Oyster Page 10

  The cock’s comb oyster (Lopha cristagalli).

  Oyster-shells have also provided the inspiration for several iconic architectural designs of the twentieth century. The craggy, jagged, zigzagged shapes of the giant cock’s comb oyster (Lopha cristagalli) provided part of the natural inspiration for the Danish architect Jorn Utzon’s design of the Sydney Opera House. The result of an international design contest won by Utzon in 1956, the massive structure perched on Bennelong Point took nearly 17 years and $102 million to complete. This extraordinary white-bleached building made of precast and tile-covered concrete juts out into the sea and is reflected in it on a headland where aborigines collected oysters long before European settlers found their way here. It stands as a bridge, therefore, between the ancient and the modern, evoking the sea above in its visual echo of wind-blown fishing sails, and the sea below in its jutting oyster shapes.

  Sunrise over the Sydney Opera House. Jorn Utzon’s design for the building, begun in 1957, was in part modelled on the craggy zigzags of the cock’s comb oyster.

  Oysters are silent and enigmatic, but in the hands of painters, photographers, architects and installation artists they have come to speak of time, memory and desire. And when they have not been used as object lessons on the consequences of pleasure or to meditate on decay or the mysteries of time, they have been painted entirely for the sheens and textures of oyster-shells and oyster flesh – the challenge of capturing the effects of light on wet flesh and the lure of representing a whiteness that is never quite – or merely – white. The oyster, though ubiquitous and familiar, is – for the artist and writer trying to turn it into words or paint – never quite knowable, always just beyond representation.

  ‘La Perle’, an erotic surrealist postcard by the French photographer S.T.A.I., 1930s.

  8 Oysters, Sex and Seduction

  Think of oysters, think of sex. Myths about the aphrodisiac powers of oysters have proliferated in most cultures for centuries and may have a basis in truth due to the high zinc content of the meat, or may simply be an extension of ancient fertility myths and rituals associated with shells – the word aphrodisiac comes from Aphrodite, goddess of love, born from the sea. The oyster’s association with sex is to be taken as read, but what is more interesting is the different ways in which oysters have been sexualized in the human imagination and what this tells us about changes in assumptions about sex and sexual behaviour, and indeed gender, in different cultures and different periods of history. For example, the idea in art and literature that oysters increase desire is almost always associated with male arousal and virility, rather than female. Casanova claimed to have eaten as many as sixty oysters a day. The American food writer M.F.K. Fisher wrote in the 1940s: ‘there is an astounding number of men, and some of them have graduated from Yale and even Princeton, who know positively that oysters are an aphrodisiac . . . one of the best. They can tell of countless chaps whose powers have been increased nigh unto the billy goat’s, simply from eating oysters.’1

  Oysters are associated with male potency, but they also signify female fertility in many cultures, and have often been given to girls at puberty or on marriage. They have been linked to other superstitions of gestation and foetal development. Gilbert White, for instance, in The Natural History of Selbourne (1778) described a young man who suffered from rough skin: ‘The good women, who love to account for every defect in children by the doctrine of longing, said that his mother felt a great propensity for oysters, which she was unable to satisfy, and that the black, rough scurf on his hands and feet were the shells of that fish’. A hundred and fifty years later, the dancer Isadora Duncan playfully claimed a similar explanation for her talent: ‘Before I was born my mother was in a great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply, “In my mother’s womb, probably as a result of the oysters and champagne, the food of Aphrodite.”’

  A T-Shirt equating oysters with Viagra.

