1




My ornament:
writing women’s moving, erotic bodies
across time and space
A novel and exegesis 


Volume 2: The Exegesis

Submitted by 
 
Christine Gillespie 

Bachelor of Arts (University of Melbourne) 
Diploma of Education (University of Melbourne) 
Post‐graduate Bachelor of Education (La Trobe University) 
 
A Research Thesis in two volumes submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements 
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 
 
School of Communication, Culture and Languages 
Faculty of Arts, Education and Human Development 
 Victoria University 
St Albans  
Victoria 
Australia 
 
April 2008 





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Contents
Volume 2 


Introduction 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1 
Chapter one 
Ornament as motif 
 
 
 
 
10 
Chapter two  Writing the body  
 
 
 
 
16 
Chapter three  The feminist heterosexual erotic 
 
 
23 
Chapter four 
Choreographing a fiction 
 
 
 
34 
Chapter five  Writing across space and time 
 
 
42 
Conclusion  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
53 
Works cited 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
55 
Works consulted  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
61 

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Introduction
The title of my novel, My ornament, has a strong metaphoric function, both in the
fiction and in the exegetical reflections. It encompasses the emotional resonances of
the writing and encapsulates a number of discursive issues that arise in the text. It is a
motif deployed to choreograph the shifts in subjectivity and agency for the women
characters―for Rachel and for Muddupalani―across time and space, on the sensuous
surfaces of Indian texts, in particular Muddupalani’s Radhika santwanam.1
The experiential base of the novel is drawn from a number of trips to India, as
well as two periods of living in a provincial city South of Mumbai, in the state of
Maharashtra, for several months at a time. I lived in a sexual relationship with a
North-Indian man (B.G.), wearing salwar kameez2―the baggy pants, tunic and large
scarf―at his suggestion. I mixed only with Indian people, mainly the middle class
speakers of English, intellectuals, feminist activists, writers. I communicated in my
inadequate Marathi,3 the vocal attempts often accompanied by extravagant gestures
and body language, as I interacted with the local shop-keepers, the cleaning lady, the
dhobi who ironed my dresses, while pondering on the complex layering of Indian
daily life.
B.G. and I lived as an autonomous couple in a miniscule gap, surrounded by
the tight local web of family duties that friends and acquaintances were engaged in:
we dwelt outside of the ‘familial-conjugal enterprise of domestication’ as Hélène
Cixous would say, in her ground-breaking essay, ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ (p.290).
For me, social life was limited and there were few public places in the early 1990s
where a foreign woman could acceptably go alone without a clear purpose. To make
sense of the extraordinarily different life experience, to increase my imaginative space
and, as a writer, to connect it with artists in my host culture, I undertook some
preliminary research on women artists of Maharashtra. This gave me a framework in
which to meet dancers, musicians, writers, film-makers―mainly feminist―and a
bona fide reason to use the local university library. It also enabled me to ask the
question that has always interested me: how does a woman nurture her creativity, in
particular, her writing? What are the factors that foster or inhibit it? How might the

1 I consider the motif, ornament, in Chapter one.
2 Salwar kameez are termed ‘churidars’ in Tamil Nadu, the setting of the novel.
3 The language of Maharashtra.

4
experiences of these Indian women artists differ from my own? I did not know at the
time that these reflections would be the basis of a novel.
I travelled around the state, in this space that I had made for myself, in an
otherwise potentially intense and claustrophobic situation. While there was an
atmosphere of love and care in my life at the time, there was not much leeway for the
individuality of a mature, single Australian woman in the Indian setting. Personal
boundaries tended to melt or become rigid structures, with confused readings of
cultural/gender sensitivities and reactions, generating tensions that can come with the
patriarchal construction as well as ‘regulation of bodies and space in this contested
area’ (Ahmed in Eagleton 2003, p. 248). These experiences and reflections were
mixed with my sensitivity to the fact that I was a guest in a cultural space, with a
constantly shifting awareness of my own colonial and post-colonial failings. Ahmed,
a feminist theorist interested in transcultural issues, recognises the 'complex locations
of Western women as they rewrite and participate in colonial discourses’ (p. 248). At
the time, given the overwhelming totality of the world in which I lived as a stranger, I
did not give much thought to my effect on the space and place that I inhabited in
India. And I was not at all sure who I was. During these months, the woman in the
salwar kameez was different from the one who wore a sari for gala occasions, or the
wearer of long, loose dresses in the house during the heat of the afternoon. (These
women were different again from the one who wore jeans or skirts in Australia.) Then
there was the reading and writing woman, the one who became involved in a Mumbai
feminist organisation4 who, as a devotee of performance, sat transfixed in theatres for
all the classical dance and music programs available in a provincial city. There was
also the Australian woman with the Indian lover in the small, uncharted space of the
erotic/exotic in the heat, dust and noise of the material world.
Accordingly, I developed an understanding of the different ‘I’s who existed
and who manifested at different times and places. The public ‘I’ was demure,
following social cues, taking up little space in the street, painfully aware, especially in

4 I spent many hours on the train to Mumbai and travelling with members of Stree Mukti Sanghatana
(Women’s Liberation Organisation), watching their play Mulgi Zali Ho (A Girl is Born) performed in
slums, villages and universities. I interviewed the playwright Jyoti Mhapsekar. Later, I organised
(accommodation and food among friends, as well as contacts) for twelve of the members to perform the
play at the International Women Playwright’s Conference in Adelaide 1994. I was made an honorary
life member for services to the organisation.

5
the first few months, of the constant presence of the gaze.5 Then, there was the
transitional ‘I’ who changed out of the churidar and into jeans and a tee shirt in the
women’s toilets at the halfway mark, the inbetween space of Singapore or Bangkok
airport, on the flights back to Melbourne.
As I strode around the Antipodes, I speculated on the different ‘I’s of the
Indian women I met. The ones who entered my sphere, the wives who stayed at home,
the working/family women, a continuum across class and caste. I encountered almost
no single women. What was the nature of their becoming? How did it intersect with
my developing subjectivity (a single woman, with her lover, her own money, away
from her family, not engaged in a clearly defined career, easily apprehended by the
interested Indian observer)? This raised myriad questions for me about the role of
agency,6 of the self and the other, in particular relating to my experience of the erotic
writing woman. In India/Australia/India, she kept a diary of her project of becoming,
recording the vivid moments, as well as fictionalising them―short stories based on
Indian life.7 She drew on a fund of reading―having a window on the present world
(The Times of India delivered); taking an auto-rickshaw to the university library to
devour Indian history, social science, poetry, fiction, aesthetics, the arts.

