Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

and this great ambition, so outside the bounds of human possibility,ends up being met by strangers and pills. The strangersand the pills provide the intensity of sensation, the absorptionin feeling, that her soul craves. She wanted a passion largerthan what she perceived as mere physical sex, a passion lesscommonplace (less vulgar); and though Williams frames her asa model of repression, suggesting by the formula of the playthat sleeping with John would have done for her all along, infact the character he created is too immense and original forthat to be true, John too small and ordinary. She ends uplonely, wandering, desperate, not only because she misplacedthe passions of the body in the soul but also because the passionsof the soul dwarf the capacities of the body. So she hastwo addictions: men and pills. Ethereal or promiscuous, she isstigmatized by the awesome drive behind her desire, the restlessnessof her soul on earth, the mercilessness of her passion,hardest on her, leaving her no peace. Chaste or promiscuous,she is sexual because she is pure and extreme, with a passionlarger than her personality or her social role or any conflictsbetween them, with a passion larger than the possibilities inher life as a minister’s daughter or, frankly, as a woman anywhere.Her desire is grandiose and amoral, beyond the timidityshe practices and the conscious morality she knows. She isstigmatized by her capacity for passion, not unlike artisticgenius, the great wildness of a soul forever discontent with existingforms and their meanings; but she, unlike the artist, hasno adequate means of expression. She would have to be, perhaps,the stone angel transmuted to flesh and still be named“Eternity. ” In the last scene of the play, both she and the stoneangel are in the public square. She, being flesh, needs andtakes the man. The stigma, finally, is in that alone: the old-time