In 2008 I published a long essay on Carol Ann Duffy’s powerfully erotic poem, Warming her Pearls, comparing it not unsurprisingly to Sarah Waters’ tantalising Neo-Victorian Thriller, Fingersmith.
The essay appears on Duffy’s site Sheer Poetry, The Tutor Pages, and of course on this site, Tusitala Expert English tuition too. Reading the poem again, I was immediately struck by Carol Ann Duffy’s ability to convey the palpable eroticism of proximity. ‘Next to my own skin, her pearls.My mistress…’ It is as if the speaker is aware of her own skin for the very first time. There is a sense of wonder and awe at the aliveness perhaps of ‘my own skin’ when near to something , (namely the pearls), charged with the physicality of ‘My mistress’. How ambiguous such a declaration is- transcending class and situation, spoken by a female.
Tomorrow, Carol Ann Duffy is chairing a book launch at The Royal Exchange Manchester for the novelist Jeanette Winterson whose autobiography is eagerly anticipated as a revisitation of Oranges are Not the Only fruit.I can still remember the impact of the Womens’ press publishing the book and its wonderful ‘gift’ of passion, wit and compassion.
Today, I was browsing through my favourite Winterson novel so far, The Passion and noticed a similar predilection for physical proximity to Duffy’s famous poem. Perhaps it is the secret nature of the irresistible attraction in both that makes the lanaguage take on a breathless, highly charged quality. I think it is the ATTENTION and AWARENESS that attraction brings to the proxmity of the other’s desired body that engenders such looming excitement. No one has written better about this than Roland Barthes in his A Lover’s Discourse.
But here we have Winterson’s heroine Villanelle about to meet the mysterious older woman at the Venetian Carnival for the first time.
‘ It’s getting late, who comes here with a mask over her face? Will she try the cards?
She does. She holds a coin in her palm so that I have to pick it out.Her skin is warm. I spread the cards. She chooses. The ten of diamonds. The three of clubs. Then the Queen of Spades.
A lucky card. The symbol of Venice. You win.’
The Venetian Carnival with all its colour and transgressions, is intimately reenacted here. Both women are dressed in disguise, veiling their identiity even gender. This allows for greater freedom and self expression.
Transgression is thus literally on the cards! Nothing is more seductive than touch. In this game of chance, each movement becomes weighted with significance, weighted with possibility.
Acquiescence. Yielding to desire.
Powerlessness.
Pearls and cards!
Here is an extract from the 2008 essay. I still like it and unlike some things I have written, I still agree with most of what I tried to say!
The poem bravely foregrounds the maid’s physical proximity to her mistress, from its opening assertion: ‘next to my own skin, her pearls.’ How far can syntax avow and almost integrate the parallel yet widely distant worlds of maid and mistress? There is something lingeringly delicious and yet prohibited about the use of the possessive pronouns and the real intimacy of ‘skin’ and ‘pearls’ have a tender connotation that goes significantly beyond the words themselves.
The hierarchical relationship between mistress and maid assumes an implied eroticism with the breathy breathlessness of ‘bids me wear them, warm them….’ The maid has re-appropriated her mistress’s orders into her own secret sexually charged fantasy. The pearls become a code, a talisman, for female sexuality and pleasure.
The acute awareness of the enticing physicality of the other, ‘her cool, white throat…’is immediately followed by the besotted acknowledgement, ‘all day I think of her, resting in the yellow room.’ The enjambment mirroring the running on fantasies of the maid lost in love for her apparently unobtainable mistress. The all- inclusive, agitation of the emphatic ‘all day’ contrasts with the seemingly languid mistress ‘resting’ in her designated ‘yellow room’.
How far do we all recognise the shame of need here and the almost vampiric desire to know or feel we know the whereabouts of the beloved other? The verb ‘think’ masks sexual want.
The apparent triviality of the mistress’s life choices: ‘silk or taffeta’ are transformed into suggestively intimate possibilities through the positioning of the present participle ‘contemplating’ and the very obviously tactile nature of such choices.
But then I wonder who is really fantasising about whom? For the mistress ‘fans’ herself ‘and ‘my slow heat entering each pearl’ has such tantalisingly overheated erotic potentiality that I don’t wonder that the mistress needs some sort of ventilation. But then again the fan itself has its own semiotics of courtship and interest. The very nature of the Dramatic Monologue’s viewpoint restricts the reader’s ability to know the truth of this relationship and in this example the mistress remains an object of desire rather than being a desiring subject in her own right. We cannot know what the mistress feels as the maid, our narrator, has no access to such knowledge. The lingering eroticism of ‘my slow heat entering each pearl’ is suggestive of the maid’s desire to take her mistress in ways that the mistress’s ‘pearl’ will know.
Janet Lewison