna myth colors the heartrending scene in which Kama accuses his mother of not acting like a mother. Manu and Yama might have said the very same thing. Is A BEDTRICK A RAPE?
Goddesses (and, as we might assume by extension and will soon see in examples, women) play bedtricks to avoid sexual abuse or rape. This is a familiar mythological (and psychological) pattern: the victim of sexual violence splits into two or more personalities.:!: Myths on this theme often express or represent a woman's fantasy or a woman's personality dissocia- tion in reaction to rape. But Parvati's surrogate, the demon Adi, is both the perpetrator and the victim of a rape.
Hub 443
The bedtrick in this instance- made possible by the supernatural power of the sexual trickster not only to change his sex but to transform that sex into a lethal weapon-is a rape counteracted by the rape of the bedtrickster. What implications does this myth have for human women who do not have these powers? Desens, considering primarily texts involving human women rather than goddesses, has asserted that to be the victim of a bed- trick is to be raped: The bed-trick explicitly requires that at least one partner not have informed consent to the sexual contact.
Cycle 444
The absence of physical violence in most bed- tricks should not become a pretext for ignoring the physical and emotional violation that occurs whether the deceived person is female or male. At least one partner is always physically and emotionally violated in a bed- trick; while that partner has chosen sexual involvement, he or she has not chosen it with the person unwittingly embraced in the dark. denies that a man could be sexually assaulted- particularly that he could be assaulted by a woman.
Cycle 64
Flow 65
The Rape Of The False Mother
77 the genders reversed in two ways at once) Shiva rapes Adi when he realizes that Adi intends to rape him. These arguments take on new meaning in the context of actual legal t cases about real women-legal disputes about marital rape, date rape, and sexual fraud. Larson argues, in a subsection of her essay entitled "Not as Bad as Rape": "By equating force and fraud in its working definition of coercion, the law demonstrates a nuanced grasp of how body and mind are fused in human personhood.
Flow 445
Ladder 446
Compare 447
Posner assumes that it becomes disgusting as well as humiliating if the man 78 CHAPTER Two pretends to be her husband (or a speculum), and disgusting a woman is, apparently, criminal. By this account, we must ask whether Martin Guerre'st wife was at the end disgusted (having been really fooled by the sexual lie) or "merely" humiliated (having been fooled at first by the small lies but then having seen through the big lie). The mind, at least the nonlegal mind, boggles.
Hub 448
Most texts don't even describe the reactions to the bedtrick, assuming that they are obvious: the experience of loss, imperfec- tion, and abandonment. Since we tend to believe that the sexual act reveals the most intimate truth about both our partners and ourselves, tour deepest sense of self may be challenged when this assumption is shattered by the violent deception of the bedtrick. The humiliating knowledget lapse also applies in ordinary cases of sexual betrayal, but it is extreme in the case of a bedtrick.
Cycle 449
Hoffmann's "The Doubles") one day sees that her lover is two people and she has been fooled: "A deep horror seized Nathalie when she saw the two youths, a double image of the beloved whom she carried in her heart."3o 0, in Storyo!O, t regards the bedtrick as worse than physical torture: "She was surprised that the whipping she had received had left her so untroubled, so calm, whereas the thought that she would probably never know which of the four men had twice taken her from behind, and whether it was the same man both times, and whether it had been her lover, quite distressed her."3! In Ibsen's version of the myth of Siegfried and Brunhilde, the tricked woman later says to Sigurd (Siegfried): "You have poisoned my whole life!
Ladder 66
Compare 67
The Rape Of The False Mother
Your body says yes, and then, later, your mind says no. t When you finally realize, ex post facto, that it was the wrong guy/gal, you reclassify the whole experience as rape. At the time of the act, the victim of rape experiences terror and the victim of the bedtrick experiences plea- sure; later, the victim of rape experiences rage and shame, and when the truth of the act is revealed, the victim of the bedtrick experiences rage and a different kind of shame, tempered by mental remorse.
Flow 450
There is a tension, in the mind/body world, t which is to say much of the Western world, between the view that if the mind is fooled, the body cannot be raped, and the view that it can; or, on the other hand, between the view that if the body remains pure, the mind can be raped, and the view that it cannot. But either form of the violation is profoundly disturbing; rarely does one get off scot-free by arguing that the glass is half empty-that since "only" the body was raped, or "only" the mind, the person has remained intact.
Ladder 451
In real life, t too, the victims of transvestite bedtricks express their sense of humiliation, anger, and disorientation: Teena Brandon'st successful masquerade as a man, with several women who found "him" an entirely satisfactory partner, ended when two men, enraged by her deception, first raped and then murdered her. Here the bedtrick was not explicitly caused by a rape or equated with one, but it was punished with one. Most of the earlier, more classical versions of the bedtrick imply that the successful masquerader is a happy masquerader, that only the victim suffers.
Compare 452
Moreover, a bedtrick of any kind is tragic not just for the victim but
The Rape Of The False Mother
81 also for the trickster, especially the trickster who realizes the tragedy of being caught in the double-bind. t The bedtrickster also suffers from the big lie, knowing that the victim is really responding to someone else; in some texts, the trickster, male or female, is shown to suffer an agony more exquisite than that of the victim. The male bedtrickster in Kobo Abe's novel The Face of Another says, later, "I felt intolerably sad ....
Hub 453
Helena grapples with the lust that feasted on her body. She partici- pated in it. She was used sweetly but she was also abused.
Cycle 454
Will he ever be aroused by her, or will he always have to imagine Isabella in order to perform the act? Angelo will think he has had [Isabella] and, in a way, will think so for the rest of his life, even though he is to learn that it is untrue. Angelo has had the experience of Isabella and will probably spend the rest of his life comparing Mariana with Isabella ....
Flow 455
t But then why is the man not equally humiliated when he succeeds in the trick and proves that his wife cannot tell the difference between him and another man? But when it comes to reactions to the bedtrick, the gender of the trickster is not always as significant as the gender of the victim; here, for once, the double standard t does not always apply. Many male tricksters are after nothing but the body, not the mind or the soul or the love, t of their victims and are perfectly happy to have the trick work.
But some are after more, and their victory is bittersweet, at best; that is one reason there are relatively few triumphalist stories about men who trick their wives in this double-backingt way, in compari- son with the far more numerous stories in which wives trick their hus- bands into committing adultery with their disguised wives. Natalie Zemon Davis, in The Return of Martin Guerre, t points out how both trickster and victim suffer from the deception. She presents us with a wonderfully detailed historical record of a sexual lie told by a man
The Rape Of The False Mother
83 called Pansette (Arnaud du Tilh was his full name), who claimed to be Martin Guerre and either fooled Martin Guerre's wife, Bertrande de Rols, or persuaded her to pretend that he had fooled her. Bertrande, the puta- tive victim, "loved the new Martin, but he had tricked her once; might he after all not trick her again? And what if the other Martin Guerre came back?" Pansette, the putative trickster, "could never acknowledge his lie and never give them a chance to pardon him.
Ladder 456
Dressed as Palamon, the Wooer kissest her twice (the Doctor, when he hears of this, says, "Twenty times had been far better, / For there the cure lies mainly"), and then she says, "And then we'll sleep together." The Wooer hesitates, but the Doctor prompts, "Take her offer," and he says, "Yes, marry, will we." Her final 84 CHAPTER Two words are, "But you shall not hurt me. If you do, love, I'll cry." It is not clear whether she is cured, or indeed whether she recognizes the decep- tion (5.2).
Compare 457
both fraudulent and fair, both corrupt and restorative." 54 Is it worse to have your mind t raped or to have your body raped? Different people will make different choices. The situation is more com- plex than Desens and the lawyers make it.
We need different words; both rape and the bedtrick are forms of illegitimate sexual access, one by force and the other by guile; but English is a rich language, and "rape" should not be applied to both situations. The two phenomena can neither be conflated in a term like "rape-trick"55 nor be simply dichotomized. The anguish that a woman feels when, bound and gagged or at knife point, she is physically penetrated by someone she despises is different from the anguish that she feels when she realizes, after enjoying a night of passion- ate sex, that she had been with someone she did not love and could not distinguish from the one she did love-or, worse, that she half knew the difference and could not stop her body from responding.
Hub 458
The shock with which most victims of the bedtrick react to it is not unlike the reaction to a conventional rape, but the bedtrick violates the trickster as well as the victim. Both the bedtrickster and the victim suffer a kind of de- basement, each in his or her own way, whereas in physical rape the rapist does not usually share the sense of debasement that is felt by the victim. Neely wisely makes a distinction between the two great Shakespearean bedtricks: "Whereas All's Well's bedtrick is a corrupt bargain that feels like prostitution, Measure for Measure's is a coercive assault that feels like rape." 56
The Rape Of The False Mother
Or perhaps Eve Black's occupancy of the body he knew so well lent an erotic piquancy to the situation which he found irresistibly titillating. Or it may be that he saw this as a golden opportunity to repay Eve White for the many blows she'd dealt his ego by her constant rejection of his advances. Whatever his motivation, he finally said, "O.K., it's a deal." 59 But what of her motivation?
Cycle 459
I've never slept with him. "61 When Eve White awoke to find herself with Ralph in the hotel room, she was furious and sick. "Don't ever try to see me again," she said, and left him for good.
Flow 460
They reflected also deep horror in the awareness that her own person had, without her will or knowledge, been used in this peculiarly treacherous transaction.63 86 CHAPTER Two The "deep horror" that is here attributed to Eve White upon her realiza- tion that she herself was the tricksteris precisely what E. Hoffmann's Nathalie felt on learning that she had been the victim of a bedtrick. Since Eve was both the original (White) and the surrogate (Black), she was humiliated both as victim and as trickster.
It is a sexual fantasy, t rich in meanings that have shifted constantly over three millennia. The bedtrick functions as a woman's fantasy that protects her from the trauma of rape,t but for every female fantasy there is a male fantasy, and this is no exception. Emily Detmer has pointed out that, just as bedtricks depend on men's inability to tell the difference in women's bodies, rape plots seem to assume that men can't tell the differ- ence between consensual and nonconsensual sex.
Ladder 461
In other words, the shadow of the wom- an's fantasy of a bedtrick in reaction to the threat of being raped is the man's fantasy of a bedtrick in reaction to having raped. The long, tragic history of sexual violence, from the Hebrew Bible to contemporary police
The Abandoning Mother And Lover
Stories in which women create doubles in response to (or in order to avoid) abuse by their sexual partners are bedtricks, at least from the standpoints of the man and woman involved. But from the children's point of view, the double masquerades as a mother as well as a wife, and the children suffer because their real mother has vanished and another woman, who pretends to be their mother, has taken her place. Different subsidiary episodes adhere to the basic bedtrick according to whether it does or does not involve, or emphasize, the birth of children.
In general, myths emphasize children and the production of heirs, while later literary forms are concerned less about children and more about adult sexuality. But the two scenarios are inextricably linked: in myths as well as secular stories, the child may serve as the physical proof of the identity of the bedtrickster, treated merely as an object whose physical resemblancet to his father proves not his own identity but the fact that his mother is his father's wife.
Compare 462
The mother who flees from her husband and abandons her child often inflicts damage on both her husband and her child. Parvati curses her son to have a stony mother, and the flight of Samjna:j: results in the muti- lation of her husband and the quasi-fatal mutilation of her son. When the mother "splits" (as in the slang phrase for a hasty exit), her children may also be split-at worst mutilated or destroyed and at best deeply wounded.
Although there is a significant difference between the harm inflicted by the mother who goes away and the mother who is a false copy or a shadow, they are often causally related: because one mother leaves, the other is a mere copy. When the mother vanishes, who or what is to be put in her place? What surrogates can the child find?
Myths such as the tale of the demon Adi speak to us out of a culture in which the frequency of maternal death, the routine remarriage of wid- owers, and a close-knit extended family with many available "aunties" made absent mothers and surrogate mothers far more common than they 88 CHAPTER Two are in contemporary America.
Hub 463
And so Gene- sis tells us (2.24) that a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they are one flesh. In this sense, the loss of the mother, any mother, is inevitable, and this loss, as Freud pointed out long ago,66 sets us on the path for the search for a subsequent (nonincestuous) replace- ment, a substitute: a lover, a god, or a teddy bear. Winnicottt spoke of transitional objects that a child uses as substitutes both for himself as the totality of the world and for his mother-a breast, a thumb, a blanket, a teddy bear, and, perhaps most important, a story.
Cycle 464
Or, in a related sce- nario, the son who grows up and leaves home may perceive his loss of his mother as her loss of him, something to feel guilty about. Ruth Padel asks, "When a man leaves a woman he has loved, is he re-enacting the experience on which his adult self is built?"7l The compelling connection between betrayal by a mother and by a wife is inverted by Shakespeare in Cymbeline (2.5), where Posthumus,
The Rape Of The False Mother
89 when he thinks his wife has betrayed him, imagines that his mother be- trayed his father, too: We are all bastards, And that most venerable man which I Did call my father was I know not where When I was stamped. Some coiner with his tools Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seemed The Dian of that time. So doth my wife The nonpareil of this.
Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained And prayed me oft forbearance. Posthumus has been taken in by falsified evidence of his wife's infidelity, but there is absolutely no evidence of his mother's infidelity. He leaps to this conclusion perhaps because she died just as he was born (hence his name, Posthumus), a loss that, coupled with his wife's apparent sexual coldness to him, produces the scenario of the abandoning mother dou- bled by the abandoning wife and the transformation of rejection into sexual betrayal, by both women at once.
Flow 465
The chain of substitutions appears in the mythology of the bedtrick as a cluster of masquerades (a disappearing mother/lover/self) that the victim simultaneously longs to uncover and fears to uncover, a series of paradoxest that are expressed differently according to the point of view of the character in the drama. We can express this cluster of substitutions in the form of a three-point syllogism:t 1. "My mother is not my mother." This may be a happy discovery (or fantasy): my real mother is someone better than this one, who is really just a stepmother; my real mother would not treat me as badly as this mother does.
This fantasy of other, better parents is what Freud called the Family Romancef2-the myth of the child who is taken from his parents at birth and raised by strangers who pretend to be his parents. Thus, Freud would add, the child reasons that since this apparent mother is not in fact related to him, he can acknowledge his sexual feelings for her. But the realization that "my mother is not my mother" is also an unhappy discovery (or fantasy): my real mother has abandoned me and therefore clearly does not love me.
Ladder 466
"My wife/husband/lover is not my wife/husbandllover." This scenario, too, which is the bedtrick, may be a happy discovery (or fantasy): the person in my bed is not my familiar, boring partner but an exciting stranger. However, it may also be unhappy: my lover has gone away and betrayed me, and I am in bed with a potentially dangerous stranger. "Therefore, I am not who I am." The happy aspect of this discovery (or fantasy) is: I am of higher birth than I appear to be (the Family Ro- mance).
This applies even in ordinary cases of sexual betrayal, when the victim retroac- tively realizes that, since the lover was not what s/he appeared to be, the victim, too, must have been someone else, not someone loved but some- one fooled.
Sometimes the child tries to take the place of the lost loved object (as the French diplomat, for instance, becomes his fantasized lover, Butterfly, at the end of M. This may be the most basic of all masquerades: to become the person that you long to have with you to tell you who you are. The loss of this most intimate substitute is the final link in the tragic chain of betrayals that tears away the identity of both the bedtrickster and the victim of the bedtrick.
Compare 467
Thus, the mother and the lover as the betraying others make us doubt that we know who we are.
Approach Two: Psychology
Bedtricks are about that great Lost and Found department known as hu- man identity; they tackle the case of mistaken identity at its most intimate level, in bed. What Hegel called the human need "to be recognized, to be desired and valued by other human beings,"75 varies from one culture to another, and people in different cultures do not react in the same way to the shock of discovering that their lovers, and hence their selves, are not who they thought they were.
Hub 68
The Case Of The Missing Identity
Bedtricks are about that great Lost and Found department known as hu- man identity; they tackle the case of mistaken identity at its most intimate level, in bed. What Hegel called the human need "to be recognized, to be desired and valued by other human beings,"75 varies from one culture to another, and people in different cultures do not react in the same way to the shock of discovering that their lovers, and hence their selves, are not who they thought they were.
Hub 468
Some cultures do not construct identity sexually, though surprisingly many do. Bedtrick myths weave fantasies on the theme of individuality; they are about the fragility, indeed the fictive nature, of identity. All three of the key players in a bedtrick-the trickster, the victim, and the impersonated partner-may feel the ground of their identity shifting beneath them.
Cycle 469
The threat to individuality is posed not only by our own double but by the double of the one we love, who challenges the assumption that the person we love is different from everyone else-and that we ourselves are, therefore, different from everyone else. Bedtricks force us to confront the issue of the sexual object:t do we define ourselves, including our sexu- ality, in terms of who we are or in terms of who we are with? Those who view the sexual act as an extension of the self, a form of self-knowledge, define their sexuality with reference to the sexual self, the subject of desire.
Flow 470
The authors of texts that express this point of view seem to ask, "Who 91 92 ApPROACH Two are you regardless of who you are in bed with?" This attitude limits the destructive capacity of a partner's sexual betrayal: even if the partner is other than you thought, you may still be who you thought you were. For those who define themselves by their partner, however, the knowl- edge that the lover is other than what they had thought is particularly devastating because it means that they themselves are other than they had thought.
The intimate partner is a kind of finger painting of one's own identity, a place to hang up one's emotional hat. The mutual exchange of intense physical pleasure and responsiveness is a powerful medium for the merging of identities. Bedtrick myths express a longing not just for the real him or the real her but for the real me, indeed, the real mes, and the real us.
Ladder 471
Compare 472
And is this bosom mine? Is my reflection in the mirror mine? Would he be stranger to me than myself?
Cycle 69
Remove my eyes and I will hear him still; My ears, I'll feel him still; my touch, I'll breathe him; Take eyes and ears and touch and sense of smell And all my senses, and but leave my heart, And you will leave me with the bell I need To find him in this wide world.sO
Flow 70
Psychology
93 The identity that she found at her mother's breast, when she was mirrored in her mother, she has now lost in her false husband's arms. When Joseph Roth's shah of Persia discovers that he fell for a bedtrick, he doubts his infallibility for the first time: [The eunuch]: "Sire, it wasn't the same woman, it was a similar one!" "Are you telling me I'm blind?" "We are all of us blind," said the Chief Eunuch. He pushed the dishes with honey, butter and fruit to one side.
Hub 473
He thought or rather he gave the appearance of thinking, but his head remained as empty as a hollow pumpkin. "Well, I see, I see!" he said. And then: "But she made me happy!" "Indeed, indeed!" affirmed the Chief Eunuch.
Cycle 474
Flow 475
How is it that we are perceived as one when we are so many? Indeed, we should expect much more multiplicity; since each of us is several persons, often one of us gets us into a situation that another one of us has to get us out of. The wish to be multivalent may take either (or both) of two forms.
In the Romantid model, or the paradigm of desire, some people, or per- haps some parts of each of us, want to have all the parts known at once, to be and to appear to be integrated; we desire to find a single person who loves all parts of us, who fulfills our sexual needs, family needs, intellectual needs, and so forth. But, in the traditionalt model, or the paradigm of duty, some people, or some parts of ourselves, seem to want to play one 94 ApPROACH Two part at a time and to keep the separate selves separate, validated by differ- ent people.
Ladder 476
This involves us in another paradox:t though we may want to find a single person to perceive all of us at once, rather than being seen in fragments, one part at a time, yet we reserve the right to be as many separate people as we are. A part of each of us rejoices to find a different self, and a part is terrified by this. This paradox is compounded by another factor that often intersects with it: we expect others to show us always the same face, and we may feel betrayed when we see different sides of them, just as we may feel shortchanged when they see only one side of us.
Compare 477
In these stories, intolerable conflict moves the characters simulta- neously in two apparently opposite directions, toward splitting (one per- son creating a second, different person, real or imagined-the double) and integration (one person pretending to be the same as another person, real or imagined-the masquerade). In the myths of rape, for instance, the woman does not want the man and produces a substitute in order to avoid him. But in the stories of the man who commits adultery with his own wife, t the woman wants the man and pretends to be two women (herself and the woman he desires) in order to get him.
Ladder 71
We may see this as a tension between patterns of avoidance (through the double) and seeking (through the masquerade) or as a single act interpreted from two different points of view: to the person who produces the double, the story is about doubling, splitting, avoidance; to the double who takes the place of the original, it is about masquerading, integrating, seeking. To the question "Which is real, the split form or the integrated one?" the answer is "Yes." The integrating masquerade extends the personality by allowing the original to do more than he or she can do within the original persona; the splitting double limits the personality by doing the things that the original does not do, or does not acknowledge doing.
Another set of stories regards splitting as the problem: the self does not wish to be regarded as only partial but wishes to play more roles than those that the partner would allow (the wife wishes to be both the mother and the mistresst) and so slips into the role of another personality ("I am both this person and that person"). Splitting the double away from ourselves begins by denying the otherness within us, saying, "I am not that person."
Hub 478
Compare 72
Psychology
Masquerading is not something weird that only deranged people do, or even something that we ourselves do only once in a while when we are in extremis. It is natural and unavoidable, since we are all varied (if not necessarily two-faced). There are, from one culture to another, different ways of distinguishing "healthy multiplicity" from "pathological schizophrenia." The idea that people who "see double" are mad has a long literary history in the West, from Plautus's Amphi- tryon:j: through Shakespeare's The Comedy ofErrorst to Craig Lucas's Pre- lude to a Kiss (l992).t But who is crazy, the bedtrickster (for engineering it) or the victim (for falling for it)?
Cycle 479
But if you take it literally, and start introducing people to your double, they lock you up.
Hub 73
Freudian Bedtricks
Psychological observations of a general nature inform all of my readings of the myths, and I have concentrated on the psychological aspects of identity that the bedtrick threatens (though the bedtrick is also about a lot of other psychological concepts).
Flow 480
We will be concerned primarily with psychological theories that illuminate puzzling aspects of our texts and only secondarily with the evidence that our myths offer in support of those theories. And we will concentrate on three seminal thinkers in this field: Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, and Jacques Lacan. I have already used many of Freud's concepts and terms in my dis- cussions of texts about bedtricks throughout this book: splitting,:j:86 the Family Romance, t repression, t projection, t multiple personalities, t the Freudian error or slipt (an unconscious slip that reveals a deeper truth), and upward displacementt (the belief that parts of the body often stand in, as it were, for other parts; in particular, that the genitals are often displaced upward to the head, mouth, nose, or eyes).
Ladder 481
Compare 482
Cycle 74
Psychology
97 split her apart and to fantasize that he has two sets of parents, or to split himself apart and to fantasize that there are two of him. Freud argued that in myths of the Oedipal type, the man projects double parents or splits himself (and/or his mother) in order to avoid or deny his erotic attachment to her. That is, he splits her into one woman who is maternal and another who is erotic, and then splits himself so that there is one of him for each of his emotions.
Hub 483
In her variant of the mother/whore hypothesis, Melanie Klein at- tempts to explain the split image of the good and bad mother through her concept of projective identification. Her theory of the good and bad breast,92 which might have a stronger claim for universality than Freud's male-oriented Oedipal syndrome, tells us that it is natural and inevitable for very young children of both sexes to distinguish two female figures, the breast that gives milk and the breast that feeds itself, the loving mother and the devouring mother, and that this dichotomy is the basis of all subsequent moral judgments.
Cycle 484
Flow 485
Her husband was not really her husband, "not the man he said he was." This is said to have "contained a cogent element of existential truth: he was not the man he had 'said' he would become .... At issue here is the basic notion of a 'kernel of disguised truth' that axiomatically forms the core of all paranoid delusions."104 3. Her youngest son was not really hers; "a switch was made at the hospital" and her own child had been taken elsewhere.
Ladder 486
She gave six reasons in support of this intuition, including the fact that the delivery was under general anesthesia, t so she did not see the baby immediately afterward, and that "a court had placed her children in foster homes (be- cause of Mrs. M.'s neglect), which implied to her that the children could not have been truly hers." 4. She was not the real Mrs.
Compare 487
She insisted that "she herself was a good loving mother while the real Mrs. was a 'no good bitch.' " Here the authors remark that "the selfas impostor" is "the psychotic expression
Flow 75
Ladder 76
Psychology
99 of an ambivalence about mothering that is consciously intolerable": "She was partially correct when she said, 'There are two other Mrs. M.'s run- ning around out there.' The 'other Mrs. M.' who is most important in her life, however, is her husband's mother, whom she despises ....
The ambiguity about which of the two Mrs. M.'s-patient or mother-in- law-is being called a bitch cannot, we feel, be entirely coincidental."lOs And, finally, inevitably: 5. Her therapist was not the real doctor.
We might, for instance, analyze the story in terms of a wish component (the wish to be in bed with a certain person) and a defense mechanism (the wish not to be in bed with another person or, indeed, with that same person). Or we might see it in terms of Freud's belief that the ego is capable of splitting itself, thus causing a subject/ object relationship within the self that passes judgment on itself, the ego in conflict with the superego, the self in self-reflectionYo Freud's basic argument that you pretend you don't know what you do, especially but not only with regard to incest, is a broader example of the more particular argument that the bedtrick depends on this sort of self-delusion.
t Thus, when the Zohar suggets that Jacobt was lying to himself about Leah, we may see an early source of Freud's well-known rabbinic thinking.
Compare 77
Otto Rank On The Double
Of all the studies of bed tricks that Freud inspired, Otto Rank's The Double remains the classic text. Like Freud, Rank focused his analysis on a story by E. Hoffmann, but where Freud chose "The Sandman"t (as Rank notes at the end of his study), Rank chose "The Story of the Lost Reflec- tion." (In opera, t which has a good instinct for myths, Offenbach chose these two stories plus one more for his Tales of Hoffmann.) Oddly enough, neither Freud nor Rank paid much attention to Hoffmann's most explicit tale of a bedtrick, actually called "The Doubles"t ("Die Doppelganger," 100 ApPROACH Two 1821).
Hub 488
Though Rank's insights apply primarily to nineteenth-century Gothic doubles (more specifically to German ones, though also to British- Jekyll/Hyde:j: and Dracula:j:) and are not limited to bedtricks, he also makes several suggestions that, on the one hand, generally illuminate our more circumscribed theme and, on the other, focus specifically upon sexual as- pects of the double (as when he associates the loss of the shadow with castra- tion:j: and impotence).lll Rank summarizes these themes as they are em- ployed in the literature of the nineteenth-century Romantics such as Hoffmann: "We always find a likeness which resembles the main character down to the smallest particulars, such as name, voice, and clothing-a like- ness which, as though 'stolen from the mirror' (Hoffmann), primarily ap- pears to the main character as a reflection. Always, too, this double works at cross-purposes with its prototype; and, as a rule, the catastrophe occurs in the relationship with a woman, predominantly ending in suicide by way of the death intended for the irksome persecutor." 112 Not merely the image in the mirrort but namet and voicet are stolen by the double.
Cycle 489
Rank connects the fear of death and aging with "the threat to narcis- sism by sexual love," which may take either the form of pathological self-love as in the Greek legend ... the defensive form of the pathological fear of one's self, often leading to para- noid insanity and appearing personified in the pursuing shadow, mirror- image, or double. On the other hand, in the same phenomena of defense the threat also recurs, against which the individual wants to protect and assert himself.
Flow 490
Psychology
Thus, the sexual double is a manifestation of both sexual megalomania and sexual inadequacy, both longing for sex and fear of sex; this makes good, human sense and constitutes another cluster of paradoxes.
Lacan On The Mirror Stage
Ladder 491
Woody Allen pays transsexual tribute to this 102 ApPROACH Two scene in his film Sleeper (1973), in which our hero (Woody), transported to the futuristic future, shaves in an electronic mirror in which another actor (also Woody) mimics his every move, until he pushes a button and a woman appears, eventually shaving to match him (a scene that in turn inspired the transsexual mirror scene in All of Met [1984]). The Marx Brothers scene is also visually quoted in Big Business (1988), in which a woman meets her unknown identical twin, wearing the same suit, in a powder room in which a series of mirrors is separated by a series of open spaces, and the two of them play the mirror scene until they realize that they are twins.
Compare 492
Hub 493
The Imaginary is the dialectic between the lost object and the totalized, complete ego; the pull between them is what inevitably splits the subject. In terms of our mythological actors upon the Mirror stage, the original narcissist, still fixated in the Imaginary, incestuously engaged with his mother or himself, judges only by the visual, by the mirror. Like Harpo and Chico in Duck Soup, he thinks there is no one there but him- self, when actually there is someone else; the supposed mirror image is another person.
Here he is trapped within an infinite mise en abime, locked into a conflict with infinitely proliferating doubles of the self. As Margaret Trawick put it: "The self imagines itself to be an image of an image (the baby sees the mother and himself in her). This vision is static and closed, an eternal, mutual reflection between two images.
Cycle 494
Flow 495
Psychology
Ladder 496
Compare 497
To be what one is not, as in this syllo- gism, is to be a masquerader, more precisely someone who masquerades as himself or herself. t But, as Sedgwick pointed out for Freud, I would suggest that our myths admit of yet another possibility: the intrusion of a double of the mother or a false lover as the other who breaks the cycle of self-reflection; the mother who makes us real is later replaced by the beloved who makes us real.
Hub 498
Finally, the Real stage is generated by the tension of the dialectic between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The masquerade dissolves this tension, too. Lacan, glossing Freud's "Wo Es war, solI Ich werden" ("Where It was, there shall 1 be," sometimes translated "Where Id was, there shall Ego be"), wrote: "Who, then, is the other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since, at the heart of my assent to my own identity, it is still he who agitates me?
Cycle 499
Hindus and Buddhists represent the guru's face as a mirror in which the devotee's face is truly and compassionately reflected, undistorted by fear or self- hate. The fifteenth-century poet Kabir spoke of the guru that resides in one's own heart: Within the heart a mirror but no face shows. You'll see the face when the heart's Doubleness goes.
Flow 500
128 The mirror of the guru's heart, like the lover's face, may reflect the du- plicitous self, but unlike the lover, it reflects it truly.
THREE: Waking Up in Bed with an Animal
any bedtricksters are animals whose trick consists in a transforma- tion: the demon Adi becomes a snake, Parvati, a lion. Waking up in the morning to discover that you have been in bed all night with an animal (or a deity or a human in the form of an animal) is the fantasy that underlies both the folktales and the literary retellings of those tales about figures that folklorists sometimes call "animal lovers." (Unfortunately, this term is often spelled with a hyphen, which produces a potential con- fusion with animal-lovers, people who are fond of stray cats and dogs.
Hub 78
Animal Lovers: Beauty And The Beast
any bedtricksters are animals whose trick consists in a transforma- tion: the demon Adi becomes a snake, Parvati, a lion. Waking up in the morning to discover that you have been in bed all night with an animal (or a deity or a human in the form of an animal) is the fantasy that underlies both the folktales and the literary retellings of those tales about figures that folklorists sometimes call "animal lovers." (Unfortunately, this term is often spelled with a hyphen, which produces a potential con- fusion with animal-lovers, people who are fond of stray cats and dogs.
Ladder 501
The hyphen distinguishes our animal brides or grooms-the latter term meaning here, not people who curry horses, but people who marry brides-from those who dote on their pets, although the partner of an animal lover is in a most literal sense, even a bestial sense, an animal- lover.) The Family Romancet often involves animals, for the changeling child may be raised by or among animals who serve as maternal surrogates, like wet nurses, impersonating a mother; or the child may be sent out to be killed, whereupon the compassionate killer relents and kills an animal instead, taking back its heart (or tonguet) as proof of the murder, so that the animal is a sacrificial surrogate, impersonating the sacrificial victim. The Family Romance presents two complementary animal paradigms.
Lowly animals may be assimilated to the lower-classt people who adopt a royal child; as animals are below humans, so lower classes are regarded as naturally below higher classes. On the other hand, animals may be assimilated to gods and regarded as the higher parents of children who appear to be lower-merely mortal. Animals are similarly high and low on the continuum that Edmund Leach has articulated between the ani- mals we eat and those we don't eat, paralleled by the continuum of the women we marry and those we don't marry.l Some are tabooed because 105 106
Compare 502
Cycle 79
Horses And Swans
Horses are closely associated with bedtricksters and visual deception. When the goddess Samjna:j: runs away from her husband, the Sun, and transforms herself into a mare, he takes the form of a stallion and tries to cover her; not recognizing him, she turns her hindquarters away from him but he impregnates her through her mouth. She gives birth to the twins called the Ashvins, who are half horse and half anthropomorphic god, the Hindu form of the Greek Dioscuri or the Roman Gemini.:j: The theme of the equine mother survives in the story of Kama t only in the form of "Horse River," which receives the child, a body of water that is not mentioned elsewhere in the epic, to my knowledge.
Hub 503
Flow 80
Indra And The Queen
Janamejaya was consecrated for the sacrifice, and his queen, Vapush- tama, approached the designated stallion and lay down beside him, ac- cording to the rules of the ritual. But Indra saw the woman, whose limbs were flawless, and desired her. He himself entered the designated stallion and mingled with the queen.
And when this transformation had taken place, Indra said to the priest in charge of the sacrifice, "This is not the horse you designated. Scram." And he fired the priests and banished Vapush- tama. But then Vishvavasu, the king of the demigods [gandharvas], calmed him down by explaining that Indra had wanted to obstruct the sacrifice because he was afraid that the king would surpass him with the merits obtained from it.
Cycle 504
To this end, Indra had seized upon an opportu- nity when he saw the designated horse and had entered the horse. And WAKING Up IN BED WITH AN ANIMAL 111 the woman with whom he had made love in that way was actually Rambha, a celestial courtesan. Indra had used his special magic to make the king think that it was his wife, Vapushtama.
Flow 505
This becomes less puz- zling in the light of the Sanskrit parallel of the birth of the equine Ashvins to the equine Sun amd Samjna; this equine element from the mother remains, atavistically, even when the father is not a stallion but a swan. Female swans, too, are bedtricksters, and the Swan Maiden is often 112
Ladder 81
Snakes And Mermaids
When the (male) demon Adi takes the transitional form of a snake to sneak into Shiva's bedroom and then takes the (female) form of Parvati, who has just been compared to a snake herself, he evokes two comple- mentary myths: the male serpent lover and the female serpent lover. Let us consider them one by one. The tale of the animal groom usually involves the transformation of one actor into another; it becomes a bedtrick when the snake imitates the victim's spouse.
Ladder 506
In the following contemporary Kannada retelling by a woman, the snake masquerades not as a husband but as the husband, so that there are two of them:
Compare 82
The Serpent Lover
There was a newly wedded woman named Kamakshi whose husband never slept with her; he spent every night with his mistress, a courtesan, and returned to his wife only to eat, in silence, the food that she prepared for him. She made a magic potion to win his love but then threw it away in fear that it might kill him; a snake in the garden drank it and fell in love with her. When she peeped at him through the chink in the bedroom door, the man outside looked like her husband.
Compare 507
When she talked to him, he talked exactly like her husband. She took him in without asking too many questions and he made her very happy that night. He came to her night after night, and in a few days she was pregnant.
WAKING Up IN BED WITH AN ANIMAL 115 When the snake came to know of it, he wanted to tell her the truth. He said, "Kamakshi, who do you think I am? No, I'm the king of snakes.
Hub 508
I fell in love with you and came to you in the shape of your husband." Then he shed her husband's form and became a five- headed cobra. She was terrified and shut her eyes. He changed back into her husband's form again and said, "You know now I'm the king of snakes." When her husband discovered her pregnancy, he accused her of adultery, since he knew that he himself had not slept with her.
Cycle 509
But the cobra helped her to prove her chastity through an act of truth: handling a deadly cobra. She put out her hand and took the cobra, who was no other than her lover, the king of snakes. He hung around her neck like a garland, opened all his five hoods, and swayed gently.
After several months, she gave birth to a son. Her husband began to be attentive to her and to make love to her; the mistress was spurned by the husband; and the wife, with the help of the serpent lover, tricked the mistress into becoming her servant (carrying water for her). Her husband gave up the concubine's company, favored his wife in all things, and was supremely happy with her.
Flow 510
In the happiness of regaining her husband, Kamakshi forgot the king of snakes. She was wholly absorbed in her husband and son now. One night, the king of snakes came to see how Kamakshi was doing.
Ladder 511
He saw her lying next to her husband and child, fast asleep, contentment writ- ten on her face. He couldn't bear this change: he twisted himself into Kamakshi's loose hair, which hung down from the edge of the cot, and hanged himself by it. She said to her husband, "This is no ordinary snake.
Hub 83
I had made offer- ings to him to get my husband back. It's because of him you're with me now. He's like a father to my son.
Compare 512
Cycle 84
The Fatal Error
Animals of various species appear in the mythologies of nonhumanness and otherness. One of Stith Thompson'st motifs is K 1223.1, "Bride leaves goat as substitute in bed (Type 1685)." In Thomas Deloney's Jack of New- bury (1597), a would-be bedtrickster is double-crossedt when he finds himself in bed with a drugged sow placed there by the husband of the woman he intended to seduce. In My Little Chickadee (1940), Mae Westt puts a goat, horns and all, into the bed in her place while W.
Hub 513
Fields WAKING Up IN BEn WITH AN ANIMAL 119 is engaging in his precoital toilette. She turns down the light and tells him she's going to surprise him. He gets into the bed and exclaims with surprise that she is still wearing her fur coat and indeed suggests that it has been a while since she's had it cleaned.
Finally, he pulls off the covers and discovers the truth. Just as there are generic ways of telling a god from a human,:j: so there are traditional ways of recognizing a demonic or magical animal in human form. The Japanese fox-masquerader is not hard to spot: A fox took the shape of the consort of the Lord of Shikoku, and the latter found to his unbounded astonishment two women sitting in his house, who were exactly alike and who both pretended to be his real wife.
Cycle 514
Flow 515
The story of the animal lover will be told differently depending upon whether the bedtrickster is an animal pretending to be human or a human bewitched into an animal form and depending upon whether the bed- trickster is happy or unhappy about being translated to a different world. For these stories present two sides of the single truth that a human being is really an animal; when the story ends, and the masquerade is over, either there is a human or there is an animal.
When the seal folk, or silkies, for instance, are conceived of as origi- nally humans, they are usually unhappy as seals: the woman in the sealskin coat may be a deviant mortal whose longing for the sea is a betrayal of her human husband; a mortal "whose longing for the sea speaks to an aberration that must be remedied"; a human transformed into a seal by falling under a spell, so that "the pleasures of the supernatural field do not compensate for the loss of her soul";s6 or a human undergoing punish- ment for having committed a sin. 57 When the silkies are conceived of as originally animals, on the other hand, they are usually unhappy as hu- mans: the seal maiden's stay on earth may involve infidelity to her seal lover, and her human existence may deprive her of what she needs to be 120
Ladder 516
Flow 85
Cephalus, Procris, And Aura
Procris would have preferred her husband, Cephalus, to Jove, and he would not have been tempted by Venus. Just two months after Procris and Cephalus had married, Aurora, the dawn, fell in love with Cephalus as he was out hunting. She carried him away with her, but when he kept protesting that he loved Procris, the furious goddess let him go, warning him that he would live to regret his loyalty to his wife.
As Cephalus went home, Aurora's warning made him begin to fear that Procris had been unfaithful to him, especially since he himself had stayed with a notorious goddess. Aurora egged him on and changed his face; unrecognized, he tried to seduce Procris to test her. At first she re- sisted, but his offers of wealth made her begin to waver; then he revealed himself, insisting that he himself was not a real adulterer, but that he had seen, with his own eyes, her faithlessness.
Compare 517
Ashamed, Procris left him, but when he begged for pardon and acknowledged that he was the one who had sinned, she came back to him. One day, Procris began to suspect Cephalus of infidelity, for she followed him when he went out hunting again, and when he called out to the breeze, "Aura," she thought he was calling a woman. He heard a sound that he thought had been made by the movement of an animal, threw his javelin, and hit Procris, who clutched her wounded breast and 122
Ladder 86
Animal Husbandry And Animal Brides
Hub 518
Samjna becomes a mare to flee either her husband's excessive sexual- ity or her own. A vivid Jewish tale of a woman whose sexuality took the form of a beast was recorded in Egypt in this century. It tells of a prediction that a certain young man would be devoured by a beast on his wedding night.
His parents, with misgivings, allowed him to marry and tried to protect him by having the marriage take place on a small island, uninhabited by man or beast. Then he saw his bride: She was astonishingly beautiful, with raven hair that reached to her waist ... fine, slender fingers and long nails.
Cycle 519
He smiled shyly at her, but she seemed afraid to lift her eyes from the floor. When at last she did, the young man was astonished to see a look of wild desire in them unlike anything he had ever seen. When he stepped forward to embrace her, he heard a low growl.
From the woman's point of view, as Germaine Greer noted, tales of the Swan Maiden may be fantasies of es- cape from the dreariness of earthly married life,n but they may also reflect a man's memory of his painful separation from his mother and his fear that his wife, too, will leave him. t The frog prince also carries different messages for men and for women (and for different male scholars). Bruno Bettelheim regarded the frog prince genre as an expression of repressed t 124
Flow 520
Compare 87
Hub 88
Night And Day
Ladder 521
Through the weary hours of the night she seeks him, to be reunited with him at last."8o In Apuleius's tale, Psyche cannot bear the anonymity of making love in pitch darkness and brings a lamp to make night into day; when at last she has won him back, she has joined together the pleasures of the night and the pleasures of the day. "My night is your day," says the Beast in Jean Cocteau's film Beauty and the Beast (1946). The Hindu queen Cudala,:j: gifted with magic yogic powers, was transformed into a woman by night and a man by day; the serpent lover allows the woman to experience her husband as an intimate lover by night and a distant partner by day.
Compare 522
Hub 523
Cycle 89
Flow 90
Approach Three: Zoology
Our myths and rituals represent as masquerades our relationships with animals: in rituals, humans often literally wear the masks of animals, and animals stand in symbolically for human victims, while in myths we imag- ine that animals masquerade as humans and humans as animals. Since ancient mythmakers often lived closely with animals and could see how they behaved, they used animals consciously as natural metaphors to ex- press their ideas about human and divine sexuality and masquerade ("All cats are gray"t), and by looking at the animals in myths we can learn something about those ideas.
Ladder 91
The Cuckoo'S Nest: Sexually Deceptive Animals
Our myths and rituals represent as masquerades our relationships with animals: in rituals, humans often literally wear the masks of animals, and animals stand in symbolically for human victims, while in myths we imag- ine that animals masquerade as humans and humans as animals. Since ancient mythmakers often lived closely with animals and could see how they behaved, they used animals consciously as natural metaphors to ex- press their ideas about human and divine sexuality and masquerade ("All cats are gray"t), and by looking at the animals in myths we can learn something about those ideas.
Cycle 524
Flow 525
Moreover, myths may express the animal parts of ourselves, the parts that our bodiest remember and that our minds-our superegos, formalized by society-may suppress in open discourse and express in myths only in a censored transformation. This realization, along with a 129 130 ApPROACH THREE knowledge of animal mating habits, especially camouflaging and masqu- erading mating habits, may help us to understand some of the uncon- scious levels of symbolism in the myths. Sexual deceptions by animals begin on the microbiological level.
Ladder 526
Immunological terror can be turned into erotic trysts, and battles into orgies. As Laban set up his daughter for his duplicity, so drug designers craft molecules that deceive .... Could it be that the appropriate metaphor for the drug designer is not that of a gen- eral, but a playwright?
Compare 527
Hub 528
Compare 92
Only in sexual matters, then, do they have to tell the difference: "In nature, red in tooth and claw, every other animal is a po- tential danger. Even creatures that live in herds, swarms or packs usually keep some distance from each other. At mating time, however, that dis- tance can be reduced to zero.
From the trills in their song, from that specific smell of urine, from that wonder- ful look which occurs in no other courting repertoire, the owner of the semen and the owner of the eggs conclude that their semen and their eggs will shortly be compatible and grow into new male and female owners. Everything else is capriciously rejected." 100 Animals can tell the difference in the dark: while visual clues may play an important role in the initial courtship, smell t and a baroque complex of other clues are essential to an animal's decision to lower its defenses in order to mate.
Cycle 529
Despite these clues, however, the criterion of instinctual sexual re- sponse is far from watertight as a mechanism for mating only with animals of one's own species, for animals often trick one another in the course ofthe mating game. It is sobering to realize that even insects can undergo face-lifts (grasshoppers impersonating branches, moths with false eyest on their wings, and so forth) and that they are quite successful in cross- species masquerading: "Females of [aJ species [Photuris pennsylvanicaJ of firefly accurately imitate the light code of the smaller Photinus scintillans; exactly one second after two short flashes they give a flash of exactly the correct strength and duration.
Eager to mate, the males head for the light 132 ApPROACH THREE source, whereupon they are seized and devoured by the despicable Lore- lei."IOl Even mammals occasionally sink to such low tricks, though in a more playful key: "a dolphin was put in the same tank as a sea-lion. At a certain moment the dolphin began playfully imitating the sea-lion, until the latter became so confused that it tried to mate with the dolphin. The dolphin did not welcome the advances, and a few bites returned the sea-lion to the real world."I02 Sometimes the problem consists in distinguishing, not between two females of two different species, but between a male and a female of the same species (the M.
Where the cuckoo fakes its species, other animals fake their gender. One of the great piscine gender- benders is the fish known as the "sneaker":
Hub 93
The Bluegill And The Sneaker
It is noteworthy that in certain conventional male-and-female species, members of one sex may turn such coordination to their advantage by imitating members of the opposite sex. Such activity may be thought of as another nongenetic form of sexual differentiation. The bluegill sunfish engages in an intriguing form of such gender bend- ing ....
Male bluegill sunfish exist in three different forms. Large, colorful males court females and defend their territories. A second kind of male- often known as a "sneaker" -becomes sexually mature at a much younger age and smaller size.
Flow 530
These small males live on the periphery of a big- ger male's territory and clandestinely mate with females while the domi- nant male is otherwise occupied. Sneaker males mature into a third kind of male, one that assumes the behavior and drab coloration of a female sunfish. These female mimics intervene between a territorial male and the female he is courting.
The female mimic, rather than the courting male, usually ends up fertilizing the eggs.103 Apparently the male victim wastes his sperm on the "sneaker" male (the female mimic), who can then fertilize the female with his own sperm. The bluegill is not unique; nature abounds in such transsexual trick- sters, like the male red-sided garter snakes in the grass:
Cycle 94
The Mating Ball
At times of peak sexual activity, males congregate around females, forming a so-called mating ball .... In 16 percent of the balls, the snake being courted by the males was in fact a disguised male, what we call a she- male. She-males have testes that produce normal sperm, and they court and mate with females.
But in addition to exhibiting male-typical behav- iors, she-males produce the same attractiveness pheromone as do adult ZOOLOGY females. In the mating ball, this second source of the pheromone confuses the more prevalent conventional males, giving the she-male a decided mating advantage.104 133 Is the mating ball like the great balls held in Europe where young women came to find their suitors? Where Cinderella met her prince?
Ladder 531
Do red- sided garter snakes lie about, like Alice in Wonderland, waiting for a frog-footman to bring them "an invitation to the mating ball"? Thus, animals are capable of both perpetrating and detecting bedtricks, and they provide both basic metaphors and basic data that can inspire our own bedtricks. We are, moreover, capable of perpetrating bedtricks upon animals.
Compare 532
THE (TEASER) MARE'S NEST: "NOT AS GOOD AS STALLIONS" Konrad Lorenz, one of the great animal-lovers and animal-knowers of this century, once apologized to a woman at a cocktail party for failing to recall her face or her name; but, he added, it was a funny thing: he could remember the faces and names of all of his 458 greylag geese. liD So, too, Barbara Smuts, who lives and works with gorillas in the wild, can recognize over 450 gorilla faces, far more than the people she knows.
And of course the gorillas themselves recognize one another; they know one another as individuals, with idiosyncratic histories. II I To a gorilla, all goril- las do not look alike in the dark. People notice distinctions between indi- vidual instances of what they care about.
Hub 533
Flow 95
Cycle 534
Flow 535
One need only think of the gulf separating the rigid and schematic ZOOLOGY 135 treatises of physiognomy (judging character or mood from the appear- ance) from its perceptive and flexible practice by a lover or a horse-dealer or a card-player." 114 Horse owners in both ancient India (according to the Ashvashastra) and present-day England identify their individual horses by "skin colours and markings and where exactly on the body the hairs of the coat grew in whorls"ll5-like the missing "twist of hair" that enabled Shiva to distinguish the demon Adi t from Parvati. Husbands are often unable to describe their runaway wives,1l6 but they could probably describe their horses; people who care about animals see them as individuals, often at the cost of blindness to the individuality of people.
In Joseph Roth'st novel about a Viennese bedtrick, both the vic- tim, the shah of Persia, and the man who orchestrates the bedtrick, Cap- tain Taittinger, find women interchangeable but horses unique. The cap- tain loves only his horse, Pylades, and will ride no other after he is forced to sell Pylades. So, too, the shah falls in love with the supreme Lippizaner stallion: "He kept two thousand eight hundred horses in his stables in Tehran.
Ladder 536
Compare 537
(ditto Count W.):for whom Captain Taittinger substi- tutes his own mistress, the prostitute Mizzi. Thus, Mizzi is, in a sense, ultimately a surrogate for the Lippizaner. Our finely honed ability to discriminate among horses has led, para- doxically, to an equine breeding policy that depends upon our ability to subvert the horses' own ability to discriminate among themselves.
Sexual deception is the essence of the surrogate mare used to lure the stallion to the AI (artificial insemination) tube. Before bringing the stallion to the tube, the breeder often teases the stallion with a real mare in heat (often a mare for whom the stallion is known to have a particular affection) and then leads him to the dummy to collect his sperm. (He thought it was Rachel t and it turned out to be Leah.
Hub 538
Ladder 96
Can he tell the difference?) This procedure has a low-tech precedent: mule breeders used to put a big jack donkey to a mare, but the jack wouldn't respond unless teased with a jenny, a female of his own species. Further complications are introduced by the use of a surrogate on the other side of the fence. 136 ApPROACH THREE "Teaser" stallions of no particular breeding value are sent to the mare to detect the moment when she comes into heat (her estrous period), at which point she is whisked away from the teaser and shipped over to the designated stallion, the prizewinner who commands the high stud fees.
Cycle 539
Cows are natural teasers of this sort, through a kind of inversion: when a cow comes into heat, she "bulls," that is, acts like a bull, mounting other cows, which the observant breeder immedi- ately recognizes as a sign that that cow really wants, not to mount, but to be mounted by a bull. But the inversion of the teaser mare is of a different order, as we learn from a relevant article, entitled "Teaser Mares: Not as Good as Stallions," from the newsletter of the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine: "Using a mare (one 'androgenized' or given some male characteristics by drug therapy) as a teaser [is al good idea but, alas, one that doesn't seem to work very well ....
