Darlings!!
I recently had the privilege of meeting, in person, my icon, my inspiration, my heroine, Susan Griffin. She is the author of a book that has had a huge impact on my life and work, "The Book of the Courtesans". Susan is one of the great seductresses of the English language. She can spin a word, a phrase, wind around a sentence, and extract the hot molten core of her subject while slowly weaving you inside her erotic spell. And there she was, this Pulitzer Prize Finalist and NEA grant recipient, on the Mastery stage, and then, in the Palace for a special private appearance for Inner Circle, introducing us to the deeper layers of her work, and the stories behind the stories. I am still rippling in the wake of her visit.
--- Mama Gena
School of Womanly Arts: What attracted you to the courtesans? Why did you decide to study them?
Susan Griffin: I was writing a book about having had an illness, and when I write about anything in my life, I like to combine it with some sort of history. I had an exchange with someone about how you look at psychosomatic medicine, and he spoke about Camille as a positive framing of someone who is ill. I became fascinated by the story because it had a lot of the elements that I was interested in. I did some research and found that it was actually based on a real woman, a courtesan whom Alexandre Dumas’s son knew. I did some background research into her life and learned about the phenomena of courtesans. There existed this whole group of women in Europe, vaguely similar to Japanese Geishas in talent and skill, but with more freedom. They had independence; they were the only group of women who, categorically speaking, had financial independence. They lived a much better lifestyle than prostitutes and often had a better education then upper class women. They began to fascinate me. Some were writers, poets, playwrights or novelists. Many of them were brilliant and talented, and I decided that I wanted to write about them.
SWA: Their stories are incredible… How does that translate for modern day women?
SG: I don’t think it can. It was a tradition that was wholly dependent on the circumstances that created it. The closest to it in today’s world would be very highly paid call girls who have social skills in addition to erotic skills, including skills around relating to people and creating a mood, being cultured, and dressing very well. That would be the closest, but call girls aren’t public figures like courtesans were.
Historically, the tradition evolved to the celebrity of movie stars. Look at Sarah Bernhardt: she was a courtesan and an actress, and that was true of many women who were actors in the late 19th century. Sarah Bernhardt was one of the greatest actors on the stage, so her story is especially extraordinary. Mogador performed in the circus, then she acted in plays, then she wrote plays and many of them were produced. She made a reputation in the public dance halls with her famous dance, then she moved up from there. She became a courtesan from the celebrity that she gained as a great dancer in the music hall.
The whole movement into celebrity was something that very much originated with the courtesans. They were written about in these weekly journals (the equivalent of tabloids) that would print gossip about courtesans – what they were wearing, who they were out with, what restaurants they habitutated. There are some other transitional figures like Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo who were known to sleep with more than one person to climb the ladder; of course, that is an old Hollywood story. But the whole idea of sleeping their way to the top is silly when you talk about someone like Dietrich or Garbo, because they were very talented. It’s just that this was part of their talents and their strategies.
You also have people also like Pamela Harriman, who was very charismatic and attractive. She gained power and became ambassador to France through a series of erotic connections and marriages. She engaged in serial marriages, which is not exactly the same thing as the courtesans. Actually, the courtesans ended their own tradition when they could marry the men who had been their protectors. There was no longer a role for them to play when men could marry women that they loved (in the full sense of spiritual and erotic love) instead of entering unions that pertained to aristocratic bloodlines and economic conditions.
SWA: What do you think a modern day woman could learn by studying the courtesans?
SG: Their virtues. My book, The Book of the Courtesans, is subtitled “A Catalogue of Their Virtues.” I made up the virtues after studying and thinking about specific courtesans. Each of them possessed something that was really incredible. Coco Chanel had this incredible sense of timing, and that’s what fashion is: being completely in sync with where things are moving in a culture and a society. She had an astonishing ability to embody the moment and put it in material form. That skill is seductive, and crucial to flirtation.
