Tennessee Williams, Baby Doll And Pure Sexuality - The Indefinable Sexual Allure Of The Select Few

De Joan Merchant was born and raised in a dry spit of land in the middle of Eddy Lafourche a cypress tangle of alligators, swamp rats, and cottonmouths where her father dredged, fished, trapped and netted every live thing that lived in that backwater.  Every morning after cornpone, fatback, and coffee he set out into the swamp to check his trap line.  If he was lucky he might come upon a panther, raccoon, or opossum, but usually came back with a haul of catfish and a water snake or two. 

Alvin Merchant often wondered why he stayed put, waterlogged and penurious in this forgotten place, but his family had always lived in or near the swamp, denizens of it no different than crocodiles, alligators, and black bears. It might have been different if his children had been restive, anxious for New Orleans or Charleston; but they seemed to take to the watery life. De Joan was a good helper, a real trooper, and Alvin relied on her for her sharp eyes, willingness to work, and good spirit. 

The Merchant place was not the only cabin in the woods and were not alone in the swamp. Other families clustered on the land, built a church and a school, ferried goods to and from the swamp, and lived a happy though meager existence.  The residents were not bothered by taxes, limits, or revenuers and in a way lived in a forgotten idyll. 

Yet the charm, the simple allure of a quiet, natural life began to fade once De Joan reached early adolescence.  Most girls mature slowly, evenly, progressively into womanhood, but it all came at once to the Merchant girl who found herself in full womanhood before she was out of he fifth grade. As remarkably she was fully aware of her sexuality, that particular female potency that comes to very few at such a young age. 

She toyed with the boys of her age, a sexually diffident lot, attracted older ones who sniffed out a female in heat as sharply s a black bear, and had sex with Harper Ward, wholesaler and landowner from Lanier who visited Eddy Lafourche in the Spring and Fall. 'Come visit me', said Harper, and one day De Joan took the outboard through the swamp to the bayou and to the small own of Lanier. 

Tennessee Williams wrote about Baby Doll Meighan in his screenplay for Baby Doll and she could have been De Joan Merchant.  'A voluptuous girl under twenty, on a bed, the covers thrown off' is Williams' opening liner notes. She is simple and uneducated, but with a languor and irresistible feline sexuality no man can refuse. 

 

Williams was fascinated with sex and sexuality, perhaps best expressed in A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley is a sex object, the male version of Baby Doll - a simple, man with a primitive virility - a sexual allure which overcomes notions of class, intelligence, or sophistication.  He for Williams is male sexuality, undiluted, unrestrained, and unaffected by opprobrium or dissent. 'We've had this date with each other since the beginning', he tells Blanche.  Stanley's pure machismo and Blanche's matching sexual desire make sex inevitable.  There is an ineluctable potency to the attraction, a pre-human, animal need; something beyond debate or consideration. 

Baby Doll is the feminine version of Stanley - sexually desirous, infinitely desirable, and irresistible to all men.  She represents the purest, unadulterated female sexuality.  There is only the sexual urge, the desire to be taken, the irrepressible need for sexual satisfaction.  

Like Baby Doll, De Joan Merchant had no idea what drove her to Lanier and into the bed of Harper Ward except for his intent. Some men are like that, wrote Williams, incapable of restraint, invulnerable, and driven only by desire for women.  Blanche calls Stanley a brute, barely evolved from the apes, an evolutionary throwback, a primitive; and she is right. He is more animal than human, a proto-male, an unstoppable sexual desire. 

So it was not surprising that De Joan motored her launch out of the swamp to Ward's bed.  She could smell him five miles off through the twists and turns in the swamp, past the nests of water moccasins, the burrows of voles, and fox lairs, through the cypress roots, the narrows where moss and wild lilie.  s clogged her way, out to open water and the bayou to tie up at the Ward dock. 

Vaccaro, Baby Doll's lover wants her as a woman but also as the instrument of vendetta.  Her husband has burned down Vaccaro's cotton mill, and taking his wife was the ultimate vengeance.  The play is one of deliberate, canny, practiced seduction highlighting another one of Williams' frequent themes - sex has its consequences, usually ignored because of the nature of sexual desire.  Yet Baby Doll is powerless, so aroused by male pursuit is she. 