Flow 540
For there is yet another twist, the case of "the teaser mare who wound up, in effect, teasing herself": "This androgenized mare actually experienced two estrous periods of nor- mal length-in spite of the hormones given to keep her androgenized. The mare was even observed responding to her own urination and defeca- tion with male-type sexual behavior, including sniffing, flehmen, and the elimination and covering responses." This mare was a surrogate for the stallion (the "teaser") used as a surrogate for the real stallion.
Ladder 541
(This is the house that the Jack-donkey built.) The mare who became androgy- nous and fell in love with her own urine is a cousin of Narcissus, t who ZOOLOGY l37 fell in love with his own reflection. She is the victim of a sexual fantasy- not her own, but her owner's. The sex lives of mares are now intimately connected with those of women.
Premarin, a hormone-replacement drug widely taken by post- menopausal women, is made from the urine of pregnant mares and con- tains more than twenty horse estrogens, none of which is native to the human body. This prompted Molly Haskell to quip, "How can you tell if you've overdosed on Premarin? Answer: You start craving oats, hay and wide-open spaces and start looking for a stud." She suggested that some women who had "bonded with horses" in their adolescence may have developed horse hormones that would later react with the Premarin to make them "move toward the finish line like some weird female centaur, half beast, half human, galloping into the sunset, another of the modern world's hermaphrodites of nature and technology."12o The sunset, t in- deed: entre chien et loup, the right place for a liminal creature like a centaur or a postmenopausal woman.
Compare 542
Compare 97
Zoology therefore teaches us that the ability to deceive sexually and to be deceived sexually is built into the very structures of reproduction, as is the sexual asymmetryt that makes so many of the human masquerades necessary. The biological paradox, embodied in many of our myths, ar- gues that it is biologically advantageous for men to be polygamous (the drive to scatter their genes everywhere, promiscuously) and for women to be monogamous (the drive to concentrate on raising one set of children).
Hub 543
Among the many human paradoxest that the bedtrick addresses is the tension between the male claim that promiscuity is necessary to keep de- sire fresh and the female claim that a stable relationship is needed to ensure progeny and child rearing. (This asymmetry is often justified in humans by the so-called Coolidge effect, named after the president's well- known banter with his wife: when she called to his attention the frequency with which the rooster mounted the hens, he reminded her that it was a different hen each time.) Besides the biological differences in the opportunities for women and men to dissemble about such things as pregnancy and erections, t a biological bias underlying the double standard may also contribute to the fact that, in life as well as in our texts, the consequences for men's adultery are so much milder than the consequences for women's adultery.
Cycle 544
In order to bear children who will have all the advan- tages of legitimate children, as opposed to the children of the mistress, a wife merely has to bed her husband periodically (sometimes only once), until she becomes pregnant. She might prefer not to have her husband gallivanting about impregnating other women, but she can achieve her biological ends, at least, through her husband's intermittent fidelity. On the other hand, for the man to fulfill his wish for legitimate offspring, he must be perpetually sure of his wife's fidelity; in some hardheaded sociobiological way, the man cares about his wife's fidelity, virginity, and so forth because he has no other way of guaranteeing that her child is "genuinely" his.
As Lorraine Daston has put it, "The men want all or nothing from their wives; the women can afford to be satisfied with some- thing."122 This gnawing paternal insecurityt is, in part, what impels some husbands to test their wives with bedtricks. Why, then, does she care about his fidelity? She knows damned well that the child is hers.
Flow 545
His infi- delity, however, jeopardizes not the public identity of the child but the private identity of the mother, to the extent that she defines herself through her husband's fidelity to her. Biology is not everything; we are animals, but we are not just animals. (The fact that many animals eat their young is not usually taken as a paradigm for human behavior.) Biology, moreover, is not a constant.
Our ability to regulate pregnancy and childbirth (through the labyrinths of abortion and adoption, and now in vitro fertilization) moves forward constantly, and the mythology of mating shifts in its wake. The revolu- tionary changes in women's rights to dispose of their children and their property that have taken place in this century will surely effect corre- sponding (but unpredictable) changes in the mythology of the next mil- lennium. Yet the double standard of biology spreads to the sociology, as ZOOLOGY 139 well as the psychology, of men and women in our texts.
Ladder 546
Hub 98
Jealousy, t for instance, transcends biology when culture constrains it, and although jeal- ousy is asymmetrical for the two genders in some ways, it is symmetrical in others. Nervous husbands are tormented, just like their wives, by the sexual jealousy that stems from desire and the need for a sexual mirror of identity. Some tomcats kill their own kittens in order to have sexual access to the mother cat, who will not mate while she is nursing her young; at such moments, even for an animal, desire outranks biological survival.
Compare 547
Both men and women care about sexual fidelity for reasons of both bio- logical lineage ("if I do not know who my sexual partner is, I do not know who my child is") and cultural identityt ("if I do not know who my sexual partner is, I do not know who I am"). But both biology and culture are structured in such a way that most men care about lineage more than women do, while culture is structured in such a way that most women link their identity to their sexual partner more than men do.
The bedtrick is about that, too. The zoological data tell us what we share with other animals, and the myths reveal how deeply embedded in us are our ideas about ourselves as animals. But we can challenge both our zoology and our myths, to strive for a sexual humanity that is not given.
Hub 548
Cycle 99
FOUR: The Lovely/Loathly Lady
VV e have seen Kali, the dark side ofParvati, sloughed away from the fair side, Gauri, and the serpentine Adi masquerading as Parvati. Implicitly in this myth, and explicitly in Beauty and the Beast, the masquerade of a god or animal as a human is superimposed upon the masquerade of ugliness as beauty and enacted in the twilight zone between the dark and the light, night and day.
Flow 100
The Lovely Lady
VV e have seen Kali, the dark side ofParvati, sloughed away from the fair side, Gauri, and the serpentine Adi masquerading as Parvati. Implicitly in this myth, and explicitly in Beauty and the Beast, the masquerade of a god or animal as a human is superimposed upon the masquerade of ugliness as beauty and enacted in the twilight zone between the dark and the light, night and day. These contrasts also hedge the myth of the Lovely/Loathly Lady, a doubled double, for she appears in two forms, each a double (which can be still further doubled in its male variant): the Lovely Lady is ugliness masquerading as beauty (like the demon Adi as Parvati), and the Loathly Lady is beauty masquerading as ugliness (like Parvati before she sheds her black outer sheath [Kalil to reveal the fair beauty beneath [Gauri]).
Cycle 549
The two polarized forms of the myth alternate according to where the author believes reality lies. The bedtricks of the Lovely Lady or Substitute Bride take place when an ugly (old) woman takes on the (false) appearance of a beautiful (young) woman, usually because she desires a man, while the Loathly Lady only appears to be ugly, through a curse, until his desire for her (or his kiss) restores her true loveliness. When she succeeds in fooling her victim in bed, the Lovely/Loathly Lady becomes a bedtrickster; until then, she is a bedtrickster in potentia, a bedtrick waiting to happen.
The connection between Beauty and the Beast and the Lovely/Loathly Lady was noted by Salman Rushdie in a question his hero wanted to ask a wise man of his acquaintance: Whatif, whatif a Beastji somehow lurked inside Beauty Bibi? Whatif the beauty were herself the beast? But I think he might have said I was confus- ing matters: "As Mr Stevenson has shown in his Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, such saint-and-monster conjunctions are conceivable in the case of men; alas!
Flow 550
But the whole essence of Woman denies such a possibility." 1 140 THE LOVELy/LoATHLY LADY 141 The wise man was wrong: Bibi in this story turns out to be, as the hero fears, not the traditional Beast (beauty masquerading as ugliness, the Loathly Lady), but the reverse, a Lovely Lady (ugliness masquerading as beauty, Hyde masquerading as Jekyll). If Pandora is the paradigmatic Greek Lovely Lady (in potentia), Shur- panakha:j: is her Hindu counterpart. This is how Shurpanakha's story is told in the poet Kamban's Tamil version of the Ramayana, composed in South India in the seventh century:
Ladder 551
Ladder 101
Shurpanakha
The demoness Shurpanakha, the sister of Ravana, well aware of her ugli- ness, fell in love with Rama; he rejected her but offered her to his brother Lakshmana, who mutilated her by cutting off her nose, ears, and breasts. She then transformed herself into the image of the divine form of Sita. When the real Sita appeared, Shurpanakha told Rama that the other woman (the real Sita) was a deceitful, man-eating demoness who was skilled in the arts of illusion and had adopted a false form.
Rama knew who was who, but continued to tease Shurpanakha. But when Sita ran to Rama and embraced him, Rama rejected Shurpanakha.2 The poet makes explicit the demoness's motive. She reasons, "He will never look at me while she who has no equal is near him.
Compare 552
Kathleen Erndl asks the right questions about Shurpanakha: How did she actually appear in Rama's eyes, beautiful or ugly? If she could take on any form she pleased, why did she appear ugly? Was the poet describing her "true" form rather than her "apparent" form?
Hub 553
Compare 102
Mara'S Daughters And The Buddha
When the three daughters of Mara saw that their father had failed to defeat the Buddha, they went to the Buddha and tried to seduce him through infatuation, flattery, and threats, but he remained absorbed in meditation. Then all three took on the appearance of young women and asked him to receive them as renunciants; still he kept his eyes closed. Then they took on the appearance of older women and approached him in order to delude him; they said, "We come to you after wandering as slaves, and we have grown old; teach us the true Buddhist teaching.
We are older women; pity us. We are bewildered by our fear of death; fix us firmly in the Release that will stop all rebirths." When he heard the words of those magicians, he did not get angry; but he fixed them firmly in old age through his own magic power. When they realized that he was immovable as a mountain, they turned away their faces, but they could not get back their beauty.
Cycle 554
Dragging their feet with their worn-out limbs, they asked their father, "Lord of the field of Desire, Daddy, fix us firmly again in our own shapes."
Hub 103
The Buddha'S Sister
[The Buddha), concluding that her disintoxication from intoxication with form would be best achieved by form itself, just as one draws out one thorn using another, conjured up a beautiful woman by his psychic power at the moment Rupa Nanda entered the monastery. She was the very definition of sweet sixteen .... He caused the body to age in appearance, so that Rupa Nanda suddenly saw a twenty-year-old woman.
His sister noticed the difference instantly, and "her mind was a little displeased." THE LOVELy/LoATHLY LADY 145 The Buddha then caused the spectral woman to age in a time-lapse se- quence. First, he gave her the appearance of a woman who has given birth once, then the appearance of a middle-aged woman, and then the appear- ance of "an old woman broken with decay." Rupa Nanda, aware of the changes wrought by each stage of the phantom's aging process, became disgusted upon seeing the last stage: a grey-headed, toothless, hunch- backed, palsied old woman leaning on a walking stick.
Flow 555
On the verge of achieving his goal, the Teacher moved in for the kill: "Then the Teacher mastered her with disease. fell to the ground, and rolled back and forth, wallowing in her own urine and feces. Seeing her, Rupa Nanda was extremely disgusted.
The Teacher then caused her to see the death of this woman. Her body immediately assumed a bloated condition; putrid lumps and maggots oozed out through the nine gaping wounds. Crows and the like fell on her and tore into her flesh.
Ladder 556
Cycle 104
The Loathly Lady
First, she solves a riddlet that saves his life and then she sets him not so much a riddle as a puzzle, which consists in the choice between her ugliness and her beauty. He is quite willing to disenchant her, but he balks, at first, at her real desire, that he should marry her-which he seems to regard as a fate worse than death. She insists, he submits, and she becomes Lovely.
Compare 557
Flow 105
The Lady Of Pleasure
A beautiful young married woman who desires a young gigolo gets an old bawd to bring him to the bawd's house, blindfolded. She offers him THE LOVELy/LoATHLY LADY 149 gold and jewelry if he will sleep with her, but he fears she is a succubus, t "so cold, an incubus would not heat her"; he asks her if she wasn't a cat in former days. But she assures him: "Yet thou wilt find by light of thy own sense, for other light is banish'd my chamber, when our arms tie lovers' knots, and kisses seal the welcome of our lips, 1 shall not there affright thee, nor seem old ...
; my skin is smooth and soft as ermines, with a spirit to meet thine." And so he goes to bed with her, for the gold and because he fears she will curse him if he does not. When he next meets the married woman, he gives her the gold and jewelry as a gift and tells her he had gotten it from "an old witch, a strange ill-favored hag ... a she-devil, too, a most insatiate abominable devil with a tail this long." When she asks him if he saw her, and if he is sure "it was the devil you enjoyed," he admits it was all in the dark but insists, "I did the best to please her, but as sure as you live, 'twas a Hellcat." When he leaves, his unrecognized mistress muses, "'Tis a false glass, sure 1 am more de- formed.
Hub 558
His mistress believes that he is telling the truth, which sobers her up so that she breaks off the affair; he has in a sense turned her into a witch. Yet the old bawd told him to expect a beautiful woman in his bed, transformed by his magic kiss; did he not believe her?
The love of visible beauty is a delusion, and beauty, more than anything else in human life, is subject to what the Buddhists call anicca, impermanence.
Ladder 106
Old Women Masquerading As Young Women
It is noteworthy that Mara's beautiful young daughters think that some men (perhaps religious fanatics?) might be aroused by old women, for there is another essential factor in these myths besides the tension between beauty and ugliness: the contrast between youth and age. The Lovely Lady is not just ugliness masquerading as beauty, but an old woman mas- querading as a young woman in bed. One such story was told by Giam- battista Basile (1575-1632), who called it
Compare 107
The Old Woman Discovered
[An old woman hid under the trees near one of the windows of the king. The king, hearing her talk, thought she must be beautiful and proposed that she come to his bed. She accepted his invitation but insisted, "Let me] be received in thy bed at night without a candle, because I could not bear to be seen naked." The king [agreed, and when the night grew dark, the old woman] came in the gloom, covered from head to foot with a thick veil looped up behind.
Cycle 559
And reaching the king's bedchamber, she unrobed at once, and went into bed. The king, who had waited like a match near a powder-cask, when he ... heard her get into bed, perfuming his person with sweet scented musk and civet, and anointing his beard with perfumed ointment, jumped into bed.
And it was well for the old woman that he was thus anointed and perfumed, so that he could not smell the stink of her mouth, and the vinegar of her arm-pits, and the mustiness of that ugly thing. But as soon as he felt her limbs, he perceived the deception; he felt her bottom and found it fleshless, the limbs thin and withered, and the breasts as empty bladders; and he marvelled with exceeding marvel, but kept silence, so as to be better assured of the case; and forced himself to do that for which he had no more desire ....
Flow 560
But when sleep overtook the old woman, the king drew out . a small lanthorn which he lit, and made a perquisition under the bed-linen, and beheld a harpy instead of a nymph, a fury instead of a grace, Medusa instead of Venus. [He shouted,] "This, and worse, deserveth he who buy- eth the cat inside the bag." [He threw her out the window, but then some fairies made her young, beautiful, and rich; when the king saw her, he said,] "Am I sleeping, or awaking?
Ladder 561
Am I in my right senses, or am I mad?" [He begged her to marry him, and she agreed.]'7 152
Hub 108
Double Threat
An aging star, Monica Martel, making her comeback, insists on having a young girl, Lisa Shane, replace her in the sexual sceneS. Eric, who plays her lover on camera and off, also becomes the off-screen lover of the "body double." When Monica finds out, she is surprisingly cool and for- giving, but she and Lisa plot together and murder Eric. Before she shoots him, Monica says to him, "You were once attracted to me; it makes sense that you would be attracted to my daughter." The policeman who figures it out doesn't prosecute her because, he explains, Eric had murdered his (the policeman's) sister.
Compare 562
THE LOVELy/LoATHLY LADY 153 The rather obvious plot suddenly veers, at the end, into a Family Ro- mance, t indeed a double family romance: the Loathly Lady is replaced by her lovely daughter, and even the avenging spirit at the end turns out to be a blood relative of the parallel victim. What appeared at first to be a case of older woman versus younger woman turns out in the end to be a case of the girls against the boys, while the incestuous implications of the double-crosst hover salaciously in the air.
1: MOTHERS Ugly old women do not have to be the natural mothers of the beautiful young women whom they counterfeit, but they often are. The paradig- matic mother in many myths is exactly like her daughter in every way but one: she is old, t and the daughter is young. Thus, many Cinderella t stories begin with the incestuous premise that the widower father deter- mines to marry only a woman who looks exactly like his dead wife-a category of one, his daughter.
Hub 563
The woman who impersonates her daughter is not becoming someone else; that would happen if she impersonated someone else's daughter. By impersonating her own daughter, she is be- coming herself, young again. Many bedtricks, particularly but not only incestuoust bedtricks, turn upon the failure of brothers and sisters (or parents and children) to recog- nize one another through their mutual resemblance or the failure of other people to tell them apart.
Cycle 564
Flow 565
Cycle 109
The Woman Who Stole Her Daughter'S Skin
A young man in a strange land falls in love with a young woman and takes her to wife in her mother's tent. By day the women chew skins and boil meat while the young man hunts. But the old crone is jealous; she wants the boy.
Calling her daughter to her one day, she offers to braid her hair; the girl sits pleased, proud, and soon is strangled by her own hair. One thing Eskimos know is skinning. The mother takes her curved hand knife shaped like a dancing skirt, skins her daughter's beautiful face, and presses that empty flap smooth on her own skull.
Ladder 566
Flow 110
The Woman Who Stole Her Daughter-In-Law'S Eyes
Once there was a barren woman who asked a traveling holyman for some medicine to make her fertile. He gave her something that looked like eggs and instructed her to cook them but not to eat them until the next morn- ing. She cooked them, then left to fetch water.
Compare 567
While she was gone, her husband returned, peeked in the pot, found the "eggs," and ate them. When she came home and saw the empty pot, she was alarmed. "Oh no!" she said, "now you'll get pregnant." Her husband didn't believe her but later realized that he was pregnant.
Then one day he felt labor pains. He came to his wife and asked her what to do. She replied, "Go out and squat behind that bush and deliver the baby.
If it's a boy, bring it home. If it's a girl, just leave her there." He went and pushed and pushed, hanging onto the bush until he gave birth. He took off as fast as he could.
Hub 568
A bird came along and carried away the baby girl. He put her in a nest high up in a tree and brought her food every day. She grew up to be the most beautiful girl imaginable.
No one surpassed her in beauty. Now, under this tree was a spring. Muhammad buh Sultan, living in a castle not far from there, had a beautiful horse [later referred to as "she," apparently a mare] which he sent with a slave to be watered un- der there.
Cycle 569
But when they approached the spring, the horse reared and re- fused to drink. Muhammad buh Sultan was furious when they returned, shouting, "What do you mean she wouldn't drink?" So he beheaded the slave. The next day, he sent another slave to water the horse.
Flow 570
So the third day, he decided to go himself. When they approached the spring, again the horse reared, but as it did, he caught a glimpse of the girl's reflection in the pool and immediately fell in love with her .... Now Muhammad buh Sultan had hidden himself nearby, and when the girl sto(.
Ladder 111
ped over he jumped out and grabbed her, put her on his horse, and took off. She cried and screamed all the way .... She did not stop screaming until they got to the castle.
Then he talked to the girl.
Compare 112
The Mother Who Stole Her Daughter'S Eggs
I said [to Christa's doctor], half jokingly, that I wished he could transplant my uterus into Christa's body. "After all," I said, "I'm not planning to use it anymore." Dr. Ory looked at me and said, "How old are you?" I said, "Thirty-seven." He paused for a moment and said, "I don't think a uterus transplant is possible, but ...
Ladder 571
" He didn't have to say another word. It was as if a light had gone on. Now it all seems so simple.
Why couldn't I carry a baby for Christa? What bothered me most were the quotes from an ethicist who said that the pregnancy was a bad idea because Christa's children could be confused about who their mother really is. Another expert said that my pregnancy might create tensions in the fam- ily.
Compare 572
I told the reporter that our case goes beyond ethical questions. I am simply a mother who is trying to help her daughter fulfil her dreams. What mother could do less?55 Muhammad buh Sultan's mother or Naomit (in the Book of Ruth) is the answer that comes immediately to mind.
Hub 573
Yet, clearly, the surface agenda here is entirely benevolent, and the child (and the husband) ended up belonging to the daughter, not to the mother. The mother did not steal the eggs, she was given them. (Christa's body, however, reacted vio- lently, as Arlette admits: "I don't think any of us anticipated that it would be as agonizing as it was for Christa.
They gave her morphine to dull the pain, but it couldn't blot out everything .... 1 told her to remember this day, in case anyone ever tells her that she didn't endure the pain of child- birth. 1 really feel this was Christa's labor.") But it certainly wasn't as "simple" as Arlette blithely assumes, and I'm with that ethicist, perhaps because of the heavy mythological overtones of the story, so reminiscent of the confusion of the generations of women in the tales of Tamart and 160
Cycle 574
Hub 113
The Black And White Bride
The Lord asked two stepsisters the way to the village. One refused to help, and the Lord cursed her to be black as night and ugly as sin. The other was helpful, and the Lord granted her wish to be as beautiful and fair as the sun.
Flow 575
The king saw the fair girl's picture, fell in love, and asked her to marry him. But as the bride was traveling to the castle, the stepmother used her magic to make the coachman (the fair girl's brother) half-blind and the fair maiden herself half-deaf, and the black girl put on the clothing of the fair girl and pushed her from a bridge. A white duck emerged from the water.
Ladder 576
"Magic" is all that is needed to explain why the king cannot tell the difference between his white beloved and a black copy of her in bed. A paradigmatic tale of a substitute bride occurs in the Hebrew Bible story of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah. Jacob wishes to marry Rachel, but her father, Laban, substitutes Rachel's older sister, Leah, in the bed, and Jacob cannot tell the difference until the morning, when, "Behold, it was Leah" (Genesis 28.15-24).
Compare 577
This story is a fine example of the minimalist plotst of the Hebrew Bible: the barest outline is given, in true mythic fashion, leaving the later tradition free to invent midrashim (commentaries) either to flesh out what the commentators think is there or to use the text as a springboard for later theories (or both: the two agendas are seldom sepa- rate). What, for instance, is Rachel thinking? She must know what Laban is plottin3, since she herself does not go to Jacob's bed that night, and so she is a party to the deception.
We might then assume that Rachel both does and does not want her sister to sleep with Jacob, or that she 162
Cycle 114
Rachel'S Bedtrick
"Jacob loved me very much [best], and served my father for seven years, for me. When the time came for him to marry me, my father insisted that my sister be married instead of me. This was very difficult for me.
I told my husband [i.e., Jacob, her husband-to-be], and I made a secret sign between him and me, so that he could distinguish the two of us, in order to thwart my father's plan. "But then I changed my mind, and I mastered my passion. And I felt pity for my sister, lest she be disgraced.
Hub 578
In the night, they substituted my sister for me. All the secret signs that I had made with my husband, I told my sister, so that he would think she was me. Not only this: I went under the bed where he was making love with my sister.
Whenever he spoke to her, she was silent, and I would answer, so that he would not recognize her voice. I did this out of my compassion and kindness to her. And I wasn't jealous of her.
I would not allow her to be disgraced. And if I, who am only flesh and blood, dust and ashes, was not jealous of my co-wife [Jacob subsequently married Rachel as well] and did not permit her to be shamed and humiliated, then You, 0 Living King, why are You jealous of idols, though they are nothing, as Y ou Yourself know? You exiled my children, and they were slain and ill-used by strangers." Then God was moved; his mercy rolled around, and he said, "For your sake I will bring the Jews back.
Cycle 579
Why does she help her sister like this? The midrash implies that Rachel's jealousy is overcome by her realization that the other woman is a true human form of herself, related not only by family blood but also by a broader humanity, by common goals, by being part of the same people; that the other woman really is her double, not merely her surrogate. The sexual jealousy that is overcome in this way is then theologicallyt analogized, in a brilliant original stroke of this text, to the divine jealousy that God feels toward his surrogates- toward the images of him that substitute for him in heathen temples even as false lovers substitute for one another in lustful beds.
But we might speculate on other, lower motives: maybe she does it to spoil things for 164
Flow 115
Ladder 116
The Poisoned Kiss
A tale is told of two sisters who resembled one another. One of them committed adultery. The thing came to the attention of her husband, and he decided to take her to the priest to have her drink the bitter waters of the adultery ordeal [see Numbers 5:11-31].
Flow 580
She went to her sister, and said to her, "My husband suspects me, and I know that he intends to make me drink the bitter waters. Now, we look a lot alike, and you are my bone and flesh. Be a loving sister, and cover my shame and disgrace, for you also will bear it otherwise.
So, make ready and go THE LOVELy/LoATHLY LADY 167 with my husband and drink the bitter waters-for you are innocent, and there is no impurity in you!" And her sister replied, "I'll do as you ask." That night, the two of them spent the night together, and the next day, the look-alike rose early to go off with her sister's husband to the priest. There, the priest gave her the poisonous brew to drink, and it had no effect on her, for she was innocent.
Ladder 581
When she returned, she encountered her sister, and the latter came up and threw her arms around her and kissed her, for she felt great love for her and great happiness, and she said to herself, "From now on, I'll have many lovers!" But it was the Lord's wish that the following should happen. At that moment, just as she kissed her sister, she smelled the aroma of the bitter waters, and immediately her face went green, her belly swelled up, and she fell to her knees and keeled over dead.7° The "shame and disgrace" that the evil sister begs to be protected from, and threatens her sister with, is precisely what Rachel decided to save Leah from.
Compare 582
Here the intimacy of the sisters is extreme: they sleep together and kiss on the lips. Indeed, the good sister inadvertently kills the evil sister by a traditional folk weapon generally used by women upon their male lovers: the so-called poison kiss. t Yet here, as usual, the evil sister initiates the fatal embrace, though the poison is on the lips of the good sister.
A muted sexual death (sororal, incestuous) exacts payment for a blatant sexual sin (adulterous) in a bedtrick displaced onto an ordeal.t
Compare 117
Twin Sisters
In some variants of the Substitute Bride, the substitute is not only the natural sister of the heroine but her identical twin, a plot device that supplies a more realistic explanation for the success of the bed trick. For example, in Yasunari Kawabata's The Old Capital, a Japanese girl gets her long-lost twin to substitute for her in a marriage to a man she does not love. Lawrence Wright, in a study of real-life identical twins separated at birth, saw different aspects of the problem of identity posed by this variant of the Family Romance, including what I have termed the paradox of the double-bind, t the hope for and fear of the double: Babies actually do get lost or separated, and, however rare such an event may be, when a person finds his twin it feeds the common fantasy that anyone of us might have a clone, a doppelganger; someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion; someone who under- stands me perfectly, almost perfectly, because he is me, almost me.
It is not just the sense of identity that excites us but the difference; the 168
Hub 118
Nora And Dora
I'll only do it once, I said. He's really stuck on you, Nora, he's crazy about you and he's never given me a second look. But won't he be able to tell the difference?
I don't know, we won't know until we try; but why should he notice any difference? Same eyes, same mouth, same hair. If it was only the once and if I keep my mouth shut ....
Hub 583
She put on my Mitsouko and I put on her Shalimar .... I nearly fainted when we kissed, I was scared witless, I thought he'd recognise the ruse at once and suddenly I didn't want to go through with it. But he was just my own age, just seventeen, a child, too; nothing to be afraid of.
And for the purpose of the act, I wasn't Dora anymore, was I? Now I was Nora, who was afraid of nothing provided it was a man.
Cycle 119
The Lovelyiloathly Lady
169 him back and we slipped off .... He never said: "Nora, there's something different about you, something more enchanting, tonight." I never wanted him to, either. I'll never know if he could tell the difference.
Cycle 584
If he did, he was too much of a gent to say .... Afterwards, I pretended to be asleep, I didn't dare talk ....
He was the faithful type. Did we betray the innocence of the boy with our deception? Let the one without sin cast the first stone.
He really thought I was the one he loved so he was not deceived. And I got the birthday present that I wanted and then I gave him back to Nora/4 That was the first bedtrick, in which the women switched the smells, t liquort dulled the perception, silencet kept the secret of identity, and the will to self-delusiont-or male gallantry-carried the day. Some time later, at a big party, Dora recognized the man she had borrowed from Nora on her birthday, who again mistook her for Nora.
Flow 585
They went up- stairs to a bedroom, and Dora started to take off her makeup, thinking, "Tonight, this night of all nights, I wanted to look like myself, whoever that was." But after they had made love, all he said was, "Nora, you've changed your perfume." And she did not correct him.75
Double Takes: The Twin Sisters On Film
Hollywood borrows the identikit of myth and supplements it with its own cliches for mythic themes like "the good and evil twins," who seldom engage in a consummated bedtrick on screen (largely because the censors would not allow it) but enjoy all the fringe benefits of the bedtrick plot. Tricky camera work allows one actor to play two parts simultaneously in those melodramatic tours de force in which the great women and men of the silver screen play their own twins.
In the same year-1944-when Betty Hutton sang duets with herself in Here Come the Waves, Gene Kelly danced with his alter ego in Cover Girl. Danny Kaye practically cornered the market on male twins: Wonder Man (1945), On the Riviera (1951), and On the Double (1961). In The Divorce of Lady X (1938), a rather stuffy lawyer falls in love with Lady Mere, who presents herself to him as both the simple, chaste (mere?) girl she really is and the wicked, much-divorced woman for whom he mistakes her (and whom she fears he may prefer to her).
Ladder 586
Both of them appear at his flat one day when he is out, and 170
Cats And Candles In The Dark
Throughout this mythology, mothers and daughters, sisters, and unre- lated women slip in and out of one another's beds unnoticed. One factor that enables one woman to be mistaken for another is the misogynist assumption that all women are alike. As Janet Adelman puts it, comment- ing on the "pitchy night" in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Wellt (4.4), the bedtrick "becomes the epitome not only of the dark wayward- ness of desire but also of its depersonalization, the interchangeability of the bodies with which lust plays."Bo After all, the essence of prejudice has been defined as the assumption that an unknown individual has all the characteristics of the group to which he or she belongs.
Compare 587
The comments "people like you" or "they're all alike" (frequently said of women) are always offensive.Bl Myths, as I have argued, often enact and embody meta- phorst and cliches;t in this case, they enact the metaphor of the cats and candles in the dark.
The Three Bushes
Said lady once to lover, "None can rely upon A love that lacks its proper food; And if your love were gone How could you sing those songs of love? 1 should be blamed, young man." o my dear, 0 my dear. "I love a man in secret, Dear chambermaid," said she.
"I know that 1 must drop down dead If he stop loving me, Yet what could 1 but drop down dead If 1 lost my chastity?" o my dear, 0 my dear. 178 "So you must lie beside him And let him think me there. And maybe we are all the same Where no candles are, And maybe we are all the same That strip the body bare." o my dear, 0 my dear.
Hub 588
Seven Hundred And Fifty Queen Pingalas
King Bhartrhari goes hunting, taking pains to kill only male animals, but after he kills a magnificent talking stag, the seven hundred talking does who are the stag's wives commit suicide [satil by impaling themselves on the stag's horns, cursing the king to suffer as they have suffered. But he thinks, "These sluts are just barking; they are animals," and ignores their curse. Then he decides to test his wife, Queen Pingala, to see if she too would commit sati for him.
Cycle 589
He soaks his handkerchief in the does' blood and sends it with a message to say that he has been killed while hunting. Meanwhile, the great yogi and trickster Gorakh Nath arrives and chastises the king for killing an innocent animal and making seven hundred wid- ows, and Gorakh Nath revives the stag. When Pingala sees the bloody handkerchief and hears the message, she commits sati, even though the god Shiva himself tells her that the king is alive and she herself knows this through her own magic powers; she realizes that it is a test and decides, stubbornly, to use her powers to fulfill it.
When the king returns and finds her dead, he begs Shiva to revive her, and the god summons Gorakh Nath and tells him to "put an end to King Bhartrhari's stubbornness." As Gorakh Nath hears the king moaning, "Alas, Pingala!" he drops his jug, which shatters into many pieces, and he begins to moan, "Alas, my jug!" Gorakh Nath THE LOVELY !LOATHLY LADY 185 promises to bring back seven hundred and fifty Pingalas "just like yours" if the king will have his potters make seven hundred and fifty jugs "just like this one." The potters make the jugs, but Gorakh Nath points out that they are the wrong color. The king, who does not want to wait for another batch of jugs to be made, agrees to accept Pingalas "good or bad, black or fair, ...
Flow 590
black or yellow." Gorakh Nath worships Shiva, and there appear seven hundred and fifty Pingalas, all looking alike, exactly like Pingala, with her face, her exact face, her eyes, her bangles and clothes. "Not one of them was missing something. Or else the king might not have recognized her." Gorakh Nath tells the king to grab his Pingala by the hand, threatening to flay him alive if he grabs any but the one that is his.
Ladder 591
The king tests Pingala just as the hunter Cephalust tests, and kills, Procris in the course of his fatal error. The metaphysical lesson teaches the king first not to discriminate be- tween blackt and fair women, and then that there is more difference among jugs than among women. In fact, jugs and pots often stand in for women as parthenogenic wombs, sometimes giving birth to sages with the matronymic of "pot" (such as Drona in the Mahabharata and Kumbha, the fictional male form of Cudala,:j: in the Yogavasishtha).
Compare 592
Then Gorakh Nath defies the king to find the Pingala that is his, just as Dama- yanti:j: had to choose her own Nala from among five look-alikes. But in fact he cannot tell the difference between the queens, and the threat of punishment for failure-a flayed skin-is appropriate both to a hunter, who strips animals of their skins, t and to someone who cannot see be- neath the surface. Only when he is blindfolded t does the king touch and get to keep his own Pingala.
Hub 593
But is she real or just one of the many fakes? The king thinks she is real, and Gorakh Nath tells him she is his own, but is he telling the truth? The storyteller later told Ann Gold that "the 'real' Pingala was no more real than the magic replications of her form.
Approach Four: Feminism, or Women Are Good to Think With
We have noted that one of the many things that tales like Beauty and the Beastt or the Swan Maiden t are about is the common practice of exog- amy, which forces women at marriage to leave their native home and move away to live with their husbands, who may be so foreign as to appear like beasts. This foreignness may also bring the bride to a place where a different dialect is spoken, so that she literally loses her voice, her native language, her mother tongue (which A.
Flow 120
The Silent Woman
We have noted that one of the many things that tales like Beauty and the Beastt or the Swan Maiden t are about is the common practice of exog- amy, which forces women at marriage to leave their native home and move away to live with their husbands, who may be so foreign as to appear like beasts. This foreignness may also bring the bride to a place where a different dialect is spoken, so that she literally loses her voice, her native language, her mother tongue (which A.
Cycle 594
Ramanujan taught us to con- trast with the more public father tongue)Yo Rarely, a man in our stories is rendered voiceless (Secundust undertakes a vow of eternal silence when he seduces his mother and she kills herself), but women are often silenced. In many variants, the Loathly Ladyt "has been bound by a spell and can- not speak the truth of her state." 121 Hindu women are expected to remain silent when they are subjected to impregnation by surrogate husbands in the levirate.
Flow 595
More often, however, the female victim of the bedtrick is silenced against her will. The Greek nymph Echo, in love with Narcissus,t is for- bidden to speak and may use her voice only to repeat what someone else says (like E. Hoffmann's Olympia in "The Sandman"t).
Ladder 596
Perhaps the answer is that some cul- tures allow women only this kind of talking.
Ladder 121
Feminism, Or Women Are Good To Think With
189 Male bedtricksters sometimes willingly disguise their voices, for the voice can reveal or conceal; a person's speech patterns, nuances, rhythm, and accent are all identifiable marks, but they can be hidden or changed as part of an effective disguise. The timbre of the sound and the content of speech together often unmask a bedtrickster, particularly when vision is obscured; speech and, sometimes, silence identify the true person, over- coming the false evidence of vision. Stith Thompson isolates a motif (H 38.2.3) that he calls "Recognition of maidservant substitute by her habit- ual conversation." Not surprisingly, bedtricksters in operast are often re- vealed by their voices-Mozart's Don Giovanni,t Susanna in The Mar- riage of Figarot (Figaro insists, "I recognized the voice I adore"); and so is Cyrano.t For both men and women, the successful imitation of the voice often makes a bedtrick succeed; the snaket lover talks like his victim's husband.
Compare 597
So, too, in Roald Dahl's "The Great Switcheroo,"t one of the men planning the bedtrick says, "No talking, I presume," and the other replies, "Not a word." The voice functions in these myths as a kind of prescientific voice- print, an auditory fingerprint. t As Ralph Harper put it: "Through all the changes in the bodies of a man and woman, the voice alone usually sur- vives unchanged." 125 But women are silenced both as bedtricksters and as women, tout court.
Angela Carter'st masquerading sister is careful to keep her mouth shut. Men sometimes cut out women's tongues, to silence a sexuallyag- gressive woman or to silence a woman who is the victim of male sexual aggression. The huntsman cuts out the tongue of a deer in place of Bran- gane'st tongue, which counterbalances the use of Brangane's maidenhead in place of Isolde'st maidenhead.
In a Roman myth, Tereus rapes Philo- mela and cuts out her tongue, but Philomela uses her hands to weave the story into a piece of cloth. In revenge, Philomela's sister, married to 190 ApPROACH FOUR Tereus, remarks to their son Itys, "How very much you look like your father," then stifles her maternal feelings, kills him, and feeds him to Ter- eus. 126 In Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, the rapists cut out Lavinia's tongue, and the mute girl uses the stumps of her arms to point to them- for her hands, as well as her tongue, were cut off expressly so that she would not be able, like Philomela, to write the story out.
Hub 598
(She points, in fact, to a book that tells the storyt of Philomela.) Appropriately, Titus, Lavinia's father, gags the rapists when he tortures them in revenge. Rape is marked by silence just as incestt is marked by riddling speech; both are "unspeakable acts," protected by the further unspeakable act of cutting out the woman's tongue. But the silence about a rape rebounds because it, too, is a statement, a speaking silence.
In The Queen of Corinth, t when Merione is asked to identify the man who had raped her ("His tongue, / Did you not heare his tongue, no voice?"), she replies, "None, none Sir: / All I know of him was his violence." Here the man's silence, rather than the woman's, testifies to his sexual violence. The female tongue may serve as a weapon that can kill a sexual enemy more literally than can a mere poison pen( -is) or barbed words.
The tongue and the vagina together function like the vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth; this is the weapon of the (male) demon Adi,t trumped by the razor-sharp penis of Shiva. Shiva inherits this mythological trope from the god Indra,t127 whose deadly penis(es) and phallic thunderbolt often come in handy in his combats with women who have excessive and ag- gressive genitalia and tongues.:j: Such women pose a threat for which there is only one solution: castration, or an (upwardly) displacedt clitoridec- tomy.12S The mouth must first be castrated (the tongue cut out) and then penetrated.
Cycle 599
Compare 122
But the stories also tell us that the mouth is not the same as the genitals at all, because it has the power of a particular sort of speech that the genitals, articulate though they may be, lack: ambiguity.
Flow 600
Hub 123
Night Blindness
Eyes, like tongues, are sexual weapons. The truism of the cats in the dark can be presented from either a nonsexist or a sexist point of view: (1) People may look different but in all other aspects they are alike; hence, when you can't see them, they become alike. (2) Women may look differ- ent but, unlike men, in all other aspects, particularly in their sexuality, they are alike; hence, when you can't see them, they become alike.
Let us begin with the more general visual aspect of sexual sameness, which ap- plies to both men and women in bed, and then consider its sexist aspect.
Cycle 124
Feminism, Or Women Are Good To Think With
191 The war between the senses-between vision and other senses such as hearing, or the broader power of mind-looms large here. We call it the deed of darkness, but so much of human sexuality is really visual, often deceptively visual; and the person who is tricked is blind even in the light. Which of the senses do we trust when they compete?
As human beings (in contrast with, say, dogs), we tend to privilege our eyes, in many ways our most highly developed contact with the outside world. Since, for humans, vision is the king of the senses, it is vision that must be stymied when a human is to be sexually flummoxed. If love is blind, lust is stone blind.
Ladder 601
More precisely, in most European texts Cupid is blind (though according to Apuleius he is invisible and will make love to Psychet only in the dark), but his Hindu equivalent, Kama, is invisi- ble,129 so that we are blind to him-a more appropriate location of the blurred vision of lust. Desire influences vision in another way, as well: it causes us to projectt upon the face we really see the image of the face we would like to see. After someone we love dies or goes away, or even when our children leave home, we keep thinking we see them when we are looking at people who resemble them in even the most general way-the same height or baseball cap or color of hair or way of walking.
At the end of the film Multiplicityt (1996), the protagonist's wife happens to see all three of his clones driving away in an open convertible car; she blinks and says to the children, "You know how you can tell if you really love someone? When everyone you see reminds you of him." People in myths often use their eyes to make sexual discriminations, but some myths seem to imply that they should not. In a way, the empha- sis on the physical identity of doubles is an argument against the visual: it demonstrates that we are wrong to judge by appearances.
When two people look alike, we are forced to distinguish between them by searching for more subtle, more profound, signs of identity. In traditional, t imper- sonal contexts, the visual element of sexual love predominates, and all that binds the doubles together is their appearance, while other, more intimate factors such as actions, words, smell, feelings, and personality don't count. If the impostor looks like the other person, the trick works.
Compare 602
By contrast, the voicet and other senses playa central role in some stories that take a more spiritual or Romantic approach to the uniqueness of the individual. These are more than two variants on the theme of recogni- tion; they are two very different approaches to the problem of human identity. 192 ApPROACH FOUR Night blindness is often evoked, metaphorically, to explain why some- one "accidentally" gets into bed with the wrong partner.
Hub 603
Flow 125
The fantasy of having a blind lover, dramatized in a bedtrick in the film Sirenst (1994), may be a fantasy of being loved for one's true self, for one's soul, forever, for qualities that will not decay. When the woman's face is invisible, veiled, for instance, the man has to judge her by her body-or her soul. The tenuous link that connects the fantasy of making love in the dark with the elements of jealousy, t hatred, t and paranoia t that drive many of these stories may be seen in a story that Chaucer tells ("The Merchant's Tale"), in which the wife of a blind man makes love to her lover in his presence, epitomizing the "blindness" of the cuckold.
Cycle 604
t In tracing the role of the eye in narratives of bedtricks we may speak, on the one hand, about the gaze, about what we see through our eyes (vision as part of the judging subject), and, on the other hand, about the eyes that we see (the eyes as objects to be judged). The eye is both a mirror-often called the mirror of the soul-and a window, the point through which the soul moves out of the body. As a mirror, it reflects the world; as a window, it is what we look through and into to see who a person is.
Flow 605
These ideas are conflated in the belief that we see ourselves mirrored t in the eyes of those who love us and whom we love.
Ladder 126
Feminism, Or Women Are Good To Think With
193 speare used this concept in a brilliant, proto structuralist joke about infi- delity in Merchant of Venice (5.1), when Bassanio, swearing his love to Portia, says, "I swear to thee, even by thine own fair eyes, I Wherein I see myself,-" and she breaks in, "Mark you but that! I In both my eyes he doubly sees himself; I In each eye, one: swear by your double self, I And there's an oath of credit." And in Troilus and Cressida (5.2), Cressida says: "Troilus, farewell!
Ladder 606
one eye yet looks on thee, But with my heart the other eye doth see. / Ab, poor our sex! this fault in us I find, I The error of our eye directs our mind." The doubleness of eyes makes inevitable the duplicity of sexual love.
Eyes recur throughout our texts as things to look not through but at, as objects rather than instruments of identification. The evil Bedouin t mother-in-law steals her daughter-in-Iaw's eyes in order to replace the young woman in her son's bed. In the film My Geishat (1962), it is only when the color of the actress's eyes, reversed from blue to brown by con- tact lenses, are re-reversed (doubled backt) on a negative film that her husband can see who she is.
Compare 607
But it is hard to keep the subjective and objective aspects of the eye separated. In the film The Scart (1948), when a woman puts her hands over a man's eyes, she doesn't see him, doesn't notice that he is masquerading as the man she thinks she loves. Urvashit demands that she not be forced to look upon her human husband when he is naked and MeIusinet demands that he not look at her naked.
Hub 608
An Oxford anecdote is told, variously, about Maurice Bowra, David Daube, Isaiah Berlin, and other local characters. There has long been a bathing spot on the River Charwell known as Parsons' Pleasure, where men can swim naked. (More recently, there has been another, for women, known as Dames' Delight.) One day when Bowra (or Daube or X) was bathing there with a group of friends, a punt carrying a group of women strayed into the forbidden pool.
Cycle 609
In this instance, it is a conflict between the generic (Victorian, Oxonian) belief that a woman should not see any male genitals and the sense of personal embar- rassment underlying the belief that a woman should not see one's own genitals. It is also a conflict between the face and the genitals as the locus 194 ApPROACH FOUR of personal identity-upward displacementt again. The tale of Parsons' Pleasure may be rather flimsy and highly apocryphal, but it rides on the crest of a very serious myth indeed, the myth of sexual blinding.
Flow 610
A similar point was made in the film Body Heat (1981, a remake of Double Indemnity, 1944) when the adulterous (and murderous) lover, who is caught in the act by a little girl, dreads that she will identify him- until he discovers that she was so mesmerized by the sight of his naked, erect penis that she never looked at his face at all. In a neat twist on the theme of "sexuality as revelation," the preemptive force of sexuality gives it the power not to reveal but to conceal.
Compare 127
(It also reflects the bedtrickster's own inability to distinguish one sexual object from another; in Body Heat, on one tryst he approaches his mistress from the back and calls out, "Hey, lady, you wanna fuck?" only to discover, to his great embarrassment, that it is another woman with the same sort of blond hair.) The metaphorical blindness of the male toward the inner nature of the "official" woman, often coupled with the temporary blindness of the woman, who closes her eyes in her resistance to the "official" man, may be expressed as the literal blindness of the child who results from such a union, like the child begotten by Vyasa. t The blindness of the child may also express the fact that, without the visual element, the sexual act of the parents was some- how incomplete, and so the child is incomplete.
If one person cannot see another, it may be because the viewer is blind or because the object of vision is invisible. These two conditions have the same result-the viewer cannot see the truth-but they are not symmet- rical inversions of one another. In darkness, both the bedtrickster and the victim are literally blinded, but the bedtrickster "sees" (i.e., knows) both the body and the soul, while the victim sees neither.
Both instances are degrading for both partners, through the loss of their individuality and identity and through the incompleteness that the blindness of each inflicts upon the other. THE MOUTH SAYS No BUT THE EYES SAY YES These unisex aspects of sexual blindness form the basis of the more partic- ular sexist form of the adage about cats in the dark, meaning female cats. In bedtrick stories, women's eyes and mouths are often functionally op- posed, like the literally transposed mouth and eye of the Loathly Lady in The Marriage of Sir Gawaine.
Ladder 611
t In Twelfth Night (2.2), Viola in drag com- plains that Olivia "made good view of me, indeed so much, / That sure methought her eyes had lost her tongue." The trickster masks both eye
Hub 128
Feminism, Or Women Are Good To Think With
195 and tongue; in Measure for Measure (3.1), the wily duke advises Isabella to carry out her bedtrick with a combination of "shadow and silence"- eliminating any sensual contact at all but the sexual, since darkness sty- mies vision, and silence stymies hearing. Just as the woman's mouth is threatening and must be blinded, so, too, her gaze must be silenced. His gaze-what feminists have taught us to recognize as the male gaze, an organ of penetration-appears in direct opposition to the female mouth.
Compare 612
The female impersonator in M. Butterflyt speaks eloquently of the rape mentality, the macho argument that "her eyes say yes when her tongue says no," with its embedded pun on "eye" and "aye (yes)." The rape mentality splits the woman into a welcoming eye and a rejecting mouth; it ignores speech and relies only upon vision, while the raped woman claims, by contrast, that the man falsely saw a vision of sexual seduction when she was sending verbal messages of sexual resistance or revulsion that he failed to hear.
Vision is what the rapist fixates on, the message of the eyes, communication on the animal level; speech is what the rapist denies, the message of the tongue, the message on the cultural level of the individual. All cats may be gray in the night, but cats can't speak; women can, and hence are not alike. When Casanova t was confounded by the person who was either a castrato or a woman, he later recalled: "It was at this moment that I saw he was a man, and believed that I saw it against his will.
Hub 613
Cycle 614
Cycle 129
Asymmetrical Gender Patterns
If we isolate contrasting patterns in the behavior of men and women in comparable situations, we find that the same stories are told about men and about women, but the plot takes a different turn when a woman is the subject; the same acts have different consequences when men or women engage in them.:j: Sex is never an equal opportunity employment. In tales of transvestism, for instance, men usually masquerade to kill t or to have sexual access to other men, t while women usually masquerade 196 ApPROACH FOUR to avoid rapet or to have the social freedom of a man, not to have sexual access to other women but, on the contrary, to have nonsexual-or, occa- sionally, sexual-access to men.
Flow 615
t On one level, the threat to identity posed by the bedtrick is the same for both genders. Some men invest their iden- tity in their women, partly through their desire for paternal securityt but partly because a man, too, may confirm his sense of self by seeing his reflection in the mirrort of the eyes of the woman who replaces his mother.t This is evident from the terror of infidelity and the shock of betrayal expressed by men in stories even when children are not at stake.
But this loss of a sense of self does not occur in the same way for the women in our texts, whose identity is often defined, as a man's is not, by their marital fidelity. Moreover, the asymmetries of biological aging, t compounded by the asymmetries of social and political power and the pressure of paternal insecurity,t result in two distinct genders of the mythology of the bed- trick. The different biological consequences for his and her adulteries ac- count for the far milder recriminations for men tricked into committing adultery with their own wives, in comparison with women tricked by their own husbands.
t Even on those relatively rare occasions when a woman does turn a bedtrick in order to sleep with a man who does not want to sleep with her, that man is her own husband, t who has been sleeping with another woman, his mistress. Lorraine Daston has noted another asymmetry in stories in which husbands and wives test one another with apparent adulteries: Whereas the man has gone astray on his own, and his long-suffering wife reacts to this provocation, the wife/fiancee had every intention of re- maining faithful until actively tested by her disguised husband or his friend.