I decided that I wanted to write an Australian erotic novel set in India, with an
Australian protagonist, a literary work that was not an Oz Kama Sutra. A friend
recommended reading for me, beginning with the women mystic saints. I began with
The Songs of Mirabai, by the late 15th-century North Indian Hindu saint who not only
wrote ecstatic poetry about her god but left her Rajasthani royal husband and home to
follow Krishna, showing herself in public―dancing ecstatically in temples in her
devotion to him. I was struck by the sensuous verse, the summoning of images of the
god as a lover, divine, but earthly as well. I speculated on the connection between the
erotic and the spiritual, the way it was expressed by women from different cultures.
My Irish Catholic experience of the divine was hardly erotic, and the feminist activists
I met in India, rather than indulging in time-consuming Krishna-inspired raptures,
were focused on their professions, voluntary political work for social change,
plodding up the stairs at 10pm to reach home and cook chapattis for their mother-in-

5 Mulvey (1974) first used the term for the act of looking at other (particularly women’s) bodies as
erotic objects.
6 Anzaldua advocates new notions of ‘agency’ that move from ‘victimhood’ to a higher level, that
question what we're doing to each other, to those in different countries, and to the earth's environment,
that acknowledge relationship and motivate us to act collaboratively (Anzaldua & Keating 2002, p. 2).
7 Gillespie (1995, 1996, 1998).

6
law. This text led to further reading and the recognition of Krishna as a potent male
mythic presence. Back in Australia, I read Syncope: the philosophy of rapture in
which Catherine Clément connects East and West in the space of syncopation.
Holding the breath before the beat in music, suspended after orgasm, the subject
attempts to escape, from time, but also ‘from a part of itself that denies access to
intimacy’, stuck in its ‘unbearable collection of belongings to’ in time and space
(Clément 1994, p. 251). The notion of this liminal zone resonated strongly with my
experiences, reflections and fictions.
I began to write, assuming that I would immediately conjure up the main
protagonist, Rachel, a contemporary erotic writing woman.8 But the first image that
drifted in and out of my consciousness was a woman alone and having a nervous
breakdown in a bleak palace on a great river. It was not Rachel, but Muddupalani
(1730–1790), whom I had met for the first time in the pages of Women Writing in
India: 1600 BC to the present (Lalita & Tharu, 1991). The Prologue to volume one
contains an account of this 18th-century historical figure, poet, courtesan and
dancer―who wrote the erotic epic, Radhika santwanam. Lalita and Tharu present
Muddupalani as a feminist icon of Indian womanhood. Not only is there a strong
sense of agency in her story, but she is transgressive in her textual portrayal of the
erotic woman, Radha (Krishna’s lover), from the woman’s point of view.
As I continued to write, Muddupalani developed her own strong voice. I
became anxious and wondered if Rachel would be audible. After all, she was to be the
lynchpin framing the narrative, as well as being a vehicle for exploring many of the
author’s issues and questions about the lives of both an Australian and an Indian
woman. Muddupalani did take over for a while, but Rachel’s voice gained in timbre
and volume as I wove it together with that of her 18th-century ‘counterpart’.
Concurrently, Radha became a textual presence, as the main protagonist in Radhika
santwanam but also as an element in the inter-subjectivity of the women. Their voices
blurred at times, particularly in the transitions from one world to the next, as I
matched similar motifs in their lives. In writing the three women, losing and finding
themselves through their erotic bodies and their art, I realised that Rachel, by the end

8 I was Asialink Writer in Residence in Malaysia in 2000. I stayed at Rimbun Dahan to write the first
draft of My ornament.

7
of the narrative, was more like a ganika9 while Muddupalani was more like a modern
writing woman.

Positionality and methodology
As a feminist I advocate and work, in bursts, for women and feminist issues.10 As a
writer, I have a further commitment to creating women characters and placing them at
the centre of literary-critical discourses, as part of a wider political process. As a
researcher, I acknowledge the difficulties of ‘maintaining the links between
knowledge and action’ (Ahmed in Eagleton 2003, p. 237). I also recognise the
ontological centrality of the embodied, social existence of gender as a basis for a
feminist epistemology, as well as the belief that grounded research and creative
production can contribute to the increasing emancipation of women globally.
Theorists such as Grewal and Caplan (1994) advocate transcultural feminist reading
and writing practices from around the world, avoiding essentialising the term
‘woman’, in:
feminist work that attends to issues of class, caste, and sexuality (that) interrupts… binarism,
working against the hegemonic formations that occur within both sides. (Grewal 1996, p. 13)
As a Celtic-Australian woman born into a settler society, I am conscious of the
complex intersections of identity and locations from which I speak and write, as well
as their contradictions. I am also conscious of the temptations of many white Western
feminists to universalise women’s experience11, despite disparities in the material
existence and agency of women. And while there are rich discourses of identity
politics and assertions of difference, I am interested in pursuing commonalities and
areas of resistance across cultures, in this time of globalised capitalism and a
dominant patriarchal discourse of US hegemony and transnational and national

9 Ganika: a dancer/courtesan in 18th-century India. At that time, her role and life was similar to that of
a devadasi, but the ganika was not married to the god nor dedicated to the temple.
10 I have worked in women’s health and education, including Women’s Health Victoria, BreastScreen
and the Cancer Council. In 1999 I was the writing facilitator for the multi-media Warrior Women
project, that resulted in an exhibition that toured Victoria. I facilitated the writing projects Inspirational
Women and Heartsongs in the Key of C, also for women with breast cancer. See Gillespie, Moloney &
Fry (2006).
11 ‘Feminist work has collided with work on ‘race’/ethnicity and racism, a collision that is now fairly
well documented (Moraga and Anzaldua 1981; Amos and Parmar 1984; duCille 1994; Mirza 1997;
Bhavnani 2001)…It was only when women of colour challenged…hierarchies of power within
feminism (and) its universal claims…that the…complacency in the women’s liberation movement was
disturbed’ (Bhavnani, K and Coulson, M, in Eagleton 2003, pp 73 – 74.)

8
religious fundamentalist movements. I consider that it is crucial for women to make
spaces of connection. My mode of exploration of such commonalities is fiction.

To explore connection and to begin my research, I needed in particular to find
out about Muddupalani, a woman very different from me; to study her, not just as a
historical figure but also as a textual and cultural presence. I knew from Lalita and
Tharu that Muddupalani was a controversial figure when her epic poem, Radhika
santwanam, was considered obscene and banned by patriarchal/colonial forces in the
20th century. She was rehabilitated by a member of her community, Bangalore
Nagaratnamma, who ‘wrote back’ against the empire, editing a new version of
Radhika santwanam, with an Introduction that was a powerful statement of advocacy
for the artistic and moral reputation of the dancer and her community
(Nagaratnamma, 1910). This action, standing up to famous male critics of the time,
was a key factor in developing a discourse of South Indian woman as
writer/dancer/agent, built upon by later work, for example, Lalita and Tharu’s Women
writing in India (1991).

