I don’t think that last part applies. This is a feudal society, basically medieval, futuristic sci-fi gewgaws notwithstanding. People fight duels to the death in this society, with full legal sanction. The Bene Gesserit are one of the most powerful organizations in the Imperium, roughly in fourth place after the Emperor, the Landsraad, and the Spacing Guild, with the power of life and death over their membership. They prefer to lead from the shadows, but they have great leeway in their actions. They manipulate marriages, concubinages and breeding of most, if not all, of the nobility and royalty.
I have no problem believing that a few people suffering relatively quiet deaths would be laid at their doorstep in any retributive way (at least until Paul).
Two different things; the act of reading is different from the act of writing. If you read the thread you’ll see that I’ve acknowledged that different readers may well have interpreted it differently; the question under discussion, however, is the intent of the author.
The text means something different to every reader. If you’re familiar with my posts on similar subjects over the years, you might have noticed that I always come down on the side of the importance of individual experiences of any given artwork.
So I fully understand, and have acknowledged, that to a reader who is unfamiliar with the idiomatic meaning of “the little death,” that passage probably carries no sexual subtext whatsoever.
That’s reading.
In the writing, we’re left with two possibilities, assuming that Herbert was at least as well read and culturally conscious as I am (and I don’t consider myself a very high bar on that count by any means). Taking that as a given–that Herbert was, in fact, aware of the idiomatic meaning carried in the phrase “the little death”–he either:
[LIST=A]
[li]Used the phrase as a way to subtly layer a pyschosexual connotation over the proceedings–which, now that I think of it, somehow coincided with puberty, or at least achieving manhood, and thus the sexual connotation is obvious; Herbert was drawing a parallel between sexual maturity–manhood–and, what, psychic maturity, religious maturity, choose your phrase. Or[/li][li]Used the phrase, which he knew had a loaded sexual meaning, in a way that either presumed his readers’ ignorance, or else simply ignored the loaded idiom of the word and used it just cuz he liked the way it sounded. A bad writer, in other words.[/li][/LIST]
Frankly, it’s obvious enough to me which of these scenarios is more likely. YMMV.
The RM was freaked out because Jessica not only (a) bore a male child, against her orders, but (b) trained him as a BG. She effectively initiated someone into the BG order, but the initiate had never undergone any vetting.
In essence, she handed Paul a deadly weapon, without the approval of the licensing authorities. The RM was doing a belated background check. (Of course, as mentioned, she was also freaked that Paul may have been the KH, and that he was outside of BG control … just like his mother was not entirely in their control.)
This makes me wonder even more about the psychosexual subtext, toadspittle: the overwhelming importance of gender. The more I think about it–the gender of the offspring was to be controlled because a male heir would have had too much power (obviously oversimplifying, but the importance of gender can’t be denied).
Putting aside the possible sexism of this storyline, it seems even clearer to me that Herbert was alluding, indirectly, to inborn power that came to Paul with his gender–his sexual power, to rephrase a little more bluntly. It was this sexual power, Herbert might have been suggesting–or, if not “sexual power” in the way that phrase would usually be taken to mean, then at least the power inherent in his sex–that contributed to his power as the KH. It was at the moment of that “little death,” as portrayed more explicitly in Lynch’s version, when the RM suddenly became aware of it. I think the sexual nature of that scene, by Lynch, was drawn from the subtext he read in the Herbert original.
Chinatown with giant worms? It might work but I don’t think you’d be able to get Polanski to direct this, atm. However, Jim Jarmusch may be into doing “Down by Fremen Law”…