Chapter III

Sex

Barbary Shore (1951)

The next explosive and imaginative novel of Norman Mailer,

after The Naked and The Dead, is Barbary Shore with specific

sexual abnormalities. In this chapter, we intend to show sex-

violence in the novel. Barbary Shore , where we see a very little

and innocent sex-experience in the characters of the novel, even

an immature sex of the three- year old girl, Monina. As a matter

of fact, Mai lei" goes a step ahead and introduces lesbianism,

masochism and obscene sexuality of Monina who displays her

actions like an eighteen year old girl. In the novel, sex is

merely for physical satisfaction. The characters are symbolic

microcosm of American society. By and large, the result of the

Second World War gave birth to depression, frustration and

explicit destruction. That is why the contemporary society

involved itself in all sex-levels to fill the destruction gap of

the war. Sex is a serious and important concern to Norman Mailer

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in Barbary Shore. Stanley Gutman says that the novel

"tentatively offers a loosely defined humanistic socialism as the

sole alternative to the forces which threaten to take over

American society."l

The main action of the novel takes place in a small boarding

house in Brooklyn Heights " This city is the real city, the

material city"2 where Mikey Lovett settles having ten hundred

dollars in order to write a novel. The ambition of Mikey Lovett

to be a writer is a hard task for him to establish. He says:

"I would hardly have expected in myself put away regularly

at the end of the week a sum of ten dollars. I was driven with

the ambition that I should be a writer, and was grubbing quite

appropriately for a grubstake. My project was to save five

hundered dollars and then find an expensive room... I would have

enough money to live for six months and I could write my novel or

at least begin it ."3

He has lost his memory and is completely unable to remember his

past, and that is why he has no sense of future. In his house, he

1. Mankind in Barbary , P.29.

2. Norman Mailer. Barbary Shore ( New York : Carroll & Graf
Publishers, Ins., 1951 ), P.6.
3. Ibid., PP.7-8.
meets five people like McLeod, a man of forty four; Leory

Hollingsworth, FBI agent; Lannie Madison, Mrs. Baverley

Guinevere, a lusty landlady; and Monina, her abnormal child.

Stanley Gutman throws light on the setting of the novel;

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6

"The setting is a rooming house in Brooklyn. With a few

light exceptions, every moment is spent inside this old walk up

and the entire novel becomes enclosed, caught within these narrow

dirty walls, reminiscent of the offices of the law in Kafka's

The Trial."1

The boarding house is a self-contained place of the American

society in which "The blind lead the blind and the deaf shout

warnings to one another until their voices are lost."2

The story of the novel revolves around the landlady, Mrs.

Guinevere, an overweight exotical ly dressed, ex-burlesque- star of

twenty eight. Sex has become a shopping merchandise for her and

she takes full advantages of it. She made her luxurious living on

the basis of her sexual display in the past and in the present

as well and she uses it to play upon Lovett. Guinevere is

1. Mankind in Barbary , P.29.

2. Barbary Shore , P.312.
introduced to Lovett by Willie Dinsmore as "Guinevere's a

nymphomaniac."1 Dinsmore acknowledges Lovett that Guinevere has

different kind of sex appeal. He says:

"Oh, she's got sex appeal of a sort, but she's a crazy

dame."2

Her ambition for the future possibility is based on the

American Dream. In order to make her daughter, Monina, a child

star of Hollywood film world, she does all the unacceptable and
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lesbian sexual activities to put motherly spunk into the child.

Guinevere has been a temporary bed-partner with most of the

characters of the novel. Exceptionally, as far as Lovett is

concerned, she does not share the bed with him despite his

extreme desire to go to bed with her. It is obvious enough to

know that Guinevere has become habitual of various sex-

experiences both to satisfy her sexual lust and money desire.

Lovett finds her beautiful and attractive even after her

refusal.

She stands for a hope of sex for Lovett. She is always blameful

that Lovett spys on the other boarders for her.

1. Ibid., P.ll.

2. Ibid.. P.12.
 68

Guinevere stands for a sex -symbol of Americafn «£hetype

woman. She suits into the general scheme of the ssxuadj Rations

very well. She possesses enormous sexual appeal. 3r* fac&she

is

the nucleus around whom all other characters including Lannie

Madison and Monina revolve. She is an incarnation of aindless

cupidity, vanity and vulgarity. Her sexual appeal is presented

in

the beginning of the novel.-

"Her thin lips pursued, but this was beneath the other

mouth

of lipstick which was wide and curved in the sexual stereotype

of a model on a magazine cover, and seemed to work in active

opposition to the small mobile lips beneath...."1

We have noted earlier that sexuality is a bargainable

thing. especially for Guinevere, and she uses it for self

advancement and self-love.