Ladder 616
That is, in both male and female variants of the story, it is the man who propels the action, who initiates the adulterous situation. Presumably both husband and wife have grounds to fear recidivism: a husband who has once chased a mistress is likely to do so again; a woman once seduced by a lover is an easy mark for the next gallant. Yet only the husbands who
Flow 130
Deconstructing And Reconstructing Beauty
Annie Dillard asks, of the story of the woman who skinned t her daughter, "Is beauty itself an item fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all?" Let us see how our texts wrestle with this question. Plato equated beauty with goodness, love, happiness, wisdom, truth, and knowledge, ugliness with old age, evil, ignorance, lies, hate, unhappi- ness, waste, and destruction. Following Plato, in "Ode to a Grecian Urn" Keats equates the beautiful not only with the true (in contrast with the false, the surrogate) but with the good.
Compare 617
In a Japanese story, a beautiful girl hides under a skin that transforms her into an ugly old woman;141 the magic skin is a shield to protect her from her own beauty-and, presumably, also from her intelligence, since the young master who spies on her seems to be even more astonished that she can read than that she is beautiful. This story of the young woman who puts an old woman's skin over her head is an inversion of the Kiviokt stories in which an old woman puts a young woman's skin over her head.
Hub 618
Here is another of the basic paradoxest that inform these texts: the surface of the myth and the fairy tale argues that beauty is truth, that the beautiful woman is the symbol of all else that is good. But just as the hero must penetrate the surface of the Lovely/Loathly Lady, the reader must penetrate the seductive surface of the old archetype. And beneath that surface a Christian or Buddhist fifth column may undermine the blithe equation of the beautiful and the good and argue that what is real is not the surface but the interior, and that the interior may be the true beauty of an apparently ugly woman, or the true ugliness of all that ap- pears beautiful.
Our myths hold the two opposed paradigms in suspension as a para- dox: (1) ugly women are evil; (2) ugly women are good. But they subvert the basic equation of beauty with truth in various ways: 1. Beauty (with its correlates) is good, but it is hard to be sure that it is real.
Cycle 619
This is the message of the Lovely Lady. This is the message of the Wife of Bath and of the Buddhist Lovely Lady.
Feminism, Or Women Are Good To Think With
Beauty is bad, but if you are smart enough to make the right choice, to reject beauty, you are rewarded by being given a beautiful part- ner-because beauty is good. This is the paradoxical message of the Loathly Lady. Sometimes the story may begin with subversion (the heroine is inde- pendent and smart) but end by capitulating to the traditional paradigm (she dances, displaying her lovely body, and gets the prince to help her overcome the villain).
In the end, youth and beauty win the day. The paradox of evil beauty goes on to become part of its own inversion in yet another paradox, for many stories end by deconstructing their own premises. After Jacobt and Rachelt have come to accept that Rachel's beauty is not as valuable as Leah's fertility, Rachel is made fertile after all; beauty wins.
Flow 620
So, too, the Loathly Lady saves the knight's life, an act that establishes her goodness as well as her quite reasonable expectation that, in return, he will be good to her; he is, and she ceases to be Loathly. In the end, the heroine or hero who has rejected beauty is rewarded by having the beast made handsome, or the wife beautiful, after all, which means that superficial beauty is a good thing after all; like reconstruc- tive surgery, t reconstructive narrative is retrograde.
Thus, we have a third, paradoxical term in the paradigm: (3) One should value ugly women- so that one will be rewarded with beautiful women. The story sells out in the end; the subversive paradigm subverts itself in a double-back.t WHY Is OLD UGLY? Not only is beauty good; beauty is young.
Ladder 621
Compare 622
It confronts us with the impossibility of being some- one else." 150 And the impossibility of being someone else (someone who, unlike oneself, has not already started to age and die)-or of avoiding being someone (oneself, who is aging and dying)-is the challenge that inspires the bedtrick. Flagging desire and sexual performance may be more painful for men than flagging interest and/or response are for women; at least, male desire is harder to fake than female response. But our stories bypass this factor by their emphasis on the male gaze, the requirement that women, not men, must be beautiful.
Old women are ugly, in these stories, in ways that old men are not. Some of their perceived ugliness is natural, not cultural; biologically, t men and women do age differently in some ways, though not in others. Women by and large outlive men, but they do not remain fertile as long.
Less significant than fertility, though often more prominent in mythology, is the fact that the softness of women's tissue makes more dramatic changes in their bod- ies as they age (their breasts, for instance, soften more obviously than do the chests of men). And physical aging reverses the genders in different directions, forming a double set: mature women are like young boys, ma- ture men like old women. Mature women are smaller than mature men, more like children (i.e., young men), and mature men are thicker and rougher than mature women, more like older women (who do become more masculine, with more male hormones, mustaches, etc.).
Hub 623
As Marjorie Garber points out: "The authors of Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual cite Molloy [John T. Molloy, The Woman's Dress for Success Book] specifically and by name when they address the
Feminism, Or Women Are Good To Think With
A thirty-year-old woman can play the part of a fourteen-year-old boy (both have a short stature and high voice), and a thirty-year-old man can playa fifty-year-old woman (both have a thick waist and low voice). There are practical benefits in using the opposite sex in the theater to portray characters at the ends of the age spectrum where actors are unreliable (if children are too young to behave or to master the part, a woman can playa boy; and if old people are too infirm to project their voices, a man can play an old woman).
Cycle 624
Cyranot de Bergerac suffers from his youthful ugliness the same tragic loss that is usually suffered by ugly and/or aging women. Nevertheless, men usually fear the loss of strength, power, and virility 202 ApPROACH FOUR more than the loss of beauty, while the problem of aging in women is usually inextricably connected with the loss of beauty. Our society does not set the same premium on physical beauty in men as in women, or even construct "beauty" for older men as it does for older women (com- pare, for instance, the aging Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford with the aging Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall, even Eliza- beth Taylor, let alone Gloria Swanson).
Flow 625
Biological decay (wrinkled skin and sagging flesh) is compounded by social construction (a preference for one sort of flesh and skin over another) and a double standard (wrin- kles that are acceptable on a man's face but not on a woman's). Moreover, although for both genders, old age often brings power,155 such power is socially constructed as a positive, erotic factor in men but as dangerous and antisexual (masculine, castrating, etc.) in women. And ugly old men can use power to get young women into their beds; they therefore do not resort to bedtricks as often as old women do.
The myths never argue that old is beautiful, but they subvert the para- digm of youth and beauty at least to the extent of arguing that old is good (wise, kind, and so forth), and that ugliness, too, may be good. Benjamin Franklin's=!: notorious preference for old women over young women as sexual partners was cynical and almost certainly tongue-in-cheek. 156 More recently, the inevitable links between old age, ugliness, and women have been disputed by feminists of various persuasions.
Betty Friedan's Foun- tain of Age, for instance, attempts to demolish the mythology of old women much as Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth and Nancy L. Etcoff's Survival of the Prettiest attempt to demolish the mythology of beautiful women. But they are attacking a powerful and firmly entrenched power: the mythology of female youth and beauty.
Ladder 626
Face-Lifts
The process of aging and changing presents us with new versions of our- selves, both the same and different, like new tellings of the same story. Some people totally reject the selves of the past, the former lives, the former wives or husbands, and become each new person, each new mask. Some acknowledge the truth and value of all the masks at the same time and strive to recognize themselves in all of them.
Compare 627
But others totally re- ject the present self and strive to put on the masks of youth, through the magic of the Nautilus machine, the younger and younger lovers, the haunting of high school reunions. The primary obstacle to the recognition of a stable self
Feminism, Or Women Are Good To Think With
203 transformed by aging is the retransformation of the face; the mythology of the bedtrick imagines people who attempt to swim upstream against the current of time by changing their faces back in the other direction. Face-lifts embody the belief that to remain yourself you must stay the same, and to stay the same you must change your skin into the skin that belonged to what you were-though with the face-lift you actually change into someone else, away from who you really are now (a person with a soul and a face that are formed and scarred by experience).
Hub 628
The outer surface of the old woman lies, by concealing the young soul beneath, and the dye restores the truth of youth. Marjorie Garber questions the meaning of such face-lifts in the context of the sexual soul: "Why does a 'nose job' or 'breast job' or 'eye job' pass as mere self- improvement, ... while a sex change (could we imagine it called a 'penis job'?) represents the dislocation of everything we conventionally 'know' or believe about gender identities and gender roles, 'male' and 'female' subjectivities?" 159 The face-lift offers a quick fix to stave off the inevitable flood of a deeper change.
Saul Bellow's Armenian cynic spoke of that other change: "On any certain day, when you're happy, you know it can't last, but the weather will change, the health will be sickness, the year will end, and also life will end. In another place another day there'll be a different lover. The face you're kissing will change to some other face, and so will your face be replaced.
You make your peace with change." 160 "Your face will be replaced" has so many meanings here: your own present face will be replaced by your aging face or by the face of another person with whom your lover will replace you or, as a result of the first and in order to prevent the second, by a face-lift. The anguish with which the victims of bedtricks react to their betrayal indicates that 204 ApPROACH FOUR they, at least, have not made their peace with change-or, at least, with the betrayal that claims change as its excuse.
Cycle 629
What is the relationship between our sexuality and our faces, our skins? Our texts both express and challenge the mythology of the face- lift. Parvati and Kiviok'st mother-in-law sloughed their skin in what we might regard as proto-face-lifts; Kleist's Sosia* expresses to his look-alike (Mercury) the impossibility of doing what Kiviok's mother-in-law did: "I can't annihilate / Myself, transform myself, slough off my skin / And hang my skin around your shoulders." 161 The characters in the films Shat- teredt (1991) and FacelOff* (1997) undergo face-lifts that enable them to masquerade as other people.
The plastic surgeon functions as a kind of a deus ex machina in many bedtricks, such as Kobo Abe's Face of An- other;t in A Face to Die For (1996), the plastic surgeon gives his patient the face of his dead wife, an inadvertent masquerade that she only dis- covers later; but she masquerades on purpose in order to murder her unfaithful lover. Angela Carter's Dora describes a woman whose ex-husband is in love with Dora, and who, like many wives of straying husbands, has undergone a face-lift; but this face-lift, like the bedtricks turned by such wives, makes her look like the woman her husband fancies (Dora): A hand-made, custom-built replica, a wonder of the plastic surgeon's art.
The trouble she'd gone to! She'd had her nose bobbed, her tits pruned, her bum elevated, she'd starved and grieved away her middle-age spread. She'd had her back molars out, giving the illusion of cheekbones.
Her face was lifted up so far her ears had ended up on top of her head but, happily, the wig hid them. And after all that she looked very lifelike, I must say, if not, when I looked more closely, not all that much like me, more like a blurred photocopy or an artist's impression, and, poor cow, you could still see the bruises under the Max Factor Pan Stik, however thickly she applied it, and the scars round where the ears should be.
Oooh, it must have hurt! [She] loved her man so much she was prepared to turn herself into a rough copy of his beloved for his sake .... [He] and the imitation Dora lived happily ever after, once he'd got over the shock, and if you believe that, you'll believe anything.
162 The pain that the rejected wife endures for her man is not unlike the pain that the mermaid t experiences when she slices apart her tail to make legs for her lover's pleasure. It didn't work for the mermaid, and we are led to believe that it will not work for this woman either.
Flow 630
FIVE: The Cuckolds of the Heart
he demon Adi t played a bedtrick not because he desired Parvati but because he wanted to kill Shiva. Hatred of the alien rival, and paranoid t fear of him, are central to many bedtricks in which desire is outranked by hate, or at least by a spirit of revenge or rivalry.
Ladder 131
Cuckolding To Kill
he demon Adi t played a bedtrick not because he desired Parvati but because he wanted to kill Shiva. Hatred of the alien rival, and paranoid t fear of him, are central to many bedtricks in which desire is outranked by hate, or at least by a spirit of revenge or rivalry. Often the antagonism between the men takes the form of violence, which may rebound upon the woman, as well.
Ladder 631
Sometimes the wife's seduction is simply the by- product of another plan aimed primarily at her husband. Men may force their bedtricks upon their female victims in collusion with other men, t and they may also masquerade as their male enemies against the enemies' will. Some of the men in these stories attempt to destroy an opponent by sleeping with his wife, as the wife's chastity functions as a shield for her man.
Yet men tell stories of cuckolding not only against one another but also against women, who are depicted as too easily seduced or fooled and who also retaliate strongly against the efforts of men to erase their individuality. In all of these stories, though hate, rivalry, and revenge are said to be the primary motives, desire constantly reasserts itself and often causes the aggression to miscarry. The film Excalibur (1981) cuts back and forth between the scene in which the duke of Tintagel is breathing hard and moaning because he is dying and the scene in which Uther, magically transformed into the form of the duke (played by the same actor), is breathing hard and moaning because he is approaching his sex- ual climax with Igraine, the duke's wife.
Compare 632
The merging of the two move- ments emphasizes not only the lethal aspect of cuckolding but the lethal aspect of sex itself, la morte douce: as the husband dies, the child is engen- dered. (Death and sex also overlap, according to Jain and Buddhist theory, when the soul escapes from a dying body-released as the seed is re- leased-and immediately engages with a copulating couple.)l The Kamasutra condemns a man who commits adultery out of love 205 206
Hub 633
Compare 132
Jalandhara Impersonates Shiva
Jalandhara reigned with justice, but he usurped the prerogatives of the gods. They asked the sage Narada to help them, and he went to Jalandhara and inspired in him the desire to abduct Parvati. Jalandhara sent an emis- sary to Shiva asking him to give up Parvati; instead, a great battle ensued, in the course of which Jalandhara created the magic illusion of celestial courtesans.
While Shiva was fascinated by the courtesans, Jalandhara, driven by lust, went to the palace where Parvati lived. With his power of illusion he assumed the form of Shiva, with ten arms, five faces, three eyes, and matted hair, seated on the great bull-in every way the image of Shiva. When Parvati saw Shiva approaching, she was full of love for her beloved; she came forward to meet him.
Cycle 634
But as soon as the beautiful Parvati came into the demon's range of vision, he released his seed and became impotent in all his limbs. Realizing that he was a demon, Parvati disappeared immediately, and Jalandhara returned to the battle.5
Hub 133
The Cuckolds Of The Heart
The fact that Parvati is Jalan- dhara's stepmother adds yet another significant layer of incestuoust non- recognition to the myth, like that of Oedipust (or, culturally closer, Kutsat): Parvati at first mistakes her (step-) son for her husband. Anoer, roughly contemporary version of the myth elaborates upon the sign-virility-that distinguishes Shiva from Jalandhara:
Flow 635
Cycle 134
Jaya Impersonates Parvati
Vrinda, the wife of Jalandhara, said to Jalandhara, as he was arming, "Do not fight, my lord, with that despicable yogi. Why do you desire her? Is Parvati better than me?
She wants a son, but she is barren and has only artificial, adopted sons. Leave her alone and enjoy me." But Jalandhara replied, "Vrinda, look after the country and the treasury; remember me always, if Shiva kills me." And then he went to fight with Shiva. Shiva said to Parvati, "I am going to the battle.
Ladder 636
Stay here, even though you will be alone and full of longing." When Jalandhara realized how difficult it would be to conquer Shiva in battle, he thought to him- self, "I have not seen Parvati, whom Narada told me about. I will go to see her today, and afterward I will fight with Shiva." He said to the demon Shumbha, "Take a form just like mine and fight the battle, while I go to see Parvati, who has captured my heart." And he took off the ornaments from his own body and gave them to Shumbha.
Then he took the form of Shiva, and another demon took a form just like that of Nan- din, Shiva's ally. The two demons, disguised as Shiva and Nandin, ap- proached Parvati. When Parvati saw Jalandhara-as-Shiva approaching, wounded by arrows, leaning on Nandin's shoulder, his garments smeared with blood, she was amazed.
Her friends, Jaya and the others, went to him and said, "What happened?" And when Parvati saw that he was carrying the sev- ered heads of her sons Ganesha and Skanda, she cried out, "0 Skanda, o Ganesha, 0 Shiva!" Jalandhara-as-Shiva sighed and said, "Your two 208
Compare 637
Flow 135
The Cuckolds Of The Heart
And once she becomes suspicious, Parvati takes action. Shiva has ex- pressly forbidden her to change her own form, perhaps because he sus- pects she might do so to play erotic games of her own, for he acknowledges that, with him away at war, she might be prone to longing, and she does change forms to play bedtricks on other occasions. t But Shiva did not forbid her to let someone else take her form.
Hub 638
Jalandhara ultimately reveals himself sexually: he fails because he has "small virility" (alpendriya), a complex pun implying a lack of virile staying power, a small penis, or a penis that quickly becomes small by losing its erection. But he does not reveal himself to Parvati, for unlike the first text we considered, in which the demon sheds his seed at the mere sight of Parvati, this text assumes that Jalandhara will shed his seed-and therefore lose his powers-only if he actually consummates the sexual act.
To avoid polluting Parvati in this way, the myth introduces a substitute for her, as Tulsi Das did to protect Sita,:j: not a magic double this time but just the standard surrogate to stymie a rape or droit du seigneur:t the maidt or friend. This results in a double-back-cross,t in which the trickster meets another trickster. (Shiva himself takes the form of Parvati to stymie another demon who lusts after her, Bhasmasura, whom Shiva kills while merely dancing with him, before any sexual act is consummated.
lO In this he is the counterpart of the demon Adi, who takes the form of Parvati in an attempt to kill Shiva; the difference lies in the fact that Parvati is Shiva's wife, not Adi's.) There are still further twists in the plot, for this text adds another bedtrick after the exposure of J alandhara, a retaliatory seduction ofVrinda by Vishnu, who is said to be motivated not by demonic lust but by the divine knowledge that only by destroying the fidelity of the demon's wife can the god destroy the demon. Several texts insist upon the tit-for-tat nature of the counterseduction; in one, as soon as Parvati has penetrated Jalandhara's disguise she summons Vishnu, tells him what has happened, and demands, "He himself has shown the path: destroy the dharma of 210
Cycle 639
Ladder 136
Vishnu Impersonates Jalandhara
The Garuda bird said to Vishnu, "You should go there and engage in a war of illusion against Jalandhara, whose wife I have seen: she is a hun- dred times more beautiful than Parvati, Rambha, or Urvashi. Do a favor for Shiva and give yourself pleasure." Deceiving his wife, Lakshmi, Vishnu used his yogic power of illusion to assume another form, for he was deluded by passion for Vrinda. He gave Vrinda nightmares, portending her own widowhood: she saw the severed head of Jalandhara, its eyes plucked out by a vulture.
She awoke and entered a terrible forest; suddenly she realized that the female mules pulling her chariot had stopped neighing, and that the wheels made no sound, nor the bells. Then a horrible demon devoured the mules, seized Vrinda, and said, "Shiva has killed your husband in the battle, or so I have heard. Take me for your husband and drink sweet wine and eat the meat of large animals." When she heard that, the life went out of her.
Flow 640
Vishnu then appeared in the form of an ascetic, wearing bark gar- ments, and reduced the demon to ashes. Vrinda, fooled by Vishnu's illusory power, threw her arms around Vishnu's neck, a touch which gave him much pleasure, and he said to her, "By your embrace, the head of your husband will come back again, and all his limbs, even better than before." She lay down on the divine bed and picked up the head of her husband and drank kisses from his lower lip and closed her eyes in waves of pleasure.
Then Jalandhara seemed to appear, for Vishnu had taken on a handsome form just like his, with his chest, his height, his speech, his frame of mind. Seeing the full form of her beloved, Vrinda cried out, "I will do whatever pleases you, my master. Tell me about the battle." Vishnu-as-Jalandhara said, "My darling, Shiva cut off my head, but just then by your power of yoga, the severed head was brought here and re- vived by the touch of your body." Then Vrinda, lusting for sexual plea- sure, embraced him closely and kissed him.
Vishnu thought that the plea-
Compare 137
The Cuckolds Of The Heart
211 sure that came from deluding Vrinda was greater than the delicious pleasure of the love of his wife Lakshmi, and that this sexual release was greater than the pleasure of metaphysical Release. He enjoyed Vrinda's body for a number of days, and then he thought about what he was sup- posed to do for Shiva. One day, at the end of their lovemaking, Vrinda saw Vishnu in his own form, with his two arms around her neck.
She loosened the noose of his arms from her neck and said, "How is it that you came to delude me in the form of an ascetic?" And he said, to calm her down, "I am the beloved of Lakshmi. Your husband went to seduce Parvati in order to conquer Shiva, and 1 am Shiva, and he is me. Ialandhara has been killed in the battle.
Ladder 641
Make love with me now." Furious, she cursed him, and then she said to her friend, "The sight of my beloved was just an object of the senses made of my own longings." And she killed herself and went to heaven. 14 When Vrinda finally sees Vishnu as Vishnu, she asks him only why he took the form of the ascetic, not why he took the form of her husband. It appears that she goes to her death believing that it was she herself, not Vishnu, who conjured up the image of her husband in bed, out of her own longing, as she herself admits, tacitly acknowledging the projectivet power of sexual fantasy.
Vishnu works much harder at his successful seduction ofVrinda than J alandhara does at his unsuccessful seduction of Parvati (though one can hardly call it work). Where Jalandhara's bedtrick fails, Vishnu's bedtrick succeeds-or, rather, succeeds long enough for him to seduce the woman he desires. What success he achieves is due in part to his greater skill as a magician: he mimics not only Jalandhara's chest, height, and speech (and, presumably, his multiple arms, which distinguish him from the an- thropomorphic, two-armed form of Vishnu) but his "frame of mind,"t a factor seldom taken into account in these myths.
Moreover, the textual convention demands that Vishnu succeed at least long enough to let Shiva win the fight: demons must fail, gods must win. In one text, Jalandhara's own demons tactlessly point out the contrast and parallel when Jalandhara has failed to seduce Parvati: "Shiva has destroyed your army, and you will not get Parvati. How can a jackal get the lion's queen?lS And Vishnu has taken away your queen.
Compare 642
As you do to others, so they do to you. You came to abduct Parvati, and Vishnu abducted your wife."16 Where Jalandhara's trick with death (the mirage ofParvati's dead sons) was anti-erotic, Vishnu's trick with death (the mirage of Jalandhara's 212
Hub 138
The Cuckolds Of The Heart
Hub 643
Cycle 644
Indeed, Jalandhara becomes reincarnated as Ravana to take away Sita in Tulsi Das's sixteenth-century Hindi version of the Ramayana, the Ramacaritamanasa, when Vrinda curses Vishnu (here called Hari or the Lord): "By a stratagem the Lord broke her marriage vow and thus accomplished the purpose of the gods. When the lady discovered the de- ception, she cursed him in her wrath. Hari, the Blessed Lord, sportive 214
Flow 645
Cycle 139
Sleeping With The Enemy
We have seen that desire often enters the ostensibly political scenario of cuckolding-desire for the wife. Sometimes desire for the husband enters the scenario, too, and when two men collude together to trick a woman into cuckolding one of them, the element of male homoeroticism can become quite blatant. The cuckolders in these myths may be sleeping with the enemy in the sense of making love with the purported enemy, for the man who is ostensibly in competition for the woman may, on some deeper level, de- sire her man.
Occasionally, women can play this game, too: in Single White Femalet (1992), the passion of Ellie (also called Hedra) is really directed, not toward Sam, Allie's boyfriend, but toward Allie, whose place she takes in Sam's bed and in a sense cuckolds: she seduces Sam, not because she lusts for him, but to prove to Allie (whom she loves) that Sam is unfaith-
Ladder 646
Flow 140
The Cuckolds Of The Heart
215 ful, so that Allie will no longer love Sam and will, presumably, love Ellie. As Marjorie Garber nicely sums up such a situation: "We always fall in love with a fantasy, and it is sometimes as easy to fantasize about the rival, who is so desirable that he or she might take away the beloved, as it is about the more familiar and 'known' beloved .... If we desire what the rival desires, we also sometimes desire the rival because of his or her desire." 30 The Freudian t view of cuckolding emphasizes the repressed t desire that the cuckolder has for his victim.
Compare 647
Ladder 141
Titus And Gisippus
Hub 648
The men care for one an- other far more than either cares for the girl; when Titus does for a moment
Compare 142
The Cuckolds Of The Heart
217 take into consideration the girl's feelings, he says, "If it appear to her that she has been deceived, it is not I who am to blame therefore, but she, who did not ask me who I was." This is precisely what judges have ruled in cases of date rapet very much like this story, one man replacing another in the dark: that it was a woman's own fault if she was fooled. And there is surely irony in Boccaccio's voice when he remarks that the wise woman "readily transferred to Titus the affection she bore Gisippus." This twisted sexist argument implies that since, to a woman, all men are alike in the dark, t women do not deserve sexual choice as men do.
A vivid example (myth or reality?-it is hard to tell) of the same sort of ostensibly nonsexual male bonding evinced in a bed trick is told in a captivity narrative, published in 1778, about the Revolutionary War period in America, involving British soldiers and Native Americans ("Indians"):
Cycle 649
Hub 143
Braddock'S Soldier And The Innocent Squah
The men are virtually in bed together. In Story ofO,t Pauline Reage's Sadeian novel, published in 1954, het- erosexuality is visible on the surface, while homoerotic bedtricks take place in the field of fantasy, often in darkness:
Flow 650
The Cuckolds Of The Heart
Ladder 651
The "accidental" killing of Hiraldus by Eulinus is clearly motivated by the jealousy that Eulinus experiences as the unreal double, in the familiar double-bind, t despite his insistence that he is satisfied to possess Landora physically, even under another man's identity. Hiraldus's tactless reminder that Eulinus, like all bedtricksters, is not loved for himself, seals his own doom. The repressed t antipathy between the two men who collude in a bed- trick may amount to no more than sexual rivalry, a grown man's version of little boys competing to see who can pee farthest.
This is the point of the most realistic successful bedtrick that I know, contrived by Roald Dahl in 1965, in which two men, Vic (married to Mary) and Jerry (his next- door neighbor, married to Samantha), plot to replace one another in bed without their wives' knowledge, in what we might call a double-play:t two bedtricks simultaneously perpetrated by two tricksters. Vic, the narra- tor, tells Jerry his idea, but then:
Compare 652
The Great Switcheroo
[Jerry objected,] "Everybody knows that a wife and a husband who have been married for some years develop a kind of routine. My God, a new operator would be spotted instantly .... " "A routine can be duplicated," I said.
"Just so long as every detail of that routine is described beforehand." ... The only thing one had to watch out for was not to get carried away and start improvising. One had to follow the stage directions very carefully and stick to them.
Hub 653
[They began to compare notes on their lovemaking techniques.] At the end of it all, it turned out that the only real difference between Jerry's routine and my own was one of tempo. But what a difference it was! He took things (if what he said was to be believed) in such a leisurely fashion 220
And Male Jealousy
Cuckolding is a problem not primarily, or not only, because it mocks a man's virility but because it casts doubt upon the (male) progeny who are going to inherit his property. Cuckolding myths also reflect another deeply embedded human concern: the search for the identity of a child or a parent through the identity of a sexual partner. For people who define themselves in terms of someone else, lover or child, cuckolding renders the identity of that other person more elusive than ever.
Cycle 654
The Cuckolds Of The Heart
Flow 655
For no one himself knows his own father." A rejected suitor in Fumiko Enchi's Maskst expresses the man's fear: A man may try as hard as he likes, but he'll never know what schemes a woman may be slowly and quietly carrying out behind his back. Children- think what endless trouble men have gone to over the ages to persuade themselves that the children their women bore belonged to them! Making adultery a crime, inventing chastity belts.
Ladder 656
Apparently there was (in 1998) a paternity case pending for one of every 100 children in the United States, about 750,000 cases. DNA testing has become commercially popular, advertised on billboards (l-800-DNA- type), taking the mystery out of this once mysterious matter even as it testifies to its enduring human appeal. "An incredible number are just doing it for their own peace of mind," said Caroline Caskey, president of the Identigene lab that answers the call to 1-800-DNA-type.
Compare 657
The Cuckolds Of The Heart
53 Resemblance was the ancient weapon most often used to slice the Gor- dian knot of paternal insecurity. We have seen that the resemblance (or falsely stated resemblance) of bedtricksters to their siblings usually con- ceals the truth, but the resemblance of children to their parents usually reveals the truth. Many bedtricks about women's adultery pit the father's ability to recognize his child through its resemblance to him against his wife's apparent inability to distinguish the father from another man who resembles him.
Hub 658
Such myths express the father's fear that his child is not his child or, rather, that he can never be sure that his child is his child- unless, of course, he trusts his wife. Herodotus told of a place where all the women were promiscuous, and a child could know his father only by looking for the one who most resembled him. 54 If the child does not resemble the parent, the assumption is that the mother has been unfaithful.
The proverb supplied both the title and a part of the essential philosophy of Carter's Wise Children:t "Our father denied us," is how Dora remembered it. "It's a wise child that knows its own father," hissed Peregrine, ... "but wiser yet the father who knows his own child." [Later, Dora said,] "Biology is biology.
Cycle 659
You can't fool a sperm .... We were not flesh of his flesh. But then, again, a person isn't flesh of its father's flesh, is it?
Flow 660
It was blood calling to blood." To this Figaro replies, "In my
The Cuckolds Of The Heart
This need to be doubled in his chil- dren may drive a man to place a premium on the chastity of his wife; for if some other man should replace him in the marriage bed, the cuckolding would destroy not merely the husband's virile pride in this life but his only means of survival after death. On the other hand, by creating a child one creates one's rival and, sometimes, one's killer.t Men are jealous of their sons and envious of them for replacing them; this is one of the bases of the conflict between father and son, as well as between mother and daughter.
Ladder 661
Parental Imprinting
Compare 662
Aside from the implausibility of the imprinting mechanism, the value of this theory is fatally undercut by the consideration that if every woman 226
The Cuckolds Of The Heart
Here, here I bear him, / Himself in a less model. / If he mistrusts 'tis none of his, let him / But rip me up. There he shall see each limb / As like to his as his one hand, one eye, / One cheek, is like another." The violence of the image- that, to prove her faithfulness to him, she will let Ferrando rip out the unborn child and examine it-collapses the interval between the preg- nancy (the occasion for accusations of infidelity) and the birth of the child (that validates the mother).
Hub 663
The irony is that she is wrong; if the child resembles anyone, it is the villain who bedtricked her, and who will ulti- mately cause the death of Felicia, Ferrando, and the unborn child. Projec- tion t here hath made its masterpiece.
Approach Five: Theology, or When God Has Lipstick on His Collar
In most mythologies, to forgive is human, to err, divine. The more or less rigorous strictures that traditional societies place upon human sexual- ity have as their shadows myths in which deities violate all of those stric- tures.
Cycle 144
The Sexual Masques Of God
In most mythologies, to forgive is human, to err, divine. The more or less rigorous strictures that traditional societies place upon human sexual- ity have as their shadows myths in which deities violate all of those stric- tures. The divine escapades thus shed light upon the human dilemma of sexual misbehavior; but beyond that, the human situation helps us to understand what it means to worship a goddess who sends a demonic surrogate in her place, or a god who cheats on his worshipers.
Cycle 664
Ralph Harper sees in several passages from Proust, ostensibly about human love affairs, a sense of grace, of the presence of god. Then he remarks: "Perhaps underneath some of the casual talk about sex these days is a secret hope that in sex we may still be able to experience the intimacy of real presence. But for most people it is probably a simulacrum at best.
Flow 665
Ladder 666
Flow 145
Theology, Or When God Has Lipstick On His Collar
Compare 667
In India, Samjna's bedtrick creates the ancestor of the human race; it is the source of the illusory nature of all of human existence. This basic masquerade is perpetrated by maya, illusion: the one godhead is shattered into multiple images in the phenomenal world, and we must look to find the single image behind all the false forms/5 Hinduism is highly accessible to the idea of having more than one body per soul, and the multivalence of certain Hindu gods leads to an image of a multivalent whole, which functions not merely on the level of sexual metaphors, polygamous gods, and polytheism (what Max Miillert called henotheism or kathenotheism, and we might call serial monotheism: worshiping one god as supreme and then another and then another) but also on the level of the personality.
All of the Hindu myths of illusion, not merely the myths of sexual illusion, catapult us into a new reality that forces us to recognize not merely our 230 ApPROACH FIVE multiplicity but, sometimes, our illusory existence, and this transition is particularly vivid in the mythology of Shiva and Parvati.
Hub 668
Ladder 146
Divine Betrayal
Theology and psychology intersect at the point of abandonment. The hu- man experience of the terror of being abandoned by human agents, first the mother and then the spouse (sexual jealousy but also, at a deeper level, the fear of rejection and sexual inadequacy), and the theological hypothesis of being abandoned by god reinforce one another. The loss of the lover and the loss of the mother foreshadow the loss of the deity who abandons humankind.
Thus, to the syllogism developed in chapter 2 we must add a fourth assertion: 4. "My god is not God." This is an entirely unhappy discovery, which does not even leave us the dignity that Existentialism, for example, found in the absence of god, the challenge to create our own fate. For the myth does not say that there is no god at all; on the contrary, it says that there are several, and the human race was created by a second-rate one who does not care for us.
Cycle 669
The abandoning mother behaves like god in the deist argument, who made the world and then left it here for us, without him (or her) to run it, a watch with no watchmaker-and, the myth adds, leaving us to the mercies of the substitute. The god or goddess in these myths is otiose, hidden, vanished, a layabout: like a policeman, she's never there when you need her. Or she is absconditus, like a criminal with the loot: when you need her, she is feasting with the Ethiopians, like Poseidon in the Odyssey (1.22, 5.282), or temporarily indisposed, like Baal (off an- swering a call of nature)16 in the contest with Elijah (1 Kings 18.27).
In Woody Allen's film Mighty Aphrodite (1996), when the Greek chorus call out to Zeus, they hear the sound of an answering machine with the voice of Zeus inviting them to leave a message after the tone. The Hebrew Bible tells us how Moses and the Jews lost the original tablets of the Ten Com- mandments, written by the very hand of God, and had to settle instead for the surrogate, written by the hand of Moses (Exodus 31.18, 32.15- 19,34.1-5,27-28).
Once again, the myth tells us that all that we have is the double. We must, however, distinguish between the mother who abandons her child and the woman who betrays her husband. In the human narrative, this may be the same woman, viewed by the child or by the husband.
Flow 670
In the theological narrative, it is manifest in two aspects of the divine be- trayal: god goes away, or god turns out to be a fake (the real god having
Compare 147
Theology, Or When God Has Lipstick On His Collar
Male gods can also be absentee fathers, dud dads, or, more often, abandoning lovers. In Hinduism, the otiosity of god is also ex- pressed through the erotic metaphor of viraha: the longing for a lover (often an adulterous lover) from whom one is separated-the longing of Shiva and Parvati for one another. God is not with us, the poem says, because he is making love to some other woman instead; god (Krishna,:!: for instance) doubles himself for his various women and comes to us with some other woman's lipstick on his collar (or the Hindu equivalent: the scars of her nails on his back).
Ladder 671
Sex masquerades as reli- gion masquerading as sex; the love poem masquerades as itself. t Weare left asking: "What is sex? What is religion?" Though other religions also mix religion and sex, Hinduism is notorious for it; a character in a David Lodge novel suggests helpfully to a friend who is groaning under the yoke of Christian repression: "But if you must have religion, why not Hindu- ism?
Compare 672
Hub 673
t This is what happens in a sixteenth-century Telugu poem about the god and his wife, but also about the god and us:
Hub 148
He'S Standing Right Next To Her
Tell her he's standing right next to her, and he's amazed she doesn't see him. She's thinking so much and missing him that when he comes to her door and calls her she doesn't hear. Right from the beginning, this separation has worn her down.
Cycle 674
Now, if anyone tells her the truth, she doesn't believe it. [Wjhen he comes for real, she says it's a lie. He lies down beside her and she doesn't see him.
Then he looks up and makes love to her and she says she's had the strangest dream. He's standing right next to her.8l This philosophy argues that when we mistake the reality for a dream, we ourselves make the real lover/god into a fantasy lover, a god who has failed us; or, mistaking the dream for a reality,82 we do not recognize the real lover/god when s/he comes to us. But when the god makes love to his wife (or to the worshiper), she wakes up; sex is not just reality,t it's Enlightenment.
Flow 675
How are we to unpack these sexual/theological metaphors? What does it mean to say that you have been raped by god (like Alcmena and Ahalya), or that god herself (like Parvati) has been raped? What sort of a theodicy is implied by such a violation?
Ladder 676
What sort of a theodicy is implied by divine adultery, such as the infidelities of both Shiva and Parvati? The lesson that the adulterous and/or sexually violent god teaches the worshiper is manifold: god cannot belong to anyone person; love (whether of god or of a human lover) respects no boundaries, particularly possessive bound- aries; and love is painful and unequal. The worshiper may be "possessed" by god in a trance, but god is never possessed.
Cycle 149
Theology, Or When God Has Lipstick On His Collar
233 Both religious and Romantict philosophies distrust visual t recogni- tion. Theresa, who had a most erotic relationship with her god, said: If I say that I do not see Him with the eyes of the body or the eyes of the soul, because this is no imaginary vision, how then can I know and affirm that he is beside me with greater certainty than if I saw Him? If one says that one is like a person in the dark who cannot see someone though he is beside him, or that one is like somebody who is blind, it is not right.
There is some similarity here, but not much, because a person in the dark can perceive with the other senses, or hear his neighbor speak or move, or can touch him. Here this is not so, nor is there any feeling of darkness. On the contrary, He appears to the soul by a knowledge brighter than the sun.B3 The argument here is that human partners should be able to recognize one another in the dark, by the senses other than vision, which should tell us that someone is "standing right next to her" (in the Telugu) or "beside me" (St.
Compare 677
But since there is "not much similarity" be- tween partners in bed and worshipers in the presence of god, this is not how one knows god-or how god sees us. Can we trick the gods in bed the way that they trick us? There is a Herodotean text, from the fifth century B.C.E.
in Greece, that argues this question rather obliquely. It is literally a bed trick, though it is not, strictly, a bedtrick:
Flow 150
Xerxes' Bedtrick
[Xerxes had a dream urging him to attack Greece, against Artabanus's advice. He summoned Artabanus and said,] "If it is a god that sends it, and it is entirely his pleasure that this expedition against Greece should take place, then this same dream will hover about you too and will lay the same charge on you as on me. And I think this would be most likely to happen if you would take all this raiment of mine and put it on and sit upon my throne and then go to sleep in my bed." [Artabanus replied,] "Let the vision appear to me with the same orders.
Hub 678
But there is no neces- sity that it should rather appear to me because I am wearing your clothes rather than my own or sleep in your bed rather than my own-that is, if it is minded to appear at all. The vision that appears to you in your sleep, whatever it is, has hardly attained such a degree of simplicity that it will think me to be you when it sees me, drawing its evidence solely from your clothes. If it shall disdain me altogether and shall not choose to appear, whether I wear your clothes or my own-that is what we now have to find out ....
Cycle 679
But Artabanus was also right in thinking that the dream would know who was in the bed; it addressed him, not Xerxes. Even when we appear to trick the gods, therefore, they see through us; as in the myth of Prometheus,* the human trickster is, in the end, outtricked by the divine trickster. To the gods, apparently, humans are not all alike in the dark.
Flow 680
Ladder 151
Human Blindness And Divine Invisibility
Is there any point in distinguishing the "mythical" variants of the theme from the "realistic" ones? Does the divine lover vanish because of human blindness or because of divine invisibility? When these stories appear as myths, they involve deities in magical situations, and when they appear as tales that function on a more banal and human level, servants or sib- lings often assume the role played by magical doubles in the myths.
Ladder 681
Often, we may read the same myth on the level of realism or on the level of fantasy. But in a sense, all of the tales of bed tricks, even the realistic ones, are mythological in one sense of the term: they imagine what cannot ever be in real life. More precisely, they imagine what might be most natural to real real life devoid of the constraints of human culture (a situation that can never exist for us).
The supernatural and the realistic stories are alike in some ways, different in others. They are alike in that
Theology, Or When God Has Lipstick On His Collar
235 they deal with the same sets of human problems, but they express those problems differently according to the idioms of each genre, and they im- ply different ultimate meanings. Many stories about gods turn out to be largely about human problems, and many stories about human beings raise theological questions. The psychological and theological concerns of the myth stand as metaphors for one another, like the Escher drawing of the hand drawing the hand drawing the hand.
Myths about the relationship between the body and the soul, t however psychological or political their concerns, are religious myths. It is not the case that one can ask psychological and/ or political questions only of "realistic" myths and theological questions only of "fan- tastic" myths. As Ernest Gellner has remarked: "[Humlankind in general is seldom if ever conceptually kosher.
Compare 682
And by attempting to unravel this unfortunate process, the euhemerists rationalized the myths: that is, they took stories ostensibly about the gods and made them (back, as they saw it) into stories about humans. Freudt may be regarded as a latter-day euhemerist when he argues that stories that appear to be about god are really about your father. t The interpretive process of rationalization (regarding the super- natural as derived from the natural) argues that the myth itself has irratio- nalized, turning what is rational (observable human behavior) into what is irrational (unobservable divine behavior).
Thus, the midrash on Lamen- tations takes the (human) story of Rachelt and Leah and turns it into a story about the jealousy of god; it makes one sort of theology (mixed with psychology and history) into another. We can also see the opposite process at work in our stories, the deri- vation of human meaning from theological texts. That is, theological ques- tions are posed, and to answer these questions, human images, human concerns, are projected into myths about the divine world.
Hub 683
The mean- ings of these myths, however, must be sought not merely in superficial 236 ApPROACH FIVE anthropomorphic forms and quasi-human events but in the darker the- ological questions that are posed. Thus, both rationalization and irratio- nalization may occur in the making of myths as well as in their interpre- tation. Irrationalization occurs when ideas about men and women are transformed into myths about gods and goddesses, when stories about human women and men, entangled in the toils of human sexual tragedy, take flight in the illusion provided by myth.
But the opposite process, rationalization, is equally common and important, when ideas about gods and goddesses are translated into myths about men and women, when insoluble theological problems take on flesh and seek their solutions, al- ways in vain, on the human stage. The banal and the magical are by no means mutually exclusive, for the myth is a bridge between the actual human sexual experience and the fantasy that grows out of that experience and in turn transfigures it. But it is also a bridge between the terrifying abyss of cosmological ignorance and our comfortable familiarity with our recurrent, if tormenting, human problems.
Some variants narrow the gap by rendering the fantasy in almost realistic terms; but the gap, however small, remains nevertheless. The tension gives rise to the myth.
SIX: Designated Hitters
n many stories a man substitutes for another man in bed-not secretly but officially, using instead of magic or family resemblance family connec- tions (in the case of the leviratet) or political power (in the case of the droit du seigneurt). Such a man may act as a sexual pinch hitter or desig- nated hitter not only to achieve his own projects but, sometimes, to help out a friend.
Compare 152
Legal Male Surrogates
n many stories a man substitutes for another man in bed-not secretly but officially, using instead of magic or family resemblance family connec- tions (in the case of the leviratet) or political power (in the case of the droit du seigneurt). Such a man may act as a sexual pinch hitter or desig- nated hitter not only to achieve his own projects but, sometimes, to help out a friend. If the man who is replaced is not being tricked, if the arrange- ment is entirely official, this is hardly a masquerade, though we may still speak of doubling or surrogation.
Cycle 684
On the other hand, though the men may agree to it, the woman may not be told, or be bedtricked into it. Even when it is official and she knows about it, the woman may find unofficial ways to subvert it, through a double-crossing bedtrick of her own. Instead of remaining the passive field in which the man sows his seed, instead of closing her eyes and thinking of England (or Bengal), the woman becomes active and refuses to follow the script.
Indeed, the levi- rate and droit du seigneur are dramatized in narrative primarily in their subversion through bedtricks. The levirate is a legal way for a man to produce an heir for his dead brother by impregnating his brother's widow. The term is derived from the late Latin leviratus, "son-in-law," although the levirate marriage is sometimes (apparently wrongly) said to be so called because of its occur- rence in the Hebrew Bible, where Levi's brother begets a son on his behalf (and where a descendant of Levi, Onan,t husband of Tamar, resorts to the sin of onanism in order notto function as a levirate husband).
Flow 685
Raphael Patai lists the conditions that "had to be present in the social mores of the society in order to make levirate both possible and necessary": the society had to be polygynous ("Only in a society where a man was allowed to have several wives could he be expected to marry his childless brother's widow irrespective of his own marital status"), patrilocal (with brothers 237 238
Ladder 686
Hub 153
Designated Hitters
239 For the myths of levirate marriage are about yet another series of para- doxes. t The first is a metaphysical mystery: How can a dead man beget a child? This riddle resurfaces at the end of a bedtrick in All's Well That Ends Wellt (5.3), referring to a woman instead of a man: "One that's dead is quick" ("quick" meaning both "alive" and "pregnant").
Then come the psychological paradoxes. On the one hand, a man must never have sex with his brother's wife; on the other hand, he must have sex with his brother's wife-if the brother is dead. On the one hand, the person you most want to have sex with your wife, when you are dead, is your brother, because he has your genes; on the other hand, the last person you want to have sex with your wife, even when you are dead, is your brother, because of sibling rivalry.
Compare 687
On the one hand, the child that results is your child, because the law says he is; on the other hand, he isn't your child, because he does not spring from your loins. On the one hand, your widow wants to have sex with your brother, because she wants to bear a child; on the other hand, she may very well not want to have sex with your brother, because he is not the man she chose to marry. (This paradox interacts with and further compli- cates the one in which you fear that your wife does want to sleep with your brother.) Fraternal sibling rivalry yields to the necessity for the levirate marriage, expanding the sexual boundaries of women at least in principle, but then this necessity rebounds into the need for ultimate control of women so that they do not encourage illicit surrogations.
Whether the brother is doing his dead brother a favor or an injury is the source of considerable tension within the mythology. This is a variant of the double- bind: t when one man officially invites another to substitute for him, the resulting bedtrick still humiliates him, not by fooling him but by forcing him officially to acknowledge that the other man can do what he cannot.
Cycle 154
Brothers
The mythology of the levirate is best understood in the context of the more general corpus of stories about brothers who substitute for one an- other in bed. Like sisters, t brothers often use their innate resemblance to work with or against their siblings in bedtricks-a theme so common that Stith Thompsont lists it as a motif: K BILl, "Husband's twin brother mistaken by woman for her husband." A Buddhist text (dating from sometime before the fifth century) tells of a king who is a previous incarnation of the Buddha himself; it employs motifs that European folk- lore usually associates with women: the Substitute Bridet (here, groom), 240
Hub 688
Flow 155
King Kusa And His Handsome Brother
Queen Silvati had a wise but ugly son, named Kusa, and a son who was foolish but handsome, named Jayampati. She found a very beautiful bride for Kusa, named Pabhavati, and arranged the marriage, but then she began to worry, "This maiden is very lovely and my son is ugly. If she sees him, she won't stay for a single day but will run away." So she said to the girl's father, the Madda king, "In our family a wife is not allowed to see her husband by daylight until she has conceived." The girl agreed to this, but when Kusa wanted to see his bride by daylight, the queen arranged to have him disguised as an elephant keeper when Pabha- vati came to see the elephants (he pelted her with a piece of elephant shit), and as a groom in the horse stable when she came to see the horses (he pelted her with a piece of horse shit).
Cycle 689
t The second half of the story, too, follows a pattern far more typical of women's stories, and more particularly of Cupid and Psyche: after the wedding, the bride (here groom) loses the groom (here bride) by indulging her (his) forbidden curiosity and must undergo trials to win him (her) back. But both Kusa and Cupid are invisible to their brides, and the fact that Kusa's only flaw is that he is ugly links this tale with a related pattern of stories about male bedtricksters: Beauty and the Beast.
t Brothers frequently jump in and out of beds in real life (and in legal cases,t by no means the same thing). I cannot resist citing a little-known episode from the life of the real Abraham Lincoln. It seems that in 1829 the Lincoln family was excluded from the list of guests invited to the
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241 double wedding of their neighbors, the Grigsby boys, Charles and Reuben, and Lincoln felt mortified by this slight, the more so since an enemy of his named Josiah Crawford, a man with a "long, huge, blue nose," had been invited. This is what happened, in the words ofJames C. Richardson, from an interview recorded in September 1865:
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Abraham Lincoln And The Mistaken Partners
After the infair was ended the two women were put to bed. The candles were blown out upstairs-the gentlemen-the two husbands-were in- vited and shown to bed. Grigsby went into bed with, by an accident as it were, with Reuben Grigsby's wife and Reuben got into bed with Charles's wife, by accident as it were.
Lincoln, I say, was mortified and declared that he would have revenge. Lincoln was by nature witty and here was his chance. So he got up a witty poem-called the Book of Chron- icles, in which the infair-the mistake in partners-Crawford and his blue nose, came in each for its share-and this poem is remembered here in Indiana in scraps better than the Bible-better than Watts's Hymns.
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Another version of the story, more cryptic, gives Lincoln the role not merely of archivist of the plot but its author: "young Abraham became the moving spirit in a plot that resulted in maneuvering the brides into the wrong bedchambers on their wedding night. The mistake was rectified before too late, but not without considerable chagrin to those involved, a state of mind not 242
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Twin Beds
Samjna's:j: son Yama,t whose name actually means "twin," is the king of the dead; one of the two Gemini,:j: Castor and Pollux, gives half his life to the other. But the twin mistaken for his brother in bed has also been one of the great comic themes from the time of the Romans. In Plautus's Menaechmi (or The Two Menaechmuses), Menaechmus of Syracuse unwittingly mas- querades in Epidamnus as his brother from Epidamnus and enjoys both his brother's dinner and his courtesan, Erotium, who believes that Ma- naechmus the Syracusan is the same Menaechmus she saw moments be- fore and whom she has entertained in the past.
(The local twin puts on a dress and compares himself to Ganymede, Zeus's boy lover.) A Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare's great slapstick treatment of the theme of twin brothers, written between 1589 and 1593 and well adapted in the 1938 musical comedy The Boys from Syracuse,!l is itself an adaptation of both Menaechmi (in which, though there are two brothers, there is only one servant) and another play by Plautus, Amphitryont (in which two gods impersonate a man and his servant). But A Comedy of Errors doubles the doubles in a tale of twin brothers and their twin servants.
The theme is a perennial favorite, the innocence and comedy inhering in the fact that, like the brothers in Menaechmi rather than the gods in Amphitryon, the double does not intend to take over his twin brother's life-or wife. On the contrary, the joke is that he does not desire her as she hopes he will. Although no sexual act is explicitly consummated (perhaps because the courtesan in Plautus, whom the unconscious impostor explicitly says he has bedded [scortum accubui, "I lay with the whore"), becomes a wife in
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243 Shakespeare), the mistaken "dinner" with the woman (the courtesan in Plautus, the wife in Shakespeare) takes its place. Shakespeare is usually quite explicit about sex, but there may be more implied here than a mere souper intime. In David Bell's 1998 production for the Shakespeare Reper- tory Theatre in Chicago, the unwitting double staggers out after the "din- ner" half naked, pulling on his pants, and more than a shared meal is expressed by the horror in the wife's face when, learning that her husband has an identical twin, she asks, "Which of you two did dine with me to- day?" (5.1).
