Here she is:

V

VIRGIN

And your quaint honour turn to dust
And into ashes all my lust…

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress c.1640s

Virgin has a comparatively straightforward etymology: it derives from the Latin virgo (= ‘maiden’), whence the star-sign Virgo (apparently the sign of the shy, modest and meticulous, with a dash of perfectionism and anxiety). Its first sense (c.1200) is an ecclesiastical one: ‘an unmarried or chaste maiden or women, distinguished for piety or steadfastness in religion, and regarded as having a special place among the members of the Christian church on account of these merits.’

Like a virgin

Saint Lucy, with her eyes, as depicted in 1521

There are innumerable such virgins in Christian hagiography: Saint Ursula had an army of 11,000 virgin handmaids who all had their heads chopped off (in a bit of a pun-fail); Saint Cecilia (patron saint of music) managed not only to persuade her husband to forbear on their wedding night, but also to join the Christian cause along with his brother, and suffer death in consequence.

Saint Lucy consecrated her virginity to God, and, supposedly, tore her own eyes out and gave them to her husband (who had admired them) as a kind of macabre substitute for the marital debt. (Lesson: never admire your girlfriend’s essential organs).

And, of course, there is the arch-virgin much mentioned in these posts – the eponymous Mary, who gets a definition all to herself as virgin‘s fourth meaning.

Mary’s particular achievement – the Virgin Birth – is also considered of some importance in these definitions for virgin. It presumably lies behind the gloss ‘a female insect producing fertile eggs by pathenogenesis [without the input of a male insect]’ (1883), as well as virgin‘s simple equivalence with ‘pathenogenesis’ itself (1849) – a word with its origin in the Greek parthenos, also meaning ‘virgin’ and ‘genesis’ (= ‘creation’).

This – reproduction without fertilisation – though clearly associated with Mary in Christian tradition, is also arguably the origin of Adam, so it doesn’t have to be have an explicit cultural gender-association. Indeed, there is a Middle English citation for virgin that defines it as ‘a youth or man who has remained in a state of chastity’. But this is admittedly an unusual example among the definitions as a whole. 

A woman’s touch

A Vestal Virgin

If we go back to ancient Rome, we meet another sense the religious meaning of virgin can have: the very non-Christian Vestal Virgins, a group of highly respected women whose job it was to guard the ‘sacred fire’ and take care of the rituals and responsibilities that could not be dealt with by male priests.

They were so named because their duties were primarily to Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth and family, and, in consequence, the Vestal Virgins took on a role as kind of symbolic housewives to the whole of Rome.

Though they would be obliged to remain virginal throughout their time as priestesses, in the word’s second sense ‘a woman who is or remains in a state of inviolate chastity’, the vow only lasted thirty years, at the end of which they were free to marry (though most of them seem not to have been all that bothered).

This all said, while these saints and priestesses are all very much virgins in the most common sense of the word, the ecclesiastical meaning does not have to imply the sexual inexperience they normally connote, since ‘chastity’ simply means ‘clean, pure’ (from the Latin castus), and has no intrinsic connection with physical ‘intactness’, though it is frequently used as a synonym. In fact, the fourth definition for the second primary meaning of the word (where it can be used to describe things other than women) highlights ‘purity or freedom from stain’ and being ‘unsullied’.

If you cast your mind back to ‘M is for Marriage‘, you may remember that adultery means ‘pollution of the marriage bed’, suggesting by association that the marriage bed was a sacred – or indeed ‘pure’ – space. And indeed, marriage was widely considered invalid without consummation – something Henry VIII made much use of in his royal divorces – and, in consequence, the virtuous wife who dexterously trod the balance of Pure Marital Sex and Pollution of the Marriage Bed (whether by adultery as we conceive it, or by lusting after her husband) could be as much feted as the unmarried virgin (indeed, more so, if she proved herself skilled in housewifery and produced equally virtuous children).

The ‘sieve portrait’ of Elizabeth I, 1583

That said, a curious and related term first cited in 1644 was virgin widow, meaning a woman whose husband had died before the marriage could be consummated, and whose status was therefore ambiguously poised between virginity (in the sense of being unmarried) and widowhood (being left behind after the death of a husband).

This was Catherine of Aragon‘s position, as argued at her divorce hearing, during the painful period  after Prince Arthur’s death – languishing in a political and social limbo, waiting for something to happen, steadily running out of money and losing points on the marriage market.

Purity is a virtue of the soul

An excellent, though somewhat horrific, example of the noble wife trope is Lucretia, the virtuous spouse of Collatine, whose rape by the royal prince Tarquin so outraged Rome that it led directly to the establishment of the Roman republic. As a wife, Lucretia is not a technical virgin, but she is (as Shakespeare puts it in the oft-forgotten early poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594)) ‘Collatine’s fair love, Lucrece the chaste‘.

Saint Augustine posits that ‘purity is a virtue of the soul‘, and since body and soul are (in this reading) distinct, Lucrece can consummate her marriage while still retaining her essential ‘bodily sanctity’ because she is free of polluting lust in the process.

Unfortunately, Collatine spends so much time bragging about his wife’s chastity to the bros in the camp that he invites trouble:

Haply that name of “chaste” unhapp’ly set
The bateless edge on [Tarquin’s] appetite

Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

Lucretia is so traumatised by Tarquin’s subsequent rape that she stabs herself rather than ‘live impure’, widely considered by the (male) world to be a Noble Decision. This led to her immortalisation in literature and philosophy as a perfect wife, but also prompted Augustine to engage in some terrible rape apologism in the service of his broader argument (‘If she was adulterous, why praise her? if chaste, why slay her?’).

Saints and sieves

It is presumably a version of this chastity-of-the-soul idea so beloved by Augustine that lies behind the story of Tuccia, the Vestal Virgin who proves her virginity by carrying water from the Tiber in a sieve without spilling a drop (here she is depicted in 1555 with the sieve itself, and wearing an outfit that leaves little to the imagination, chaste or otherwise).

I suppose the idea behind the sieve story is that something that would normally flow through the porous surface is maintained ‘intact’, perhaps representing the pure soul within a porous body. At any rate, it became a key symbol of virginity, most notably in the ‘Sieve Portrait’ of the ‘Virgin Queen‘ Elizabeth I, who is also cited in the Dictionary as a definition of virgin in herself.

The last citation given in the dictionary for virgin, with which we will end, is from 1780, as ‘a fortress or city that has never been taken or subdued’. This has an obvious resonance with Lucrece, and the ultimately martial tale her story becomes – another link between feminine ‘closedness’ and men’s military convenience.

