Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 69 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Querelle (1953)

  Thea lost his temper. So did Gil, but he didn't dare hit him, because of the drink he had just consumed at the mason's expense. From then on, in the yards, both while at work and during the breaks, and in the living quarters, at table and even sometimes when he was in· bed, Thea would crack terrible jokes at the expense of Gil who did not know how to retaliate. Little by little, the gang-from laughing, to start with, at Thea's jokes-ended up laughing at Gil who tried to rid himself of those seductive mannerisms he now saw provided each joke with its point, but he could not destroy his natural beauty; the too green, too vivacious shoots, burgeoning within him and scenting him, refused to wilt and die, since they were permeated with, and drew their nourishment from, the very sap of adolescence. Without their being aware of it, all respect for the young man dwindled away in the minds of the others. Step by step, Gil lost his standing; word by word, his dignity. He became a mere pretext for belly laughs. No longer did he receive any exterior confirmation of his own sense of himself. That sense was now sustained within himself only by the presence of shame, its pale flame rising as if fanned by the wind of revolt. He let himself be run into the ground. Roger did not show up. What would he have had to say? 101 I QUERELLE That Paulette had not come out with him? He would not be able to see her. She was no longer working as a waitress at the little bistro, it was qifficult to get to meet her now. And if she had turned up, by a stroke of bad luck, an even more scorching feeling of shame would have set Gil sizzling. He found himself hoping that Paulette \vould not appear. "All this just because I never busted his fucking face." He was being crushed by an ever more oppressive malaise. Had he been smarter, a-nd less macho as well, he would have understood that tears, without making him any softer, would have provided a true relief. But all he knew to do there in the deepening dark was to parade the pallor of young men who have backed out of fights, that crucified countenance of nations who refuse to dp battle. He closed his jaws firmly, gritting his teeth. "Why'n the hell didn't I smash that asshole's face in."

• From Querelle (1953)

  When I became an officer, it wasn't so much in order to be a warrior, but rather to be a very precious object, guarded by soldiers. Which they would protect with their lives until they died for me, or I oflered up my life in the same manner to save them. It is thanks to Jesus that we can praise humility, for he made it into the very characteristic of divinity. An interior kind of divinity ( how can one deny the powers given one on earth? ) , opposed to those powers, and it has to be strong in order to overcome them. Humility can only be born out of humiliation. Any other kind is a vain simulacrum. That last entry refers to an incident the officer does not relate. Having made a rather audacious pass at a young dock worker, he took him to one of those thickets in the old city moat: as we had occasion to mention before, these were perennially littered with turds. The Lieutenant let his pants down, stretched himself out on the slope-and as ill-luck would have it, placed his belly right over a solid portion of shit. Both men were instantly enveloped in its fresh odor. Without further ado, the young fellow disappeared, and there was the Lieutenant, all by himself. With a handful of dry grass-though it was mercifully a little moistened by the dew-he tried to clean his coat. Shame went right to work on him. He watched his beautiful white hands-although humiliated, they still were that to him-energetically, if maladroitly, do what they had to do. In the mist, now enveloping the desolate scenery once and for all, he still glimpsed the gold of the braid on his cuffs. As pride is humiliation'S" child, the officer now felt prouder than ever. He was acquiring a taste for his own endurance. \Vhen he got on his way again, avoiding any populous area in the manner of an 266 I JEAN GENET old·time leper, all open places onto which the wind wafted his stench, he began to understand that any birth in a manger is a miraculous sign. His thoughts of Querelle ( which had rendered the labor of cleaning so painful : in their vagueness and sullen·

• From Querelle (1953)

  43 I QUERELLE who acted as a serving maid to the masons. To prevent any of them coming up to tease her, to smack her on the buttocks with great gusts of laughter, he made sure all his motions were brisk and busy. 'When he took his hands out of the now revoltingly tepid water, they no longer appeared soft like that at all-you could see the ravages wrought by plaster and cement. He felt some regret at the sight of these workman's hands, their cracked skin, their permanent white frosting, their fingernails crusted with cement. Gil had been storing up too much shame over the last couple of days to even dare think about Paulette at this point. Nor about Roger, either. He was unable to think of them warmly; his feelings had been soiled by shame, by a kind of nauseating vapor that threatened to mingle with all his t�oughts in order to corrupt and decompose them. Yet he did think of Roger: with hatred. In that atmosphere, the hatred grew more noxious, grew so forcefully that it chased away the feeling of shame, squeezed it, rammed it into the remotest comer of his consciousness; there, however, it squatted brood ing and reminding him of its presence with the heavy insistence of a throbbing abscess. Gil hated Roger for being the cause o f hi s humiliation. He hated Roger's good looks, even, for provid ing Theo with ammunition for his evil sense of irony. He hated Roger for coming down to the shipyard, the previous day. True, he had smiled at him all through an evening, while singing, on a table top-but that was simply because Roger alone knew that the last song was the one Paulette liked to hum, and thus he was addressing her, through an accomplice: He was a happy bandit, Nothing did he fear . . . Some of the masons were playing cards now on the table deared of the white china bowls and plates. The stove was going great guns. Gil wanted to go and take a leak, but in turning his head he saw Theo walking. across the room and

