An Interview With Marilyn Simon: Part II

Shakespeare, Sex, Submission, Continued

Dear Republic,

We continue our interview with Marilyn Simon (Part I here). Marilyn is a Shakespeare scholar, mother, and a Substacker of complex and unorthodox views. Topics include eros in Shakespeare, submission, feminism, parenthood, Anglicanism, and the awesomeness of

Matthew B. Crawford

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-ROL

AN INTERVIEW WITH MARILYN SIMON: PART II

14.Can you say more about how your perspective [against autonomy] influences your reading of Shakespeare? I would tend to see him in the way that Harold Bloom does, as developing interiority and the ‘capacious’ self. But it seems like there’s more of a psychodrama within your Shakespeare.

I can recall times during my dissertation when it felt like Shakespeare wasn’t saying quite what I needed him to say. Scholarship is like that. We get tunnel vision with our thesis and want to then make the text fit our idea. I would get mad at Shakespeare. In a fit of pique, I’d toss his book across the room. (I actually did this once with Hamlet.) Shakespeare is more mature than I, and has much more dignity. “I’ll wait,” I could hear him saying. “When you are ready to come talk to me like an adult, I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere. But you can’t hear me when you act stubborn and willful.” Eventually my love for his sentences would draw me back to him. I’d pick up his books, wipe the tears off my testy little face, and say, “Alright, fine, William. I am ready to listen.” He would then wrap his arms around me and treat me like an equal, capable of understanding things in a more complex, more generous light.

I had to submit to Shakespeare, to become submissive to his texts. I was always brought forth into a new way of seeing that was bigger than my own, but eventually this bigness became my own way of seeing. For the most part. I still pick fights with him occasionally. But he never condescends to my level. He expects me to rise to his.

Much academic work is a kind of scolding of the past. We look at how much the past fails to live up to our own morality, especially when it comes to considerations of sex, race, and class. We believe, foolishly, in the myth of progress, and believe that we have now arrived at the end game of all ethical consideration and have nothing to learn from the past. Indeed the past needs to learn from us. It is an arrogant way of seeing the world, and not a very interesting one. Approaching the past with humility and submission is much more rewarding intellectually, to say nothing of the rush of joy I feel as I become liberated from the de facto moralizing of the present-day academy.

15.This line seems to be very critical to your thinking about sexuality: “I wanted to give my entire soul and my entire body to a lover. I wanted to be cherished as belonging to another. But to make this sacrifice of my own centrality, my beloved would have to be above me and not my equal.” How did you come to this way of thinking? — which, by the way, seems a very long way from the teenage tomboy and sexuality-controlling virgin.

Not at all a long way! Only a tough-minded, whole, free and autonomous individual has the capacity to give herself joyfully and without reserve to another. You might think this kind of self-giving is a shrinking of the self, or that it’s a kind of withering defeat, a failure of individuality and independence. But the opposite is true. It takes someone in full possession of herself to have the capacity to give herself. One has to be strong in order to be so generous. She isn’t like a ragdoll, floppy and without her own will. This is a bold woman who submits herself entirely to the authority of her beloved with joy. But he must be above her or the gift of herself would be demotion rather than an elevation.

Above her means that he is a man in full, in himself. This is not the same as being some kind of boorish Andrew Tate type guy who thinks women are beneath him, or whatever this brand of manosphere posturing professes. This is a man who is so sure of himself as a man that he desires, in turn, to elevate the woman he loves. Her submission, so gentle and so loving, makes him her vassal. He is her lord. It is mutual submission, and it is very gendered, very sexed.

My favourite moment of just this kind of love is in the closing scene of The Taming of the Shrew. Kate gives her hand for her husband to step on. Of course he doesn’t actually tread upon her. That would be ridiculous. The action instead shows that she puts herself beneath him. But the act of putting herself beneath him is precisely what elevates him in the world. And he knows that his stature is due to her submission, and so he is dependent upon her. They submit to each other, after the manner of their sex. This is the scene that our culture loves to hate. But this hatred is a reflection of our imaginative impoverishment, not of their mutual love for each other. Love makes submission a triumph.

