Sin and a Tiger Skin: The Stickiness of Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks

Abstract

This article considers how the press announcements about Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks (1907) and then the reviews of the novel, titillated the reading public. It then considers how sex, pleasure and desire function in the novel, centring on the tiger skin on which the adulterous love affair between Paul Verdayne and the Lady is consummated. The article also considers not only how desire and pleasure are located within the novel, but also how the tiger skin is embedded with those desires and pleasures. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) on how emotions and feelings travel, penetrate and stick to particular bodies, the article reflects upon how the circulation of affect, of affective value, can fix the objects of emotions. If an object such as a book which has received a great deal of advance press regarding its possible censoring, or a tiger skin on which an adulterous affair is consummated, is associated with a particular discourse repeatedly, then certain affects will stick to this object. In short, how does a tiger skin come to function as erotic shorthand for sex, pleasure and desire? The tiger skin in Three Weeks became a marker of all these emotions and affects, circulating in the cultural afterlife of this text in significant ways. Considering how the tiger skin functions in the novel complicates the understanding of generic codes and readerly expectations, and how desire is messily articulated.

Keywords:

• Elinor Glyn
• Edwardian popular fiction
• Three Weeks
• sex
• pleasure
• desire
• Sara Ahmed

Notes

1 Clarabelle is initially featured in a state of undress, similar to many other unclothed animals in other Walt Disney short films at the time. In Shindig, it is the particular act of reading Three Weeks that renders her unclothed state as nudity, and thus as sexually provocative, particularly in light of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America adopted in 1930.

2 Laura Horak has explored how Glyn used her age and knowledge, during the Hollywood phase of her career, to counter criticisms about her unconventional interest in sexual relations: ‘Glyn mitigated backlash against her version of female sexual authority by containing her Tiger Queen image within the persona of a middle-aged, upper-class, British woman. Glyn was fifty-six years old and a widow when she arrived in Hollywood. Even atop her tiger skin, she emphasized her British propriety by serving tea at her interviews’ (Horak 2010: 83).

3 It is certainly of significance then Glyn retrospectively positioned ‘Three Weeks [as] the product’ of her sexual and emotional unhappiness in her marriage (A. Glyn 1936: 129).

4 The original reads: ‘le goût du public anglais ne sera pas de sitôt débarrassé de sentimentalisme, et … [un] récit invraisemblable et morbidement sentimental sera accueilli avec un engouement déconcertant’.