  Oysters are associated with female sexuality in many complex ways. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for instance, the woman oyster seller was used in poetry as a figure of erotic play, something, like the oyster, to be consumed, part of the sensuous fruit of the London street for the male urban voyeur. In such descriptions the erotic pleasures of the oyster seem to merge with the figure of the seller herself. In the third book of his Trivia, written in 1716, John Gay wrote:

  If where Fleet-Ditch with muddy current flows,

  You chance to roam, where oyster-tubs in rows

  Are rang’d besides the Posts; there stay thy haste,

  And with the savoury fish indulge thy taste;

  The damsel’s knife the gaping shell commands

  While the salt liquor streams between her hands.2

  There are numerous references to oyster-wives and to oyster sellers in seventeenth century writing that show that they were seen as indistinguishable from prostitutes, a commodity on the sexual market. And even in the 1930s a comic sketch on the front cover of the French political and satirical magazine Le Rire satirizes this age-old association of prostitutes and showgirls with oysters, as commodities to be consumed by rich older men. Two bored old men converse while showgirls dance before them, their upkicked legs and petticoats transforming them into opened oysters. The caption reads: ‘To tell you the truth, these days I’m more excited by a plate of oysters than by a girl’s thighs . . .’.

  Even in the twentieth century sexual female availability was often symbolized by open oyster-shells. In New Orleans, oyster capital of the United States, Kitty West, cousin of Elvis Presley, performed as Evangeline the Oyster Girl in the 1940s. Her striptease began in an enormous and slowly opened oyster-shell. In Michael Ondaatje’s novel of 1979, Coming Through Slaughter, the author describes Tom Anderson, ‘The King of the District’, who every year compiled a Blue Book listing every whore in New Orleans as he would compile a list of local restaurants:

  This was the guide to the sporting district, listing alphabetically the white and then the black girls, from Martha Alice at 1200 Customhouse to Louisa Walter at 210 North Basin, and the octoroons. The Blue Book and similar guides listed everything, and at any of the mansions you could go in with money and come out broke. No matter how much you took with you, you would lose it all in paying for extras. Such as watching the Oyster Dance – where a naked woman on a small stage danced alone to piano music. The best was Olivia the Oyster Dancer who would place a raw oyster on her forehead and lean back and shimmy it down over her body without ever dropping it. The oyster would criss-cross and move finally down to her instep. Then she would kick it high into the air and would catch it on her forehead and begin again.3

  In the late nineteenth century two of the most notorious pornographic magazines were called The Oyster and The Pearl, their titles playing provocatively on the notion of purity (the pearl, pearls before swine) and the consumption of flesh (the oyster). But if the oyster is associated with female availability – the flesh to be consumed – a woman eating oysters or breaking open oysters is then perhaps doubly eroticized. In Lucullus; or, Palatable Essays (1878), for instance, the anonymous author writes:

  ‘Bored with Showgirls’, Le Rire, 3 March 1939.

  How sweet it is too, to open some of the dear natives for your pretty cousin, and to see her open her sweet little mouth about as wide as Lesbia’s sparrow did for his lump of – not sugar, it was not then invented – but lump of honey! How sweet it is, after the young lady has swallowed her half dozen, to help yourself.4

  The nineteenth-century novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, who found oysters utterly revolting, used the image of a woman eating oysters as the centrepiece of his comic story ‘Ottilia’ in his adventures of Fitz-boodle to represent the antithesis of desire, revulsion. A beautiful young woman, Ottilia de Schlippenschlopp, has swept the hero off his feet. He is infatuated. The young woman is described as dressed in clothes that sugge
st the colours, sheens, textures and seductions of an opened oyster as are many of the women oyster-eaters in Dutch seventeenth-century feast scenes:

  Ottilia was pale and delicate. She wore her glistening black hair in bands, and dressed in vapoury white muslin . . . Many is the tea-party I went to, shivering into cold clothes after dinner (which is my abomination), in order to have one little look at the lady of my soul.

  The hero begins to have doubts, however, when he sees how much Ottilia eats (though she remains thin). Her gluttony repulses him.

  ‘What! Marry,’ says I, ‘a woman who eats meat twenty-one times a week, besides breakfast and tea? Marry a sarcophagus, a cannibal, a butcher’s shop? Away.’ I strove and strove. I drank, I groaned, I wrestled and fought with my love – but it overcame me: one look of those eyes brought me to her feet again. I yielded myself up like a slave; I fawned and whined for her . . .