Flow 160
The Comedy Of Errors
Identical twin brothers were separated in youth as the result of a ship- wreck, and each was called Antipholus. One (Ephesan Antipholus, hence- forth E.) lived in Ephesus, the other (Syracusan Antipholus, henceforth S.) in Syracuse, and each had a servant named Dromio (E. was married to Adriana, and E.
Dromio was engaged to Luce, Adriana's maid, but neither S. came by chance to Ephesus with S. The sexual "errors" turn upon sexual jealousy and rejection.
The wife wonders why her husband (as she thinks, but actually her husband's twin brother) does not love her, and indeed, her worries are not unfounded: for her husband is suspiciously friendly with a courtesan, as he himself admits. Thus, where a wife (rightly or wrongly) often suspects what we have come to call "the other woman," this wife begins to believe that her husband actually is "another man" -which he, or rather his twin brother, is. By contrast, the unattached S.
Dromio is puzzled to discover that E. Dromio's comically fat girlfriend, who of course seems to S. Dromio to be a total stranger, regards him as her boyfriend.
The Comedy of Errors is about asymmetryt in sexual love: one partner expects intimacy, while the other regards him or her as a stranger. This distancing is wonderfully expressed by Adriana to S., whom she mistak- enly regards as her (straying) husband: Ay, ay, Antipholus, look strange, and frown: Some other mistress hath thy sweet aspects, I am not Adriana, nor thy wife .... How comes it now, my husband, O!
how comes it, That thou art thus estranged from thyself? Thyself I call it, being strange to me, 244 That, undividable, incorporate, Am better than thy dear self's better part. For if we two be one, and thou play false, 1 do digest the poison of thy flesh, Being strumpeted by thy contagion.
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The person he pretends to be, an artist, is the person he once was (before he sold out), the real person, and the one he remains in the end. The mythology of twin brothers who replace one another in bed is balanced by a mythology of twin brothers who do not replace one another in bed, despite all temptations to do so. The Brothers Grimm recorded a paradigmatic form of this story in which one brother lays his sword in the bed between himself and his brother's wife (who has mistaken him for her husband) to protect them both.
IS The knife that separates the brothers was given a bizarre twist in the film The Corsican Brothers (1941), in which conjoined twins, t Lucien and Mario, are separated shortly after birth; years later they become bitter rivals when Lucien falls in love with the woman who loves Mario. Attacking Mario, Lucien says, "The doctor's knife couldn't separate us; but my knife will do it now." The irony is that Lucien always experiences whatever pain is inflicted on Mario; if he were to cut him, he would wound himself (as in Theophile Gautier's story Avatar:j:)-an extreme case of the double-bind.t The twin who tries not to sleep with his brother's wife fails hilariously, several times, in a modern variant of this story, the 1996 film
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Multiplicity
Doug wants more time to meet his increasing workload as an engineer and more "quality time" with his kids and his wife, Laura, who wants to go back to her job in real estate. He lets a geneticist create two clones of himself (Doug 2 and Doug 3), and Doug 2 on his own produces a clone of himself, Doug 4, who is, like the blurry Xerox of a Xerox, flawed-an idiot. Doug warns the clones away from his wife (Rule Number One: "No clone nookie; original nookie only"), which he has anticipated by joking, "It wouldn't work if Laura rolls over in bed in the morning and finds two Dougs." Laura notices the discrepancies, memory lapses, and so forth- "I feel like I don't know you anymore," she says.
But one night when Doug is away, though Doug 3 loyally puts a pillow between them in the 246
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247 you think she liked you more than she likes me?" "Of course not," Doug 2 says. "You are me; 1 am you." But Doug himself admits, "I wasn't really there for her. Even when 1 was there, 1 wasn't there." The psychobabble cliche is here cunningly applied to a liminal situation in which "there" means simultaneously "existentially real," "sexually intimate," and "or- gasmically on the G-spot." The sensitive Doug 3 reassures Doug: "Trust me; it's all quality time." But the question of timet-which is, ultimately, the question of death-is what justified the cloning in the first place.
Real twins don't always behave like the ones in the stories; the fantasy and the experience of having a twin are quite different. A study of fifteen hundred pairs of twins (a project statistically flawed but still anecdotally interesting)l6 was carried out in Minneapolis (the twin city in more ways than one). The results suggest that "although twins competing for the same mate is a staple of television talk shows" -and, 1 would add, of myths-identical twins in real life very rarely replace one another in bed.
They tend not to be attracted sexually to the same sorts of partners: "The extraordinary difference between identical twins lies in whom they choose to marry."l? This evidence comes from left field (sociobiology) to confirm the mythological assumption that sex is the touchstone of difference in identity. t The researchers found that "when the twins were asked to eval- uate their twin's spouse, about as many disliked the spouse as not.
Cycle 164
The Levirate, Hindu Style
Let us turn now from stories in which brothers unofficially replace one another in bed to stories in which they do it legally, through varieties of the levirate. In ancient India, the Rig Veda, composed in Northwest India in about 1000 B.C.E., speaks of the wife of a dead man sleeping with his brother ("Who invites you, as a widow takes her husband's brother to her bed,
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Ladder 166
The Sons Of Dirghatamas
Dirghatamas fathered many sons, but they threw him in the Ganges on a raft, not wishing to support him since he was blind and old. He came downstream to King Balin, who recognized him and said, "Please father sons on my wives, to continue my line." The virile seer agreed, and the king sent him his wife Sudeshna. Seeing that he was blind and old, the queen did not go but sent the old man her nurse, on whom he fathered Kakshivat and ten other sons.
The second time, Dirghatamas feels her limbs, presumably to determine that he is in bed with the real queen this time, since, being blind, he must rely on touch rather than on sight. (A similar tactile test is carried out by Isaac on Esau t and by the prince in Basile's "The Old Woman Discov- ered."t) This test is then reflected in the child's name, Anga, "Limb." The argument as to whether the children really belong to their biological father (Dirghatamas) or their official father (Balin) is an early instance of a pa- ternity suit.
It is also one of the eternal paradoxes of the levirate and of the other forms of legal male surrogation that came to supplant it in Hindu mythology. The story of Dirghatamas and King Balin is told in the Mahabharata when Bhishma:j: wishes to convince his stepmother to support the pro- posed levirate of Vyasa on behalf of his dead half brother, King Vicitra- virya (for whose sake Bhishma himself has endured complex woman
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Persuaded, she summons Vyasa and sends him to Vicitra- virya's two widows, Ambika and Ambalika. The essence of what happens is this: THE SONS OF Vy ASA Since Ambika dosed her eyes when she conceived her son, Dhritarashtra, he was born blind. Ambalika turned pale and conceived Pandu the Pale.
Ambika:j: closes her eyest (and, presumably, thinks of Kurukshetra), and her child, Dhritarashtra, is blind,t by attraction to both his mother and his blind ancestor Dirghatamas. Ambalika turns pale and gives birth to a pale (and functionally impotent) son. When Ambika sends a slave girl in her place, staging a bedtrick that duplicates the one used against Dirghatamas, her son becomes a servant.
Another tragedy is also part of the indirect fallout from this disastrous levirate. There is an awkward imbalance here between the number of wives (two) and the number of sons (three), doubly and hence counteref- fectively patched by the double statement that the third son was born to a servant girl and that the first wife (Ambika) was supposed to sleep with Vyasa twice. In fact, the arrangement was originally more symmetrical, for there had been a third woman, Amba,:j: clearly the basic name, of which Ambika and Ambalika are variants.
(These are the names of the three queens that Vedic texts describe as pantomiming copulation with 252
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253 the end according to the story-teller?' They liked the idea. 'Because of the girl's unhappiness, a god would sleep with her and get her with child.' Sannicheri cackled. It is the sort of mind she had.
'If it was Ganesh, I would like to talk with her afterwards,' she said. Ganesh was the elephant god .. ." The plot succeeds (though the woman gets a girl, not the desired son), and when she is pregnant and the husband is delighted, the Englishman, who tells the story, remarks: "Before he went, he reminded me that the Gods must also be credited with the pregnancy.
But the unofficial levirate father need not be divine; Ann Gold has noted non theological fictions of this sort in villages in Rajasthan, where husbands who are able to admit to themselves the possibility of their own sterility tolerate the adultery of their wives in order to get the sons they so desperately desire.40
Cycle 169
The Levirate, Jewish Style
Like the Hindu stories we have seen, the two great tales of the levirate in the Bible-the stories of Tamar and Ruth (which record oral traditions that may date back to the eighth and seventh centuries B.c.E.)-tell of failed levirates, levirates called into question. The double standard t oper- ates here because the law tells us what the man can do if he does not want the levirate but not what the woman can do if she does not want it.
The stories address only the former situation, but in two permutations: the problem of the man who refuses the levirate and the problem of the woman who has to deal with such a man. The law of the levirate (yibum or meyabbem) and the conditions under which it could be abrogated (halitsa)-the fabric of the law and its un- weaving-are proclaimed together (as they are in the Hindu texts) in Deuteronomy 25.5-10: "If brothers live together, and one of them dies and has no child, ...
[the widow's] husband's brother shall go in unto her and take her to him to wife .... And if the man like not to take his brother's wife, ... then shall his brother's wife come unto him in the presence of the elders, and loose his shoe from off his foot, and spit in 254
Flow 170
Tamar And Judah
A long time afterward, Judah's wife, the daughter of Shuah, died; after being consoled, he went up toward Timnah to his sheepshearers, together with his friend Hirah the Adullamite. And Tamar was told, "Your father- in-law is coming up to Timnah for the sheep-shearing." Then she took off her widow's garments, covered her face with a veil, wrapped herself up, and sat down at the entrance to Eynaim on the road to Timnah, for she saw that Shelah was grown up and she had not been given to him as a wife.
Judah saw her and took her for a harlot [zona] because she had covered her face. So he turned aside to her by the road and said, "Look here, let me lie with you," for he did not realize that she was his daughter- in-law. She answered, "What will you pay me for lying with me?" He replied, "I'll send you a kid from my flock." She said, "Only if you leave a pledge until you send it." And he said, "What pledge should 1 leave you?" She replied, "Your seal and cord, and the staff that you carry." He gave them to her and he lay with her and she conceived by him.
Then she got up, went away, took off her veil, and put on her widow's garments. Judah sent the kid by his friend the Adullamite to redeem the pledge from the woman, but he could not find her. He inquired of the men of the place, "Where is the cult prostitute [qedesa], the one at Eynaim by the road?" and they answered, "There has been no cult prostitute [qedesa] here." So he went back to Judah and told him, "I couldn't find her, and the men of the place said, 'There has been no cult prostitute [qedesa] here.' " Judah said, "Let her keep the things, or we shall become a laugh- ingstock.
We are explicitly told that he reads her veiled presence by the wayside as characteristic of a harlot (zona), and he does not correct those who, later, accuse her of being a zona; but his friend asks about a cult prostitute (qedesa), a related but significantly 256
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Tamar is doing something similar to what Lot's daughters did when they aggressively and incestuously played a bedtrick upon their drunken father (Genesis 19.31-36). Tamar's seduction ofJudah is a far less griev- ous sin, since Judah is her father-in-law, not her natural father, but Leviti- cus (18.15, 20.12) prohibits a father from uncovering his daughter-in- law's nakedness and adds: "If any man lies with his daughter-in-law, both of them shall certainly be put to death.
Their blood is upon them." In this respect, the Hebrew Bible story of Tamar is liminal. Middle Assyrian law specifically gives the father-in- law the right to beget children by his sons' widows,51 but Hammurabi's Code forbids a man to sleep with his daughter-in-Iaw,52 and a later text, Jubilees (second century B.C.E.), explicitly points the finger of guilt: "And Judah knew that the deed which he did was evil because he lay with his daughter-in-law. And he condemned himself in his own sight" (2.41.30).
In Genesis, Judah does not take the Assyrian option by choice, but he admits that Tamar was more righteous than he in tricking him into taking it in fact. Thus, Judah's act is poised liminally between incest (with a natural daughter, a serious crime) and a quasi levirate (with his son's, rather than his brother's, widow, a crime by Jewish but not by Assyrian law); it is and isn't a crime. The confrontation between Judah and the woman he mistakes for a prostitute takes place right after the death of Judah's wife, the daughter of Shuah, a troublesome woman who is said, in Jubilees (2.41.130), to be indirectly responsible for the final debacle, because she prevented Shelah from marrying Tamar.
Ruth And Boaz And Naomi
[Naomi's husband died, and her two sons married Ruth, the Moabitess, and Orpah. When the two sons died, Naomi decided to return to her home, Bethlehem. Orpah remained behind, but Ruth protested her love for Naomi ("Whither thou goest ...
In Bethlehem, Ruth went to work in the fields of Naomi's kinsman, Boaz. Boaz noticed Ruth; he spoke to her and liked her. Naomi told Ruth to bathe, adorn herself, and go to Boaz, to make herself known to him only after he had feasted and drunk well, and to uncover his feet and lie with him and do whatever he asked.]
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259 Ruth went down to the threshing-floor and did just as her mother-in- law had charged. Boaz ate, drank, and felt free of care. He then proceeded to lie down at the edge of the grain pile.
Approaching quietly, Ruth bared his "legs," and lay down. Around midnight, the man was shaken by fright; he twisted away-there was a woman lying close to him! "Who are you?" he exclaimed.
"I am Ruth your handmaid," she replied. Spend the night here," said Boaz, " ... Lie down until morning." Ruth stayed by him until daybreak, but rose before a person's features could be recognized, for Boaz had thought it best that her arrival to the threshing-floor remain unnoticed.
Boaz married Ruth, and the elders said:] "May the Lord make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel.
Two tricky women (Leah and Tamar) are invoked as role models. The law of the levirate is mentioned several times, in a negative form, but the child is not regarded as the descendant of the dead husband. And there is, at midpoint, a surprising surprise: Is Boaz just surprised to find any woman in his bed?
Or is he particularly surprised because the woman is Ruth? If so, whom did he expect? Why does the Book of Ruth cite the stories of Leah and Tamar as parallels to itself in the elders' final blessing?
Bal argues that all three (Ruth, Leah, and Tamar) are women who collude with other women against men in levirate or pseudolevirate marriages. 59 I would add that each of the three women pretends to be another woman in bed. But who, then, is the other woman for whom Ruth substitutes, even though it is Ruth whom Boaz desires?
Who is the woman whom Boaz expected, so that he was frightened and drew back when he saw Ruth there?
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261 Naomi herself considers and rejects the possibility of a real marriage for herself that might produce new husbands for her two widowed daugh- ters-in-Iaw to marry, in turn, through their own levirates. At the very start of the story, Naomi says to them, "Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. If I should say I have hope, even if I should have a husband this night and should bear sons, would you therefore wait til they were grown?" (1.12).
This is exactly what Judah had asked Tamar to do after Onan died, and the same verb, "he was grown," is used to indicate when Tamar had a right to expect to be mar- ried to Shelah, although Judah failed to arrange the marriage. Naomi, then, might have acted like Judah and produced another son for Ruth to marry. But Naomi is too old-not necessarily too old to bear children, as she herself points out (when no one had asked her); the ambiguous Hebrew allows us to believe either that Naomi can bear children or that she can- not.
After all, these women are the descendants of the laughing Sarah, who became pregnant when she was much older than Naomi-for with God, all things are possible (Genesis 18.12-15). But Naomi is too old, as the Hebrew literally puts it, to "be with a man" or "for or of a man"- that is, to attract a husband. Indeed, Naomi may well have urged her daughters-in-law to abandon her not, as is usually argued, out of a selfless concern for their welfare ("I'll just sit here in the dark") but to get rid of younger women who would (as in fact Ruth does) attract men away from Naomi herself.
There is an interesting variation in the ancient writ- ten version of the text (Mona Fishbane calls it "Naomi's slipt of the tongue") when Naomi uses the first person instead of the second in in- structing Ruth: "Bathe, anoint yourself, and I will put on your dress, and I will go down to the threshing floor ... and uncover his feet, and I will lie down." This slip may represent, in Fishbane's opinion, "the conflation of identities in Naomi's mind"61 or, in my opinion, the relict of a bedtrick, Naomi in Ruth's clothing.
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263 adage that the size of a man's feett indicates the size of his genitalst), thus implying that Boaz and Ruth made love. Feet and shoes also playa role in the ceremony by which Boaz makes Ruth legally his, the ritual enacted with the man otherwise entitled to her. This ceremony, which involves "drawing off the shoe," seems to resemble the halitsa, the abrogation of the levirate, mentioned in the original Deu- teronomic text that we considered in connection with Tamar.
Thus, when Ruth uncovers Boaz's feet-which might well involve taking off his shoes-she seems to be drawing off the shoe of the levirate, releasing Boaz from a levirate with her. Boaz claims to be engaging in a levirate- he insists that he is marrying Ruth "the wife of Mahlon, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance" (4.5, lO)-but the levirate in the Book of Ruth is not really a levirate. So, too, this apparent halitsa is not a halitsa: the "nearer kinsman" whose shoe Boaz draws off is not obliged to perform the levirate and so is not shirking any duty.
On the contrary, Boaz volunteers to do it, thus taking on the levirate that is normally can- celed by the halitsa. And, as we have noted, Boaz is not Ruth's brother- in-law, her designated Jewish levirate hitter, but Naomi's. In fact the story represents a different ritual, a kind of shadow of the halitsa, a ritual not about sex but about real estate.
The competition between Boaz and the "nearer kinsman" is between two potential redeemers (goel) of Naomi's land. When Boaz is first introduced, he is called a goel, a redeeming kins- man to Elimelech; Ruth reminds him of this when she comes to him in the night, and he speaks of being a goel when he buys off the nearer kinsman (4.4-9). The Book of Ruth therefore turns out to be a bed- trick masquerading as a goel masquerading as a halitsa masquerading as a levirate.
BEDTRICKSTERS IN THE LINEAGE OF JEsus The line of masquerading women from Leah to Tamar to Ruth leads in the New evidence to the birth of Jesus, the child of double fathers. 64 Matthew's lineage ofJesus, from Abraham and Isaac through Boaz, Jesse, and David, to Joseph, includes only four women: "Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, ... Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, ...
and David the father of Solomon by [Bath-Sheba,] the woman who had been Uriah's wife" (Matthew 1.2- 6). Matthew has to mention all the fathers-that is the whole point of the male lineage-but gratuitously he adds the names of four of the moth- ers. Edmund Leach has sought the underlying structures 264
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265 size" the levirate as subvert it; nor is David Uriah's brother (far from it; Uriah is a Hittite). Thus, Bath-Sheba joins Tamar and Ruth both in ignor- ing the levirate and in having two fathers for her son. She is also of a tribe (Hittite) foreignt to that of the man she sleeps with; similarly, Tamar is often said to be a Canaanite, and Ruth, the Moabitess "amid the alien corn,"68 is descended from Moab, the offspring of Lot's daughters and their father (Genesis 19.31-36).
The handmaid went and told everything to her mistress, who said, "My daughter, what can I do, seeing that he has not touched me for three years?" The handmaid replied, "Prepare yourself, as will I, and at night when he tells you to close the door, you will come in and I will go out." So she did. At night the handmaid got up and blew out the light and went to close the door, and her mistress entered when she left.
She made love with him all night and got pregnant with David. And because of [Jesse'sllove for the handmaid, David was redder than his brothers. After nine months had passed, her sons wished to kill her and her son David when they saw that he was red.
Jesse said to them, "Leave them alone and let him be our slave and tend the flocks." And the matter remained a secret for twenty-eight years.73 266
Joseph'S Bedtrick
The beginning of the birth of Jesus. His mother was Mary (a daughter) of Israel. And she had a betrothed of kingly seed, of the house of David; and his name was John.
And he was learned in the law, and feared heaven greatly. Now, over against the door of her house (there dwelt a man) of fair appearance (a warrior), Joseph the son of Pandera: he cast his eyes upon her. It was Saturday night and a man entered the door of her house.
She thought in her heart that he was John her betrothed and she hid her face and was embarrassed. He hugged and kissed her. And she said, "Don't touch me.
I have separated myself from others because of my menstrual impurity." But he did not pay any attention to what she had said, nor did he worry about her impurity. He lay with her and she became pregnant by him. In the middle of the night her betrothed, R.
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The claim that one or the other of the two sisters is "more real" -older, wiser, younger, or more beautiful-has therefore had serious historical consequences. Certain medieval European Christian texts explicitly connect the irreg- ularities of the birth of Jesus to Mary with another sort of problematic maternity-maternal imprinting,t which they regard as "a blasphemous parody of the cult of the Virgin Mary. In erasing all traces of the progeny's legitimate father, the monstrous mother replicates, and derides, the Im- maculate Conception.
Mary resembles not only Tamar but Alcmena and Leda,t who were impregnated by Zeus in the form of a husband and a swan, respectively. The Evangelist may have had both the Hebrew stories and the Greek ideas in mind when he chose the women to include in the lineage of Jesus in his Gospel.
Transformations Of The Levirate
We have seen that, though the levirate is ostensibly an act of collusion between two men, there is often uneasiness on the part of one or both of the men (in the Jewish variants) or distaste on the part of the woman (in the Hindu variants), and bedtricks frequently occur as a means by which women circumvent the plans of men. In the Hindu stories of Dirghatamas and Vyasa, the women object to the levirate and avoid it 270
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271 Harume, and a boy, Akio. Harume, who was brain-damaged by her broth- er's feet during the birth, was hidden away immediately; Akio married a woman named Yasuko but died in an accident only a year later, leaving her childless. Harume then came back to live with Mieko, and Mieko contrived with Yasuko to have Yasuko's lover, Ibuki, spend a night with Yasuko, during which Ibuki was drugged and Harume was substituted for Yasuko.
Mieko arranges the bedtrick in order to get Ibuki to father a child in Harume, so that she, Mieko, might con- tinue the line of her own blood and that of her lover, but also, indirectly, the blood of her son, Akio. The configuration of this levirate is complex: when Akio dies without an heir, his mother enlists not his brother (he has none) but his wife's lover and, in place of his wife, his sister, to supply the genes that the nonexistent brother would have provided.
Differences among these stories are intriguing, and we must grant that the emotions that they express are always modified by culture, certainly by the time they are encased in narrative and arguably even when they are experienced by each person in the culture. Yet the parallels between these stories of subverted levirates are .stunning and must give us pause.
The Droit Du Seigneur
The levirate overlaps with two other sorts of male surrogation: in one, the king has (or takes) the right (or duty) to deflower a virgin, and in the other, a priest has the duty to deflower the bride in order to pro- tect the bridegroom from the danger of the blood of defloration. We have seen how the role of the priest was transformed into a more conventional levirate in the story of Vyasa; now let us consider how the role of the king undergoes permutations in Europe.
Designated Hitters
273 as a woman might have wanted to sleep with her husband's younger brother, so too she may have preferred the king to her husband (just as women in myths often preferred gods to their husbands:j:), for reasons of sex or power or both. But surely the use of political power to secure sexual favors is ancient and widespread. The droit du seigneur in the broadest sense-political pressure for sexual favors, what we now call sexual harassment-must have been invoked informally all the time but was formalized in the myths as if it were a kind of unofficial law or right, one that was, from the start, intolerable.
We might regard the myth (or reality) of the droit du seigneur, in which the king controls the sexuality of his female subjects, as merely the extreme political form of the much more common practice of arranged marriages, in which the father controls the sexuality of his daughter. The myths dramatize the tension between duty, t in which women had little or no choice, and desire, t in which they had some choice. Stories like "Beauty and the Beast"t make explicit the connection between the father's familial power over the girl and the Beast's royal power over the father.
European Subversions Of The Droit Du Seigneur
Even more than the levirate, the droit du seigneur is dramatized in narra- tive primarily in its subversion. A man betrays his wife with another man, as it were, when he inflicts a designated hitter on her; and when she sends a covert substitute, substituting a maid for the princess, her bedtrick re- sponse is a kind of double-cross. t The levirate and droit du seigneur are social fictions, which lead in turn to the antisocial fiction of the double-cross.
At a production of this play in 1992, at the height of the Clarence Thomas/ Anita Hill debates, when Angelo sneered, "Who will believe thee, Isabella?" the audience gasped as perhaps no audience for this play has ever gasped before. It is not hard to imagine Judge Clarence Thomas say- ing to Anita Hill, in response to her threats to expose him, an updated version of what Angelo said to Isabella: "My unsoiled name, th' austere- ness of my life, / My vouch against you, and my place i' the state, / Will so your accusation overweigh, / That you shall stifle in your own report, / And smell of calumny.
As for you, / Say what you can; my false o'erweighs your true" (2.4). Isabella escapes the droit du seigneur by double-backingt the villain into sleeping with his rejected fiancee, Mari- ana. Yet Isabella may be the victim of yet another droit du seigneur.
She is silenced,t literally dumbstruck, at the end of the play by the duke's offer of marriage, which confronts her, like the other offenders onstage, with a forced marriage as punishment for the offense of slandering a prince. Indeed, the duke, not Isabella, is the one who orchestrates her bedtrick-to get her away from Angelo, perhaps the better to turn his own powers on her. Here, as in so much else, the duke and Angelo are twins.
The servant girl here plays an ambiguous role: usually she takes the place of a noble lady (such as Isolde) to get her out of an unwanted situa- tion, but occasionally, as in the story of Jesse's wife Nazbat, the noble
Designated Hitters
275 lady may save her maid from harassment by a man whose bed the lady wants to get into-her husband. The device of putting the harasser's wife in place of the harassed woman is also used in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, t both in Beaumarchais's play and in Da Ponte's libretto. The opera opens with Figaro and his bride, Susanna, planning their wedding; then she tells him that Count Almaviva regrets having abolished his feudal privilege of droit du seigneur and wishes to revive it for her.
In response to the unwanted sexual double presented by the seigneur, Susanna helps the count's wife, the Countess Rosina, to double- backt and substitute herself for Susanna.
The Diritto Della Signora
There is a chain of subjugation in many of these stories, as the exercise of power travels down the line: when the king inflicts his will upon a lady who loves another man, oppressing both the man and the woman by exercising the droit du seigneur, she inflicts her own power on an inferior. Many a lady of quality, like the woman in Yeats's "The Three Bushes,"t sends her maid in her place, using her power over the maid as the king or husband uses his power over her.
A Russian noblewoman uses her power over her maid almost as blatantly as a man, though indirectly, in 276
Designated Hitters
277 century C.E., the injuries to her become an important factor in the subse- quent plot: (TRISTAN AND) ISOLDE AND BRANGANE When King Mark sent Tristan to woo Isolde on Mark's behalf, Tristan himself fell in love with Isolde on the voyage home to Mark (they drank a love potion prepared by Brangane, Isolde's maid); and so, when Mark expected Isolde to be a virgin on the wedding night, Brangane took her place in the dark. Only the three of them (Mark and the two women) were present in the king's bedroom; Brangane wore the queen's robes, they put out the lights, and Brangane "suffered her ordeal" in silence.
Worried that Brangane might say something to betray her, Isolde re- mained "as close as possible to them during the night to ascertain what they said." 100 After the consummation, Brangane slipped out of the room and Isolde slipped in; the lights were turned on, wine was drunk, and, to Isolde's distress, Mark resumed his lovemaking. He noticed nothing: "To him, one woman was as another; so he found Isolde, too, to be of good deportment. There was nothing to choose between them-he found gold and brass in either.
Moreover, they both paid him their dues, one way and another, so that he noticed nothing amiss."lOl Thus, the servant Brangane substitutes (unofficially) for Isolde to atone for her sin in serving the love potion that made the servant Tristan substi- tute (unofficially) for the king. They might have assumed that since it is the first time Mark will have slept with Isolde, he has no basis for compari- son; but even when he does have such a basis, he cannot tell the difference.
Isolde hovers over the bedtrick as Rachel t hovers over Leah (in the mid- rash), but she needn't have worried: Mark notices neither the switch nor the switch back (to Isolde), because it is dark,t he is drunkt from the wedding feast, nobody says a word, and it's in everyone's best interestt to allow the deceit to succeed. When Isolde turns against Brangane, another dou- ble appears. For when Isolde commands a servant to take Brangane to the forest and kill her, the servant, as usual, balks at the last minute and kills a deer instead, taking back its tonguet as proof of the murder.
The animal that is killed instead of Brangane is thus a sacrificial substitute, and the physical proof provided by Brangane's tongue is a double of the physical proof of the dragon's tongue that Tristan used earlier to prove that he, and not the false Steward, killed the dragon and had the right to Isolde. But Brangane's tongue lies (it is not, in fact, Brangane's tongue 278
The Old Mistress And The Young Maid
[A knight was the lover of a woman who, during his absence, married an elderly knight, who seldom made love to her more than once a month. The lover returned and came to stay with the elderly knight and his lady and schemed to get into bed with his former mistress. She summoned the maid and explained the problem: "My husband is in the habit, as you well know, of turning toward me in the night, to feel around for me a bit, and then to leave me alone, once again dropping off to sleep." So the maid got into bed with the old knight; the lady, with her lover.] As was his custom, the lord awoke about an hour before daybreak, and turned towards his chambermaid, assuming that it was his wife.
In groping around, his hand happened to strike her breast, which was very firm and pointed to the touch. He immediately knew that it was not his wife's, which was nowhere so firm. "Aha!" he exclaimed to himself.
"I see very well what is going on. They've played a trick on me, and I'll play one on them in return." He turned towards this lovely girl, and despite some misfortune, he broke only one lance, but she let him do it without saying a single word, or even half a word. [Then he called out to his guest, saying,] "I'll make the same exchange as last night with you anytime you so wish it ....
I'll trade an old woman whose youth is passed, and who is dishonest and disloyal, to boot, for a beautiful, good, fresh young thing. For where Casanova was tricked into mistaking an old woman for a young one, this old knight was "tricked" into mistaking a young one for an old one-but did indeed notice the difference.
The mistress promises the maid, apparently in good faith, that she will not have to submit to an actual sexual act; the old knight, however, responds to the younger woman with unaccustomed vigor, and the maid must suffer in silence.t Perhaps the exposure of her mistress is some compensation for her; perhaps not. Some women wield not merely the power of any rich and/or noble woman over her servants but special royal (or divine) power over men.
Designated Hitters
279 This is a female droit du seigneur of a different sort, what we might call, because of its notorious use by several Italian women, the diritto della signora (a woman's direct use of political power to demand sexual favors). The Marriage of Figaro suggests a diritto della signora in another subplot: Marcellina tries to force Figaro to marry her against his will, through legal coercion, and is foiled only when it is revealed that she is his mother, in a comic variant of, simultaneously, the droit du seigneur, the diritto della signora, and the Family Romance.
t In such cases, a woman may use her power not to force her maid to get her out of a sexual situation but to force a lower-class man into one. Potiphar's wife (Genesis 39), the seduc- tive goddesses/queens (Aphrodite,:j: Astarte), and even, perhaps, Iocasta (who doesn't exactly force Oedipust to sleep with her but perhaps buys him or seduces him with the power of the throne) may be included in this category, to say nothing of all the older women who keep gigolos (though here it's hard to say who's using whom).
But the female variant of the droit du seigneur, though common enough in the first sense (her power over female servants), is relatively rare in the second sense (her power over lower-class men). A Lombard queen combined a bedtrick with a protofeminist use of the diritto della signora against a man who was the servant of her husband the king, in this eighth-century Latin text:
King Alboim'S Wife
[King Alboim killed the father of his wife, Rosemund, and made her drink from a cup he had made from her father's skull. To take revenge] she put herself at night in the bed of her dressing-maid with whom Peredeo was accustomed to have intercourse, and then Peredeo, coming in ignorance, lay with the queen. And when the wicked act was already accomplished and she asked him whom he thought her to be, and he named the name of his mistress that he thought she was, the queen added: "It is in no way as you think, but I am Rosemund," she says, "and surely now you have perpetrated such a deed, Peredeo, that either you must kill Alboim or he will slay you with his sword." [Peredeo helped her to kill the king.]103 This story owes much to the story of King Candaules, t who, having made the mistake of falling in love with his own wife, urged Gyges to hide behind the bedroom door (according to Herodotus l.8) or to wear a ring of invisibility (according to Plato, Republic, 2.359D-360D) to see for himself how beautiful she was.
When the queen learned that Gyges had looked upon her naked, she exercised her diritto della signora, 280
Designated Hitters
281 fooled and only realized the trick later, when he saw the two women together; then he cursed Taravati to be raped by someone else in disguise (the god Shiva, t as it transpires). 107 In a story told in a Sanskrit text of c. 900 B.C.E., a woman uses a bedtrick to escape from a Brahmin:
Yavakri And The Brahmin'S Wife
Yavakri had the brilliance and glamor of a Brahmin. If he called a woman to him and said, "Hey!" to her, she had sex with him and she died; even if she did not have sex with him, she died. He called the wife of a certain Brahmin to him and said "Hey!" to her.
She reflected, "If I have sex with him, or if I do not, I will surely die in any case. Hell, let me have sex with him; ifI am to die, let me at least die giving pleasure to a Brahmin." [Or, in an alternative reading, "A woman who does something displeasing to a Brahmin will die."] She said to him, "Stay there, and 1 will come to you." As she was preparing herself, weeping, her husband came to her. He said to her, "Why are you adorning yourself, and why are you weeping?" She said, "I am full of self-pity when 1 realize that 1 am going to die.
For Yavakri called me to him and said 'Hey!' to me." Her husband made an oblation and said, "Fire, bring to me the beloved of Fire, prepared and adorned for Yavakri, and she will save me today." With this he created a celestial nymph ofthe same form [as his wife], saying to her, "There is Yavakri. Go to him." Then he made a second oblation and said, "Bring me a fierce demigod, lusty, rock-hurling, blindingly bright, to be the killer of Yavakri." And with this he created a jealous demigod with an iron club in his hand, saying to him, "Your wife has just gone to Yavakri.
Go to him." As the nymph came to Yavakri, Yavakri spread out the bed, and she smiled at him. He said to her, "Little woman, you're smiling, but you don't have anything to smile about." "Why so?" "Because you are going to die," he said. She stretched out her foot and said, "Man, you have surely never 'cooked' a woman with feet like this." For the bottoms of her feet were covered with hair.
The two of them went together, and when they finally pulled apart, just at that moment the demigod with the iron club in his hand came to them. Yavakri said to him, "Honor to you. How can 1 avoid paying for this?" "Maybe there is a way for you to make up for it, and maybe there is not," said the demigod.
"If you cut off the head of everything that your father possesses, before sunrise, that might make up for it-or maybe it won't." Yavakri began to cut off the heads in that way. People said, "Yavakri has gone crazy. Let's tie him up." "No," said his father; "my son acts as 282
Jewish Subversions Of The Droit Du Seigneur
Jewish tradition, which calls the levirate into question, also suggests ways of escaping the droit du seigneur. Esther, in the Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible, is an orphan adopted by Mordecai, her cousin. Pretending not to be Jewish (already a masquerade!), she marries King Ahasuerus.
But according to a Jewish tradition recorded in various sources between 100 B.C.E. and 500 C.E., Esther was married to Mordecai, and that tradi- tion, troubled by her relationship with Ahasuerus, took a route that the reader by now should almost be able to predict:
The Shadow Esther
When Esther had grown to maidenhood, Mordecai had espoused her. Nat- urally, Esther would have been ready to defend her conjugal honor with her life. She would gladly have suffered death at the hands of the king's bailiffs rather than yield herself to a man not her husband.
Luckily, there was no need for this sacrifice, for her marriage with Ahasuerus was but a feigned union. GOD had sent down a female spirit in the guise of Esther to take her place with the king. Esther herself never lived with Ahasuerus as his wife.
The old sources do not know of this docetism, and main- tain that the last Darius was the offspring of Ahasuerus' marriage with Esther.lIo "The old sources" may not know of this particular Docetism, but they know the bedtrick very, very well, and they know that it can be used not only to protect a woman from an unwanted sexual liaison but sometimes, even more usefully, to allow her to say that it has protected her from such a liaison, claiming false knowledge.t Moreover, where the other stories we have considered seem to express a woman's response to rape or an unwanted sexual liaison, the revisionist story of Esther more obviously reveals the concern of its (male) author to remove any possible stigma from one of the heroines of Jewish tradition. Stories about the subversion of designated hitters may be so numerous simply because acquiescence doesn't make much of a story, but they may also be evidence that subversion was a popular fantasy, or perhaps even a popular stratagem.
The male surrogates in different cultures come from different directions and are subverted in different ways. The levirates of brothers (Hindu and Jewish), drawing upon a broader cross-cultural my- thology of brothers who replace one another in bed, are subverted in ways that refract upon early Christian mythology and undergo different transformations in African and Japanese cultures. The droit du seigneur, an early European variant of male surrogation, is resisted in many ways in texts such as The Marriage of Figaro and Tristan and Isolde, as is its female counterpart, the diritto della signora.
Its Hindu and Jewish variants also intersect with the mythologies of Brahmins and tyrants who oppress not merely individual women but an entire religion and ethnic group. It is also the focus for a more general kind of political sexual harassment, still operative in contemporary European and American culture, which we will consider in chapter 7.
Approach Six: Law, or Loopholes in the Penal Code
Twentieth-century variants of the bedtrick deal with scientific issues- cloning and the creation oflife-which, in our litigious society, find their way into the law courts in the form of fights about abortion, adoption, artificial insemination, and rape. I have already noted, in different con- texts, some of the legal t repercussions of new technologies of in vitro implantation, t as well as the implications that medical techniques of sur- rogation t have for bed trick concepts such as the diritto della signora.
Compare 172
Rape And Sexual Fraud
Twentieth-century variants of the bedtrick deal with scientific issues- cloning and the creation oflife-which, in our litigious society, find their way into the law courts in the form of fights about abortion, adoption, artificial insemination, and rape. I have already noted, in different con- texts, some of the legal t repercussions of new technologies of in vitro implantation, t as well as the implications that medical techniques of sur- rogation t have for bed trick concepts such as the diritto della signora.
t The fallout from what have been called "Sperm Wars," the techniques of artificial insemination and frozen sperm, constantly touches the media. An adopted child created by donor insemination wrote a Newsweek essay in which she complained: "The process is centered around deception .... Some doctors encourage the couple to lie, to say that the husband's infer- tility has been treated successfully.
The Family Romancet has been subjected to heavy litigation in the past half-century in America, but the ancient mythology of the levirate should warn us that these problems are not likely to be settled in any court oflaw. In contemporary legal debates about sexual fraud, t as Judge Richard Posner points out, "the problems of proof of seduction by false pretenses ... are exquisitely difficult." 112 One doctor who lied about artificial insemination became involved in a bedtrick.
Our source is a 1992 article in the New York Times, entitled
Hub 173
Law, Or Loopholes In The Penal Code
Jacobson, convicted on 52 counts of fraud and perjury, caused his patients "extreme psychological injury," ranging from depres- sion and guilt to a fear of doctors, said Federal District Judge James c. Jacobson, who is married and has eight children by his wife, was allowed to remain free during appeal. "I was totally unaware of the anguish, the anger and the hate that 1 have caused," he told the judge.
"I am deeply sorry." Dr. Jacobson was convicted on March 4 after former patients testified under anonymity they never would have let him insemi- nate them if they had known he was using his own sperm, rather than that of anonymous donors supposedly matched to characteristics of their husbands .... On the witness stand Dr.
t The ancient myths also cast light on modern legal and psychological aspects of rape, t including date rape, marital rape, and what we have now designated, in contrast, by the strange phrase "stranger rape" (stranger than what?). In legal terms, a bedtrick is one subdivision of sexual fraud, which includes not only other sorts of lies (such as saying that you are using contraception when you are not, or that you do not have AIDS when you do) but two senses of "impersonating a spouse," one of which is our bedtrick while the other simply involves the banal pretense that you have married your victim when you have not.
These legal cases turn upon deception about the nature of the act or the personal identity of one of the participants. The Model Penal Code paragraph 213.1(2)(c) contains a provision criminalizing the seduction of a woman by imper- sonating her husband. About forty states had similar laws in 1995, and prosecutors have won rape-by-fraud cases across the countryY4 Such cases usually come down to a matter of consent or choice.
Cycle 174
Flow 175
Par Tners Thought He Was Somebody Else
The phone rings late at night. In a sexy whisper, a man persuades a woman to unlock her door, undress, put on a blindfold and wait for him in bed. At least three women did so, thinking he was their boyfriend, and had sex with the so-called Fantasy Man.
One woman had sex with him twice a week for two months. Now they want police to charge Raymond Mitchell III with rape. The 45-year-old businessman says he was just fulfilling the women's fantasies and the sex was consensual.
Police are not sure what to do. Investigators are looking at whether Mitchell claimed to be someone else, which could constitute rape by fraud. But Connie Vaupel, who got Mitchell, a co-worker, charged with at- tempted rape in 1989, defended the alleged victims.
"These are not stupid women," she said. "They were convinced of something that was not true. He had enough information beforehand to convince them.
Believe me, this guy is slick." ... The Tennessee Sentencing Commission ... in 1989 updated an 1870 criminal statute on "fictitious husband rape" and came up with Tennessee's current rape-by-fraud statute.
More information is given in the "box": Raymond Mitchell's accusers are: A 26-year-old woman who realized that Fantasy Man was not her boyfriend as soon as he touched her. She feared that he would hurt her if she resisted. A woman in her mid-30s who thought Fantasy Man was a man from Texas she had met a week before.
She had sex with Fantasy Man twice before calling the Texan and realizing the truth. A woman in her early 20s who said she had sex with Fantasy Man twice a week for two months because she believed he was her boyfriend. She realized the truth when her blindfold slipped.1l7
Ladder 176
Law, Or Loopholes In The Penal Code
287 Thus, one woman did see through the trick but was virtually raped. The others, however, saw and heard just what they hoped to see and hear, t just like the people in myths. A legal case involving identical male twinst in Nassau County, New York, appeared in a 1994 law journal, headlined
Compare 177
Sexual Misconduct Count Dismissed In Deception
OF TWIN's GIRLFRIEND A twin accused of deceiving his brother's girlfriend into having sexual intercourse won dismissal of a sexual misconduct charge this week after a Nassau County judge decided there was not statutory basis for prosecu- tion. The judge ruled that what amounted to loopholes in the Penal Law mandated dismissal tied to facts in a case he described as "truly novel." The key elements missing in the statutory framework, District Court Judge John Michael Gallaso explained in People v.
Lamont Hough, was the Legislature's exclusion of fraud, deception or impersonation in defining sexual misconduct where there was lack of consent .... The charge against Lamont Hough alleged he made an early morning visit to the home of the girlfriend of his twin brother, Lenny. The woman, in her complaint, said she consented to intercourse in her darkened apartment believing the man was her boyfriend.
Only afterwards, when the man asked, "Are you going to tell Lenny?" did she realize the deception .... "The lack of consent results from the complainant's mistaken belief, resulting from defendant's alleged fraud, that the body she made love with was that of her boyfriend."llB The "loopholes in the Penal Law" reflect the blind reasoning that is the driving force behind the folklore on this theme; if the judge had read those stories he would not have found this case "truly novel." The belief that the woman made love with a body, rather than a person (or a mind t), is a masterpiece of the legal mind at work.
The record shows that there was no moon on that night.") 120 Both by insisting on darkness ("curiously enough") and by looking away, the victim stymies sight. t But are there no other ways of telling who you are in bed with? The other bases of the woman's nonrecognition of the man in her bed are quite traditional: Complainant believed the male was her boyfriend because it sounded like him ....
Complainant opened the door and thought it was Lenny who entered the apartment, as it was dark and she couldn't see. The male, who smelt of alcohol, got into bed next to the complainant .... The male began to touch the complainant's breasts and complainant responded "Oh boy, your [sic] drunk and horney." He then asked her to have sex with him and she told him to make it quick because she had to work in the morning .
Complainant wasn't looking at the male's face. Darkness, t inattention, t time ("make it quick"), t drunkenness, t and self-deception, t as well as the voicet-they're all there. Equally tradi- tional is the reason given for the trickster's self-revelation: male pride, t sibling jealousy,t and the double-bindt ("When the act was over, the male said, 'Was that the best sex you ever had?'" -as Jupiter said to Alcmena:j:).
In yet another case of this type, in Arizona, a woman was at first fooled by the man's silencet but then came to realize the deception, not by his behavior in bed, but by other, more trivial factors. The defendant testified: "When I got in bed with her, she thought I was her husband and kept calling me 'Charlie.' I didn't want to talk, because she would know I wasn't her husband and I took her pajama bottoms off. She didn't know that I wasn't her husband until we had had intercourse." Again the clue of the voice is deflected.
Hub 178
Judge Posner discusses another sort of sex by fraud: a medical prac- titioner who inserts his penis into a patient's body under the guise of administering "medical treatment."122 Similarly, a gynecologist who re- peatedly had intercourse with a young and, apparently, very inexperienced patient under the pretext of treating her menstrual cramps was convicted
Cycle 179
Rape And Multiple Personalities
Multiple personalities have always given the courts a headache, and when sex is involved, it reaches the proportions of a migraine. Eve White,:j: it may be recalled, wanted to sue her husband for divorce when he slept with her alter ego. A judge found "mind-boggling" (but rendered a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity) the 1977 case of William Stanley Milli- gan, a twenty-three-year-old Ohio man accused of nine rapes, who argued that "the rapist was not Milligan, but Adelena, a 19-year-old lesbian, one of his personalities." 127 In a 1990 lawsuit in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a woman who had been diagnosed as having a multiple personality disorder (she had forty-five personalities) claimed that the personality who was flirta- tious and promiscuous had accepted a date with a man who had pressed his sexual claims upon another of her personalities, who was shy and chaste.
The whore invited him into bed and the nun kicked him out:
The Ufo Of Psychiatry
Jurors heard psychiatrists disagree over the 27-year-old woman's con- tention that she was unaware one of her personalities-described as a fun-loving 20-year-old woman-was having sex. She said she learned of it from another personality, a girl the age of 6. Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist who testified for the defense, said he feels she comprehended her conduct.
Treffert said the woman's various characters were encour- aged by her therapists who believe in multiple personality disorder, which he called "the UFO of psychiatry." 128 Six of the woman's personalities testified in the trial. The little child who blew the whistle was Emily, "a personality who is approximately 6 years old and sometimes eats crayons that the other personalities are then obliged to spit out." 129 The ruling sustained the law on the books, that it was a crime to have sex with someone known to have a multiple personality disorder.
But in a case in St. Paul, Minnesota (the twint city), in 1995, a woman named Jeanne Chacon, who had previously accused her fiance, Paul Erlinder, of domestic abuse, later made another claim: CHACON A SON Goin In a flashback to childhood abuse, she reverted to being "Little Jeanne." As "Little Jeanne," she says, she attacked Erlinder, who restrained her. Now that she's back to being "Big Jeanne," Chacon wants the case dropped.
So Chacon wants to defend Er- linder herself (as "Big Jeanne") and turn in "Little Jeanne" to police.l3l We might see the Wisconsin and Minnesota cases (what is it about those cold midwestern states?) as exaggerations of the more usual claims in date rape, that the man misunderstood the woman's intentions or even that he disregarded her explicit protests. This is the "rape" mentality, which argues that "her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes."t The myths support both of these views, the man's and the woman's.
Some of these myths argue, like the woman who is the victim of rape, that the man does not see both sides of the woman he is with. Other myths, or other parts of the same myth, argue, like the man who is accused of rape, that the woman herself is more than one woman, that the woman who wants the man is replaced by another woman who does not want him (or the reverse, depending on your point of view).
This latter view, however, the view that a woman has several doubles, may also express another fantasy that the raped woman herself creates to deal with her memory of the rape.:j: When both the rapist and his victim have multiple personalities, the bed gets very crowdedt indeed. A double-crosst of this sort in real life (or at least in the newspapers, which is not quite the same thing) took place in 1944:
Personalities
They met, he says, in group therapy last spring, and as they became better friends so did their multiple personalities, who fell in love and talked of marriage. Kelly, 44, of Falls Church, Va., has been charged with breaking into the woman's Prince William County home, binding her hands with wire and raping her. Kelly says he didn't do it.
But when we look a bit closer we see that only one of them claimed that it happened that way: the woman says she was raped by Edward, while he says that "Spirit" and "Laura" had consensual sex. He was arguing that it was a double-cross; t apparently she, or at least one of her, maintained that it was plain rape. As in so many enduring myths, an insoluble paradoxt is embedded in a tale of desire, sexual violence, and masquerade.
SEVEN: Color, Class, and Clout
n the tale of the rape of the false Parvati (the demon Adit), Shiva is white (covered with the white ashes of corpses and illuminated by the crescent moon in his head) and Parvati is dark ("with skin like the petal of a blue lotus at night"). When he teases her about the contrast in their skin colors, she sloughs off her dark shadow, Kali, t and creates, instead, a bright shadow of herself, Gauri.
Flow 180
Color-Blind And Out Caste
n the tale of the rape of the false Parvati (the demon Adit), Shiva is white (covered with the white ashes of corpses and illuminated by the crescent moon in his head) and Parvati is dark ("with skin like the petal of a blue lotus at night"). When he teases her about the contrast in their skin colors, she sloughs off her dark shadow, Kali, t and creates, instead, a bright shadow of herself, Gauri. In one version of the story, Shiva gives the issue of skin color a strange twist: "People like us, whose dark bodies are smeared with white ashes, have one sort of thought in the heart, but our words express the opposite thought."!
Is Shiva referring to what we call "passing"? Can we call his remarks racist? One single Rig Vedic hymn refers to the Dasyus (slaves), the enemies of the Aryans [sic], as coming from "dark wombs,"2 which may indeed be a slur on the ethnic stock of India at the time when the authors of the Rig Veda arrived.
But since later classical Sanskrit texts (composed at a time when the Aryans and Dasyus had intermarried for centuries) have no clear expression of a concept of race, let alone a correlation between race and skin color, we would do better to identify this negative attitude to dark skin in terms of class and otherness: in India during most of recorded history, people with dark skins were generally regarded as social inferiors (or, in the case of Krishna and Kali, whose very names mean "black" or "dark," as gods). Since most bedtricks are about the deceptive surface, the skin, it is not surprising to find many variants that deal with the most dramatic aspect of skin, its color.
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Color, Class, And Clout
293 imagery of night and moon evokes the myth of Samjna, t whose husband, the Sun, is regarded as both too bright and too dark for her. I have dealt elsewhere with the problem of his (and her) excessive brightness;:j: here let us return to an abbreviated form of that text (the Harivamsha, c. 700 C.E.) to consider the problem of the Sun's darkness:
Compare 182
The Dark Sun
The Sun married Samjna, the daughter of Tvashtri, the artisan of the gods. She was not satisfied by the form of her husband, for she was filled with her own bright ascetic heat, and the form of the Sun, burnt by his own fiery brilliance in all his limbs, was not very attractive-excessive, it constantly overheated the three worlds. When Samjna saw that the form of the Sun had a dark color, she was unable to bear it.
