Midnight’s Women
Isobel Harbison | Tolka Issue Five, November 2023
The first night home from the hospital I lay in bed. My body had spent a week wrestling with labour until, eventually, the baby was taken out with a knife. He slept beside me now, breathing fast. It was a warm late-summer Sunday in London and the bedroom window was open. Our rented apartment ran adjacent to the railway bridge and opposite another beige tower block, the hard U-shape trapping the voices of the wine-soaked clients from the restaurant below and sending them rebounding upwards. I listened to the misshapen chorus. Having a small child, I thought, knowing virtually nothing about the endeavour, is like having the front door of your home removed so that nobody can leave unless some other adult is in there. And with this thought came fear. I might lose night.
*
Crepuscular animals forage and fuck at dusk. The foxes, the squirrels, the rats, the city-dwelling wild do their work in order to survive, consuming human waste without succumbing to our shrieks and death traps. Outside the cities, the distant cousins of the crepuscular choose their work hours, but not in the lit towns, where we have forced them to toil by twilight or, still ravenous, into emergency work, creeping around under clear moonlight or from the dulled shadows in the greyest of days. Here in the gloaming, there emerges a contest of visions, where the wild perform their necessary tasks within the strained limits of their eyesight but just outside the peripheries of our own. In sewers and basements, side and blind alleys, they hunt, eat and shit. Out of sight.
Bimodal activity, the work that bridges day and night, makes its claims on humans too. We adapt our circadian rhythms, mode-switching to survive. By day, able eyes capture light’s play on contour, registering it as information and summonsing language to articulate what some might, in common, see. At dusk our vision breaks open and, as night falls, this gives way to something more fleeting. Forms whisper. The eyes’ targets require illumination to dart across the threshold of what’s visible. Lights are insufficient, though, so we pilfer from different parts of the mind to accompany our partial vision: memory, emotion and perception. We grapple with darkness by drawing upon our whole body filtered through our whole mind and from this conjuring, this disinterring, grasp at altered forms. We work all hours like other animals, but we are unique among the natural world in our embrace of the nocturnal. We stay up late to get inside it, fascinated with how it wrestles itself free from the day’s grip, compelled with its imperfect forms we eye its distortions, enjoying the other eyes we find there too.
Dusk’s transition appears seamless, looking up at the deepening blueing of sky but closer to the ground, beneath its gradient, there is movement and noise, foul-tempered cries of hunger, tumult and disruption. Every evening the world is cleaved apart as we, the sleepless, depart from the restful and scramble towards the chaos and solace of night.
*
The demimondaine is a mid-nineteenth-century noun that describes a woman whose work bridges day and night, a term assigned by composers, playwrights and novelists – many of Europe’s literary elite – at the birth of contemporary capital and in a new phase in the economies of marriage. These women were extravagant whores, seductive accomplices, part-time prostitutes, divorced or abandoned, stage actresses, muses and models. The demimondaines were half-worlders, drawn from beneath the ground, the netherworld, wanton and immoral, restless and untameable, hell’s own creatures. Not the fresh or marrying kind, they endangered husbands and wives and young defenceless children and the holy sanctimony of it all. Les demimondaines were defined by a temperament, not by their openness to crepuscular and nocturnal foraging but by the sensual pleasures they gleaned from their travels and spoils, and by how they participated so wholly in activities of the night.
Images of midnight’s women continue to abound: the harlot, the drunk, the stripper, the victim, the drifter or deserter. Segmented from images of women in the day, or men at any time, of any age group, women of the shadow world are so often lit by singularly angled lights, residual images fixed to hold in place. To feel real pleasure in the night incurred judgement and classification then and remains, in some ways, something of a trap.
*
On one of the first nights out after the boy was born, I attended a talk by an aging intellectual. I took a seat beside a man I sort of knew who turned to me and, grasping for something to say, asked how motherhood was going. I replied with a glare, inadvertently, feeling the strangeness of this term land upon me with all its forced intimacy and assumption. The question cut through us and threatened the pleasure of my just being there. This was the pleasure I needed to take me through the work of the following day that itself now seemed torn, divided in two.