 

'Saint or sinner' has been the male take on femininity since the beginning, and the most adept women have blended the two into an irresistible, indistinguishable mix; but the Baby Dolls and De Joan Merchants of the world - and their Stanley Kowalski male counterparts - are far less devious and complex.  They are throwbacks, sexual creations alone, primitive in nature only but expressively mature in their understanding of their desire and its effect on others. 

Woody Allen, an admirer of Tennessee Williams created a Baby Doll-De Joan character in his movie Match Point.  In a cafe scene, the future lover of the Scarlett Johannsen character says 'You realize the effect you have on men, don't you'.  She replies, 'No one has asked for their money back'.  

She is irresistible in a Baby Doll way - soft, pliable, welcoming, infinitely desirable - and her lover cannot stay away. 

Most women are circumspect in their desire.  They are looking for a proper mate; and most men may dally with insignificant women, they have their eyes on the prize.  The very few do not deny that part of their nature which makes them indelibly male or female, accept that it is what defines them, determines them, and completes their design. 

Vladimir Nabokov in his novel Lolita creates what he calls a nymphet, a young girl with a preternatural sexuality- a sexuality that describes and motivates her more than anything else; and in parallel creates an older man who cannot resist her - a man with the same indefinable male desire as that of Stanley, a desire which becomes an obsession. 

D.H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover creates the same scenario but with a more oblique obsession. The two lovers want 'sexual mutuality', that coming together which Lawrence considers epiphanic.  Sex is not only on everyone's mind, it is the be-all and end-all of human experience. 

Baby Dolls rarely end up well.  Baby Doll Meighan is used by Vaccaro, De Joan Merchant was passed from lover to lover and ended up back in Eddy Lafourche catching swamp rats, catfish, and beavers; but this does not deny the principle - they were Darwinian prizes. 

Islam, The Religion Of Peace - Except For The Nasty Bits About The Jews

Fatma Yilmaz was a polite, God-fearing, devout and considerate Muslim who fasted, prayed,  and read the Quran.  She visited the elderly, sick and shut-ins during Ramadan, observed all the Muslim holidays in a generous spirit of family and community, and hoped that Allah would smile upon her faith and good works. 

She was critical of selective readings of the Quran, those  Suras that urge death to the infidel, speak of the hateful, insidious and genocidal nature of the Jews, demand an unquestioning faith in the will of Allah, and foresee an ultimate world Islamic caliphate realized through the force of arms. 

'Nothing of the sort', she insisted.  These verses have only to do with Islamic solidarity, unified faith in Allah and the hope for a spiritual Utopia and the rest of the Quran reflects the central ethos of Islam, that it is a religion of peace.

'Islam is a gutter religion' said social critic Christopher Harkins in a speech to the Athanasius Society, 'a theocratic bulldozing Genghis Khan juggernaut masquerading as faith.  A nonsensical, hysterical, absurd quackery with the gall to claim divine inspiration.  The sooner the world is relieved of this insensate crock, the better'. 

Easier said than done, of course, since Islam continues to attract adherents - 'marginalized cultural derelicts in the sinkholes of the Third World' who, desperate for some mantle of respectability and social promise, have taken to 'the world's religious freak show'. 

When Israel countered the Hamas terrorist attacks on Jerusalem, Fatma demurred, insisting on the divine right of Islamic destiny, the necessary elimination of the Jews, and the expansion of Islamic rule throughout the Middle East and the world

 . 

The expansionist, hegemonistic, aggressive move to spread Islam by any means possible and to create a world sanctioned by Allah with no dissenters was inspired, ineluctable, and certain. 

Most of the Islamic world is illiterate, uneducated, and dying of preventable disease.  It is a failed culture, said Harkins, a humiliating example of ignorant, bullheaded, reflexive faith. 

Fatma was vehement in her objection.  Islam was a civilizing force, spreading the world of Allah and the divine principles of the faith worldwide.  ISIS, al-Shabab, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis were not terrorists but divine emissaries, crusaders as anointed and holy as any of Pope Clement's crusader armies. 

Why were Muslims always getting the short end of the stick?  Why after medieval brilliance, algebra, zero, and astronomy, had Muslims fallen so far off the rails. Why in the Middle East were Syrian, Iraqi, and Lebanese Muslims still stuck in mud while Israelis enjoyed a European standard of living? Why was backwardness endemic in Muslim communities? And why this persistent, viral, bilious hatred of Jews?

