My Year With Proust - Day 143

   "As usual, but more easily now that her father had left her to talk to the barrister, I was gazing at Mlle de Stermaria.  No less than the bold and always graceful distinctiveness of her attitudes, as when, leaning her elbows on the table, she raised her glass in both hands over her fore-arms, the dry flame of a glance at once extinguished, the ingrained, congenital hardness that one could sense, ill-concealed by her own personal inflexions, in the depths of her voice, and that had shocked my grandmother, a sort of atavistic ratchet to which she returned as soon as, in a glance or an intonation, she had finished expressing her own thoughts - all this brought the thoughts of the observer back to the long line of ancestors who had bequeathed to her that inadequacy of human sympathy, those gaps in her sensibility, a lack of fullness in the stuff of which she was made.  But from a certain look which flooded for a moment the wells - instantly dry again - of her eyes, a look in which one sensed that almost humble docility which the predominance of a taste for sensual pleasures gives to the proudest of women, who will soon come to recognise but one form of personal magic, that which any man will enjoy in her eyes who can make her feel those pleasures . . ."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 740

Women and desire.  " . . . a certain look which flooded for a moment the wells - instantly dry again - of her eyes, a look in which one sensed that almost humble docility which the predominance of a taste for sensual pleasures gives to the proudest of women . . ." Of course, I think this statement says more about gender identity and, for that matter, the construction of identity than it really does about desire.  A great friend of mine, an anthropologist, always talks about "marked" vs "unmarked" categories.  Men always fall into the "unmarked" category, whereas women are in the "marked" category.  Essentially, society is constructed around men, which means they never have to define themselves since they are the default answer (in some ways it's similar to Simone de Beauvoir's identification of men as "the one" and women as "the other").  So, for instance, you never, or at least remarkably rarely, hear a man say something like, "as a man I believe", whereas women, trapped in the "marked" category, typically are forced to say things like, "as a woman I believe."  What small amount of time has been devoted to the topic of "male desire" (other than from pharmaceutical companies who are looking to create a market)?  Part of this relates to the perception that men are rutting, carnal beasts, and thus not particularly complex, but I would argue this is mainly the case because men are an "unmarked" category - or "the one" - so whatever they would want or do sexually must be the norm.  Now, compare that to the library of material, usually characterized by mystification or fear (such as the old Islamic canard that women are nine tenths of desire), focused on the question of "female desire."    Now, part of this might relate to the fact that the female orgasm is a little trickier (although hardly impossible), but even that is an oversimplification because that is the physical consequence of desire and not desire itself.  Going back to my hardly fully-formed argument, the discussion of "female desire" seems to me the very definition of an aspect of a "marked" category.

I'm not exactly certain why the description of Mlle de Stermaria reminded me of this painting Woman in a black Hat by Kees Van Dongen, which was one of my favorites from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.  It might be the prominent eyes that hint at much more beneath the surface.