Kate and Petruchio leave the stage to “go to bed.” They are going to fuck. They are such a hot couple.

16.Just to argue with you a little here, I’m wondering how much this emphasis on sexual polarity as opposed to equality is a matter of ‘the grass being greener on the other side’ — or to be more cutting about it, of women’s inability to make up their minds. I’d suggest that, first of all, I do know what men are like, and that really there aren’t any individual men who are worthy of that kind of submissiveness. That that submission might be interesting as part of an initial erotic role-play but then the spell is going to wear off and the man is going to be knocked off the pedestal — and that equality-based models of relationships may prove to be more sustainable after all. And then I would also suggest that men don’t actually want this, that in a long-term loving relationship, what men really want is to be vulnerable, and real vulnerability is neither powerful nor sexy. So if you’re talking about polarity what you’re really doing is sentencing men and women to gilded cages where they can’t truly interact with or find emotional nourishment from one another.

It was Rousseau who said, “If you want virtuous men, you first have to teach women what virtue is.” You men so desperately want to please us! You’ll do as we desire. We women should probably desire carefully.

Here’s a few paragraphs from, again, my recent essay “Against Equality”:

There is a passage in Charlotte Brontë’s great love story, Jane Eyre, where Rochester realizes that his beloved Jane will not be his wife (because, it turns out, he is already married). “‘Never,’” Rochester says as he grinds his teeth, “‘never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!’ (and he shook me with the force of his hold.) ‘I could bend her with finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye,’” he says directly to her:

‘Consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage – with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it — the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit — with will and energy, and virtue and purity — that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself, you could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would: seized against your will, you will elude the grasp like an essence – you will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh! Come, Jane, come!’

I’ve quoted Rochester’s speech in its entirety so that we can see the threat of violence that underlies his feelings. The desperation to possess that part of a woman which is wild, savage, free, can lead to brutality. I know this well. But the desired part of her, the part that can only be possessed if offered and given, will be farther away from him than ever. And she will look upon him with contempt. His manliness will be mocked. This is the confusion of the rapist.

Given willingly, however, Jane’s love not only causes Rochester great joy, but overrules him entirely. “‘I never met your likeness, Jane,’” he says; “‘you please me, and you master me — you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced — conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph I can win.’” Jane submits to Rochester because he is commanding and self-possessed. She desires these qualities in him; she desires his authority over her, even his seeming indifference to her. Yet the power of Jane’s submission to her beloved isn’t merely that her pliancy moves her master’s heart. It is that his heart, too, becomes tender and soft and submissive to her. In giving herself to him, he becomes both more masculine and more feminine, just as she becomes more feminine and, as conqueror, more masculine. A woman’s self, given in love, sees the two become, not merely one, but somehow, if this were possible, one squared. One to the power of one. A man understands, shares in, and loves, more of what is feminine in his lover; she loves and shares in more of what is masculine in him.

In his strange and little-known poem, “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” Shakespeare describes the union of lovers: “So they lov’d, as love in twain / Had the essence but in one; / Two distincts, division none: / Number there in love was slain.” They are one, and yet somehow distinctly two. Lovers become both more themselves and more each other, more distinct and more unified, more male and more female. And yet no one is quite as feminine as a man conquered by love; he becomes tender and nurturing. And no one quite as masculine as a woman who is beloved; she is ruler. She rules by surrendering. But it is wrong to think of this relationship in terms of gaining or losing power. Love is both a paradox and the most benevolently ordered hierarchy. A hierarchy of power leads to brutality. But one built on love leads to bliss. This is why Shakespeare described it as “a wonder.” When Kate surrenders to Petruchio, she doesn’t lose. She grants him the authority he has over her, and he becomes her vassal.

-- In short, I think you might be misunderstanding the nature of submission and love. And have a lower opinion than I, perhaps, of what men and women can become.

One must have a very large soul for this kind of love. Being loved deeply is not for the faint of heart. I think it isn’t in giving love, but in receiving it that takes more courage. Receiving love means that you allow yourself to be seen as your beloved sees you. It is a decentering of the self, and that is what makes is terrifying.