Samjna rejects him because of his blackness and creates an appropriately black mate for him (chaya here perhaps indicating the dark shadow rather than the bright reflection)-someone who, being dark like him, is at least in that sense similar to him (sa-varna, literally "of the same color"). Through her shadow, Samjna passes for black. The counterintuitive idea that the sun is both black and golden may be an expression of the black spots we see when we gaze directly at the sun:j: or of the sun's black color during its underworld journey, when it is night on earth.s Later variants of this myth explicitly connect the color of the skin with class.
The word for "color" (varna) also means "class" in Sanskrit and thus has social, as well as aesthetic, overtones, which overlap in the idea that the lower castes have darker skins than the upper castes. These con- cepts color, as it were, Indian attitudes not only to the Sun but to his 294
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blond and swarthy) from their own version ofIndo- European mythology and racialized it in a different way, to use primarily (though not only) against the Jews. The Hindu preference for brides with light skin color, already attested in the ancient period, was of course exacerbated by the colonial experi- ence. And when stories about light and dark women, such as the "Black and White Bride,"t were recorded in the European tradition, they almost always took on racist overtones.
White animals abound in the stories of animal lovers (Whitebear Whittington, t the white witch mare, t and so forth), but black women are even more significant: "The blackness of the substitute bride ... Where she is not specifically black, she is often ugly and swarthy, such as the Arab girl in a Turkish variant and the impostor in a Norwegian version, where one would not expect to find a dark-skinned woman .... In many Hispanic examples, the stories ...
"Moors" appear in bed- tricks in a number of English Renaissance dramas, including Samuel Har- ding's Sicily and Naples (1640), t John Marston's Sophonisba (1605), Wil- liam Rowley's All's Lost by Lust (1619), and Philip Massinger's The 296
Cycle 184
The Brahmin Woman And The Outcaste Man
A Brahmin girl began to menstruatet before she was married; in keeping with the custom, her father blindfolded her eyes and left her in a jungle. A man who pitied the girl took her home and raised her as his own daugh-
Flow 185
Color, Class, And Clout
An Outcaste fell in love with her, dressed himself in Brahmin-style clothes, and married her. She bore him two sons, but one day they spied on their father at work and saw him measuring people's feet and sewing sandals for them. Then they went home, gathered big leaves, and cut out the outlines of their feet, telling their mother, when she questioned them, "We are doing exactly what Daddy does." When she realized what caste of man she had married, her anger rose, and she grew bigger and bigger and became a terrifying goddess.
She put out her tongue and went in search of her husband. Her children, terrified, hid themselves in two goats, but she broke off the goats' heads and drank her children's blood. The Outcaste man entered a he-buffalo, but she slit him open and drank his blood.
The prohibition "Do not turn around and look at me" is a motif that we know not only from Lot's wife but also from MeIusine, t Lohengrin, t and Cupid and Psyche. t Thus, the goddess is visually be- trayed by three different men: her father, who blindfolds her; her husband, who masquerades for her; and the luckless mendicant, who looks at her when she tells him not to (a violation that brings into play the male gazet).
The blindfolding of the girl is a weak form of a myth told over large parts of South India about Yellamma under the name of Y ellamma- Renuka,z' in which her Brahmin husband has her beheaded in punish- ment for a minor act of mental infidelity and she gets the head of an Outcaste woman;:j: this set of variants structures the motifs of concealed sexuality, blinding, an abusive husband, and Outcaste status in different ways. In response to the curtailment of her powers of sight, the goddess lets loose the powers of her destructive tongue.
t Her children are among the 298
Ladder 186
Color, Class, And Clout
Yet, though some later texts (Jewish and Christian) do regard blackness, rather than whiteness, as problematic (in the children of white parents), it was Heliodorus's version, the black woman giving birth to a white child, not Quintilian's, that was more often cited in later Jewish and Greek literature. This is puzzling, unless we assume that the whole story, which is after all about a reactive back-formation ("What could have produced a child of the wrong color? Perhaps it was the sight of someone of the wrong color ...
That he escapes by putting on (and taking off) his mother's clothing makes him 300
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Color, Class, And Clout
301 looks like a white person? The simple answer is, a white person.3l The irony of racism inheres in the fact that people who do not look black at all are defined as black by nonvisual criteria, invisible genealogical criteria, though the convention still assumes that they may be identified by skin color. Thus, where Larsen depicted black as white as black, casting a white woman as a passing black woman results in white as black as white.
Given the parallels between transvestite passing and racial passing, it is not surprising that the double- (and even the triple-) back applies to racial as well as sexual masquerades. Just as the girl serving the tray pretends to be black, which she is, her mother on one occasion pretends to be her mother, which she is-a trick she might have learned from Moses't mother, in a very similar situation. (In both Passing and Imitation of Life, the women who "pass" are usually also neglectful moth- ers and/or oversexual women.) Skin color (often compounded by eye color) is regarded as a dramatic sign of paternity.
Hence, these myths may simply be using racist criteria in the service of another agenda, broader than racism: the agenda of paternal insecurity. t In vitrot impregnation replaced the theory of parental im- printingt (and the test tube replaced the male bedtrickster) in a modern variant of the myth of Ethiopian parents and children, a 1995 legal suit:
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Color, Class, And Clout
303 Bride,"t magic allows a dark person to pass as a fair one; and in more realistic literature, a fair person defined, racially, as "black" may pass for white. A different sort of passing takes place when one person defined as "black" substitutes for another. Color prejudice produces a scorn for the other, for the person of a lower class or darker color, who is not worth looking at carefully.
In The Great White Hope (1970), the prizefighter Jefferson jumps bail by getting another man to double for him while the FBI is watching his house. When his friends and family remark that the other man doesn't look like him, Jefferson points out that he is big, black, and wearing the same bright pink shirt and adds, "Don't you know that people say all Niggers look alike?" In Watermelon Man (1970), a white bigot wakes up one morning to discover that he is black.
Previously, while still white, he had said to a black man under suspicion of committing a crime, "It would be hard for the police to identify you. All you cats look alike." The phrase took on a new twist in Men in Black (1997) when the black FBI agent said to the extraterrestrial-a gigantic, hideous bug- "You guys all look alike." (The producers of the film, speaking of the limited number of ways in which aliens are portrayed in Hollywood, con- firmed this opinion: "They all look similar.
The sexist "In the dark, all cats are gray" is usually applied to women; but it is also applied to black men (and, rarely, to black women) as a racist slur, implying not only that black cats are all alike in the light (that, in a sense, they are their own darkness) but that they are like women. Another metaphor of darkness links them, too: the depiction of the woman herself as dark, through the usual conflation of the sexual other-the woman-with the racial other.
Freud's use of the term "dark continent" (in English) to describe female sexualitf8 has racial implications, as Sander Gilman points out: "In using this phrase in En- glish, Freud ties the image of female sexuality to the image of the colonial black and to the perceived relationship between the female's ascribed sex- uality and the Other's exoticism and pathology. It is Freud's intent to explore this hidden 'dark continent' and reveal the hidden truths about 304
Cycle 189
Man Of All Work
A black man named Carl dresses as a woman named Lucy in order to get a job taking care of a child, Lily Fairchild. At the start, Carl teases his own wife, "How will anybody know? Lift up my dress?" But then, in the house where Carl-as-Lucy works, Lily asks him about Red Riding Hood and then asks why the voice of Carl-as-Lucy is "heavy, like a man's." The husband makes a pass at Carl-as-Lucy, and the wife in a panic shoots Carl-as-Lucy dead.
The doctor who makes the preliminary postmortem examination asks, "Did you, for some reason, make him wear that dress?" Mr. Fairchild immediately changes his story and insists that he (not his wife) shot the man-who must have been a rapist: "That's our answer! I was protecting white womanhood from a nigger rapist impersonating a woman!
A muted bedtrick in a very old, one-minute silent film, made by
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Color, Class, And Clout
305 Thomas Edison in 1903, satirizes both racism and sexism: "What Hap- pened in the Tunnel takes place on the set of a moving train. A young man retrieves a handkerchief dropped by a young girl seated with her [black] maid. As the man returns the kerchief to its owner, he attempts to kiss her.
The tunnel is the dark place-the womb-where light and dark women look alike. WHY ORIENTALS MAKE GOOD (MASQUERADING) WIVES The patterns of race take on different permutations in fiction about colo- nialism: colonizer is to colonized as penetrator is to penetrated as male is to female. Colonialism, of course, deals not only with "blackness" but with "yellowness" and "brownness" and views these hues through what Edward Said has taught us to call "Orientalism"-the Western tendency to present "the Orient" (and, in particular, "the Oriental") as exotic, erotic, feminine, and even worse.
Orientals, like black people, are invisi- ble. In Paul Scott's novel about the British in India, The Jewel in the Crown, the Indian, Kumar, who has been educated in England is not rec- ognized by his British school buddy Linsey when they meet in India. "I am invisible, Kumar said, not only to white people because they are white and I am black but invisible to my white friend because he can no longer distinguish me in a crowd.
Ladder 191
The Case Of Lady Sannox
[A surgeon, Douglas Stone, was carrying on an adulterous affair with a married and notorious ex-actress, Lady Sannox. One evening when Stone was about to go out to meet Lady Sannox, a rich Turk came to his house and said that his wife had cut her lower lip on a poisoned dagger and would die from the swift-acting poison unless her lip were cut off, which he offered the surgeon a hundred pounds to do. The surgeon, who wanted the money, went with the Turk to a house where there was] a couch in the comer, on which lay a woman dressed in the Turkish fashion, with yashmak and veil ....
But the surgeon was not thinking about the yash- mak. This was no longer a woman to him. [He could see only her lower lip and her eyes, which showed that she was, as the Turk said, drugged with opium.
Stone hesitated to perform the operation.] "The defiguration will be frightful." "I can understand that the mouth will not be a pretty one to kiss." Douglas Stone turned fiercely on the man. The speech was a brutal one. But the Turk has his own fashion of talk and of thought.
[The Turk persuaded Stone to do it for the money. Stone cut a V-shaped piece out of the woman's lip; she jumped up and screamed.] Her covering was tom from her face. In spite of that protruding upper lip and that slobber of blood, it was a face that he knew.
But getting the woman's lover to do the mutilation in place of her husband (or the legal powers) is an unusual use of the double-cross: t the lover mistakes his mistress for another man's wife (which she is) and mistakes her husband, too, for another man. He remarks that "the Turk has his own fashion of talk and of thought," an Orientalist assumption that tricks him into behaving as brutally as he assumes the Turk-and his wife-would act. The woman does not will- ingly perpetrate the bedtrick, but she is druggedt into silence even before
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Color, Class, And Clout
His brutal revenge is made bearable (and, perhaps, believable) for the British audience by being not bowdlerized but Orientalized. The mutilation that Sannox engineers and the surgeon performs they would not inflict upon a White Woman, let alone a Woman of Title; but it is suitable for an adulterous "Oriental" woman, who is veiled both by the cloth on her face and by her status as an (invisible) alien. "All Japanese look alike," another Orientalist variant of the "cats" cliche, had its heyday in World War II but did not vanish in 1945.
An Orientalist and sexist fusion surfaces in Our Man in Havana (1959) when someone looking for a stripper in a strip joint asks the actor (Alec Guin- ness) passing as a vacuum cleaner salesman passing as a spy passing as a vacuum cleaner salesman, "which one is Teresa?" to which he replies, "They all look the same without [hands mimicking a brassiere 1 ... like Japanese." (That is, women below the neck are like Japanese above the neck.) And in 1996, 1 heard Senator Robert F.
1 liked everything about her. 1 still do." He goes on to say that the Japanese have no real feeling for their 308
Hub 193
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309 pretending that he still does not know that she is Lucy. When he kisses her, she rejects him, devastated by his infidelity. He decides to leave her right after the premiere.
On that night, as she prepares to go onstage and reveal that she was the actress so as to take all the credit (the producer has suggested that she might even get an Oscar for the part), she thinks about the geisha's message and hesitates, looking in the mirror as she has one contact lens still in (brown) and one eye nakedly blue. At the last minute, she comes out (as Lucy) and says that Yoko has retired to a convent and will never be seen again, and that she is very proud of her husband for making such a wonderful picture.
As they take their bows (she bowing only in her capacity as his wife), he whispers to her the words that Yoko had said to him during the seduction. "You knew!" she says, in relief. "I knew," he confesses smugly, implying that he had known all along.
The assumption is that white women can play Japanese women better (or at least can fool white men better with their cliches of Oriental wom- en's behavior) than Japanese women can, an Orientalist transformation of the sexist argument that only men know what women should be like. The Orientalism is emphasized by the moments of recognition that de- pend upon the racist criterion of the color of the eyes; but it is then somewhat modified by the sexist codicil that Japanese women are properly submissive to their husbands, a lesson that this uppity American actress must learn from the Japanese.
Only when she decides not to reveal to the public that she was masquerading as the geisha (Le., that she is a fine actress, compounding the felony by fooling her own husband so that he did not recognize her, the ultimate betrayal) does her husband decide to withdraw his counterattack and tell her that he knew she was masquerad- ing as the geisha. He lies when he says he knew "all along," but all she cares about is that he knew who she was when he made love to Yoko, and that is true.
She sacrifices her artistic persona for her sexual persona, finally taking on in life the attitude and mentalityt of the double she has invented in her art, the character that she assumed to trick her husband, which is the mentality of a woman who would never trick her husband. Indeed, she also takes on the mentality of the heroine of the Puccini opera, in which the hero is named, significantly, Benjamin Franklin ("In the dark all cats are grey"t) Pinkerton. Orientalism made possible the seduction of the Frenchman in David Henry Hwang's 1989 play 310
Cycle 194
Color, Class, And Clout
Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes. The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated-because a woman can't think for herself. You expect Oriental countries to submit to your guns, and you expect Oriental women to be submissive to your men.
That's why you say they make the best wives .... Being an Oriental, I could never be completely a Man. The contrast between mouth and eyet is a sexist construct that has noth- ing to do with Orientalism; but it is contlated with a racism that feminizes the Other.
Flow 195
Close Your Eyes And Think Of England
Being royals, these foreigners can invoke their droit du seigneur, t but, as usual, that does not protect them from bedtricksters:
Ladder 196
Experiment
[Uncle Freddy told his nephew-the narrator-about his meeting in Paris in 1928 with the Surrealists, who questioned him about his sexual practices. He had told the Surrealists that he used to dream of twin sisters on his street who were in all visible respects identical.] !fyou were having sexual relations with one, how could you tell it was she and not the other? And this in turn provoked a further question.
What if there were two people-women who in their ... sexual movements were exactly the same, and yet in all other respects were completely different .... erotic doppel- gangers yet social disparates .
so that if you closed your eyes you couldn't tell the difference .... In sex we note distinctiveness, not similar- ity ... we don't as a rule think, Oh, being in bed with her was much like being in bed with So-and-So a couple of years ago.
In fact, if I were to close my eyes .... We don't, on the whole, think that way. Courtesy, in part, I expect; a desire to maintain the individuality of others.
And perhaps a fear that if you do that to them, they might start thinking the same back about you. [The Surrealists then challenged Freddy to tell the difference between an Englishwoman and a Frenchwoman in bed, blindfolded; on two suc- cessive days, they sent him two women who used the same perfume. He said he could tell the difference, though he wouldn't tell his nephew how.
Without reporting back to the Surrealists, he sailed back to England; on the boat train he met a woman named Kate, whom he married within three months; he never told her about this adventure because she was, he said, "as pure as driven snow." Many years later, Aunt Kate and Uncle Freddy died, and the nephew learned that the Surrealists had often used, in their experiments, an Englishwoman referred to sim- ply as "K."]
Color, Class, And Clout
313 Both uncle and nephew insist, against the force of most of our myths, that people behavet differently in bed (even if they are twin sisters, t even if they smellt alike, even if you close your eyest). And they admit that you want your partner to think that you are different in bed. But all of these apparent challenges to the old cliche are then subverted at the end, in two stages.
First comes the hint that one of the women, presumably the Englishwoman, was "K.," the "secretive" Aunt Kate, who is therefore not "as pure as driven snow," so that Freddy unknowingly slept with the woman who was to become his own wife. t Then the narrator meets a well-known Master of Wine, a woman, who tells him that if you decant a magnum into two different bottles, "It's extremely rare for even wily drinkers to guess that the wine in those two particular bottles is in fact the same one.
People expect all the wines to be different, and their palates therefore insist that they are." (The womanizer in Roald Dahl's "The Visitor" uses the same metaphor for telling women apart in the dark- "A connoisseur, a supreme connoisseur, should always be able to guess the vintage without seeing the label on the bottle" -and is, like Freddy, fooled.) This testimony (significantly, from a woman) that people who hope for difference will find it even in sameness makes us realize that "K." must have been both of the women. This means that Freddy is not only incapable of telling a Frenchwoman from an Englishwoman t but incapable of telling his own "pure" wife from a Parisian whore.
Barnes is telling us that women are one big sexual magnum (the Magnum Mater?), decanted into containers that only appear to be different-old wine in new (young?) bottles, as we say. Some bedtricksters pretend to be foreign, and sometimes real foreign- ers masquerade, their foreignness affording them an incidental advantage. In a broad sense, women t are often foreigners, linguistically and cultur- ally, to the men who marry them and whom they trick.
Double Penetration Agents
Thus far we have considered the ways in which political ideologies such as racism, sexism, casteism, Orientalism, and xenophobia-all versions of stereotyping others as groups and denying their individualism-are played out in bedtricks to the advantage of the bedtricksters who are the victims of these political prejudices. Let us now consider the ways in which people in positions of political dominance-spies and dictators-are dis- armed through bedtricks. The bedtrick is often set in the context of some other (often related) concern that a particular culture may regard as even more basic than sex, such as fraternal succession or political rivalry (an important motive for cuckoldingt).
Many of the men who replace one another in bed are not sexual enemies but political enemies, and they hide in bed primarily to escape from other dangers (like the two cross-dressing musicians in the film Some Like It Hot, t who are running away from gangsters-if we accept this progress narrative). The men who exercise the droit du seigneurt are using political power for sexual ends, but on the other hand, political power (which means, in many traditional cultures, royal power) is often at stake in a bedtrick: many Substitute Bridest care more for ruling than for romance.
Political masqueraders, such as spies, have to be careful because they
Color, Class, And Clout
315 know that people will be suspicious, will try to find out who they really are; but sexual masqueraders know that their victims will do everything possible to ignore the glaring inconsistencies in their disguises. t On the other hand, spies, knowing that they do not exactly resemble the people they are impersonating, get away with it by keeping other people at a distance, while bedtricksters are subject to a much closer scrutiny. We therefore often expect sex to unmask political masqueraders.
One political form of masquerading is censorship, which our texts use as a metaphor on several levels. Freud used censorship as the metaphor for the mechanism that the superego uses to control the id, for political oppression is closely related to mental repression;t where there is no re- pression, there is no symbolism. On the level of unconscious symbolism, the superego censors the wish to commit incest, t for instance, with the result that people dream of incest in symbolic forms, often by masquerad- ing in the form of animals;t many of the tales of bedtricks are masked tales of incest.
t On the political level, the law censors freedom of speech, resulting in political repression but also in secret plans for revolution. And on the level of language, people use riddlest and myths to express what cannot be said directly for one reason or another. Oppressed people know how to make words have two meanings; they use language simulta- neously to satisfy and to defy their oppressors.
The double-backs in "Spy versus Spy" in the old Mad Comics grow out of the same Mobius strip logic that pervades the more complex bed- tricks: the double-back, t the double-cross, t and the double-play. t The very term for a certain type of spy-"double agent" or, even better, "dou- ble penetration agent" -speaks volumes. As Ron Rosenbaum remarked of a "mole" like the great double (or, perhaps, triple) agent Kim Philby: "His entire being, every smile, every word he exchanges, is an intimate violation (an almost sexual penetration) of all those around him.
All his friendships, his relationships, his marriages become elaborate lies requir- ing unceasing vigilance to maintain, lies in a play-within-a-play only he can follow." 61 In this instance, the sexual relationships ("marriages" in the plural, perhaps significantly) are overshadowed by the political decep- tion ("an almost sexual penetration") and the art form (the play-within- a-playt); but the lies can originate in the sexual field, too, and spill over into the political. There is a special parallel between the lies of international spying and the lies of transsexual masquerading; the lover of VictorlVictoriat (1982), who deals with gangsters and pretends to be operating legally, confesses 316
True Lies
A spy whose wife thinks he is merely a businessman neglects her. When she becomes bored and depressed, she totters on the brink of an affair with a used-car salesman who pretends to be a spy and claims credit for certain acts, reported in the press, that were actually committed by the husband. To keep his wife happy, the husband trumps up a spy scenario for her to play in and summons her to the hotel room of a mysterious stranger.
When she comes to the hotel room, he sits in the dark and plays a tape recording of the voice of a French colleague (knowing that she would recognize his own voice). As he watches her strip, he sees her with fresh lust in his eyes, and then he makes her close her eyes while he kisses her. At this moment, the real spies who are his enemies break in on them, and the seduction does not proceed.
Later, the husband becomes suspicious of his wife's fidelity and has her interrogated as if she were under suspicion for spying; in the course of the interrogation he keeps asking her if she has had an affair with another man and if she loves her husband. In the same way, when the enemy has injected him with truth serum, she takes that opportunity to ask him if he has had an affair with another woman. Together, they kill all the bad guys and live happily ever after.
The husband is a political masquerader from the very start, and when he takes on the sexual masquerade he is impersonating himself, producing a fantasy figure who may be his secret self but is also his wife's fantasy lover. In the hotel room, the play-within-a-playt is recast by "real" spies, political spies (though none of it is very real; when she finally discovers his true profession, she asks him, "Have you ever killed anyone?" to which he replies, with deadpan self-satire, "Yes.
But they were all bad."). The lies of spying are used to force sexual truths when husband and wife politically "interrogate" one another about sex. Her shock in finding out that he has been a spy all these years when she didn't know it, that he has not been as intimate with her as she thought, is balanced by his shock in finding out (as he thinks) that she has been unfaithful to him when he didn't know it, that she has not been as intimate with him as he thought.
But her shock is grounded in reality-he has indeed lied to her. His is not-she has told the truth. This is an asymmetryt that is all too familiar.
Spying and sex converge when the "bag over her head" is used on captives in war to make them helpless (and, perhaps, feminized): unlike a blindfold, a bag over the head t simultaneously blinds them, constrains their arms, and silences their mouths.63 A bag is placed over the head of 318
Color, Class, And Clout
319 Jody's girl, Dill, is in fact a boy. Jody is blindfolded, but Fergus is the one who is blind: he cannot recognize Dill, cannot see Dill's true sexuality, even when he finds him in a gay bar surrounded by obvious transvestites, and even when the bartender says, "There's something you should know about her ... " When Fergus realizes that he was wrong about Dill's sexual- ity, he realizes only in retrospect that he was wrong about Jody's sexuality and, perhaps more important, wrong about himself, both politically and sexually: he is not a straight IRA man.
The film ends with the blurring of all categories, good and evil, black and white, Irish and English, and male and female. Thus, the bag over Jody's head serves both the same manifest purpose as the bag on Parolles (to blind a political prisoner) and the same latent purpose (to mimic a bedtrick). In both cases, a bedtrick is accompanied by a political trick in which the political victim has a bag put over his head to dehumanize him like the dehumanized woman in the dark.
The bag over the head appears with a twist in the film Mission: Impossi- ble (1996), in which the trickster places over his own head a bag which is actually the mask of his enemy. He uses this bag to trick the enemy's wife, who has been sleeping with both of them, into revealing an essential secret to the man she thinks is her husband: his plan to kill the hero- the man she is actually talking to. (A similar trick, doubled, was used in the film FacelOfft.
[1997].) Once again, sexual and political betrayal wear the same mask.
Pretenders
The plot concerns an English nobleman, Rudolph Rasendel, who is a dead ringer for the rather dissipated king of Ruritania and takes the king's place during an assassination plot. Rasendel also falls in love with Flavia, the future queen of Ruritania, who notices the difference between the two 320
Color, Class, And Clout
321 closely related than in the book, sharing not just a distant ancestor but a father) but of far higher morals. The ultimate degradation of the myth (to use the Eliadean term) came in a 1996 cable TV film entitled The Prisoner of Zenda, Inc., which grafted the plot onto another Hollywood stereotype: the teenage twins (ultimately descended from Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap or, behind that, the two young boys in The Prince and the Pauper). The resulting bricolage makes the kingdom of Zenda into a billion-dollar computer company (Zenda, Inc.), Ruritania into Berkeley, the king a teenage nerdt (named Rudi) whose father has just died and left him the company, and the look-alike a jock, a champion baseball player (named Ollie) whose father is out of work.
When, after the trick has been revealed, Fiona (i.e., Flavia) asks Ollie, "When you said you wanted to get to know me better, were you talking as Rudi or Ollie?" he makes no reply, and she indicates to her girlfriend that she likes them both. No sex here (even in the older genera- tion: Ollie and Rudi are unrelated, just chance ringers) and no conflict (Ollie and Rudi become friends, promising to teach one another about computers and baseball and, presumably, to share Fiona, as friends).
The final line is "This could be the beginning of a really cool friendship." I wonder if anyone young enough to sit through this movie (for pleasure rather than research) would recognize the variant of the final line from Casablanca (1942). The Zenda formula, without the name, was used again in 1988 in Moon over Parador, in which a look-alike actor impersonates a South American dictator after his sudden death. The dictator's mistress recognizes him immediately as an impostor-and proceeds to teach him the "expressions and gestures" of the real man, whom, she points out, she knew better than anyone else.
When the press asks her if she approves of the ways in which he has changed (he suddenly "lost" twenty pounds and made politi- cal reforms), she replies with the usual ambiguous line: "He's certainly not the same man I first met." As in the original Zenda scenario, the impostor decides to return to his old life; but now the mistress becomes the new-and benevolent-dictator, and the impostor (better than the original) improves the system (by instituting a number of reforms) before he leaves it. This is after all the people's dream: get Nixon out and put in his place a guy who looks just like Nixon but is actually Abraham Lincolnt (or Lenin or St.
Francis, depending upon your taste). Class and power here supply yet another reason for the political or sexual masquerade to succeed: when those with power masquerade, the 322
Color, Class, And Clout
323 (1977), a Nazi attempt to kidnap Churchill almost succeeds-except that the Nazis capture only Churchill's double, who is in Ireland while the real Churchill is in Teheran; many lives are lost, all for a phantom Churchill. Danny Kaye doubled himself both in Wonder Man (1945) and in On the Riviera (1951), in which the wife of a French aviator (Kaye) for whom a cabaret artist (Kaye) doubles wakes up happy one morning but then has a moment of panic when she thinks (wrongly) that she slept with the double.
In 1961, Kaye took a shot at the Normandy/Zenda for- mula, impersonating a general in On the Double; like the pretenders in Dave and the Sellers version of Zenda, the double loves the wife of the original, while the original (a notorious womanizer) does not. The wife immediately knows he isn't her husband and calls for the military police, who are in on the masquerade. When the impostor confesses his failure to them, saying, "I guess I didn't fool her at all," one soldier replies, "Don't worry, sir.
In 1591, Dimitri, the third son of Ivan the Terrible, was murdered, presum- ably by Boris Godunov. Dimitri had married a Polish noblewoman named Marina Mnishek only a few days before his death, and Marina and her father were not allowed to return to Poland after his death. But in 1607 a pretender arose saying he was Tsar Dimitri, who had never been slain.
Pretending To Be An American In Hollywood
The flawless copies that are achieved by magic in myths are achieved by science in science fiction films: artificial intelligence and machines that masquerade as people (robots and clones). The perfect replication of the robots or clones forces people to rely upon super- (or, more often, in- fra-) scientific senses, such as the heart and other instinctive, somatict forms of knowing, to detect modern masqueraders. Fritz Lang's Metropo- lis (1926) makes use of the sexual double (a robot clone of the heroine) who fools everyone except the man who loves her, a role later played by the robot in Blade Runner (1982) and the Borg in Star Trek.
Later films depict elaborate computer techniques used to program memory banks to steal the victims' minds, t including their memoriest and identifying knowledge, t and give them to the tricksters. The great classic of this genre is the 1956 film
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers
Seed pods from outer space land in a small town and begin to replace its inhabitants one by one. One of the few people who realize what is going on complains of a familiar character who has been replaced, "He looks, sounds, acts, and remembers" like the original. When Miles proposes that they test an alleged clone's memory by having his suspicious friend ask him about "certain things that only you and he remember," the suspect performs perfectly.
"No one could impersonate him without you knowing. There are a thousand little things you'd notice," insists Miles; but the thousand little things, such as scars and fingerprints, are in place or can be accounted for. Only the actual discovery of the clones being formed in the pods persuades the doubters.
At the start of the film, Miles says, jokingly, to Becky Driscoll, "I'd hate to wake up one morning and find that you weren't you" (a presump- tuous remark, since they have not yet been intimate and there is no reason for him to expect to "wake up" with her at all). "How can you tell?" she asks, flirtatiously. "You really want to know?" he asks, and thereupon kisses her thoroughly, smiles, and says, "Mmmmm.
You're Becky Dris- coll." They become lovers, though they do not marry. At the end of the film, Becky falls asleep and a clone takes over her body. Miles does not notice her change at first, but then she falls, and he falls on top of her 326
Color, Class, And Clout
The fear seems to be that aliens are out to strip Americans of the emotional life that makes us who we are. One of the born-again clones argues the body snatchers' case: "You're reborn into an untroubled world-there's no need for love, no emotions. You've been in love before; it didn't last; it never does." True enough; but the hero's girl, Becky- before she is corrupted-defends the world of love and grief and, above all, difference: for all the clones are the same.
The political assumption that the clones have no feelings supports the mythological belief that the hero's sexual feeling about his girl is the only true test of her identity. The fact that Becky sleeps with Miles before she gets the ring on her finger is a key clue, for in 1950s films, girls who "do it" before marriage are bad girls, and alien invasions ultimately function, like Old evidence plagues, to bury Sodomy and Orgy in fire and brimstone. Therefore, we should not be surprised when Becky falls asleep t and is possessed by the aliens.
The hero's girl is not an alien but she defects to their side, and the sexual act is, again, where the final unmasking takes place. In the final scene, we see another man and woman in bed making 328
Approach Seven: Weapons of the Weak
331 flee from evil, hide from danger, avoid showdowns, give the angry powers of the universe as wide a berth as possible.82 It has been said that tyrants make liars. Singer seems to be saying that Gentile tyrants made Jewish masqueraders.
Compare 197
Weapons Of The Weak
Not merely women and children, but also Outcastes and servants and, above all, foreigners, Others, are depicted as tricksters. The weak have to lie and trick because they lack the power to win in a direct con- frontation. This is particularly true of women.
Hub 198
Revenge Of The Nerds
At the college homecoming celebration, the nerds, led by Lewis, and the jocks, led by Stan, set up competing kissing stands. When Lewis ap- proaches Stan's girlfriend, Betty, who is selling kisses for the jocks, she scorns him, saying, "I'm not kissing a nerd," and Stan produces a surro- gate in her place: a very fat girl. When Lewis sees Betty wander off into the House of Mirrors, he puts on the cloak and mask that Stan has been wearing and follows Betty into the House of Mirrors.
As they begin to make love, she says, "Take off your mask," but he shakes his head in refusal, to which she simply remarks, "Oh Stan, you're so kinky." Later, aglow with happiness, she says, "Oh Stan, that was wonderful. At that, Lewis takes off his mask and she screams, "You're that nerd!" "Yeah." "God, you were wonderful. Are all nerds as good as you?" "I guess." "Why?" "All jocks think about is sports; all we think about is sex." She gives Stan's frat pin back to him, saying, "I'm in love with a nerd!" and runs off after Lewis.
Like Woody Allen in The Front, t the nerd takes the place of the hunk and gets the girl. There is the vestige of a double-crosst here: Lewis's substitution of himself for Stan with Betty pays Stan back for substituting a fat girl-one of several stereotyped scapegoats-for Betty with Lewis. Stan's emasculation, the inversion of his sexual power, is item by the fact that, at the moment when Betty ditches him for the second and final time, he is in drag: for the stage performance at the end of the home- coming celebration, the jocks have dressed as pompom girls and the girls as football players.
But there is a subversion of political power as well: the nerd who steals the jock's girl simultaneously seizes his office. He does this with the help of the physically powerful branch of the nerds' frater- nity, who are black, a racial stereotype employed in the interest of the intellectual stereotype of the nerd; this sort of bigotry, too, travels down the line. There is mythology here: the inversion takes place on the Moon Walk in the House of Mirrors t (Betty asks the masked Lewis, "You wanna do it on the moon?"), with Lewis wearing the mythologically charged mask and cloak of Darth Vader (the evil father from Star Wars).
Lewis's heavy breathing inside the mask simultaneously conveys Darth Vader's telltale personal noise (like the ticking of the clock inside the crocodile
Cycle 199
Weapons Of The Weak
333 in Peter Pan) and Lewis's sexual excitement, like the double meaning of the heavy breathing of the two men dying and climaxing in Excaliburt (1981). And there is the less magical mythology of all bedtricks: the jocks and their girlfriends always look right through the nerd without noticing him. At first, when Betty tells Stan, "One of those nerds asked me out," and he asks, "Which one?" she replies, "I don't know; they all look alike to me." (Even the father of one of the nerds says to him, "You college guys are all alike; all you care about is getting laid.") But Lewis reverses the stereotype when, in his moment of triumph, he maintains that all nerds are good in bed, in the dark.
Knowledge often results from power, for those in power can force others to reveal themselves; and power often results from knowl- edge, when knowledge is used to manipulate, to blackmail, and so forth. But often the dominator does not need to know anything about the ob- jects of domination in order to dominate; power and ignorance may coex- ist. And ignorance (false or real) may occasionally serve the interests of power, as Eve Sedgwick points out: Knowledge, after all, is not itself power, although it is the magnetic field of power.
Ignorance on the part of the dominators may deprive them of the power to dominate; their ignorance of the other may render the powerful weak. The bedtrickster-Tamar, t Song in M. Butter- jlyt-wins by having knowledge that the victim lacks.
Flow 200
Ladder 201
Compare 202
Hub 203
Cycle 204
EIGHT: Cross-Cultural Cross-Dressing
Cross-Cultural Cross - Dressing S orne myths ask, How do you tell a human from a god or an animal in bed? Others ask, How do you tell one human from another in bed?
Flow 205
E I G H T
Cross-Cultural Cross - Dressing S orne myths ask, How do you tell a human from a god or an animal in bed? Others ask, How do you tell one human from another in bed? Now let us consider myths that ask, How do you tell a man from a woman in bed?
Many bedtricks involve transformations into someone of the other biological sex, with different physical sexual organs, and I would call these transsexual bedtricks. The story of Parvati and the demon Adit is such a story, as is the transsexual masquerade that takes place when Vishnu takes the form of a woman, Mohini, in order to seduce, and kill, certain demons; Shiva is also overcome with lust for Vishnu/Mohini and, in some texts, rapes her.:j:l David Shulman sees the androgyny of both Shiva and the goddess as interdependent: "The goddess always has the male inside her, while she is somewhere inside of him ....
It is this aspect of the bedtrick, involving transformations of gender rather than of sex, the bed trick made possible merely by a change of clothing and makeup-in a word, cross- dressing-that will be my concern in this chapter. CRoss-DRESSING TO KILL In the Mahabharata, men who masquerade as women generally do so to get close to men, not to women, for martial, rather than sexual, reasons, 335 336
Ladder 206
Kicaka In Bed With Bhima
The evil general Kicaka harassed Draupadi until he forced her to agree to an assignation. But she told her strong and headstrong husband Bhima, who went to the palace in the night ahead of Kicaka, lay down on the bed, and covered himself up, awaiting him like a lion awaiting a deer. Kicaka, dressed up in his finest to meet Draupadi, entered the dark room; deluded by lust, mad with joy, smiling, he approached Bhima, who said, "I bet you've never before known a touch like this, which you will appreciate because you are a man of the world, clever in the ways of love- making." Then Bhima jumped up and laughed and grabbed Kicaka by his per- fumed hair and beat him to death; long after Kicaka had ceased to move Bhima beat him, until all his bones were broken and he was a shapeless mass of flesh.
Not only is he not going to get laid, he is going to get CROSS-CULTURAL CRoss-DRESSING 337 killed. And the trickster who inflicts this double punishment is doubly disguised: first as a cook and then as Draupadi. The ultimate revenge on the promiscuous womanizer who cannot tell the difference between one woman and another is to mutilate him so that no one can recognize him as a human being, let alone a particular individual.
He becomes a symbol of the chaos that is threatened by the erasure of sexual boundaries. (The same sort of ball of flesh is produced when two queens mate after the death of their husband the kingS-here the product offemale, rather than male, same-sex union.) This episode became a kind of sexual parable in Hinduism. The otherwise quite permissive Kamasutra invokes Kicaka with Draupadi as an example of a man destroyed by desire, comparing him to Indra with Ahalya+ and Ravana with Sita;+ elsewhere it cites him as the paradigmatic victim of a sexual trick carried out by someone in someone else's form and compares his deception by Bhima with Rama's deception by Shurpanakha.
t6 The transvestite masquerade has a different, but still ostensibly non- sexual, motive in a story told in several Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Bengali variants. The following version is from a twentieth-century Bengali Bud- dhist text:
Compare 207
The Revenge Of Kabikumar
King Satyarata of Kampila had two wives who bore him two sons, named Alolamantra and Kabikumar. Since it was predicted that Kabi- kumar would kill Alolamantra, the king ordered his minister to get rid of Kabikumar. The minister put a girl in Kabikumar's place before the execution and entrusted Kabikumar to a fisherman.
Kabikumar grew up incognito until he heard that Alolamantra was now the king. To win back the kingdom and take revenge on his enemies he traveled to the city of Kampila, where he assumed the form of a dancer so beautiful that she captivated all the people of the city with her performance. The king heard of her skill in dance and music and traveled with his ministers to see her; when he saw Kabikumar's beguiling dance, he thought he was like Vishnu in the form of Mohini, who stole back the nectar for the gods.
The dots of perspiration on her body watered his tree of lust. That evening the king gave the dancer a prize of fine gems and brought her back to his home like a man in his dying hour who craves what will harm him. In seclusion, the dancer became the very essence of Death as the lover of the impatient, undisciplined king.
And so, when the king climbed into bed for a long sleep, Kabikumar shed the form of the dancer and said, "Your greed made you keep the fruits of kingship for yourself.
Hub 208
The Revenge Of Shang Sanguan
A man was murdered by a powerful local bully. His two sons did nothing. His sixteen-year-old daughter, Shang Sanguan, was engaged to be mar- ried, but because of her father's death, the marriage did not take place.
She dressed as a male actor named Li Yii and was hired to perform on CROSS-CULTURAL CRoss-DRESSING 339 the murderer's birthday; this "actor" had great beauty, like that of a lovely young woman, and took pains to keep filling all the cups with wine, espe- cially that of the host, the murderer. As the host's desire mounted, he dismissed his servants and kept only Li Yii with him. After some time, the servants discovered them: the host's head had been severed from his torso, and Yii had committed suicide by hanging herself.
Then it was discovered that she was a female. 9 This text assumes that filial piety to the father can justify female cross- dressing. By masquerading as a male (aided, as usual, by drinkt), the daughter becomes the death of her father's murderer, and she herself is unmasked only by her own death.
The masquerades of Arjuna:j: and Cudala:j: demonstrate the comic side of ancient Indian transvestism. An inadvertent, complex, and farci- cal English transvestite bedtrick occurs in Henry Fielding's novelloseph Andrews (1742): PARSON ADAMS's MULTIPLE MISTAKES Beau Didapper went one night to what he took to be Fanny's bedroom but was actually the room of Slipslop, Lady Booby's servant woman, who mistook him for Joseph Andrews. Eventually both discovered their error, she immediately, he a bit later.
She shouted rape, and Parson Adams rushed naked into the room in the dark and mistook Didapper for the victim and Slipslop for the rapist. Didapper escaped, and Lady Booby, now entering the room, thought that Parson Adams was raping Slipslop. Adams left the room but accidentally went into Fanny's room instead of his own and got into bed beside her, neither knowing that the other was there.
At dawn, Joseph Andrews, who had an assignation with Fanny, entered her room and found Adams there .. .n The first double-playt is soon compounded by a series of errors too frivo- lous to chart. This is good dirty fun.
Cycle 209
Gender-Bending In Hollywood
Women wear trousers and men wear skirts in a genre of films sometimes known as "gender-benders," films that "cross ... the wires of the specta- tor's libido." 13 We have stumbled onto several scenes of this genre in films that belong primarily to other contexts, but now let us focus on them. In the more magical variants of the theme, as in several myths about transposed heads,:j: the mind of a man is put into the body of a woman, or the reverse.
A transsexual variant of the reincarnation motif (which we know from nontranssexual films like Heaven Can Wait [1978] and Chances Aret [1989]) results in a kind of mythological transsexual equiva- lent of the realistic transvestite double-cross-dress. t In Dead Again (1991), a man and his wife die and become reincarnated-he as a woman, she as a man-and fall in love again. At one moment, he looks into a mirror and sees the image of the earlier incarnation of the woman, as if he were just thinking about her.
But as we later understand, this is a clue that he really is her, or perhaps his own former self as well as hers: he is looking at his soul, through the common convention of a mirror. t The implication is that they were so deeply in love that they became one flesh, an androgyne, which then burst apart again in a sexual reversal. Magical transsexuals have appeared from time to time.
George Axel- rod's play Goodbye, Charlie (made into a film by Vincente Minnelli in 1964) depicted a womanizer reincarnated as a woman. This theme was taken up again in Blake Edwards's Switch (1991), about a male chauvinist reincarnated in the body of a beautiful woman but still retaining the soul of a man-that is, a soul with the memoryt traces of a male body. S/he (meaning, in this case, not the nonsexist "she or he" but the androgynous "she and he") attempted to make love with a gay woman but was so homophobic that s/he could not bear to be with gays of either sex: his mindt would reject one, and her body the other.
Finally, a man raped her in her sleept (when her male mind was out of commission-just as King Budha impregnated the transsexual IlalIlii:j: when she was suffering from amnesia) and got her pregnant.
Flow 210
Prelude To A Kiss
A young man named Peter and a rich young woman named Rita fall in love. When Peter tells her he loves her, she says, "What about when I'm a hundred years old and have yellow teeth and a moustache? And when I never want to make love, and 1 can't remember anything?" "I'll still love you.
And you can't remember anything now." They get married, and as Peter nervously prepares to walk down the aisle his best man tries to relax him by joking, "There's nothing to it. It's just like sliding down a banis- ter-that turns into a razor blade." During the wedding ceremony, a poor, old, ugly, dying man named Julius Becker kisses Rita, and at that moment their souls enter one another's bodies. On the honeymoon, Peter begins to feel that Rita is somehow not her- self; as he later recalls, "Our first full day of being married, and she seemed like a different person.
I said, well, it's the excitement." On his return, he asks his best man, "Have you ever been having sex with someone, and everything is all right, more or less, but they've stopped doing certain things they used to do . ?" "You mean, like oral sex?" his friend asks, but Peter means something more subtle. He says that she does only con- ventional things, not innovative and personal things, when they make love.
Eventually he becomes certain that Becker-as-Rita is not Rita; and when he meets Rita-as-Becker, he recognizes her. They live together, but Peter says to Rita-as-Becker, "I'm sorry, I'm not attracted to you," to which Rita-as-Becker replies, "What, are you nuts? That's not the issue here." When Rita-as-Becker finally confronts Becker-as-Rita, together they remember the moment of the switch-He: "I wished to god 1 were that bridegroom, or the bride, for that matter." She: "I wanted to be you.
To just be and not be afraid." He: "My whole life would be ahead of me." She: "My whole life would be behind me." Both together: "Nothing to lose." At that moment, they willingly switch back again. This is a variant of the fairy tale motif of the Substitute Bride, t with the substitution taking place at the wedding. At the end, both Rita and Becker realize that the initial transfer took place because each wanted to be in the other's place on the continuum of time, to have what the other had, including the change of sex.
The old man wanted to be a woman, who could make babies, "To see life from the other side of the bed," the Teire- sias:j: experience, while the young woman, when she saw him, wanted to CROSS-CULTURAL CRoss-DRESSING 345 be "a father." But more important than gender was age, the fact that each was afraid of the future: the young woman of having children, and the old man of dying. During the ceremony, the one line that Rita can't remember and has to have repeated is "for better or for worse, in sickness or in health." This is the clue to the problem of agingt and identity: are you still yourself when you're sick and old?
Becker describes the terrors of his natural aging, "You can't recognize yourself in the mirror,"t just as Rita reveals her fear of aging in what becomes a running joke about yellow teeth. t The film then gives her the years and the yellow teeth, and he does still love her- but he also wants her young body back. In a variant of the quandary of the Loathly Lady'st lover, Peter must choose between the soul and mindt of the woman in the loathsome body of the old man and the body of the young woman with the alien mind and soul of the old man.
The lover is not satisfied with the woman's body when he realizes that the soul is different, but still he misses her body very much, and he misses sex with it. The film sketches a spectrum of ways to determine whether a person is the original or a double, some of them used to prove that the person in Rita's body is not Rita, some to prove that the person in Becker's body is Rita, some for both. The criteria range from the intimate (a kiss, t things that you do in bedt) to the superficial and banal (favorite brands of Scotch and beer, the yuppy insignia).
Ladder 211
The sensitivities of the people mak- ing the judgment determine their position on the spectrum: the lover, who has only known Rita for a few weeks (and so, one might think, does not know her), senses immediately that something is wrong; her father, though he has known her all her life, does not know her at all; and, in the middle, the mother senses that something is amiss and that her daughter is "not herself" -but does not have the metaphysical range to guess what has happened. The film juxtaposes the sorts of coincidencest and shared tastes that strike people as significant when they are falling in love and the importance that these same idiosyncracies have, and do not have, in helping one person to recognize another.
We never see them in bed after the switch, but we see that he is un- happy. There is bitter irony in the best man's joke about the razor's edge and in other jokes about clichest (the girl you woo is not the girl you marry, people are different in bed and out of bed, and so on) that Peter uses to rationalize away his own suspicions, to delude himself. t Newsweek's David Ansen saw something else in the film: "This is a 346
Compare 212
All Of Me
When a crusty old woman named Edwina dies, her soul enters the body of a young man named Roger, which continues also to contain the soul of Roger. Roger's androgyny becomes a problem when he attempts to go to bed with a woman named Terry and the soul of Edwina inside him revolts against this. She persists in thinking of very old nuns or dead kittens, which makes him unable to perform with Terry.
He goes into the bathroom to look into the mirror so that he can talk to Edwina, and he persuades her (she is a virgin) that sex is something she should try, in his body. But her fantasies about Clark Gable taking off his under- shirt are even more detumescent for him. Determined to get Edwina out of his body, he consults a Tibetan guru, who masterminds a soul-transfer.
When Edwina's soul is projected into the body of Terry, the soul of Terry is, by her own choice, projected into a white horse that she has always loved. The mirrort (the age-old dwelling place of the inner soul) here becomes the essential cinematic device to depict one actor inside another. Caught between two women with androgynous names (Terry and Edwina), he is also caught between a woman whose mind he comes to love despite her surliness (Edwina) and a rather horrid woman whom he loves only for her body (Terry).
The perfect solution is to have Edwina's mind not CROSS-CULTURAL CRoss-DRESSING 347 in his body (where, as an androgyne, he cannot make love to her) but in Terry's body (where he can, incidentally also getting rid of Terry's mind). A happier solution was devised, in the less homophobic climate of 1999, by Being John Malkovich, in which the woman who enters the man's body is bisexual and hence does not resist but, on the contrary, engineers his/her seduction of another woman, so that both the hetero- sexual man and the bisexual woman inside him desire the woman in his bed.
Transvestism here really does not seem to be about sex at all; it's about showmanship (which is also about sex), and this is why the final scene, the best scene, is a show. When Victoria decides to give up the stage, her friend, an old drag queen, takes her place: a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. (If we want to stretch it as far as it can go, we could say that an actor [Robert Preston] is masquerading as a drag queen [Toddy] masquerading as a drag queen [Victoria] masquerading as a Spanish woman.) Since Toddy is an old queen (as he points out from the start), he is funny, whereas Victoria, a young queen, poses a real sexual threat to the macho hero who falls in love with her.
Hub 213
Some Like It Hot
Two jazz musicians who inadvertently witness the Saint Valentine's Day massacre escape from the mob by posing as women musicians (Josephine and Daphne) in Sweet Sue's girls' band. There they meet Sugar (Marilyn Monroe, in full sexual spate), who confesses to the saxophone player, Jose- phine (Curtis), her fatal weakness for (male) saxophone players and her desire to break this habit and marry a millionaire. The sax player then pursues her by masquerading as a millionaire.
First the bass fiddler (Lem- mon), still in drag as Daphne, and then the sax player, as the millionaire, who says he's impotent, pretend not to become aroused when Sugar inno- cently (to Daphne) and purposefully (to the millionaire) exposes her ex- traordinary charms. Meanwhile, a genuine millionaire (Joe E. Brown) gets a crush on Daphne, proposes to her, and is accepted.
(2) Self-deception:t Sue doesn't follow up her suspicions because she desper- ately needs two women to play in her band. (3) The beauty syllogismt (one ofthe "proofs" or syllogismst that Roland Barthes applied to Sarra- sine:t if it is beautiful, it is a woman),21 here inverted, as it was in I Was a Male War Bride: Ugliness is female, insofar as no one pays close atten- tion to the men in drag because they are so ugly. Thus, when Daphne objects, "I feel naked ....
I feel like everybody's staring at me," Josephine replies, "With those legs? Are you kidding?" and "They don't care, just 350
Cycle 214
Phylotus And Emelia
A rich old Roman named Phylotus fell in love with a young virgin named Emelia, whose equally old father, Alberto, forced her to submit to the marriage. A young man named Flanius fell in love with Emelia; she said she would marry him if he could find a way to help her escape from her father's house. He brought her a suit of men's clothing, and she escaped.
Now, it happened that Emelia had a brother, Phylerno, who had been raised from birth at Naples and came now to Rome to seek his father for the first time. As Alberto and Phylotus pursued Emelia, they "happened to meet with Phylerno in the streets, who was so like his sister Emelia" that they assumed he was Emelia (in the expected drag).