It’s hard to find a way to re-appropriate any of these ideas in a positive way. But maybe this transferred definition or fortresses and cities should make us think about Elizabeth I, who at least made them work to her own military and political advantage.

Of course, I’ve deliberately stacked the deck there, partly because I don’t think the chivalry debate is actually a debate; it’s a way of obscuring the real issues behind a warm, old-timey phrase.

“Chivalry” tends to enter the conversation when it is suggested that women might be treated as equals in the public space, that they might not be subjected to sexualised commentary for simply walking down the street, or might be paid an equal salary to men.

Then “chivalry” suddenly arrives as the benign, patronising face of patriarchy. Don’t women want men to open doors for them, to buy drinks for them, to arrange for them to be unable to support themselves economically and thus be dependent on the contingent goodwill of another person for their livelihood? That’s just plain mean, and almost certainly emotionally manipulative.

The reason this gambit interests me is not how ridiculous it sounds when spelled out (though that too) but how much explanatory force is attributed to such a vague and nebulous ideology.

Even more than evopsych, another gender-wrangle bugbear, “chivalry” offers so little specific justification. Even the debased version of evolutionary psychology one meets in the arguments of MRAs and redditors who have stumbled furiously into the comments section of Feministe (in the manner of a partygoer in Cancun who reaches for that Hawaiian shirt in the wardrobe and finds himself amid the snows of Narnia) purports to present an argument and a set of historical (well, mythical) explanations.

That’s why “chivalry” is so often a distraction, a way of blowing warm, nostalgic smoke across the debate until its not clear what we’re even arguing against.

The other reason it seems odd is the diametrically opposed way we use “medieval”. Like sixteenth-century humanists, we rush to brand anything barbarous, vicious or ignorant as “medieval”. The actions of Boko Haram, for example, or the conditions in an inner-city crackhouse, or Creationism. Somehow “chivalry” expresses a comfortable reactionary vision of gender relations, in which women simper and accept being corralled into particular spheres of activity away from real power, whereas “medieval” is backward and dumb. The bad kind of backward and dumb.

Between them these terms manage a bait and switch on our engagement with the past and its bearing on gender politics. A necessary one, given the preponderance of “princess” vocabulary which saturates the images offered to girls and young women. Narratives about dating, dress and men’s attention are full of language which assumes that the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages – all those castles, quests, damsels and princes – are the natural image of relations between genders.

At the same time, it’s necessary to decry the treatment of women in other countries as “medieval”, to maintain the fiction that women in our culture have nothing to trouble their heads about. The terminology carefully allots two meanings to the same collection of past events, and assigns our (rightly) divided feelings of shame, horror, belonging and heritage to whichever side is needed to keep gender norms in place.

The word “chivalry” has been particularly bothering me recently since I started rereading bits of Malory’s Morte Darthur. One of the most influential Arthurian works in the English language, this fifteenth-century version of the Camelot legends looms over almost all subsequent Arthurian works in some form or another, whether that be Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, or the recent BBC TV Merlin.

An examination of this romance also gives a bit of a lie to the myth of “chivalry”. It’s not that it debunks the soft-focus pageantry with a brutal expose of fifteenth-century repression and sexual violence (though an account of its author might do something of the sort). Rather, it undermines the “princess” paradigm by offering a very different kind of female character.

As Helen Cooper notes in her edition of Morte Darthur, women are often the characters who incite action:

Most of them, moreover, are active agents, not mere passive damosels.

The book also seems quite at home with women’s romantic agency: to quote Cooper again, Malory “takes it as natural and unthreatening…that women have sexual desires” and act upon them.

One particular passage struck me as illuminating this issue: when Dame Lyonet realizes her sister Lyonesse is in love with the knight Sir Gareth. The section doesn’t need much more prologue:

Then was Sir Gareth more gladder than he was more. And then they troth-plight, other to love and never to fail while their life lasteth.

And so they burnt both in hot love that they were accorded to abate their lusts secretly. And there Dame Lyonesses counselled Sir Gareth to sleep in no other place but in the hall, and there she promised him to come to his bed a little before midnight.

Their counsel was not so privily kept but it was understood, for they were but young both, and tender of age, and had not used such craft before.

Wherefore the damosel Lyonet was a little displeased, and she thought her sister Dame Lyonesse was a little over-hasty, that she might not abide the time of her marriage; and for saving of her worship [reputation] she thought to abate their hot lusts.

And she let ordain by her subtle crafts that they had no their intents either with other as in their delights, until they were married.

Unfortunately I haven’t got space to continue copying out the episode, but the way she decides to use her “subtle crafts” to frustrate her sister’s insufficiently crafty crafts involves creating an enchanted knight who comes charging in whenever Gareth and Lyonesse manage some alone-time, causing Gareth to have to battle it.

He defeats it each time, in increasingly final ways (eventually swiping its head off, and carefully chopping the head into a hundred pieces and dropping it out of a window into the moat) but each time Lyonet puts it back together with magic ointment. Because who doesn’t have space in their life for a moment-ruining sorcerous cyborg created by their older sister?

This passage also exhibits some surprising gender politics. On first reading it’s simply another fabulous (in both senses) tale of magic and love, but the framing is strikingly modern.

Firstly, the narrator seems to find nothing either surprising or blameworthy about the two young people wanting to have sex before marriage: that use of “lust” is, in context, simply denoting a particular emotional and physical state. It’s not the “lust” of the Seven Deadly Sins, it’s more like the lust of a Magnum advert or a Cosmo special issue.¹

Neither does Lyonet see anything wrong with her sister wanting to sleep with Sir Gareth – she simply realizes that everyone else knows what is going to happen, and that her own wish for her sister to be happy won’t stop people shaming Lyonesse. She creates the magical knight because she’s acutely aware of the gap between her own sympathetic understanding of her sister’s feelings and desires, and the hypocritical attitude of the society they have to live within.

Interesting that the word “craft” is used of both Lyonesse’s secrecy and Lyonet’s magic. I’m tempted to read this as suggesting they’re both sets of skills which the women have developed in order to survive in a difficult world – though Lyonesse’s is far less effective. The initiative Cooper identifies in Malory’s women is dramatically present here: Lyonesse instructs her lover where to be at night and comes to visit him, whilst her sister makes a counter-plan to foil her.

Sexual attraction is hardly an unusual motive for action in the fiction we see around us, but in this case it’s the young women who take action and negotiate their way between their feelings and the expectations of a broader community.

There’s also something meta-romance about Lyonet’s solution. I may be over-reading this brief passage, but Malory’s deliberately laconic style encourages us to interject motivations and connections to make sense of the narrative. So I think the form Lyonet’s obstruction takes – an enchanted bouncer – is also a symbol of her superior ability to understand heroic romance as a genre.

