Not Being Like a Man: Femininity and its Stake in Pureness By Elke Weissmann Being Like a Man Where the proper men meet The pride of mankind assembles Their voices echo sharply into the night Their chests heave with better knowledge And after they have had enough to drink The night ends as it usually does With their firm bodies moving in on each other Too unsteady to exchange blows But one still in control pushes the other Hard into street where his head Cracks open on the wet asphalt. 0. Before I start let me confess: I have a personal stake in this. This is that I do not want to be like a man (see above) which, in this world of binaries, leaves me with femininity. But increasingly what it means to be like a woman is a little too limited for me. So what I aim to do here, by historicising concepts of femininity, is to critique what we have learnt to understand as feminine and to consider alternatives in the hope that eventually I find a somewhat broader conceptualisation of femininity. I. There is something quintessentially feminine about the concept of purity. Not just because we – women – get married in white or because more patriarchal cultures still insist on us being virgins when we meet the ‘right one’, but because the unmarried spinster, the asexual woman is part of a shared belief system. Women, it seems, don’t want to have sex. At least, not really. And in the 18th and 19th century this is exactly what women propagated: they were pure, they had true moral integrity, and they insisted on it. The idea of the pure, asexual woman largely developed in response to misogynist attitudes prevalent in Britain until the late 17th century. As E.J. Clery argues, from the late 1600s onwards, as Britain embraced the French
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coffee house culture, the category of woman was elevated from the depth of misogynist discourse, eventually leading to a distinction between an ‘effeminate’ and a ‘feminised’ man. While ‘effeminacy’ stood for all the bad things associated with femininity – ‘including corruption, weakness, cowardice, luxury, immorality and the unbridled play of passions’ (Clery 2004: 10) – feminization incorporated what was considered good about femininity: ‘sociability, civility, compassion, domesticity and love of family, the dynamic exercise of the passions and, above all, refinement, the mark of modernity’ (ibid.). After a backlash, a new positive ideal was established that revolved around woman’s incorruptibility; and this meant primarily woman’s strength to resist seduction attempts by countless rakes. Clery points to Samuel Richardson’s novels and in particular Clarissa (1748). Comparing this novel with Richardson’s earlier Pamela (1740), Clery argues: As in Pamela, sexual difference takes precedence over class; … Clarissa transcends the trial in a way that neither Lovelace nor many contemporary readers expected. Instead of conceding the point and accepting his offer of marriage, she gradually sheds her alluring mortal frame and becomes pure soul, all mind. Dying from a mysterious wasting disease, the text of her history remains as a legacy to a fallen England, with which her virtues were incompatible. Feminization, the promise of reform through the example of female virtue, is violently detached from worldly expectations, including the promise of sexual pleasure (ibid.: 96). Clarissa, then, personifies the new feminine ideal which transcends the earthly passions in a sacrifice that shames men into better behaviour.