A Woman's Place, Where Exactly Is That? - Nancy Potter's Journey From Nymphet To Kitchen To Call Girl And Back

Whore or Saint? Women, caught between social and biological imperatives and natural sexual desire, try both and, confident of their ability to sort right from wrong, good from bad, decide who they are.  

Nancy Potter was no different except that she was a nymphet, Vladimir Nabokov's creation of a young girl, precocious beyond her years, aware of her sexual allure and sexual destiny, and determined to explore every inner room of a demanding nature that she didn't choose but which was nevertheless hers. 

She experimented early on.  She was no more than eight or nine when she asked Bobby Vale to join her in the woods.  The boy, barely out of emotional diapers, clueless about everything except Legos, Pokémon, and basketball, and still very much a mamma's boy, stood there dumbfounded as Nancy pulled down his pants.  

The squirrels chattering in the trees knew more about what was happening than he, but as deaf and dumb as he was about sex, he had an inkling that what Nancy was doing was not right, in a class by itself, and reserved only for adults.

Nancy was a tigress in middle school and a vixen in high school, but only at her small liberal arts college in the Midwest did she change direction. While no one ever thought that devilish Nancy would sail a different tack, she turned out to be a whiz at numbers.  Not just 1+1 kinds of numbers but negative numbers, imaginary numbers, number series, and number theory.  For four years she was more interested in solving Fermat's theorem than removing her drawers.  

This early adventurism, said Harvard Professor of Psychobiology Adam Brookings, is not atypical of the prematurely sexual female, nor is its temporary hibernation:

Nabokov was on to something, writing as he did of the nymphet, a pre-pubescent girl of primal sexuality.  There are such girls, endowed with an extra-sensory ability fine tuned for sexual adventure and gratification.  These girls, in the shadows because of a persistent sexual obscurantism, are women from the day they are born; women born to mate early and often.

The particularly highly-evolved woman is multi-dimensional, trading, diverting, but always returning to form.  Such sexually urgent females are rare but permanent fixtures on the asymptotes of the bell curve.

What Professor Brookings did not say was that the trajectory of such complex women can include regression, a pulling in of sexual antenna and deploying other, more traditional sensors of womanhood. 

And so it was that Nancy turned ingenue, sexual innocent, woman of virtue, fidelity, and hearth-and-home desires. The third phase of her sexual history had begun.  She married and married well; but for her, now the very image of a fertile, reproductive, full-bodied woman, social status was unimportant.  

It was the giving birth, the ultimate expression of femaleness and femininity that mattered.  The sexual act, always enjoyed, became indescribably passionate for it was the means to reproduction.  That in itself was destiny. 

However after a decade of childbearing, childrearing, and sexual fidelity, the quieted, banked sexual energies returned with renewed urgency.  The years of motherhood and dutiful second fiddle were over and she was on her own once again. 

 

The string of lovers was little more than irrelevant strands, threads come loose, bothersome irritants.  Like Portia in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, she entertained her male suitors, dismissing each in turn.  They were a pompous, self-absorbed, immature, ignorant lot, and she toyed with them, played with their hopelessly infantile assumptions, and finally settled for the pick of the litter, the importuning Bassanio. 

Nancy would be damned if she settled for a Bassanio or any other of his kind, at least not before she stepped out a bit, exposed that inexplicable sexuality within, and took as many lovers as possible - not for marriage but for the simple, pure feeling of being sought after, desirable, and irresistible. 

Belle de Nuit is a film about a woman like Nancy Potter - an aristocratic woman whose ordinary upper middle class  married French life was nothing more than a purgatory of good intentions.  Lovers are no anodyne to the desperation and the sexual desuetude of marriage, and she becomes a call girl.

Nancy was equally disaffected with the life for which she had been programmed and was following.  She, like Belle de Nuit would become available to all and would revel in the anonymity and the pure femaleness of her enterprise. 

She became once again her own woman with a growing reputation for sexual versatility. She was the primus inter pares of Washington call girls.

This uninhibited, anonymous, sex was what she always had wanted - the ultimate sexual freedom, the defining exercise of free will.

The Belle de Nuit syndrome is but a temporary phase in the sexual life of the pre-pubescent sex queen - an exuberant excess, correct, and an inextinguishable validation of womanhood.  Once a woman has passed through that defining period, she can return to anything more ordinary.

In Nancy's case it was Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen. There was nothing more satisfying after an interlude of uncompromising sex than returning to her farm family in Iowa - the family which had dismissed and ignored her during her fugue but who welcomed her back at its end.

She was Mrs. Tyler Blanding of Ames, mother of four, marvelous cook, wife, and choir leader of the First Methodist Church of Christ.  After a personal Hejira as defining, powerful, and transformative as Muhammed's crusade from Mecca to Spain, she settled down.  The sexual genie had finally been satisfied.