Hello friends, Happy Sunday!
The sun’s out in London, everybody’s out in the park in short shorts and bikinis, there are barbeques and beers and the big speakers and apparently next week it’s going to rain. It’s a part of the charm of the English summertime: you’re never quite sure when it’s coming, and there’s always the possibility of it getting very suddenly snatched away.
This week, I’ve had two very different reasons to think about something that has preoccupied me throughout my writing career. It’s a big, complex and, I often thing, a messier thing than really it should be. The thing I’m thinking about is desire. The first reason I’m thinking about it is that so many people are out in the sun, skin on show, suddenly appearing less self-conscious, more open, more relaxed. There’s music, there’s drink, and in that first real glimpse of sun there is always this feeling of excitement, possibility, connection. I love that feeling.
The second reason I’m thinking about desire? This week, after a long, hot day dropping proof copies of my novel around East London, I headed south to watch Emma Rice’s production of Bluebeard at the Battersea Arts Centre.
I loved this play. Bluebeard is one of those stories that lodged itself into the popular imagination centuries ago and has stayed there, evolving with every generation that retells it. It’s also one of those folktales, like many of the Grimm Tales, that you might encounter in childhood without quite fully understanding what it means.
Bluebeard, it turns out, is an especially dark tale. Bluebeard is a charismatic man, larger than life and full of promises. In Rice’s telling, Bluebeard meets a woman called Lucky, and she is swept away. Lucky is drawn in by the sense of safety and an intense, all-encompassing desire: she wants to be wanted. There’s danger, she knows there is danger, but this is part of the appeal. She is sure that she can handle the danger, that she’ll thrive on it, even, it adds to her longing.
We know the story. Bluebeard and Lucky fall intensely in love, or maybe lust. They marry. Bluebeard goes away, and he tells her that in his house, there are no rules. She can eat what she wants, drink what she wants. She can go in any of the rooms in his house with one notable exception: the seventh room. Lucky agrees, but Lucky is also Lucky: she is different, if she wants to go in the seventh room – and of course she wants to go in the seventh room – then she knows she’ll get away with it. She’ll be safe, Bluebeard won’t find out, and if he does, well, he might even reward her tenacity. After all, she’s special.
What Lucky finds in the seventh room is the bodies and bones, decayed, half-decayed, of Bluebeard’s last six wives. All of them, murdered. Bluebeard comes home. He knows that she has been in the room because the key is a magic key, it bears a bloodstain that will not shift. He tells her that he will kill her. Lucky, too late, sees her error. She had thought that she was different.
I loved this play, but it shook me. The retelling, from the point of view of Mother Superior, a narrator who has a large, almost Shakespearean comedic presence, performed brilliantly by Katy Owen, interweaves this story with the story of a young girl whose name we don’t know other than to know that she is – was – somebody’s sister. The play edges towards theatrical violence that draws laughter from the crowd, before suddenly, abruptly, cutting to CCTV footage of the sister walking home, and a figure, shadowy, not far behind her.
That was where the play hit me, most viscerally, with that sudden cut to violence. Watching it, my friend and I both started to shake. We cried. There was a row of giggling, animated schoolgirls behind us, and they were suddenly silent. But what I left with wasn’t this sudden reminder of danger lurking. That knowledge is bone deep: it is nothing new. That knowledge bores me, it is burdensome, it gets in the way of the things I want to do.
The thing that really touched me was the desire. Lucky, who follows her desires right into the path of danger. We are made to feel so guilty about desire: all people, not just women. We are made to feel so guilty about wanting to be wanted, about wanting attention, about wanting to be touched, seen, loved, wanting to wear little and move freely, to bear our skin in the sunshine, to colour our faces or express ourselves through music or laughter or movement or whatever it is brings us joy.
Desire and how we act on it is something I’ve written and thought about extensively – in both my novels, both about women who experience violence in different forms. Both women find themselves feeling that their desires are somehow responsible for the violence they’ve experienced. In my second novel, The Orange Room, my protagonist is much like Lucky: young and free and full of passion, drawn into a relationship that turns out to be coercive and controlling. It is, in part, her desires that draw her into this relationship, and she ends up feeling so guilty for having ever felt desire. If she hadn’t felt desire, sure, she might not have been so vulnerable. But that doesn’t mean she is morally responsible for the things that happen to her: there is a difference, and it matters.
Somehow desire very often ends up taking the blame for the bad things that happen to us. And I’m not just talking about violence, I’m talking about rejection, humiliation – the kinds of knockbacks we all get when we put ourselves there. It’s easy to wind up thinking that’s the punishment for daring to be wanted, for daring to seek connection. But there is nothing wrong with desire itself, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be wanted or loved or touched. In fact, it’s one of our most basic human instincts – the need to be wanted. The human race would expire without it: we are hardwired for connection, it is one of our most fundamental needs and desire is an essential part of this. I’ll say it again. There is nothing wrong with desire.
I don’t have answers to the knotty problems posed by desire, or more specifically, by the way we act on our desires. But I’m going to keep on asking the questions, and one thing I do know is that shame doesn’t really do a whole lot. I don’t want to feel guilty for feeling desire – not if it’s not doing anybody any harm, not if it makes me feel bolder and braver and happier.
So, on that note. I’m heading to the park, and I’m packing my bikini.
With love, Rosie xxx