Such writing women challenge the severe limitations of numerous
cultural/textual constructions of South Asian woman. Many contemporary feminists
deplore ‘Brahminic cultural fictions’ that posited a perfect (Aryan) Hindu woman
who was above all chaste, faithful, passive and self-abnegating so that an
asexual glorification of women limited them to socially-confined roles whose boundaries
were fixed and well-defined, eliminating the possibilities of transgression or cultural errance.
(Mehta 2004, p. 544)12
Mehta goes further, homing in on the Indian class and caste system as they affect
South Indian women, specifically:
Discriminatory practices based on skin colouring and the… cultural inferiority of non-Aryan
social systems depicted [Tamil and Telugu people] as cultural anomalies who were less Indian
and therefore, less Hindu than the fair-skinned northerners. (p. 542)
Accordingly, Muddupalani as a textual figure introduces a bold challenge to static and
repressive notions of Indian ‘woman’. She was a Telugu-speaker living in Tamil
country, born into the 'low’ sudra caste. As an artist and courtesan, she was also a
stellar figure in the kingdom of Tanjavur, inhabiting complex and contradictory sites

12 Mehta discusses the situation of Indo-Caribbean women in British Guiana (Tamil and Telugu); it is
clear from the paper that her remarks are relevant to women on the sub-continent.

9
of performance. How, I wondered, could this dancing/writing woman demonstrate her
subjectivity and agency in an Australian novel?13

In 2000, when I undertook my first field trip to India to learn about
Muddupalani, I met K. Lalita, editor of Women writing in India, who provided me
with invaluable contacts for my project. I located and interviewed feminists,
intellectuals, dancers, historians, Telugu academics and two elderly devadasi ladies. I
sourced material dealing with aesthetics and the history of Tamil country, specifically
literary/cultural analyses of 18th-century Tanjavur; texts about Indian dance, music
and drama; and historical and contemporary studies related to devadasis.14
The only extant work by Muddupalani is Radhika santwanam. Telugu and
English speakers could not point me to other primary sources directly relating to her,
so I had to piece her life together. I arranged for translation of the text into English
and waited expectantly in Chennai for each instalment to see what I could learn and to
wonder: what is there in Muddupalani’s writing to excite the controversy and later
rehabilitation of Muddupalani as an erotic writing woman?15 Despite (or because of)
the paucity of material available, I had no intention of making Muddupalani only an
intertext for Rachel’s film. I had the need and the latitude to imagine her as a full-
blown character.
In writing a novel about a Telugu-speaking Indian woman of the 18th century,
this Celtic-Australian found that the post-colonial problematics did not just go away.
Such an attempt certainly requires imagination. I find Gayatri Spivak’s comments on
reading and understanding world literatures useful in this context. The process, says
Spivak, does not involve the activity of 'learning about cultures.'
Rather, you need to be imagining yourself, really letting yourself be imagined (experience that
impossibility) without guarantees, by and in another culture, perhaps. (Spivak 2003, p. 52)
This imagining and being imagined is a key process in My ornament, with the
contemporary character, Rachel, not only imagining Muddupalani, but also imagining
herself in an Indian location. Radha is a vivid presence in Muddupalani’s imagination,
her role model, shaping her identity as an erotic writing woman. In addition,

13 While there is often a blanket of religious correctness surrounding cultural productions in India (for
example, the banning of Deepa Mehta’s 2003 film, Water), there is robust debate about women and
agency. An example is Gairola, 2001.
14 See footnote 46 for details of field work. Some valuable texts related to devadasis/ganikas include:
Marglin (1980); Meduri (1996); Kersenboom-Story (1987); Ramanujan and Shulman (1994);
Srinavasan (1985 & 1988); Soneji (2004). See Works Cited for further references.
15 Mrs Sarojini Premchand, a Chennai poet who writes in Telugu and English, translated fragments of
Radhika santwanam, in consultation with Emeritus Professor Chekuree Rama Rao, Hyderabad.

10
Muddupalani breaks out from an Australian imagination at the Summer Palace as she
imagines Rachel. In this liminal fictive space, the characters are letting themselves ‘be
imagined’, seeking a space in South Indian feminist writing discourse. And the author
of My ornament knows, like Spivak, that there are absolutely no guarantees.


This exegesis
In the exegesis I attempt to engage in an ‘erotics of thinking’―within the framework
of creative writing discourse from a feminist perspective―to make multiple
connections among the discursive, political and aesthetic issues raised by the thesis
novel. In the process I draw on discourses of transnational feminism, cultural
nomadism, écriture feminine, and of the heterosexual erotic, as well as dance and
planetarity.
‘Erotics of thinking’ are ‘affective connections’ in one’s engagement with
texts, according to Rosi Braidotti, in her Metamorphoses: towards a materialist
theory of becoming (2002). Such thinking may achieve ‘the unity of the aesthetic with
the cognitive and their joint contribution to an ethics of empowerment’ (Braidotti
2002, p. 95). In outlining this ‘erotic imaginary’, she points to:
a nomadic, fluid notion of thinking that bridged the constitutive gap between mind and body,
reason and imagination, being and becoming. (2002, p. 106)
In this fluid space there is room to move in the thesis for a fictive and exegetical
consideration of the nomadic subject in process which bridges the gap in regard to
political will as well as desire that is not necessarily conscious. This is a zone
inhabited by Braidotti’s ‘becoming woman’ (2002, p. 97), a notion congruent with
écriture feminine.
As a reading and a writing woman, I have been variously influenced in my
research and fiction by Francophone women’s literature, and my project is in the spirit
of Hélène Cixous’s oeuvre as she explores ’the relations between women, femininity,
feminism and the production of texts’ (Moi 1985, p. 102). In my discussion of the
subject in process, I shall refer frequently to ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, which
advocates:
writing that inscribes femininity as woman, embodied, speaks out. She must 'write her self',
creating an ‘insurgent' writing that takes a woman back to her body. In the process, as she
speaks, she bursts into history. (1983, pp. 282–4)

11
As the textual figure, Muddupalani bursts into my imagination. She locates herself in
my Western consciousness, making a further leap from South Indian to transnational
contemporary discourses. In writing her and launching three women on an
intercultural trajectory through time and space, this project requires a firm grounding
in transnational feminism. Like Inderpal Grewal, I want to avoid essentialised binaries
between Western women and women in ‘Third World’ countries. And I concur with
Grewal’s advocacy of an increase in the ‘focus on the multiplicity of discursive
practices utilized by women’ (Grewal 1996, p. 12), in a recognition that information
flow, reading and writing practices in transnational cultural production and reception
are produced in diverse locations and are not all one way: Muddupalani and Radha
have much to teach Rachel and the author. Accordingly, My ornament is an attempt,
in the words of Gayatri Spivak, ‘to write the self at its othermost’ (2003, p. 91).