I think that the whole art of seduction is very important. It is often demonized, but it’s not a bad thing. Seduction can bring people to open their hearts and come more into themselves, which is why people like being seduced. Seducers are different from exploiters, who evoke the image of a wealthy man with a moustache who leads girls down the wrong path. History is full of exploiters who used their charisma to treat people like objects, but that isn’t the only story about seduction. You can seduce yourself, other people, and a whole society into growth, insight, joy, and a larger vision of the universe. Nature is seductive -- look at a field of flowers seducing the bees to continue creation by being fruitful and multiplying.
SWA: Which of the virtues do you feel that you’re best at?
SG: It’s hard to say… perhaps beauty, in that I am very good at creating beauty in my writing. I love beauty, especially in language, and I also love to decorate things around the house. I think that I’m highly attuned to both aural and visual beauty. You’ll find that you’re best at what you love a lot, what pulls you in.
Historically, women have been trivialized if they had that power because of their beauty, as if that is all there is to it, but this kind of beauty is something that is created. You can be born with great features but not have this extraordinary ability to create beauty. Some of the courtesans were not physically beautiful but they knew how to create beauty and allure around them, not just from makeup, but also from an inner sense. It’s clothing, jewelry, putting it all together, and that is also related to the sense of timing. They were very artful and this shouldn’t be trivialized. We recognize it as an art form when we look at ceremonial dances of other cultures, like in Asia or Africa, where ordinary people wear fabulous costumes and we can see how dazzling and wonderful it is. We don’t realize that we have similar traditions and forms of expression ourselves.
SWA: Who is your favorite courtesan?
SG: I love Marie Duplessis. She was the first courtesan who seduced me. I love all the contradictions in her: she was born so poor, and she learned so well the art of looking like she was upper class. She became very cultivated, learned to read, played the piano, and all these things that upper class women did, but she had had this intensely hard childhood working in the garment trade sweatshops. There is a story about Marie that when she had some time to herself late at night, after she’d been out with one of her protectors, she’d go down to the Palais Royale (where they used to have gambling). She’d drink a lot and return to the lower class Patois that she spoke as kid in Normandy. She was considered among the Parisians as one of the most refined women, and she also had this “swearing like a sailor” side, a contradiction that I love. I also love Veronica Franco.
SWA: The movie Dangerous Beauty was based on her life. How much of that story is true?
SG: The filmmakers had to put a romantic plotline in the movie, which is the main difference. There was a man she loved; he was her lover for years and didn’t marry her, and it was very hard on her. Also, Veronica Franco didn’t fence, but she did write poetry, which has been translated and published by the University of Chicago Press. Her mother was a courtesan and taught her the arts of courtesanerie. She was tried as a witch but got off, which was amazing. Their stories are almost too good to be true, but they are true.
SWA: How has learning about them inspired you personally?
SG: It helped me accept the side of myself that likes to dress up. In the beginning days of feminism, I was very poor, so it was very convenient to wear army surplus clothes. It was also the fashion to wear blue workshirts and jeans all the time because we were breaking the stereotypes of femininity. Once I’d earned the right not to wear garter belts (which were very uncomfortable) and makeup all the time, then, slowly, I began to accept the part of me that loves getting all dressed up and choosing what earrings go with what outfit. Children love to play dress up. It’s a form of play and art.
Also, I think there is something that got affirmed in me as a woman. Every part of woman’s history that we reclaim, reinterpret, and re-vision gives us a greater understanding of ourselves as women. We understand better the history of attitudes towards us, and the injustice of attitudes towards us. I’m bisexual, so I had to come out as a lesbian and claim that. I think everybody is, to some degree, bisexual, but even for women who define themselves as heterosexual, it is vital to understand the hatred of lesbianism and the misogyny that manifests as homophobia. This hatred affects all women, because people use “lesbian” or “slut” or “dyke” as an insult when a woman asserts herself, in her life or her sexuality. When you understand the spectrum of prejudices against women and the social circumstances from which they came, you reclaim self-esteem and parts of yourself that you might have been afraid of.
SWA: You are an incredible visionary. How do you see the state of women in our culture today?