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  At the request of the Army, Clark Bonner had sold Donald Douglas the land for the aircraft plant the year before. The Douglas workers assembling B-17 bombers for the War Department needed places to live. Bonner turned over 650 acres of lima bean fields to John Griffith and Herbert Legg. Their real estate company subdivided some of the acreage into fifty-by-one-hundred-foot lots. Shortly after the Douglas plant opened in 1941, the company distributed a sales brochure for the new houses it was putting up. One side of the brochure is a map. It shows the subdivision’s convenient location, on a main highway between Los Angeles and Long Beach. The guide describes the country club and tells potential buyers that it’s open to all residents of the new subdivision. The other side of the brochure is a list of “one hundred reasons why you should live here.” Reason eleven is “churches of all denominations.” Number seventeen is “Good Humor Man.” Number twenty-two is “telephones.” Number forty-nine is “good radio reception.” Number sixty is “healthy soil.” Sixty-one is “deep rock well water.” 284 The sales brochure lists the last of the reasons to live here under the heading “100% American Family Community.” These reasons are arranged as answers to a series of questions. The first question is “race restrictions?” The answer is yes. The second question is “residential restrictions?” The answer is yes. The fourteenth question is “carefully planned home on each lot?” The answer is yes. The eighteenth question asks if the new subdivision is the “white spot” of Long Beach. The answer is yes. 285 Herbert Legg left the real estate development company and ran for office. He became a county supervisor. 286 In 1940, Long Beach had 164,271 residents. It had a black population of 2,000. Jobs at defense plants, desegregated by presidential order during the war, brought the number of black residents to 15,000 in 1950. By 1960, the number had dwindled to 9,500. In 1947, city officials in Long Beach had demolished part of the federal housing built for war workers. The city tore down the part segregated for Negroes and left standing the part reserved for whites. That had eliminated 190 families. Real estate agents steered black families away from May-fair and the newer subdivisions to neighborhoods in Compton and Willowbrook. The war-surplus beacon on the steel derrick that identified the suburb Boyar, Taper, and Weingart were building attracted tens of thousands of potential buyers every week. If they were black, they didn’t stay long. The Federal Housing Authority made it possible to build the houses and offer them to men who sometimes made less than a hundred dollars a week. Still, the sales staff refused to accept applications from Negro families. In 1960, six years after residents of my suburb voted for incorporation, the city was still 98.5 percent white. The Census that year counted seven people—in a population of 67,125—who admitted they were black.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  At Petersburg, as soon as the train stopped and she got out, the first person that attracted her attention was her husband. “Oh, mercy! why do his ears look like that?” she thought, looking at his frigid and imposing figure, and especially the ears that struck her at the moment as propping up the brim of his round hat. Catching sight of her, he came to meet her, his lips falling into their habitual sarcastic smile, and his big, tired eyes looking straight at her. An unpleasant sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary glance, as though she had expected to see him different. She was especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experienced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her relations with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of the feeling, now she was clearly and painfully aware of it. “Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,” he said in his deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in earnest what he said. “Is Seryozha quite well?” she asked. “And is this all the reward,” said he, “for my ardor? He’s quite well....” Chapter 31 Vronsky had not even tried to sleep all that night. He sat in his armchair, looking straight before him or scanning the people who got in and out. If he had indeed on previous occasions struck and impressed people who did not know him by his air of unhesitating composure, he seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than ever. He looked at people as if they were things. A nervous young man, a clerk in a law court, sitting opposite him, hated him for that look. The young man asked him for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even pushed against him, to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a person. But Vronsky gazed at him exactly as he did at the lamp, and the young man made a wry face, feeling that he was losing his self-possession under the oppression of this refusal to recognize him as a person. Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself a king, not because he believed that he had made an impression on Anna—he did not yet believe that,—but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  For the few seconds during which the visitors were gazing at the picture in silence Mihailov too gazed at it with the indifferent eye of an outsider. For those few seconds he was sure in anticipation that a higher, juster criticism would be uttered by them, by those very visitors whom he had been so despising a moment before. He forgot all he had thought about his picture before during the three years he had been painting it; he forgot all its qualities which had been absolutely certain to him—he saw the picture with their indifferent, new, outside eyes, and saw nothing good in it. He saw in the foreground Pilate’s irritated face and the serene face of Christ, and in the background the figures of Pilate’s retinue and the face of John watching what was happening. Every face that, with such agony, such blunders and corrections had grown up within him with its special character, every face that had given him such torments and such raptures, and all these faces so many times transposed for the sake of the harmony of the whole, all the shades of color and tones that he had attained with such labor—all of this together seemed to him now, looking at it with their eyes, the merest vulgarity, something that had been done a thousand times over. The face dearest to him, the face of Christ, the center of the picture, which had given him such ecstasy as it unfolded itself to him, was utterly lost to him when he glanced at the picture with their eyes. He saw a well-painted (no, not even that—he distinctly saw now a mass of defects) repetition of those endless Christs of Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and the same soldiers and Pilate. It was all common, poor, and stale, and positively badly painted—weak and unequal. They would be justified in repeating hypocritically civil speeches in the presence of the painter, and pitying him and laughing at him when they were alone again. The silence (though it lasted no more than a minute) became too intolerable to him. To break it, and to show he was not agitated, he made an effort and addressed Golenishtchev. “I think I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you,” he said, looking uneasily first at Anna, then at Vronsky, in fear of losing any shade of their expression. “To be sure! We met at Rossi’s, do you remember, at that _soirée_ when that Italian lady recited—the new Rachel?” Golenishtchev answered easily, removing his eyes without the slightest regret from the picture and turning to the artist. Noticing, however, that Mihailov was expecting a criticism of the picture, he said: “Your picture has got on a great deal since I saw it last time; and what strikes me particularly now, as it did then, is the figure of Pilate. One so knows the man: a good-natured, capital fellow, but an official through and through, who does not know what it is he’s doing. But I fancy....”