Summary of chapters
The five chapters of the exegesis are a synthesis of the key issues that arise from (or
that have informed) the writing of the novel My ornament. Chapter one considers the
motif ornament as it illuminates issues of women’s dancing sexual bodies in the
novel. Chapter two outlines ways in which My ornament writes the body, particularly
in relation to écriture feminine. Chapter three problematises the heterosexual erotic
and women’s agency in My ornament. Chapter four writes the moving body, finding
feminist and queer spaces inhabited by a cast of writers and dancers, in which fictive
women can choreograph, perform and improvise their subjectivities. Chapter five
charts the time/space trajectory of the Australian feminist writer mapping women’s
desire across and inbetween centuries and hemispheres and depicting an 18th-century
Indian woman dancer who is an historical figure.

A key link―or a gem―in the chain is the notion of ornament, both South
Indian and Western, which is taken up in Chapter one.

12

Chapter one. Ornament as motif
In the novel, the motif of ‘ornament’ illuminates notions of women’s dancing sexual
bodies, translating across time and space. As Rachel and Muddupalani’s relationships
with each other―and with their lovers―develop, new meanings of the term emerge
and shift from Western to the richer South Indian connotations in the shared
resonances of the intersubjectivities-in-process.

The Macquarie Dictionary (1997) defines ‘ornament’ as ‘an accessory, or
detail, used to beautify the appearance or general effect. A person who is an
“ornament” adds lustre as to surroundings, society etc.’ She is a decoration, an item
that celebrates excess. She may be a plaster statue. Her likeness may rest on a shelf, a
decorative detail in the scheme of some larger design. As an ornament, she may be
one of a mass-produced run of women who are all the same, with no meaning beyond
herself who, over time, might at best develop sentimental value for the owner. As
ornament, she does not have the power of an idol to be adored or of a sculpture, an
object of art that has cultural and market value.

These impressions of ‘ornament’, in relation to women16, exist on the first
level of recognition in a Western cultural reading of the title of the novel, My
ornament. They problematise the shifting balance of equality and inequality in
relationships; raise issues of subjectivity and agency; the gaze; and the translation of
an ‘other’ into an object whose value can be easily assessed and dismissed. All of
these reverberations resonate in the material lives of the women characters. While
Rachel and Muddupalani are sometimes ‘ornaments’ in the Western sense, they are
often transformed by this motif in the multiple meanings of Indian poetics. In writing
Radhika santwanam, Muddupalani follows the same traditional structure as the
Gitagovinda, an earlier and more influential Radha/Krishna erotic poem in which the
poet Jayadeva begins the narrative with the recognition of desire, moves through
stages of separation and yearning and then to the final consummation. (To some

16 It could be argued that both Surinder, and indeed Krishna, are ornaments in the same way. However,
in this chapter, I have concentrated on the issue of women as ornament, in an attempt to unfix the
traditional patriarchal ‘individual (bourgeois white male) subject of Western humanism whose
centrality had elided questions of class, gender and racial differences.' Sunder Rajan, p. 10. See p. 36 of
the exegesis for a discussion of the issue of the objectified Asian man, in relation to the character of
Surinder.


13
degree, the thesis novel follows these stages as well.) ‘Ornament’ is a key motif in
these texts. When Jayadeva’s Krishna has strayed from Radha and wants to return to
her, he acknowledges her preciousness as he begs:
You are my ornament, my life,
My jewel in the sea of existence.
Be yielding to me forever,
My heart fervently pleads! (p. 112)
In Radha/Krishna poems, the characters are always covered in gold and precious
stones. The lovers, both the man and woman, ornament themselves and each other,
with garlands and jewellery, in sensuous, poetic images of mouths, shining bees,
glowing faces, fragrant flowers, curved flesh, so that the woman is cherished, desired,
divine, powerful, an ornament. In the process, Radha achieves the status of the divine
by the very nature of the erotic rapture that exists in the embodied sexual connection
that she enjoys with her lover, a relationship that is mutually dependent and giving.17
In My ornament, too, the women are precious gems, as the adornments of the male
characters, but there are further complexities. Seven-year-old Muddupalani is being
prepared by Ammama, the grandmother, for her first appearance before the King at
the Big Temple. Ammama tells her:
‘The King must see you unadorned. The sweetness of your young body needs nothing.’
Ammama bent lower to attach the strand of white jasmine to the girl’s coiled plait and the
scents of her oiled smooth breasts oozed into the air.
‘In time, kings and princes will bedeck you with rich ornaments. These will cover you, even
when you are otherwise naked.’ She laughed as she held the girl’s chin in her hand and her
heavy gold bangles clunked together down her fore arm. (p. 36)
Jewellery will be the mark of this girl’s success. From the time of her professional
debut, six years after this scene, Muddupalani uses ornaments as a tool and a means of
assessing and displaying her public and private power. When she adorns herself in
spectacular silver jewellery (and little else) she is donning armour, assembling her
weapons against a threat, the new talent―the moonbeam girl―whom she fears will
be her successor. When the King is dead, the great tangled ball of ornaments is the
token of the right to mourn at his side. The new girl’s mother has claimed both. When
Muddupalani arrives:

17 Radha is often regarded the female side of Krishna. Shakti (the wife of Shiva) is the supreme creative
power of the Absolute Being, a dynamic part of the Hindu cosmology. Shakti is a philosophy and
practice of women’s power, particularly in South India.

14
The girl climbs off the couch, walks across the chamber and hands me the tangle of gold as
big as a melon. ‘These are yours. He would have given them to you, his Radha,’ she says. I
drop the clump on the floor beside the bed and brooches, earrings and anklets clank and jangle
on the stone. And I leave the room, a hand on my breast to still my burning heart. (p. 36)
It is Muddupalani who is represented by the great gold chunk of gems, chains,
pendants and loops―the riches of the King, his ‘life in the sea of existence’―as she
takes the first step to go away, leaving the matted clump behind, and fall apart at her
home in the dancers’ street, and then more completely at the Summer Palace, where
she will be stripped of her ornaments. Similarly, Rachel’s relationship with ornaments
parallels the shifts in agency in her relationship with Surinder, but her trajectory is
different. She succumbs to his urging her to be pierced to wear his silver jewellery,
then goes further in piercing other parts of her body (under her own volition). This
raises complex issues of feminism in relation to body politics and ornamentation,
which would suggest to some theorists masochistic submission to a patriarchal norm
of beautification and a giving in to a lover’s wishes, against her own feelings.
Almost at the end of the novel, Surinder’s gift raises power issues. Sending
the gold bangle with the lavish one thousand rupees for a taxi is an overt act in his
modelling of her into his 20th-century courtesan―transforming her into a ganika, a
dancer for the gods. She is a figure who must be garlanded, adorned, adored. She is
his Radha, his Muddupalani, who dreams of bees and honey and is worshipped by
him. In the realm of the trope, ‘ornament’, she has the capacity to turn him into a god.
But finally she rejects the transaction, takes off her ornaments, changes into her jeans
and leaves for the airport.

