The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History

By Emma L. E. Rees

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright © 2013 Emma L. E. Rees
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62356-871-9

Contents

List of Figures……………………………………………………xAcknowledgements…………………………………………………..xi1 Revealing the Vagina: Introduction…………………………………12 Revealing the Vagina: Antecedents………………………………….513 Revealing the Vagina in Literature…………………………………874 Revealing the Vagina in Visual Art (1): Judy Chicago…………………1455 Revealing the Vagina in Visual Art (2): Birth’s Wide Berth……………1796 Revealing the Vagina on Film and TV………………………………..2217 Revealing the Vagina in Performance Art…………………………….2698 Revealing the Vagina: Conclusion…………………………………..305Bibliography………………………………………………………321Index…………………………………………………………….341

CHAPTER 1

Revealing the Vagina:Introduction

The mother of invention

Serendipity, not necessity, is the mother of invention. How else would a nice girllike me end up writing a book like this? In the summer of 1995, while drivingthrough the borderlands of England and Wales in a Volvo so old that it imposeda leisurely pace on us, we saw an unremarkable sign pointing to ‘KilpeckChurch’. Turning off the road, we found an extraordinarily quirky Romanesquechurch in a fairly deserted spot. We parked, and wandered round on foot, ourgaze drawn upwards to the ornate, Celtic-style stone carvings which dominatedthe grey façade. Dolphin-like swirls gave the weathered stone the appearanceof effortless motion; a flow, as though waterborne. A line of gargoyles (which, Iwas later to learn, were actually ‘corbels’) was wrapped around the little churchlike a taut line of bizarre stone bunting (see Figure 1.1).

Very few of the 70 or so corbels which have survived the assaults of theweather, the Reformation, and, anecdotally, at least, the parasols of censoriousVictorian women, depict recognizably conventional religious images. Thereare two very equine-looking representations of the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God),and human faces which, at a push, might be Adam and Eve, but most of whatwe saw that hot summer’s day in 1995 mystified us. Here, a weirdly cartoonishcarved rabbit had, for over 800 years, been squashed next to a stone dogwhose droopy ears projected an air of weary resignation; a bird-like monster wascaptured greedily eating a wide-eyed human being; and a knot of serpents bitdown on their tails, their writhing at a standstill for the eternity the stonemasonwanted them to represent. And then we saw her: a bald-headed, primitive figurecrouched on the corbel table, her blank eyes somehow fixed on her observers,and her hands, inside her knees-akimbo, spreading her proportionately massivelabia, exposing her vulva. What was she doing on this church? On any church?How could an image of such full-on femaleness possibly bear a sufficiently hallowedmessage? Did she justify her place on that sacred building through somesort of code which Hugh of Kilpeck’s stonemasons had understood in the twelfthcentury, but which was lost to us in the twentieth? (Figure 1.2)

We went into the cool, dark church to buy a guidebook, dutifully droppingour coins into the wooden honesty box where they made a hollow clang,briefly hushing the birdsong. Along with the guidebook came a reprint of anextract from a nineteenth-century guide written by G. R. Lewis. Blinking intothe sunlight we used Lewis’s meticulously illustrated guide to point out to oneanother the ‘meanings’ of the different corbels we could see. All was goingwell until we reached that perplexing female figure. Here, Lewis’s meticulousnessroundly failed. His illustration of the corbel – number 26, as he calledit – clearly showed the same bald-headed figure with the staring eyes. Lewis’sFigure 1.1 Kilpeck Church showing the Corbel Table. Photo credit: Jon Cookefigure, though, had its hands pointing outwards, to the sides, at complete oddswith what we could see. Arms, tailing off into those deceitful little stone hands,seemed somehow to have replaced legs. What were evidently, albeit astonishingly,labia, had been transformed into an unobtrusive, shield-shaped mark.This nineteenth-century antiquarian’s illustration might be flawed, we reasoned,but what of his written description? ’26 represents a fool’, wrote Lewis,’the cut in his chest, the way to his heart, denotes it is always open and to allalike’. ‘That’s no chest!’ we said to one another, and ‘that’s no cut!’ The puzzlementand indignation stuck with me, and a few years later I wrote an essay onG. R. Lewis’s encounter with our stony puzzle, more properly called Sheela-na-Gig(Figure 1.3). She was, I discovered, a didactic figure found on churchfaçades throughout Europe, silently warning about the dangers of fornicationfor hundreds of years. What did it mean, I wondered then, and still wondernow, for the female genitalia to be so very visible, and yet to be so blatantly andunapologetically eradicated?

