Sexual Politics

If I had to be killed by someone...Quite an ending.
It invites an explanation, perhaps “how the imagination, the sexual imagination, men’s ancient dreams of hurting, and women’s of being hurt, embodied and declared a powerful single organizing principle, which distorted all relations, all truth.” (P.126) Mary and Colin love each other. Yuck. They forget they are not the same person, spending days on end making love and talking. They fear that “private thoughts would destroy what they shared” (p.82) and want to chain themselves to each other and throw away the key. And then there are some less conventional manifestations of their intimacy, like Colin’s surgery or Mary’s machine.
Against the equal, non-hierarchal relationship of Colin and Mary there is Robert and Caroline. Caroline likes to feel pain for the fact of pain itself, pain in a context, punishment and guilt, and remembers Hamlet as being about “someone locked up in a convent”. Right… The real prize is Robert, a man whose problems would make Freud, to use an apt expression, crap his pants. He misses the “real” men. He misses the time when women did what they were told. He’s obsessed with little relics and razors from the patriarchal past, “which, Mary said, was the most powerful single principle of organization shaping institutions and individual lives.” (p.80)
I’m not sure what Venice did to McEwan to deserve this story (food poisoning? poorly drawn maps?) but the aspects of travel play a unique role in this story. It seems Colin and Mary’s big flaw is that they love each other too much: “Alone, perhaps, they could have explored the city with pleasure, followed whims, dispensed with destinations and so enjoyed or ignored being lost…their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches.” (P.13) Their lives are tied too closely to one another; with love and intimacy come limitations, constraints – a poetic turn to the “ball and chain”.
As Colin is being escorted to Robert’s house (Robert, the one who has stalks him, refers to him as his homosexual lover, who replies enigmatically to questions of Mary’s welfare and talks of his “preparations” for the two) he stops and looks down a narrow street: “It asked to be explored, but explored alone, without consultations with, or obligations towards, a companion. To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so very easy.“ (p.106) He chooses Mary though, and continues to Robert’s flat. That climax is a very beautiful and romantic if you think about it. He chooses Mary, and sacrifices himself (ironically echoing Caroline’s definition of love): “I’ll do whatever you want…But please get a doctor for Mary.” (p.122)
Whether you agree with it or not, McEwan has applied sadomasochism to the nature (arguably, rather, the history) of male-female relations; women love and submit to the aggression, power and strength in men. It is deep within us. Women “dream of captivity” (p.71) This is “inevitable, logical…[irresistible]” (p.111) As “it” is about to happen, Caroline and Robert say that God is in on their plot, that they knew the couple would return, that Colin and Mary understood all along what was happening; that they were somehow complicit.
So what’s the point?
1) If you are in a relationship where there the man and woman are on equal footing, the sexual politics of human nature and history will eventually manifest itself as a burly Italian man who rapes and kills you.
2) Robert and Caroline are out of their goddamn minds.
3) #1, but McEwan wants people to still like him so he implies #2.
4) Gives readers a much-appreciated excuse to research S&M on the internet.
5) #3 and #4
6) #5