1. Ibid., PP.14-15.of sexuality leads to the corruption of other

Perversion

emotions as well. This can be well substantiated by Guinevere' s

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version of the love story and the ways in which she brings up

Monina. The love story which she narrates to Lovett is only a

semi-autobiographical story about which she feels will be a sure

financial success in Hollywood. But the narrated story is vulgar

enough with a greater emphasis on lust than on love. . The

vulgarity of Guinevere's mind is revealed when she deliberately

stunts the mental and physical development of Monina.

Deliberately, Guinervere intends to keep Monina as a life long

child of three and a half. She says:

" I want to keep her a baby.. . In about year or two,

another
I'm going to have enough money put together to head fo
r
Hoilywood, and Monina is a cinch. Only she has to remain a
got
kid. There is not so many rules for kids five years old as there

is for infants, one year old and up. So I want her to stay
young."1

Lovett appreciates Monina's beauty.-

”... a child of exceptional beauty. The sunlight illumined

herIbid.,
1. golden hair and steeped her face and arms in a light so
P.48
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intense her flesh appeared translucent ... She was an angel come

to earth, but a sullen angel, perplexed by the mechanics of

living." 1

Monina halted before a mirror and preened her body, kissing her

wrist with the absorbed self— admiration which she had seen in

her mother:

"... her body was extraordinary. She was virtually a

miniature of a girl of eighteen, the limbs round, slender curves

flowing from shoulder to hip, her luminous blonde hair lovely

against the pale flesh. " 2

Mailer continues to emphasize the connection between

sexuaul

perversion and violence in Barbary Shore. Holingsworth, the

villain of the book, suffers from sexual deviation whereas

Lannie's relationship with Guinevere is marked by lesbian

overtones. Hollingsworth's relationship with Guinevere is not

devoid of violence. At times he even physically hurts and

subjugates her. Nigel Leigh is of the view that:

1 . Ibid.,
P.47.
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2. Ibid.. P.61.
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Beneath Hollingsworth's attempts at sexual charms lies

the puerile, predatory mind of a rapist. Beyond there are

moments when he seems 'womanish', and his approaches to McLeod

sometimes hint at sexual attraction."!

Moreover, Hoi 1ingsworth betrays a violent approach of sex when he

describes what he would do to Guinevere's various parts:

"...how he would tear this and squeeze that, eat here and

spit there, butcher rough and slice fine, slash, macerate,

pillage, all in unrecognizable voice which must have issued

between clenched teeth, until his appetite satisfied." 2

Norman Mailer's earlier fiction shows a negative treatment

of sex in its connection with violence but in later fiction, he

develops a special taste for the positive role of sex and

violence in human relations. This development of positive sex

role was because of lack of sufficient literature on female

sexuality. The twenties aroused the sexual significance which

excited female abomination for male domination. Nonethless, the

1. Radical Fictions and the Nove 1 s of Norman Mailer, P.37.

2. Barbarv Shore, P.203.

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female contempt for male supermacy aroused as a protest against

freudianism. Freud had claimed that:

"The libido is regularly and lawfully of a masculine nature,

whether in man or in woman."l

In Barbary Shore . Mailer makes clear the result of a man's

excessive interest in the sheer abstraction without consideration

for the sensual, the material and the physical. The sense of

incoherence and emptiness becomes a defining principle in Barbary

Shore , Mailer himself has suggested that if the novel projects a

vision of history as an "orgiastic hollow', it also draws our

attention to the implacable void in sexual communication. Mailer

provides an insight into the incoherence of the "life of the

body'. In highlighting this point, Barry H. Leeds statement

becomes very helpful when he says:

"The sexual alliances in this novel are without exception

sordid, onesided in motivation and significant primarily in terms

of negations rather than affirmation. There is no enjoyable sex,

no sex for love, no real communication between sex partners."2

1. Sigmund Freud. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (New

York : Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., 1920).P.70.
 7
4

2. The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer , P.114.

In this focus of Leeds' statement, we can trace the origins

of this sense of void in sexual communications. The importance

of the theme of sex and sexual relationship become relevant when

we relate it to what he has already marked in his emphatic

concern over 'the life of the body’. This concern gains a sharp

light in Barbary Shore. The frustration of the life of the body

results in a dominant tendencey towards aggressiveness or sexual

deviations such as sadism, masochism or sado-masochism. The

impulse struggles within the body and a slight imbalance between

these forces can cause a sense of guilt or the loss of love and

social anxiety. The loss of love and social anxiety become

corresponding terms in the organic scheme of the body, with all

its creativity and destructiveness, is a temporal manifestation

of the divine and can transcend its limits only by positive

equilibrium of its inner forces or a proper reconciliation

between self and the other.

Mailer suggests that because of lack of commitment to the

given or the physical relationship, the sexual and the

histoical, fails to attain integrity or affirmation. Thus.

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5

physical relationship in Barbary Shore provides a deep insight

into Mailer s existentialism and the political content. In other

words, the sexual relationshps in the novel are invariably

sordid, selfish and often brutal as Mailer has used in the

sexual

combination among various characters primarily as symbolic

statements on the political issues at stake. They are

significant only in the terms of negation rather than

affirmation. Sex is not pleasurable but it is devoid of the

most vital elements of warmth and love. Even there is no real

communication between sexual partners. Like the contemproary

politics, it is simply inauthentic, and mechanical.

As a matter of fact, Lovett soon gets involved in the lives

and the past of his fellow boarders. He is drawn to McLeod who

becomes his mentor and confident. McLeod is the failure husband

of Guinevere. In fact, Guinevere herself is responsible for her

husband's critical social position. According to Stanley Gutman,

McLeod is :
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who enunciates the relationship between the failed revolution

and the death of the love. His words are given weight by the

fact

that although the novel gives the overwhelming impression of

sexual heat and desire, there is no real fulfillment and no

love." 1

For McLeod, love is a crutch. He dooms himself why his

existence is no more. Even he is jealous of others warm

sexuality. He says:

" Love is ... a crutch, that's all, and there isn’t a one

of

us that doesn't need a crutch."

" still, it can't be just anybody, ''I protested.

" Not today, no. Existence warps us too much. But in abstract,

in essence, any two human beings can find warmth together.It's a

primitive notion , and history won't set it free again until

socialism is established. That's the human assumption of

socialism , to find relationship with everybody. "2

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7

1. Mankind in Barbary , P.40.

2. Barbarv Shore , P.125.

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8

McLeod works as a departmental store dresser. He is a

revolutionary socialist and worked for the Communist Party for

nineteen years and he is known as the hangman of the Leftist

opposition. He is the main attractive personality in the novel

but as a failure husband, he works for household activities.

Lovett observes his daily routine :

"I had the fantasy that each morning he cleaned

this room . dusted the woodwork and beat the rug. Then after he

was gone, a stranger would enter and make a furious search for

something Hollingsworth could not possisly posess. Or else...

There was the picture of Hollingsworth making search himself,

ripping open the drawers, hurling clothing to the floor. This

was

fanciful, and yet the room seemed to be visited more by violence

than by sloth." 1

McLeod is blameful to Guinevere who has less respect to

him.

He accuses her that he is ruined physically and socially by her

for nineteen years because he says: “ Nineteen years with the

wrong woman." 2 The tragic failure of the socialist revolution

2. Ibid.,
P.121.
1 Ibid., P.38.
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9

resulted in the loss of love. Lovett's affair with Lannie

Madison

is abortive and brief. There is homosexual relationship between

Guinevere and Lannie. Guinevere tells Lovett how she had enjoyed

homosexual pleasure with Lannie:

She's a wonderful and strange girl... there’s something

about her. I’ll tell truth, Lovett, she does me good. I don’t

know, may be I am that way . . . She makes me feel like I

haven't

felt in years. . . you know, I believe in happy endings. I love

her, I guess."1

" Boy, I got to admit it, that dame does have a line on

her. I used to think I could hold up my end in a conversation,

but your friend Miss Madison makes me look tongue-tied."2

Lannie is in pajamas and one more pajamas in her handbag

shows her comfortabi 1 ity of her pajamas dress. As a matter of

fact, her pajamas has become a metaphor of sex. Lovett is

attracted by her pajamas over "her slim body" . 3 She feels

wonderful in them. She says:

3. Ibid.,
1. Ibid., P.262.
P.129 .
2. Ibid., P.262.
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I feel so free. 1 was walking down the street a little

while ago, and I new that if I wanted to, I could let them fall,

and I would be naked."1

It is obvious that Lannie has recently returned straight after

having sexual fulfilment. Lovett asks her why she does not wear

anything underneath her pajamas and it is easy enough for Lovett

to know her desire.