• From Querelle (1953)

  "You sure about that?" "But of course. Sailor's bags, the real thing, with a flap and all.'' "Well, if you don't believe us, there ain't much use telling you anything." Being at last able to discuss a certain and verifiable fact, they hastened to abandon their initially timid stance, their fawning humility in front of the police. They turned quite arrogant. They knew what they were talking about. As they were in a position to furnish the police with a proven fact that the authorities had overlooked, this had to elevate t_heir standing. The police had spent a whole night interrogating Roger with merciless insistence. All they found on him was his cheap pocketknife, broken and clumsily repaired. "What's this for?" Roger blushed, but the policeman thought this was. due to a fleeting sense of shame about the poor condition of the knife. He didn't pursue the matter. He had not realized that the weapon, being practically useless, was the more dangerous for being merely symbolic. In the keen edge of a true blade, in its accuracy and true balance, lies the very beginning of the true act of killing : thus it has to appear frightening to any child already living in a state of fear ( the child who invents symbols of fear for himself, using the materials we clumsily refer to as "reality" ) . On the other hand, the symbolic knife represents no practical danger at all, but as it is employed in a multitude of imaginary inner lives, it becomes a sure sign of its owner's acceptance of crime. The cops were unable to see that the knife was an endorsement of Gil's act of murder even before he had committed it. "Where did you know him from?" The boy denied ever having slept with the murderer or with Theo, saying that the day of t�e latter's death was the first time he had ever seen him. Then he admitted that he ,had gone to see his sister one night in the bistro where she was working as a 151 I QUERELLE waitress at that time. Gil had been standing at the bar, exchanging banter with her. At midnight, she finished work, and Gil walked both sister and brother back to their house. The next day Gil was there again. Roger had found him there on five subsequent occasions, and now and again, when they happened to meet, Gil had bought him a drink. "He never tried to sleep with you?" The interrogators were quite taken aback by Roger's wide-eyed, innocent look : "\Vith me? \Vhat for?" "He never made any advances to you?" ••Advances? Oh, no." He let his limpid gaze rest on the embarrassed police officers . .. He never touched you, like, down there?" ·�ever."

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Darya Alexandrovna sent him a letter, asking him for a side-saddle for Kitty’s use. “I’m told you have a side-saddle,” she wrote to him; “I hope you will bring it over yourself.” This was more than he could stand. How could a woman of any intelligence, of any delicacy, put her sister in such a humiliating position! He wrote ten notes, and tore them all up, and sent the saddle without any reply. To write that he would go was impossible, because he could not go; to write that he could not come because something prevented him, or that he would be away, that was still worse. He sent the saddle without an answer, and with a sense of having done something shameful; he handed over all the now revolting business of the estate to the bailiff, and set off next day to a remote district to see his friend Sviazhsky, who had splendid marshes for grouse in his neighborhood, and had lately written to ask him to keep a long-standing promise to stay with him. The grouse-marsh, in the Surovsky district, had long tempted Levin, but he had continually put off this visit on account of his work on the estate. Now he was glad to get away from the neighborhood of the Shtcherbatskys, and still more from his farm work, especially on a shooting expedition, which always in trouble served as the best consolation. Chapter 25 In the Surovsky district there was no railway nor service of post horses, and Levin drove there with his own horses in his big, old-fashioned carriage. He stopped halfway at a well-to-do peasant’s to feed his horses. A bald, well-preserved old man, with a broad, red beard, gray on his cheeks, opened the gate, squeezing against the gatepost to let the three horses pass. Directing the coachman to a place under the shed in the big, clean, tidy yard, with charred, old-fashioned ploughs in it, the old man asked Levin to come into the parlor. A cleanly dressed young woman, with clogs on her bare feet, was scrubbing the floor in the new outer room. She was frightened of the dog, that ran in after Levin, and uttered a shriek, but began laughing at her own fright at once when she was told the dog would not hurt her. Pointing Levin with her bare arm to the door into the parlor, she bent down again, hiding her handsome face, and went on scrubbing. “Would you like the samovar?” she asked. “Yes, please.”