  The hero’s obsession is only finally broken at the German oyster feast: Fitz-boodle, like Thackeray, finds oysters repulsive and can only eat them well covered in sauces. He also discovers that the oysters on the plate which he and Ottilia are sharing are off. Despite this, Ottilia eats hers voraciously and then turns her greedy eyes towards Fitz-boodle’s nine uneaten bad oysters which he incredulously passes to her and watches her eat. ‘I left Kalbsbraten that night’, he tells us, ‘and have never been there since.’5

  Oyster eaters afloat.

  When oysters are anthropomorphized they are almost always male, but when the oyster is eroticized anthropomorphically in literature then the oyster is usually female. In the mid-nineteenth century, James Watson Gerard, an American lawyer, judge and abolitionist, published a series of works in the satirical tradition of Swift. The first of these, published in 1857, was called Ostrea; or, The Loves of the Oysters and was dedicated to male epicures: ‘my grinding, gulping, gorging, stuffing, tucking, bolting Brobdingnagians . . . my Flagellators of the Flesh-pots’. The book is a series of mock-heroic poems in which oysters are anthropomorphized and eroticized as star-crossed lovers, doomed to destruction by the greed of man. The first poem introduces the oyster with direct reference to the most erotic and controversial poems published in nineteenth-century America, Leaves of Grass, published only two years earlier in 1855 by Walt Whitman. One of the most notorious poems in that collection begins ‘I sing the body electric’. Gerard begins with a male oyster:

  I sing the Oyster! (Virgin Theme!)

  King of Molluscules! Ancient of the stream!

  But then Mya is introduced, the poem’s oyster heroine, both object and subject of desire:

  Mya! – fairest of shell-fish, she

  That creep the shore, or swim the sea,

  Or haunt the slimy ooze; –

  Oyster of ancient family,

  Of tender years, scarce summers three

  Her rounded valves disclose […]

  With softest yellow shines her skin,

  While violet blood, her veins within,

  Reveals a purple hue.

  Polished each shell on outward side,

  By amorous kissings of the tide

  Long loving and caressing.

  This beautiful oyster of ancient family mourns her lost love Loligo (which means squid) who has gone to sea but who eventually returns to be ‘clasped within her shell’. The two are married, like Romeo and Juliet, in a secret cave:

  By altar of rosy coral placed,

  Tenderly with shell inlaced,

  The twain became but one:

  No witnesses, save crickets three,

  Who, passing, stop and sing with glee

  Their epithalamium

  And now by Hymen’s fetters tied,

  Loligo bears his juicy bride

  Beneath the sparkling flood;

  There wrapped in bliss, the happy pair

  The honeymoon together share,

  In softest Jersey mud!

  The final poem in the sequence is another mock-heroic poem about man’s greed and cruelty to animals. Long clusters of stanzas turn on the thoughts of the oyster lovers, now caught, dragged up from their seabed and condemned to death, as the cooking pot heats up.

  Together STEWED! Within the pot they lie! –

  Mourn ye fond lovers! Their untimely fate,

  Weep, weep, ye cupids who on lovers wait –

  Yet – weep them not, nor mourn their early doom

  In Julia’s throat! They find an envied tomb!6

  The poem is a wonderfully satirical play on cultures of eating and sex so that it becomes difficult to tell where flesh begins and ends. Mya enfolds Loligo, the two are joined, then both cooked and eaten – their final resting place in the throat of Julia. Insides and outsides, flesh inside flesh.

  But although oysters have been used for centuries as a nudge-nudge euphemism for sexually available female flesh, writers from as early as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tell counter-stories of women who, like Daniel Defoe’s Moll in Moll Flanders (1722) or like Lizzie in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ (1862), are able to work the sexual market to their own advantage. Rather than represented simply as commodities, like oysters themselves, to be consumed, flesh for the taking, they begin to be the subjects of their own sexuality, able to define their own deals in the exchange of money for sex in the sexual market. Here, for instance, is a Victorian broadside:

  As I was going down Bishopgate-street,

  An oyster girl I chanced to meet,

  Into her basket I chanced to peep,

  To see if she had any oysters.

