William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

This dancing light, the clean skin, etcetera, what precisely makes them alluring? Inspection may promise to elucidate this, but closer inspection may keep that promise only in the way that Mr. Umewaka’s Edo-era Noh kimonos resolve into real golden scales and soft multicolored threads, all the while giving off a smell of dead men’s sweat. Where is the scent of the woman here?

American fashion magazines from my own time present beauty in some of the same ways as does Kawabata. Most revealing are the advertisements, which concretize the beautiful in order to sell it. Very often they claim to improve a woman’s skin, making it soft, smooth, elastic, moist, taut, “wide awake,” young and luminous. They do so in pseudomedical or magically chemical ways, hydrating, nourishing, mineralizing, concealing within their measured statistical language of benefit (within the first six weeks, seventy percent of our customers report lightening of the dark pouches beneath their eyes) some hope that beauty can be saved from the ageing which brings it such terror. Indeed, much of the discourse of these magazines has to do with fear of imperfection. (We know what the waki priest would say about that .) Perfection, at least as seen in the skin cream and lingerie ads, equals a long sweep of unblemished skin. Not long after A.D. 1169, Chrétien de Troyes made his lovelorn hero report that “from the hollow / Of her throat to the top of her bodice / I spy a trifle of uncovered / Breast, more white than snow.” Thus the beautiful Sordamour. And in a twenty-first-century perfume advertisement I see the face of Britney Spears, in whom everything is paled down, slightly frosted, so that her blonde hair resembles white gold; 1her pale coral lips freeze in a faint and steady smile; and her complexion’s superficial monochromatism of pinkish-white is actually, like the old ivory of a Noh mask in torchlight, a family of tints and shades whose subtle variations almost escape the gaze; and so it is with her skin — quite a lot of skin; we see most of her, down to the ring in her belly button. The Noh mask gleams a trifle more glossily, the model’s, a bit more moistly. Much of American fashion is the constant presentation of moist pinkness. A face’s shining smoothness becomes naked or nude, one of a piece with the exposed thighs, throat, hairless armpits, all of which appear nearly the same color upon a given model’s body.

And so one might get the impression from these magazines that the preeminently feminine attribute, aside from primary and secondary sexual characteristics, is the skin. But while that might have been so even for Kawabata, we remember that for Lady Murasaki and the Manyoshu , the essence was long black hair. (Meanwhile, Yeats wrote in his poem to Anne Gregory that only God could love her for herself and not for her yellow hair.) And until now I have failed to mention the collarbone, which is “arguably one of the most feminine parts of the body.” Another magazine informs me that “high cheekbones are considered desirable and indicative of high levels of estrogen necessary for procreation.” The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Saadi epitomizes female charm by means of “talons dyed with the blood of lovers, fingertips colored red. Such beauty of face and form would distract the lover from unlawful acts…” And in his Baiae , the Renaissance poet Giovanni Giovano Pontano (who is hardly the only such exponent) singles out from all feminine charms breasts, eyes, hair and mouth — to be specific, the shining breasts of Hermione, which stirred the aged poet into youthful craziness; the dazzling breasts of Lucilla; the eyes of Deianira, and above all of Focilla; the flowing locks of Focilla, the aromatic hair of Theonilla; the honeyed lips of Constantia, Focilla’s aggressive mouth, Neera’s and Batilla’s delicious breath. Of all these manifestations (and, by the way, Pontano neglects the collarbone), only the breasts are particularly female in their natural state. Significant differences in shape and proportion obviously do exist in women’s bodies: the belly curves more and is relatively longer, the back arches, the buttocks protrude; the legs are less knobby; the waist is absolutely narrower and the hips absolutely broader, which combination creates the so-called “feminine A-line,” the feet shorter and narrower. But Pontano dwells on none of these things. Nor does Kawabata. What then can be said about the female attributes of greatest allure to their celebrants? These must partake of some artificial aspect, presumably the aspect of performance. Eyes are shadowed with makeup; hair is grown long, lips rouged, etcetera. Femininity thus becomes not only a noun but a verb. This verb may be grace.

Another way of making the same point is that gender partakes both of anatomy and accomplishment. One feminist scholar of Meiji- and post-Meiji-era Japanese theater describes that time as the replacement by the former, literally embodied by actresses, of the onnagatas, the female impersonators of Kabuki. Accomplishment replaced anatomy. — It must be the case that between those two quantities lies a feeling : the sensation of such feminine accoutrements as earrings, which swing and tingle with delicious weight against the neck; smooth and even silky undergarments; necklaces and bracelets, geishas’ precious hairpieces, etcetera. Then there are femininity’s tools, for instance cosmetics and hairbrushes. (For the ancient Greeks, we are told, a mirror’s “mere outline, next to that of a distaff, suffices to conjure up a specifically female environment.” In Niger, a young man of the Wodabe nomads employs yellow skin powder, black kohl for his eyelids and lips, and a white stripe on his nose. If he is pretty enough, a woman will want him; he will have become a distant version of her. In either case, and in many others, the instrumentality of such items cannot be overlooked. As we read in the Gotagovinda of Jayadeva: “She is sumptuously arrayed in ornaments for the war of love.”) These objects, some of which keep a woman constant company against her very skin, may soothingly reinforce her sense of her female self. 2Moreover, a woman puts on a pearl necklace, the recent gift of a sweetheart, and feels, perhaps, more beautiful, confident, loved and worthy of love. And because they are accessories rather than body parts, an onnagata or a Noh actor may well obtain benefits from them equivalent to what they offer someone born with breasts and a vulva. An old lady named Sharon Morgan, who once upon a time was anatomically male, remembered that the sight of her mother getting tightly laced into her corset by a neighbor lady inspired the thought: “That’s for me!” After the thought came experiments, and eventually a transgender operation. In other words, it seems to have been the props that commenced her female performance, which became an identity.

But who am I to say that it must have happened in this way? Another young boy experienced an inexplicable “well-being” when he dressed up in his sister’s clothes; when he tried to stop, he felt physically ill. As his body matured, he found himself more hairless and his nipples more “extensive” than other young men. Many years later he too underwent the operation.

Farther along that continuum, a case study in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) quotes a patient who experiences “the penis as clitoris, the urethra as urethra and vaginal orifice, which always feels a little wet, even when it is actually dry… in short, I always feel the vulva.” This is no performance, but a state of being. For a biological man, the result is agony pure and simple.

What is feminine? Who are you? I cannot even promise that my understanding of who I am will never change. If I tell you, “a woman is this ,” I may through luck, thoughtfulness and experience approach describing something that many women in this epoch are; but then what? I might believe that Mr. Umewaka’s bouts of womanhood do or do not resemble Sharon Morgan’s experience, or the porn model Aya Kudo’s, but to delineate the lives of others in any insistent way is to produce offensive absurdities comparable to the following (Janice Raymond, 1979): “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves. However, the transsexually constructed lesbian feminist violates women’s sexuality and spirit as well.” — Gender varies over time and place. There is no all.