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Come on! As you can see, I've got hemorrhoids! But never mind, get going! Shove it in! Dig into the shit!" He straightened up again. He was red in the face. One big guy walked up to him. "Come off it, man. If you've got something going with Theo, that's none of our damn business." Thea snickered. Gil looked at him and said, coldly : ''I never let you do it to me. And that's what's riling you." He turned on his heels. Clad in shirt and socks, he went back to the bed and put on the rest of his clothes, in silence. Then he left the room. Close by there was a small wooden shed where 103 I QUERELLE the masons kept their bicycles. Gil went in. He walked up to his bike. It had a yellow frame. The nickel plating shone brightly. Gil loved its lightness, the curve of its racing handle bars which obliged him to bend right over them, loved its tires, the wooden rims, the mud guards. Sundays, and sometimes on weekday evenings after work, he would clean and polish it. His hair falling over his eyes, his mouth always half.apen, he would loosen the bolts, take off chain and pedals and strip down the bike as it stood upended on saddle and handle bars. Engaged in this, Gil knew his life made sense. Each operation was carried out scrupulously, neatly, whether it required a greasy duster or a monkey wrench. Every action was good to watch. Squatting on his heels or bending over the wheel to set it spinning, Gil was transfigured. Every one of his movements was a radiant instance of precision and skill. So he went straight up to his bicycle, but as soon as he placed his hand on the saddle, the feeling of shame returned. He could not work on it, not today. He was unworthy of being what the bike had made him. He leaned it against the wall and walked out, to the shithouse. After he had wiped himself, Gil put his hand between his buttocks to finger the small excrescence formed by his hemorrhoids. He felt happy to have it, right there, under his fingers : both proof and object of his anger and violence. Once more he touched it, with the tip of his index finger. He was glad and proud to know he had this thing to protect him. It was a treasure he had to revere and cherish, because it permitted him to be himself. Until further notice, his hemorrhoids were himself. Once the sun had disappeared that afternoon, the city became shrouded in fog again. Gil felt sure he would run into Roger on the Esplanade. He wandered up and down there for a few minutes. At four P.M.

• From Querelle (1953)

  us I JEAN GENET Still disbelieving, Robert smiled at Nono. "Well, that's what happened. But you'll keep it to yourself, right?" "Sure thing." As the boss told him all about it, all the details, including Querelle's cheating at dice, Robert began to seem more and more indifferent. Inwardly, he was seething. Shame kept his mouth shut, creased his pale cheeks, and Nono thought he was rather dim-witted and gutless, after all. Except where it borders on the sea and the Penfeld wharf, the city of Brest is surrounded by its solid old ramparts. These consist of a deep ditch with steep embankments. The embank men ts-both on the inner side and the outer-have been planted with acacias. On the outer side runs that road off which Vic was slain and abandoned in the dark of the night by Querelle. The ditch is overgrown with brushwood, brambles,_ and here and there, in marshy places, even rushes. It also serves as the city dump. During the summer all the sailors ashore for the evening, if they miss the last liberty boat (at 2200 hrs ) , doss down there until the arrival of the morning boat at six o'clock. They lie down on the grass, among the brambles. Ditch and banks are littered with them, sleeping on leaves, often in bizarre positions, having to adjust themselves to roots, trees, terrain, and often in attempts to protect their clean unifom1s. Before stretching out or curling up they relieve themselves one way or the other, and then, completely wiped out, crash right next to the spot they have befouled. The ditch is strewn with turds. In the midst of the others the few sober ones prepare some kind of lair for themselves and bed down. And there they lie, snoring under the branches. The freshness of dawn will awaken them. In certain places along the ditch there are some gypsy caravans, a few fires, yells of verminous children, loud arguments. These gy psies travel about the surrounding countryside, where the

