Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

Virginity 13visions as “ seminal losses from the pictorial faculty o f theimagination, ” or as combinations o f “ Saint Theresa, Hoffman,and Edgar Poe. ” 64He was not burned alive, although his father, a doctor, trying totreat him, did accidentally pour some hot water on his hand.Instead, he was put to bed, told to rest, not to get excited, notto consume coffee or wine or meat, not to smoke, and “ to lead aperfectly quiet life. . . ”65 He was allowed to leave the universitywhere he was studying law, which he hated; to retire to hisfamily’s country estate, which he rarely thereafter left; and towrite, painstakingly, books. From his affluent repose, he wrotewhat a current paperback edition of his masterwork hails as“the greatest portrait ever written of a woman’s soul in revoltagainst conventional society. ”66The book is not about Joan ofArc. It is, instead and on the contrary, about Emma Bovary, apetite bourgeois whose great act of rebellion is to commit adultery.With this woman, called “my little lady”67 by her creator,the modern era begins: the era of the petite bourgeoisie seekingfreedom. Female freedom is defined strictly in terms of committingforbidden sexual acts. Female heroism is in getting fuckedand wanting it. Female equality means that one experiences realsexual passion— driven to it, not faking. There is an equationbetween appetite and freedom, especially promiscuity (as oneform of appetite) and freedom. A romantic distinctly not in thetraveling, lyric tradition of Shelley or Byron, indeed, a femaleromantic with lightness in the head and fragmented fantasiesfeverish on the brain, “ she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiasticveneration for illustrious or unhappy women. . .who stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity ofheaven. . . ”68For Emma, Joan was such a comet, a figure of