The psychologist Virginia Braun has written brilliantly on what it meansto research the vagina (I mistyped ‘vagibna’ there – the demure spellcheckeronly offered me ‘vagabond’), not from a medical, but from a representationalperspective, and what it means to bring ‘private issues into public discourse’.I understand precisely Braun’s point when she writes that, in discussingher research with new acquaintances, ‘I admit to making judgements aboutwhether people can “handle” the information. Which leads to lies and omissions.By omissions I refer to my “parent-friendly” account of my research’. Inmore academic settings, Braun recounts how she would introduce her researchin such a way as to invite laughter which, nonetheless, ‘reinforces [her …]observation that the vagina is a “troublesome” topic. It remains private in away that makes its appearance as a topic of social science surprising and illegitimate,at least initially’. Braun’s thoughts on what it means – in academicand ‘civilian’ settings – to want to research and write about the cultural vaginavividly reflect my own experiences in writing this book. I know, for example,that at least one (male) colleague believes my research to be somewhat ridiculousand to fit absolutely with the stereotypical image he has of the ‘feministacademic’. Gladstone’s Library in North Wales, where I’ve spent many happyhours writing, has a largely ecclesiastical client-base: at communal meal-times,when asked what I was working on, coyness shamed me into saying somethingwoolly along the lines of ‘representations of the female form in literatureand art’, as though I were some bluestocking researching the ancient Greeksculptures of Praxiteles, rather than a writer concerned with the epistemologyof Sarah Lucas’s ‘Chicken Knickers’. My own mother, always my biggestfan, has a collection of pieces I’ve written down the years, which she wheelsout whenever an unsuspecting guest asks after me, and is perhaps just a littledisappointed that I couldn’t have found a more ‘respectable’, or at least easilyexplicable, topic for this book.

The naming of parts

My earliest encounter with the word that dare not speak its name was when Iwas very young, at that age when summers seem perpetual and one inhabitsone’s body with an easy, sensual grace. In my green and white striped dressI must have looked the epitome of a British schoolgirl. The school itself wasmainly housed in a large redbrick Victorian house in the suburban EnglishMidlands. Around the house were extensive grounds (which seemed huge, to aseven-year old) made up of some wooded areas, some grassy and the slumpedmound of a long-disused air-raid shelter. It was one of those prickly andoppressive summer afternoons when the playful yells of schoolchildren scatterthe air, together with the far-off whirring of lawnmowers, the hollow ‘bokk’of tennis balls and the overhead hum of distant aeroplanes. Hunkering downin the long, brittle grasses, Peggy Lucas and I animatedly exchanged words.It was one word in particular that we shared that day. But it was in some waymore than a word, too: it was a jewel, a token of infinite worth, a treasure tobe shared and considered and repeatedly turned over in our minds and onour tongues. The word was ‘cunt’. An odd little word – harsh-sounding andsomehow replete. Consonantal and spat out. We had no idea, Peggy and I, asto what the thing might be to which ‘cunt’ referred, but we knew that the worditself had a magic, and a deliciously taboo aura. It wasn’t to be said in front ofadults, and friends would have to beg to be allowed into our exclusive semioticclique. We owned that word; it was a code word or cipher. At lunch and inassembly we knew that we knew. In Maths lessons and in English classes weknew that we knew. Changing for PE, and washing brushes in a jam jar in Art,we knew that we knew. We were initiates into a hushed world of words fromwhich adults must be protected, and into which we, in turn, would invite onlythe most popular girls, those who had, perhaps, another word to trade with us.But no other word could quite reach the potency of ‘cunt’. It was a word withthe enchanted power of a smooth pebble pressed into the palm of a trader andclasped tight, protectively; a linguistic charm, more powerful even than theBeagle’s Captain Robert FitzRoy’s buttons, traded for Patagonian children inthe late 1820s. And so I learned early on about the currency of language; of itsalmost talismanic power both in use and in exchange.