'Many of my friends are Jews' said Mehmet Erdogan, Turkish weaver and manager of Istanbul Fabrics, proprietor of a wholesale garment warehouse in Bethesda.  Mehmet Bey had made his fortune in America, but he was exaggerating his inclusive, multicultural claim. All the Jews he had known were money-grubbing weasels, sniveling little hawk-nosed miscreants out only to make a buck.

'Enough of this bullshit' said Fatma's brother Ahmed, a tailor at Mehmet Bey's establishment, who was bound and determined to test the inter-cultural waters.  'Jewish women are women', he said to Mehmet Bey and made overtures to Esther Pilchman, assistant cutter at a rival factory, in a calculating measure of inter-ethnic harmony.  

The whole idea of a Jewish lover - kinky hair, smelling of smoked fish, sallow skin and a watchmaker’s hunchback - was repulsive, but he had to know.  Thee must be some commonality.  After all Islam and Judaism were both Abrahamic religions, neither community ate pork, and both were halal and prayed to one God.

 

'Don't ask', he replied to his brothers who said, 'Disgusting Jew', but he had been tempted by those full Syrian lips, the swarthiness of Palestine, and the eagerness of a New York Jewish princess.  He never let on how taken he was by The Jezebel of Orchard Street.

On Friday at the mosque he prayed with his Muslim brothers but noticed for perhaps the first time, the absence of women. Of course the Quran pronounced them unclean harlots, trollops, and common whores and his sexual life would be one of cold penury - wife Mariam lying under the sheets to preserve her dignity while he labored over her.

Better a Jew than one of these bagged, passionless Muslim hags.

And then he met Marlise Finch, as white, Christian, and wholesome as could be, a woman who could strip him of his faith and Muslim identity and leave him standing there naked, alone and desperate for more. 

She had always wanted to sleep with a Muslim.  They couldn't all be 9/11 bombers, ISIS terrorists, and incarcerating Saudi camel-jockeys, and so it was that she and Mehmet Bey began their brief, exhausting experimental affair in her Soho loft walkup. 

She, according to the Quran was an infidel, a non-believer, a dismal variant of the divine canon.  She was a free spirit - just what he wanted.; but just as he was getting used to the sight of a naked woman welcoming his advances,  a wave of guilty apostasy choked him, stunted his curiosity and desire.  He was a Muslim eunuch. 

'Allah has condemned me', he said, 'consigned me to a Muslim purgatory.  Here I am a good Muslim desirous of ridding the world of apostasy but only a failed, shameful Christian idolater. 

After Friday prayers Mehmet sought out the imam of the mosque and confessed his fall from grace. 'I have sinned, Blessed One, I have consorted with a Jew and a Christian harlot'.  

Now, confession is not within the Muslim catechism, so the imam was taken by surprise at the young man's candor. 

Frustrated in love and hating the Jew even more because of it, he joined a radical Muslim political group hewing to the Islamic party line and became a crusader, a man in the avant garde of the movement to establish a Muslim caliphate and to rid the world of infidels. 

'Whoever said Islam was a religion of peace?', he asked. 'We are militants, crusaders, Turkic soldiers in the neo-armies of Genghis Khan. Heads on stakes is our meme'. 

Liberals in America shout 'Islamophobia' when conservatives call out the rising, violent militancy of Islam; but soon progressive heads will roll. Inclusivity is the Devil's playground, and Islamic zealots cannot wait to take scalps from the credulous American dupes.

Tales Of First Love, Innocence, And Obsession - Nabokov, Lolita, And Everyone Else

Coleman Silk, the main character in Phillip Roth's novel, The Human Stain, is having an affair with a much younger woman - an uneducated, barely literate woman with a psychopathic, stalking ex-husband. Coleman's friend warns him and says the relationship can only end badly. At best he will end up disappointed, at worst dead at the hands of the husband. 

Coleman pauses, looks at his friend and says, 'Granted, she's not my first love, and granted she's not my best love; but she certainly is my last love.  Doesn't that count for something?'

