The Oldest Deception

The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade by Wendy Doniger

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that often accompany that uncomfort- Are women smarter?Or more
able subject.Jones' account of the piles alike?Or do they simply value the
of victims' shoes that are now displayed parts of people that are not alike,
as memorials turns the footless shoes
celebrated in other essays into the sub-
The oldest leception while the men value the parts that
are alike?In any case, women are
ject of lament. Shoah and postmod- bySeni` Young often able to subvert the powers
ernism have more in common than of men precisely because men
either would want. regardwomen as indistinguishable
As with many essays in Footnotes,
The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade by Wendy Doniger.
how- or not worthy of distinction....
ever, "EmptyShoes" made me think, not Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, Because men think women are
of shoes, but away from them. Shoes alike, they do not notice them,
become an excuse to talk about some- 576 pp., $35.00 hardcover. and that invisibilitycan be used as
thing else. Though Jones quotes a weapon of the weak when
De.rrida'sexaltation of the Holocaust women need to masquerade.
victims' shoes-"They will have traveled Husbands of runawaywives
a lot, traversedall sorts of towns and ter- T he "bedtrick" of Wendy beauty masqueradingas ugliness." They "prove surprisinglyobtuse when
ritories at war"-these shoes probably Doniger's title refers to a theme include stories about men seduced by a asked by detectives to describe the
traveledverv little since by the time of of manv ancient and modern sto- beautiful young woman who turns into runaway,revealinghow long it had
the death marches thev had long been rytelling traditions-the Hebrew Bible, an ugly old one or seduced by an ugly old been since thev had truIv,looked
confiscated. Thev are in fact the most Indian, Greek, Roman and other woman who turns into a beautifulyroung at their wives as persons, 'reallv
inert memorialsimaginable.Why,displav mythologies, as well as contemporarv one. In a matter of three pages Doniger seen' them." But since the wife
piles of shoes? Why not piles of the hair film and literature:going to bed with is on to the connections between this cares about who her husband real-
that grew on violated bodies, or of the someone who pretends to be someone ty,peof tale and "Beautyand the Beast" ly is, she takes pains to get away
eyeglasses that helped victims see both else, or avoiding an unwanted bed part- stories, all the while tossing out asides from him. (pp. 179-180)
joys and horrors? In most of these ner by substituting a double. Her 1999 about demonic shape-shifters and the
essays, shoes are inadequate to the book, Splitting the Difference: Gender and meaning of beauty. "Why, indeed, are In other words, a paradoxwithin these
weight put on them. Myth in Ancient Greeceand India, covered demonesses generally described as tales is that while they demean women,
Jaime HoveV's "In Rebecca's Shoes: the second of these topics-a literary ugly?...Perhaps they assume such forms they also subvert their own patriarchal
Lesbian Fetishism in Daphne du doubling, though both books work as because they see the world upside down assumptions, showing it is misogynists
Maurier'sRebecca" is a subtle and shrewd independent volumes. Some of the best from us and regardas ugly what we think who insist on the sameness of women.
account of du Maurier'santi-romantic known bedtricks occur in the stories of beautiful-and also because their default They also represent beauty as a trap, a
romanceas an ironic elegy for the British Rachel and Leah in the Old Testament, position, as it were, is ugly." form of otherness that blinds the
Empire. Before Hovey gets to her point, or Arthurand MorganLeFayin the King Bedtrick deceptions play out against onlooker to individuality.
though, she forces herself to enumerate Arthurlegends. Others animate the plots the contrasting revelations of night and In another chapterthe readeris led to
all Rebecca'sshoes and to discuss them. of Shakespeare'sA11i Well That Ends Well day,both pointing to a single truth-the consider whether the Virgin Mary was
Rebecca does indeed have manv shoes, and MeasureforMeasur?,Mozart'sMariage ephemeral nature of beauty and pas- involved in a bedtrick, as Doniger
but she has a lot of everything.The other of Figaro, Richard Strauss' Rosenkavalier sion-and also depicting a social reality, explores Jesus' descent through four
possessions she leaves behind are more and numerous contemporaryplays, films the devaluing of older and plain women named in Matthew 1.2-6. She
redolent than her shoes. Her lingeriecar- and literature,includingreal-lifeinstances women. Doniger keeps digging, turning finds him to be the end result of unions
ries the memorv of her body, and the of bedtricks such as those depicted in M up variants in which the old woman is by,the female bedtrickstersTamar,Ruth,
furnishingsof Manderleyare the memo- Butteofl and The Returnof Martin Guerre. the sexually competitive mother of the Rahaband Bathsheba-all of whom, like
ry of her taste. Rebeccais about many Doniger describes the shock of vio- young woman, the ugly woman is the Mary,were impregnatedby males other
things, but feet are not among them. An lated intimacy when the bedtrick is older sister of the beautiful woman or than their husbands.She sees such stories
enforced focus on its shoes throws a uncovered as "the violent disjunction her evil twin. as symbolic of paternityanxiety,an anxi-
thoughtful essay off balance. that ?ften takes place when we come up In another chapter,"The Cuckolds of etv she believes women can now share in
too quickly from the deep-sea dive of the Heart," Doniger uses the lens of this age of in vitro impregnationwhere
A s with most criticalanthologies, sexual intimacy into the cold light of the depth psychology to bring out themes bedtrickscould and have occurred when
this one sinks under repetition. morning air and experience the emotion- not literallyplayed out in the stories.The either the sperm or the eggs about to be
There is a lot of fetishism, with al equivalent of the-bends." These are trickster undergoes a loss of identity, implantedare mixed up.