For Peggy Lucas and I, then, in the long, dry grass in the heatwave of 1976,’cunt’ was our currency. It was a word whose shared taboo bonded our friendship.The odd part is that, aft er so many years, I forget who had ‘brought’ theword to school that day. What I do recall vividly is how it would have felt likebetrayal for one or other of us independently to trade our currency with anyoneelse (in that innocent world of clandestine linguistic commodity exchange Iwould have been delighted – although somewhat bemused, of course – to haveread the OED‘s description of the ‘restricted currency‘ of ‘cunt’). This necessityfor a restriction, or control, of usage is certainly something grasped by almostany English-speaking person. That the OED lists as its first definition of ‘cunt’:’the female external genital organs’ is problematic for those of us who knowthat the female genitals are made up of numerous components, both internaland external. The alternative word, ‘vagina’, is clinical-sounding – and actuallyvery anatomically specific, referring as it does to the birth canal. VirginiaBraun and her colleague Sue Wilkinson have explored the differences betweenacademic and lay interpretations of the word: ‘the referent of the term “vagina”does not necessarily mirror its anatomical referent. Vagina is frequently usedas a shorthand term to encompass women’s genitals as a whole, or the morevisible vulva’. So – do we need to develop a new language for women’s bodies?Or somehow rehabilitate the old one? ‘Cunt’ is, the OED aside, the mostinclusive term, referring to the vulva, labia, vagina and clitoris. As GermaineGreer somewhat whimsically puts it, should we talk about ‘the whole boxand dice’; or, as Gloria Steinem writes, about the ‘power bundle’; or, for EveEnsler, ‘the package […] the entire deal’? 8 If we don’t say ‘cunt’, then we aren’tspeaking the truth. In the same TV programme where Greer conjures up thatgaming image (one which, somewhat uneasily, reminds me of playing Yahtzeewith my grandmother many years ago), the irony is that she doesn’t actuallysay ‘cunt’ very oft en. When she does, as in reading out lurid verses by theseventeenth-century libertine the Earl of Rochester, she forcefully emphasizesthe word’s guttural ruggedness. Greer’s documentary, broadcast in 2006, was asegment of the popular etymological BBC programme, Balderdash and Piffle.Despite the programme showing footage of Greer painting a huge orange-redword ‘cunt’ onto a whitewashed wall, it’s not until more than two minutes inthat the word is actually said at all – and that’s by a man in a vox pop survey.Greer describes how in the 1970s she set about rehabilitating the word,because the word ‘vagina’, in its omission of ‘all the bits that make it fun’, feltoffensive, not least in its violent sexist etymological roots associating it with a’sword sheath’. She also suggests that there’s something inherent in the soundof the word ‘cunt’ that conveys most forcibly the power of women’s genitals ina way that ‘vagina’ simply cannot. ‘Cunt’, Greer argues, ‘demands to be takenseriously’.

However seriously we take a word, however, there are some words which areso potent and yet so frangible that they need to be handled reverentially. Theyare philological nitroglycerine. In this sense, ‘cunt’ is the older linguistic siblingof the equally hazardous ‘nigger’; both words possess the power to shock, andboth polarize their advocates and detractors. ‘Cunt’ is the ‘nigger’ of the genderwars. It ‘has never been innocent’, argued the late linguist Ruth Wajnryb, ‘atleast not for a good number of centuries’. Even Mellors’s attempts in LadyChatterley’s Lover to normalize the word are, according to Wajnryb, doomed,because ‘taboo words […] are overly invested in connotative or emotionalassociations rather than descriptive or dictionary meanings’. Is the battle forreclamation already lost, then? Has the connotative freight of social disgustbecome simply too great for the little word to bear?

