EFFIE GRAY'S PUBIC HAIR

by Stephen Gibson

 

 

In Egypt, Flaubert mistook a cavity in a belly-dancer’s tooth
to be a caraway seed and was so startled by a prostitute’s
shaved pubic hair (her shaved cunt, he wrote,

had an unnatural appearance, like bronze), he vowed to tell the truth,
thereafter, in all of his writings. Effie Gray’s lawsuit
against John Ruskin, in the press, was a joke—

she wanted the six-year marriage annulled amid a flood
of ridicule (e.g., he wouldn’t touch her because she was hirsute
like a gorilla). To her parents, she suggested that her person provoked

disgust in the world-famous art critic because each month
there was blood.

 

 

 

 

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