17.Where do you position yourself in the trad wife movement?

Honestly, I haven’t thought much about the trad wife movement. It seems very 21^st century, as though someone is cosplaying wifehood. Look, in the past women worked. In Elizabethan England, 48% of people entering guilds were women. Shakespeare’s wife was not running a house. She was running an industry, with many people in her employ.

There’s an episode of Family Guy where Meg, the daughter, takes over her mother’s tasks. In a day she has the house sparkling and dinner set. The mom, Lois, is gobsmacked. Meg replies, “It’s a house. It’s a finite area. I’m not cleaning a town.” That more or less sums up how I feel.

18.Do you believe that there is a ‘woman’s brain’? If so, what is it?

I don’t know. I’m sure that there are sex differences in the brain. In fact, science seems to back this up.

I am still a tomboy in many ways. Matthew [Crawford] often teases me and tells me that on the inside, I’m a toxic male. He’s probably right. But I do know that what is womanly in me is called forth by a man. Everyone is nonbinary in that they have both feminine and masculine traits. (And every female is on some level bisexual. The reason why is because we are so delightful to behold! Who wouldn’t desire us.) It takes a man to make me feel like a woman. It is a relational thing. The difference between us becomes apparent with each other. Contemporary notions of gender-identity don’t seem to grasp this. They seem to proclaim that it is inwardly where one chooses or discovers her or his (or they/them/their) identity. This seems to miss the point entirely about sex and gender. We exist for each other. We are made for connection. What lucky creatures we are!

19.How aligned are you with the idea of ‘pussy power’?

Hahaha! I’m dying. I am not aligned with this concept nor have I even heard of it. Why are so many modern social movements so utterly ridiculous. “Pussy Power.” I am laughing. Sure, ladies. Do your thang.

20.What I believed, as a student, was that we were entering into a very new era of sexual dynamics, that women felt themselves to be imprisoned by ‘girliness,’ and that what women wanted was all the autonomy and agency that men had, and just wanted men to make room for that — and, unanimously, it seemed that’s what the older women I came across were advocating for. Now that we’re a few years down the road, women have gained more power in the public sphere, but gender dimorphism seems to be increasing rather than decreasing, and there’s a kind of consensus that being ‘girly’ is an essential attribute of being a woman and not to be given up — and I would add, by the way, that there is often not quite the same sense of responsibility and duty in many of the women taking positions of power. How do we make sense of all of this? Were women of the older (feminist pioneering) generation just lying? Was there a false consciousness about what they really wanted? Or is it just that there are no good answers to gender dynamics and every generation makes its own mistakes in its way?

I understand what you’re saying. I once thought that a kind of gender neutrality was desirable, too.

But I think what we’ve done is make the public private. I haven’t any problem with women achieving any kind of career success that they’d like. Who would? But women were misinformed if they thought a job would be fulfilling. Jobs suck, for the most part. That is why people pay you to do them. We got the gold ring only to discover that it was brass.

Understandably, once women have kids they don’t want to make the sacrifices it takes to attain a position of power and influence in a career. Or they simply no long have the time to devote to chasing this kind of corporate success because they’re too busy chasing kids. I don’t see this as a problem. “Do the needful,” I say to myself everyday. Taking care of a family is needful and important work. Busting your ass for shareholder profits perhaps less rewarding. Office work is depressing, let’s face it. Women are probably wise to back off a bit.

But being “girly” can be enormously empowering. I am one kind of Marilyn when I’m in sneakers and t-shirt. Another kind entirely when I’m in stilettos and a dress. It really depends on how I’m wanting to be treated.

“Give a girl the right pair of shoes and she can conquer the world,” said Marilyn Monroe. Indeed.

21.I found it refreshing to read your writing on parenting — that you feel like the smart phones aren’t really the problem, that kids are adapting to them. It sounds like your belief is that many of the bad mental health outcomes we’ve had in the smart phone era are all about the trendiness of ‘trauma’ as opposed to the smart phones per se?