"You're not wearing anything underneath ?"

She shivered in answer:

"Don't scold me Mikey. I'm warm. I've had a wonderful

evening."2

Lan»e says about her homosexual encounter with a big and fat

woman :

2. Ibid.,
P.129.
1 . Ibid. ,
P.129.
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I went and looked at her , and she said , " you know who I am

now , don t you ? ' and then she put her arms around me , and

she took me in her lap and ran hands through my hair , and she

kissed me. I never loved anyone , Mikey the way I loved her

then . She was beautiful ."1

However , Lannie is moderate in sex. She does not like

love-

making in day time. She disgusts even to wander in the streets

in

day time. On the other side of her poignant sexuality, she wears

only pajamas in the night nothing underneath in order to undress

easily in conjugal relations. It is Lannie's habit to underess

fully while having sexual intercourse as a matter of fact to

scatter sexual fire around.

" I hate making love in the day time. It’s always so

obscene, and I keep thinking I’m a little girl and I'm peeking

through the keyhole to see fat papa on the john."2

In the field of sex, Mailer has presented all the possible

perverted forms of sex, such as homosexuality, biosexuality,

hetero sexuality, lesbianism, and incest. But throughout his

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1. Ibid., P.130

2. Ibid., P.154.
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discussion of sex in Barbary Shore . we do not come across the

type of sex which emerges out of love and passion. Legitimate

sexual relationship after marriage is almost absent in his

novels. Most of the critics stress that sex controls the nature

and behaviour of most of the characters in Barbary Shore. These

characters are the product of Mailer's imaginative mind and

through them Mailer has given expression to all his ideas about

sex.

Except for Lovett, everyone approaches Guinevere with ends

motivated by the factors other than pure emotional commitment.

Lannie's lesbian affair with her comes close to achieve the

purity of emotional involvement. They love each other, they

adorn

each other. They need nothing except each other's arms. The

homosexuality has been drawn towards the beauty. Sexuality is to

play an important part in the relationship between Guinevere and

Lovett, as it does with all the relationship in the novel. But

it

is significant that these two characters never sleep together.

Appearances are never proved true in Barbary Shore . Lovett is

stimulated by Dinsmore to make love to Guinevere. He says to

Lovett that:
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4

She likes you kid... she just likes you. Good looking kid

like you. You'll be having your hands full with her." 1

Between Dinsmore's statement and Guinevere's suprisingly

attractive initial appearance. Lovett is caught in his external

involvement:

I was startled. Dinsmore had poorly prepared me. She was

quite pretty. at least to my taste; pretty in a flamboyant

cootchy way. so that first impression was no more than fabulous

crop of red hair and a woman beneath, wriggling her hips.

Undeniably shot and stout, her limbs were neverthless delicate,

her face was not heavy, and her waist, repectably narrow,

tapered

inward from her shoulders in an exaggeration which was

piquing."2

Unlike the other characters, Lovett is truly more desirous

of sex as a means of communication. In this aim, he is

continually frustrated. The abortive encounters with Guinevere

make Lovett feel that he is alone and isolated. Vision from his

past, some vague memories and some merely fantasies trouble his

1. Ibid., P.45
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mind. Several of these are sexual in nature and one is of

particular significance in order to understand the nature of

Lovett’s character and quest:

"Across the blur of past, I have a memory which returns

over

and over again, and I am almost certain it happened. Perhaps it

was during a furlough from the Army, although that is not

important. I knew a girl then who was in love with me and very

much in love with her. We spent a week in tourist home at some

sexshore resort, and that week provided more happiness and more

pain than I could have thought possible. For the girl love had

always been difficult... But I adored her so completely, so

confidently, that my admiration seemed to accomplish everything.

The room we shared burgeoned for her. She came to love her

flesh,

and from there it was but a step to loving mine. We lay beside

each other for hours on end, brilliant with new knowledge. I had

discovered magic to her and reaped the benefit; I could shine in

the reflection of her face."l

Lovett here too fails to make love as it has been his lot. Sex

is

a matter of alienation of his breakable relations with

Guinevere.