“Alright, little sister”, her choice of magical weapon seems to say, “You want to be the heroine of a chivalric romance? Because in all the romances I’ve read you don’t get the knight that easily…” She ironically goes along with Lyonet’s casting of herself as romantic damosel, and cranks up the volume, providing her sister with her very own enchanted nemesis to overcome before she can get what she wants.

If we wanted to translate this into a realist mode, this gestures towards the idea that love doesn’t end your story arc as a person, and that finding the person you want to spend “happily ever after with” doesn’t subsume your identity into a “game over” montage.

Lyonesse still has to deal with what Camelot will think of her, and she’ll do so whilst remaining Lyonesse and a member of her own society. The meta-romantic element, in which Lyonet goes to the spell-book to slow up her sister’s love life, seems to valorise young women who are symbolically and semantically competent, as well as active in the world.

Lyonet wins this episode because she is more capable than Lyonesse of taking the narratives which surround them in their culture, understanding and decoding them, and then redeploying those narratives to her own advantage, with a combination of critical analysis, sisterly compassion, and geeky in-joke wit.

So if nothing else, this chunk of Malory provides us with another reason to sneer at “chivalry” when used to argue that the world was better when women were (supposedly) passive, and to own up to our medieval heritage, whether it’s embarrassing, troubling or apparently irrelevant.

Because occasionally we may trip over moments like this, where Dame Lyonet is exercising her subtle crafts. Crafts which, as I read them over again, look more and more like medieval geek feminism.

• Images taken from Kate Beaton’s inspired ‘courtly love’ comics over at Hark! A Vagrant.
• Jem Bloomfield also blogs at Quite Irregular

1. Not that either of those are anything but problematic, but my point here is the modernity of the word’s implications.

Without thinking, I responded in kind with a big, angry, I-will-slash-you hiss.

DESIST

He looked pretty taken aback.

I carried on my way and mused that I appear to speak feline like a mothertongue, but also I got to thinking: what the ever-loving crap?! Seriously, what on earth was he expecting from that encounter? What would a positive result have been? Surely that’s never worked for anyone, right?

Ah, street harassment. It’s been a few months. Usually my experience of you is relegated to when I’m wearing a summer dress (gender norms for the lose) but it sucks whenever it happens. It’s also antithetical to ever actually getting my interest because – no matter how many mad cat-lady vibes I’ve got going on – no one who thinks they can approach me like a pet is getting the time of day.

This particular encounter didn’t throw me much because I actually had a comeback – I walked away pleased with myself for thinking fast – but how you deflect it shouldn’t be the first point of call. WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS?

Far more often it’s crap shouted from cars – which I find rubbish twice over because they’ve gone before you can say or do anything in response. (Come back right now, dudebro. I have a LOT to say about what you just did.)

A friend of mine recently had some jerk shout “nice tits!” at her from a car. She was (understandably) angry and upset for the rest of the day, but the guy shouting it might have told himself it was a compliment – some interviews with street harassers have revealed what is either complete ignorance or willing ignorance of the effect it has on women. Many of the men, when asked why they do it, say it’s a compliment and it makes women feel nice.

Maybe it is a compliment for a very small percentage of people – I cannot claim to speak for everybody – but I am yet to meet or hear of one person who’s had a catcall, wolf-whistle or similar and felt good about it. The thing about street harassment is, it’s not flirting. Street harassment doesn’t make a person feel good because it isn’t about a person: it’s boiling them down to their physical attributes (‘nice tits’, ‘nice ass’) and funnily enough that doesn’t feel great.

“News of your interest in my ‘nice butt’ has not made my day in any way.”

The other thing is, it’s almost never a conversation: mostly ’cause the objects of the harassment aren’t interested and want to get on with their day, and also because often it’s at a remove – stuff shouted from cars, or (to use the cliché) from scaffolding. The people doing the shouting don’t actually expect a response. This isn’t a tool used to chat up women: it’s used to silence them. Under the guise of a compliment it’s a one-way street of objectification.

And Objectification Street is a crappy street. Seriously, I looked at a flat there once. There were rats all over the place and it smelled bad.

Of course, if people are physically closer to the harassers, it doesn’t exactly get better. The wonderful (and award-winning) Anti-Street Harassment UK campaign (ASH UK) was set up after its founder, Vicky, was harassed by a group of men who were initially shouting at her from a car, threatened to rape her, then got out of the car and followed her into a tube station where they assaulted her. The police (who did intervene) then blamed her for responding to them and said “boys will be boys.” SO. MUCH. FAIL.

Um… *cough* male readers – this is essentially Met officers saying your entire gender are all hopeless gropey asshats. Erm… *cough* I wouldn’t take that.

So, what can we do?

• Well, the first step is breaking down the idea that it’s either normal or OK. It’s neither, and we need to spread the word. Thou shalt not take shit, and (not that our readers should need telling) thou shalt not dish it out, either.
• Read up on it – from the likes of stopstreetharassment.org to this brilliant video on street harassment and women of colour:

• Check out Jezebel’s ongoing street harassment category, and call catcalling out for the asshattery it is.
• Those who want some background on why people are often hostile to approaches on the street would do very well to read this blog post ‘Schrödinger’s Rapist’. (Heavy, but a thousand times worth it.)
• And in the meantime, don’t let that ‘compliment’ strawman argument derail you on your quest for gender justice.

On that note…

… since you’ve been such a good class of gender justice warriors today, I’m going to let you finish early with just one more video:

I absolutely love their line of questioning about “has that ever worked for you?” Also “sweetheart, please stop perpetuating the patriarchial dividend – it’s so over” should be on a t-shirt. I would buy that shirt.

And that’s a wrap. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to more important things – like buying cat food for my wonderful kitty – because some catcalls are nice. The ones that come from an actual cat.¹

• All images of unimpressed cats in high dudgeon from Morguefile, the free image bank!

1. Not Schrödinger’s cat. He is a meanie.

Published in New York by the Knickerbocker Press

I mean, just look at it. Look harder! It’s all lavender and embossing and gold leaf and a looking-glass (wonderfully implying ‘it could be YOU’). It’s an absolutely sodding gorgeous book: rough uncut paper edges on two sides, gold leaf on the top, strange red-and-black printing on the pages which reminds me a little of the Kelmscott Press facsimile I own (made by William Morris. The most beautiful books since illuminated manuscripts. OHMIGOD read his Chaucer… *cough* Excuse me, I seem to have bibliophiled all over the place).