Muddupalani provides three further dimensions to the term ‘ornament’ in
Radhika santwanam, which are firmly located in the richly erotic tradition of Sanskrit
and Telugu courtesan poetry. The first refers to embodiment and character traits as
ornaments. Following tradition, in her opening stanzas the poet enumerates her
outstanding qualities―a face that glows like the moon, conversational skills,
compassionate eyes, generosity:
These are the ornaments
that adorn Palani,
when she is praised by kings. (Lalita & Tharu 1991, p. 117)
So here, and in other Indian lyrical court poetry, character traits are surface, bodily
phenomena, in the same list of ornaments as a beautiful face, worn by the individual

15
like ornate clothing or jewellery. Accordingly, character development is then an
increase in one’s ‘ornaments’.

More broadly, embodied woman as ornament in Sanskrit and archaic Telugu
poetry is a means of defining and explaining traditional Indian poetics, as well as
being a trope within the texts themselves. Hijjas, in Ornamented bodies, uses the
Sanskrit term alamkara in her discussion of women’s Sanskrit court poetry (1999, p.
87). ‘Alamkara’ means both jewellery worn by people and figures worn by poems.
This theory was originally proposed by the 9th-century CE Sanskrit literary critic
Anandavardhana. He writes about both literal and implied meaning (dhvani),
suggesting that the body parts of the woman are like the surface meanings of the
poem―the individual characteristics, or gems―while the sum of the parts is the
indefinable quality, intuited by the reader, the charm (of a woman), the metaphor for
dhvani, that makes up the whole. This latter element of poetry is not paraphrasable
(Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta & Ingalls 1990). Alamkara is a range of poetic
devices and rhetorical figures from alliteration to metaphor. So what makes the text
beautiful is ‘woman’ and the definable textual specifics of the poem, her ornaments.
The third element is the poetic convention of using a woman’s body as a
symbol for the beauties of nature, descriptions of landscape and vegetation, a
combination of woman/ornament/poetry/natural world. The discussion of ‘ornament’
in Sanskrit and Telugu literatures suggests that these meanings are complex, not just
for the callow Westerner but also for Indian readers. Hijjas notes that Sanskrit poetry
assumes the reader will do a lot of work. The same could be said for Telugu,
particularly in translation. These literary conventions―the nexus between
ornament/woman’s body/poetry/beauty―are confidently followed by courtesans such
as Muddupalani in their poetry, as well as by male poets in South Indian court life.18
Muddupalani and Rachel, as women artists, subvert and extend the resonance
of alamkara/ornament. They are not just the subject of nor the form of a poem; rather,
they are creating their own work, extending their agency, claiming the qualities that
are their ornaments―their sensibilities, their sensuality, in their dance and their
making of erotic text. In so doing, the women inhabit the textual space. They are not
merely fleshed out in a poem, but by creating their own embodied filmic or poetic
expression they develop a voice and celebrate woman’s erotic bodies from the

18 Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam (1992) mention examples: ‘women such as Rangajamma and
Ramabhadramba’ (p. 53).

16
desiring woman’s point of view. As Cixous says, in her (woman’s) speech and
writing, the profound and moving element is 'the song; first music from the first voice
of woman which is alive in every woman' (1983, p. 285). Muddupalani is a writer, a
scholar, a singer, a dancer, aware of woman’s song, woman’s voice. When she begins
writing Radhika santwanam, with the King in attendance, he encourages her, with
royal largesse:
‘Well,’ says My Lord. ‘Your work will be widely read when it is completed.’
I turn to him. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I do not wish to be merely read; rather my verse must become
ornaments for the throats of the learned. (p 87)
Muddupalani has a larger vision for the text that she is beginning to create. It has a
physicality. It will be like jewels lodged in the body, precious text that can spill,
overflow, from the mouths of those who read and speak it. Women at the end of the
second millennium write the body, in the same spirit:
proclaiming it so that other women can relate to the experiences and say: I, too, overflow; my
desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard of songs. (Cixous 1983, p. 280)
The term ‘ornament’ echoes the French feminist notion of jouissance in écriture
feminine, but it is even more multi-faceted―closely associated, I would suggest, with
the Indian aesthetic of rasa. According to Barbara Stoler Miller, the translator of
Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, ‘rasa is at the heart of all Indian artistic expression. Rasa is
literally the taste or flavor of something’ (Miller 1977, p. 14). It is the sap or juice of a
plant, but in traditional Indian aesthetics it is the feeling, the relish, the heightened
aesthetic rapture that flows between the musician or dancer and the rasika, the viewer,
the listener. Its power was realised and expressed by Sanskrit poets and critics, so that
not only is rasa available as a rapturous feeling, but it was also an organising
principle, in the same way as dhvani (implied meaning) and alamkara (ornament) in
Indian poetics. There are multiple connections within this aesthetic framework. Poems
such as Jayadeva’s and Muddupalani’s would have been sung and danced according
to the Carnatic system of classical music, in these explorations of the ‘aesthetic
potential of sexual passion’ (p. xi). Erotic sentiment (sringara) is the ultimate rasa, the
expression that a dancer such as Muddupalani must learn:
We were progressing with our lessons in abinhaya in our dance classes, learning to change the
expressions on our faces like beautiful masks. So we were becoming better at pretending to be
fascinated when our teachers droned on. (p 165)
Sringara was the emotion that overwhelmed Radha and the gopis of Hindu
mythology, as they felt and acted upon the urge to leave their husbands’ beds, their

17
domestic and other work to go to Krishna, dance rapturously and couple with him
simultaneously, each one thinking that she was the only one. Sringara is uncontained,
beyond the law, where passion is paramount. In rewriting desire, the erotic body and
connection in My ornament, rasa opens a space for transcultural aesthetic
correspondence, offering a notion of the intersubjectivity of dancing bodies that
resonates with the French feminist notion of jouissance in écriture feminine―rasa, the
sap that runs in the jouissant inbetween.19
‘Ornament’ expands traditional Western frames and opens the gap for an
exploration of new economies of desire. For the woman maker of text, her ornaments
are her strong character traits, her embodied beauty, enshrined in text of her own
making. Significantly, both Rachel and Muddupalani leave their jewellery, their
precious stones, behind, replacing them with fluctuations and tensions in their agency,
as they make more creative space for themselves, each choreographing and
performing her newly ornamented character in a metaphoric staging of woman, across
space and time.