Phylerno did not know who they were but went along with the joke. Phylotus brought Phylerno-as-Emelia to his house, sent for Eme- lia's clothes, and kept Phylerno-as-Emelia, for safekeeping until the marriage, with his (Phylotus's) beautiful daughter, Brisilla. Phylerno- as-Emelia told Brisilla that Phylotus was going to force Brisilla to marry Alberto, just as Alberto was forcing Emelia to marry Phylotus; 352
Flow 215
Love Tricks
A rich old man named Phylotus was passionately loved by a young virgin named Emelia, whose father, Alberto, tried in vain to dissuade her from the marriage. A young man named Flanius fell in love with Emelia. Dn the eve of her wedding to Phylotus, Emelia decided she loved Flanius after all.
In a suit of shepherd's clothing, she escaped to the forest, where she met her sister Felice, who had run away some time before to escape a marriage to Gasparo. Emelia's brother, Phylerno, pretending to search for her, dressed in Emelia's clothes, and Phylerno-as-Emelia married Phylotus in church. (Phylerno commented, "Either I am infinitely like my sister, or they are all mad with credulity.
But our good fathers are blinded with their passions, and that helps me much.") When they were alone in the bridal chamber, Phylerno-as-Emelia threw Phylotus down and made him promise never to come to "her" bed and to keep, instead, a whore in "her" place. Phylotus, crying out, "Dh, I have married a Devil," but concerned to keep up appearances, asked Phylerno-as-Emelia to sleep in the bedchamber of his beautiful daughter Brisilla, whom Phylerno al- ready loved but whom Phylotus was going to force to marry a fool named Bubuculus.
Gasparo found Felice and Emelia in the woods, and eventually their father and the others discovered them and learned the truth. Phylerno's servant Gorgon, in drag as a woman named Mopsa, got Bubuculus to admit having fathered several bastards on "her"; humiliated at the revelation of "Mopsa's" identity, Bubuculus retreated. So, too, on see- ing Phylerno as a boy, Phylotus cried out, "Ha, how's this, my wife become a man?
I confess she plaid the man with me." The three couples married: Felice and Gasparo, Emelia and Flanius, and Phylerno and Brisilla. The changes here erase the central moment in Riche's story when Phy- lerno, undisguised, is thought to be in male drag; instead, he goes directly into female drag, and his sister Emelia remains in male drag for much longer. Emelia at first desires the June-September marriage, but she sees the light soon enough, and although her resistance is displaced onto a sister who was apparently created for this express purpose (and who 354
Ladder 216
The Changelings
Part I: The Masquerade Phase. Chunagon IF/m] behaved and dressed like a boy, and Naishi no Kami [M/f], Chunagon [F/mrs half brother, behaved and dressed like a girl. Chunagon [F/m] married a woman named Yon no Kimi, whom their male friend Saisho seduced and im- pregnated; Yon no Kimi bore Saisho a girl, who was regarded as the daughter of Chunagon [F/m].
Saisho tried in vain to seduce Naishi no Kami IM/f] and succeeded in raping and impregnating Chunagon [F/m]. Naishi no Kami IM/f] seduced and impregnated the imperial princess. Chunagon [F/f], now dressed as a woman, went into seclusion at Uji and bore Saisho a son.
Naisho no Kami IM/m], dressed as a man (she said she was the brother of Chunagon 358
Compare 217
The Myth Of Gender-Transcending In Reality
You can get away with a transvestite masquerade for a long, long time in cultures where gender rather than sex is at issue in courting and where many people are, socially speaking, gender-impaired (which is to say most cultures). And how long does the masquerade have to last? Most of these stories deal not with lifelong identity but with momentary action, with a same-sex union rather than a same-sex nature.
Some masquerades, how- ever, do last for a lifetime, like that of the jazz musician Billy Tipton, who 368
Hub 218
Casanova And The Castrato
The masculine attire did not prevent my seeing a certain fullness of bo- som, which put it into my head that despite the billing, this must be a girl. In this conviction, I made no resistance to the desires which he aroused in me .... I went to bed ...
sorry to leave without having given him proof of the justice I did him in not being hoodwinked by his disguise .... I could not take my eyes from this being whom my depraved nature impelled me to love and to believe a member of the sex to which it was necessary to my purposes that she should belong .... His gestures, the way he moved his eyes, his gait, his bearing, his manner, his face, his voice, and above all my instinct, which I concluded could not make me feel its power for a castrato, all combined to confirm me in my ideaY Because Casanova desired the castrato, he had to persuade himself that the castrato was a girl; he trusted his groin feeling.
t 51 This is a myth in the classical sense of the word-a story that has been told, and retold, for many cen- turies in many cultures, often by men who dress as women and use the story to argue that they are women playing men playing women. That same myth played a key role in one of the most notorious cases of a successful transvestite bedtrick in recent years, a real-life tragedy on which David Henry Hwang based his tragicomedyt M.
t The real-life story was reported by Richard Bernstein, in the New York Times of May 11, 1986: "FRANCE JAILS 2 IN ODD CASE OF ESPIONAGE" Paris, May 10. A former French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer have been sentenced to six years in jail for spying for China after a two-day trial that traced a story of clandestine love and mistaken sexual identity. A member of the French counter-espionage service said at the trial, which ended Tuesday, that the operation to collect information on France was carried out by a Chinese Communist Party intelligence unit that no longer exists.
The Chinese Government has denied any involvement in the case. The case has been the talk of Paris lately, not so much because of the charge of spying itself as because of the circumstances. The case centered on a love affair between a young French diplomat, Bernard Boursicot, now 41 years old, who was stationed in Peking two decades ago, and a popular Chinese opera singer, Shi Peipu, 48.
Cycle 219
Boursicot was accused of passing information to China after he fell in love with Mr. Shi, whom he believed for 20 years to be a woman.
Flow 220
Turning The Transsexual Tricks Of The Trade
How do transvestite and transsexual masqueraders get away with it? To a certain extent, the same way that cross-sex (heterosexual) masqueraders do-drunkenness, t self-delusion, t and so forth, or by having sex only rarely. Thorne Groves's trick of avoiding intercourse altogether by claim- ing he had AIDS could be used by any bedtrickster, though the prosthetic penis would be of no use to a straight bedtrickster.
Teena Brandon band- aged her breasts (like Thorne Groves), padded her crotch (like Casanova's pseudo-castratot), and stood up to pee (like the girl in Bachelor Partyt), but she also improvised some ingenious new tricks: He stuffed socks into his shorts to give his groin the appearance of a male basket; later, he would wear a dildo. suggested to Heather that he was a hermaphrodite, or, alternatively, a man trapped inside a woman's body, explanations ... picked up from "The Montel Williams Show." Billy told Heather that he had undergone sex-change surgery, but as he refined the story over the next years he would claim that the process had only just begun, that there was something down there, it was small, but it would get bigger by the time all the operations were completed.
Fellatio functions as a varia- tion on the theme of the magic kiss, t both more and less intimate than full genital intercourse. Like the kiss, fellatio is often welcomed by the victim as something more intimate, more unusual and exciting than sex in the missionary position; but it is also welcomed by the bedtrickster as something less intimate, since less revealing of gender (everyone has a mouth) than the missionary position. (This paradox was hilariously de- bated in the film Clerkst [1995) by a young man and his girlfriend when he did, and she did not, think it necessary to include among the list of her past sexual partners the dozens of men on whom she had performed fellatio.) Other texts come up with more imaginative transvestite tricks; the "war wound" argument for castrati t alleged that the organ in question had been bitten off by pigs.
Ladder 221
Compare 222
Approach Eight: Queer Theory and the Theater of Deception
Hub 223
Queer Theory And The Theater Of Deception
In either case, the audience experiences a doubling of their already double pleasure; but when the cross-dressing goes one way in the outer frame (say, MTF) and the other way in the inner frame (say, FTM), the result is a kind of double-back- cross-dress: t someone pretending to be the gender s/he really is.
Cycle 224
Operatic Scenarios
Many of the reasons for cross-dressing apply equally well to opera and to theater, but there are also reasons for cross-dressing specific to opera, such as the kind of exaggeration and artificiality that opera has and Shake- speare does not. In some early operas, the parts of some women (as well as of some men) were played by men (often by castratit), while in others, the parts of men were played by women. (In one performance, a castrato and a woman in breeches met, the woman playing the man and the castrato the girl,77 in what I would call a double-cross-dress.
(In India, too, strolling bands of male players had men play the parts of women, while troupes of temple dancers, or devadasis, had to have women play the parts of men.) Finally, the asym- metry in agingt that proved useful in the theater proved even more useful in opera: the unreliability of the voices of young boys on the cusp of manhood, as well as their immaturity and social unreliability, inspired composers to use women instead, while men in their prime can play old women with a vocal power that most old women do not have. Opera appears as the frame of many masquerades and as an element in the plot of others.
(We might stretch the framing genre to include musical comedy: in 1996 alone, musical comedy versions of several bed- tricks-Victor/Victoria, t The House of Martin Guerre, t and The Picture of Dorian Grayt-were playing in New York and London.) E. Hoff- mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal together supply most of the mythic operatic scenarios in the contemporary repertoire; Hofmannsthal, with Richard Strauss, produced an almost obsessive corpus of stories about double women (Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Fraue ohne Schatten, Die iigyp- tische Helena:t.) and bedtricks (Rosenkavalier, t Arabellat).
Mozart (with Da Pontet), Verdi,t and Wagnert are simply the best known of many operatic composers who depicted bedtricks. Opera also figures as an ob- ject, an element of the plot of many nonoperatic sexual masquerades. Both of the separated twin sisters in The Double Life of Wroniquet (1991) are singers; Sarrasinet and M.
Butterflyt are about transvestite opera sing- ers; and when the hero of Victor/Victoriat (1982) goes to the opera with his transvestite lover, the opera is, significantly, Madama Butterfly. t Opera is a bedtrick-friendly medium because opera is about sex and masquerade. As for sex, Reynolds urges us to take seriously the unmen- tioned but blatant physical act when one woman (in trouserst) makes love to another: "Everyone knows that opera is about sex.
It is no accident that the opera house is furnished with velvet plush, gilded mirrors, naked
Flow 225
Ladder 226
Queer Theory And The Theater Of Deception
There is an old English folk song about the erotic (and deluding) powers of the voice: When I was a-lying across my bed, And his hand across my breast, He made me believe by the faults of his tongue, That the sun rose in the west.B3 The film Hear My Song (1991) is also about the erotic power ofthe voice, particularly in its relationship with aging and self-deception. A man who claims, falsely, to be a famous aging tenor enchants a woman who had heard the real tenor sing years ago; she says, "You close your eyes and cast your mind back thirty years, and you see and hear what you want to see and hear." The voice trick in this case is doubled by a bedtrick, but by itself the voice casts its sexual spell; "There won't be a dry seat in the house," says the promoter urging the real tenor to return.
Compare 227
Sexual Objectives And Sexual Objects
Our texts suggest many different sorts of ostensible reasons for men and women to cross-dress both in fiction and in real life. The men who act as women in Shakespearean plays and Noh dramas, and who sing as women in operas (not to mention the men who are castrated in order to sing), often say, We did it only for art (or money); the Vaticant made us do it. Thomas Middleton's Micro-Cynicon (1599) tells of a transvestite who cross-dresses not in order to rape the victim of his bedtrick but sim- ply to rob him.B4 This amounts to what Garber might discount as a "prog- ress narrative," a self-deceptive or hypocritical excuse in a real-life mas- querade.
But although the subtext of transvestism is sexual, there are meaningful surface texts, too. Some of the women in our stories cross-dress so they can move about 380 ApPROACH EIGHT freely to accomplish a goal (often on behalf of their husbands, like Jessica and Portia in The Merchant of Venicet). Others (Yentl, t the sister in The Changelingst) do it to get an education; this is what, in the case ofJane Welsh Carlyle, Phyllis Rose wittily calls "pen envy": "In her childhood, she wanted to study Latin, as boys did.
Her parents would not allow it. Furtively, Jane consulted a local scholar and managed to teach herself the declension of a Latin noun, choosing-with unerring emphasis-the word penna . She said, 'I want to learn Latin; please let me be a boy.' ...
Cross-dressing to murder a sexual enemy (as Amba:j: avenges her own rape), whether or not the killing involves a sexual act, might also be construed as a sexual motive. When it does involve a sexual act (as in the killing of Kicakat) , there can be no doubt that it has a sexual motive; the "sweet death" or "little death" of the orgasm or the romantic Liebestod becomes a bitter, full-sized, and most real death. Many women cross- dress to avoid being raped, and since rape is an act of sexual violence that is both nonsexual (in its desire to inflict pain and to dominate) and sexual (in its choice of the sexual act to do this), this, too, is a sexual reason to cross-dress.
Hub 228
Queer Theory And The Theater Of Deception
381 raped the young man start out to rape a woman and then, when they found out that she was a man, simply switch from cross-sex to same-sex rape? Was the argument against him that, like all women, he was "asking for it"? The same questions might be asked of a modern instance in which the victim is not an MTF but an FTM.
For rape, or its inverse, sexual security, was also mentioned as a factor, if not the most important factor, by a cross-dressing woman interviewed by Holly Devor: I used to hitchhike home from the hospital and the other nurses used to freak out that I'd hitchhike home. But I'd wear a toque and a down jacket and work boots. No man in his right mind would think I was a woman ...
Did the "dykes" know that the hitchhiker was a woman? What did she do when they found out? How kinky is "that much kinky"?
Those who assume that transvestites are "homosexual" are defining sexuality by the object of desire (the "real" other man or woman): a transvestite is a man who wears woman's cloth- ing in order to attract a man. Such people would define gender by asking, 382 ApPROACH EIGHT "Do you do it with a man or a woman?" But texts such as The Changelings, like many actual transvestites and transsexuals, more often define sexual- ity by the subject than by the object of desire.
The man who had a sex change operation in order to become a lesbian and the man who married a lesbian and who plans to undergo a sex change operation to become a woman91 puzzle us only in the "Who-do-you-do-it-with?" paradigm ("All that trouble just to end up in bed with a woman anyway") but not in terms of the "Who-are-you?" paradigm. And once we factor in the many other variables-distinctions between sexual anatomy and social presen- tation, or sex and gender; between self-perception and self-delusion; be- tween masquerades intended to fool and masquerades intended to be per- ceived as masquerades (which is not the same as the distinction between realistic and exaggerated, or "camp," masquerades)-we realize just how difficult it is to know precisely what is going on when someone cross- dresses.
Cycle 229
But the idea of the fake always im- plies the idea of authenticity: for A not to be B, you have to know what B is; when a woman is being a woman among men she is also masquerad- ing as the man's image of her, as herself, and as her idea of the authentic woman. This is not, however, merely a feminist problem. The same thing can happen, though in different ways and with far less serious conse- quences, to men.
Flow 230
NINE: Incest
olstoy begins Anna Karenina with a variant of the paradoxt of the same and the different: "All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way." Incestuous families are certainly unhappy, each in its own way, but the Freudian t hypothesis of the univer- sality of the Oedipal complex implies that, though they may all be differ- ent, their unhappinesses look alike in the shadow of incest. Our texts provide evidence in support of both Tolstoy (difference) and Freud (sameness); but beyond that, they provide evidence for a close connection between incest and the bedtrick.
Ladder 231
Incest And The Bedtrick
olstoy begins Anna Karenina with a variant of the paradoxt of the same and the different: "All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way." Incestuous families are certainly unhappy, each in its own way, but the Freudian t hypothesis of the univer- sality of the Oedipal complex implies that, though they may all be differ- ent, their unhappinesses look alike in the shadow of incest. Our texts provide evidence in support of both Tolstoy (difference) and Freud (sameness); but beyond that, they provide evidence for a close connection between incest and the bedtrick.
The demons Andhaka t and J alandhara, t born of Shiva, try to seduce Shiva's wife Parvati, their stepmother; and Andhaka's son Adit impersonates his grandmother, Parvati, to seduce and kill his grandfather, Shiva. Viraka, the son of Parvati and Shiva (and hence Andhaka's brother and Adi's uncle), experiences the devastating fallout from Adi's attack, more particularly the wrath of Vir aka's mother when she blames him for his failure both to keep his father from other women (his nephew Adi) and to recognize Parvati herself.
And in the Bedouin t story retold by Lila Abu-Lughod, a man mistakes his mother for his wife after a long absence and sleeps with her. Here, too, is grist for Freud's myth. Incest is often the result of a bedtrick (on the explicit level) but is 383 384
Compare 232
Mothers And Sons
A paradigmatic bedtrick is the tale of the son whose mother mistakes him, at the very least, for someone who is not her son (as in Sophocles' Oedipus the King) or, at the very most, for his father. Though our concern in this chapter will be primarily with humans, there are myths about the gods en famille, rather than in contact with mortals, that function in the same way as stories about human families, t and we shall begin with one of these.
The Hindu god Indra,:j: the villain in many divine adulteries, is 386
Hub 233
Indra And Kutsa
Kutsa Aurava ("Thigh-born") was made out of the two thighs of Indra. Just as Indra was, so was he, precisely as one would be who is made out of his own self. Indra made him his charioteer.
He caught him with his wife, and when he asked her, "How could you do this?" she replied, "I could not tell the two of you apart." Indra said, "I will make him bald, and then you will be able to tell the two of us apart." He made him bald, but Kutsa bound a turban around his head and went to her. Indra caught him again, and again she said she could not tell them apart. Indra smeared dirt between his shoulders, but Kutsa covered it up and went to her.
(As usual, the woman's state of mind remains ambiguous: does she recognize the imposture and re- main silent because she welcomes the lover-which seems likely, given her suspicious failure to become suspicious-or is she genuinely fooled and angered by the deception when she finally discovers it? In any case, Kutsa knew very well that he was not his own father.) By failing to correct his mother's error, Kutsa is masquerading as him- selft-for, according to classical Hindu law, he is his father.
INCEST 387 In the course of this myth, Indra undoubles his son in order to keep the woman for himself. Making Kutsa bald deprives him of the hair that is so often a symbol of semen, the seed in the head.s Smearing him with dust makes explicit the pollution of incest and, through two puns, associ- ates him with both spiritual and social pollution: rajas means "dust," "pas- sion" (in contrast with spiritual purity, sattva), and "menstrualt blood," whereas raja means "king," regarded by this text as spiritually inferior to a Brahmin; and mala means "dirt," whereas a MalIa is a wrestler, of low caste.
The myth of Kutsa is part of a larger corpus of myths that deal not only with the profane Freudian concerns of the nuclear family but with the cosmogonic concerns of humankind as a whole, the creation of classest of men (such as wrestlers and rajas) and the estrangement not only of sons from fathers but of humans from gods. In another story from ancient India, it is the father who almost makes the incestuous error: a man returning from a long journey sees a young man sleeping near his wife and, thinking that he is her lover, moves to kill him; restrained by a verse that he happens to see, he discovers that he almost killed his own son.
9 We are left to wonder if the boy's proximity to his mother was innocent; if it was not, the story presents an Oedipal encounter that averts the punishment for incest. Incest is also averted at the last minute in the much retold Greek tale The Life of Secundus (as Herschel Levine remarks, "Strange as it may seem to us, this revolting story was very popular in antiquity and in the Middle Ages and was trans- lated into Latin, Syrian, Armenian and Arabic").
Cycle 234
Here is the opening of the Greek text, probably composed during the latter half of the second century C.E.: 10
Flow 235
The Life Of Secundus
[To test his assumption that all women are whores, a young man who had left home as a small boy let the hair on his head grow long, grew a beard, returned home, and, unrecognized by his mother, got her to accept his offer of fifty gold pieces if she would sleep with him.] She told the maid, "At nightfall I will have him enter secretly and I will go to bed with him." Secundus sent provisions for a dinner, and when they had finished dinner and started to go to bed, she was expecting to mingle with him carnally; but he put his arms around her as he would around his own mother, and fixing his eyes upon the breasts that had suckled him, he lay down and slept until early morning. When the first light of dawn appeared Secundus got up to go, but she held him with her hands and asked, "Did you do this in order to convict me?" And he an- 388
Ladder 236
The Man Who Married His Daughter And Sister
[A rich widow had one son. When he was between fourteen and fifteen years old he began to desire a young lady who slept in his mother's room. The girl complained to the mother, who at first refused to believe her but then said, "I will find out if what you say is true," vowing to punish the boy if it was true, and the girl if it was not.
At the mother's instruction, the girl told the boy to come at midnight to join her in bed, but the mother took her place. She waited in silence until he did something that would prove that his intentions were bad, but] so long did she wait, and so fragile was her nature, that her anger turned to pleasure, a pleasure so abominable, that she forgot she was a mother. [That night she became pregnant, while he still thought he had lain with the young girl.
Overcome with remorse, she sent the boy away. She bore the child, a daughter, in secrecy and gave her away to her own bastard brother to raise as his own. When the child was grown, he placed her, on her mother's advice, with Catherine, queen of Navarre.
After some time, the son wanted to return, but his mother, fearing that she might repeat her sin, told him to return only when he had his wife with him. He visited the queen of Navarre, fell in love with his own daughter, and married her. When he told his mother who his bride was, she] sank into a state of such utter desperation that she thought her end was near.
[But several doctors of theology advised INCEST 389 her never to say anything to her children,) for they had acted in ignorance and consequently had not sinned .... The poor lady returned to her house, and not long after that her son and her daughter-in-law arrived. They were very much in love.
Never was there such love between husband and wife, never were a husband and wife so close. For she was his daughter, his sister, his wife. And he was her father, brother, and husband.
They endured forever in this great love, while the poor lady, their mother, in the extremity of her penitence, could not see them show their love but she would withdraw to weep aloneY The permutations of this tale resemble those of a double-back-cross of a special sort; and the sophisticated author, a woman, applies to incest the Machiavellian coincidental,t and involuted permutations more generally characteristic of nonincestuous bedtricks. A modern take on the theme of the mother who does not recognize her son in bed is provided by a group of five films released between 1985 and 1988, all dealing with the switching of an adult man and a boy through a magic transformation or time travel.
13 The series begins in Back to the Future (1985), in which a boy finds himself in danger of masquerad- ing as his father with his mother when he travels back in time to become the contemporary of his potential parents in high school. The potential mother keeps falling in love with her son, who is far more attractive (and intelligent) than the ineffectual father. This is a powerful fantasy in which the child surpasses his father but nobly rejects the opportunity to take his mother away from him.
Compare 237
The son keeps trying to help his blundering future father win her, because he knows that if this does not happen, he himself will never be born. This danger is graphically, and mythologically, represented by a photograph of the family that the boy brings with him into the past: every time the mother rejects the father, the image of the boy in the photograph begins to fade away, just as the portrait of Dorian Gray:!: becomes uglier every time he commits an evil act.
The incestuous shadow of the child lover is all but erased in the film Big (1988), in which a thirteen-year-old boy named Josh makes a wish to be big and wakes up to find himself encased in the body of a young adult male. The first person he tries to convince of his real identity is his mother, but when he appears in front of her, wearing his father's clothes, she panics and screams for the police, treating Josh as if he were a stranger who had come into the house to attack her or rape her.
He tries to shout, over her screams, "Mom, it's me, Josh .... I have a birthmark on my left knee." But when he starts to take off his pants to show her his 390
Hub 238
Fathers And Daughters
Many variants of Beauty and the Beastt begin with a father who chooses for his daughter a man she does not love, while she gladly sacrifices herself because of her love for her father. Father-daughter incest looms large in the bedtricks in the tale of Cinderella, particularly in the locus classicus, Perrault's "Donkeyskin," in which "the king's beautiful and charming wife falls ill, and on her deathbed she asks him to swear that he will only marry again a woman who is more beautiful than she.
Ovid, writing at the turn of the common era in Rome, told a story also known to other Greek and Latin sources:
Cycle 239
Myrrh A And Her Father
Myrrha feU in love with her father, Cinyras; she knew that stallions would mate with their daughters, and that there were tribes where fathers mated with their daughters, mothers with their sons, but not, alas, her own. When he asked her what sort of man she would like to marry, she replied, "One like you." This pleased him, for he didn't understand its full meaning. Myrrha confessed her forbidden desire to her nurse, who promised to help her.
Drunkenness, t too, is a stock prop for the bedtrick, particularly the incestuous bedtrick, and perhaps provides an alibi for the father, who claims he "didn't understand its full meaning" when his daughter told him that her heart belonged to daddy. But the father sobers up quickly enough to bring a lamp to see the bedmate who has implicitly demanded what Cupid t explicitly demanded of Psyche: stay in the dark. And then the jig is up.
Brothers And Sisters
Incest is the love of someone who is too much the same as oneself, and this sameness, which blurs the line between generations, is more powerful among siblings of the same generation and most powerful in twins. In chapter 4 we considered stories about twin sisters who replace one another in bedtricks, raising gender-specific questions of beauty and aging; in chapter 6, the relatively straightforward case of twin brothers; and in chapter 8, the case of male and female siblings who are mistaken for one another.
The Mark Of Incest
A brother came to his sister in the night and slept with her when "it was dark and she could not recognize him." When he visited her again, she marked his face under the left eye with soot; and the next day she discov- ered the telltale mark on her brother. She was so angry that she took a knife and cut off her left breast. He told her to go to the sun, where it is always warm, and he went to the moon, where it is always cold.
The Family Romance As Comedy And Tragedy
The Family Romance, analyzed, after Freud, by Otto Rank, Joseph Camp- bell, and Alan Dundes,24 is usually happy, or at least triumphant: in the end, the hero finds his real parents and comes into his true legacy as a king. But the plot often involves a bedtrick, and then it may well take a tragic turn. In the hands of Sophocles and Freud, the child, raised by people he mistakes for his parents, is in danger of mistaking his real par- ents for unrelated legitimate sexual partners.
The idea of the tragi- comedy was well paraphrased (reversing Marx) in a song in a Broadway musical distantly descended from the Plautus play (A Funny Thing Hap- pened on the Way to the Forum): "Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight." 394
Approach Nine: Sexual Rhetoric
One of the questions that these stories are asking is, What is intimacy? Sex or talk?
Flow 240
Aural Sex
The speech act recurs in these stories in opposition to the sexual act. We noted in another context that, in ancient Judaism, as in contemporary India, "conversation" is a euphemism for intercourse. (This link was im- plicitly invoked by the bedtrickster in the film The Truth about Cats and Dogst [1996], who joked that she had gotten pregnant by having phone sex.) The protagonist of Julian Barnes's "Experiment"t remarks, "The truth is that everyone talks about sex in a different way, just as everyone, we naturally assume, does it in a different way." Deborah Garrison argues "that the old maxim that sex and reading have a lot in common is proba- bly true.
Ramanujan said, "genders are genres."33 The San- skrit term varnat has a very similar range, designating classt (including, most prominently, the four social classes) and, not gender, but species, mortal versus immortal, t family versus nonfamily, t color, t and a vowel or syllable. A related cluster of meanings is blanketed by the Sanskrit 396
Ladder 241
Sexual Rhetoric
397 word linga (according to the standard Sanskrit dictionary of Sir Monier Monier-Williams), primarily "a mark, spot, sign, token, badge, emblem, characteristic" that might be used to distinguish one person from another. It then means "any assumed or false badge or mark, guise, disguise." The idea that a sign is, ipso facto, a deception is worth noting. And linga also means "proof, evidence; ...
a sign of guilt, corpus delicti." Moreover, in logic, Monier-Williams continues, the linga is "the invariable mark which proves the existence of anything in an object" (as in the proposition "Where there is smoke, there is fire," where smoke is the linga of fire). But its narrower meaning of "the sign of gender or sex, organ of genera- tion," is further narrowed to "the male organ or Phallus (esp. that of Siva)" or "the image of a god, an idol." The sign of universal sexuality is linked with the sign of a particular god, Shiva, in texts that argue that all human beings are naturally designed to be the worshipers of Shiva and his wife Parvati.
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Dirty Stories
The bedtrick is the occasion of a struggle between two people for the power to remain the subjects of their own stories and to have their part- ners recognize those stories. But since each of them has two identities, each has two stories to tell. The female trickster has both the story she tells to herself and the one she tells the victim, while the female victim has both the story she thinks she has (a story that depends on the identity of the trickster) and the one that the trickster knows the victim has.
And occasionally the bed- trickster makes the trick work by luring the victim with a story about the trick; this happens to several victims of cross-dresserst who fall for the old story of the boy raised as a girl t -a story often told as an alibi for a trickster who does not cross-dress but merely appears to do so while remaining as he (or she) is. One reason such a story is effective, able to convince people against their better judgment, is precisely because it is such a cliche.
t "Oh," says the victim, "that story." Thus, in John Erskine's novel, the daughter of Helen:j: of Troy tries to get her mother off the hook by making up a story of a bedtrick: I could have told more than one lie; I tried to choose the best. The first I thought of wouldn't do-I had it out of old-fashioned poetry-that situa- tion you get so often where the gods deceive the lover by a spell, and he doesn't know who it is he takes in his arms, but afterward his eyes are cleared and he knows he's been tricked.
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Sexual Rhetoric
399 Terence Cave has argued that recognition stories in general (of which the bedtrick is a subgenre) work because when the victim recognizes the trickster, the audience recognizes the time-worn plot: "The recognition scene is, as it were, the mark or signature of a fiction, so that even if something like it occurs in fact, it still sounds like fiction and will probably be retold as such." 39 This is certainly true of myths in general, which derive much of their power from repetition,40 and particularly true of stories of bedtricks; the predictable ending is as expected, and as satisfying, when it finally comes, as the resolving cadences at the end of a Mozart sym- phony. After a series of insanely unlikely coincidencest in the Chinese Family Romancet "Nativity Room,"t the author, Li Yu, comments: "Who would ever have expected the Creator's ingenuity to be a hundred times greater than man's?
Thus, bedtricksters (in real life and in stories) often tell bedtrick sto- riest to persuade their victims. Martin Guerret had on his side an already existing corpus of stories in his favor: the man who returns to his wife after a long absence, usually in a war, and must prove to her that he is 400 ApPROACH NINE her husband despite the changes wrought by time and suffering was even in his time a classical motif, often simply called "The Return" or the "Nostos" theme.
I noted, in the introduction, that myths, even more than other sorts of stories, swing upon the double ability of storytelling to conceal or re- veal. We must also bear in mind that a story often functions as a negative truth: when, for instance, the stories present successful bedtricks, we should conclude not that bedtricks succeed more than they fail but, rather, that stories about bedtricks pay far more attention to successful illusions than to failures, precisely because common sense insists that illu- sion is what has to be justified, and is hard to justify, in a bedtrick.
Cycle 244
(Simi- larly, more texts explain why mortal women prefer mortal men:\: than
Flow 245
Sexual Rhetoric
401 why they prefer immortal men precisely because that is what needs to be explained.) The narrative dice are loaded in favor of bed tricksters because the real-life dice are believed to be loaded against them. David Shulman has remarked upon the way that myths force us into the logical impasse of doubling and masquerading whenever we try to think about our lives: "In myths, the articulation of major categories of thought or perception is based on their occlusion or disguise; that is, myth is predicated on the listener's not perceiving the primary categories that the story attempts to set out.
Heinrich Zimmer has illuminated the connection between myths and bedtricks (of the Lovely Ladyt variety) through the metaphor of the aging face, t the source of so many bedtricks: The mythical content often appears rather like an overpainted, tricked-out old beauty. Beneath all the frippery there is nothing of the reborn freshness of a youthful figure with radiant countenance, but only a shriveled, corru- gated old thing with a rewritten face. Nevertheless, just such long-overripe old beauties are often the very ones to tell best the ancient tales of life; they are better at that, by far, than the young and attractive fascinators.
The only problem is not to shudder at the look of them while we are listening. 52 And one reason that we shudder is that we realize that the old lady is telling the truth, despite the lie implicit in her "overpainted" beauty and "rewritten" face. The knowledge that the myth transmits is, in part, self- validating; it transmits the knowledge of its own truth.
But these myths also deconstruct their own truth and tell us, using language, that language, in which myths are inscribed, is a lie. Thus, simultaneously they explicitly affirm and implicitly deny the deceptive nature of knowledge itself, both sexual knowledge and the fragile knowledge transmitted by language. Howard Bloch, in The Scandal of the Fabliaux, notes that, among the many sexual tricks depicted in the medieval French stories, the dirty story itself is the greatest trick of all.
The central event is not necessarily the cuckolding but the clever words that the trickster tells to conceal the cuckolding. The desire for narrative of which Bloch speaks owes a great deal to the idea of the pleasure of the text in the writings of Roland Barthes, particularly S/Z. t The Balzac story of Sarrasinet itself, even before Barthes illuminates it for us, is about language; as Sarrasine says to La Zambinella: "You have dragged me down to your level.
Ladder 246
Thus, language is not merely castrated; it castrates. Balzac's story has a frame: Sarrasine's story is told by a would-be lover to a lady who asks for the story ("I want to know now"), to which the storyteller replies, "You haven't yet given me the right to obey you when you say: 'I want to.'" Barthes's gloss of this reply is: If you give yourself to me, I will tell you the story: tit for tat: a moment of love in exchange for a good story ....
A man in love, taking advantage of the curiosity evidenced by his mistress, . offers her a contract: the truth in exchange for a night of love, a narrative in exchange for a body . Carried by the narrative itself, this disease [of castration] ends by con- taminating the lovely listener and, withdrawing her from love, keeps her from honoring the contract.
Caught in his own trap, the lover is rebuffed: a story about castration is not told with impunity. 55 Thus, Barthes frames Balzac, adding his own layer outside the narrator who frames Sarrasine. The "desire for narrative" appears here as a contract that is the inverse of Scheherazade's: the story is told by a man to a woman, and it causes, rather than prevents, his "death." For the woman
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Sexual Rhetoric
403 who hears about Sarrasine is horrified; the seducer's story backfires. Where Scheherazade's story forestalls her death, the narrator's story fore- stalls the seduction (by the narrator) but not the death (of Sarrasine). The pleasure of the text is an old idea in India.
In the Valmiki Rama- yana, t a king who lives with a man who becomes a woman every other month gives her pleasure as she gives pleasure to him (the verb for sexual enjoyment, ram, is consistently used in the causative both for him and for her); and when she becomes a man, the king gives him the pleasure of hearing stories, using the same verb, ram, for the pleasures of sex and text.:j: D. Winnicott argues that bedtime stories are among the child's first transitional objects, t the first things that build a bridge between the self-created world and the created world, the first substitutes for the mother.
t 56 Fran~ois Flahaut sees a slightly different relationship between narrative, sexuality, and the loss of the mother: Every human being has two umbilical cords: one, made of flesh, is cut at birth; the other, even before conception, weaves a person into language. But not only can this second cord never make up for the cutting of the first, it is itself an ambiguous, or paradoxical, umbilicus: it connects only by keeping apart; it plunges each person into the immense universe of meaning only at the price of an irrevocable break.
Fictional narratives are one of the forms of compromise (sexual life is another, and the most basic) which seek to reduce this paradox. 57 The paradox of linguistic alienation argues that the original unity of lan- guages (in Eden) was shattered at the time of the tower of Babel; narratives seek to heal that break, when one person tells a story and the other says, "Yes, I understand; that's my story, too." Similarly, the paradox of sexual separation argues that when the umbilical cord is cut, we are separated from our mother; sexual union (and the advent of the father's phallus and, with it, language, according to Lacan t) seeks to heal that break, when one person joins physically with another.
When these two paradoxes of linguistic and sexual alienation, the tower of Babel and the separation from the motherllover, are simultaneously addressed in narratives about sexual life, the form (the narrative) reinforces the content (the image of the sexual act). In myths about bedtricks, the two paradoxes converge in an attempt to heal one another, as narrative and language themselves may emerge as substitutes for the lost object oflove. But, the deconstructionists argue, we never do understand another person's story, and we know that 404 ApPROACH NINE lovers, like stories, prove untrue, widening the rift even farther, language tearing away at sexuality and sexuality at language.
And yet poets and mythmakers dare to dream that we can somehow experience one anoth- er's stories. Terry Eagleton has remarked on another aspect of the analogy between the loss of the mother and the telling of a story: It is an original lost object-the mother's body-which drives forward the narrative of our lives-impelling us to pursue substitutes in an endless metonymic movement of desire. Something must be lost or absent in any narrative for it to unfold.
If everything were fixed, there would be no story to tell. Loss is distressing but also exciting. Desire is stimulated by what we cannot have, but we must know that the object will always be restored to us.
Hub 248
Cycle 249
The Double Entendre
When people double, they may become masqueraders; when words dou- ble, they may become puns and riddles, verbal hiding places. The riddle often turns on the double meaning of a word or a phrase: the trick is to find out what the second meaning is, to identify the surrogate-which is also the point of so many of the stories of bedtricks. Riddling is often erotic, a kind of teasing, verbal foreplay that sets up the bedtrick; in some societies, including India, a woman may have what is called a "joking relationship" with certain men regarded as sexually safe.
The term "dis- tinctive feature," used in structural linguistics to distinguish one pho- nemet (or, by Levi-Straussian extension, mythemet) from another, ap- plies equally well to the narrative clue that enables us to tell one sexual partner from another. So many bedtricks depend upon the trickiness of words, riddles, puns, and double entendres. The myth of Samjna,:j: first stated in the form of a riddling verse in the Rig Veda, turns upon the riddle of the foot:j: that is both a part of a leg and a part of a meter of poetry; and Samjna embod-
Sexual Rhetoric
405 ies the riddle of the relationship between the mother and the nonmother, the Text and the Commentary. The Loathly Ladyt sometimes solves rid- dles that other people have posed for the young hero (What do women want?), sometimes poses riddles to the young hero herself, and sometimes herself constitutes a riddle, either the same riddle that she solves for him (What do women want?) or the riddle of her own ugliness and beauty, or beauty and infidelity. One retelling of the tale of Rachelt and Leah introduces a play on the phrase "Hi leah, hi leah," which is ostensibly an exclamation of joy (like "Hallelujah") but also means "It is Leah, it is Leah!": That night they were singing, "Hi leah, hi leah." In the evening they came to lead her [into the bridal chamber] and put out the light.
A key clue in the film Prelude to a Kisst (1992) consists of a series of linguistic tests about a riddle in Dutch that the real Rita teaches Peter before the switch. The phrase in Dutch means "What white teeth you have," and the response is "The better to eat you with" (also in Dutch). Becker-as-Rita knows the phrase, and for a moment Peter thinks that this proves that slhe really is Rita; but slhe can't remember the response, and later we learn that Becker was born in Amsterdam and so just happens to know Dutch.
When Peter finally meets Rita-as-Becker, he says the Dutch phrase, to which slhe replies, "Not any more," showing the yellow teeth that Rita as Rita had worried about. The Dutch riddle comes from a fairy tale about a masquerade in bed (the wolft with Little Red Riding Hood), but its transformation here ("Not any more") makes it even more appro- priate, for the dream of teeth yellowing and falling out is, as Freud noted,6O the nightmare of aging and dying, the subtext of Prelude to a Kiss.
I have noted that words like "betray"t and "deceive"t in English have both a general and a particularly sexual meaning; the word "myth," too, is one of a small but interesting group of words that mean, usually for reasons of historical conflation, both one thing and its opposite (like "cleave"t).6\ Other languages contain similar sorts of double entendres: 406 ApPROACH NINE in French, dedoubler means both to split one thing in half and to double it; Persian uses one word for both "image" and "beloved,"62 suggestive of myths in which an image stands in for the lost love object; and Tamil uses one word for both "body" and "reality," suggesting a great deal that is relevant to my arguments about mind and body, t reality and illu- sion. The fact that in German (as in many languages) there is one word (Miidchen in German) for both "maiden" and "girl" is the source of a pun that leads to great misunderstandings between Arabella t and Mandryka: where she means to say goodbye to her maidenhood, he thinks she has given her maidenheadt to another man.
Marina Warner has pointed out the particular relevance of riddles to myths of incest:t "A riddle contains negative terms that turn into positives as soon as they are decoded: riddling means to defy logic in peculiar cou- plings of like and like .... Mutually exclusive terms become one in the verbal game. It is a form which abolishes linguistic logic, just as incest cancels kinship law ....
Yet words often protect the masquerader and make possible the im- proper conjunction. English-speaking people nowadays usually regard puns or even strong rhymes as humorous, as doggerel; the accepted social reaction to an elaborate pun is a groan. But puns can be deadly earnest in religious texts (as well as in French literary criticism), and riddles are often a matter of life and death.
Barthes demonstrates how puns are used to save Sarrasine from admitting the truth to himself: The tenor says, "You have no rival," because: (1) you are loved (Sarrasine' s understanding); (2) you are wooing a castrato (understanding of the ac- complices and perhaps, already, of the reader). According to the first un- derstanding, there is a snare; according to the second, a revelation .... The double understanding, the basis for a play on words, cannot be analyzed in simple terms of signification (two signifieds for one signifier) ....
If the play on words seems to be addressed to one person only (for example, the reader), this person must be imagined as being divided into two subjects, two cultures, two languages, two zones of listening.64
A Lover By Any Other Name
In Love Letterst (1945), the name of Singleton (which means an only child in contrast with a twin, a strange name for a double woman) is a clue the hero misses at first. In Dead Ringers (1988),t one of the twin brothers (who are named, androgynously, Beverley and Elliot, nicknamed Bev and Ellie), finding himself alone in a hotel, sends for twin sisters. When they arrive, he tells them, hesitating uncertainly at the first name, "So that I can tell you apart, I want you, Mimsy, to call me El, and you, Coral, to call me Bev." The names of the twin men are thus given the chiasmic twist of allowing the trickster to tell twins apart not by their names but by their names for him.
This logic of a projected t voice corresponds to the logic of the projected gaze, t which made some people in ancient India 408 ApPROACH NINE paint a magic ointment:j: on their eyes in order to become invisible to others (and makes children cover their own eyes when they want to be- come invisible). The initials of Jupiter's name on Amphitryon'st box or, in other vari- ants, his monogram on a headband provide a key piece of damning evi- dence, though this hard proof fails when the gods tamper with it.
But the weight of evidence in the myths goes against Alcmena's apparent sophistication and in favor of Sosia's apparent naivete: you can indeed steal someone's name. Javier Marias's paranoid protagonist, Victor, seeing a prostitute who mayor may not be his ex-wife, Celia, wonders what would happen "if it was her and she bore the same name-because a face is not enough, it grows old and can change and can be made up to look different." He asks her name. "'Victoria,' she lied, assuming she was Celia and perhaps even if she wasn't.
The name of a king has both a politicalt aspect (the title) and an individual aspect (the personal name). In Prisoner of Zenda, t both the king and Rasendel have the same first name (Rudolph), yet Rasendel urges Flavia to call him not by his title but only by his name (Rudolph), and later he consoles himself with the memory of her chanting his name over and over, even though it is also the name of the king, with whom she is now presumably in bed.
This doubleness of the private and the public also affects the taboo against knowing the name of the animal lover or
Sexual Rhetoric
409 the lover from another world, such as Lohengrin:t "Nie sollst du mich befragen ... noch meine Name und Art." The prohibition against know- ing the name is a narrative parallel to the prohibition against Psyche's looking at Cupid at night. Sometimes the lover of the animal lover wants to see the animal form, and sometimes she wants to know the lover's name; these are two ways of determining identity, through the eye or the ear/mouth.
t One name in particular is critical in many bedtricks: the name cried out at the moment of passion, the moment of truth. And this is often the wrong name (for the false, present situation) but also the right name (for the true, hidden revelation); the words betray the truth, while the physical act lies (in implying a monogamous love). Crying out in the act of love, a naked cry that may at first appear to be as primitive as a speech act can be, is nevertheless a cultural fact; the inarticulate coital cries give way to the name, a culturally constructed entity.
Andersen's mermaidt hears her prince murmur, in his sleep, the name of his bride, the other woman. In Terry Southern's "A Change of Style," the woman realizes that her husband has mistaken her for his mistress when he calls her Elaine instead of Grace. In Olivia Goldsmith's Switcheroo, t when the wife, Sylvie, and the mistress, Marla, change places, and Marla-as-Sylvie accidentally remarks, "Sylvie will be furious," she fears the jig is up.
But the bedtricked husband just thinks she's Sylvie and is referring to herself in the third person; he psy- chobabbles in reply, "I think Sylvie is furious right now .... You can acknowledge your anger. Especially with me, Sylvie." He 410 ApPROACH NINE himself slips up by calling Marla-as-Sylvie by Marla's nickname, Cookie Face, and she objects, "Cookie Face?
People often "stumble on the name" in films. In Seven Sinners (1936), Marlene Dietrich, in drag as a navy officer, sings a song about the navy, of which one verse is: "Many men just can't remember / The affair from last September .... But when he says, 'I love you Bessie,' / To some girl whose name is Jessie ....
0 Ashley and Butterly." The protagonist in An Awfully Big Adventure (1995), in bed with a young woman named Stella, calls out the name of Stella Maris; when the woman asks him who Stella Maris is, he confesses it was a woman he knew years ago, who had given herself that nickname; later we find out that Stella Maris was the mother of the Stella in his bed, to whom she had given her own fantasy name and-unwittingly and inces- tuouslyt-her own lover. It happens in real life, too, as we know perhaps from our own lives and certainly from those of famous people.
During World War II, rumors about an affair between General Eisenhower and his driver, Kay Sommer- sby, circulated widely, and after the war Ike returned to a very suspicious Mamie. To placate her, he took her off on a three-day vacation, just the two of them, but unfortunately he called her Kay-and not once, but SEXUAl. RHETORIC 411 twice/4 In the notorious William Kennedy Smith rape trial in 1991, the defendant testified that the woman who accused him called him "Mi- chael" (significantly, the name of her stepfather),75 while she testified that he called her "Cathy" (which was not her name).
TEN: Real Sex and Fantastic Sex
Supernatural or magical bedtricksters in myths can often be identified not by any constant criterion, such as their lack of a shadow,:j: but rather by things that they do at certain moments-such as, for instance, the moment of making love. We have noted psychological projectionst in the minds of the victims of bedtricks.
Flow 250
The Sexual Act
Supernatural or magical bedtricksters in myths can often be identified not by any constant criterion, such as their lack of a shadow,:j: but rather by things that they do at certain moments-such as, for instance, the moment of making love. We have noted psychological projectionst in the minds of the victims of bedtricks. Literal t projections also occur in myths: a god or demon projects from his mind, like a beam of light from a film projector (or what, in my childhood, we stilled called a "magic lantern"), an illusion that envelops the mind of his victim.
Such a trickster is, however, compelled to take his (more rarely her) own true form when he loses mental control and hence inadvertently turns off the current from the magic projector in his head. When the king in a Sanskrit play asks, "How can you find a deity who has concealed herself by her magic pow- ers?" the jester replies, "Sometimes they fail to conjure up the conceal- ment."l This happens, according to various texts, when the trickster sleeps, dies, eats, laughs, gets drunk, angry, frightened, very happy, or, in the case of a demoness, gives birth.
It also happens when the trickster makes love, when sexual passion strips away the disguise and reveals the true identity. This cluster of beliefs centers upon the intuition that the truth is encased in the subconscious-in sleep, in dream, in bed, in sex. When Thomas of Erceldoune, the hero of a medieval English romance, makes love with the ravishingly beautiful queen of the fairies, she is re- vealed as a Lovely Lady.
t She protests, from the start, that if he should 412
Ladder 251
Real Sex And Fantastic Sex
Supernatural creatures are well aware of the fact that they may be unmasked by sex. A Hindu bedtrickster in a Sanskrit text from c. knows that he may reveal his true form when he makes love, and so he takes precautions:
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Varuthini And The Demigod
A Brahmin named Pravara obtained a divine ointment that, when smeared on his feet, enabled him to fly. But he flew to the Himalayas and walked in the snows, which washed off the ointment so that he could no longer fly, though he longed to return home. A celestial courtesan named Varuthini fell in love with him and begged him to stay with her, but he rejected her, saying, "Don't touch me!
Go to some other man who is like you." He continued to protest that he desired only his own wife, and that his gurus had told him never to desire the wife of another man, until finally the householders' fire transported him back home. Now, a demigod [gandharva] named Kali was in love with Varuthini and had been rejected by her. He observed Varuthini now and reasoned, "She is in love with a human.
If I take on his form, she will suspect nothing and will make love with me." Kali-as-Pravara approached her and said, "You must not look at me during the time of our shared sexual enjoyment [sambhoga] , but close your eyes and unite with me." She agreed, and when they made love, and her eyes were tightly closed, she thought, because of his hot energy, it was the form of the [Brahmin] suffused with the sacrifi- cial fire. Then, after a while, she conceived an embryo, who came from 414
Hub 253
Real Sex And Fantastic Sex
A Japanese variant of the myth of MeIusine:j: (another snake lovert) demonstrates the sobering ef- fect of the birth of a son: A man fell in love with the daughter of a sea god, and when she was ready to bear him a child, she said, "All persons of other lands, when they bear young, revert to the form of their original land and give birth. Therefore, I too am going to revert to my original form and give birth. Pray do not look upon me!" But he watched in secret as she turned into a giant crocodile, and he was astonished and ran away.
In Basic Instinct (1991), a brunette masquerades as a blonde by wearing a wig. The movie begins with a man first making love with and then being murdered in bed by a (wigged) blonde with an icepick and ends with the (unwigged) blonde making love exactly like the first, murderous blonde. Everything else is lies; only the sexual act, seen first only by the camera and the victim, then by the camera and the hero (perhaps the next victim), claims to tell us the truth.
But what is the truth? That the blonde at the end must be the blonde at the beginning (i.e., the murderer)? Or that all women behave like that in bed (i.e., that all cats are gray in the dark)?
Or, finally, that all (hyper-) sexual women are murderers? Even in this film, which generally equates sex with reality, the cynical heroine remarks, "Do you think I'm going to tell you all my darkest secrets just because I had an orgasm?" To that question, the hero of American Gigolo (1980) would have answered, "Yes." When the heroine in that film, all starry- eyed and worshipful in her postcoital glow, says to the hero (if we can call him that), "I want to know all about you," he replies, "We just made 416
Cycle 254
Postcoital Sleep
Our texts suggest that, in addition to the change that sex makes in the trickster, weakening the power of illusion, sex also changes the victim by strengthening his or her power to resist illusion. After making love, when the mists of lust have been burnt off a bit, the mind clears and the victim of the bedtrick looks more closely at the other head on the pillow. This happens even in mythological texts.
In most versions of the myth of Samjna, t when her husband takes the form of a stallion to mate with her in her mare form, she fears that he might be another male and resists him; but one version states that this possibility occurs to her only when she is resting after mating with him.lO The power of this moment for the victim is also compounded by changes that postcoital sleep brings about in the trickster, not unlike the changes brought about by the sexual act itself. Postcoital sleep also overlaps with the mythological themes of the demon who is revealed when he falls asleep (for any reason) and the demon, devil, or intergalactic invadert who can possess a mortal who falls asleep.