Yes, I think that’s mostly true. There are some kids who are very online. But this isn’t the norm, and these kids would anyway likely have been the shy and awkward ones in school. Online is where they feel they fit in. There are A LOT of teens who pass through my doors every week. Sometimes the entire girls’ varsity volleyball team is here. (And anyone who says that boys eat more is insane! These girls are like a swarm of locusts that devour everything in their path.) The teens are filled with life and energy and hope. What they lack is meaning. But that isn’t because they are fragile and weak. It is because our post-structuralist, self-loathing, suicidal culture is.

When my girls’ friends sleepover here on weekends, they always come to church with us on Sunday morning. (I ask their parents first. But the parents literally don’t care. They’re like, “Yeah, fine sure. Take our kid to church. Keep her for the week. Whatever. We are just happy to have some free time.”) The young don’t have the same chip on their shoulder when it comes to church that their parents may have had. We are such a secular culture that church is a genuinely new experience for them. They absolutely love it. What is this place, they wonder, where people sing together, where they pray together, where the old and young join each other every week to care for each other. These teens come back week after week. I’ve seen a number of them get baptized. They experience Christianity as freedom, as good news, not as oppression. These youth become forces to be reckoned with.

22.It’s heartening the way you talk about things going kind of back to normal about adolescents, but a small part of me died when you wrote, “Teens do see each other as they are on the inside, and that the groups are formed accordingly. The truth is that the teenagers like their groups.” I would argue that teenagers usually feel themselves to be imprisoned in their groups because of ironclad social hierarchies and are basically desperate for high school to end and to get away from it all. It kind of feels like you’re advocating for the return of Mean Girls?

Don’t diminish the insight of teenagers. They sort themselves, often. I’m not at all advocating for something mean. And I love more than anything when girls and guys become friends with the other kids in their classes simply because they are in classes together. (This is the nature of a civil society: we are close to people simply because of proximity. Neighborliness. This is very important.)

But, look, I am close with a teenage girl who is socially awkward. She is very much welcomed by the basic-bitches that tend to congregate in my kitchen. But she has a hard time fitting in. It’s her own friends who are likewise socially awkward (who are into anime and geeky stuff and lack the kind of physical vitality of the more traditionally popular girls) with whom she feels most at home. They are the NPC kids of the school, but they like it that way. When they hang together in their own group, they feel that they are cool and that the more conventionally popular girls are lame.

If anything I find that — this is an inversion of the original Mean Girls movie — that the traditionally hot girls are actually more inclusive than the NPC ones. (Non Player Characters.) The hot girls are vain. But the other ones have a moral vanity that they believe is a virtue. They feel superior, and look down on what they consider to be the superficiality of those who have more physical vitality. It’s really an inversion of morality. The new Mean Girls movie, which I haven’t seen because I’ve heard it was terrible, driven by ideology rather than character, would be an example of this. It’s the weirdos who drive the morality. But you are mistaken if you think that the NPC kids long for access into the jock-girl group. They don’t, typically. They vibe with their own crew.

At any rate, once these teens get to university all the groupings of high school more or less evaporate, and new ones form. Ones built around cultural, financial, and professional capital. Most people feel most comfortable with others who share similar interests and values. But no one should look down upon or be mean to others, obviously.

23.It seems like more than trad wife or the ‘new prudery,’ or anything else, what you’re kind of arguing for, in the domain of child-rearing and maybe eros as well, is anti-fragility, that it’s in the extremes that we really find ourselves. Is that kind of right?

What I’m really advocating for is joy. Brittleness doesn’t seem to incline one towards joy. But strength can likewise take one further away from joy by making him or her brutal instead of joyful. Joy makes one strong of heart. It’s different from happiness, and certainly different from cynicism.

24.Where are you in the journey towards fulfillment? How satisfied are you with the choices you’re making at the moment?

Oh my gosh. I never think about self-fulfillment. Probably as a culture we think about ourselves far, far too often, and that is the problem.

I have many people I get to love. That makes me incredibly blessed. My life is beautiful because it is a gift from God. I am deeply grateful to Him. That is it. That is the beginning and end of my fulfillment.

Thanks for these questions, Sam! They were fun to answer. And I really am deeply flattered that you’ve found my work so engaging.