Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

I answered that it was indeed a great success, although perhaps rather overburdened with symbols, in the romantic and surrealist traditions. 8

T h e rose as a symbol has powerful occult origins.

Eliphas Levi says o f it:

It was the flesh in rebellion against the oppression

o f spirit; it was Nature testifying that, like grace,

she was a daughter o f God; it was love refusing to be

stifled by the celibate; it was life in revolt against

sterility; it was humanity aspiring towards natural

religion, full o f reason and love, founded on the

revelations o f the harmony o f being, o f which the rose,

for initiates, was the living floral symbol. 9

T h e rose became for Christian mystics “a rose o f light

in the center o f which a human figure is extending its

arms in the form o f a cross. ” 10 However, the official

Church, in its unending struggle against carnality and

nature, posited the rose as a symbol o f both in opposition to the lily, which represented purity o f mind and body. The Image takes a stand on the side o f official

Christianity by using the rose as an instrument o f pain

and blood-letting.

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Woman Hating

The photographs which Claire shows to Jean

de Berg are also overflowing with symbolic importance.

The photographs are a series of conventional sadomasochistic poses. They chart the torture and mutilation o f a victim, in this case Anne, and culminate in what is apparently the brutal stabbing, the actual death, of

the victim. Together they reveal a woman’s preoccupation with her own body, a narcissism which is concretized in the last photograph, which is of Claire herself, faceless, caressing her own cunt. This narcissism is a

flaw which defines woman, and to atone for it a woman

must, in the glorious tradition of O, consent to and

participate in her own annihilation. Such is the scenario

which permits her a Christian salvation, which redeems

her o f the sin of Eve and the subsequent sin of her own

self-love. The photographs are “really nothing more

than religious pictures, steps along the way of a new

road to the cross. ” 11 The road, however, is an old one,

well traveled, and if the cross is difficult to reach via

this particular road, it is only because the bodies of

martyrs other than Anne and Claire lie piled so deep.

It is only too obvious that the tortured, mutilated

woman who appears first as Anne, then as the more

impersonal victim of the photographs, and finally

in a dream of Jean de Berg’s as a dead body “pierced by

many triangular stab wounds in the most propitious

areas” 12 is the secular Christ of cunt and breast, Eve’s

fallen, lustful, carnal descendant, the victim who, unlike

Jesus, is suffering for her own sins, the criminal whose

punishment scarcely equals the horror o f her crime.