Why are so many stories in the world’s literary canon on women cheating, written by men? Why do so many of these female heroines end up jumping from trains, dying from consumption, or drowning in lakes? Simply review a few classics: Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, Moulin Rouge, Hamlet where heroines wear the Jezebel label. Let’s go beyond the sinning female symbolism and into the braver world of the sardonically sharp ladies of the screen and stage. Where would we be without Mae West, Sophie Tucker, Katherine Hepburn, Tina Turner, and even Madonna? It seems to me that they are all Jezebel-inspired, that they believe Jezebels shall conquer, Jezebels shall roar in “numbers too big to ignore.” Or, I wonder, is this only my fantasy?
I pull no punches, given my own personal history. I admit it. I openly identify with the Jezebels. The nomenclature originally hails from the Old Testament Biblical story. Its not so subdued meanings from that religiosity continues to this day. Nonetheless, to embrace the word and the multi-faceted meanings behind Jezebel, we must first ask ourselves: What do Jezebels have in common? My answer—they are proud owners of the self, with their own distinct voice. Search YouTube for scenes of Bette Davis, who not only plays up the Jezebel queen image, but also starred in a movie by the same name: “If you obey all the rules,” Ms. Davis quips, “you miss all the fun.”
The Jezebel code of conduct is embraced by the sharp sardonic and resounding retorts that Mae West so symbolized. “Good girls go to heaven,” she would state, her eyes tilting in a leftward lean to keep us in on the joke. “Bad girls go everywhere.” It was if to say, the fun of being a Jezebel outweighs the punishment.
In my upcoming memoir, The Practical Seductress, I open the book with a quote from Electra by Euripides – “Yet censure strikes hard at women, while men, the true agents of trouble, hear no reproach.” Growing up in the 20th century, girls witnessed the literary and film equivalents of justice due women who followed the Jezebel code. Anna Karenina, after her adulterous affair, throws herself in front of the moving train. Satine, in Moulin Rouge, dies of ‘consumption’ as punishment for her servicing men. Madame Bovary, driven to despair, commits suicide by eating arsenic, a gory way of dying in horrible agony just to make a point. Even female writers would get into the punishment befitting the Jezebel crime wave. For instance, Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening returns to Grand Isle, and after stripping down to her swimsuit, marches into the sea, swimming until she loses her strength and presumably drowns herself for being a free thinker. Sarah dies of pneumonia in the film The End of the Affair, which entails a properly Jezebel-induced ending, while the man she has the affair with continues living out his life free to seek new intimate adventures.
How do we dispense of this tragic female history and reframe the symbol? I think the sex researcher Esther Perel, author of State of the Affair and Mating in Captivity, has the best answer: “I say no to a double standard that men can roam and women must stay put at home. I say no to the fact that men are allowed to claim their sexuality and women just have to pretend that it doesn’t matter to them…An affair is a way of saying, ‘No. I’m not playing by the rules.’ And sometimes betrayal is part of that because you deceive somebody else, but you feel like you are, for the first time, being honest with yourself. Sometimes when people have affairs, they feel like they have been lying to themselves for years.”
I’ll end my tirade with an episode from my own life I call ‘naked lady screaming for sex before it’s too late.’ When my marriage was irretrievably breaking down and my ex had discarded me for younger fare, I was close to menopause. In a moment of lusty urgency, I remember running into his office where he had been holed up emailing to whom I did not know. All I knew was that I was not ready to end my sex life and it seemed wrong to have someone else end it for me. I began a diatribe of first tempting, then begging, only to end in anger after being called a ‘nagging B’ for wanting sex.
As I looked into the full length mirrored closet doors, I saw a disheveled messy-haired middle-aged naked woman, a true sex-crazed Jezebel, who was me. After examining the wild image, I thought, “Hey, I look pretty damn good for a screaming banshee.”
Another quote from the Greek tale of Electra emerged that night so long ago, “I ask this one thing: let me go mad in my own way.” It was at that moment I embraced the mad Jezebel within and found my freedom.