*
‘I love nighttime,’ the American actress Jennifer Coolidge declared to People magazine in April 2022. ‘And I really feel like it’s the only time I’m really alive. I was just meant to be a night person . . . The whole morning, afternoon and dusk are wretched, and I can barely function, and then 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. starts happening and I’m like, Woo-hoo. I know something’s going to happen.’
*
The French Impressionists were obsessed with women at night. In L’Absinthe (1875), Edgar Degas painted a moll sitting in a bar with her shoulders slumped, eyes murky and cast down to the floor. Her dress and hat have a silver sheen. There’s a man sitting beside her on the banquette smoking a pipe. If she knows him, she’s not engaging – maybe he’s just some John. Before her on a marble tabletop, Degas painted a glass of absinthe, mixing an acrid shade of green to capture the tincture’s hot-cold flood of wormwood, anise, fennel and thujone. It lights the canvas’s centre like a wormhole into which she might dive.
The man in Degas’s painting was Marcellin Desboutin, an artist of reasonable renown. The woman was Ellen Andrée, a stage actress involved in Parisian naturalist theatre who, from the 1860s, posed for painters. Photographs of her then show her pale skin and distinctive mouth, a soft overbite presenting an irregular jawline interesting to follow and watch speak, and not unpleasant to trace. Her eyes had a watery quality that glimmered in a way that intrigued the same regard, presenting glints of her expression’s quirk, depth and melancholy. And so, Andrée was seated alone or in crowds, in bars and restaurants and drinking establishments glistening to the satisfaction of the plein-air experimentalists greedy to catch in pigment what daylight or lamplight ricocheted off glasses and mirrors and wet lips.
She drank for Renoir in Luncheon of the Boating Party, her face obscured by the glass tumbler she drained amid the din. And she sat for Manet’s Chez Le Père Lathuille a few years later. She turned up to the first sitting at an outdoor restaurant, dressed to the nines. He painted her body upright as she sat encircled by the young doe-eyed man beside her, him holding a coupe but utterly in her grip. At least, what remains is half of her. Before the third sitting Andrée stayed out late partying and failed to appear on time so Manet, enraged, scraped her face off the canvas and replaced that patch with the features of another model.
For Degas, Andrée was the picture of midnight’s reflection, but not as the critics would have it. ‘What a slut!’ Irish critic George Moore tut-tutted. ‘Desboutin is thinking of his drypoints; the woman is incapable of thought.’
*
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has said that she writes what she cannot paint and paints what she cannot write. She can paint most everything, imagined people in imagined places, often windowless. She throws light from her foreground to illuminate their fine features, their thinking – with controlled pigment she breathes life. Yiadom-Boakye reflects on her creative practice of drawing from the mind’s eye through the form of a poem about an owl at nighttime (‘Plans of the Night Part 1’, 2015). The Owl is a nighthawk, an avatar for the artist, who explains to her other character, Sceptical Pigeon, ‘there was something Infinitely Preferable/ About the Night/ The Owl had difficulty explaining this to other birds.’ Yiadom-Boakye’s nighttime is a special zone, a capsule for freed imagination, a ritual or process that feels good. It is any time for a crepuscular form of catching.
*
What is the word for daydreaming at night? Not daydreaming – this I know. Or dreaming, this I know, too, like all of us, surely, at some point. I am asking what is the nighttime equivalent of daydreaming, that ooziness when you’re not asleep, but awake, lucid and static, but travelling still to some loosely controlled elsewhere, some other part of you or some alternative set of coordinates? Maybe there’s alcohol involved in the passage. What is this space of nocturnal drift, of loosened thought close to, but not drenched entirely by, fantasy? It is a distinctive cavern, an almost perfect one.
*
For the People interview, Coolidge’s hair is curled and coiffed, her lips are glossed, and her body is cinched into a red rib-hugging dress, her decolletage rising plump and abundant in a black lace bra, just visible where her neckline dips. This is an interview for the magazine’s beauty issue in which she talks about the edgy norms of the present compared to the beauty pageantry of her youth. For the shot filmed for social media, she is seated in an art studio in front of unglazed pots. In one corresponding image, she’s at a potter’s wheel, hands dirty on wet clay, boobs squeezed between outstretched arms. In another, she’s at an easel before a canvas, watching a lithe shirtless man coquettishly, her teeth biting the end of a dry paintbrush.
