Slime!: The Stickiness of Eros / Vagina as Metaphor

“It was horrible to have her there embracing his knees. It was horrible. He revolted from it, violently. And yet—and yet—he had not the power to break away. […] Then, as it were suddenly, he smelt the horrid stagnant smell of that water. And at the same moment she drew away from him and looked at him. Her eyes were wistful and unfathomable. He was afraid of them, and he fell to kissing her, not knowing what he was doing. He wanted her eyes not to have that terrible, wistful, unfathomable look.”

The dead lake’s reek has stuck with me ever since I read D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter.” The passage above comes after a doctor rescues a woman from drowning herself. When she comes to, wrapped in blankets in his home, she suddenly declares love. In a mixture of fear, compulsion, and revulsion, the doctor acquiesces into her mire: He feels that he must love her.

I am interested in what makes desire horrifying. Here, so drawn in by the woman’s odor, I want to ask: Could we interpret that thick, sultry rottenness as a component of eros?

From what I’ve read of Lawrence, particularly Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he often associates passionate sex with the natural world. (Of course, what is presumed “natural” and healthy in Lawrence is rigidly heterosexual. His attitudes on gender are similarly essentialist; the gamekeeper Mellors refers to Lady Chatterley, affectionately, as a “piece ‘a cunt,” the supposed true source of her womanhood.)

And yet here, in “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” what is natural – the lake – isn’t invigorating or inspiring: It’s gross and sucks you in and down, down into murky helpless depths.

It’s no accident, I think, that a specifically female character becomes the vessel for such power and putridity. Perhaps it’s not just sexuality in general here: Could we think of the dead lake as a kind of signifier for … a slimy vagina?!

Don’t worry. I know that literature isn’t reducible to a simple system of codes that, once memorized, will allow texts’ “real” meanings to curl goldenly open. What I like about “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” is its mystery. I’ve just been thinking a lot about slime. And the vagina. Particularly, slimy vaginas as metaphor, as metonym.

In literature and philosophy, slime has represented the vagina, which in itself becomes a morass of meaning pertaining to woman’s sexuality. At best, the implied meaning is just kind of lame: a lack, a cold womb of nothingness waiting to be penetrated. More interesting is the vagina (/female sexuality) as a festering thing: as if it were not the origin of life, but a grave.

Let’s look at one of my favorite sections of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She describes the vagina as “concealed, mucous, and humid … Man ‘gets stiff,’ but woman ‘gets wet’ … If the body leaks – as an ancient wall or a dead body may leak – it seems to liquefy rather than to eject fluid; a horrid decomposition.”

Here, the smell and materiality of woman is not only swampy, but as rotten as a dead body. There’s more: “Feminine sex desire is the soft throbbing of a mollusk. … [M]an dives upon his prey like the eagle and the hawk; woman lies in wait like the carnivorous plant, the bog, in which insects and children are swallowed up.”

Wow. Even insects and children will not be spared. “She is absorption, suction, humus, pitch and glue, a passive influx, insinuating and viscous.”

Beauvoir was a feminist. But she was also an existentialist. In The Second Sex, she argues that women can achieve a liberated selfhood in the state of pour-soi, “for itself”: a state defined by strength and solidity of borders, impenetrable. Its converse is en-soi, “in itself”: described in some instances as (you guessed it) slime: a muck of weak passivity, sticking with its own immanence.

Women can transcend this slimy state, Beauvoir writes. But her language around en-soi collapses with that of woman’s sexuality and “slimeginas.” How can woman be a free agent, as Beauvoir defines it, if her very body is slime?

To avoid beating “slime” into the ground (a slippery task indeed!), I’ll switch gears for a moment. What is the relationship between slime-like viscous matter, self, and eros?

Jean-Paul Sartre (Beauvoir’s longtime partner in lovin’ and philosophizin’) had this to say about viscosity: When sticking a hand into honey, “Long columns falling off my fingers suggest my own substance flowing into the pool of stickiness. Plunging into water gives a different impression; I remain a solid. But to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity.”

Viscous matter is neither solid nor liquid, near impossible to classify, to hold. Not only is it outside our control, slipping out of grip, it can make us lose control – of our boundaries, slipping and sticking in the matter – and of our selves.

I encountered Sartre’s example in one of my favorite books, Eros the Bittersweet by poet and classicist Anne Carson. In her exploration of the alphabet’s origins and the first written poetry, she discusses the Greeks’ metaphors of dissolution – fear for the self dissolving (into the beloved) through erotic love.

One “melted” by Eros (the “melter of limbs,” according to some poets) suffers a loss of control, feels oneself sliding into desire's object. “To control the boundaries is to possess oneself,” Carson writes. “When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat.”

Carson writes of a desire unattached to specific gender markers. But in much of the literature and philosophy I’ve encountered that deals with fear of losing control, the perspective seems decidedly masculine. By this I mean, it codes an idealized concrete self with supposedly masculine values: strength, solidity, impenetrability, wholeness. In contrast, it positions the body of woman/feminine sexuality as a total mess, uncontrollable and uncontrolled. She is all seepage: Blood, wetness, and copious feelings leaking out. Her rages, her tears and hysterics. And then her sexuality – The seductress’ specter is not only uncontrolled, but suffers men to lose control: ensnared in her bog, sticking to her essence, that alarming dissolution of self. As in “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” it is a dissolution partially enjoyed and finally accepted, but not without horror and disgust.

I’ve made a lot of leaps here. I should clarify that when I talk about the vagina as metonym for woman’s sexuality, I am speaking only to cultural interpretations of both. By no means do I think these words (“vagina,” “sexuality,” “woman”) are easily reducible to simple definitions or essentially, naturally aligned. But in conflating language around the vagina (Beauvoir’s throbbing mollusk, seeping corpse, etc.) with language suggestive of woman’s sexuality and not explicitly the vag (Lawrence’s story, or the Greek poets Carson cites), do I again equate the two?

I have to be careful about these distinctions as I continue my research. But I have to say, I am really excited – I do believe that slime is a potent site for further inquiry – particularly in regards to control/loss of control. (Oh, and btw, if anyone has any suggestions for related reading, please share!)

If I can include a small “rah rah womyn!!!” bit of closure, I’d like to quote my friend Penny, who writes the best emails (in verse!). Fear of women, she writes, comes from fear of "the unbridled wildness of women's nature -

because they are the life-givers,
the keepers of the mystery --
and because they have the capacity, unlike the masculine,
for such unfettered, unbridled, uncontrollable, and unlimited JOY
of the life-force."