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Now from everywhere the subjects of the Prince, mere specks in the distance growing ever and ever larger, ran toward the road that wound down and then up again before them. Riders came over the drawbridge and rode toward them with a blast of trumpets, their banners streaming behind them. The air was warmer here, as if this place were protected from the sea breeze. It was nothing as dark as the narrow villages and forests through which they had passed. And Beauty could see everywhere the peasants dressed in lighter and brighter colors. But they were drawing ever nearer to the castle, and in the distance Beauty could see not the peasants whose admiration she had received all along the road, but a great crowd of magnificently dressed Lords and Ladies. She must have uttered a little cry and bowed her head, because the Prince came up alongside of her. She felt his arm gather her close to the horse, and he whispered: "Now, Beauty, you know what I expect of you." But they had already reached the steep approach to the bridge, and Beauty could see it was just as she feared, men and women of her own rank and all clad in white velvet trimmed in gold, or gay and festive colors. She dared not look, and felt the blush in her cheeks again and for the first time was tempted to throw herself on the mercy of the Prince and beg him to conceal her. It was one thing to be shown to the rustics who praised her and would make a legend of her, but she could already hear the babble of haughty speech and laughter. This was unendurable to her. But when the Prince dismounted, he ordered her down on her hands and knees and told her softly that this was how she must enter his castle. She was petrified, her face burning, but she fell quickly to obey, glimpsing the Prince's boots to her left as she struggled to keep up with him in crossing the drawbridge. Through a great dim corridor she was led, not daring to raise her eyes, though she could see rich gowns and shining boots all around her. Lords and Ladies were bowing to the Prince on either side of her. There were whispers of greeting, and kisses being thrown, and she was naked, moving on her hands and knees as if she were only some poor animal. But they had reached the mouth of the Great Hall, a room far more vast and shadowy than any in her own castle. An immense fire roared on the hearth, though the sun streamed warm through high narrow windows. It seemed the Lords and Ladies pressed past her, flowing silently along the walls and towards the long wooden tables. Plate and goblets were already set. The air was heavy with the aroma of supper. And then Beauty saw the Queen. She sat at the very end upon a raised dais.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She sat down beside her husband. “You don’t look quite well,” she said. “Yes,” he said; “the doctor’s been with me today and wasted an hour of my time. I feel that someone of our friends must have sent him: my health’s so precious, it seems.” “No; what did he say?” She questioned him about his health and what he had been doing, and tried to persuade him to take a rest and come out to her. All this she said brightly, rapidly, and with a peculiar brilliance in her eyes. But Alexey Alexandrovitch did not now attach any special significance to this tone of hers. He heard only her words and gave them only the direct sense they bore. And he answered simply, though jestingly. There was nothing remarkable in all this conversation, but never after could Anna recall this brief scene without an agonizing pang of shame. Seryozha came in preceded by his governess. If Alexey Alexandrovitch had allowed himself to observe he would have noticed the timid and bewildered eyes with which Seryozha glanced first at his father and then at his mother. But he would not see anything, and he did not see it. “Ah, the young man! He’s grown. Really, he’s getting quite a man. How are you, young man?” And he gave his hand to the scared child. Seryozha had been shy of his father before, and now, ever since Alexey Alexandrovitch had taken to calling him young man, and since that insoluble question had occurred to him whether Vronsky were a friend or a foe, he avoided his father. He looked round towards his mother as though seeking shelter. It was only with his mother that he was at ease. Meanwhile, Alexey Alexandrovitch was holding his son by the shoulder while he was speaking to the governess, and Seryozha was so miserably uncomfortable that Anna saw he was on the point of tears. Anna, who had flushed a little the instant her son came in, noticing that Seryozha was uncomfortable, got up hurriedly, took Alexey Alexandrovitch’s hand from her son’s shoulder, and kissing the boy, led him out onto the terrace, and quickly came back. “It’s time to start, though,” said she, glancing at her watch. “How is it Betsy doesn’t come?...” “Yes,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, and getting up, he folded his hands and cracked his fingers. “I’ve come to bring you some money, too, for nightingales, we know, can’t live on fairy tales,” he said. “You want it, I expect?” “No, I don’t ... yes, I do,” she said, not looking at him, and crimsoning to the roots of her hair. “But you’ll come back here after the races, I suppose?” “Oh, yes!” answered Alexey Alexandrovitch. “And here’s the glory of Peterhof, Princess Tverskaya,” he added, looking out of the window at the elegant English carriage with the tiny seats placed extremely high. “What elegance! Charming! Well, let us be starting too, then.”