accompanying citations of Freud and stories about the power of sexualitv to since her or his only,means of succeed- Doniger tells us she has three goals in
Lacan;there is a lot of Cinderella. Several transform perspective; though literally ing is to pretend to be someone else. this book. First and foremost, to tell
essays mention the mistranslation of they are about actual switches in the When women coerce another woman to some good stories. Second, to prove
Perrault'sCendnillon, who wears a fur slip- night, they are also metaphors for the take theirplace in bed (for instance,when some points, "such as the importance of
per in French but a glass one in English. morning-after feeling of having gone to Isolde sends her maid to King Mark),the the theme of the bedtrick, the fruitful-
Oddly, though, instead of providing an bed with one person only to awakenwith female tricksteris splitting off a part of ness of cross-cultural studies, the value
authentic translation of Perrault, the another. Of course, they rely on the her identity, while the substitute must of using many different approaches,and
anthology reprintsAndrew Lang'ssweet- powers of illusion and fantasy that fuel deny who she is for the trick to succeed. the existence of certain patterns in the
ened glass-slippered version. There are the desire to seduce and be seduced, to Looked at from yet another perspective, ways that human beings have devised to
also many red shoes, as featuredin both beguile and be beguiled, to create the Doniger sees a homoerotic dimension: deal with their sexual fantasies."Third,
Hans Christian Andersen's tale and illusion of being wonderful and to allow bedtricking a woman means that two "to dazzle the reader with my peculiar
Michael Powell's masochistic ballet film. ourselves to accept the same illusion in men sexually share the same woman, erudition, by juxtaposing narrativesthat
In fact, glass slippersand ballet shoes are another. The successful bedtrick often often a code for the trickster'sdesire for no one else would think of juxtaposing."
virtuallythe only shoes in this collection involves the complicity of the one sup- the male partnerratherthan the woman. She succeeds admirablyin all three. She
that hurt. The essays complain freely posedly tricked. As Doniger points out, She finds a female example of this in the is a gifted and witty storyteller, delight-
about shoes in fairy tales, while refusing the stories reveal our paradoxical view movie SingleWhiteFemale,where a woman ing in wordplay,and she wears her eru-
to criticizethem in life. that sex is both revelatory (of ourselves bedtricksanother woman'slover in order dition lightly.
Footnotes is part of a trend in academ- and others) and deceptive. to prove him faithless and thereby turn Doniger has never had a methodolo-
ic feminism, one that celebrates style, The book is a tour de force, tracing the woman's affection toward herself. gy. Each new book seemed to use a dif-
writing lovingly about particulararticles over three thousand years of storytelling ferent one: structuralist;Freudian,philo-
of clothing while detachingclothes from about sexual relations. Some of the T-
m 1he stories raise intriguingques- logical, philosophical and so on. Now,
the women who must wear them. I find book's delight anisesfrom Doniger's per- tions about identity and recogni- she tells us, having become familiarwith
this fin-de-si?cle vogue less liberating sistence in continually revisiting the sto- tion. Can we be known in the a wide range of methodologies, in this
than it is decadent 'andsad: it denies the ries, viewing them from various angles dark? Is something of our essential book she has deliberatelynot settled on
constraints and conformity fashion that allow her to keep unearthingmean- natureknowableor not in the sexual act? one. Her point is that sometimes a cigar
imposes, implying that freedom comes ings as rich in psychological insight as To what extent does aging challenge our iS a penis, and sometimes it iS just a cigar:
from looking the waywe are told to look. they are in the realities of sexual, racial notion of a stable self? As she ponders looking at a text through one method-
To the extent that most of the shoes in and class discrimination.It is a very long these questions Doniger has a grand time ological lens may only reveal a single
this book walk at all, they lead us full cir- book-495 pages, not counting bibliog- trackingdown sources for two seemingly aspect, but severallenses can reveal mul-
dle back to the restraints that inspired raphyand notes. Doniger offers an apol- universal folk sayings that underlie these tiple, equallymeaningfulones.
feminist criticism in the first place. The ogy that anyone ever obsessed by a topic tales: "All women are alike in the dark" Through it all, though, she never
implicit message of Footnotesis that can accept: the stonies are so good, there and "All cats are gray at night." The abandons the stories, which she rightly
women buy shoes, while men like Van are so many of them, and she only dis- implicationis that the essence of women maintains are greater than any of their
Gogh's invisible workman inhabit them. cusses her favorites. She assures us that is their sexuality,and that female sexuali- analyses. She does not nail down a text
Why can't women at the tumnof the the book does not have to be read ty is all the same in the dark:one pussy is or a theme; rather,she sets them loose to
twenty-first century wear ugly embar- "straightthrough,"and 1 took her at her the same as another. Doniger turns this be multiple in their meanings, and in the
rassing shoes that tell stories of labor word. I began with the chapter titled idea inside out, looking at it from the process she allows the myths and stories
and unprotected lives? Do we imagine "The Lovely/Loathly Lady." female point of view. In the vast majoni- to reveal the reason they continue to be
ourselves reduced to shopping and col- In the tales expiored in this chapter, ty of bedtrick stories women know who told: they contain paradoxesthat keep us
lecting, and are we supposed to pretend "the Lovely Lady is ugliness masquerad- the men are, but men do not know who fluid in our thinking about what it is to
to be happy? ing as beauty... and the Loathly Lady is the women are. She asks: be human.

The Women's Review of Books / Vol. XVIII, No. 9 / June 2001 1