Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

There’s nothing very subtle here, is there? Their daughters are sexual rivals, on the one hand, and everyone knows, on the other, that there is always something sexual in the relationship of mother and son — in fact, the husband of a mother is always a cuckold.

“Sexual frenzy? O, when that itching begins, my friend, how far flung are the perimeters of intrigue and assassination! It’s the Bottomless Pit! The Fire Not Sated With Wood! Can it come as a surprise to anyone to see in the Scrovegni Chapel — for there is no wife who has not been untrue to her husband in thought — that Lust is led around on a halter by a woman no bigger than your thumb? Cato believed in fact that kissing among relatives was a custom maintained only to keep women under control in this matter. The natal day of Blessed Pudens — as much a warning as an example — was purposely placed on the church calendar in May, the month of lust. And because of lust St. Pius V had to foliate the genitals of every single statue in Vatican City in 1569. No, Darconville, infidelity is the mulier puisne to the bastard eigne that is the state of marriage, but there’s no stopping it, for when any of these sabre-toothed tarts who has chained herself to someone’s bed for a mere band of miniature ice-cubes round her finger decides to act, no longer letting the ‘I would’ wait upon the ‘I dare not,’ it’s open communion to every passing dunce and dancing master. Nothing can halt it. You can cringe, swagger, weep, or lie doggo. You can motion for an Act of Sederunt or read her passages from the life of Pelagia the Harlot. You can even die. (How many women, however, would actually laugh at the funerals of their husbands if it were not the custom to weep?) But whatever you do to try to dissuade her won’t make the smallest particle of difference — it’s like trying to rub the smell of nickels off a Jew’s hands: an honest woman is unfair to the entire female race. And that applies to the lot of them, whether it be Jane Bedknickers, Marie Royne d’Escosse douayrière de France , or this birding-piece new scoured called Isabel Rawsthorne.

“But take heart, Prince Darconville, and weigh well the time — for death comes from life, not life from death. It is but a small step between weariness and hate in a woman, and there is not much to choose between a woman who deceives us for another and a woman who deceives another for ourselves. Reality increases in direct proportion to the length and proximity of contact and when her retractile heart withdraws again—? Look to your sheets, Dutchman. This whore of yours can count beyond two.

Confirmatio

“What is woman, anyway? A mere collection of similar individuals, each cast in the same mold, the whole forming as it were a continuous plasmodium. Googlies with bisque hearts! Rash, inconsiderate voluntaries with dragons’ spleens! Pies with the devil’s finger in them! But all women are at bottom one woman. I mean, you’ve been presenting this bechangeable flouter of yours as if she were the chryselephantine statue of Athena, convincing me then, before all else, that men never want to see women as they are, but if you must insist upon showing in both face and sentiment the grace of the troubadours, you must then coquet with truth after their fashion; the reality, I make free to say, is quite otherwise— men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them, although the chap who does successfully study them must of necessity be an amphibologist.

“Look at them! The sight of an upright female form in the nude makes most patent her purposelessness — if pretty, briefly pretty, and yet how many abortions for one Helen, how many Gothones for one Aphrodite? No, the caricature of a woman isn’t one! Their greasy faces! Their buttered hair! Their fucused breasts! My God, they’re ugly as dubbs! A very, very woman is a dough-baked man! They were the very last thing God made — evidently he did so on Saturday night: she reveals his fatigue — and the very first to betray him. Their brains, their hearts, are tinier than those of men. Of the one face they’ve been given they must make themselves another, and, mobbling it, they come flying out at you behind that ill-befitting clownage of false fingernails, chinstraps, mudpacks, padded asses, and toenail polish and then dare to ask man, ‘Are you real?’ To hear such a thing! To hear anything like it! To hear anything ! Can you, for example, think of a more revolting sound on earth than a woman rummaging in her handbag? No, face it, woman is supreme only as woman: ‘vapourizing, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and oversensitive,’ as Carlyle said of France.

“What is the definition of gross incompetence? 144 women! They don’t live in the grip of envy only for others — no, most girls, incredible as it may sound, are actually jealous of their own bodies, coming to hate the very tits-’n’-bums superficially used to attract men in the first place. They can’t be grateful, conceptualize, or exercise heavy pressures with their arms raised above shoulder height. Their acrobatics of excretion could bring a smile to the face of Muscular Dystrophy. And the nap of the female skin? It would vex a dog to see a pudding creep! The sinewy walk is only a condition relating to a built-in instability in the thighbones whereby they tend to lose their balance easily and stumble. Their menstrual flux can sour wine, curdle milk, dim mirrors, and wilt young plants. And, finally, food for her is but a few seconds in the mouth, a few hours in the belly, and the rest of her life on the hip, for, like medlars, they are no sooner ripe than rotten, and when St. Jerome went to Scotland to find cannibals there, it turned out that it was only male flesh that they’d eaten because the female flesh — insipid and characterless as banana — was stringy and vile, flowing with unsavory streams. Overbodied? Well-punctured? With small irregular holes? Wherein, for chrissake, does woman differ from a Tilsit cheese?

“It made Byron sick to see a woman eat. Zeuxis claimed he needed all the beauties of Agrigentum to compose the image of a female, and then he died in a fit of laughter after contemplating the face of the hag he’d painted, And then was it not said by the only rare poet of that time, the Wittie, Comicall, Facetiously-Quicke and unparalleled John Lilly, Master of Arts, that if you take from them their perywigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their rowles and boulstrings, thou shall soone perceive that a woman is the least parte of hir self? The rest of them — and it’s a good deal — lies on the dressing table! The traditional idea of them being a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma is a joke! A sphinx without a secret is a minx! It is of course no secret that they hate men for the talents they have, partially because they’re covetous and partially because they don’t know how it’s done. Behind every great man, believe me, stands an astonished woman! ‘Let the vain sex dream on,’ wrote Swift, ‘their Empire comes from us.’ But the more women aspiring to the arts who dominate the women’s movement, the more the unnatural and long-frustrated desire for equality — mental, physical, aesthetic — translates into the totally misleading equation of emancipation with creativity. Woman has never created anything, and will never create anything, as beautiful as she has destroyed, for one thing. And then there could never be anything but an ideologically imposed equality of the sexes anyway, for the artistic and intellectual incompetence of women, with the singular exceptions you could name only to reinforce that rule, is the most embarrassing fact of human history —an utter void in music, philosophy, sculpture, history, literature, and science for three thousand years! I’m afraid you must look for the book Significant Women Thinkers in the same library where you’ll find Great Chinese Comedians, The Encyclopedia of Dutch Etiquette , and The Jewish Book of Charity . But, you ask, weren’t they lacking in education? The mind is school. Or wanting in leisure? Vision makes room for vision. Then what about duress? You will argue, reductively, that women were held down, calumniated, and oppressed over the centuries until you stop to consider, with some shock perhaps, that such conditions are more often than not the very linchpin of all meaningful achievement!