Sexing the Cherry

Sexing the Cherry

‘When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me’

Similar to Antony and Cleopatra yet different. Women both referred to as food of sorts, Cleopatra as ‘his Egyptian dish’. The woman’s role is to fulfil the man, let the man take what he wants from her even if it destroys her in the process, this is their job.

Jordan is like Antony? He leaves her when he has what he wants. However Dog-woman is powerless to Jordan’s leaving just as Cleopatra is powerless to Antony’s but is more controlled and tame with her sadness. Cleopatra still tries to assert herself; Dog-Woman has given up.

‘I’d cram his face so hard into my breasts that he’d wish he’d never been suckled by a woman, so truly I would smother him’ – similar to Cleopatra ‘I drunk him to his bed, then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst I wore his sword to Philippan’. Using her sexuality for power over men. Female dominance towards men.

‘He’ll make you love him and he’ll break your heart’ – just as Antony did to Cleopatra.

‘That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion’ – just as Antony and Cleopatra were. Whispering- secrets, affairs, abandoning the duties they needed to uphold for their country. Power of love, destructive.

‘How hideous am I?’ contrast to Cleopatra and how she is described as female ‘everything is becoming to her’, ‘age cannot wither her’ , ‘th’air, which, but for vacancy, had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, and made a gap in nature’

‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ – not like Cleopatra? Cleopatra, links to Isis ‘godess’ constant reference, but is she cleanly? Metaphorical? Not clean in a sexual sense.

‘I know that people are afraid of me, either for the yapping of dogs or because I stand taller than any of them’, links to being tall and power? Fear? Cleopatra asks about Octavia ‘how tall she is’ , threatened, knows if she’s taller she is more powerful and beautiful, so Octavia is no threat.

‘What you fear you find’ , like Charmian ‘In time we hate that which we often fear’

‘Women have a private language. A language not dependant on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and the uses ordinary words as code-words meaning some other.’ – like Cleopatra’s illogical emotional blackmail when Antony says he must leave, at first says he cannot, then tells him to ‘be deaf to my unpitied folly’ yet still bitter ‘go now, play one scene of excellent dissembling and let it look like perfect honour’ – how manipulative and powerful woman are with language.

‘I watched woman flirting with men, pleasing men, doing business with men, and then I watched them collapsing into laughter, sharing the joke, while the men, all unknowing, felt themselves master of the situations and went off to brag in bar-rooms and to preach from pulpits the folly of the weaker sex.’

‘I never guessed how much they [women] hated us or how deeply they pity us’

‘They think we are children with too much pocket money.’

‘The woman who owned the fish stall warned me never to try and cheat a woman but always to try and charge the men double or send them away with a bad catch’

‘She asked me to remember that a woman, if cheated, will never forget and will someday pay you back, even if it takes years, while a man will rave and roar and slap you perhaps and then be distracted by some other thing’ – shows men as lower order (Aristotle) bodily, not intellectual. Women are more intellectual and in control. They know what they are doing but let the men think they are the ones in control.

P.32-3 ‘Men are easy to please but are not pleased for long before some new novelty must delight them’

‘Men are easy to make passionate, but are unable to sustain it’

‘Men are always seeking soft women but find their lives in ruins without strong women’ – Antony with Octavia and Cleopatra.

‘Your greatest strength is that every man believes he knows the sum and possibility of every woman.’

      ‘only God can truly love us and the rest is lust and selfishness’

‘Their companions are serpents, the very beast that drove us all from Paradise and makes us still to sin’

‘if only he could reach my mouth he would kiss me thereand then. I swept him from his feet and said ‘kiss me now’…’ – Woman is taking on a male role in romance. Taking the lead,  acting as the man in the relationship- power? Like Cleopatra over Antony? Dictates how their love should be, overpowers him?

‘love is better ignored than explored’

‘Love, if it be allowed at all, must be kept tame by marriage vows and family ties so that its fiery heat warms the hearth but does not burn down the house.’

‘Only passion freed the soul from its mud-hut, and that only by loosing the heart like a coursing hare and following it until sundown could a man and woman sleep quietly at night’

‘Passion must spend its life in chains’

‘Sappho, who rather than lose her lover to a man flung herself from the windy cliffs and turned her body into a bird’ – unrequited love. Like Cleopatra committing suicide as she cannot live on with Antony.

‘lust without romantic matter must be wearisome after a time’

‘I came to a coral cave and saw a mermaid combing her hair. I fell in love with her at once, and after a few months of illicit meetings, my husband complaining all the time that I stank of fish, I ran away and began housekeeping with her in perfect salty bliss’ – Like Antony running between Octavia and Cleopatra in Egypt and Rome.

‘My husband married me so that his liaisons with other women, being forbidden, would be more exciting’ –This is what Antony did? Married Octavia despite still keeping up his affair with Cleopatra.

      ‘Danger was an aphrodisiac to him’ – like Antony. Cleopatra is dangerous and powerful- attractive.

‘stag jumped over…in that second of flight I remembered my past, when I had been free to fly long ago…’ Antony described as ‘stag’ (connotations of mythical power.  This brings us back to his God-like image as within Pagan beliefs the stag was the ‘king of the forest’ and the horns were the animal’s crown. The horns on a stag were also seen by the Pagans as both male and female aspects of the divine being. The horns being representative of the crescent moon which was linked to the female side, and the antlers themselves being the male side. This could also be reflective of how Antony is described as both a man and a woman in the play as later on he is spoken of as ‘not more woman like than Cleopatra’. This follows through to Egyptian faiths as we see many Egyptian Gods wear horns on their heads, a link which could show how Cleopatra sees Antony as a God also ‘one side’s a Gorgon, the other a Mars’.)