On closer inspection, The Spinster Book is basically a dating/courtship guide, which very much assumes that one should never, ever attempt to talk to the opposite gender like a normal human being. Indeed, it even seems to suggest that too many friendships with men put a woman in the ‘friend zone’ forever:

“To one distinct class of women men tell their troubles and the other class sees that they have plenty to tell. It is better to be in the second category than in the first.”

It’s a bit like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, but due to being 111 years out of date it’s even more laughable. (And I absolutely love dated dating advice anyway.)

The chapter titles are a treat in themselves:

• Notes on Men
• Concerning Women
• The Philosophy of Love
• The Lost Art of Courtship
• The Natural History of Proposals
• Love Letters: Old and New
• An Inquiry into Marriage
• The Physiology of Vanity
• Widowers and Widows
• The Consolations of Spinsterhood

(… note that even in 1901 courtship was considered a ‘lost art’. When precisely were the good old days, anyway?)

“There is nothing in the world so harmless and as utterly joyous as man’s conceit. The woman who will not pander to it is ungracious indeed. Man’s interest in himself is purely altruistic and springs from an unselfish desire to please.”

– Chapter 1, Notes on Men

Why I am I still unmarried? Enquiring minds want to know

Buh. Duh…. whu? A man being self-centred is actually selfless, because he’s only doing it to be adorable. So lighten up and adore him some more, regardless of how conceited he is? Can… can I get an irony check on this?

My instinct when dealing with writing from the past (rightly or wrongly) is to assume the chance of satire is reduced the longer ago the text comes from (Jonathan Swift, forgive me). However, for most of The Spinster Book, I’m realising a grain of salt is the way forward. This book does appear, at times, to be Jane Austen-wry, and puts forward some things with a fanciful glibness:

“After the door of a woman’s heart has once swung on its silent hinges, a man thinks he can prop it open with a brick and go away and leave it. A storm is apt to displace the brick, however – and there is a heavy spring in the door. Woe to the masculine finger that is in the way!”

– Chapter 4, The Lost Art of Courtship

But at the same time, it treads the difficult line of mocking some concepts whilst also giving some advice very seriously. I mean, come on, we’re playing for keeps. ‘Do you want to be a spinster? No? Then listen up. No talking at the back. It could be you. It could be YOOOU.’

There’s also a lingering assumption throughout this book that both parties are playing a pretty nasty game of chess:

“He who would win a woman must challenge her admiration, prove himself worthy of her regard, appeal to her sympathy – and then wound her. She is never wholly his until she realises that he has the power to make her miserable as well as to make her happy, and that love is an infinite capacity for suffering.”

– Chapter 4, The Lost Art of Courtship

(Also: lucky girl. Jesus.)

A lot of the book has this kind of masochistic, ‘love is pain’ tone throughout – sometimes in understandable ways and sometimes completely out of the blue. Advice, advice, advice… misery and masochism sneak attack! For example, the final sentence of the ‘love letters’ chapter is “So the old love letters bring happiness after all – like the smile which sometimes rests upon the faces of the dead.”

So, yes, I was unsure what to make of this tone. Then our lovely editor Googled the author, Myrtle Reed, and some more information fell into place. By all accounts, Reed was well-known and admired in her own time. She was the author of some thirty books, which included cookbooks (published under the name Olive Green) and novels under her real name – the best known of which is probably Lavender and Old Lace.

Quick Bio:

1874: Born
1899: First novel published (she continued to publish at least one a year, sometimes more)
1901: The Spinster Book was published when she was 27
1906: Married James Sydney McCullough, a penpal, at the unusually late age of 32
1911: Died of a deliberate overdose of sleeping pills/powders aged 37.

Her suicide note, addressed to her maid, stated “If my husband had been as good and kind to me and as considerate as you, I would not be going where I am”. Horrible and sad, but also increasingly eerie from an author whose most famous epigram is this:

“The only way to test a man is to marry him. If you live, it’s a mushroom. If you die, it’s a toadstool.”

– Threads of Gray and Gold (pub. 1913)

No one on the outside knew of anything bad within their marriage. Indeed, according to Annie, Myrtle Reed’s maid, she “had never heard Mrs McCullough [née Reed] quarrel with her husband during the four years she had been at their home.” It’s useless to guess what lay behind it, or how much was a depressive tendency (which certainly seems to show in The Spinster Book), how much was a bad relationship and how much was a clearly intelligent and ambitious woman feeling desperate and trapped in a society which didn’t have many roles for women.

I don’t really know how to end this post. It started with a brilliant charity shop find which had me so hyped I that was reading passages aloud to my flatmate on the tube until he pretended he didn’t know me… and it’s ended with a bit of a reality-check, I suppose.

Although she never states in as many words that she herself is a spinster, Reed was writing the book at age 27 – five years past a woman’s usual marrying age. By the standards of her time, she was now a spinster, and was presumably preparing herself for the future. The advice I saw as laughable – that being a spinster isn’t so bad as a woman might yet find herself a nice widower – was, perhaps, Myrtle Reed’s actual hope.

The chapter ‘The Consolations of Spinsterhood’ does mention “the dazzling allurements offered by various “careers” which bring fame and perhaps fortune”, but it quickly goes on to show just how little consolation Reed considers these to be:

“The universal testimony of the great, that fame itself is barren … it is love for which she hungers, rather than fame…. If she were not free to continue the work that she loved, she would feel no deprivation.”

Although she was a successful and prolific novelist in her own time, the stigma of spinsterhood would have seemed to erode the achievements she had rightfully earned. Reed implies heavily in The Spinster Book that she would have traded it all in for a husband. Except that when she did eventually marry, that clearly didn’t make her happy either.

As much as I love mocking dating advice (old and new) for any hint of gendered assumptions, Myrtle Reed didn’t ‘opt in’ to play by those rules. In 1901 there wasn’t an ‘opt out’. And shame on me for finding the topic so hilariously trivial in the first place. Check your 21st century privilege, Hannah. If I’d lived in a time and a society where marriage was my home, my job, my finances, my legal rights and my love life all rolled into one – you bet your arse I’d agonise over it. I’d probably buy a few books on the topic too. For every snide, ironic, 21st century reader, there were probably dozens of contemporary readers poring over this book’s advice and worrying about their futures. I, on the other hand, have freedom and choices and don’t have to play nasty games to secure a man to secure my future stability – but you don’t have to go back even half as far as Reed’s time to find women who did have to work within this crapshoot of a system. Whilst artefacts like The Spinster Book make interesting time-pieces, we should never forget that many of us who stumble across it now are the lucky ones – and that our privilege is incredibly rare.

And I guess that’s one of the main reasons why I’m a feminist in the first place.

• The full text of The Spinster Book is available on Project Gutenberg.

