Women Artists' Sexual Identity
Both Leila Sand’s sexual and professional life are essentially scored by the men she falls in love with. She is definitely aware that this lifestyle is an ‘odd’ break through the conventions of many years on end. The way women measure their lives nowadays in love affairs, as women of another time used to measure theirs in children, is really odd from the perspective of the popular myth. Leila’s lifestyle is presented by Jong as typical to the women of her time and can be grasped as an initiation of another aspect of the contemporary women artist's myth: the unique blend of art and love, of art and sex. In order to explore this aspect thoroughly we need to gain a close insight of Leila’s five love affairs, as well as of her experience of motherhood. Perhaps only then we will realize how vital and important all of them: Thom, Elmore, Dart, Danny and Renzo, as well as the twins, are for the fulfillment of Leila’s emotional identity.
Seducing the muse
Throughout the novel, Leila is presented as a woman artist who is not afraid to speak her mind and as a woman who cannot do without love making in her art making. This is delivered consistently through the prism of ‘always’. Leila was ‘always transfixed’ by sex because she ‘always’ knew it was the primary way to seduce the muse. We could possibly argue that in the meaning of the verb transfix there is a room for a Cupid imagery. It is Cupid’s job to pierce through the heart of a woman artist and thus to propel her art.
I’ve never lived without a man. I need sex to power my creativity. I need skinlessness to get in touch with the muse.
The metaphoric use of power suggests that the strength, skills and the authority of Leila’s work are largely due to her devotion to love and sex. However Leila’s need for sex is very intricately constructed. It is part of her need to be loved and to be loving that aspires to something beyond sex, to 'skinlessness'. This neologism, used recurrently in the narrative, is coined by Erica Jong and it seems to drive her heroine beyond the realm of the visible and the touchable. Actually whenever Jong refers to sex and love she means the realm of myth, fairy-tale, mystery and dream. Unsurprisingly her need to set this realm apart from reality very often invokes in her oeuvre the topos of H. Miller - The Land of Fuck [Miller 1992]. This paradoxical rendering of Leila’s aspirations, i.e. as something out of reach and out of touch as skinlessness that is able to put her in touch with the muse, could be conceived as a hint of self-irony, anticipating the period when sex and creativity are no longer one:
I went back to meetings, my work, my twins. No more dating. No more searching for the holy grail of cock. Enough already. Nevermind that for years I had thought it the life force. Nevermind that I thought sex and creativity were one. 220/XIII
It takes a lot of time and efforts in search of selfhood for Leila to realize that both her best friend, Emily Quinn and her sane mind prove right. A woman artist needs herself to power her creativity. Dart takes Leila away from herself, from the twins, from her work. (p.104,5/VI)
Despite this revelations Leila insists that her creative self desperately needs love and affection. Only a powerful and self-confident ‘knight’ as she is, could eventually give up her quest for the holy grail...of cock. The hilarious zeugmatic image acquires a demythologizing effect on our well-established concepts of pre-/Christian times. The holy grail or the chalice, traditionally used by Christ at the Last Supper is also a subject of a great amount of mediaeval legend, romance and allegory. It apparently used to be the test for perfect purity of any adventurous and daring person. It also fires the ambition of any traveller set on a quest to the reality of the unseen (Tennyson’s Holy Grail/ Idylls of the King).
Although Leila Sand fails at some point in her search to keep her notion of the life force of cock as sacred as the holy grail, she pertains to her ardent self-mythologized belief in art and love:
And if artists love so often and so hard, it is because they have a rage to live p. 82/IV
And so often and so hard Leila loves. Out of her rage to live we come to another point in the contemporary myth quite crucial for the sexual/emotional identity of women artists.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998