SG: It’s very complex. In her confirmation hearing as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton testified about a woman in Pakistan who had acid thrown in her face because she tried to divorce her husband. In one way, we live in a different culture than the culture in Pakistan, including the fact that Pakistan has had a woman as president and we have not. But in our culture, there is still an enormous amount of prejudice against women, and it is very primitive. I don’t mean that as primitive versus civilized. I mean as primitive in the human strata in our psychology, way down into the unconscious; there is a sort of rage and anger at women, and a desire to control them. In my first prose/poetry book, Women in Nature, I explored the way this culture identifies women with nature, including on the primitive elemental level the belief that woman is nature, and therefore can be very, very dangerous. She has the ability to give birth but also according early to Christian theology brings death into the world. This belief comes from the Christian reading of the story of the Garden of Eden in genesis..
I think this prejudice grows worse in a society that is so separated from natural process. There is a way of denying the power of nature by transferring onto an “other“ group of people, like women. We come to believe that if we can control women (or this “other” group), we can control nature. Even though women have gained rights, there is a degree to which that control hasn’t shifted enough. That shift will require a great maturation psychologically and spiritually It’s one of the reasons I was so overjoyed that Obama was elected, and that the other vice-presidential candidate was a woman. Electing either of them into power shatters that psychological system that allows us to project our fear of nature onto whoever we define as “other.” The next stage of that has to be the acceptance of death, loss, evolution, and aging, and following that we have to learn to respect the needs of the earth and nature. In not respecting natural process we are creating the death of our species through global warming. There is the great irony- that you cannot escape the power of nature Certain traditions, like native American and some African societies, hold the wisdom that you must respect nature. Within this wisdom, there is enormous respect for mothers as the one that gave birth to you, and an acceptance that we don’t have control of exisence at every moment.
SWA: You are saying that the way our culture relates to women is essentially because of our fear of our own mortality?
SG: Yes, mortality and our own lack of control over loss and change.
SWA: If there were a single gift you could give women today, what would it be?
SG: It is very important for me to understand my life as significant. What I have learned is that whatever I have in me is important to the whole, and yet it is just a part of the larger pattern.
I think it’s important for women to understand that they are never alone. I may be alone in my house talking to you, but I’m looking to the west and there is the silhouette of a tree that I see every day. It is there all the time, and I’m in relation to that tree all the time. If I pause, I can feel that relation. I’m very fond of my neighbors, and if I stop for a minute, I can feel their presence. And you can move outward from there. You are in a web all the time, and who we are is part of that web: we are both shaping and shaped by it. Our ability to be relational is a strength. It is used against us all the time, to tell us that we are only here to serve other people. No relationship should be like that. Mutual respect and the sense that everybody has some power and something that you can learn from them: these are keys to the world that we really want to create as women.
SWA: That is a beautiful vision. It reminds me of the courtesans and how they used sensuality as a source of power. What are your thoughts about that?
SG: It would be better if you didn’t feel you had to use your sensuality to get money out of one person. When I was a younger woman, I could have married somebody wealthy and not faced the financial fears that have dogged me most of my life, but I know that you pay a terrible price for that. The courtesans would say that that they couldn’t afford to fall in love because that would jeopardize what they needed to do to make a living.
Rather than using sensuality for a specific goal, I would suggest mining sensuality, swimming in it and being immersed in it. Sensuality is full of meaning. I’m writing a book right now called the Book of House-Wifery. It’s about sensuality in the home, and it is full of meaning. It is not trivial.
When you look at a red apple, it makes your mouth water; it’s got a beauty and meaning that you can’t easily translate into words. I think that sort of sensual meaning is very often erased in this modern world and we hunger for it. Pleasure is one facet of sensuality and it’s not trivial. It’s ancient. It changes us enormously and it is a hell of a lot of fun, too.
Susan Griffin is the author of The Book of Courtesans and was recently a guest speaker at the SWA Mastery program. Her book, a Chorus of Stones was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and she is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim award. Her latest work Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy will be out in paperback in the late fall. She will be leading a courtesan’s tour of Paris in October 2010. For more information, contact her at griffinsusan@comcast.net.