Described by one friend of mine as ‘hate crack’, Sorority Girls is a reality TV show based around five girls from American sororities doing the standard reality TV show whittle to find their perfect ‘sisters’ in the UK and form Britain’s first ever sorority. That’s right: it’s The Apprentice for female friendship. Didn’t realise you had to jump through hoops, sing songs and outperform others to be friends? Think again.

What Are Friends For

In the ‘Greek system’ of sororities (sisterhoods) and fraternities (brotherhoods), people in colleges in the US can apply to join a sorority or a fraternity (each is represented by various Greek letters) – a combination of accommodation and social activities which – they keep telling us – is where you make friends for life.

However, obviously not everyone wants to be friends with everyone – so there’s a selection process. In Sorority Girls it begins with an interview in which each potential new member (or ‘PNM’ – this thing has more jargon than a pick-up artist convention) is interviewed about themselves by the five, identically-dressed, rictus-smile-wearing members. Questions include “Can you talk me through your outfit?”, “Can you show us your best dance move?” and “Do you think we’re heading for a double dip recession?” Seriously, WTF? EXPLAIN WHY YOU WORE THOSE CLOTHES! DANCE FOR US, MONKEY! NO, HONEST WE’RE INTELLECTUAL!

If you get through this hoop, you’re allowed (gee, thanks) to pledge your loyalty to the sorority, and you become a ‘pledge’ – not to be confused with a fully-initiated sorority sister. YOU HAVE AGES YET TO GO. REPEAT: AGES.

At this stage, you get the hazing. Interestingly, Channel 4 avoided the h-word for the whole series. Fraternities especially are infamous for their often-dangerous hazing – usually mixes of brutality, alcohol and stupidity – and stories of student deaths are sadly all too frequent. However, though sororities are not completely free of violence, in the main their selection processes are known for being far more about judgement, humiliation, and policing each others’ behaviour. All for the grand prize of… being friends.

Don’t know about you, but I don’t want friends that’d do that to me.

Past and Present

Though bitchiness and drunken stupidity have probably always been facts of life at universities (as elsewhere), the focus on controlling each others’ behaviour wasn’t always what sororities were about. My grandmother was the chair of her sorority (Delta Phi Epsilon, known as ‘Dogs, Pigs and Elephants’ to those that didn’t like them) when she was at NYU in the 1940s, but in the 1940s, after some pretty mild/vaguely titillating humiliation for a week (be a sorority sister’s ‘slave’ for one day, dress up ‘French’ – i.e. short skirt and a beret – the next) you were in the club. And then you had a home-from-home at a time when most women at university were still living with their parents. It was more… necessary, if that’s the word. Its role was mostly in facilitating female students having some freedom in a safe space (once people were in the club they went out drinking and dancing frequently).

By the 1970s (when my mother was at university in the States) sorority and fraternity membership was waning and seen by many as old fashioned and uncool, but from the mid-1980s onwards a revival has been going on, in much the same time period as the rise of the Christian right wing. Though religion and politics are never explicitly mentioned in Sorority Girls, the girls do seem to be preoccupied with furthering a socially conservative (chaste, sober, uncontroversial) set of values under the disguise of helping the pledges ‘develop’ and ‘improve’ themselves.

In The Club?

In the selection process of Sorority Girls, pledges are admonished for wearing too much make-up, for having two drinks in their hands at once, for having a hint of ‘attitude’, for being too loud, for being too quiet, for not getting on well enough with the specially-shipped-in frat boys, for getting along too well with the frat boys… In other words it’s the worst of Queen Bee girlie bullying behaviour. The worst put-down these girls have seems to be ‘that’s inappropriate’ – but at the same time, what is appropriate isn’t particularly clear. One girl got thrown out for questioning why, if fake eyelashes were banned, fake nails were still allowed.

It’s Mean Girls. It’s the Heathers. It’s high school crap, but in my experience, by the end of school (and certainly by uni) social groups had diversified enough that we were done with that shit. If the Queen Bees didn’t approve of me at age 13, they could try (and often succeeded) to make my life miserable. If they didn’t like me by age 17: Meh. Shrug. Fuck’em. I had friends and interests far away from their spheres, and likewise I think they’d often also either grown up or moved on, because all of a sudden we were all just people. Classmates with more going on in our lives than our clothes, deportment or how we wore our hair. I see most of the behaviour on Sorority Girls as a flashback to the bad old days of my early-to-mid-teens, and it depresses me beyond words that so many young women willingly submit to this – putting themselves through this self-esteem grinder – in the hope that they will be let into the club so that they too can become as composed as their frenemy tormentors.

There are also elements of the induction on the programme which appear to be cult-like brainwashing (regular sleep disruption, fake kidnappings, physical trials, deliberately bringing people emotional highs followed quickly by lows) as well as possibly encouraging a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. One ritual involves the girls holding Greek letters made of ice to their hearts until they’re melted – ‘as it burns you, so Sigma Gamma will always be burned onto your heart’. At one point (in front of their families) the would-be members pledge their commitment to the sorority above family, and by the end, cheerfully chant and praise and dance at the drop of a hat.

A "sorority rush" queue on Purdue University's Panhellenic Association Sorority Formal Recruitment day. Apparently even if you can pronounce all that in one go without stumbling, you *still* don't necessarily get in.

Frat Boys and Cold Shoulders

Also, let’s talk about males and double standards. Fraternities are famed for their heavy-drinking, womanising, loud & loutish behaviour, while sororities are famed for their bitchiness and ladylike reserve, but at the same time – despite their apparent lack of shared ground – sororities and fraternities view each other as safe and approved. By definition, it seems, frat boys are ‘nice boys’ no matter what their (individual or group) behaviour says to the contrary.

Frat boys were drafted in at one point in the show to ‘kidnap’ the girls (sling them over their shoulders and run off with them), get the girls drunk and hit on them. The girls who then seemed to enjoy their company too much were admonished for their ‘obscene’ behaviour. However, the one girl who wasn’t a fan of the frat guys and didn’t mingle with them was told off for being ‘cold’ and ‘unfriendly’.

In another stupid task the girls were taken to a town centre and told they had 20 minutes to find a ‘date’ for an event that evening. Regardless of attraction, they needed a man because they had been told to go find one – fast. Some of them already had boyfriends, and some of them had to ‘make do’ or bargain that they’d buy the guys lots of drinks. This was not about any woman’s happiness or enjoyment so much as about proving to the other women around them that they were desirable to the opposite sex. The one pledge who made the cardinal sin of taking one of these dates back to the sorority house was in a lot of trouble: you’re not supposed to be sexually available, only sexually desirable.

