Seductress by Betsy Prioleau

Author:Betsy Prioleau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

The women who hated these sorcières weren’t just mustachioed Mrs. Grundys and village scolds; many, like George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and the ladies of Lyons and Restoration England, composed the female intellectual and social elite of their age. More than merely parroting the male party line, they had their reasons. Even the most successful women are subtly conditioned by gender stereotypes, the injunctions to modesty, silence, stasis, sacrifice, subservience, monogamy, and sexual purity.

Such self-constriction doesn’t come cheap. And the merry artist-sirens gave the raspberry to the whole con. They refused to pay the price and got off scot-free, got all the marbles, men, and power. In a flash they invalidated women’s lives and made the noble careers of muse-maids, art martyrs, stunted poets, and diva spinsters look like colossal wastes.

If women, however, could have seen past their broken noses, they’d have found a feminine identity beyond their fondest dreams. Female artists don’t have to give up anything. Art and erotic power belong together by divine decree. Creativity contains aphrodisiacal plutonium, implanted there in the religiosexual rites of prehistory. The passions aroused by these ancient rites never disappear from the collective unconscious; women have only to tap the she-shaman to reignite them.

The sorcières can instruct us, too. Although fortunate in talent, teachers, and opportunities, they in large part, made their own luck. As artists they put their own stamp on the seductress persona. Their double job of nourishing their talents and making it against tough odds added shiv to their style. They took life by the throat, tore off the trodden paths, and picked mentors and men who sustained and nourished their gifts. With the artist’s high “libidinal energy” and creative upkeep, they expropriated the male privilege of seraglios and support-wives, while giving as much inspiration as they got. Like all seductresses, they were originals but to the nth power, accentuating and flourishing their eccentricities. Criticism rolled off like water from a swan’s back.

To the seductress’s queen bee personality, they added creative punch and foxfire. Even more than other sirens, they were full-souled self-actualizers with the androgyny, élan, and goddess aura that made men compare them to deities. But as descendants of the priestesses of holy madness they threw wonder dust on the flames—artistic delirium—and were the lady galores of the seductress tribe, all excess, glitz, and italics.

In their seductive siegecraft, they led with their art. Their love potions, idiosyncratically brewed as they were, were laced with the belladonna of shamanistic magic. On top of the usual blandishments of ego inflation, maternal nurture, and intimacy, they laid on the voodoo of their artistic spécialité. They brought theatrical spectacle or dance, for example, to the bedroom; they spoke the cabalistic word spells of ancient ritual; they created erotic obstacle courses with the tools of their craft and raised the bar with the numinous self-sufficiency of their calling.

Few were beauty pageant material. Yet they becharmed themselves beautiful through the necromancy of their art. For them, clothes, makeup, ornament, and setting took on the religio-magical significance of dramatic rite.

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