19 Note: this point will be developed further in Chapter four.

18
Chapter two. How does My ornament write the body?
In the previous chapter I discussed woman as ornament in my novel, attempting to
expand Western notions of this trope by locating it in an Indian aesthetic context.
Chapter two concentrates on my creative process and the feminist poetics of writing
woman’s body, with particular reference to écriture feminine.

During the early stages of drafting the novel, I was drawn to the lush
theorising of Hélène Cixous, for example in ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, and her
extravagant assertions of the embodied writing woman resonated with me as I
discovered the characters of Rachel, Muddupalani and Radha. The first fragment I
wrote for the novel―the scene in which Muddupalani ‘falls apart‘ at the Summer
Palace―shows a ‘mad’ woman, immobile, exhausted, dishevelled, unmasked,
dissolving. In retrospect, it was not an optimistic beginning for a work that deals with
women’s agency. In the scene, at first Muddupalani is passive:
I lie on the bed and shiver, even though the rains have barely begun. My skin is brittle like the
brown shell of an egg. If I move even one muscle, the shell will break and the inside will
splatter to the ground, the rotten yolk breaking in the white and spreading fetid yellow brown
across the slime. (p 122)
In the first draft of this scene, I had Kannan, Muddupalani’s companion and servant,
taking a strong part in her mistress’s recovery, drawing on her experience of women’s
‘falling apart’ and pulling themselves together, encouraging Muddupalani into a
trance, in which she laughs, dances around, physically abandoned. This idea came not
from a Western feminist study of Freudian hysteria but from an Indian source, an
ethnographic study of Mukkuvar women who lived in a mainly Catholic South Indian
fishing village (Ram 1991). I was fascinated by a ‘syndrome’ described in the study,
in which women were ‘possessed’. They participated in a healing ritual, in a safe
space. Here, a woman faith healer helped them to drive out a demon, calling on the
Virgin to save them as they screamed and threw their bodies around, until they had
reached some resolution. As an Australian woman, I found it interesting that in such
South Indian communities there was a socially recognised way for women to deal
with mental/emotional crisis.20

20 There were strong connections in these rituals with some traditional practices of non-Brahminic,
South Indian Hindu women. I am unaware of Western ways of dealing with mental illness in such a
way, with women supporting each other so strongly in a community setting.

19
In later drafts of Muddupalani falling apart, I kept Kannan’s confident
handling of the situation of passivity and the breakthrough to action, but instead of the
Catholic servant orchestrating her traditional ritual, I had Muddupalani devise her
own. When she sees herself in the mirror and realises that she is bleeding, she paints
her body with menstrual blood:
A drip falls on the skimpy dance sari. I catch the next drop on my finger and inscribe a circle
around my left breast. I dip again and decorate the other breast. I draw a line from the circle to
the nipple, paint it cherry red with my thumb and forefinger. It becomes hard like a seed pod. I
pinch colour onto the other one and shiver. I rise up to vertical, and continue my painting, my
stylus keeping pace with the supply of pigment between my legs. (p125)
It was not until much later that I could see that the scene I had written resonated with
a feminist trope―the abject body―characteristic of écriture feminine. According to
Kristeva in Powers of Horror, the abject refers to the human reaction (shit, vomit,
body seepage) a place where:
identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous,
animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject. (Kristeva 1982, p. 207)
While Muddupalani is a relatively emancipated female subject, elevated in Tanjavur
society, her life has been a constant interactive relating, as she struggles to hold up
the King, the incarnation of Krishna, trying to stave off his disintegration and the fall
of the state:
I will hold the dark forces at bay, at least for a little longer, for I am Muddupalani and the
King had asked for his Radha. (p 117)

In her exhaustion, there is no time and energy for being an independent writing
woman. As a ‘becoming woman’, she must eventually ‘attempt to disconnect her
sense of being from the patriarchal logos’ (Cavareros in Braidotti 2002, p. 164), but
there is power inherent in this matrix of abjection. Kristeva asserts that the socially
perceived danger of the ‘polluting’ menstrual fluid has it origins in the perception of
blood as an ‘uncontrollable’ power of the feminine that threatens male phallic power
(1982, p. 71). She associates this euphoria of the abject with jouissance:
One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and
painfully. A passion. (1983, p. 9)
In this space Muddupalani is deconstructing her socialised self, experiencing the
euphoria and suffering as layers of subjectivity dissolve, losing her identity in her
‘desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen body, for language, for blood’

20
(1983, p. 295). As she makes marks on her body, she displays similarities to Cixous’
Prométhea, becoming one of Cixous’ ‘admirable hysterics’:
Write on what is alive? But up to now I thought of myself as writing on paper. Sometimes the
paper was thick enough, in fact, for me not to feel the blood flowing under the skin, under the
paper… I warn her: ‘I am writing on you, Prométhea, run away, escape. I am afraid to write
you, I am going to hurt you!’ (1991, p. 15) [my bold].
For now, abjection has enabled Muddupalani to refashion her ornaments as she
wishes. She will revisit her own experience again later, risking hurting herself (like
Prométhea), to wipe her flesh clean of the inscriptions of patriarchy, dancing,
speaking and overwriting the skin with blood, but legibly, on paper. She will
reconfigure her own life through her creation of the Radha/Krishna story, in the
gradual ‘becoming’ of the writing woman and her own text, Radhika santwanam.

Muddupalani’s abjection and the imprinting on the body are mirrored by
Rachel when she farewells Surinder the day after the seduction on ‘Muddupalani’s
couch’:
she lies down on the bed, feeling the glossy pictures sticking into her arm and her hip, the
edges sharp, the slick finish sticky. The silver snake is around her wrist. She has asked the
matron to hook it on for her. She pulls the white sheet up over her and curls up like a foetus.
She shivers in her sweat and listens. With a glorious blast, a locomotive thunders into the
station, the brakes grinding and wheezing to a halt below her bedroom. She must move, she
tells herself. Her face is cooling in the wind of the fan. Sharp points of pictures lacerate her
skin. She sits up and peels the colour snaps from her back and thighs, wondering if the images
will be dissolved in the sweat and heat of her flesh. (p33)
Rachel’s sweat is potentially more powerful than the images on the photographic
paper, able to overwrite frozen visual text with the fluid of the embodied moment, an
abjection that is, according to Kristeva, ‘what disturbs identity, system, order. What
does not respect borders, positions, rules’ (1982, p. 4). Braidotti refers to such
abjection as akin to a radical sexual ecstasy: ‘this experience is one of utter
dissolution of boundaries of self, species and society’ (2002, p. 162). It is another side
to jouissance, the oceanic sexual pleasure, the realm where the three women come
together―Rachel, Muddupalani and Radha.