This worldview sees women as gatekeepers of virtue who are whores if they say ‘yes’ and unfriendly if they say ‘no’- leaving them to walk a tightrope of chaste, respectable (never flirty) friendliness upon pain of losing their ‘friends’ if they are not representing the sorority well. Oh, yes – you’re always representing your sisters. Your actions are never yours alone but a representation of the whole group, and therefore anything you do is up for analysis (‘you’ve let me down, you’ve let the sorority down, but most of all: you’ve let yourself down.’)

Friendship Is Magic

The final episode of Sorority Girls revealed the final five UK ‘sisters’ of Sigma Gamma, and rang especially hollow. The grand prize each girl had won was…. four ‘friends’. Four friends who had been selected by committee. Throughout the process the most interesting and lively girls were often cut. The American ‘sisters’ cited Kate Middleton and Jennifer Aniston as their ideal sorority sisters, and that blandness carried through. Nothing against Kate Middleton and Jennifer Anniston personally – I’m sure you’re nice – but these are women who are often photographed but rarely heard, and best known for marrying much more famous men. Surely you/I/we can all do better than that?

So, Sorority Girls: hard to tell how much was TV producers deliberately creating a young version of The Stepford Wives (surely they didn’t look that dead behind the eyes on the first take) and how much was ‘real’, but I’m pretty sure any sorority would never want yours truly, and likewise I would never want them.

So why the hell can’t I stop staring?!

Y

YES

and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

– James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

She asked for one more dance and I’m
Like yeah, how the hell am I supposed to leave? […]
Next thing I knew she was all up on me screaming:
Yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeaah
Yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeaah

– Usher, ‘Yeah’ (2004)

YES! Have finally managed a pretentious appropriation of pop culture as an epigram. Ludacris fill cups like double-Ds.

yes i will yes

Ahem. Yes is the last of our Old English words. It’s gise or gese, meaning ‘so be it’, perhaps from gea, ge (= ‘so’), plus si (=’be it!’), the third person imperative of beon (= ‘to be’). In this form, yes was stronger than its Germanic cognate, yea (much like today) and, apparently, was often used in Shakespeare as an answer to negative questions. We could do with one of them nowadays, no? How many times have you answered a question with yes when you mean no? (‘Doesn’t she….?’ ‘…Yes, she doesn’t’).

The penultimate word in our Alphabet, yes is frequently one of the first words we learn on earth; its meaning is clear and unequivocal, by turns disastrous, passionate, exhilarating, loaded and humdrum – but always positive in the full sense of that word. It is almost invariably repeated, as in Joyce (and Usher) – ‘yes I will, Yes’, the successive affirmations underlining and confirming the first – just like a signature under your printed name, if you listen to Derrida

Sure ‘Nuff n’ Yes I Do

James ‘Awesome Glasses‘ Joyce apparently made much of his novel ‘novel’ Ulysses ending on this, which he considered ‘the female word’. The final chapter, ‘Penelope’, often also referred to as ‘Molly Bloom’s soliloquy’, is 42 pages of just eight sentences, wherein Molly, wife of Leopold Bloom, muses to herself in bed.

For those who have better things to do than wrestle with a modernist doorstop, as the wife of the novel’s ‘Ulysses’, Molly is a counterpart to ‘Penelope‘, wife of Odysseus / Ulysses and conventional model of marital fidelity. The similarity expires fairly quickly, since Joyce’s Penelope is having an affair with ‘Blazes Boylan’, but nonetheless her chapter is often named after Ulysses’ wife. It begins and ends with this yes, and in a letter to Frank Budgen, Joyce explained that ‘Penelope’ rotates around what he considered the four cardinal points of the female  body – ‘breasts, arse, womb and cunt’ – expressed respectively by the words because, bottom, woman and yes. Some of the comparisons are clear – the womb has long been seen as synonymous with ‘woman’ (however reductively); bottom / arse – ok; because / breasts… um?; yes / cunt – hmm.

I suspect this last pairing has a lot to do with the affirmation of sex: interaction with this organ should be one preceded by yes and punctuated with repetitions of this confirmation (yes yes yes). (Why James Joyce, you filthy…). We see a similar thing in Usher (first time for everything): the repeated yeah, yeah, yeah is a sexual affirmation – ‘How the hell am I supposed to leave??‘. This is about a female seduction (‘she’s saying “come get me”!’), but one that we suspect will not end in when-i’m-sixty-four style knitting by the fire. For one thing, we learn that Usher already has a ‘girl‘, who happens to be ‘the best of homies’ with this club seductress; for another, Ludacris announces they will leave after a couple of drinks because they ‘want a lady in the street but a freak in the bed’. So actually, the art of being a lady lies in effectively concealing a consent that, in private, becomes loud, repeated and unstoppable.

Yes Indeed

Coming my way? The 'Easy Girlfriend' Poster, 1943-4

This is a well-trodden path, and all part of the old idea of how consent given too easily (yes yes yes) – or, in some cases, even given at all – is liable to get females into trouble. A less well-trodden example is Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), which devotes several hundred of its thousand or so pages to what happens after the protagonist has proposed to his fiance: though she has accepted the proposal, she fears that to ‘name the day’ herself – or even to consent to a ‘day’ suggested to her – would be to show a forwardness disturbing in a woman. Disturbing perhaps, but probably a relief to the exhausted reader, for she manages to suspend her final consent to ‘thursday a month hence’ for an entire blushing, confused volume of this hefty tome.

We can go further back, of course: in Shakespeare-times, Juliet fears Romeo will think she is ‘too quickly won’. To correct this, she offers to ‘frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay‘ (no no yes), artificially constructing a well-won consent where positive affirmation already exists (history does not record whether or not Juliet was ‘a freak in the bed’). Many would-be Romeos have seized on such fears to assume (or convince themselves) that this is just what their ladies are doing when they give an unequivocal ‘no’, so seduction narratives are littered with lovers assuming their lovers really mean yes when they reply in the negative – examples have spanned Austen’s Mr Collins to modern day Mills & Boon. Apparently, in the latter case, one is supposed to find this irresistible.

Go No More A-Roving

We’re teetering around something rather insidious here, and one aspect of this finds its expression in a 1940s propaganda poster. The ‘Easy Girlfriend’ anti-VD advert placed the blame for the Second World War venereal epidemic squarely with the momento-mori type be-hatted skull (a sexually experienced re-appropriation of the medieval Death and the Maiden trope). ‘The “easy” girlfriend spreads syphilis and gonorrhea’, it blazed – she who says yes too easily is to be shunned by polite society, and will be – naturellement – riddled with disease. Of course, syphilis’ original spread throughout Europe had followed the path of the Grand Tour, but this must have been because Venetian prostitutes were taking expensive package holidays throughout France, Spain, Rome, Switzerland and Turkey, mustn’t it, Lord Byron?