(Stith Thompson names one of his tale types TT 475, "Sexual relations in sleep." Both Samjna's daughter, Tapati, t and the transsexual bedtrickster in the film Switch (1991) are unknowingly impregnated in their sleep.) According to Jewish tradition, the serpent sneaked into Eden during Adam's postcoital sleepY
Flow 255
Kalingasena And The Magician
King Udayana wanted to marry Kalingasena, but Udayana's prime minis- ter opposed the marriage, because he had promised the king's first wife, Vasavadatta, that she would have no co-wife. The minister mentally sum- moned a demon [rakshasa) and told him to watch over Kalingasena night and day in order to catch her doing something that would prove her unfit to wed the king. In particular, he advised, "If she were to have an affair with a celestial magician [vidyadhara) or someone like that, that would be very fortunate.
And you must observe the divine lover when he is asleep, even if he comes in a different"form, for divine beings assume their own forms when they fall asleep." Now, a celestial magician named Madanavega ["Storm of Passion") had fallen in love with Kalingasena; he asked Shiva to help him win her, and Shiva said, "She will marry Udayana. But before the marriage takes place, assume the form ofUdayana, as if he were impatient for the union, and make her your wife by the gandharva ceremony (of mutual desire)." One night, as Kalingasena was thinking about Udayana, Madanavega used his magic to come to her room in the form of the king.
Kalingasena's ornaments seemed to warn her, ringing out the sound, "This is not the man." But she was confused by her longing and gradually she came to believe him, because he had the form of the king. Madanavega made her his wife by the gandharva ritual. Just then, the demon, invisible, entered and thought he saw Udayana.
Sadly he went and informed the minister, who, however, found out that Udayana was with his queen, Vasavadatta. Then, delighted, the demon returned to observe the form of Kalingasena's disguised lover when he was asleep, as the prime minister had advised. He found Madanavega in his own form, asleep on the bed of the sleeping Kalingasena: his foot had no dust on it, for he was a divine man, who had lost his false form because his magic power to assume such a form vanished when he was asleep.
The demon informed the prime minister, who informed the king and Vasavadatta. That night, the minister took the king to Kalingasena's room when everyone was asleep. Unseen, the king entered and saw Kalin- gasena asleep and Madanavega asleep beside her in his own form.
The king wanted to kill him, but just then Madanavega was awakened by his magic and flew away to the sky. In a moment, Kalingasena woke up too; she saw the empty bed and asked, "Why did the king awake before me and leave me here asleep?" Then she saw the two of them and asked, 418
Ladder 256
Madanamanchuka And The Magician
Madanamanchuka married King Naravahanadatta, the son of King Udayana. One day a celestial magician named Manasavega ["Storm of Thought"] feU in love with Madanamanchuka and carried her off; and his sister, an unmarried celestial magician named Vegavati ["Stormy"], happened to see Madanamanchuka and took her shape. Naravahanadat- ta's minister found Vegavati-as-Madanamanchuka and brought her to the king, but when Naravahanadatta wanted to embrace her, she insisted that he marry her "again" because, she said, she had forgotten to make certain promised offerings to the goblins [yakshas] during the first wedding cere- mony, and so they had carried her off.
He married her and drank with her in the bedroom, for he liked to drink, and he made love with this shape-changer, experiencing the pleasure of living creatures, just as the Sun did with the shadow [double of Samjna]. But when they were making love, she said to him, "Darling, you must not uncover my face suddenly
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419 and look at me while I am asleep." When the king heard this, he was filled with curiosity, and on the very next night he uncovered her face while she was asleep and looked at it. It was not Madanamanchuka, but someone else whose magic power of disguising her appearance was lost when she slept. When Vegavati woke up, he asked her who she was, and she realized that she was in her own shape and that he had discovered her betrayal.
The author sees a parallel with the story of Samjna;:j: and the English editor sees one with the story of Cupid and Psyche. tIS Closest of all, of course, is the parallel with the story of Kalingasena, told in this same text and kept in play by certain patterns of words for "passion" and "storm" in the names. t European bedtricksters, too, are sometimes revealed in their sleep, but at other times sleep facilitates the masquerade.
Thomas Mann's Jacob, t seeing Leah asleep in the morning, muses: "Are then sisters so mysteri- ously alike, and show it in their sleep, though no likeness shows itself in their features?" The protagonist of Carin Clevidence's "The Somnambu- lists"t cuckolds himself in a bedtrick in his sleep. In the film Half Angel (1951), the heroine sleepwalks and becomes another, sexier woman, who falls in love with the hero; both Dracula and the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatcherst (1956) possess (the former sexually, the latter polit- icallyt) the bodies of those who fall asleep.
Postcoital sleep overlaps with drunkennesst and anesthesia, t which produce the same kind of unmasking (or, as the case may be, masking): mental paralysis and the same morning-after uncertainty as to whether or not something has happened. And sleep's big brother, death, also often puts an end to the masquerade; the demon Adi t takes back his true shape when he dies. Death often reveals the true form not only of the mas- querading demon (through the relaxation of his mental control) but of real-life transvestite humans-through the unmasking in the autopsy 420
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In My Little Chickadee (1940), Mae Westt has a masked lover (Joseph Calleia), who kisses her; when he kisses her unmasked, she recognizes him and says, "A man's kiss is like his signature, his identification." Later in the film, when W. Fields (playing Mae West's husband) masquerades as the bandit, gets into the bedroom, and kisses her, she suspects him immediately and turns on the light to expose him. In The Corsican Brothers (1941), when Lucien pretends to be his twin brother, Mario, he fools Mario's girl until he kisses her; then she recognizes him and protests, but he argues, "Maybe you're making an- other mistake.
If your eyes can't tell the difference between my brother and me, how can your heart tell the difference between his love and mine?" In the Disney version of The Little Mermaidt (1989), the sea-witch sets a condition: "If he kisses you, and not just any kiss, but the kiss of true love, within three days, you will remain human forever." (And they sing a Disney song entitled "Kiss the Girl.") But the film kiss more often transforms the heroine from an amnesiac to a woman with a memory, quite literally a woman with a past. In The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), the hero and heroine meet as strangers, thrown together in the crowds in Paris outside the Dingo Cafe on the day of the Nazi surrender; she kisses everyone in uniform, including him, and they part; when they meet later and fall in love, he says, "We've kissed before." "Where?" she asks.
She kisses him and says, "Now I remember. It was near the Dingo Cafe." In Chances Aret (1989), when a man tries to convince a woman that he is a reincarnation of her dead husband, Louie, his knowledge of the most striking particulars about Louie fails to persuade her; then he says, "Re- member this?" and kisses her, and she knows, from her own response, that he's Louie. The same thing happens in The Reincarnation of Peter Proudt (1974).
In Batman Returns (1992), Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne 424
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Penis Envy
In a particularly gross set of variants on this theme, the genitals (more often male than female) may function as the sign by which the bedtricks- ter is recognized. Surprisingly, the genitals per se are not nearly as useful as one might expect in solving dilemmas of sexual identity. This may be in part because they are often displaced upward, t so that the head and eyes and nose and mouth (or, downward, the feet) take on genital symbol- ism, leaving the genitals relatively silent (with the notable exception of the French fabliaux, where both male and female genitalia often have tonguest).
When he wakes up and doesn't recognize her, she says (she has accidentally found out about this from a friend) that he recently lost a testicle in an accident. His mother checks ("I'm his mother; somebody's got to look") and is (wrongly) persuaded that the woman has slept with him. The tricksters in Roald Dahl's "The Great Switcheroo"t fear that geni- tals, particularly too-small genitals, may be a telltale sign: "(Jerry asked,] 'What about some ofthe other differences?' 'You mean faces?' I said.
'No one's going to see faces in the dark.' 'I'm not talking about faces,' Jerry said. 'What are you talking about, then?' 'I'm talking about their cocks,' Jerry said. 'That's what it's all about, isn't it?' "30 But they decide that, though "some are enormous and some are titchy ...
ninety percent are normal," as long as both men are circumcised or uncircumcised. And so it would seem, as the event unfolds. In Plutarch's variant of the myth of Romulus and Remus, the mother of the twins becomes involved in a bizarre bedtrick: King Tarchetius, the cruel and dishonest king of the Albans, saw in the middle of his own house a divine phantasm: a phallus arose out of the hearth and stayed there for many days.
She reacts to it as if it were a human male and, in the familiar pattern, sends her maid t to it in her place. But some penises apparently lead independent and presumably fulfilling lives. The disembodied phallus appears, winged, as the Hermetic phallos, and is often detached from the body of the Native American trickster.32 It rises 426
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427 THE WO/MEN'S ROOM A particular form of quasi-sexual exposure occurs in films about transves- tite bedtricks in which the bathroom, or wo/men's room, replaces the bedroom (or the morgue) as the site of transvestite revelation. The need for the wisdom to choose between them (to borrow a prayer from Rein- hold Niebuhr and Alcoholics Anonymous) produces here, as so often, a double standard:t where Americans find it permissible for mothers to take their little sons to the ladies' room, it is not so easy for fathers to take their little daughters to the men's room.
Nature, more than culture, dictates this: the greater visibility of both male genitalia and male porce- lain (urinals) makes the men's room more awkward than the ladies'. For adults, the problems are more subtle, though still asymmetrical: the wom- en's room is problematic for a woman in drag because the women there would be shocked to see her (dressed as a man); but the men's room is problematic for her because she would see them. The reverse is true for a man in drag: he shocks the men but is shocked by the women.
These situations pose very different problems arising out of the male/female gaze, situations that, in a reversal of the quandary of the parents of little boys and girls, are marginally more problematic for women than for men. In either case, however, since the stories under consideration are mas- querades, it is far more dangerous for the trickster to be seen than to see. S/he usually goes, therefore, into the bathroom that matches the false outer semblance, not the physical anatomy, submitting to the problem of seeing rather than being seen.
Doubtfire (1993), the hero or heroine in drag faces the quandary of the wo/men's room. In Bachelor Party (1984), a boy who goes to bed with a girl discovers that she's not a girl only when she gets out of bed, goes to the bathroom, lifts her skirt and pees, standing up, still leering at him invitingly. Multiplicityt (1996) varies the formula by having the hero meet his clone in the men's room; as they leave, they inadvertently change places when the wife greets the clone and the clone's girl greets the original (each woman merely commenting that the man seems to have changed his shirt).
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The Return Of The Return Of Martin Guerre
On hearing these stories, contemporary listeners often protest, "But, of course, such a thing couldn't really happen" (usually meaning, "such a thing couldn't really happen to me"). How could it be possible that some- one could sleep with two different people on several occasions and never tell the difference? Or, in the case of one person masquerading as two different people, how could the partner not tell the sameness?
Let us touch down, for a moment, in soi-disant real life. Bedtricks, as we have seen, are not confined to the printed page. There have been a number of notorious bedtricks in real life (such as the proto- type of M.
Butterflyt), and there is a law on the books in many of the states against sexual fraud. t Successful transsexual t masqueraders seem to inspire the most shock, and in real life such bedtricksters may be quickly unmasked; some people do notice the differenceY But certain bedtricksters carry on for a long, long time before people notice anything wrong. Hindu law books regard the mistaking of another woman for one's own wife as a real possibility.
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But it did not happen to the man who said it had happened to him; it was a lie that he told, with information that Bertrande gave him. When yOU recognize someone in bed, do you recognize his body, his size and muscle tone, or his sexual technique, his style? Davis seemed to argue the latter view in her book, but under attack she retreated to the former.
Davis argues for the revelatory power of sex: Was the weakness of the sex really so great that wives could not tell the difference between married love and adultery? The cuckolded Martin Guerre clearly thought not. What of Bertrande de Rols?
Did she know that the new Martin was not the man who had abandoned her eight years before? Perhaps not at the very first, when he arrived with all his "signs" and proofs. But the obstinate and honorable Bertrande does not seem a woman so easily fooled, not even by a charmer like Pansette.
By the time she had received him in her bed, she must have realized the difference; as any wife of Artigat would have agreed, there is no mistaking "the touch of the man on the woman."57 432
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433 paradigm of difference invoked by Davis is designed to counteract. Finlay concludes: Surely, the impostor's subsequent sexual habits would have had to be ex- traordinary for the happy, trusting wife to conclude that she was in error . The assumption, then, that sexual relations must have revealed the imposture to Bertrande is not an interpretation based on the sources.
It was the impostor's body. The real Martin Guerre was taller, darker, and thinner than the impostor: "Thus, when Bertrande finally found herself in the embrace of Arnaud du Tilh, she was feeling a body quite unlike the one she had lain next to and held for nine or ten years." And Davis argues, against Finlay's assertion, that there is good evidence that couples of that period slept "with nightcaps but naked." True, people might have assumed that he had grown fatter with the passage of time, she admits, but surely he would not have grown shorter and developed smaller feet.
Despite his ultimate failure, Martin Guerre is generally regarded as an astonishingly successful bedtrickster. Thus, Marjorie Garber remarks of 434
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435 In bed after making love, she remarks drowsily, "You certainly have changed." "For the better?" "So much better, scares me sometimes." As usual, the impostor is nicer (as well as more virile) than the original, but here this film adds a new twist: the man who impersonates Sommersby is no angel (he has gotten a girl pregnant and abandoned her, deserted his battalion in the army, and committed various frauds), but the original, the real Sommersby, has committed a murder (shot a man in a poker game), for which the impostor is now tried. The false Martin Guerre was simply tried for being an impostor and lost his case when the real Guerre showed up (as the real Sommersby could not, having died in the course of some other skulduggery).
The Sommersby variant of the trickster trickedt-making him pay for the previously unknown crime of the per- son he impersonates-may have been inspired by Bette Davis's Dead Ringert (1964), from which at least one other theme was surely borrowed: where Bette Davis purposely injures her right hand (grasping a red-hot poker) so that she will not be expected to produce her usual, right-handed signature, Jack Sommersby's wife testifies, "He couldn't sign like Jack, so he made up a story about a bad hand" (he claimed that a guard in prison had "tromped" on his handt). But then the film adds a second twist, this time political.
t The impos- tor Sommersby had sold a lot of his land to freed slaves and other disen- franchised people to whom no one else would sell. If he were proved an impostor, they would all lose their land, and his daughter (named after another trickster, Rachelt) would be a bastard. Naturally, they all testify that he is Sommersby.
By claiming to be the real Sommersby, therefore, the impostor is not ignobly claiming another man's land and wife (as Pansette did) but, on the contrary, nobly sacrificing his life for his wife and the freed slaves. A Ku Klux Klansman who testifies that the impostor isn't Jack, in order to take away the land from the freed slaves, is exposed as a racist and hauled away to jail for contempt, sentenced by the black judge. At the trial, therefore, where we might expect his wife to testify that he was the real Sommersby if she loved him and an impostor if she didn't (for the impostor would go to jail), she argues that he is an impostor because she loves him-in order to send him to jail (for the imposture) but to save him from hanging (for the murder).
And so she tells the truth: he isn't Jack Sommersby. Here the theme of the superior impostor reaches its crescendo: when "Jack" asks his wife if she knew he was an impostor because he was mean to her, she replies, "No. That's where you went 436
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437 How realistically do stories about bedtricks deal with the problems that might be involved in bringing it off? What realistic explanations do they construct? What excuses have characters in stories made to explain how they could get away with it?
What ways are there of perpetrating the deception, fooling someone in bed? This is the problem of unrealistic nonrecognition. Less pressing and less counterfactual concerns inspire the opposite set of questions about failed bedtricks.
we have also encoun- tered many bedtricksters who were quickly exposed, even among the gods, and then we must ask how bedtricks fail, how the victims see through the trick. What ways are there of detecting the deception, telling one per- son from another in bed? How do you tell the difference?
How does the victim of the bedtrick figure it out? More precisely, what are the reasons that the authors imagined for the success or failure of the bedtrick, the sorts of things that authors thought might allow a person to see through the sexual tricks to the sexual truth? In fiction, often stranger than truth, the success or failure of the bed- trick entails another of our underlying paradoxes:t all successful bedtricks are failures.
On the one hand, most bedtricks in stories (there are excep- tions) work-at least, in the beginning; otherwise there would be no story to tell, for we wouldn't know there had been a bedtrick. Just as most murders go unsolved, so, perhaps, most bedtricks are successful. On the other hand, we learn only about the unsuccessful ones.
One of the great moments in the plot, after all, is the unmasking, and some masqueraders are unmasked before they achieve anything at all. There are relatively few, rather cynical texts in which the victim either figures it out from the very start and goes along with it (the motif of false ignorancet) or, on the other hand, even at the end of the story never finds out that he or she has been tricked. But some stories emphasize the success of the trick, the relatively long period in which it does work, while others emphasize its failure, the man- ner in which the victim quickly sees through it.
Moreover, as we have noted, storiest often argue precisely for the opposite of what is the case in "real life"; that is, stories about bedtricks devote far more argument to 438
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Ten Ways Not To Know Your Lover
Let us postpone, for a moment, the ways in which bedtricks are exposed and consider the ones that succeed, the bedtricksters who are never ex- posed (at least until they choose to reveal themselves). How did they get away with it? What excuses did the bedtricksters devise to account for any apparent inconsistencies between their image and that of the original, and what excuses did those who were duped use to justify being taken in?
It is harder for a victim to prove that the bedtrickster is not the original than for a bedtrickster (wrongly) to prove 440
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Darkness As long as vision is privileged, which is to say in most of our texts, dark- ness is a (masquerading) girl's best friend. To take one instance out of thousands, in The Marriage of Figaro, t the countess changes clothes with Susanna, "with the help of the night"; when the count urges her into a dark tryst, she asks, "In the dark, my lord?" to which he replies, "That's what I want; you know I don't want to go there to read." The darkness will serve her ends, not his; he may not have to read, but he won't get to commit adultery, either.
Once again, the pleasure of the textt competes with the pleasures of sex. Occasionally, darkness that interferes with read- ing can be revealing rather than concealing: as Cyrano continues to "read" his letter to Roxanne in the growing darkness of nightfall, she realizes that he can no longer see the page-and thus discovers, at last, that he is the author of the letter-"the voice in the dark." 2. Drunkenness The bedtrickster may prevail by getting the victim drunk, but drunken- ness is also an instance of the more general lapse (which includes the primary mind-clouders, lust and sleept) that might be described as letting down your guard; tricksters who relax get caught.
Doubtfiret [1993]) gets drunk, she begins to act like a man, reverting to her natural state and flirting with a pretty young woman, who recoils with horror. Drink, however, is used far more often to fool than to unmask. It often absolves the victim of the responsibility to see through the bedtrick; when the victim is drunk or drugged, consciousness is blurred and the bedtrick works.
Drunkenness may justify the release of libido at the expense of the superego: even a victim who is not drunk enough not to know a bedmate's identity may be too drunk to care about it. Drunkenness releases inhibi- tions, including those against incest, t that may stand in the way of neces- sary begettings. Drunkenness accounts for blindnesst ("double vision" in the literal, as well as metaphorical, sense), loss of memoryt (after the episode), and the inability to discriminate between good and bad, or real and false, people.
In Measure for Measuret (5.1), when Mariana argues, "I have known my husband; yet my husband knows not that ever he knew me," Lucio replies, "He was drunk then." Tricksters in the Hebrew Bible who use liquor to fog the mind include Leah, t Tamar, tRuth, t and Lot's daugh- 442
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He asks her, "Do you have any memories of scars? I don't have the scars I'm supposed to have"; she asks him, "What happened? Did they heal our scars?" Then they realize that their memories have been replaced: "That's why our bodies are different from what our minds remember." But scars and birthmarks, by virtue of their cliche status as proofs of identity, can-like all forms of scientific evidence-be faked in order to make the trick work.
In Shakespeare's Cymbeline, the trickster uses a mole on a woman's left breast as (false) proof not of her identity but of his sexual intimacy with her. The same trick was used by the trickster in Overboardt (1987), who claimed intimate knowledge by telling the amne- siac victim that she had a small strawberry mark (a birthmark or tattoo) high up on her left buttock; she went behind a screen to check, found it, and was persuaded that she must be who he said she was.
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445 perhaps, at the final reckoning, the whole body will disappear, and only our scar tissue will be there to testify for us. Self-deception Self-delusion is explicitly invoked more often in modern texts, which tend to psychologize in ways that ancient texts do not, but it may be silently present in the earlier texts, too. People can be fooled because they want to be fooled, because they want the trick to succeed; their will to believe leads them to ignore glaring inconsistencies and the debunking implica- tions of hard evidence, however blatant.
Bedtricks work because the vic- tims do half the work themselves, often projectingt their own desires, or the image of the one they desire, over the actual trickster. There are times when one really does not want to know the truth about one's sexual part- ner; the victim of the bedtrick may half suspect that the woman (or man) who seems to be the wife or the husband is not the legitimate partner. In many myths, the victim prefers the double to the original, particularly but not only in the case of political pretenders, t a scenario reinforced by the fact that people often notice the difference but keep silent out of fear of political repercussions.
The subject's key interest is not to hear the truth, just as the key interest of the discourse is to continue to suspend the answer to the enigma."9o The bedtrickster in a Robertson Davies novel argues that the victim "is a part- ner in the deception. He wills his own belief to agree with the desire of the deceiver ... just as you will your own deception when you watch a conjuror ....
We are deceived because ... it is somehow necessary to US."91 When a man objects, "I don't believe a word of it," a woman who has been the victim of a bedtrick replies, "But I did. Or a very important part of me did ....
When a man comes into your very dark room, and you can feel your husband's dressing-gown that you know so well, and 446
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t First, as the bedtrickster points out, "Men always believe what they want to hear." (" 'This is my first time' and 'That's the biggest I've ever seen' -or both, which, if you really think about it, is not possible in a single lifetime.") Then, "Because when he finally met his fantasy woman, he wanted more than anything to believe that she was, in fact, a woman." The play implies that, after a while, the French diplomat did suspect that his lover was a man and that, after that, he didn't want to see him/her naked. The words of the Wizard ofOz (1939) take on new meaning: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." 448
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And that first night marks the transi- tion from one relationship to another so entirely different as to justify the oft-expressed folk wisdom that you marry one woman and find yourself married to a different woman, a stranger. As Janet Adelman points out, "In both All's Well and Measure for Measure the bed tricks are portrayed as one-night stands that the male protagonists have no desire to repeat- and not only, I think, for reasons of dramatic economy and credibility. Both Bertram and Angelo lose their desire for their virgins as soon as they have ravished them." 103 The first time that one makes love with a new partner has a strangeness that may justify the confusion of the bedtrick, as Casanova t himself remarked: "Though the darkness forbade my seeing, and the silence my hearing, my sense of touch should have enlightened me-after the first set-to, at all events, but my imagination was in a state of ecstasy." 104 During the "first set-to" (Ie premier assaut), even the master seducer cannot trust his sense of touch.
On the other hand, differences between the impostor and the original are often accounted for by the passage of time. Short-term memory, t especially of names, t fades as we fade, while the memory of the years of our youth often remains young. Bedtricksters in stories often succeed by appearing on the scene long after the original has left and invoking as their allies timet and the natural disguise of aging.
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Naive Testimony: Dogs and Kids Often, the revelatory proof of identity is offered by an animal. t Or- lando's:j: elkhound "threw himself with such ardour upon his mistress that he almost knocked her to the ground," despite the fact that the last time he had seen her she was his master, not his mistress. Virginia Woolf comments, "No one showed an instant's suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando they had known.
In Japan, wild foxes not only may assume any shape but may make themselves altogether in- visible to humans, though not to dogs, who always scent their real nature; that is why transformed foxes are afraid of dogsllO and flee even from a puppy.lll But dogs are also a fallible criterion, especially in films. In Peter Sellers's version of The Prisoner of Zendat (1979), the dog growls at the impostor, but the general remarks, "Jasper certainly believes you're the king. He could never stand Rudolph." Sommersbyt simply kills the dog when he realizes that it doesn't recognize or accept him (and then, when he turns into a good guy, buys the kid a darling puppy to replace it).
At the trial, his wife cites the fact that "his own dog didn't know him" as evidence that he is an impostor, but everyone just laughs. In The Dark Mirrort (1946), the psychologist says, "I interviewed a pair of twins one time, so alike that dogs got mixed up about them." And in A Stolen Lifet (1946), when Pat's dog, named Mike, ignores the call of the impostor, Katy, she just jokes, "Mike seems to have forgotten me for the moment." Then she feeds him treats by hand, and he comes to her by the time the husband returns.
Sometimes the dog, like the rest of us, likes the impostor better than the original. In Dead Ringert (1964), the boxer dog, Duke, who hated Maggie, likes the impostor, Edie, who explains this by saying that the dog became lonely after his master's death. There's Something about Mary (1998) thoroughly deconstructs the cliche about the dog who knows whether the suitor is good/real.
Sometimes dogs and kids are explicitly compared as witnesses.
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In films, too, smell is a key clue. Fields character in My Little Chickadee (1940) can tell, by the smell, that he is in bed with a goat rather than with Mae West. And the uncle in Julian Barnes's Experi- mentt notes that the two apparently different women wear the same over- whelming perfume but still insists that they are not the same woman.
Like the woman who bedtricks the blind man in Sirenst (1994), Angela Carter's twin sisterst are careful to switch their distinctive perfumes when they carry out their bedtrick, and the woman who in turn impersonates one of them uses the appropriate perfume. The villain in Single White Femalet (1992) argues that her victim must have known who she was by her distinctive smell. Smell can identify not only sexual partners but children and parents, the family resemblance.
And children, presumably, know their mothers' smells. But a confusion of smells facilitates a quasi-incestuoust bedtrick in the dark in Gabriel Garda Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Jose Arcadio kept looking for her all night long, for the smell of smoke that she had under her armpits and that had got caught under his skin.
Real Sex And Fantastic Sex
455 In Measure for Measuret (4.3), when Provost finds a head to substitute for Claudio's, a head that belongs to a man dead of natural causes and conveniently a dead ringer for Claudio ("A man of Claudio's years; his beard and head / Just of his colour"), the duke replies, "0, 'tis an accident that heaven provides." Namest are often subjected to the critique of coin- cidence. Mandryka wonders how many other girls named Arabella t might be at the ball, and in Euripides' story of the phantom Helen,:j: Menelaus tries to explain away the double by coincidence: he wonders if "some other woman with the same name as my wife has been living in this house .
Can it be there is some man who bears the name of Zeus and lives beside the banks of the Nile? I suppose it must be that in the great world a great many have the same name, men named like other men, cities like cities, women like women. Nothing to wonder at in this."IlB So, too, King Dushyanta at first rejoices when the young boy he meets says that his mother is named Shakuntala, t but then he remarks that there are a lot of similar names.
Here again, the triteness of the old story is taken as evidence for, not against, the reality of the trick. Javier Marias's cuckolded husband wavers on this point: One moment, I would feel certain that she was Celia . and the next I would be sure that it couldn't possibly be her and that it was just one of those extraordinary resemblances which nevertheless do sometimes hap- pen, as if it was Celia but with another life or history, the same person who had been swapped while in her cradle, as occurs in children's stories or in the tragedies of kings, the same physical appearance but with a different memory and a different name and a different past in which I would not have existed, perhaps the past of a gypsy child ...
, Our Lady of the rag- and-bone men. ll9 Modern readers generally do not find coincidence a useful explana- tion, though we do fall back upon it sometimes in desperation. Even within stories, the argument from coincidence can always be countered by common sense.
In Duplicates (1991), for instance, the woman's hus- band is not convinced by the evidence of coincidence-until it happens twice: "One look-alike-that can happen," he says. "But two?" (Here we may recall Lady Bracknell's comment in The Importance of Being Ernest:t "To lose one parent might be regarded as unfortunate; to lose both is careless.") This is not merely a modern attitude; common sense chal- lenged the argument from coincidence even in ancient India. 120 But it is tolerated as a convention in recognition stories.
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You could ask witnesses to identify him, and hope that they were accurate and truthful. You could consider special marks on his face and body, but their significance could only be established by witnesses who recollected the ear- lier person. You could look to see whether he resembled other members of the family.
You could check his handwriting, but only if he and the earlier person could both write and you had samples of the latter's work l2l Several of these criteria-memory, witnesses, marks, family resemblance, and handwriting-play important roles in our stories, too. They are of course irrelevant during a bedtrick, since people do not usually write or summon witnesses in bed, though they can be used to determine the bedtrickster's identity on other occasions, and indeed we have seen bed- tricksters unmasked in these ways.
But the point made by Ginzburg and Davis is that these criteria were generally useless in determining identity in public. Their inadequacy therefore ultimately tossed the problem of identity back into bed; for sexual intimacy, subjective though it was and is, was one of the few criteria that one might resort to in premodern times to establish someone's identity.
Fantastic Sex
One reason, in so many stories, the victim of the bedtrick cannot tell the true partner from the bed trickster is that the partner and the bedtrickster are two polarized images of the same person. The myth preserves the fantasy that there are two separate people there. And it works in two different directions at once: the fantasy of the masquerade allows the fan- tasizer to make the sexual act more intimate, while the fantasy of the double distances it.
And since we often want the two at once, intimacy and distance, reality and fantasy, both points of view are often expressed in the same myth. The bedtrick story is a very real fantasy that may serve either to support or to subvert social reality. The reactionary form maintains the status quo, serving as an opiate (in the Marxist paradigm, or perhaps God's 458
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459 to this evil stepmother, this whore"), t or the fantasies of the theologian t that that child grows up to be ("The world is full of evil and suffering because the real god abandoned us, and/or we are the children of the stepparent"). We may see them as the fantasies of the wife ("This is not really me in bed with this brute"t) or the husband ("Now I understand why my wife acts so strangely sometimes; it's someone else there in her place"t).
Or, through the multivalence of myth, all these purposes can be served at once.l30 Myths, like people, have multiple personalities and are notori- ous shape-shifters. Why can't we kick out of bed all those faces and voices from the past? Why this need to transform reality into fantasy?
Is sexual reality so intolerable? Throughout human history, men and women have been forced to sleep with people they didn't want to sleep with, and they have longed to sleep with people who couldn't or wouldn't sleep with them. It is therefore hardly surprising that people have told stories about surrogates or doubles for centuries all over the planet.
The myth may imagine the ideal solution, the perfect integration, the infinity in which all aspects of human sexuality can stretch out without invading one another's territories, an infinity that can never be achieved in real life. Science can turn myths into reality, dreams into nightmares, and fantasies into law- suits. Yet the need to mythologize, to dream, and to fantasize remains an integral part of human sexuality.
When, each for his or her own reason, two people in bed close their eyes to an intolerable reality, each sees in the dark the myth that makes the reality tolerable. What is produced by the fantasy in the head while the bodies are joined? The myths are the true love-children of sexual fantasy; the stories are joined at the hip.
When Dreams Become Nightmares
Why is sexual fantasy both a dream and a nightmare? There are two differ- ent sorts of fantasy at play here, desired and feared (or, to use the language of our texts, white and blackt). People masquerade sometimes to avoid danger, sometimes to exert or subvert power, sometimes just to have fun.
There is a tension in the victim of a masquerade between the terror that one might be betrayed and the hope that one could be in bed with some- one other than the safe, perhaps unloved (or at least undesired) partner- yet another paradox. t In fantasies of adultery, for instance, there are two opposing currents, from the man's standpoint: (1) You pretend that you're with your mistress when you're with your wife, and so you have 460
Real Sex And Fantastic Sex
Most active doubles are useful to the person who is doubled: they get you out of a bad situation or into a good one; you make the double yourself, and it extends you. The passive fin de siecle doubles in Germany, Russia, and England, however, are fatal to the doubled person: they di- minish, or even kill, the people whom they double. The passive double (as in the Comedy of Errors, t in which the hero accidentally encounters his double, or, later, in the body-snatcher filmst) feels persecuted.
His initial perception is that he knows something that no one else knows or that everyone else is crazy or asleep, but he slips from this position to his paranoid perception that everyone else knows something that he does not know or that everyone believes that he is mad or that he is mad. Active doubles generally do not become the victims of their own creations in the traditional texts. But in the late nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde ("The Shadow"), Dostoyevsky (The Double), and E.
Hoffmann ("The Dou- bles"), inspired in part by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, imagined a new synthesis, a kind of active-and-passive double: the hero who actively cre- ates a double who eventually persecutes him. This is a new expression of the ambivalence of the bedtrickster: the hero does and does not want to have the double, and he does and does not want to kill the double and/ or to die himself. Jeanine Basinger, commenting on films in which a woman, during sleept or hypnosis, becomes someone else (Half Angel, t Lady in the Dark, Whirlpool), suggests that the key question is "Does it control her, or does she control it?" 133 If the former, the film can be either a horror film or a comedy; if the latter, it will be a comedy.
Yet we are the ones who imagine both situations; the playful fantasy is glossed for us by Charles Rycroft,134 the paranoid fantasy by Otto Rank. And the fantasy and the nightmare converge in black comedies or tragicomedies.
Double Beds Hold Three Or More People
Sexual fantasy allows the fantasizer to project the image of one woman over that of another. Many of these myths speak of the power of the eye, t in particular the eye of someone in love, to project fantasies, but the projection t may take place in the heart just as easily as in the eye. This is a recurrent theme in Hindu mythology.
Queen Vasavadattat ac- cuses King Udayanat of being obsessed with a new woman: "You have projected her into your heart, so that you imagine that everything seems to be made of her." \35 Ravana,:j: in the Tamil Ramayana, sees an image of Sita when she is not there, and his sister Shurpanakhat accuses him of hallucinating. Women like Ahalya,:j: faced with the problem of telling their husbands from gods, may confess that they have imagined the gods in their husbands' places; or, on the other hand, like Alcmena,:j: they may be accused of projecting their images of their husbands over all other men.
When John Erskine's Helen:j: argues that her love for both Menelaus and Paris was an illusion, though she preferred her illusion for Paris, she resists the fabrication of a myth: that Aphrodite made her mistake Paris for MenelausY6 Instead, she insists, "You always think it's Menelaos you're embracing, and it turns out to be Paris." For Helen, the epitome of the woman onto whom men have projected their erotic ideals, the lover is real, the husband the fantasy. For most women, it is the other way around-as Helen herself knows, when she consoles a woman whose lover has deserted her.
But on looking more closely I saw that Freud had said, "You are certainly right about bisexuality. I am also getting used to regarding every sexual act as one between four individu- als."138 So perhaps the other two were her mother and his father? Or his female half and her male half?139 When I asked a well-known psychoana-
Real Sex And Fantastic Sex
463 lyst of my acquaintance who, in his opinion, the other two were, he quipped, "One of them was probably an analyst." 140 The copulating couple makes, therefore, not merely lago'st "beast with two backs" but a beast with four backs. Apparently it takes not two but four to tango; or we could say that all sex is four-play. Fantastic sexual doubles tend to form squares.
In Cat on a Hot Tin Rooft (1958), Maggie tells her husband, Brick, why she had an affair with Skipper, the man that Brick was in love with: "We made love to each other to dream it was you, both of us!" This eternal triangle is the bisexual fantasy of the cuckoldingt scenario: both the man and the woman of the original pair are in love with another man, or another woman.
"A Yiddish proverb warns us that in a second marriage there are four in the bed: her first husband, his first wife, and the two who really are there."145 The Babylonian Talmud 464
Real Sex And Fantastic Sex
The girls were literally joined at the hip but turned slightly from each other. They were attractive, interested in men, and could even dance. They were also promiscuous when young.
A reporter asked, "How do you make love?" Violet said that when Daisy was engaged, "sometimes I quit paying attention. Sometimes I read and sometimes I just take a nap." From Hou- dini they learned concentration: "We learnt not to know what the other was doing unless it was our business to know it." 153 These twins were able to preserve precisely the "mental privacy" that is invaded by the two supernumeraries in a joint sexual fantasy. Their mental bracketing pro- duced the inverse of Freud's two people imagining that they are four; here, four imagine that there are just two.
Some of these texts support the assumption that Freud was talking about the object of desire in his remark about the quadruple-bed, the two people desired by each of the present partners; others suggest that he was talking about the subject of desire, the male half of the woman in bed and the female half of the man. If we allow the possibility of both bisexual subjects and bisexual objects, there would be eight in the bed: each partner both is two and desires two.
The assumption that people imagine that they are in bed with other people is demonstrated by the widespread evi- dence that a person may call his or her bedmate by someone else's namet and pay heavily for the error. People may also call upon the name of God at this moment. Of course, Freud would have argued that having God in your bed is not all that different from having your parents in your bed.
In any case, in the myths of bedtricks, the beds get very crowded.
Approach Ten: Structuralism
The great French structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss retells a group of stories about bedtricks told among several North and South American tribes: the Tupinambas, the ancient coastal Indians of Brazil (recorded by the French monk Andre Thevet in the sixteenth century); the Kootenay; and the Salish: [AJ woman was going to meet the god who would be her husband, and while on her way the Trickster intervenes and makes her believe that he is the god; so, she conceives from the Trickster. When she later finds the legitimate husband-to-be, she conceives from him also and later gives birth to twins.
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Splitting Hares
The great French structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss retells a group of stories about bedtricks told among several North and South American tribes: the Tupinambas, the ancient coastal Indians of Brazil (recorded by the French monk Andre Thevet in the sixteenth century); the Kootenay; and the Salish: [AJ woman was going to meet the god who would be her husband, and while on her way the Trickster intervenes and makes her believe that he is the god; so, she conceives from the Trickster. When she later finds the legitimate husband-to-be, she conceives from him also and later gives birth to twins.
And since these false twins had different fathers, they have anti- thetical features: one is brave, the other a coward; one is the protector of the Indians, the other of the white people. Among the Kootenay, who live in the Rocky Mountains, there is only one fecundation which has as a consequence the birth of twins, who later on become, one the sun, and the other the moon. And, among some other Indians of British Columbia of the Salish linguistic stock-the Thompson Indians and the Okanagan-there are two sisters who are tricked by appar- ently two distinct individuals, and they give birth, each one to a son ....
There are two sisters who are travelling in order to find, each one, a husband. They were told by a grandmother that they would recognize their husbands by such and such characteristics, and they are then each deluded by the Tricksters they meet on their way into believing that they are the husband whom each is supposed to marry. They spend the night with him, and each of the women will later give birth to a son.
Now, after this unfortunate night spent in the hut of the Trickster, the elder sister leaves her younger sister and goes visiting her grandmother, who is a mountain goat and also a kind of magician; for she knows in advance that her granddaughter is coming, and she sends the hare to wel- come her on the road. The hare hides under a log which has fallen in the middle of the road, and when the girl lifts her leg to cross the log, the hare can have a look at her genital parts and make a very inappropriate joke.
The girl is furious, and strikes him with her cane and splits his nose.1S4 A series of sexual deceptions results in the birth of twinst to two different fathers. t But the last episode takes a different turn, ending in a series of splittings-the separation of the two sisters, of the legs of the older sister, 466
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Structualism
467 and of the nose of the hare. We have seen many women in these stories split or double themselves to avoid sexual violence,:j: and I have suggested that the bed trick is itself a form of sexual violence. In this reading, the violent splittings in the final episode are a displaced t reaction to the sexual deceptions.
Levi-Strauss's own gloss of this story suggests some of the structural aspects of splitting: "The elder sister starts to split the body of the animal; if this split were carried out to the end-if it did not stop at the nose but continued through the body and to the tail-she would turn an indi- vidual into twins, that is, two individuals which are exactly similar or identical because they are both a part of a whole." 155 "Exactly similar or identical" twins are the appropriate product of a sexual act brought about by one individual pretending to be "exactly similar or identical" to an- other; and the hare (a trickster figure) is split to compensate for the dou- bling of the sexual trickster.
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Minimal And Other Pairs
These factors are defined by means of minimal pairs, two terms that change the meaning when they replace one another in the same situation, like c and h in "cat" and "hat" -or like the partners in bedtricks, who might well be called "minimal pairs." Minimal pairs are defined by what linguists call distinctive features-another term that serves equally well in structuralism and in the plot of the bedtrick. What answers do we get if we ask structuralist questions of the myths of the bedtrick?
Levi-Strauss asserts that all mythology is dialectic in its attempt to make cognitive sense out of the chaotic data provided by na- ture and that this attempt inevitably traps the human imagination in a web of dualisms, which is to say splittings and doublings. We may see a dialectic at work in myths of bedtricks: doubling in situations of pairing. That is, bedtrick myths are about the tension between the desire to remain 468 ApPROACH TEN whole and the desire (or necessity) to split into two, a tension tentatively resolved by having the two become one (the sexual act) while one becomes two (the bedtrick double).
The dyad of "integrated" and "split" is itself a basic contrasting unit in mythology; that is, any split image may be used to form one-half of a pair, the other half being the integrated image of which the half is the dissection. The question of whether or not to split something in half may be answered by yes or no. (Most cultures, but not all, have usually answered yes to this question.) On this level, the structure is the meaning; the medium is the message.
The doubles of people occur in response to a splitting or doubling of roles. They may also occur in response to other doubles: the wife mas- querades when her husband takes another woman, or doubles herself when a man other than the man she loves forces her to his bed. The basic split is between the self and the double of the self, the "I" and the "non- I." To this is then added the particular dualism of the sexual act: "I" and "the other." In most texts, this sexual other is singular at any moment, the person with whom one engages in a single sexual act at any time, though in some texts this lover may then be doubled by another lover (or by a series oflovers).
One would merely have to go on doubling the doubles to apply the same sort of analysis to polygamous societies or group orgies. So, too, the human body is often dichotomized, both by the texts and by the scholars looking at the texts. Sometimes the face is all that is seen and is therefore equated with the body, in contrast with the soul or mind, t which is not seen.
Sometimes it is the eyest versus the mouth. t And these dichotomies often attract to themselves polarized moral judgments. Yuri Lotman has applied a structural theory (more precisely, a semi- otic theory of transformational grammar) to literary texts and come up with certain formulations that illuminate the problem of masquerades, particularly in his discussion of what he calls cyclicity.
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The Structure Of The Bedtrick
The structural method allows us to make an inventory of the network of dialectical themes that make up a corpus of myths. These themes are roughly equivalent to what Levi-Strauss called "mythemes," in response to the "phonemes" of his colleague the linguist Roman Jakobson-the atomic building blocks of meaningful sounds that make up words. As I employ them, mythemes are not images or concepts but events, things that happen, plots; each consists of a sentence, with an actor and an ac- tion, a noun and a verb.
ISS The defining mytheme of the bedtrick might be formulated: The victim does not know the identity of the trickster during the sexual act. The binary opposition or dialectic implicit in this sentence lies in the presence or absence of knowledge: t the trickster knows, and the victim does not. In addition, we might isolate subsidiary but still basic mythemes that have polarized instances, such as: The trickster produces a double (to avoid sexual intimacy) or mas- querades (to seek sexual intimacy).
The trickster impersonates someone who exists or someone who does not exist. The trickster is the unofficial or the official partner of the victim. The trickster is older or younger than the victim.
The trickster is uglier or better looking than the victim. Structuralism also enables us to isolate themes polarized only by their presence or absence, such as: The trickster is incestuously related to the victim. The trickster hates, rejects, or injures the victim.
The trickster is a twin. The trickster or victim dies or is mutilated. The trickster or victim rejects a child.
One of the trickster's or victim's senses is impaired. The trickster is of another species, race, class, or order. The trick involves art: riddle, story, painting, sculpture.
An object (usually a ring) is used as proof of identity. The trick takes place on the wedding night. 470 ApPROACH TEN These themes do not constitute a structure that can be diagrammed in a family tree, a trunk line from which variants branch off.
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It summarizes the underlying structure that the list-maker uses to draw together many tales of bedtricks, from different times and places, and to argue that they are, in some sense, "the same." It shows us how a few variables, in permutation, can account for the rough outlines of the thousands of variants in our vast corpus. It enables us to identify stories within our corpus and to see their structural patterns. It alerts us to things to look for in each story; it helps us to see the connec- tions, to determine degrees of affinity between the structures of variants.
It makes it possible to trace the recurrent themes through the corpus of myths without discussing each theme every time it occurs. And it helps us to see what is missing from some variants. If, for instance, we were to trace the themes through all the myths in this book and list the occur- rences of all the themes for male and for female bedtricksters, we would see that the lists are not symmetrical: some themes occur more in one gender than in the other.
A comprehensive list shows us all the symmetri- cal slots of possibility for the themes, but the actual examples of the stories show that some combinations do not seem to occur (perhaps because of the biological or psychological or cultural asymmetryt of men and women). Once we have seen this structure, we may use other methods to inquire after the reasons for these lacunae.
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Sexual Paradox
The network of interlacing dichotomies cannot, however, be neatly laid out as a structuralist might wish them to be and paired up tidily like children in the buddy system: goddess/woman, man/woman, permitted/ forbidden, maternal/erotic, good/evil, light/ dark, Brahmin/Outcaste, integrated/split, and, at base, known/unknown. The binary categories in these stories tend to generate potentially infinite intermediary subcategor- ies, and different cultures find different ways of blurring the lines between sex and gender (two genders or three), mind and body, and so forth.
Moreover, through the very nature of the dialectic, the splitting that seems
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Structualism
471 to solve the original problem of conflict or ambivalence is in itself a source of new anxiety. The solution to the problem of doubling is a new integra- tion, with new tensions. Thus, the mytheme of male or female may yield a new, paradoxical mytheme of male and female, and we are off and run- ning on a new and differently conflicted path of androgyny and bisexu- ality.
Dualism, the either/ordering of the world, is deeply embedded in Eu- ropean thought. What got Greek philosophy off the ground was the no- tion that, for any state of affairs, there were only two possibilities, A and not-A, and only one could be true. This is what Parmenides' poetic rav- ings about the One and the Many are all about, and what makes possible Platonic dialectic, Aristotelian logic, and the Cartesian approach to the mind/body problem.
t This aspect of consistency is the essence of what historians of science and philosophy (and modern Greek propagandists) call "the Greek miracle." The Greek paradigm casts its shadow over many myths about binary choices (posed by Loathly Ladiest and animallov- erst), about bisexuality, and about monogamy, myths that cling to the A/not-A logic, animal or human, male or female, wife or mistress, but not both. This is what makes so many of these stories assume, counter- intuitively, that you can only love one person.
The problem here is that in mythology (and much of human life), A and not-A are often simultaneously true, a position that those miraculous Greeks and their descendants regard as irrational. From the mythological point of view, consistency is the hobgoblin of people who cannot, philo- sophically speaking, walk and chew gum at the same time. Other mytholo- gies, notably but not only Hindu, flourish within the field of the both/ and,16o and between the grid lines of bed trick myths we may discern more complex human implications that arise out of the dualistic structures and seem to emerge as paradoxes.
(Calvin Klein's perfume called Contradiction, ad- vertised with the slogan "She is always and never the same," would have been called Paradox if it had been made in France.) The tension between these two paradigms holds us in suspense to the very end of the story, where we often discover that both of them are true. For the bedtrick, the basic paradox-that sexual intimacy is simulta- neously revelatory of truth and falsehood-is mediated by a series of other paradoxes.
Paradox Lost
Different cultures not only view their paradoxes in different ways but also experience different paradoxes. Myths from polytheistic cultures like Hinduism generally differ from those of monotheistic cultures in allowing, or spelling out, the maximum number of paradoxes, in ex- ploiting as many possibilities as possible, maximizing the number of prob- lems (in contrast, for example, with biblical myths, which tend to attempt to solve problems). But many of these formulations are shared by more than one culture.
Jean Giraudoux's Jupiter:j: spells out a veritable jeremiad of human paradoxes about the bedtrick when he tells Mercury what he wants: "Ev- erything a man wants, I'm afraid: a thousand contradictory desires. 1 want Alcmena to stay faithful to her husband, and 1 want her to abandon herself rapturously to me. 1 want her to be chaste when 1 kiss her, and 1 want nameless desires to flare up in her at the sight of me.
There are so many sorts of selves, and so many ways of knowing them, that the sexual way, for all of its deceptiveness, remains a unique source of something true-indeed, of several sorts of truth.
Structualism
473 paradigmatic expression of the problem of the mind and the body, reality and illusion, compounding the paradox of the double that is both us and non-us and of the story that lies and tells the truth. This paradox makes people tell the story over and over again, using the myth to negotiate the territory carved out by the paradox. The structural premises of these myths become paradoxical when combined with their opposed forms.
The mythology is saying that a sterile or impotent man should let his brother produce a child for him, despite the fact that he hates to imagine his brother sleeping with his wife. It is saying that a barren woman should have her maid produce a child for her, even though she hates that maid. It is saying that women collude together to save the family, even though older women are the enemies of younger women.
It is saying that a man commits adultery because he is in love with the wife of another man but also that he commits adultery because he hates the husband whom he cuckolds. It is saying that you want to be in bed with a certain person but also that you don't want to be in bed with that person. To accommodate all of these tensions and ambivalences, the myth allows you to fantasize that there are two of you, like the two Zen Bud- dhists that it takes to screw in a light bulb in the joke: one to do it, and one not to do it.
In this way, both the central ideal and the subversive ideal may be expressed in the same story. We are not dealing here with two different, warring bodies of mythology; in most cases, a single myth is saying both things at once. It can do this because it speaks both for the group (survival, biology) and for the individual (dying for love, ro- manticism).
The power to express both sides of the paradox at once lies in the ambiguity that is the soul of myth. For the paradox itself is a double, like the masqueraders in our myths: it forces the reader to refuse to choose between two mutually exclusive, or not mutually exclusive, alternatives, just as the plot forces the protagonist to refuse to choose between two mutually exclusive, or not mutually exclusive, lovers.
Conclusion: Carnal Ignorance and Carnal Knowledge
ne of Eve White's later personalities remarked of her husband, whom she had inherited, as it were, from an earlier personality, "I had not chosen him. I had not married him.
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Carnal Ignorance
ne of Eve White's later personalities remarked of her husband, whom she had inherited, as it were, from an earlier personality, "I had not chosen him. I had not married him. My alter named Jane had made those choices .
Sex can raise or lower our perception of a partner, moving us (ac- cording to later, retrospective judgment) from illusion to truth or from truth to illusion. The permutations are complex, if not infinite, because there are several variables, each of which may prove illusory. Sometimes we are deluded about our partners, over whom we project our own fanta- sies (before, after, or during the sexual act); sometimes we delude our- 475 476
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Conclusion
selves with fantasies about ourselves, thinking that we are animals seeking animal partners when in fact we are looking for gods, or the reverse; sometimes, all of the above. "Whatever can he see in her?" we ask one another about our friends, and often, when emotion is recollected in tran- quility,S "Whatever did I see in him?" (see, indeed-or rather, projectt onto him as a visual image). We all suffer from bovarysme, named after the heroine of Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, who deluded herself con- stantly, especially about sexual love.