He says.
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When we parted, and I believe I never saw her again, she

whispered a phrase not devoid of literary ambition, " Mikey, you

know the room is the trap of the heart", and the extravagance of

the words not completely without meaning." 1

Despite his different lot with Guinevere, Lovett succeeds to

have

sexual affair with Lannie. He gives her twenty dollars and she

is

drawn closer to him . She takes him as her guardian:

"Oh, Mikey, you' re such a guardian... I ought to make love

to you. I've always wanted to make love to a guardian and whip

his behind with his watch fob."2

Lannie has a very violent sexual intercourse with Lovett that

she

had to cry " save me". 3 She comes into Lovett's arms with

quick motion and kisses him. They hug in a wiry embrace and

cling

to each other and sway across the room to sprawl upon her bed
3. Ibid., P.138.
and

Lovett feels her body:

1. Ibid., P.46.
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2. Ibid., P.135.
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8

Her body arched against mine, rigid to the touch, her

mouth tight as though she must repel even as she would accept. I

held her in my arms, gave her my body to which she could cling,

and remotely without tenderness or desire or even incapacity I

performed, riding through the darkness of my closed eyes while

she sobbed — beneath me in fathomless desperation."!

I caught up with Lannie after running a few steps, and

encircled her waist. Beneath the cotton of the pajamas, I felt

her grow rigid. " Philanthropist"... yet her body, independent

of

what she might desire, would not bend, and along the length of

my

arm I felt its constraint. Soon I released her, and we strode

alone hand in hand toward the rooming house. "2

Thus, the factors, why McLeod has married Guinevere, come

to

be known as in order to escape from presecution. Guinevere has

been a symbol of American social veil behind it, McLeod could

hide his outrageous past. But the failure of their marriage is

suggestive of antipathy between the abstract and the physical.

In their social life, one is always absent, their life is "where

1. Ibid., PP.137-38.
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2. Ibid., PP.131-132.
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McLeod is never present and Guinevere is practically a queer-

bee."! Like General Cummings in The Naked and The Dead. McLeod

is not an important man. " He's a queer fish".2 He is a good

husband of Guinevere for nothing. He neither suffers from

'excessive sexual vanity' nor is cruelly scorched by ' sexual

esteem 1 2 3
. Because of an excessive indulgence in ideology, he has

deserted the ' life of the body’ as he is advertised of his

relations with Guinevere by Dinsmore:

"... but there’s her husband involved, and although I never

met the guy I think it its kind of sneaky seeing a dame when her

husband sleeps in same building."3

McLeod confesses to Guinevere that she could have been in

love and he betrayed that potentiality. She needed a man who

could give her a great deal but it is McLeod who could give her

very little.

1 Ibid., P.176.
2 Ibid., P.69.
31. Barbarv Shore , P.51.

3. The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer , P.63.

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McLeod has had own chance in the past so his final

resolution to devote his energy, a promise of emotiona

l
commitment, to bridge the void is discardedly Guinevere's
selfish

sexual life. The failure of their relationship suggests the

extreme to which 'body' or sexual potentials could degenerate

because of lack of attention in due time. Constant sexual

frustration transforms her potentials into selfish, grasping,

mindless, and animalistic extreme. She betrays Lannie, Lovett,

and McLeod and craves to a brute like Hollingsworth, the devil,

about whom Nigel Leigh says:

■ in the second half of Barbary Shore Hollingswoth is

used mainly to sustain a dramatic situation in which McLeod can

speak at inordinate length on issues relating to the history of

socialism, a role he shares with Lovett, the true recipient of

McLeod's inheritance."!

On the basis of sound physicality, Hollingsworth satisfies

Guinevere's sexual desire. It is Stanley Gutman 2 who says that

Guinevere, unsatisfied by her husband whom she sees secretly, she

finds excitment in the arms of Hollingsworth. However, Lannie who

had a very brief and abortive sexual encounter with Lovett also

consciously and eagerly seeks absement at the hand of

Hollingsworth who beats her, abuses her and forces her to commit
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salacia upon him. As a mattter of fact, it is Lannie who is

exploited most by Hollingsworth and Guinevere. The abnormal

sexual relations between Guinevere and Lannie, homosexuality, is

a motherly sexual inspiration to Monina who represents the

proletariat future generation of American society. She is

spoiled

and pampered by her mother in the hope that she will become

someday a child star of Hollywood film industry. She has

inherited all the characteristics of her mother in her

childhood.

