Seductress (25 page)

By the time Germaine met the man of her life, Benjamin Constant, she was, at twenty-eight, Europe’s “leading woman of letters.” Benjamin, an intellectual giant in his own right, explained his
coup de foudre.
“Her mind dazzled me,” he recalled; “within an hour she had secured over me the greatest sway that a woman can gain over a man.” Unlike her usual male lineup, Benjamin was nothing to look at: a tall, rawboned Ichabod Crane of a man in green glasses, with curly red hair tied back in a pigtail. But he fascinated women and rivaled Germaine in ego, genius, and high-decibel drama.

For ten years they were locked in a tempestuous tango, with Benjamin raving that she’d magically enslaved him with her voice. They had a daughter together, but parted in a mad dog flameout when Germaine refused to marry him after the baron’s death. Still, over the ensuing years she had only to snap her fingers or stage one of her breast-bearing arias to bring him back “a conquered man.” He moaned, “No one will ever appreciate my mind as completely as she does.”

Their furious melodrama, rather than sapping Germaine’s mental energies, fueled them. During their roller-coaster romance, while Germaine trifled with lovers on the side (three noblemen a decade her junior, an Italian poet, an Australian officer, and a scholar who declared himself her “slave” and accompanied her everywhere for the rest of her life), she produced her major philosophic works.

As she loved, so she thought. All the themes of her epoch-making books were of apiece with her erotics. Even her intellectual methodology, the alternation between engagement and detachment, mirrored her back-and-fill seductive style. Her ideology was a still closer fit. In both
On Literature
and
On Germany,
her masterpieces, she fused brains and eros and exalted women and feelings. Criticism should be an “act of love,” fiction should privilege emotions, the “superior woman” should reign supreme, and the governing sensibility of society should be liberal, imaginative, and passionate.

Her two fictional heroines, Delphine and Corinne (modeled on herself), introduced a revolutionary new woman to Western culture: a rebellious, autonomous, high-souled queen of thought who seduces men with her brains and conversation. If she’s killed off at the end, it’s a mere pro forma ploy to allay anxieties about female superpower. Germaine, on the other hand, charged ahead with her heaven-storming ambitions, immune to opinion. Her range was goddess size, encompassing every discipline from drama to theology and every interesting man on the Continent.

With age she reached her zenith. As a philosopher she held a “position comparable to Voltaire’s”; as a seductress, “Cleopatra’s.” Banished to Switzerland by Napoleon because of her pernicious influence, Germaine escaped to England in 1813 with her male entourage. Included this time in the retinue was a “splendid animal” half her age who’d seen her across a crowded ballroom and declared he would “love her so much she [would] have to marry him.”

The twenty-three-year-old John Rocca wooed Germaine (then a blowsy forty-four) with such fanatical resolve—challenging Benjamin to a duel and scaring off her acolytes—that she married him after the birth of their child. But her happiness was short-lived. Soon after their first anniversary and the publication of some of her best work, she died of a brain hemorrhage at fifty-one, followed swiftly by the inconsolable Rocca.

Her death stunned the men whose lives she’d “transformed and dominated” and shattered Benjamin Constant, whose spirit was permanently “extinguished.” Such an arrant diva, however, could not have been universally mourned. Her male detractors, who called her an “infernal slut” and “witch emerging from a sabbat,” heaved a sigh of relief. So did her countless female enemies, fed up with her insufferable sideshows and love thefts.

Germaine loved to harp on her social persecutions and griped that brilliant women were always envied, loathed, trashed, and dumped by men. Both of her fictional
femmes savantes
are annihilated by public disapproval and male perfidy. Love and brainpower cannot coexist, she stormed. But she knew better. It was just smoke and camouflage to conceal her true sexual authority and disproportionate share of the spoils.

In actuality she had an ego the size of Gibraltar and ballyhooed her self-integration, brains, and seductive feats to anyone who’d listen. “Monsieur,” she told Henry Crabb Robinson, “I understand everything that deserves to be understood and what I do not understand is nothing.” To her beaux, she bragged of her sexual fascinations and body count, and she never doubted her right to both erotic and intellectual conquest.

She saw herself as a sibyl reborn, not Apollo’s hireling but her earlier incarnation, priestess of the fertility goddess. In Corinne’s climactic scene, she wears sibylline robes and lectures a group of entranced men on the great truths at the mouth of the Cumean cave, originally known as the “marriage bower.” These truths, like Inanna’s, derive from a “descent into” and “ascent from the underworld,” a maturity passage of exile and persecution.

But Germaine emerged from her trials, such as they were, a fulsomely happy woman, even by her own exacting definition. She transcended her looks, developed her “abilities,” reconciled “love and Euclid,” and won the love of the best men with her “magic gift of seduction.” “One must adore her,” said a Russian Casanova who knelt before this “Sultana of Mind” and wept.

 

By all rights, the scholar-siren should now be in her element. With women’s assimilation into the intellectual mainstream, sexual liberation, and seductive parity, Our Lady of Learning should have men and the world at her feet. Dizzy blondes and cute mutes went out with Sandra Dee; we flash our minds with our cleavages in the mating game. Or do we?

According to some disturbing new data, we may still be stalked by negative stereotypes, the myth that brains and allure don’t mix. Sixty-eight percent of young women—in an achievement backlash—want to zone out mentally and keep house in the suburbs. Dr. Barbara Kerr believes the “underachievement and undercultivation of gifted women” have reached epidemic proportions. Afraid that IQ imperils romantic success, girls drop off academically from high school through college and lower their beams in love, relapsing into the antique strategies of “selective stupidity” and
e-z
listening. Pop how-tos fuel the dumbout.
The Rules
warns against behaving like another “smart girl,” and
Secrets of Seduction for Women
ranks “trying to appear smart” number ten on the list of “classic turnoffs.”