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  The Queen massaged her flesh, prodding it, testing it as if for thickness, softness, resilience. She tested Beauty's thighs in the same manner, and then pushed Beauty's knees so far apart and high on the bed that Beauty's hips rose and she felt she was squatting, sprawled apart, over the coverlet, her sex protruding, hanging down, her buttocks surely split so that she resembled a ripe fruit. The Queen's hand was under her sex as if weighing it, feeling the roundness and heaviness of the lips, pinching them. "Arch your back," said the Queen, "and lift your buttocks, little cat, little cat in heat." Beauty obeyed, her eyes flooded with tears of shame. She was trembling violently as she took a deep breath, and against her will felt the Queen's fingers commanding her passion, squeezing the flame so it burned hotter. Surely Beauty's pubic lips were swelling, their juices flowing, no matter how bitterly she struggled against it! She did not want to give anything to this wicked woman, this witch of a Queen. To the Prince she would yield; to Lord Gregory, to nameless and faceless Lords and Ladies who showered her with compliments, but to this woman who despised her...! But the Queen had sat back on the bed beside Beauty, and hastily she gathered up Beauty as if she were a floppy doll and threw her over her lap, her face away from Prince Alexi, her buttocks surely still exposed to his scrutiny. Beauty gave an open-mouthed moan, her breasts rubbed against the coverlet, her sex throbbing against the Queen's thigh. It was as if she were some toy in the Queen's hands. Yes, it was exactly like being a toy, only she was alive, she breathed, she suffered. She could imagine how she appeared to Prince Alexi. The Queen lifted her hair. She ran a finger down Beauty's back to the tip of her spine. "All the rituals," the Queen said in a low voice, "the Bridle Path, the stakes in the garden, the wheels, and then the Hunts in the Maze, and all the other clever games devised for my pleasure, but do I ever know a slave until I have this intimacy with the slave, the intimacy of the slave over my lap ready for punishment? Tell me, Alexi. Shall I spank her with my hand only to sustain this intimacy? Feel her stinging flesh, its warmth, as I watch it change color? Shall I use the silver-back mirror, or one of a dozen paddles that are all excellent for the purpose? What do you prefer, Alexi, when you are over my lap? What is it you hope for even as you are crying?" "You may hurt your hand if you spank her that way," came Prince Alexi's calm answer. "May I get you the silver mirror?" "Ah, but you do not answer my question," the Queen said. "And do get me the mirror. I shall not spank her with it.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  I thought of my limbs, my buttocks, my penis, as hers. But I to truly yield, I had to experience much greater exposure and discipline..." PRINCE ALEXI'S EDUCATION CONTINUES I WON'T tell you the details of my training with the Queen, how I learned to be her valet, my struggles with her annoyance. All this you'll learn in your training with the Prince for in his love for you he intends to make you his maidservant clearly. But these things are nothing when one is devoted to the master or mistress. "I had to learn serenity in facing humiliations that brought others into play, and this was not easy. "My first days with the Queen were mostly training in her bed chamber. I found myself rushing as diligently as Prince Gerald had to obey her slightest whim, and, proving very clumsy with her clothes, was often severely punished. "But the Queen did not want me merely for these servile tasks which other slaves had been trained to perform to perfection. She wanted to study me, to break me down and make of me a toy for her complete amusement." "A toy," Beauty whispered. She had felt like a toy in the Queen's hands exactly. "And it amused her greatly in the first weeks to see me serve other Princes and Princesses for her pleasure. The first I had to serve was Prince Gerald. He was now nearing the end of his service, but he did not know that, and he was in a paroxysm of jealousy at my reformation. The Queen, however, had splendid ideas for rewarding him and soothing him, and at the same time developing me according to her wishes. "Daily he was brought to her chambers and bound with his hands over his head against the wall so that he might watch me struggling with my tasks, and this was a torment to him until he realized that one of my tasks would be to give him pleasure. "I was being driven to distraction then by the Queen's paddle, the flat of her hand, and the struggle to learn grace and accomplishment. All day I fetched, laced shoes, bound girdles, brushed hair, polished jewels, and performed any other menial tasks the Queen wished, my buttocks forever sore, my thighs and calves marked from the paddle, my face stained with tears as any other slave in the castle. "And when the Queen could see that Prince Gerald's jealousy had hardened his penis to extremity, when he was all but ready to discharge his passion without the aid of any stimulant, then she set me to bathing him and satisfying him.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Don't you see, if you think only of pleasing me, and pleasing those to whom I show you, it will be simple for you." He kissed her ear, holding her tight to his chest. "You should have been proud of your breasts and your shapely hips. You should have asked yourself, 'Am I pleasing my Prince? Do the people find me pleasing?'" "Yes, my Prince," Beauty said meekly. "You are mine, Beauty," the Prince said a little more sternly. "And there is no command that you must shrink from obeying ever. If I tell you to please the lowliest vassal in the field, you will strain to obey me perfectly. He is your Lord then because I have said so. All those to whom I offer you are your Lords." "Yes, my Prince," she said, but she was in great distress. He stroked her breasts, pinching them firmly now and then, and kissed her until he could feel her body struggling against him, and feel her nipples growing hard. It seemed she wanted to speak. "What is it, Beauty?" "Pleasing you, my Prince, pleasing you..." she whispered, as though her thoughts had spread into a delirium. "Yes, pleasing me, that is your life now. How many of those in the world know such clarity, such simplicity? You please me and I shall always tell you exactly how to please me." "Yes, my Prince," she sighed. But she was crying again. "I will treasure you all the more for it. The girl I found in the castle room was nothing to me such as you are now, my devoted Princess." But the Prince was not entirely satisfied with the way in which he was instructing Beauty. He told her when they reached another town at nightfall that he was going to strip a little more dignity away from her to make it easier for her. And while the townspeople pressed their faces to the leaded glass windows of the Inn, the Prince had Beauty wait on his table. On her hands and knees she hurried across the rough boards of the Inn floor to fetch his plate from the kitchen. And though she was allowed to walk back with it, she was again on all fours to fetch his flagon. The soldiers devoured their supper, throwing silent glances at her by the light of the fire. She wiped the table for the Prince and when a morsel of food spilled from his plate to the floor, he commanded Beauty to eat it. With tears spilling from her eyes, Beauty obeyed, and then he gathered her, still on her knees, into his arms and rewarded her with dozens of wet and loving kisses. Obediently she put her arms around his neck. But this little morsel spilling had given him an idea.