However, she is only of three years and a half yet she is all

about aware of her own sexuality. She displays obscene

activities

and attempts to gain male attention revealing a body like an

eighteen year old girl.

Even she is too young to pronuniciate Lovett as " you are good

looking." 1

"Ditter Luft doodooking" 2

We agree with the view of Barry H. Leeds 3 who writes

2 . Ibid.,
about
P.51.
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Monina that she is a perverse child strangely reminiscent of

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4

Prynne s daughter Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Like

she reveals to the reader the identity of her incognite

McLeod.

Hollingsworth’s relationship with various

character in Barbary Shore is expressed in the extreme form of

sadism. McLeod calls him a sick individual and his sickness

certainly reflects upon the tendencies of his mind which seemed

to be visited more by violence than by sloth. His sexual

pursuits

are dominated more by violence than by tenderness. He himself

confesses to Lovett of having forced a girl into sexual

intercourse. He explicits his knowledge of these facts in order

to torture McLeod and also in order to explicit illusioned mind

of Lannie Madison. His secret liaison with Guinevere also

reveals

impulses working behind his sexual urges. Violence is not

serving

to release his potentality for love. Just opposite, his sexual

violence has animalistic aspect of it.

Lovett sees Hollingsworth’s sexual movement in animal

terms,

almost like a brute sguatting beside a carcass, and he himself

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5

whispers to Guinevere that he could eat her, every last bit of

her. His appetite can not be satisfied even temporarily, for

basically he hungers for that "little object' inserted into

McLeod’s flesh.
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6

We see Hollingsworth's appetite is so enormous that he is

so

bent upon destroying everything that comes in his way. His eyes

have started looking differently in assessing the little object

as a vague symbol of power. He uses all possible oppressive

methods to induce McLeod into a confession. He arranges the

dates and facts in such a mechanically perfect way that McLeod

is

revealed as the detractor and betrayer of the Great Revolution.

When he brings Lannie in, he intensifies the ever present battle

between the moralistic and criminal within McLeod.

In Ancient Evenings , Mailer expresses his early sex-levels

through his narrator of the novel who went to Memphi with his

friend and met his friend's sister and at first sight he fell in

love with her. Mailer has obviously satirized social and moral

degradation. Many times there are physical approaches between

them in spite of a close social relations. He asserts:

"She hoped I would be ready to mount her... since I had

already had her by other mouths so to speak, I was pleased at

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7

what she planned to save for me - this lady's buttocks were

equal of a panther ( a plump panther)."1

The secting of psyschological pressures shows various masks

of all the characters in the novel. McLeod is disturbed by

nibbling scratch of a finger on the door. He accepts all the

charges made by Hollingsworth against him. He faces a moral

dilemma before his surrender. His commitment to politics had

been

complete to the extent of criminality which he reveals to Lovett

that the only way to absolution is to do more of the same so

that

he ends up religin and climbs to salvation on the steps of his

crime.

Norman Mailer himself comments in Advertisements for Myself

that Hollingsworth's sadism and shyness were essentially

combined

with his sexual digression. He exploits Lannie’s derangements

and

perversions for his own selfish ends, and finds in Guinevere's

body not only a sexual substitute for her husband but rather a

manifestation of his own animalistic hunger. Hollingsworth's

macrophiliac desire to eat his own sex partner reveals the most.
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8

1. Norman Mailer. Ancient Evenings (London : Pan Books Ltd.,

1984), P.20.
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9

Hollingsworth's fierce anger of violence upsets Lannie

sufficiently. The accumulation of his facts induces her just to

have a mind to McLeod. McLeod's self introspection about the

crime is elevated by Lannie. In his body sex-violence is always

at the height. However, he is visibly unable to satisfy Lannie's

lust. Due to this lack of excitement, he emerges in animal-like

sexual behaviour. He is not so much fierce in physicality to the

sex-violence in comparison to Hollingsworth. His subconscious

mind seems to confess his physical guilt. In their sex-matter,

agony and anguish stand up between them. Completely, he is a

failure of sex.