Setup: mature, nocturnal woman objectifies young daylit man.
Genre: comedy.
What is the tipping point between the nocturnal bohemian and the absurd uber-wench? Which one is she?
*
An old friend who was both very funny and very haunted used to call the demons inside his head, inside all our heads, The Lads. It was Ireland of the early 2000s, when The Lads encompassed all genders and tones of inner voice, from the baritone to the soprano, from the angry or sad to the silly and joyful. I don’t know if The Lads always felt freer to come out at night, but they certainly always seemed closer to the surface then, hacking the control centre of constraint-weary bodies. This tenebrous space of differently operative bodies is perhaps what allows nighttime its terrible heavenly truth.
*
Jean Rhys wrote about women at midnight. From 1928 came a string of four novels, each with a nocturnal woman as protagonist. They roamed the dank cobbled streets across Île de la Cité towards the Latin Quarter or Montparnasse, or from the tall corners of Earl’s Court to the mouldy boarding houses of Bloomsbury. Abandoned by husbands or lovers, they went out at night in spite of them, not purposefully in search of other men but more programmatically so, too numb to grasp for other things. Forgoing slumber, they walked pavements, crossed boulevards, entered restaurants, found cafés, flagged waiters, smoked cigarettes, drank fines and watched other people connect.
Alcohol, for Rhys’s women, seemed a means of sedation rather than a thorough absenting, a mellow escape from the expectations of the day. It warmed their veins and ushered in the smooth indifference they needed. They were wilfully ignoring time, dulling the clock’s ticks with brandy or bypassing it, when the bottle was drained, with fits of morning sleep. Not far beyond the scant security of married lives, they remained wary of employment. Rhys’s women’s persistent disassociation from the lived world is as engrossing as the foreboding that they are running out of money, out of options, even at their insistence they have hours left to sort things out. The spectre of sex work (the hourly kind, the affair kind, the marriage kind) stalked them at every street corner.
Rhys’s fiction of this period was autobiographical. She had walked these cities by night after she married, after she divorced, after she lost her baby boy to pneumonia, after she had a daughter three years later and she walked clean out the front door. She knew the mirrored interiors of the restaurants and the names of late-opening bars, she fringed the literary parties, she married, divorced, bereaved and was also grieving for something of herself, the parts left behind. She knew the night as its occupant, a reveller, and as a writer too. For her, the hours after dark were for witching, ushering lived experience into sublime altered form.
*
What is the difference between darkness and night? Darkness exists everywhere. It is optical, astronomical, meteorological. It is a span of hours with changing duration held by the term night. Darkness is a state experienced by the awake and conscious, a state defined by its absence of sunlight when rays are not reflecting off surfaces onto or around us. Darkness is a natural state in which the atmosphere exists in its purest transparency, the odourless, tasteless, uncatchable stuff between us and those other lit masses, the stars.
The thresholds between two states of visibility, where things are lit close up or far away, is dusk and dawn. Twilight. The French call the transition l’heure bleue. It is neither immediately bright nor dark but engulfing, absorbing. The hour roams, shifting depending on season and latitude. The blue of this hour has endless depths but no tangible end or ground to knock against, no ocean floor that a human finger or any engineered substitute can extend to touch. It has no discernible upper limit or ceiling. We stand and lie on a planet rotating within a galaxy suspended within a universe that is as vast as is possible to imagine and who knows within this this quanta and infinity what way is down or up.
As a colour that darkens, night’s bleu is less a hoax than an elaborate optical trick, a fusion of the galactic beyond and intermittent pricks of luminosity.
Darkness is an optical perception of an atmospheric state and it is a sensibility often tethered to it. But the night is not always dark: it is a depth inhabitable in cities. We can step into it. The countryside hosts clusters and capers, clearer skies, all kinds of sparking and exploding. But the cities are where the dens are, and more of the people, the late spots for eating and drinking, for mixing and dancing and fucking, for working, for filling the well when it is empty or running dry.
