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MISTRESSES

 marsopa 2011-02-19
From
February 9, 2011

Mistresses through the ages

Prostitute, concubine, mistress, wife: the boundaries are blurred in this study

What is a mistress? Elizabeth Abbott, who has also published A History of Celibacy and held the post of Dean of Women at Trinity College, University of Toronto, offers this definition: “a woman voluntarily or forcibly engaged in a relatively long-term sexual relationship with a man who is usually married to another woman”. Given the persistence of this model across time and cultures, Abbott maintains that “mistressdom”, like celibacy, is therefore an essential means by which to consider sexual relationships outside marriage – “in fact, an institution parallel and complementary to marriage”. Considering the media’s current obsession with love-rat footballers and cheating celebs, “mistressdom” might also be considered a safe bet for a publisher’s list, and Abbott duly provides us with a generally cheerful tumble through adultery down the ages.

Via Pericles’ lover Aspasia through a brief peek into the harems of the East, we arrive at Royal Mistresses, where a woman’s ability to “parlay her emotional command of her lover into tangible control” turns into big business. Nell Gwyn might have been reduced to the “gutter tactics” (a phrase which recurs with sloppy frequency), of lacing a rival’s supper with laxatives, but at least she got to be the ancestress of five of Britain’s current twenty-six dukes. Even greater power devolved on the mistresses of the Bourbons, though Abbott misunderstands the institution of the maîtresse en titre, attributing the invention of the role to Louis XIV, when it dates at least to Charles VII’s elevation of his lover Agnès Sorel in the mid-fifteenth century. Since the French, as Diderot remarked, had always been terribly good at adultery, there existed no opposition to the idea that kings ought to have one wife for reasons of state and procreation and another woman for pleasure, and the interest of the grandes horizontales of Versailles does indeed lie in their individual ability to negotiate the viciously ambitious atmosphere of the court and turn their dishonour to account.

Abbott focuses on the diverting scandal created by Mme de Montespan’s husband, who rattled around the countryside with a huge pair of cuckold’s antlers strapped to the roof of his coach at the expense not only of her considerable cultural achievements but also of her success in having her children by Louis XIV legitimized. In the next reign, she takes the conventional line with Mme de Pompadour, Louis XV’s “Reinette”, that she was a charming woman who was better at commissioning paintings than at meddling in politics. Another royal mistress, Lola Montez, played nineteenth-century hypocrisy brilliantly, extracting one fortune from the besotted King Ludwig of Bavaria before making another by publishing her memoirs in which she inveighed against the double standard in which “the world had no right to expect any degree of morality in the life of a great man” and women are required to grant them the monopoly on sin. In the case of Lady Elizabeth Foster, who lived in a ménage à trois with the Duke of Devonshire and his famous Duchess Georgiana, it is this double standard that Abbott identifies as “the principal villain”. Bess’s critics, the author claims, held her up to “a standard of independence she did not possess”. Here is the paradox that stalks the book. Abbott is keen to portray her mistresses as feisty, autonomous characters who chose mistressdom as a means of negotiating with, and often defeating, the oppression of patriarchy, yet their very powerlessness in the face of that culture is invoked as an excuse which belies the premiss. She regrets Lady Caroline Lamb’s collusion in history, remembering her only as Byron’s mistress (as though anyone would bother to read Glenarvon otherwise), implying that all mistresses are at some level victims, yet claiming their problematic historical status as evidence of ingenious agency.