One thing should be clear before we go ahead, why all the

characters of the novel hover about Guinevere is only because of

her sex-appeal in physicality. She is like "a jewel set in

brass".1 Her nails were painted and her lipstic was fresh. These

external beauty of Guinevere attract everyone to be a bed

participant:

"A jewel. But set in brass... She was a house whose lawn

was landscaped and whose kitchen was on fire... if she had

1. Barbary Shore , P.17

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turned around and like the half dressed queen in the girlie

show:

surprise ! her buttocks are exposed."!

Guinevere tells Lovett about her Hollywood exprience where

people encircled her and how she would have been active with

them. She was sexually wild there:

"I ruined my career just cause I was so wild... I figured

they could do anything for my career, but because I've always

had a good heart... there were a lot of handsome stiffs out

there. I used to be crazy about making love in those days. And

the fellows out there they really got whangs on them cause they

use it so much."2

She confesses herself the guilt of her involving in

unnatural sexual fire and in unsocial activities. She says to

Lovett:

"I'm a young woman, Lovett, I'm wasting my life."3

1 . Ibid. , PP.17-18.

2. Ibid., P.87.

3. Ibid. , P.61 .
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Almost after 1900s female consciousness about their less

significance and reputation in society has been the main

subject-

matter for the writers of the period. They believe in the recent

theme that how women are discerning the theory that it makes two

to make a quarrel . Sex performance can not be taken place

better

in the absence of opposite sex. Women characters are shown much

aware of their value in society. They have started realising

their equal importance to men. About this sex subject - matter,

the second reason is the two earlier major wars and its

destruction which seem to force people or writers to make up all

the ruins of the two wars through sex-process. As a matter of

fact, they have sex themes and sex of all ages to thrive or

propagate population. The contemporary writers found sex as a

new

theme. Novelists like Norman Mailer and D.H. Lawrence clearly

accepted it. Even here, for Lawrence, sex is a flame against

phallic. Sex is so much more than the phallic and much deeper

than functional desire.

It is not obscure that Mailer's world of sex in Barbarv

Shore is full of chaos, disappointment, vulgarity and obscenity.

The characters give expression to a distorted vision of a
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mentally bankrupt common man. In Barbarv Shore . Mailer seems

to say that there are many forms of sexual perversion in the

modern materialistic world. No doubt, sex is an important

factor, but it is appealing when it is associated with love and

beauty like Guinervere and Monina.

Sigmund Freud 1 comes close to the couclusion that women are

masochists in the twenties because of their inabilities against

man paramountcy. A woman has to be victimized of male violence as

each new girl faces sex-violence at first encounter with the

opposite sex rather than a boy. When a female sexuality is not

satisfied, it becomes more violent. Sex as a divine activity of

a generation-push has become a habit of the twentieth century

people to release the sex-tension only. As sex becoming the theme

of the modern fiction, sexual knowledge has been exposed even to

ignorant below teenage.

However, sex in the twentieth century literature is not

submitted under the contempt of love but appeared as a natural

fact with its physical manifestation. Even its psychological

components are not sentimentalized or idealized. Mailer and D.H.

1. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex , P.75.

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Lawrence are much aggressive to the futility of sex. Mailer

considers the theme of sex as a potential ground of a novel. He

has called Barbary Shore the first existentialist novel in

America. He has appreciated the novel in Advertisements for

MvseIf :

"There are few insecurities like aesthetic insecurity and

when a work comes along which sets itself up in that peculiar no

man's land between the faults of the artist and the faults of the

audience, then the reviewers have a power disproportionate to

their modest minds. The same people who gave up reading Barbary

Shore in fifty pages because they heard it was bad, would

instead have been confessing that it was marvellous fun even if

they didn't understand it at all. May be it was right that this

first of the existentialist novels in America should have had an

existentialist fate, have been torn from its expected reception

and given a shrunken life which was to react on the life of the

author and reduce him as well."l

Thus, Barbary Shore throws light on the oppressiveness in

American society and politics too. Mailer goes on assessing the

1. Advertisements for Myself, P.106.

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American position which he started with .The Naked and The Dead

till approaching Barbarv Shore . In fact. Mailer has tried to

capture an intensity that can not be conveyed by great scope

nearly as well as it can be by an enclosed atmosphere of

imprisonment and suffocation.

********
3. Ibid., P.16.
1. Radical Fictions and the Nove1s of Norman Mailer , P.39.

2. Mankind in Barbary, P.32.