Greer argues that in the twentieth century ‘cunt’ ‘became the most offensiveinsult one man could throw at another’. But Wajnryb also pointed outthat ‘the more people hear a word, the weaker its taboo, and, therefore, itsshock value becomes’. She suggested that cunt is still a relatively fixed word – itsnoun usage is far more widespread than its adjectival usage, for instance(unlike the wonderful versatility of the word ‘fuck’) – and this both reflects andmaintains its taboo status. Reclamation is a way to ‘subvert the male-endowedperniciousness of the word’. In this book, I’m not so much holding out hopefor a restored denotative (i.e. straightforwardly indicative) role for the wordthat might neutralize its connotative (implied) associations, as Greer sought inthe 1970s, as exploring how and why it became pejorative (derogatory) in thefirst place. Is ‘cunt’ a word that can be moved from the dysphemistic (the polaropposite to ‘euphemistic’) to the purely orthophemistic (plain-spoken) realmof language? Or is this, as linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge somewhatdismissively call it, ‘a wish that is impossible to grant’? In the same documentary,Greer visited Bart’s Sexual Health Centre in London to ask about thepsychological impact having ‘no acceptable word’ for women’s sexual organshas on women: the route to the appropriate denotative term is compromisedby the social potency of the word itself. In a clinical setting, responses to thesocially acceptable, yet anatomically erroneous, ‘vagina’ are bound to be farmore positive than to the problematic ‘cunt’, yet both denote the same thing(one more accurately than the other, in fact). The ‘obscenity lies in the actualwords themselves – what they connote – and not in what they denote’, writeAllan and Burridge: taboo words can trigger a physical response in us. Greerclaims to be pleased that her efforts at reclamation in the 1960s didn’t work,because it allowed the word ‘cunt’ to maintain its clout, becoming ‘sacred’, a’torpedo’ and ‘a word of immense power – to be used sparingly’.

Even when the word itself isn’t used, the ‘torpedo’ effect can still be manifest.In 2004, the British Library commissioned 52 artists and writers to pair up sothat each pairing would illustrate one letter of the alphabet for an exhibition.Of the 26 letters, only one – and yes, it is the predictable one – seemed to sparkmedia coverage. Morag Myerscough and Charlotte Rawlins, responsible forillustrating the letter ‘C’, produced a pink neon sign immortalizing the question(best spoken out loud): ‘Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?’ The reactions of thepress are as interesting as the exhibit itself. Writing in the fairly right-of-centreEvening Standard, a London-based daily newspaper, Luke Leitch’s piece had theheadline ‘Workers “C” red over word-play at library’. Leitch began with a shortlist of the Library’s ‘treasures’, straightaway mentioning the 8,000 schoolchildren– that’s 8,000 corruptible minds – who visit each year. Next, Leitch implicitlycriticizes the cost of the exhibition (£5,000) before mentioning this ‘art’exhibition at the ‘£511 million library’. Unnamed BL staff, reports Leitch, whowere already ‘up in arms’ because of proposed redundancies, were ‘outraged’by the ‘adolescent […] ridiculous and offensive’ artwork. The BL, according toLeitch, clarified that ‘school parties will be kept away from this particular learningexperience’. Rawlins herself explained that ‘C, after all, is almost unique inhaving its own word. The C word. The hardest word of them all. In fact, there’sonly one other letter that has its own word and that’s F … but no one is thatscared of using the F-word these days […] Our aim isn’t to shock, it’s just tohave a bit of fun with our letter and say that we don’t think the C-word is sucha bad word after all’. By contrast, the left-of-centre national daily newspaperThe Guardian, rejoiced in precisely the ‘adolescent’ humour Leitch renounces.’Library show for word rhyming with hunt’, is the headline for Maev Kennedy’spiece, which expresses none of Leitch’s outrage (the exhibition’s extravagantwaste of money, and its near-paedophilic threat to the nation’s youth). Instead,Kennedy softly mocks the possible responses of the exhibition’s visitors: ‘If youmust laugh, please do it quietly. Should you feel a snort of outrage coming on,please bury it in a handkerchief […] And if Mike Hunt is out there, or anyonewho admits to knowing him, he might just like to drop in the British Library,where he may be surprised to find his name up in lights.’ Kennedy describesRawlins as ‘unrepentant’ – even in this largely positive piece, the idea of penancefor dabbling with the ‘C-word’ is conjured up, albeit playfully.
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