Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

pursued. He fucked her until he was eighty-one, a year beforehis death. “The devil fell upon me” was how he describedwanting Sophie when he was old, “ . . . and I slept badly. It wasso loathsome, as after a crime. And on that same day. . . stillmore powerfully possessed, I fell. ” 18Finally, in his last year, he really did not want her anymore.She was, now, “my ordeal. ” 19She should, he thought, be havinga simple old age lived in harmony and beauty with herhusband, “not interfering in his work or in his life. ”20Instead,not able to eat or sleep, crying uncontrollably, irritable, hostile,nervous, she was what “a selfish and pitiless man, ” 21 asshe once described him, had left in the wake of his magnificentand great life as an artist and a saint. Now she was discarded,because he had finished with her; and she howled in an agonythat passed for madness. After accusing her of only wanting totorment herself, he wrote that “one cannot help pitying her. ”22But he never knew what pity was, not even that, such a smalland condescending thing, not for her. Never, in art or in life,did he know her, except in the biblical sense. In The KreutzerSonata, the husband sees the wife with some empathy, as human,only after he has brutally murdered her: “ 'I looked at thechildren and at her bruised and disfigured face, and for the firsttime I forgot myself, my rights, my pride, and for the first timesaw a human being in her. ’”23Art is merciful. Murder turns thewoman one has fucked over a lifetime human. The ethos is notcontemporary. Typically now, in books, in films, murder neverrisks an aftermath of compassion; there is no remorse. Instead,murder itself is the sex act or it is sexual climax. Tolstoy’s murder,full of hate and horror at woman as such, full of sexual inevitabilityand the artist’s passionate conviction that it is rightand necessary, has fragility, recognition, remorse. It is a tragic