• From Querelle (1953)

  201 I JEAN GENET doesn't put up with the other stuff. You see I know the scene. But let's not talk about it any more." They had arrived almost at the level of the fortifications, without meeting anybody on their way. Querelle stopped. With the hand holding, the cigarette he touched the detective's shoulder: "Mario." Staring into his eyes, Querelle went on, in a serious tone: "I've lain with N o na, I won't deny that. I just don't want you to get any wrong ideas. I'm not a faggot. I like girls. D'you understand what I'm saying?" "I've got nothing to argue with that. But Nona, or so he says, Nona screwed you in the ass. You can't deny that." "All right, so �e buggered me, but ... " "But it ain't worth wasting your breath about it. I can figure things out for myself. You don't have to go on and on telling me what an hombre you are. I know that for a fact. If you were some mincing faggot, you would've lost your nerve when we had that fight. But you're not the kind of guy who loses his nerve." He put his hand on Querelle's shoulder and gave him a little shove to start walking again. He was smiling, and so was Querelle. "Listen man, we're old enough to talk. You had your scene wit h Nona, and that's no crime. The main thing, the way I see it, is that you had a good time, too. Don't tell me you didn't." Querelle wanted to go on defending himself, but his smile betrayed him. · "Sure, I came. But I don't think there's a guy in the world who wouldn't have.' ' "See, that's it. You had a good time, and no harm done. I bet Non a spunked like a walrus, too-he's such a hot-blooded guy, and you're damn good-looking." "Nothing special about my looks."

