A Disturbing Sexual Awakening

N.J. Gemmell – The Bride Stripped Bare

This piece of art, one of my favourites, is sadly only mentioned off-hand by the text - or is the point that women are as difficult to fathom for men as this piece?

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even/The Large Glass (1915-23 Oil paint, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass plates (cracked), each mounted between two glass panels in a steel and wood frame 272.5 x 175.8 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art)

AS a big fan of Duchamp, picked this book up based on the title alone, that and flicking briefly through it, it didn’t seem too terrible. The novel professes to be a woman’s confessional document, detailing her marital life and birth of her and her husband’s first son. It’s quite sexually explicit, and apparently got the writer embroiled in a bit of a tabloid scandal despite the fact that she originally left it anonymous (my copy, a reprint, contains a post-script with a little word on this signed by the author, though the frontispiece still refers to the author as “anonymous”).

The novel is written in the second person – something I’ve not seen before. It also bears the dedication “For my husband. For every husband.” Logically put together these techniques would give the text a second purpose (besides that of being a confessional), that is, to educate men. In fact, the novel contains various pieces of information pertaining to love, sex and marriage which under the yoke of the second person narrative and the dedication become advice for all men:

What you want:             The lights turned off. A touch that’s gentle, slow, provocative, that builds you up, that makes you want it too much. An orgasm; it doesn’t have to be at the same time as the man, just one orgasm so that you know what everyone’s talking about. Eye contact. A quick coming that’s not on your breasts or face. Holding afterwards, skin to skin. Oral sex, precisely where you ask, for as long and as soft and as slow as you’d like. Sex that’s uncomplicated, with no ties, where the man will do exactly what you want. Claming happiness for yourself: you’re so used to focusing on your partner’s pleasure at the expense of your own. The Bride Stripped Bare, Chapter 43

This passage has a lot to say about the novel as a whole. The main feature here is the narrator’s appeal for “her turn”, as if all the time her partner has been commanding the action around the bedroom. However, instead of an appeal for equality, what follows is a request to make her the dominator, as it were, and place the man in the subordinate position. This seems to contradict the later, deliberately degrading, multi-person sex fantasy which she carries out. The narrator clearly doesn’t know what she wants, and that is part of the development of the character certainly. She also eventually manages to have a brief affair with a man who very much becomes subordinate to her and this doesn’t work out too well either. So, as a text that supposedly has something to teach men, what is this saying? That women don’t know what they want? Certainly, the author couldn’t have forgotten, also, that women do not want the same thing as one another sexually.

Towards the end of the novel, the narrator has a child and seems consumed by pride at this fact – so much so that she revels over the fact that she has a child where her friend does not. The last few chapters consists of her looking back over the transformation that she has undergone as a character – reflecting back at her old fantasies, sexual desire and her old tryst. The novel proper ends with her giving a secret glance at her old lover and walking away with her husband whom she feels nothing sexually for at all. So the novel ends with no consequences for the main character, with her sexually un-frustrated, but nonsexual. However, after the last chapter is an epilogue which essentially recaps the prologue – the main character has apparently thrown herself off of a cliff with her newborn baby son. Is that a resolution? Was it the lack of consequences for her that convinced her to have the main character commit suicide? The novel is clearly one of badly thought out plotlines and character development.