I continued with my exploration of écriture feminine and Francophone writers,
feeling that this was an empathetic space for my thinking and imagining, this time,
revisiting or locating French fiction. I read the work of Annie Ernaux, whose novels
and short fiction―writing style, themes and images―resonated with my text. In
Fragments around Philippe V, Ernaux writes:

21
We made love on a Sunday in October, I was lying on a piece of drawing paper spread out on
the bed. He wanted to know what kind of picture the mixture of his sperm and my menstrual
blood would make. Afterwards we looked at the paper, the damp picture. We saw a woman
whose face was being devoured by her thick mouth, whose body seemed to fade and flow,
formless… Writing and making love. I feel there is an essential link between the two. I can’t
explain it, I can only record those moments when this appears most clearly to me. (1999, p.
50)
Ernaux’s character, like Rachel, is inscribing marks ‘on what is alive’ and colouring
the drawing paper with her desire, ‘writing on paper’ but with ink that is sperm and
menstrual blood. The narrator of the Fragments and Rachel have comparable
understandings of sensation moving through the permeable membrane between
abjection and jouissance, ‘the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Kristeva
1982, p. 4). Like Annie Ernaux, I wanted my characters to cut themselves free and
face the consequences. According to Clément:
Human jouissance requires that one lose one’s head; that is the foundation. That is the only
way to obtain the simulacrum, the moment when nature’s harbour is reached, when the
mooring ropes that hold fast the subject―consciousness, its cogito, its history, and through
that everyone’s history―are cast off at last. (1994, p. 15)
Rachel’s research in India encompasses a study of ecstasy, making her own story a
casting off of mooring ropes, grounded in the connections Clément establishes
between the abject and the ecstatic. In Syncope, she looks to Christian or Eastern
mystics to explain this abjection/jouissance in which:
they all describe the same ocean. A flood; a torrent of waves; a delicious immersion; a feeling
of drowning; arriving in a liquid that rolls, shakes, exhausts… and ‘oceanic feeling’. (p. 201)
Radha, Muddupalani and Rachel’s jouissance is the ‘pleasure which radically exceeds
cultural laws and limits’ (Silverman 1984, p. 321). From Clément, I returned to
Cixous who says of her fiction:
the novelistic dimension is displaced for me. . . the adventure is not situated on the exterior; it
does not manifest itself with linked scenes . . . It is in the in-between scenes where what are
the essential things for us...always take place. (Cixous & Calle-Gruber 1997, p. 68)
I could not relate my own prose to this degree of ‘interiority’. My novel definitely has
a ‘story’ as well as ‘linked scenes’, but the links and transitions are equally
important―textual interstices for intersubjectivity. I turned to other fiction to make
comparisons, to Mauve desert, by the Canadian Francophone writer, Nicole Brossard
(1998) who considers herself a practitioner of écriture feminine. I studied Brossard’s
style, the vividness of her writing of women, who were nevertheless at times just

22
sketches against the light that shimmers and shifts in the timelessness of her desert. I
decided to model some paragraphs from Mauve desert, following Brossard’s text
closely, the cadences of the sentences, the rich, evocative style. This material became
the prologue to the novel, a passage in which the three characters of My ornament are
indistinguishable. I liked the poetic prose, the intersubjectivity, but after some
agonising I deleted my poetic, oceanic prologue, deciding that it was inconsistent with
the tone of the rest of the novel and did not sit comfortably with the characters.
However, I saw parallels between Brossard’s and my writing. In Brossard’s novel, the
desert is a trope in which the women, several of them, are sometimes
indistinguishable, embodied but inbetween. Melanie, the fifteen-year-old, driving her
mother’s car, is immersed in the dry country:
In the desert one gives in without ulterior motive with the pliancy of a being surrendered to
space. The horizon is a mirage that orients the thirsting body. (1998, p. 28)
In a similar way, the river is the connecting medium for the women of My ornament
to experience their triumphs, escapes, sinking and recoveries from disaster―in the
water, at the Summer Palace, on the steps or in the cottage at Brindavan. The sacred
Kaveri flows in mythic, contemporary and historical time, a warm amniotic fluid in
which Rachel can stretch her limbs, wearing her swimsuit, and make a space for her
Australian body to be in tune with her South Indian existence, in a place outside
India/Australia:
Muddupalani is there, laughing. She walks out onto the steps as Rachel ducks her head again
for the Australian crawl, the sun striking the silver lycra of her Speedos. And what would
Muddupalani see? A fish woman with scales that are pewter in the brown of the sacred river,
her legs kicking, feet churning the surface, up and down, saplings of white, the body long. (p.
17)
Time warps as Rachel experiences herself from the imagined point of view of
Muddupalani. This scene is mirrored later in the novel when Muddupalani walks onto
the unstable fluid stage when the performance of her self is faltering. Muddupalani
sees Rachel:
And I walk towards her, calling, my arms stretched out to her because she is swimming across
the stage as if it is water. There is another scream. The door slams shut on the picture and I
shiver, up to my waist in the river, my sari dark and heavy, unravelling across the top of the
water. (p. 127)
At the river, the women meet in the Cixousian ‘in-between’ liminal space. Their
lives are texts, but interleaved, from one character to the other, from first to third

23
person, with an ambiguity at the beginning of the transition to each linked scene,
aiming for a subtle crossover, so that the reader may not be sure which world she is
in. However, while I created these inbetween, trans-historical spaces, the style of
my novel is relatively ‘realist’ and comparable to the writing of Annie Ernaux. The
commitment to telling a story differs from the écriture feminine of writers such as
Hélène Cixous, for whom narrative is not a primary focus and ‘the adventure is not
situated on the exterior’ (1997, p.67). My characters are not adventuring in a vast
interiority of textual space.
Later in my writing project, I read (and identified with) A.S. Byatt’s account
of writing her novel Possession in the 1980s. She says:
...my interest in both character and narration had undergone a change―I felt a need to feel and
analyse less, to tell more flatly, which is sometimes more mysteriously… I found myself
crossing out psychological descriptions, or invitations to the reader to enter the characters'
thought process. (Byatt 2000, p. 131)
In a similar manner, my process eschews psychological accounts and analyses.
Instead, I am telling story in a filmic way, so that the reader observes the characters in
action as the alternating scenes intertwine. Rachel, the film-maker, observes and
imagines, just as the author of My ornament, constructs a largely exterior narrative of
women spanning the 18th and late 20th centuries. This process aligns with Kearney’s
insight that ‘storytelling may be said to humanise time by transforming it from an
impersonal passing of fragmented moments into a pattern, a plot, a mythos’ (2002, p.
4). Nevertheless, I wondered: is experimental prose necessary for a feminist writer?
Trinh says that:
Experimentation with form is an absolute necessity for a woman writer. For what has been
done and how that was done neither says what she has to say nor provides the way of saying
it. (1991, p. 6)
It is possible to experiment, to find one’s voice but not produce ‘experimental’ prose,
and surely there is room for stylistic variation within a feminist political framework.
In ‘Feminist art and political imagination’, Mullin warns against generalisation by
feminist art theorists that certain styles (for example, realism) are either suited to or
inappropriate for feminist art production. Mullin states:
My claim that specific works are feminist reflects their impact on me and my assessment that
they have the potential to have a similar impact on others. I call artworks feminist if, in my
judgment, they focus on sex and gender and work toward politically progressive change.
(2003, p. 190)