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  John Harvey Kellogg, Anthony Comstock, and Sylvester Graham (inventor of Graham crackers—like corn flakes, a food specifically designed to discourage masturbation) were extreme in their grim campaigns against eroticism, but they weren’t considered particularly eccentric at the time.16 Recall that Darwin probably had had little or no personal sexual experience when he married his first cousin a month before his thirtieth birthday, and that Sigmund Freud—the other towering giant of nineteenth-century sexual theory—was a self-proclaimed thirty-year-old virgin when he married in 1886. No wonder Freud was hesitant sexually. According to biographer Ernest Jones, Freud’s father had threatened to cut off young Sigmund’s penis if he didn’t stop his obsessive masturbating.17 The Curse of Calvin Coolidge Last time I tried to make love to my wife nothing was happening. So I said to her, “What’s the matter, you can’t think of anybody either?” RODNEY DANGERFIELD Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV. JERRY SEINFELD There’s a story about President Calvin Coolidge and a chicken farm every evolutionary psychologist knows by heart. It goes like this: The president and his wife were visiting a commercial chicken farm in the 1920s. During the tour, the first lady asked the farmer how he managed to produce so many fertile eggs with only a few roosters. The farmer proudly explained that his roosters happily performed their duty dozens of times each day. “Perhaps you could mention that to the president,” replied the first lady. Overhearing the remark, President Coolidge asked the farmer, “Does each cock service the same hen each time?” “Oh no,” replied the farmer, “he always changes from one hen to another.” “I see,” replied the president. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge.” Whether the story is historically factual or not, the invigorating effect of a variety of sexual partners has become known as “the Coolidge effect.” While there’s little doubt that the females of some primate species (including our own) are also intrigued by sexual novelty, the underlying mechanism appears to be different for them. Thus the Coolidge effect generally refers to male mammals, where it’s been documented in many species.18 But that doesn’t mean women’s only motivation for sex is relational, as is often argued. Psychologists Joey Sprague and David Quadagno surveyed women from twenty-two to fifty-seven years of age and found that among those under thirty-five, 61 percent of the women said their primary motivation for sex was emotional, rather than physical. But among those over thirty-five, only 38 percent claimed their emotional motivations were stronger than the physical hunger for contact.19 At face value, such results suggest women’s motivations change with age. Or one could also argue that this effect could simply reflect women becoming less apologetic as they mature.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  One consolatory reflection upon her conduct had occurred to her at the first moment of the final rupture, and when now she recalled all the past, she remembered that one reflection. “I have inevitably made that man wretched,” she thought; “but I don’t want to profit by his misery. I too am suffering, and shall suffer; I am losing what I prized above everything—I am losing my good name and my son. I have done wrong, and so I don’t want happiness, I don’t want a divorce, and shall suffer from my shame and the separation from my child.” But, however sincerely Anna had meant to suffer, she was not suffering. Shame there was not. With the tact of which both had such a large share, they had succeeded in avoiding Russian ladies abroad, and so had never placed themselves in a false position, and everywhere they had met people who pretended that they perfectly understood their position, far better indeed than they did themselves. Separation from the son she loved—even that did not cause her anguish in these early days. The baby girl—_his_ child—was so sweet, and had so won Anna’s heart, since she was all that was left her, that Anna rarely thought of her son.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Obediently, Beauty looked down, and not knowing what to do with her hands, quickly brought them to the back of the neck. She could almost feel the Prince's satisfaction. "Excellent, my darling," he said. "Isn't she lovely, your Princess?" he said to the tavern girl. "O, yes, your Highness." "Did you talk to her and console her as you were bathing her?" "O, yes, your Highness, I told her how much everyone admired her and how much they wanted to..." "Yes, to see her," the Prince said. There was a pause. Beauty wondered if they were both looking at her, and suddenly she felt herself naked in the sight of both of them. It seemed one or the other she could bear, but both of them staring at her breasts and sex was too much for her. But the Prince embraced her as if seeing that she needed embracing, and gently squeezing her sore flesh, sent another soft shock of shameful pleasure through her. She knew her face was red again. She had always blushed so easily. And were there other ways in which he could tell what his hands did to her? She would cry again if she could not conceal this mounting pleasure. "Down on your knees, my darling," said the Prince with a little snap of his fingers. In a shock Beauty obeyed, seeing the rough floorboards before her. She could see the Prince's black boots, and then the crude leather shoes of the serving girl. "Now, approach your servant and kiss her shoes. Show her how grateful you are for her devotion to you." Beauty didn't stop to think of it. But she felt her tears come again as she obeyed, depositing each kiss on the worn leather of the girl's shoes as gracefully as she could. Above she heard the girl's murmured thanks to the Prince. "Your Highness," the girl said, "it is I who want to kiss my Princess, I beg you." The Prince must have nodded, because the girl fell to her knees, and, stroking Beauty's hair, kissed her upturned face with great reverence. "Now, you see there the posts of the foot of the bed," the Prince said to the girl. Beauty of course knew that the bed had high posts which held a coffered ceiling over it. "Tie your mistress to those posts with her hands and legs quite wide apart so that as I lie down I can look up at her," said the Prince. "Tie her with these satin bands so her skin won't be injured, but tie her very firmly for she must sleep in this position and her weight must not pull her loose." Beauty was stunned. She was in a delirium as she was lifted to stand at the foot of the bed.

• From Querelle (1953)

  221 I QUERELLE to think of him as an invisible man: and was that only because of the fog, or was there another and more fantastic reason? Querelle went through all the papers, and whenever he found one of these stories, he showed it to Gil. The young mason experienced a strange sensat ion when he saw his own name in headline-size letters, for the first time in his life. On the .front page, too. At first it seemed that those words dealt with some one else as well as himself. He blushed and smiled. His excite ment turned the smile into sustained, silent laugh ter, which seemed almost macabre even to himself. That printed name, composed in big fat type, was the name of a murderer, and the murderer to whom it belonged was no more fiction. He existed, in real life. Right next to Mussolini and Mr. Eden. Right above Marlene Dietrich. The papers were talking about a murderer named Gilbert Turko. Gil let the newspaper sink and raised his eyes from the page for a moment in order to see, in himself, in the privacy of his 0\\'11 consciousness, the image of that name. He wanted t o get used to the idea, to establish, once and for all, that the name would be written, printed, and read in ·this fashion for a long time to come. He had to remember it, he had to see it again. Gil made his name (which was a new one, belonging to someone else), and its new and irrevocably defini tive form, run through the entire night of his memory. He let it roam to the .darkest comers, across the roughest terrain, scintil lating with all its lights, carry its sparkl i ng facets into the most intimate retreats he had within himself, and only then did he look at the newspaper page again. He experienced a new shock at seeing his name there, in such real print. And again, a shiver of delightful shame goose-pimpled his body, which now felt quite naked. His name exposed him, it shipped him naked. It was fame, and it was both terrifying and shameful to have entered it through the gate of scorn. Gill had never been alto-