All three loves recalled are unforgettable. Everyone remembers their first love, an adolescent, unformed, but irresistible passion. No one can forget their best love - we replay the tape over and over again in our minds; and those who discover love much later in life and find in a December-May affair a satisfaction they never knew they had lost, lead a charmed life.  

Of all three it is the first, young love which is most indelible, the one by which all other loves are measured, an ultimate love ironically experienced at the very beginning. 

Vladimir Nabokov describes this profound yet limiting love in Lolita. There can be no love more pure and absolute than that within the embrace of innocence, he says, a love before either child even knows what it means or is supposed to mean and therefore of a virginal purity, 'a divine sublimity'.  Yet that love necessarily confines one within endless comparisons. 

Here speaking of Annabel, Humbert says:

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do.

 After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage.

There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other’s salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief

Humbert instinctively knew then that his childhood friendship with her was special, irreplaceable, and unforgettable.  How could he not then compare her with every other woman he met? He had known Annabel in an impossibly unique time and place.

When he meets Lolita, time collapses - she is Annabel and first love can be rediscovered and relived:

It was the same child - the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day.

And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side.

With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts -that last mad immortal day behind the 'Roches roses.' The twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.

Time is what Humbert sought to abolish. Time is the enemy of all lovers. Obsession has a life of its own: the object, however irreplaceable and particular it seems, can change, though it is in the nature of obsession not to recognize that.

Humbert is fortunate and unfortunate. Fortunate because he discovered love and innocence - romantic perfection - and unfortunate because no experience could ever match up to the purity, the beauty, and the almost spiritual essence of that first love. 

An unpublished story on the nature of innocence, and the foundational value it has to love, restates the theme:

Nancy Bell pulled her dress up over her head and stood naked as the water droplets from the ferns dripped onto her face and arms.  “They are my jewels”, she said to Henry Halter, “and one day you can buy me real ones.”

It was cool and dark in the woods behind his house.  Once when he was little he got lost in the woods and thought he would never find his way out. There were bears and wolves, and he might wander for days without finding his way home. 

For years he never set foot in the woods until Nancy Bell had asked him.  He knew that the wild animals were not real, but he still hesitated at the mountain laurel bushes at the back of their yard, and never took the narrow path into the woods. That was how childhood worked, he later thought, full of crazy imaginary things that scared you, and one day you woke up and they weren’t there anymore, and the woods was just a dark, wet place where you would prefer not to go.

Nancy Bell sat next to him in school the next day, so close together in the auditorium that their legs touched.  She smelled fresh and clean, like talcum powder and lilac soap, and she was wearing the same dress that she had worn in the woods.  He noticed a bit of dried oak leaf on her dress that she had not seen and remembered how she had put her clothes neatly in a pile on a mossy patch under his father’s favorite tree.

In June before the mosquitoes started biting, they sat naked in the woods and told stories to each other.  Nancy made up the rules and said that no story could be about their parents or brothers and sisters. “Make them up”, she said. “Make everything up”, and so each afternoon before the mosquitoes hatched from the wet oak leaves and puddles where the rain sluiced down the tallest trees and collected beneath them, they invented places where there were no people but people-animals.

 “Your house has disappeared”, Nancy said, “and so has mine. All we can see is the trees and the squirrels. I have made everything outside the woods disappear.”

Henry compared every woman he met with Nancy Bell; and they never measured up.  They were too matter-of-fact or too determined; too focused or too deliberate and precise.  None had Nancy’s ability to change things to suit her or to make things go away. Henry was never fully aware that she was doing this to him, making his choices for him; and when he once considered it, he laughed. They were only children, after all, and one summer with Nancy Bell was nothing. So what was it, then?

Nabokov believed that the past was far more than a part of a time-space continuum, but the most important one.  The present is a chimera, he said, imagined milliseconds of ‘reality’, bounded by the possibility of the future and the long, defining, significance of what went before.  

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for

We are not just determined by the past.  We are the past. First loves are never lost.

Is the obsession worth the frustration? The endless comparisons, the repeated failures to measure up? A moot question.   A love for Annabel or Nancy Bell is ineradicable, as present now as it was then, as determinant and inescapable as ever. 

Humbert did not exchange Annabel for Lolita - they were one and the same.  Henry Halter might never find another Nancy Bell, but if he did, the two would be as indistinguishable.  First loves are permanent.