This contradiction is at its most uneasy in the chapter entitled “Sexual Unions and the Jewish Question”, where Abbott discusses Nazi men who committed the crime, as defined by the Third Reich, of Rassenschande, or race defilement through sex. Over 4,000 people, Jews and Gentiles, were convicted of Rassenschande in the 1930s, and as the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss recalled, women’s greater role in propagating “racial pollution” led to further measures of horror than even men endured. In the hell of the camps, Abbott observes that Bett-Politik, “bed politics”, might be a woman’s only recourse. Her claim that Ruth, the teenage lover of the sadistic Paul Groth, squadron leader at the Sobibor camp, “used his unsolicited passion for her to tame his beastliness and lessen Jewish pain” is merely an interpretation, and a desperately optimistic one at that. Another woman is quoted as having exchanged sex for a vital piece of string to attach her shoes to her feet, as infection from bare soles could lead to quicker selection for the gas chamber. The act took place with a Polish worker at the Auschwitz latrines: “His hand, filthy with the human excrement he was working in, reached out for my womanhood, rudely, insistently”. The juxtaposition of this with the civilized exchanges between Voltaire and his mathematical mistress Mme de Châtelet in the following chapter is startlingly tasteless. Abbott’s attempt at sensitivity in using women-centred discussions of the Shoah may be well meant, but claiming that concentration camp victims share a crucial perspective with Maria Callas’s tribulations on Onassis’s yacht is a serious mistake. One feels that such subject matter, important though it is, can have no meaningful place in this book.

Perhaps the encyclopedic brevity of Abbott’s vignettes accounts for the careless editing (it was the Duke of Wellington, not Lord Nelson, who told Harriette Wilson to “Publish and be damned”, and Alice Keppel’s daughter, who claimed to be the child of Edward VII, was Violet, not Viola), but while the stories in themselves, particularly those of lesser-known figures such as the original gangster’s moll Virginia Hill, are entertaining, there is little evidence in Mistresses of any thorough scholarship. Malinche, the mistress of the conquistador Hernán Cortés, was “probably” sold into slavery by her stepfather to a man who “almost certainly” used her sexually, in an experience which “may or may not” have been harsh, about which she “must have” felt grief and confusion. Malinche’s success in transforming herself from concubine into colonial strategist makes a change from the trawl through the usual suspects, but the speculative nature of much of the writing is at odds with Abbott’s impressively exhaustive bibliography.

Abbott’s concluding chapters struggle awkwardly towards a coherent thesis – the boundary between coercion and volition is never satisfyingly addressed, while those between prostitute, concubine, mistress and wife are blurred to suit. Notwithstanding a section devoted to the transformation of marriage and mistressdom by the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Abbott opts in the end for victimhood over victory. Mistresses closes with a selection of true-life accounts which might be more at home in Marie-Claire. We meet Michaela, thirty-eight, a self-confessed gold-digger whose “short, overweight and homely” lover Sammy provides her with the means to maintain herself and her bankrupt boyfriend Justin, until Sammy’s wife discovers all and threatens her with his Mafia connections. Michaela ends up as a supply teacher and wannabe model. Abbott’s fighting talk of women who flouted convention in pursuit of sexual and economic independence collapses into Daily Mail-style moralizing – in cases of sexual transgression it is The Woman Who Pays. Since there’s still no such thing as free love, then women should only submit to the nasty business of sex with the insurance of a wedding band. Even Simone de Beauvoir is presented as a lonely loser whose only real ambition in life was fetching Sartre his slippers. George Eliot, likewise, is reduced to “a reluctant mistress who longed to be a wife”. Marriage remains the gold standard: “despite these liberated and liberating possibilities, too many mistresses still cast themselves in the ancient mould, with all its sacrifices and sadness, measuring themselves against the marital model, and finding themselves wanting”, Abbott ends. Mistresses has plenty of engaging anecdotes and lascivious encomiums to rounded rears and silken skin, yet despite its comprehensive scope, it remains as depressing and narrow as its conclusion.

Elizabeth Abbott
MISTRESSES
A history of the other woman
528pp. Duckworth. £20.
978 0 7156 3946 7


Lisa Hilton is the author of two biographies, Athénaïs: The real Queen of France, 2002, and Mistress Peachum’s Pleasure, 2005. Her Queens Consort, a study of England’s medieval queens, appeared in 2008.

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