Times like these call for a higher authority, the mythic goddess of wisdom and sexual passion and her earthly counterparts. All seven of the scholar-sirens make mincemeat of the nerd propaganda. In societies equally, if not more, savante-phobic, they came out, spoke out, and used their brains to seduce, enthrall, and hold the grandees of their times. They shared much of course with other seductresses. They were big, conceited dames: wild, fun, free, alive, over the top, hot-sexed, androgynous, and adroit in love. Saboteurs of the status quo, they cast off feminine constraints and cut their lives to their own pattern, a prehistoric pattern. They were no strangers to hate campaigns and persecutions. They exploded the stereotypes.

As intellectuals, however, they put their own imprint on the seductress persona. If they lucked out in genes and good educations, they had to be tougher. They walked into the eye of male prejudice. In-fighters from childhood, they bulldozed gender norms, gave conventional mothers no quarter, defected to supportive men, worked like demons, and aggressively tracked down and nabbed the best mentors.

They avoided smart women’s biggest sand trap—the submergence of self into a Great Man—and stubbornly pursued their own agendas and self-fulfillment. Because they liked and wanted men, they put their minds to seduction, mastering the moves and rolling out their secret weapon, knowledge. They didn’t tone it down or pipe down. On the other hand, they didn’t come on like rhino trainers either. They strutted their brilliance with charm: wit, eloquence, and a thousand arts of enchantment.

In love they chose carefully, men in their corner who cherished and advanced them. They didn’t lose their heads on the rapids, nor did they squash or dominate their partners. Relationships were equal, mutually inspirational. But when the music died and the inner goddess beckoned, they moved on. They tended to ramble, sample the goods, and chuck domestica.

Intellectually they were just as unorthodox and on the move. They went to town in their specialties and staked out revolutionary territory. Goddess-style, they took a holistic, comprehensive view of knowledge that included sex. In their work they sought a new and improved eros: gender equality, mind-body synthesis, female agency, sexual fulfillment, and sustained passion, with women—the natural mistresses of the field—at the helm. Practical instructions weren’t above them. Although women blackballed and assailed them, they tipped them off on the realpolitik of seduction and clamored for feminine freedom and a happiness equal to their own.

Their composite mental and amorous enchantments made beauty, even when they had it, irrelevant. Their lives give the consummate lie to babe and ditz power, both macho scams designed to keep women in their place. The truth is, a woman with brains can pulverize men and drive them around the bend: to infidelity, opium overdoses, public tears, tantrums in hotel corridors, and plunges down staircases and mountain precipices.

Real men have always admitted the earth-toppling sex appeal of intelligent women. “A well-educated woman,” said Stendhal, “is sure to inspire among the most distinguished men a consideration that verges on the fanatical.” Literature teems with scholar-vamps, and a recent
Esquire
survey ranks “intelligence” the second most desired trait in women.

The reason for the libidinal pull of learning is rooted in prehistory, deep in the anlage of myth and courtship. “Both males and females,” writes Timothy Taylor of the origins of sexual attraction, “may have found larger brains sexier.”

For men, though, they carried a special charge. They replicated the mythic first goddess, the divine know-it-all and sexual energy of the cosmos. Her avatars throughout history, not surprisingly, have wiped up the mat with the competition, the mere beauty queens. It’s chromosomal. Men can’t escape. Like Inanna’s lover, Dumuzi, they must bulge, “burgeon,” and do woman’s bidding when she steps from the “Boat of Heaven” with her
me
’s—the intellectual gifts of persuasion, judgment, psychological insight, computation, and philosophy—and robes herself in “allure,” “the art of woman,” and the “agate necklace of fertility.”

CHAPTER SIX

Sorcières:
Siren-Artists

 

 

 

Artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning delight.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE

 

[Seduction is] the female imaginary.
—JEAN BAUDRILLARD

 

—ÉDOUARD SCHURÉ

 

 

 

If it is chaste, it is not art.
—PABLO PICASSO

 

 

 

 

 

O
n a spring morning in 1827 the French artist Pierre Paul Prud’hon stepped back from his easel to check his latest painting, a soft-core Venus-and-Cupid allegory of the sort preferred by the Parisian haut monde. Behind him in the adjoining atelier worked his disciple the painter Constance Mayer, who’d served and adored him for twenty years. Just days before she’d staged a nasty scene. When he said he no longer loved her, she had not taken it with good grace. “I am ugly!” she’d shrieked hysterically. Now all was quiet in her studio, suspiciously so. When Prud’hon opened the door, he found Constance sprawled in a pool of blood, her neck slashed to the bone, with his razor in her hand.

The lives of female artists are full of such scenes. A successful art career by tradition wrecks a woman for love. The story of the great diva, dancer, poet, or painter laid low by romantic passion is one of the most enduring myths of Western culture. Novels, films, and biographies drub it into girls from grade school: Fly too high creatively, and you’ll draw a just doom on your head; you’ll wind up manless, miserable, two-timed, and driven to self-loss, madness, and suicide.

Dated as it sounds, this passé conceit still thrives. We hear endlessly of Maria Callas’s and Sylvia Plath’s calamitous unions with philandering brutes, of Mary Cassatt’s lonely spinsterhood, of Camille Claudel’s Rodin-induced insanity, of Alma Mahler’s sacrifice of a great piano career for muse service to a string of tiresome geniuses. We’re still haunted by the ancestral paternal voices warning of turf wars and dark reprisals: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and it ought not to be”; “The woman who is an artist is merely ridiculous,” a she-man, a “dog walking on his hinder legs,” a wallflower, freak, and castrating bitch.