Woo-hoo.
*
I grew up on the edge of Dublin, a beautiful and interminably wet city. I travelled to its centre as often as I could when nighttime became my jurisdiction. I descended to early-hour basements, small dark rooms with decks and speakers, lined with netting, playing dub, house, techno, drum and bass, music to inhabit you. I moved both lost and present among acne-ridden, sorrow-filled adolescents, shapeshifting under strobe lights. Sometimes the music people drove the speaker systems beyond the city, along the dual carriageways south, towards the mountains and we followed them like a line of rats.
*
Anne Imhof worked the door of one of Frankfurt’s nightclubs when she was studying in the city. There, watching the movements of the clubbers’ arms, the incline of their cores, the tension and intent within their sideways glances, she knew which men were about to fight. Her art is a choreography of clubbing, a distillation of the spooks and ghouls, recalling those early hours when The Lads are out and unabashed, this time of confluence, sometimes messy but containing within that (if you can see it) the most erotic stillness and beauty full to the brim of human instinct, wants and impulses. Now in galleries, in museums, she is in demand for staging absorbing techno-fuelled subcultures. She shows the voracious seers of the overground world, as through a glass darkly, the exquisite imperfections of the underground one.
*
Dublin seemed a big enough city until I left for a bigger one and then, on return visits, it seemed like it wasn’t. I sought infinite caverns, an overwhelming ebb and flow of people to flood them and set them alight. As the big city releases its workers, basements fill, forms extend, colours seem brighter, voices mix, accents spear and blend, perceived worlds shrink and expand. This still feels vast and spacious, enough, the urban sublime.
*
L’Heure bleue is a perfume composed by Jacques Guerlain in 1912. It was made at the mid-point of his career, after his foreign education and professional training and his forays into publishing, following initial experiments with scented inks, waters and oils, as he and his brother settled into their roles in the inherited family perfumery: Pierre, the numbers man; Jacques, the nose. Jacques mixed L’Heure bleue as a sequel to his previous Après l’ondée (1906), a name that translates as ‘after the rain shower’. Both perfumes were created around the twin scents of Iris and Violet, their blue hues mingling luminously with dusk and dawn. Guerlain retained most of L’Ondée’s top notes in L’Heure bleue, flashes of yellow and orange through accents of neroli, bergamot and lemon. He replaced cassia with coriander and brought into this aromatic constellation traces of orchids, set upon an earthy, musky sandalwood base.
This skyscape bouquet was composed at the tail end of the Belle Époque, capturing the exuberance of those last hurrahs before the ensuing wars. It infused salons and restaurants, bars and cafés, emanating from the necks and wrists of women parading through them. Jacques found inspiration from female nighthawks, creating odes to performers like Sarah Bernhardt (Voilà pourquoi j’aimais Rosine – ‘here is the reason I loved Rosine’, 1900) and Josephine Baker (Sous le vent, or ‘downwind’, 1934) and night writers he admired like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, after whose novel Guerlain titled his Nuit vol (Night Flight, 1931). Jacques was a consistent collector of Impressionist paintings – Monet, Manet, Sisley, Vuillard – those absorbed by the effects of evening, or the effets de soir, those invested in how these effects might alternatively find form in order to absorb or arrest us.
L’Heure bleue absorbed Jean Rhys, the perfume that is, an obsession marking her character Marya in Rhys’s debut novel Quartet (1928), based on a pivotal stage of the writer’s life. Between rounds of drinking Pernod aniseed liquor, Marya smelled this perfume on the hair of Mademoiselle Chardin, who had accompanied a Monsieur Bernadet to drinks in a café at the Rue Lamartine. She regards Chardin as young, unreasonably attractive and impossibly self-composed, a dancer from the Moulin Rouge who is able to refuse aperitifs and assert her limits, unlike Marya who has given limits up.
