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I thought I would nab a few quotes from my late-night reading, Emily Maguire’s “Taming the Beast”. I regard it as a quasi-porn read, about a fourteen-year-old girl, Sarah Clark, who gets seduced by her teacher, Daniel Carr, kicking off a lifelong sexual obsession that is mutually shared and mutually destructive. The book comes from Australia, and it seems to enjoy some broad popularity. Part of its appeal is that the lovers also share an obsession with literature, and the book is fairly full of rich literary allusions. But the story gets really wild, and I lost credulity during the last quarter of the book, when the lovers get back together and start to literally destroy each other in their bestial passion. They never really seem to tame the beast. I thought it a bit bizarre, but an interesting read, especially for a quasi-porn novel. The excerpt below comes early on in the story, while she is still his underage student.
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For two hours each weekday, Sarah Clark ceased to exist. Afterwards she could never identify the exact moment it happened, but always there was the crossing over, the melting, the absorption. There was no border where her body ended and Mr. Carr’s began. Mr. Carr explained that this is what Shakespeare meant by “the beast with two backs.” When two people were completely bound in the expression of love, they ceased to be separate individuals and became one creature. The act of passion when properly performed, created an organism larger than the sum of its parts; it created a beast with two backs, but one soul. Sarah knew it was no metaphor: if anyone were to stumble across their secret meeting place between three and five each day, they would not see a girl and her teacher making illegal, impossible love. They would only see a bucking, screaming two-headed monster. A dumb creature with no awareness outside of oneself. With no desire except to become more itself and less everything else.
-- “Taming the Beast” (2004) by Emily Maguire
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For two hours each weekday, Sarah Clark ceased to exist. Afterwards she could never identify the exact moment it happened, but always there was the crossing over, the melting, the absorption. There was no border where her body ended and Mr. Carr’s began. Mr. Carr explained that this is what Shakespeare meant by “the beast with two backs.” When two people were completely bound in the expression of love, they ceased to be separate individuals and became one creature. The act of passion when properly performed, created an organism larger than the sum of its parts; it created a beast with two backs, but one soul. Sarah knew it was no metaphor: if anyone were to stumble across their secret meeting place between three and five each day, they would not see a girl and her teacher making illegal, impossible love. They would only see a bucking, screaming two-headed monster. A dumb creature with no awareness outside of oneself. With no desire except to become more itself and less everything else.
-- “Taming the Beast” (2004) by Emily Maguire
