Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

238
Thomas Hardy
the ground, the mother’s injunction will be the same; “Junior!
Don’t hurt Joan! You know girls aren’t as strong as you!” As the
children get shamefully to their feet, obedient to their mother’s
note of horror (and it was pleasurable), Joan really believes she
was about to be hurt in some uncalculated way, and Junior
thinks he was about to forget his strength and wound a lady.
Already pleasure begins to smack of the harmful.’ 15
This was not always so. Certainly not in the pre-agricultural
period. ‘We do not even know whether woman’s musculature or her
respiratory apparatus, under conditions different from those of today,
were not as well developed as in man.’ 16 Tacitus reports that notions
of feminine inferiority are basically physical, since women have had
leading roles as prophetesses and priestesses without disfavour. In
France we have recently seen male writers promoting a veritable cult
of the muscular woman, ranging from Henry de Montherlant’s poems
on thousand-meter women runners to Jacques de Lacretelle’s La
Bonifas, the portrait of a masculine woman haunted by fatality. And in
contemporary America we can observe the distortions and difficulties
being created for women by introduction of the muscle rhetoric into
their lives. The desire for women to compete in men’s sports is doubtless
laudable, and has worked in swimming, but it can be dangerous as
well as ridiculous in other games.
It is natural that ‘Masculine arrogance provokes feminine resistance’,
as de Beauvoir puts it. Male demands are met symmetrically.
If we look at the dominant–subordinate polarity between the sexes
as one partially originating in physique, we at least fight free of some
of the silly squabbling that has lately been obscuring reality. And we
can come to agree with Mrs Herschberger when she suggests that
‘Some woman scientist ought to start passing it around that males
must be unnatural because they don’t have cyclical changes during the
month.’ 17
In view of woman’s superiority in sensitivity—of skin, breasts,
nipples and of course the clitoris, capable of extraordinarily varied
response—it must rank as a tragedy of our times that something called
penis envy came to be regarded as even an idea. Who said that women
suffer from penis envy? His Embarrassing Eminence from Vienna. It
is experientially untrue and has vulgarized and degraded women. Who
said that boys have secret envy of their father’s sexual organs? Do they?