24
The necessity for a distinctive literary form is not mandatory in contemporary
feminist fiction. The writer must find her own way. In fact, radical stylistic
rupture―for example, Cixousian experimental language―and lack of narrative drive
in fiction could be considered esoteric and off-putting for the majority of readers.
Ultimately, I want my writing to be accessible and to have the potential for
communication with a broad community of women. According to Mullin:
The contemporary (feminist) writer who… accepts the call to disrupt fictional conventions . . .
must recognise the possibility that her text may bear little relationship to the way women
experience their lives, and she may find that her audience is limited to an elite of feminists
familiar with theoretical concerns… [and] may contribute little to political exchange. (2000, p.
134)
Despite the fact that My ornament is not radically experimental in style, it focuses on
sex and gender from the viewpoint of the women who are strong presences, making
gaps for them to meet in an interstitial textual space as their stories cross between the
‘I’ and the ‘she’ of the poet/dancer and the film-maker, echoing each other, in these
jouissant21 narrative cavities. The women, at times 'admirable hysterics', experience
‘voluptuous moments’, enacting textual performances and fleshing out ideas of
becoming with a 'carnal and passionate body' (Cixous 1983, p. 290) as the subject
matter of the fiction.


21 Clément 1994: Translation: the French infinitive jouir―‘to enjoy, be in ecstasy, to have an orgasm’;
jouissance―‘ecstasy, orgasm, enjoyment’ (p. 291).

25
Chapter three. The feminist heterosexual erotic
My Ornament explores aspects of women’s sexual desire across time and space, by
writing about three fictional characters - the 20th century film maker, Rachel, the 18th
century dancer, Muddupalani and the mythic Radha. The characters may dwell in a
liminal zone of abjection, syncope and jouissance, but they inhabit a social/political
world and this raises questions for me―as a feminist writer―about the politics of the
erotic, and where the novel sits most comfortably in feminist writing discourse.
The political issue of agency is raised, for example, in Part Three of the novel,
when Rachel stares at a poster on the wall of the beauty shop. A tall blonde woman on
a white horse rides through clouds. She studies the caption, ‘The happiest women like
the happiest nations have no history’ (p. 192). Like the figure in the poster, Rachel is
buffed smooth, depilated, stripped back to some poster-version of woman, rootless,
country-less, with no past, to the point where it may appear that her relationship with
Surinder is the key factor that defines her.
This scene from My ornament reminds me of my first experience as a reader
of erotic writing. When I was a naive twenty-year-old, a friend lent me a copy of The
story of O. According to one of the blurbs in the front of my current paperback copy,
the novel is ‘a maze of perverse relationships… where the primary bond is mutual
complicity to the pleasures of sadism and masochism’ (Réage 1975). The work was
favourably reviewed by (male) critics such as Grahame Greene, Harold Pinter and
J.G. Ballard, and in 1960s Australia it was considered to be a decidedly ‘underground’
publication, shocking, even sensationally controversial in its explicit sex. In the novel,
a young Parisian woman agrees to become a sex-slave to her lover. She is taken to a
chateau in the country and subjected to sexual practices that are increasingly painful
and objectifying, which she embraces as sources of ecstatic sensation, until she
reaches total self-annihilation as a subject.
During my first reading of the text I experienced complex reactions. I was
thrilled and disturbed at the same time, wondering that a woman could choose to
place herself in such a position to experience extremes of bodily ecstasy. I found
myself identifying with O, recognising the darker areas of the psyche and being
uneasily aware that O, in the end, was portrayed as totally powerless, nil, nothing
zero, O. Well into the seventies, we debated O enthusiastically. Was it porn? Was it
erotica? We referred to Susan Sontag’s article, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’

26
(1969), as we strained against the puritanical remnants―including the issue of
censorship―of 1950s Australia.
Then, and now in 2007, I find Sontag’s a fascinating text about erotica,
literature and The story of O, which raises questions about and influences the writing
of my current novel. (I return to Sontag and O below).
As a second-wave feminist, my attitudes to the erotic in art/fiction are mixed.
As a reader, I felt optimistic and excited in the late Sixties and the Seventies about
‘liberation’ for desiring women. However, in the Eighties the term was heard less and
less as, I believe, the early goal of the women’s movement to free woman’s body was
left behind―as was the right to pursue multiple sources of pleasure―in the discursive
spaces of American and English feminisms. Vance’s Pleasure and danger: toward a
politics of sexuality (1992) describes and contextualises the gradual marginalising of
the heterosexual erotic for women as a result of the anti-porn debate, with its almost
total emphasis on the visual and a privileging of the male gaze, in which male
sexuality was deemed dangerous for women and men were the enemy (Vance 1992).
Braidotti contrasts a ‘generalised backlash’ in critical thought―including issues of
women and the erotic―in the US during the 1980s, with the European experience.
She states that:
on the Continent feminism was experimenting with writing, eroticism, and the exploration of
ways and means of making difference as effective tools for social policy and legislation.
(Braidotti 2002, p. 29)
With the ‘sex-wars’, American and Australian feminist discussion took a negative
turn. Heterosexual desire was downgraded in the hierarchies of sexual pleasures and
there was no flowering of an Anglophone erotic literature for women exploring
multiple sources of pleasure for women.
The issues of masochism and of domination are elements of female
sexuality/practices that were problematic for theorists such as Jessica Benjamin and
Michelle Massé. Their arguments raise issues of agency for the women in My
ornament. In The bonds of love: psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of
domination (1988), Benjamin discusses Freudian theories of domination and the
evolution of a duality that leaves women out of the equation. In her discussion of The
story of O, Benjamin writes:
Erotic domination, for both sides, draws its appeal in part from its offer to break the
encasement of the isolated self, to explode the numbness that comes with false

27
differentiations. It is a reaction to the predicament of solitary confinement―being unable to
get through to the other, or be gotten through to―which is our particular modern form of
bondage. (1988, p. 83)
For Benjamin, this is not a viable way of connection between individuals, but merely
an instance of women accepting the status of object as an inevitable aspect of th