  Oysters, oysters, oysters, sir, said she,

  They are the best you e’er did see,

  And if you please to buy them of me,

  I’ll warrant ‘em all fat oysters.

  And if to a tavern you’ll go with me,

  With a bottle of wine I’ll treat thee,

  And all so merrily we’ll agree,

  With bread and wine to our oysters.

  They had not long at the tavern been,

  When she picked his pocket of four-score pounds,

  She gave him the slip and ran into town,

  Thus dearly he paid for his oysters.

  O waiter, waiter, did you see,

  An oyster girl come in with me?

  She’s picked my pocket of all my money,

  And left me her basket of oysters.

  O yes, kind sir, I did see

  An oyster girl come in with thee,

  She paid the reck’ning – so you may go free,

  And troop with your basket of oysters.

  Of all the years I lived in France,

  I never met with such a mischance,

  An oyster girl gave to me a fine dance

  And made me pay dear for my oysters.

  Nancy, the heroine of Sarah Waters’s novel Tipping the Velvet (1999) is another example of a streetwise sexual adventurer. She tells us that she grew up in her father’s seaside restaurant, shucking oysters and stirring soup: ‘Although I didn’t believe the story told to me by Mother – that they had found me as a baby in an oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for lunch – for 18 years I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies . . . ’.7 When she visits the local music hall at night and sees a male impersonator, her life of sexual transformations begins. Her oysterish upbringing and the constant references to her oyster childhood in the novel are a perfect counterpoint to the sexual ambiguity and fluidity of the oyster itself, able to be both male and female by turns, as if by will. Whilst the lifecycle of the oyster might have offered a metaphor of the naturalness of settling down for the Victorians, for Sarah Waters it is a metaphor of sexual fluidity and bisexuality. Nancy turns and turns, performs her male/female sexuality in music halls, in alleyways, in drawing rooms and brothels.

  Oysters have also been used in film and in fiction as a way of signalling homosexual desire. In an extraordinary story published in the Harmondsworth Magazine in August 1899 a shared oyster passion is the occasion for a scen
e of homosexual innuendo of the most elaborate and transparent kind. The plot is a simple one: an impoverished actor and painter with epicurean tastes hatch a plot to enable them to eat fresh oysters regularly. In the local oyster restaurant the actor slips a small seed pearl into one of his oysters and claims to have found it there. The restaurateur is embarrassed, but the story quickly brings in many more customers all ordering oysters in the hope that they too will find pearls. The two men return to confess to the fraud and threaten to take the true story to the newspapers unless the restaurateur agrees to feed them unlimited oysters once a week. The owner reluctantly agrees.

  The story may be simple enough but the sexual innuendo is not. Take the scene in which the two men discover their mutual passion for oysters. The actor confesses to his ‘sin’ with his legs tilted upwards ‘optimistically’ in the air; ‘emboldened by his confidences’ the painter also confesses and clasps his friend’s hand. In fact there is a good deal of passionate hand clasping in this scene as the painter declares that the two of them are ‘in love’ and the actor proposes that they seal their friendship with an oyster carnival.

  On one of these occasions he confessed to me his besetting sin. It took the form of an unholy and ravenous craving for – oysters. Seated in his favourite attitude (with legs tilted optimistically upwards, to assist thought by directing the flow of blood to the brain) he expounded his reasons and desires at length . . . ‘Give me, sir, the oyster au naturel, coy and disdainful in its close-clasped, pearly shell, oh my boy!’

  Inspired by his glowing description, emboldened by his confidences, I arose and clasped his hand, whilst in a choking voice I explained that he had discovered the secret sorrow of my soul – the lack of oysters in an impecunious world. He apologised for intruding on my grief, and then we sat in silence to ruminate upon the joy of meeting a kindred spirit, a friend capable of great appreciation. Into our hearts then stole the pleasure that men feel when in love, but without the deterioration of intellect consequent upon that condition.