We trick ourselves in bed when we lie about who our partners are and about who we are. Though we may think we are "our real selves" in sex, we may actually be least so. As Lord Henry remarks, in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray,:j: "When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others.
That is what the world calls romance."9 John Donne argued a similar point (in "A Lecture upon the Shadow"): So whilst our infant love did grow, Disguises did, and shadowes, flow, From us, and our cares; but, now 'tis not so. Except our loves at this noone stay, We shall new shadowes make the other way.
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Carnal Ignorance And Carnal Knowledge
As the first were made to blinde Others; these which come behinde Will worke upon our selves, and blind our eyes. 477 The story of the sun and the shadows:j: it casts is an ancient myth of a bedtrick; the problem it describes remains thoroughly modern. The power of sexual illusion is demonstrated in Preston Sturges's film The Lady Eve (1941), in which Jean seduces Charles first in her true per- sona of a cardsharp and then when she masquerades as a titled En- glishwoman named Eve.
She offers an explanation of how the trick worked: "Do you know why he didn't recognize me? I hardly recognized him myself. He seemed shorter and bonier.
It's because we don't love each other anymore. You see, on the boat we had an awful yen for each other, so I saw him as very tall and very handsome, and he probably thought I had big melting eyes and a figure like Miss Longbeach the Dream of the Fleet." Thus, Eve, aptly named, explains her own blinding appeal and that of sexual love in general. Victims, therefore, lie to themselves, while tricksters lie to their victims and, often, to themselves as well.
To seduce is to deceive; although not every masquerade is sexual, every sexual encounter is in a sense a mas- querade. So basic is deception to sex-and so tight are the bonds between sex and text-that several languages have a punt linking sex and decep- tion. In English "deceive" means both to fool someone and to violate a sexual promise, a pun that Robertson Davies puts in the mouth of a man who slept, disguised as a man named Arthur, t with Arthur's wife, Maria: "I know that I deceived Arthur.
"You have ruined the party machine. To lie in the nude Is not at all rude, But to lie in the House is obscene."12
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Conclusion
And what is the "trick" implied when a whore "turns a trick"? Burlador in Spanish means both "seducer" and "mocker," and the French trobar is both a teller of dirty stories and a trickster. "Betray"t has the same range of meanings as "deceive"; Angela Car- ter's bedtrickster asks, "Did we betray the innocence of the boy with our deception?
"True" and "false" lovers resonate with both the philosophical conno- tations of the English words ("Speak the truth") and their moral-sexual connotations ("Be true to me"). The moral-sexual meaning of "false," in normal usage, implies that a woman is "false" to her lover if she sleeps with someone else; its philosophical meaning grows much stronger in narrative texts, where she is "false" to him if she is someone else-a bed- trickster. In the first case, the oath oflove is a false copy of the true oath; in the second, the person is a false copy of the true lover.
The legal scholar Jane E. Larson points out an underlying assumption of our culture: "lying is integral to the 'dance' of sexual initiation and negotiation. Exaggerated praise, playful suggestions, efforts to impress, and promises intended to reassure and trigger emotion (but not to be strictly believed) are all part of the ritual of escalating erotic fascination that makes up a 'seduction' in the colloquial sense.
To lie to a sexual partner is to share a leap of fancy-all very harmless and justifiable." This leads Larson to ask, "[Ils it ever reasonable to believe a lover? Were our grandmothers right in telling us that men always lie for sex, and the
Cycle 284
Carnal Ignorance And Carnal Knowledge
The ancient wisdom of the grandmothers persists in the cynicism with which we regard sociological surveys of sexual behavior. Ned Zeman, re- viewing The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior (a two-headed report? dedi- cated to Janus, god of closet doors?), advises us to "remember this one sexual truth: men lie."16 R.
Lewontin, reviewing another sex survey, writes: Anyway, why should anyone lie on a questionnaire that was answered in a face-to-face interview with a total stranger? After all, complete confiden- tiality was observed. It is frightening to think that social science is in the hands of professionals who are so deaf to human nuance that they believe that people do not lie to themselves about the most freighted aspects of their own lives, and that they have no interest in manipulating the impres- sion that strangers have of them.
In the single case where one can actually test the truth, the investigators themselves think it most likely that people are telling themselves and others enormous liesY And when the authors tried to defend the veracity of their subjects, Lewontin responded with the last word: People do not tell themselves the truth about their own lives .... Perhaps, as men contemplate their impending mortality, the dread of something after death makes lying about sex seem risky. We must, however, at least consider the alternative that affirming one's continued sexual prowess in great age is a form of whistling in the dark.
And the dark, of course, is where all cats are gray. The consciousness of agingt and impending death is indeed a major motivation for bedtricks. Anthony Lane, reviewing the same sex survey, put the matter with his characteristic wry humor: These books are not about sex.
They are not even about dancing. They are constructed with admirable clarity, but they represent the ne plus ultra of fuzziness-the unalterable fuzz of our duplicity, the need to hide the truth from other people in the hope that we will cease to recognize it ourselves. Read a sentence such as, "Men report that they experience fellatio at a far greater rate than women report providing it," 480
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Conclusion
and you find yourself glancing down a long, shady vista of self-delusion. This is not a question of inefficient research, or of culpable hypocrisy, or even of that much loved villain of the piece, the male boast; it is simply what T. Eliot called bovarysme, "the human will to see things as they are not," and throughout The Social Organization of Sexuality it never once failed to give me a good laugh.
Men lie in sexual situations: Pinocchios all, their noses stretch in resonance with (a Freudian might say upward displacementt from) their lower noses. (In the aftermath of the Clinton scandals, some entrepreneur marketed a Clinton watch, with a picture of the president on the face and a computer mechanism that makes the nose grow, suggestively, longer and then shorter.) Men are particularly inclined to lie in cultures, such as ours, where with one hand (the right hand of the superego) they impose monogamoust constraints that, with the other hand (the left hand of the id), they evade.
If tyrants make liars, monogamous societies make sexual liars, and those who are, as it were, maritally challenged often turn bedtricks. In the film Liar, Liar (1998), about a man-more precisely, a lawyer-magically compelled to tell the truth, the first place the curse manifests itself is where it is most obvious, the place where everyone lies: not in court, but in bed. When his adulterous partner asks him, in postcoital languor, how it was for him, the lawyer responds, to his own shocked dismay and her fury, "I've had better." It is easier for women than for men to lie physically in some ways, faking orgasms, for example, a widely attested, and debated, skill.
Ladder 286
Carnal Ignorance And Carnal Knowledge
Precisely because sexual truth t is posited as the ultimate truth, sexual betrayal is posited as the ultimate betrayal. The protean quality of sexual passion, unfortunately coupled with our foolish tendency to use sexual love as the rock on which we build the church of our identity, t drives 482
Compare 287
Conclusion
us to use highly charged words like "betrayal" (with its politicalt over- tones) and "unfaithful" (with its religioust overtones) to describe the sexual lie. For this is the betrayal and infidelity that cuts closest to the bone, encompassing within it the other two, the political and the religious. When we deceive others about our sexual identity, or are deceived by them, we lose one of the main anchors of our own sense of identity, since we are lying to ourselves when we betray, or are betrayed by, those whom we desire and/or love.
Why, then, do we speak of the sexual act as carnal knowledge? We would do better to call it carnal ignorance.
Hub 288
Carnal Knowledge
Despite the massive testimony to the power of sexual fantasyt and the argument that sex is a lie, t our myths present strong evidence for the counterargument, the revelatory power of sex. "Knowing" is a euphemism for the sexual act in many languages, deriving from the biblical Hebrew usage. (Here we may note the power of language:t once someone in an- cient Israel used a verb meaning "know" to refer to the sexual act, it predisposed all Jews, Christians, and Muslims to believe that they would know the people they slept with.) Zvi Jagendorf relates this biblical usage to the biblical stories of the bedtrick (Rachel, t Tamart) and to an even more basic biblical text: The awareness of sexual difference is the fruit of knowledge and after the Fall Genesis imagines sex in a new and striking way: "And Adam knew Eve his wife." The metaphor of sex as knowing cannot in this context be ac- cepted as a euphemism, "modesty of language" as some commentators have called it ....
"Hebrew, it seems, could not say that (although it could in the negative as Lot's daughters
Cycle 289
Carnal Ignorance And Carnal Knowledge
That the sexual act is the ultimate key to concealed identity is a Freud- ian assumption, which Michel Foucault (building on the insights of Bachelard) sums up well: 484
Flow 290
Conclusion
[W]e also admit that it is in the area of sex that we must search for the most secret and profound truths about the individual, that it is there that we can best discover what he is and what determines him. And if it was believed for centuries that it was necessary to hide sexual matters because they were shameful, we now know that it is sex itself which hides the most secret parts of the individual: the structure of his fantasies, the roots of his ego, the forms of his relationship to reality.
These texts insist that the body tells the truth: the real person is the person glimpsed in bed, while the person whom we see at other times is a veneer, a superficial double. The extreme form of this view, which denies individuality and reduces sexuality to animality, is characteristic of pornography, as John Hubner remarked: "Sex strips away identities it takes a lifetime to build. A naked aroused man is not a brain surgeon or a university president or a Methodist bishop.
I could still smell the smell
Carnal Ignorance And Carnal Knowledge
Because of our shared assumption that sex reveals the truth. In David Lodge's Small World, after the hero has slept with one twin whom he mistook for the other (in a story that Cave regards as "a parody of romance recognitions"),40 she chides him: "If you can't be sure whether the girl you just. screwed is Angelica or not, how can you be in love with her?
Conclusion
The cross-sex (or heterosexual) fantasy, by contrast, is the challenge of knowing someone who is otherwise opaque to you, someone as different from you as you can imagine or find (not just someone of the other gender but, ultimately, someone of another culture or even another species, as in the tale of Beauty and the Beast). Mendelsohn's assertion that "sex between men dissolves otherness into sameness"46 makes no allowance for the sexual individuality that applies equally well to same-sex and cross-sex experience: the chance to know the unique qualities revealed both in sexual sameness and in sexual differ- ence, the different ways in which each of us is penetrated or penetrates.
The sadistic aspect of sexual knowledge as power was chillingly de- picted by Nicholas Delbanco in his glimpse into the mind of a serial killer named Trip: Control: Trip liked the way he kept it and how his partners lost it-the weepers, the screamers, the polite ones swearing shamelessly and then the proud ones begging, stripped of pride. He liked what he learned about women from the way they behaved in the dark. There was nothing else- well, drowning or torture maybe, but he wasn't into drowning-that could teach you so much, and so fast ....
From the moment he first understood how people change without their clothes, how what they're hiding matters and you can get their secrets when you get them into bed, Trip understood the game. He knew her, says the Bible, and Eve swallowed knowledge when she ate the apple and offered a piece to Adam and then got dressed and left .... The satisfaction was discovery-how you never knew beforehand what a person would reveal to you when you had your cock or hand inside them and were bearing down.
You never knew till you were trying them how they would respondY The casual dismissal of drowning, but not torture, as an equivalent to the sexual manipulation of knowledge is one of the minor terrors of this passage.
Carnal Ignorance And Carnal Knowledge
487 Annie Dillard balances the assertion that sexual love is the best (and the counterassert~on that it is the worst) source of know led get of personal identity in her novel, in a passage about a man named Clare: Clare knew that common wisdom counseled thilt love was a malady that blinded lovers' eyes like acid. Love's skewed sight made hard features ap- pear harmonious, and sinners appear saints, and cowards appear heroes. Clare was by no means an original thinker, but on this one point he had reached an opposing view, that lovers alone see what is real.
The fear and envy and pride that stain souls are phantoms. The lover does not fancy that the beloved possesses imaginary virtues. He knew June was not especially generous, not especially noble in deportment, not especially tolerant, pa- tient, or self-abasing.
False Ignorance And False Knowledge
But what sort of knowledge is obtained in the sexual act, and by whom? One could answer, knowledge of the body of the other, of course, on the most superficial level, and of the emotional vulnerabilities of the other. Against a rather material view of human identity (the assumption that carnal knowledge is the best knowledge, or even the only knowledge that we have), the criterion of intellectual knowledge asserts itself in many myths.
Can she "know" him as he "knows" her? It may well be that because men have given most of our texts their final form, those texts speak primarily of a woman being en- tered and known, and of a man as having (carnal) knowledge of the woman. The man is the knower of the woman -as-field (of knowledge and of progeneration).
The Hindus speak of the soul as the knower of the 488
Conclusion
body-as-field (kshetrajna), just as they speak of the legitimate son as the one born from the wife's body-as-field (kshetraja).so In these texts, the man goes inside the woman's head as well as inside her body,Sl and in this sense he claims to know more about her than she, who does not physically penetrate him in the same way, knows about him. But the inadequacy of the assertion that men know women sexually is often demonstrated by the very text that makes it in the first place: all that the man learns is a lie.
A woman can conceal a number of things, including her very identity, by virtue of that very passivityt that was to give him the advantage in knowing. This asymmetry is compounded by the asymmetry of public knowledge concerning who is the father (uncer- tain) t or the mother (more certain) of the child, made yet more asymmet- rical by the fact that the mother usually knows perfectly well who the father of her child is, though the father may not know what children he has fathered.
Moreover, women can know through being penetrated. Sexual knowl- edge, like power, can flow both ways, as Yeats pointed out in his poem about the rape of Leda t by Zeus: "Did she take on his knowledge with his power, before the indifferent beak could let her drop?" The Swan's penetration of Leda is a source of Leda's knowledge; women (like Delphic oracles) are possessed and thereby become not only mediums for knowl- edge but also knowers. Thus, when a man "knows" a woman, he may not know her at all, but she may very well know him.
As Tagendorf puts it: A man may know a woman (physically) and be mistaken about her identity. He may even know her carnally without any awareness whatsoever; he may be drunk. On the other hand, a woman being possessed in sex, apparently the object, may yet be the subject, the only possessor of the volatile element of awareness.
There is also such a thing as false knowledge, and there is false igno- rance. True ignorance characterizes the victims of most bedtricks, who are simply fooled. It also characterizes unwitting bedtricksters, who do
Carnal Ignorance And Carnal Knowledge
489 not actively mean to trick anyone but are, passively, mistaken for other people, as is the case in Oedipus Rex, t where neither Oedipus nor Iocasta knows that she is his mother, and in The Comedy of Errors, t where neither of the twin brothers is aware that the other is there, or in Twelfth Night, where Sebastian is mistaken for "Cesario." False ignorance (which is not the same as actually being carnally ignorant) is fairly straightforward: the victim of a bedtrickster who impersonated the victim's spouse claims, falsely, not to have recognized the trickster and therefore, falsely, not to be guilty of infidelity. Thus, it is argued that the wife of Martin Guerret (or Alcmena:j: or Ahalya:j:) did know it was someone else in the form of her husband and falsely claimed ignorance because she preferred the impostor.
This claim is seldom made against a man, but in the film Body Language (1992), an adulterous psychiatrist interviews a man who is brain-damaged; the psychiatrist shows the man a picture of Marilyn Mon- roe, whom he does not quite recognize. llie doctor assures him that this is someone he knows. After a while he says, "Is that my wife?" to which the psychiatrist's colleague remarks, "Hey, that would be a great line.
You could cheat on your wife and say, 'I thought she was you.''' False igno- rance about bedtricks is also recognized in a song by Lerner and Loewe entitled "I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore" (from Gigi), in which an old man lists the things he is glad to be rid of, No more confusion, No morning-after surprise, No self-delusion, That when you're telling those lies, she isn't wise. Mutual self-deception, so characteristic of sex, is here terminated only by aging; but agingt is more often a sexual problem than a sexual solution.
False knowledge begins as the other side of the same coin, another way out of another sort of adultery, the sort that is exposed through a double-backt bedtrick. The unanswerable argument that the victims of bedtricks can use to bail themselves out when their spouses catch them in bed with people who appear to be other than the spouse is to say, with simple common sense, "I saw through the trick from the start and just pretended to be fooled." Marliss C.
Conclusion
But this excuse carries with it a more subtle form of betrayal, vividly depicted in Kobo Abe's Face of Another. After the husband has, he thinks, bed tricked his wife, she leaves him, and he finds a letter that says, in part: From the very first instant, when, elated with pride, you talked about the distortion of the magnetic field, I ... saw through you completely ....
Even you knew very well that I had seen through you. You knew and yet demanded that I go on with the play in silence. I considered it a dreadful thing at first, but I soon changed my mind, thinking that perhaps you were acting out of sympathy for me ....
To imagine that you had seen through everything! It was as if I were putting on a play in which I was the only actor, thinking I was invisible, believing in a fake spell. 56 Like her, he finds the knowing deception-her deception of him, her pre- tense not to know-even more terrible than he had felt her apparent infidelity to be-through his deception of her.
False knowledge may also come into play when someone asserts falsely that a bedtrick has taken place. Casanovat lies like this when he asserts that he himself was not the victim of a bedtrick because he perpetrated his own double-cross. t This might make us wonder about other texts in which characters say that a bedtrick has taken place; perhaps they, too, are lying.
Was the demigod lying to King Janamejayat about the substitu- tion of another woman for his queen when Indra substituted himself for the sacrificial stallion? Did the host of «The Visitor" invent the story of a leprous daughter to punish his guest for actually seducing the host's . Did the Brighton t lady lie about her adulteries just to
Carnal Ignorance And Carnal Knowledge
491 make it possible for her son to go to bed with the neighborhood girls (allegedly begotten by his father)? Did Ruth lie to Boaz in the morning just to get him to marry her? Or, stepping out of the text for a moment, did the authors of certain texts invent bedtricks (in the case of Esther, t for instance) to absolve their heroines of the guilt for inappropriate sexual acts?
The bedtrick is an exercise in epistemology: How could you know? How could you not know?
The answer to the question "Is it the same person?" will be expressed differently according to the different points of view of several different characters within the story. It has been argued that in all narratives there are no events (for an event would imply a narrator with a god's-eye view) but, rather, only the conflicting and inter- secting points of view of the characters. Whether or not this is true of all narratives-there are points of view about this, too, after all-it is particularly true of mythss7 and even more particularly true of bedtrick myths, whose very premise is that there are two different points of view about the identity of the masquerader: that of the trickster who plays the bedtrick and knows the true identity of both partners, and that of the victim who is the object of the bedtrick and does not know the identity of the bedtrickster.
In the case of inadvertent bedtricks, where neither the trickster nor the victim knows that a bedtrick is taking place, only we, the audience, and the author, know the truth. And sometimes the narra- tive forces us, the readers or hearers, to change our point of view in mid- stream, even several times, as we discover that the protagonist (or the author) has been hiding something from us. Point of view determines subject/object: if you know the trick and the other doesn't, you are the subject and the other is the object.
This knowl- edge is what turns the tables (or beds) in the balance of sexual power. In the bedtrick, for the partner who knows, or who keeps his or her eyes open, sex is a source of knowledge. For the one who is fooled, or who allows lust to dupe him or her, sex is a lie.
The bedtrick, like all masquer- ades, is situated on the cusp between knowing and not knowing, more precisely on the narrow divide between not knowing, knowing while pre- tending to yourself that you don't know (self-delusion), and knowing while pretending to others that you don't know (lying). The question is not simply whether one "knows" one's partner in the 492
Conclusion
sexual act but which of the many aspects of the partner one recognizes in this most revealing, and concealing, of human interactions. The theme of "knowing" is particularly central to the many incestt myths in this corpus, which ask, each in its own way, "How do you know it is your mother (or father)? Are you let off the hook if you do not know?" But the more pertinent question, coded in the story and relevant not just to incestuous bedtricks but to all bedtricks, is perhaps "How is it that you do not know who is in bed with you?" Or "How is it that you do not know that you do not know who is in bed with you?" Or, better, "Who are you who do not know that you do not know who is in bed with you?" Or, finally, "How is it that you do not know who you are?"
Appendix: Bedtricks in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index 493
Ladder 291
Bedtricks In Stith Thompson'S Motif-Index
Compare 292
Hub 293
Cycle 294
Flow 295
Ladder 296
Compare 297
Hub 298
Filmography: Double Features: Bedtricks (and Related Plots) on Film
DOUBLE FEATURES: BEDTRICKS (AND RELATED PLOTS) ON FILM W = written by, d = directed by, wd = written and directed by, s = starring All of Me, 1984, w Phil Alden Robinson, from the novel Me Two, by Ed Davis; d Carl Reiner; s Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Victoria Tennant. American Gigolo, 1980, wd Paul Schrader; s Richard Gere, Lauren Hutton.
Cycle 299
Lmography
DOUBLE FEATURES: BEDTRICKS (AND RELATED PLOTS) ON FILM W = written by, d = directed by, wd = written and directed by, s = starring All of Me, 1984, w Phil Alden Robinson, from the novel Me Two, by Ed Davis; d Carl Reiner; s Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Victoria Tennant. American Gigolo, 1980, wd Paul Schrader; s Richard Gere, Lauren Hutton. An Awfully Big Adventure, 1995, w Charles Wood, from the novel by Beryl Bain- bridge; d Mike Newell; s Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Georgina Cates.
Bachelor Party, 1984, w Neal Israel, Pat Profit, from a story by Bob Israel; d Neal Israel; s Tom Hanks, Tawny Kitaen. Back to the Future, 1985, w Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale; d Robert Zemeckis; s Michael J. The Ballad of Little Joe, 1993, wd Maggie Greenwald; s Suzy Amis, Bo Hopkins, Ian McKelen, David Chung.
Basic Instinct, 1991, w Joe Eszterhas; d Paul Verhoeven; s Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone. Batman Returns, 1992, w Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm; d Tim Burton; s Michael Kea- ton, Michelle Pfeiffer. Being John Malkovich, 1999, w Charlie Kaufman; d Spike Jonze; s John Matkovich, John Cusack, Orson Bean.
La belle et la bhe (Beauty and the Beast), 1946, wd Jean Cocteau, from a story by Madame LePrince de Beaumont; s Jean Marais, Josette Day. Bells Are Ringing, 1960, w Betty Comden and Adolph Green, from their play; d Vincente Minnelli; s Judy Holliday, Dean Martin. Big, 1988, w Gary Ross, Anne Spielberg; d Penny Marshall; s Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Perkins.
Big Business, 1988, w Dori Pierson, Marc Rudel; d Jim Abrahams; s Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin. Bitter Moon, 1992, w Roman Polanski, from the novel by Pascal Bruckner; d Roman Polanski; s Peter Coyote, Hugh Grant. Blade Runner, 1982, w Hampton Fancher, David People, from Philip K.
Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; d Ridley Scott; s Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Daryl Hannah.
Flow 300
Filmography
Body Double, 1984, wd Brian de Palma; 5 Craig Wasson, Gregg Henry, Melanie Griffith. Body Heat, 1981, w Lawrence Kasdan, from James M. Cain's novel Double Indem- nity; d Lawrence Kasdan; 5 William Hurt, Kathleen Turner.
Body Language, 1992, made for television, wd Arthur Allan Seidelman; s Heather Locklear, Linda Purl, James Acheson. Boys Don't Cry, 1999, w Kimberly Pierce and Andy Bienen; d Kimberly Pierce; s Hil- ary Swank, Cloe Sevigny. Bringing Up Baby, 1938, w Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde; d Howard Hawks; s Kath- arine Hepburn, Cary Grant.
Butterfield Eight, 1960, w Charles Schnee, John Michael Hayes, from the novel by John O'Hara; d Daniel Mann; s Elizabeth Taylor. Carefree, 1938, w Allan Scott, Ernest Pagano; d Mark Sandrich; s Fred Astaire, Gin- ger Rogers. Casanova's Big Night, 1954, w Hal Kanter, Edmund Hartmann; d Norman Z.
McLeod; s Bob Hope, Joan Fontaine. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1958, w Richard Brooks, James Poe, from the play by Ten- nessee Williams; d Richard Brooks; s Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Burl Ives. Cet obscur object de desir (That Obscure Object of Desire), 1977, w Pierre Lary, Juan- Luis Buftuel, based on Pierre Louys's novel La femme et Ie pantin; music by Richard Wagner; d Pierre Lary, Juan-Luis Buftuel; 5 Fernando Rey, Carole Bou- quet, Angela Molina.
Chances Are, 1989, w Perry Howze, Randy Howze; d Emile Ardolino; s Cybill Shep- herd, Robert Downey, Jr., Ryan O'Neal, Mary Stewart Masterson. China, 1943, w Frank Butler, from Reginald Forbes's novel The Fourth Brother; d John Farrow; s Alan Ladd, Loretta Young. Clerks, 1995, wd Kevin Smith, Scott Mosier; s Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Mar- ilyn Ghigliotti, Lisa Spoonauer, Jason Mewes.
Cobra Woman, 1944, w Richard Brooks, Gene Lewis; d Robert Siodmak; s Maria Montez. Comrade Stalin's Trip to Africa (Georgia, Russia), 1991, d Irakli Kvirikadze. Consenting Adults, 1992, w Matthew Chapman; d Alan J.
Pakula; s Kevin Kline, Kevin Spacey, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Rebecca Miller. The Corsican Brothers, 1941, w George Bruce, Howard Estabrook, from the Alexan- der Dumas novel; d Gregory Ratoff; s Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Akim Tamiroff, Ruth Warrick. The Return of the Corsican Brothers, 1953, w Richard Schayer; dRay Nazarro; s Richard Greene, Paula Raymond, Raymond Burr.
Cover Girl, 1944, w Virginia Van Upp; d Charles Vidor; s Rita Hayworth, Gene Kelly. The Crying Game, 1992, wd Neil Jordan; 5 Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson, For- est Whitaker, Jaye Davidson. Cyrano de Bergerac, 1950, w Brian Hooker, from the play by Edmond Rostand; d Michael Gordon; s Jose Ferrer, Mala Powers.
Ladder 301
The Dark Mirror, 1946, w Nunnally Johnson, from a story by Vladimir Pozner; d Robert Siodmak; s Olivia de Havilland, Lew Ayres; remade in 1986. Dark Victory, 1939, w Casey Robinson, from the play by George Brewer, Jr.;
Compare 302
Filmography
569 d Edmund Goulding; s Bette Davis, George Brent, Humphrey Bogart, Ronald Reagan. Dave, 1993, w Gary Ross; d Ivan Reitman; s Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver. The Day of the Locust, 1975, w Waldo Salt, from the novel by Nathaniel West; d John Schlesinger; s Donald Sutherland, Burgess Meredith, Geraldine Page.
Dead Again, 1991, w Scott Frank; d Kenneth Branagh; s Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Derek Jacobi, Robin Williams. Dead Ringer, 1964, wAlbert Beich, Oscar Millard, from a story by Rian James; d Paul Henreid; s Bette Davis, Peter Lawford, Karl Malden. Dead Ringers, 1988, w David Cronenberg from the novel Twins, by Bari W od and Jack Greasland; d David Cronenberg; s Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold.
Decameron Nights, 1952, w George Oppenheimer; d Hugo Fregonese; s Louis Jor- dan, Joan Fontaine, Joan Collins. Destination Tokyo, 1943, wd Delmer Daves; s Cary Grant, John Garfield. The Divorce of Lady X, 1938, w Lajos Biro, Arthur Wimperis, Ian Dalrymple, from Gilbert Wakefield's play Counsel's Opinion; d Tim Whelan; s Merle Oberon, Lau- rence Olivier, Ralph Richardson.
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, 1976, w David Cronenberg, from the novel by Jorge Amado; d David Cronenberg; s Sonia Braga. Double Impact, 1991, wd Sheldon Lettich, Jean-Claude Van Damme; s Jean-Claude Van Damme. Double Indemnity, 1944, w Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler, from the novel by James M.
Cain; d Billy Wilder; s Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. The Double Life of veronique, 1991, wd Krzysztof Kieslowski; s Irene Jacob. Double Threat, 1992, wd David A.
Prior; s Sally Kirland, Andrew Steves, Sherrie Rose, Chick Vennera, Gary Swanson, Richard Lynch, Anthony Franciosa. Dream Lover, 1994, wd Nicholas Kazan; s James Spader, Madchen Amick. Dressed to Kill, 1980, wd Brian de Palma; s Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson.
Duck Soup, 1933, w Bert Kalmar et al.; d Leo McCarey; s the four Marx brothers, Margaret Dumont. Duplicates, 1991, made for cable; w Sandor Stern; d Andrew Neiderman; s Cicely Tyson, Kevin McCarthy, Gregory Harrison, Kim Greist. The Eagle Has Landed, 1977, w Tom Mankiewicz, from the novel by Jack Higgins; d John Surges; s Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence.
1988, w Josh Goldstein, Jonathan Price; d Paul Flaherty; d George Burns, Charlie Schlatter. Enemies, a Love Story, 1989, w Roger L. Simon, Paul Mazursky, from the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer; d Paul Mazursky; s Anjelica Huston, Ron Silver, Lena Olin.
Hub 303
Europa, Europa, 1991, w Agnieszka Holland, from the book by Salomon Perel; d Agnie~zka Holland; s Marco Hofschneider. Everyone Says I Love You, 1997, wd Woody Allen; s Woody Allen, Goldie Hawn, Alan Alda, Julia Roberts.
Cycle 304
Filmography
Excalibur, 1981, w Rospo Pallenberg, John Boorman; d John Booman; s Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Nicol Williamson. Eyes Wide Shut, 1999, w Stanley Kubrick, from a novella by Arthur Schnitzler; d Stanley Kubrick; s Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise. Face of Another, 1966, w Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe, from the novel by Kobo Abe; d Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe; s Tatsuyu Nakadai, Machiko Kyo.
Face/Off, 1997, w Mike Werb and Michael Colleary; d John Woo; s Nicholas Cage, John Travolta. A Face to Die For, 1996, w Marvin Welin, Mark Welin; d Jack Bender; s Yasmine Bleeth, James Wilder. Farinel/i, 1995, w Walther Vanden Ende; d Gerard Corbiau; s Stefano Dionisi, Enrico L.
The File on Thelma Jordan, 1949, w Ketti Frings; d Robert Slodmak; s Barbara Stan- wyck, Wendell Corey. The Flame of New Orleans, 1941, w Norman Krasna; d Rene Clair; s Marlene Die- trich, Bruce Cabot, Roland Young. The Forbidden Street, 1948, w Ring Lardner, Jr., from Margery Sharp's novel Britan- nia Mews (also the British title of the film); d Jean Negulesco; s Dana Andrews, Maureen O'Hara, Sybil Thorndike.
Freaky Friday, 1976, w Mary Rodgers, from her novel; d Gary Nelson; s Jodie Fos- ter, Barbara Harris, John Astin. The Front, 1976, w Walter Bernstein; d Martin Ritt; s Woody Allen, Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, Andrea Marcovicci, Michael Murphy. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 1987, w Melvin Frank, Michael Pertwee, from the play by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, with additional lyr- ics by Stephen Sondheim; d Richard Lester; s Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Jack Gil- ford, Buster Keaton.
Goddess of Love, 1988, d Tim Drake; s Vanna White, David Naughton, Amanda Bearse. Gone with the Wind, 1939, w Sidney Howard et al., from the novel by Margaret Mitchell; d Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood; s Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland. Goodbye, Charlie, 1964, wHarry Kurnitz from George Axelrod's play; d Vincente Minnelli; s Debbie Reynolds, Pat Boone, Walter Matthau, Tony Curtis.
The Great Dictator, 1940, wds Charlie Chaplin. The Great White Hope, 1970, w Howard Sackler, from his play; d Martin Ritt; s James Earl Jones, Jane Alexander. Groundhog Day, 1993, w Danny Rubin, Harold Harmis; d Harold Ramis; s Bill Mur- ray, Andie MacDowell.
Guys and Dolls, 1955, w Joseph L. Mankiewicz, from the musical by Jo Swerling, Abe Burrows; lyrics by Frank Loesser; d Joseph L. Mankiewicz; s Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Vivian Blaine, Stubby Kaye.
Half Angel, 1951, w Robert Riskin; d Richard Sale; s Loretta Young, Joseph Cotten. Hear My Song, 1991, w Peter Chelsom, Adrian Dunbar; d Peter Chelsom; s Ned Beatty, Adrian Dunbar, Shirley Anne Field.
Flow 305
Ladder 306
Filmography
571 Heaven Can Wait, 1978, w Warren Beatty, Elaine May, from the play by Harry Seg- all (and the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan); d Warren Beatty, Buck Henry; s Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, James Mason, Jack Warden. Hello Again, 1987, w Susan Isaacs; d Frank Perry; s Shelly Long, Judith Ivey, Gabriel Byrne.
Henry and June, 1990, w Philip Kaufman, Rose Kaufman, from the book by AnaYs Nin; d Philip Kaufman; s Fred Ward, Uma Thurman. Here Come the Waves, 1944, w Allen Scott et al.; d Mark Sandrich; s Betty Hutton, Bing Crosby. High Heels, 1991, wd Pedro Almodovar; s Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes, Miguel Bose.
Imitation of Life, 1934, w William Hurlbut, from the novel by Fannie Hurst; d John Stahl; s Claudette Colbert, Warren William, Louise Beavers, Rochelle Hudson; 1959, w Eleanore Griffin; d Douglas Sirk; s Lana Turner, Juanita Moore, Susan Kohner. The Importance of Being Ernest, 1952, w Anthony Asquith, from the play by Oscar Wilde; d Anthony Asquith; s Michael Redgrave, Edith Evans, Margaret Ruther- ford, Joan Greenwood, Dorothy Tutin. In This Our Life, 1942, w Howard Koch, from the novel by Ellen Glasgow; d John Huston; 5 Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, George Brent, Dennis Morgan, Wal- ter Huston.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956, w Daniel Mainwaring, from the novel by Jack Finney; d Don Siegel; s Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter; 1978, w W. Richter; d Philip Kaufman; 5 Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin McCarthy. The Iron Mask, 1929, w Elton Thomas (Douglas Fairbanks); d Allan Dwan, from Alexandre Dumas's novel Ten Years After; s Douglas Fairbanks, Belle Bennett, Ullrich Haupt.
I Was a Male War Bride, 1949, w Charles Lederer et al., from a 1947 Reader's Digest story; d Howard Hawks; s Cary Grant, Ann Sheridan. Killer in the Mirror, 1986, made for television, wd Frank De Felitta; s Ann Jillian, Len Cariou, Max Gail. The Lady Eve, 1941, w Preston Sturges from the play by Monckton Hoffe; d Pres- ton Sturges; 5 Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, William Demarest.
Ladyhawke, 1985, w Edward Khmara et al.; d Richard Donner; s Rutger Hauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Broderick, Leo McKern. The Last Time I Saw Paris, 1954, w Julius J. Epstein, Richard Brooks; d Richard Brooks; s Van Johnson, Elizabeth Taylor.
Let's Make Love, 1960, w Norman Krasna; d George Cukar; s Yves Montand, Mari- lyn Monroe. Liar, Liar, 1997, w Paul Guay, Stephen Mazur; d Tom Shadyac; s Jim Carey. Like Father, Like Son, 1987, w Lome Cameron, Steven L.
Bloom; d Rod Daniel; s Dudley Moore, Kirk Cameron. The Little Drummer Girl, 1984, w Loring Mandel, from the novel by John Le Carre; d George Roy Hill; s Diane Keaton, Yorgo Voyagis.
Filmography
The Little Mermaid, 1989, w John Musker, Ron Clements, from the story by Hans Christian Andersen; d John Musker, Ron Clements. Love Letters, 1945, wAyne Rand, from Chris Massie's book Pity My Simplicity; d William Dieterle; s Joseph Cotton, Jennifer Jones. Magnificent Obsession, 1935, w George O'Neil et aI., from the novel by Lloyd C.
Stahl; s Irene Dunne, Robert Taylor; 1954, w Robert Blees; d Douglas Sirk; s Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson. The Major and the Minor, 1942, w Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder; d Billy Wilder; s Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Diana Lynn. The Man in the Iron Mask, 1939, w George Brent; d James Whale; s Louis Hayward, Joan Bennett; 1977, d Mike Newell; s Richard Chamberlain.
The Man Who Never Was, 1955, w Nigel Balchin, from the book by Ewen Mon- tagu; d Ronald Neame; s Clifton Webb, Robert Fleming, Gloria Grahame. Maxie, 1985, w Patrick Resnick, from Jack Finney's novel Marion's Wall; d Paul Aaron; s Glenn Close, Mandy Patinkin, Ruth Gordon. Men in Black, 1997, wd Barry Sonnenfeld; s Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith.
Metropolis, 1926, w Thea von Harbou; d Fritz Lang; s Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel. Mighty Aphrodite, 1996, wd Woody Allen; s Woody Allen, Mira Sorvino, Helen Bonham-Carter. Mirror Images, 1991, made for television; w Georges des Esseintes; d Alexander Gregory Hippolyte; s Delia Sheppard, Jeff Conaway.
Mission: Impossible, 1996, wd Brian de Palma; s Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave. Moon over Parador, 1988, w Leon Capetanos, Paul Mazursky, from a story by Charles G. Booth; d Paul Mazursky; s Richard Dreyfuss, Raul Julia, Sonia Braga.
Doubtfire, 1993, w Randi Mayem Singer, Leslie Dixon, from Anne Fine's novel Alias Madam Doubtfire; d Chris Columbis; s Robin Williams, Sally Field, Sidney Walker. Multiplicity, 1996, w Chris Miller, Mary Hale, Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel, based on a short story by Chris Miller; d Harold Ramis; s Michael Keaton, Andie Mac- Dowell. My Geisha, 1962, w Norman Krasna; d Jack Cardiff; s Shirley Maclaine, Yves Mon- tand, Robert Cummings, Edward G.
My Little Chickadee, 1940, w Mae West, W. Fields; d Edward Cline; s Mae West, W. My Twentieth Century, 1990, wd Ildiko Enyeko; s Dorotha Segda, Oleg Jankovskij, Paulius Manker.
National Velvet, 1945, w Theodore Reeves, Helen Deutsch, from the novel by Enid Bagnold; d Clarence Brown; s Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, Anne Revere. Night Song, 1947, w Frank Fenton et al.; d John Cromwell; s Dana Andrews, Merle Oberon. Ninotchka, 1939, w Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch, from a story by Melchior Lengyel; d Ernst Lubitsch; s Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas.
Filmography
573 North by Northwest, 1959, w Ernest Lehman; d Alfred Hitchcock; s Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint. Nudo di Donna, 1984, w Nino Manfredi, Paolo Levi; d Nino Manfredi; 5 Eleanora Giorgi, Carlo Bagno. Olivier, Olivier, 1992, w Agnieszka Holland et al.; d Agnieszka Holland; s Frans:oise Cluzet, Brigitte Rouan, Jean-Frans:oise Stevenin.
On the Double, 1961, w Jack Rose, Melville Shavelson; d Melville Shavelson; s Danny Kaye, Dana Wynter, Diana Dors. On the Riviera, 1951, w Valentine Davies, Phoebe Ephron, Henry Ephron; d Walter Lang; s Danny Kaye. Our Man in Havana, 1959, w Graham Greene, from his novel; d Carol Reed; s Alec Guinness, Noel Coward.
Overboard, 1987, w Leslie Dixon; d Garry Marshal; s Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell. Peggy Sue Got Married, 1986, w Jerry Leichtling, Arlene Sarner; d Francis Coppola; s Kathleen Turner, Nicholas Cage. The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1945, wd Albert Lewin; s George Sanders, Hurd Hat- field, Donna Reed, Angela Lansbury, Peter Lawford.
Pinky, 1949, w Philip Dunne, Dudley Nichols, from Cid Ricketts Summer's novel Quality; dElia Kazan; s Jeanne Crain, Ethel Barrymore, Ethel Waters. Pleasantville, 1998, w Don Knotts; d Gary Ross; s William Macey, Joan Allen. Portrait of Jenny, 1948, w Peter Bernais et aI., from the novel by Robert Nathan; d William Dieterle; s Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotton.
Prelude to a Kiss, 1992, w Craig Lucas, from his play; d Norman Rene; s Alec Bald- win, Meg Ryan, Sydney Walker. The Prisoner of Zenda, 1937, w John Balderston, Wills Root, Donald Ogden Stewart, from the novel by Anthony Hope; d John Cromwell; s Ronald Colman, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Madeleine Carroll. The Prisoner of Zenda, 1952, w John Balderston, Noel Langley; d Richard Thorpe; s Stewart Granger, James Mason, Deborah Kerr, Robert Coote.
The Prisoner of Zenda, 1979, w Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais; d Richard Quine; s Peter Sellers, Lionel Jeffries, Elke Sommer. Psycho, 1960, w Joseph Stefano, from the novel by Robert Bloch; d Alfred Hitch- cock; s Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, Janet Leigh. Queen Christina, 1933, w Salk Viertel, H.
Behrman; d Rouben Mamoulian; s Greta Garbo, John Gilbert. Rebecca, 1940, w Robert E. Sherwood, Joan Harrison, from the novel by Daphne du Maurier; d Alfred Hitchcock; s Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine.
La regie du jeu (The Rules of the Game), 1939, w Jean Renoir, Carl Koch; d Jean Renoir; s Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Jean Renoir. The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, 1974, w Max Ehrlich, from his novel; d J. Lee- Thompson; s Michael Sarrazin, Margot Kidder, Jennifer O'Neill.
Le retour de Martin Guerre, 1982, w Jean-Claude Carriere, Daniel Vigne; d Daniel Vigne; s Gerard Depardieu, Nathalie Baye. Return from the Ashes, 1965, w Julius J. Epstein, from the novel by Hubert Monteil- 574
Filmography
Lee-Thompson; s Ingrid Thulin, Maximillian Schell, Samantha Eggar, Herbert Lorn. Revenge of the Nerds, 1984, d Jeff Kanew; s Robert Carradine, Anthony Edwards, Timothy Busfield, Andrew Casses. The Richest Girl in the World, 1934, w Norman Krasna; d William A.
Seiter; remade, in 1944, as Bride by Mistake, with Laraine Day. Roxanne, 1987, w Steve Martin; d Fred Schepisi; s Steve Martin, Daryl Hannah. The Scar, 1948, w Daniel Fuchs, from a novel by Murray Forbes; d Steve Sekely; s Joan Bennett, Paul Henreid, Leslie Brooks, Mabel Page.
(Formerly called Hol- low Triumph.) "Second Chances," in Star Trek: The Next Generation, week of May 24, 1993, no. 250; w Rene Echevarria, from a story by Michael A. Medlock; d LeVar Burton; s Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis.
Seven Sinners, 1936, w John Meehan, Harry Tugend; lyrics by Frank Loesser; d Tay Garnett; s Marlene Dietrich, John Wayne. Shattered, 1991, w Wolfgang Petersen, from Richard Neely's novel The Plastic Night- mare; d Wolfgang Petersen; s Tom Berenger, Greta Scacchi, Bob Hoskins. She Woke Up Pregnant, 1996, made for television; w Michael O'Hara; d James A.
Cotner; s Michele Greene, Joy Penny, Linda Carter. Showboat, 1936, w Oscar Hammerstein II, from the novel by Edna Ferber; d James Whale; s Helen Morgan, Irene Dunne, Paul Robeson; 1951, w John Lee Mahin; d George Sidney; s Ava Gardner, Kathryn Grayson, William Warfield, Joe E. Single White Female, 1992, w Don Roos, from John Lutz's novel Single White Female Seeks Same; d Barbet Shroeder; s Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Sirens, 1994, wd John Duigan; s Hugh Grant, Tara Fitzgerald, Sam Neill, Elle Mac- pherson. Sleeper, 1973, w Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman; d Woody Allen; s Woody Allen, Diane Keaton. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937, w Ted Sears et al., from the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.
Some Like It Hot, 1959, w Billy Wilder, I. Diamond; d Billy Wilder; s Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, Joe E. Sommersby, 1993, w Nicholas Meyer, Sarah Kernochan; d Jon Amiel; s Richard Gere, Jodie Foster, James Earl Jones, Bill Pullman.
Spellbound, 1945, w Ben Hecht, from Francis Beeding's novel The House of Dr. Ed- wares; d Alfred Hitchcock, with dream sequences by Salvador Dali; s Ingrid Berg- man, Gregory Peck, Leo G. Splash, 1984, w Lowell Ganz et al.; d Ron Howard; 5 Tom Hanks, Daryl Hannah.
The Stepford Wives, 1974, w William Goldman, from the novel by Ira Levin; d Bryan Forbes; s Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss, Patrick O'Neal. A Stolen Life, 1946, w Catherine Turney; d Curtis Bernhardt; s Bette Davis, Glenn Ford. (Also 1939, w Marget Kennedy, George Barraud, from the novel by Karel J.
Benes; d Paul Czinner; s Elizabeth Bergner, Michael Redgrave.)
Filmography
575 A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951, w Tennessee Williams from his play; dElia Kazan; s Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden. Switch, 1991, wd Blake Edwards; s Ellen Barkin. Sylvia Scarlett, 1935, w Gladys Unger et aI., from the novel by Compton Mackenzie; d George Cukor; s Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant.
The Tales of Hoffmann, 1951, wd Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger; s Robert Rounseville, Robert Helpmann, Pamela Brown, Moira Shearer, Ludmilla Tcherina. There's Something about Mary, 1998, wd Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly; s Cameron Diaz, Matt Dillon, Ben Stiller, Lee Evans, Chris Elliott. They Live, 1988, w Frank Armitage, from the story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" by Ray Nelson; d John Carpenter; s Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George "Buck" Flower, Jason Robards III.
The Three Faces of Eve, 1957, w Nunnally Johnson, from the book by Corbett H. Cleckley; d Nunnally Johnson; s Joanne Woodward, Lee J. Tie Me Down!, 1989, wd Pedro Almodovar; s Victoria Abril, Antonio Banderas.
To Be or Not to Be, 1942, w Edwin Justus Mayer, from a story by Ernst Lubitsch and Melchior Lengyel; d Ernst Lubitsch; 5 Jack Benny, Carole Lombard; 1983, w Thomas Meehan, Ronnie Graham; d Alan Johnson; s Mel Brooks, Anne Ban- croft, Charles Durning, Christopher Lloyd. Tom Jones, 1963, w John Osborne, from the novel by Henry Fielding; d Tony Rich- ardson; s Albert Finney, Susannah York, Hugh Griffith, Diane Cilento. Tootsie, 1982, w Larry Gelbart, Murray Shisgal; d Sidney Pollack; s Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Teri Garr, Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, Sidney Pollack.
Trading Places, 1983, w Timohy Harris, Herschel Weingrod; d John Landis; s Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy. True Lies, 1994, wd James Cameron; s Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis. The Truth about Cats and Dogs, 1996, w Audrey Wells; d Michael Lehmann; s Uma Thurman, Janeane Garofalo, Ben Chaplin.
Turnabout, 1940, w Mickell Novak, Berne Giler, John McLain, from the novel by Thorne Smith; d Hal Roach; s Adolphe Menjou, John Hubbard, Carole Landis. Twice Blessed, 1945, w Ethel Hill; d Harry Beaumont; 5 Preston Foster, Gail Patrick. Two-Faced Woman, 1941, w S.
Behrman, Salka Viertel, George Oppenheimer, from the play by Ludwig Fulda; d George Cukor; s Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas. Two Much, 1996, w Fernando Trueba, David Trueba, based on the novel by Donald E. Westlake; d Fernando Trueba; s Antonio Banderas, Melanie Griffith, Daryl Hannah.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1987, w Jean-Claude Carriere, Philip Kaufman, from the novel by Milan Kundera; d Philip Kaufman; s Daniel Day-Lewis, Juli- ette Binoche, Lena Olin. Vertigo, 1958, w Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor, from the novel D'entre les morts, by 576
Filmography
Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac; d Alfred Hitchcock; s James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes. Vice Versa, 1947, w Peter Ustinov, from the novel by F. Anstey; d Peter Ustinov; s Roger Livesey, Kay Walsh, Anthony Newley.
Vice Versa, 1988, w Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais; d Brian Gilbert; s Judge Rein- hold, Fred Savage. Victor/Victoria, 1982, w Blake Edwards, from the German film of 1933, Viktor und Viktoria (wd Reinhold Schunzel); d Blake Edwards; s Julie Andrews, James Gar- ner, Robert Preston. Watermelon Man, 1970, w Herman Raucher; d Melvin Van Peebles; s Godfrey Cam- bridge, Estelle Parsons.
What Happened in the Tunne~ 1903, d Thomas Edison. While You Were Sleeping, 1995, w Daniel G. Sullivan, Fredric Lebow; d Jon Turtel- taub; s Sandra Bullock, Bill Pullman.
White, 1995, w Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Krzysztof Kieslowski; d Krzysztof Kieslowski; s Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy. The Wizard of Oz, 1939, w L. Frank Baum, Jr., Leon Lee, Larry Semon, from the novel by L.
Frank Baum; d Victor Fleming; s Judy Garland, Bert Lahr, and Ray Bolger. Wolf, 1994, w Jim Harrison; d Mike Nichols; s Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer. Wonder Man, 1945, w Don Hartman et al.; d Bruce Humberstone; s Danny Kaye, Vera Ellen.
Yentl, 1983, w Jack Rosenthal, Barbra Streisand, from the story by Isaac Bashevis Singer; d Barbra Streisand; s Barbra Streisand, Mandy Patinkin, Amy Irving, Nehemiah Persoff. You're Never Too Young, 1955, w Sidney Sheldon; d Norman Taurog; s Dean Mar- tin, Jerry Lewis, Diana Lynn, Nina Foch. ZeUg, 1983, wd Woody Allen; s Woody Allen, Mia Farrow.
Main Points
1. The bedtrick is a named pattern: body A taken for body B in sex. 2. Gods, humans, and servants all run the trick in different corpora. 3. Gender asymmetry: who may trick whom is historically loaded. 4. Indian and European tales rhyme without being identical. 6. Masquerade links sex to politics and inheritance. 7. Animal and divine doubles expand the pattern. 8. Law and narrative both punish and enjoy the trick. 9. Doniger's taxonomy is a tool; not every tale fits cleanly. 10. A closer look when one culture's trick is flattened into another's. 11. Desire and knowledge collide: knowing the body vs knowing the person. 12. Comedy and tragedy share the same substitution engine. 13. Read for who consents, who is fooled, and who narrates. 14. Comparative method: hold difference and pattern together. 15. The book is long; use the chapter map as a routing table.
Frameworks
| Name | What it says | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Bedtrick schema | Substitute → consummation → recognition → cost | When classifying a tale |
| Gender fork | Male vs female tricksters and victims | When morality tales moralize unevenly |
| Cross-cultural rhyme | Same pattern, different stakes | When comparing India and Europe |
About this book
The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade by Wendy Doniger, 2000. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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