So while you probably disagree with Joyce’s view that yes is an intrinsically female word, it’s certainly one whose utterance is littered with potential problems for women. Yes means yes.

NEXT WEEK: the Alphabet returns for its final installment – Z is for Zone

Oh matron. Natalie Portman in the poster for Black Swan.

Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s latest filmic offering, hinges upon the idea of a cunning duality running through Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake (1877). We know this because within about fifteen minutes of the film’s opening, the creepy French dance teacher Thomas (Vincent Cassel) has given a rather thinly disguised explanation of what the whole film is about, clumsily telling a room full of professional dancers what the plot of this ‘done-to-death’ ballet is.

Except he doesn’t. The plot of Swan Lake is a composite of various Russian folk tales and a German short story called ‘The Stolen Veil’. It features Prince Siegfried who is reluctant to marry, despite the wishes of his queen-mother. But one night he meets the swan-queen Odette and is completely won round: alas, tragedy ensues when Rotbart, the evil magician, sends his daughter Odile (the ‘black swan’) off to impersonate Odette at the Prince’s birthday party, which she does so well that he mistakes her for his True Love. Yada yada yada. It’s a fairly clear example of the ‘fairy bride’ tradition (where a man meets a magical woman whom he marries and inevitably loses), and typical of Romanticism and other Romantic ballets in its interest in man’s relationship with the supernatural and the ideal: Odette is fundamentally unattainable, an imagined perfection, not a representation of sexual love.

But not if you’re Aronofsky, who can’t resist a little Psychology 101: the Black Swan (whose appearance on stage in the original ballet amounts to a measly few dances) becomes Odette’s ‘EVIL TWIN’, a good old fashioned Id to Odette’s Ego. Just to clarify, that’s Black Swan = BAD, White Swan = GOOD (repeat ad nauseum). Siegfried, whose own sexual stand-offishness and maternal relationship is a lynchpin in the ballet, is all but gone in the film, where he functions simply as a sort of pole for the prima ballerina to dance around. She, on the other hand, now has all his issues and then some: the White Swan is FRAGILE and VIRGINAL (yet has somehow managed to woo her reluctant prince into marriage in the course of a single night), and, in perverted-Ugly-Ducking style, no one wants to fuck her (boo hoo). Meanwhile, the Black Swan is a bit oh-matron, a Sexy Seductress. Were she living in 21st century Manhattan, Aronofsky decides, she would be taking drugs, listening to her iPod, sexin’ down the clubs, and carrying a black singlet around ‘in case she ends up somewhere unexpected’. Gosh darn it, isn’t she exactly like this rather pouting ingenue who can’t dance very well, but has lots of passion?

Thus this Romantic tale – which actually has much to offer Black Swan‘s premise through its use of supernatural and metaphorical elements, illusion, ideals and identity – becomes a tired old angel/whore dichotomy, and an indirect sort of homage to the ur-backstage bitches backstabbing drama, All About Eve (1950). I can’t help feeling here, though, that Aronofsky may have arrived at the party a bit late: as Spanish cinema fans will remember, back in 1999 Pedro Almadovar made a brilliant film based on just this cinema classic, and also managed to fix the 1950s gender politics in the process, making the whole thing a loving tribute to women’s endurance, rather than a film about how women always screw each other over.

'Not you, grey swan!' Photo par Hodge.

But even if you read Black Swan as a straight portrait of mental disorder rather than a supernatural horror story (a lazy choice to give an audience, and a bit clever-by-numbers, don’t you think?) the whole thing still hinges around a sexual awakening that portrays lesbianism as a freakish Other, sex itself as A Bit Naughty and the definition of a successful woman as ‘a seductive one’. And from this angle, too, Black Swan is derivative of a much finer (and less misogynistic) film, Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste (2001), which, er, features as its main character a self-mutilating, sexually repressed champion piano player who lives with her obsessive privacy-intolerant mother who wants to live through her daughter.

This post has not been attempting a sword-swinging defence of the sacred Swan Lake story: as Matthew Bourne has shown, it is a skeleton on which vastly different interpretations can hang beautifully. And, yeah, I get metaphor and that. But what really bothered me was this feeling throughout the film that despite the constantly pummeled ‘BLACK SWAN WHITE SWAN’ contrast, manipulation of Tchaikovsky’s music on a scale not seen since Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (itself based on another Tchaikovsky ballet) and the whole ‘ballet theme’ thing, Aronofsky really has no interest in any of those things except as they make him look Clever and link up (in a feminine sort of way) with his Grand Theme of vocations that require you to abuse your body (a la The Wrestler). A case in point is Nina’s much-touted ‘minor eating disorder’, which is presumably introduced as part of the whole ‘dancers are thin and they lust after physical perfection’ thing, and something I have a couple of key problems with. These are: firstly, its yawn-inducing predictability, exploiting the one thing everyone knows about ballet; and secondly the fact that, even though eating disorders are supposedly ballet’s Defining Feature, Black Swan makes no attempt to examine their specific relationship to a career that demands major energy output 24/7.

Plus, of course, the whole ‘Ah yes. She’s a dancer who wants to do well in her career. So let’s give her an eating disorder to really symbolise that drive for perfection. But eating disorders – they’re not all that SEXY are they? The BLACK SWAN must be SEXY… So let’s shove a bit of eating disorder in there, just so we know this is a film about a woman with a perfectionist streak, then forget all about it and focus on the sexy wanking and the sexy lesbian sex.’

Such heavy-handedness sits strangely at odds with the elegance of the dance-world – which, of course, does involve great physical hardship, a short career and an inevitable amount of luvvie backstabbing. That said, I’m not going to attempt to deny I had fun: it’s a rip-roaring yarn, and a splendid performance from Portman. But perhaps if Aronofsky had taken less time to think about how clever he considers himself, and more time to consider the intricacies of the ballet he takes as his framework, Black Swan would be less derivative, less cocky and – as a film – infinitely superior.

Hodge’s List of Related(ish) Films That Don’t Leave Her Toffee Nosed

• La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher)
• Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother)
• …and if you want something specifically balletic, Hable Con Ella (Talk To Her)
• If you can get over the sexual politics, All About Eve (1950) is a fantabulous film (YEAH, BETTE)
• And for backstage meta kind of stuff, a lot of the 1950s musicals are still some of the most fun and unpretentious mainstream films you can watch: my particular favourites would have to be Singin’ In The Rain (1952), Show Boat (1951) and Kiss Me Kate (1953).
• And for all this black swan ‘dark side’ type stuff, there’s always Belle De Jour (1967). Its views on women could be read as fairly atrocious, but aren’t necessarily – one day, we’ll discuss it over pork scratchings.