*
When the big city shut down, turned off its lights and closed its caverns, I wore perfume. Green notes for the day. Spectrums of blue, purple, red and brown by night. I missed my gemstone friends, their dark facets and depths of colour, their noise, their sharp contours and fine rebuttals, dancing, stealing cigarettes, draining glasses. Were they why I stayed here, away from the wet city, the first home, the whole one? Bad things happened anyway, poisoned, we lived and died, simultaneously and adjacent, in boxes, like Schrödinger’s cats. Perfume was something tiny and enormous to get inside, an atomic substitute for big city release.
*
Sillage is the length of time a scent remains on the skin – without getting lost or fading away.
*
Nan Goldin used photography to offset loss at night. The constant use of her camera from her mid-teens, the period that she left home, offset different kinds of losses, the loss of her sister to suicide, the loss of other family as she fled their impositions, a loss of innocence in the process of seeking herself – exploring her sexuality, appetite and promiscuity – and the loss of memory, memory of her sister, her friends, her lovers, her pain and pleasures, memory of the previous night, as stimulants hit the bloodstream and recall failed.
From Polaroid to Pentax, Goldin used cameras to capture atmospheres and congregations on her trips to clubs and hotels and lofts and squats and parties, in different US cities and some in Europe, taking hundreds and then thousands of images of friends performing, undressed, in drag, in one another’s grip. Sleeping, fornicating, beaten or broken, herself occasionally included. The Bowery loft she rented in 1978, the writer Darryl Pinckney remembered, had no windows, or else the windows were covered up and ‘this made her parties long, hilarious, dangerous events. You had no idea what time it was or how light the sky was getting out there. Her guests departed when they could ingest no more and some didn’t leave even then.’ Pinckney called her once after one such party, at midday, and she interjected his small talk immediately, ‘I am one of the missing today’, and hung up.
Daylight rarely permeates her photographs, and although her set ups and angles seem ad hoc enough to be unconstructed, her colours are very sharp and specific, in evocative contrast to dark corners or nooks or recesses: post-punk chiaroscuro. Goldin’s is a lifelong photographic habit of picturing night’s strange fabric, a record of partial absence, of the slippery world of gemstone friends, wormholes, substances, bodies, voices, bad company and various kinds of love.
Her reclamation and articulation of the fabric of night resonates with others. Mary Gaitskill observed New York City on her nightly walks through her character Susan (in the short story ‘Connection’, from 1987) who stopped at intersections to stare at gutsy rats and heaped garbage bags, astonished by the buzz around her and ‘the contrasting layers of existence sitting so closely atop one another’. Gaitskill treats this strange fabric like Goldin does, albeit in an entirely different medium, as a fine gauze, silky and luxurious at some moments, hazy or ungraspable at others, in either instance providing a dressing or swab for previous grief, the loss of a past life, the abandonment of a half one.
*
I’m not sure why the need to get inside the night, like the expanse of a perfume, a drink, a city . . . a person, another person, The Lads let loose from the self. I am not alone in the search for its special kind of transcendence, the distinct sensation it offers of travelling on the spot, of bilocation, of existing in one world while wilfully occupying another. To move through the night among others, observing its layers and pockets, is to enjoy a protean place for a self, split, to live fully beyond given images or lost parts.
Nighttime is where sensation meets perception, where touch and taste and scent pool and spill, where watched time gives way to impulse and the pursuit of presence, where thought and feeling dance, and limbs do too, extending upwards to anticipate the beat dropping, gloriously in sync, We Are Alive, before edging sideways, before sideways glances, before speakers are unplugged, candles blown out, glasses collected, bags gathered, routes plotted, vehicles flagged, before slotting the key in the door and closing it behind me, firmly, as executives hit treadmills, as the bins are collected, as the rats descend to sewers and the foxes to their kits, as birds regroup and children rise to warm their chorus, as the putrid productivity of the daylight world closes in imperilling the best of us.
Daily, half-worlders await a nightly freedom.
Isobel Harbison is an art historian and critic, lecturing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared in the White Review, the London Review of Books and elsewhere.
‘Midnight’s Women’ was first published in Issue Five of Tolka (May 2023), which you can purchase here. You can also subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
