Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin Page B

religious in quality: “To me the big bed was beautiful like a religion. ” 7 She keeps the big bed of her marriage after the death of her husband, not changing it for a single bed as widows are supposed to do; it is another sign that marks her. The tattoo, which was on her breast only for a moment, is indelible in her experience, because the fucking was indelible in her experience, as a sensual obsession surviving her husband’s death, creating a monstrous desire for the sex; that desire—a combination of insatiable longing and lived sensuality, a memory almost physical in its weight and texture—is symbolized by the rose tattoo. She isolates herself in her house for three years, not dressing, sewing to make a living, with the ashes of her dead husband in an urn, serving as part of a religious shrine (with the Madonna); and her mourning is a prolonged sex act, lovemaking that never reaches a climax but becomes more and more fevered, a sexual obsession that is a passion sustained into near madness.
    Alma in Summer and Smoke finds the meaning of life in
[h]ow everything reaches up, how everything seems to be straining for something out of the reach of stone—or human— fingers... To me—well, that is the secret, the principle back of existence—the everlasting struggle and aspiration for more than our human limits have placed in our reach. 8
    Her name means “soul” in Spanish; her symbol is the stone angel named “Eternity” that is in the center of the public square. She is different from everyone around her, even as a child of ten having “ a quality of extraordinary delicacy and tenderness or spirituality in her... She has a habit of holding her hands, one cupped under the other in a way similar to that of receiving the wafer at Holy Communion. ” 9 Asan adult, her speech has an exaggerated elegance that sets her apart as someone who has affectations; she has a nervous laugh, a premature spinsterish-ness. She is concerned with art and literature and higher things. Loud noises shock her. She is a hysteric who swallows air when she laughs or talks and has palpitations of the heart. John, the dissolute doctor whom she has loved since they were both children, diagnoses her as having “aDoppelgangerand theDoppelgangeris badly irritated. ” 10 TheDoppelgangeris the sexuality hidden inside of her. She is marked by it, however deeply it is hidden. But she is also marked, stigmatized, by her purity, the intensity of her soul, her refusal to be diverted from it. Each is the same energy to different ends. “‘Under the surface, ”’John tells her, “'you have a lot of excitement, a great deal more than any other woman I have met. ’” 11 She is not being disingenuous when she says that she wants more than the physical sex—pedestrian by the standard of her soul—that he is offering: “Some people bring just their bodies. But there are some people, there are some women, John—who can bring their hearts to it, also—who can bring their souls to it! ” 12 He challenges her to show him the soul on a chart of human anatomy: “It shows what our insides are like, and maybe you can show me where the beautiful soul is located on the chart. ” 13 In the sad ending, he has come around to her way of thinking, as he puts it, “that something else is in there, an immaterial something—as thin as smoke... ” 14 But Alma has abandoned the ambitions of her soaring soul; she wants sex with him, an intense connection of physical passion. Denied by him, she ends up wandering late in the nights to the stone angel in the public square, taking little white pills and picking up traveling salesmen. Whether ethereal or promiscuous, she is an outsider because of the intensity and purity of her longing. She wanted absolute love—by definition, an uncompromising passion— and this great ambition, so outside the bounds of human possibility, ends up being met by strangers and pills. The strangers and the pills provide the