RAKE

Men, some to Business, some to pleasure take;
But ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake.

Alexander Pope, Epistle II: To a Lady, Of The Characters of Women (1743)

Why Do The Good Girls…

It is one of the principal views of this publication: to occasionally venture outside the female sphere and see what the chaps are doing. DASTARDLY DEEDS would seem to be the answer in many cases focused around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the word rake first came into being.

A spot of rakish gardening: the 'Temple and Chamber of Venus', in the grounds of West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire. Photo par Hodge.

I am frequently asked, with a wry smile, ‘So, was your dissertation on garden implements?’, to which I invariably respond, with a smug one, ‘Well, yes.’ You see, rake as ‘a dissolute man of fashion’ derives first from rake as ‘an implement consisting of a pole with a crossbar toothed like a comb at the end’ for ‘drawing together hay etc. or smoothing loose soil or gravel’… you know, a ‘rake’. In this form, the word is (at least) Old English (raca) from the proto-Germanic rak- (‘to gather or heap up’), and rake in its many applications to people springs first and foremost from the compound term rakehell (c.1560). This, in turn, comes from the (apparently common) phrase ‘to rake out hell’ (first cited around 1542), meaning ‘to search’ or, perhaps more appropriately, ‘comb’ out the infernal regions. A rakehell, then (= ‘an immoral person’ or ‘a scoundrel’) is someone than whom there is no-one worse, even should you ‘comb through Hell’. Tut tut.

Oh, what an odious Creature is a Rake!

In this early incarnation, the rakehell is a broadly classless figure who basically spends most of his time making a nuisance of himself. By 1687, he had lost his suffix, and, in the form rake, became defined as ‘an aristocratic man of dissolute and promiscuous habits’. Historically, these ‘habits’ boil down to drinking, swearing, whoring, and causing public disturbances (‘rioting’). Ever a sensualist (and sworn enemy to marriage), his iniquities always involve sexual depravity, often grotesquely extreme: Shadwell’s Don Juan feels ‘forced to commit a rape to pass the time’. Dr Johnson was less than impressed with such goings-on, and he defined a rake in his 1755 Dictionary as ‘A loose, disorderly, vitious, wild, gay, thoughtless fellow; a man addicted to pleasure’. Nevertheless, the true rake is protected from proto-ASBO consequences by his pedigree, which is the only difference between him and a ‘common’ criminal / rakehell.

It is in this ‘hellish’ yet aristocratic form that the rake first becomes defined as that archetype hanging out in the gangs….sorry, ‘clubs’ that the ever-hysterical Victorians dubbed ‘Hellfire Clubs‘. These were either groups of aristocrats dressing up as monks and nuns to commit acts of bestial iniquity, or sedate philosophical and political discussion groups, depending on the fruitiness of the historian. The overlap is more overlapp-y than you might think, and it relates to rake‘s satellite term, and secondary meaning, ‘libertine’. As libértin, this word is all over c18th French literature, which has no real cognate for rake as a distinct term, and it is in this form that rake gives us the Libertines (Pete Doherty) and The Libertine (Swoony Depp). Relating, as you might think, to our word liberty via Latin’s liberta, libertine can mean anything from ‘free translation’ and ‘free thinking’ (the revolutionary ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ among other things) to the sexual excess and decadence (‘freedom’, or indeed ‘free love‘) associated with John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and perhaps even Doherty himself (depending on whether or not you think celebrity is the twenty-first century’s aristocracy).

Never trust a man in a pastel pink two-piece. Robert Lovelace prepares to abduct Clarissa Harlowe, by Francis Hayman.

Set Me Free.

Given this libertine background, it is unsurprising that, in its second wave as ‘The Order of the Monks of Medmenham’, the rakish ‘Hellfire Club’ was associated not only with Sir Francis Dashwood (defined by Wikipedia as ‘an English rake and politician’, and responsible for the horticulture displayed above, left), but also with notables like William Hogarth, the liberty-obsessed Benjamin Franklin and even Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (a close friend of Mary Astell, the ‘first feminist’).

Perhaps, then, this sexual excess could be connected with burgeoning ideas about general freedom, and here we must ask the obvious question: female rake, yes or no? The dictionary says ‘yes’, but cites as proof Pope’s line that ‘every woman is at heart a rake’, closer to an eighteenth-century “‘cor, she’s askin’ for it'” than acknowledged sexual equality. So, institutionally at least, the female rake always risks sliding into the Other Category, as the harlot, which must be at least partially because women were less likely to espouse rakishness as part of a broader public life. The closest we seem to get to an actual love’em’-and-leave’em she-rake is the upper-middle-class lesbian: Anne Lister‘s diaries record her pursuit of local girls, her habit of dressing in male garb, and her nickname ‘Gentleman Jack’. And of course a particularly saucy woman is always free to wear her hat at a ‘rakish‘ angle (where rakish = ‘dashing, jaunty or slightly disreputable’) as modelled by the celebrity adulteress Georgiana ‘Keira Knightley’ Cavendish , Duchess of Devonshire (who was getting it on with THE Earl Grey: libertea, geddit?!!).

What Women Want.

Meanwhile, middle-class intellectuals were determined to shelter poor Woman from such degenerates. They had to: for even the most virtuous young ladies are dangerously susceptible to rakish charm! What is more, they always believe (poor souls) that their chaste beauty and noble virtue can save a rake from himself! (…Katy Perry, anyone?) Samuel Richardson in particular seems to have lived in perpetual horror of just such folly, endlessly repeating his fear of the ‘dangerous but too commonly received notion that a reformed rake makes the best husband‘ and crying ‘But MADAM!’ to those young ladies who wrote to him describing the seductive appeal of his own rake, Clarissa‘s Robert Lovelace. To this, Mary Wollstonecraft:

It seems a little absurd to expect women to be more reasonable than men in their LIKINGS, and still to deny them the uncontroled use of reason. When do men FALL IN LOVE with sense? When do they, with their superior powers and advantages, turn from the person to the mind? And how can they then expect women, who are only taught to observe behaviour, and acquire manners rather than morals, to despise what they have been all their lives labouring to attain?

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Well, quite. Excuse me, I have to rearrange my hat.

Further Rakish Adventures:

• Jane Austen’s Mr Willoughby (A Rake Determined To Marry Well).
• The Dastardly Mr Wickham (A Lazy Lower Class Rake)
• William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress
• The West Wycombe Caves and West Wycombe Park – A rakish sort of National Trust day out.

NEXT WEEK: S is for Ship