What is it about mysterious women that makes them so attractive? (2024)

As the age of oversharing reaches its crescendo, the reclusive wiles of Greta Garbo and the seductive intrigue of Rekha hold special allure.Vogue ponders the charm of the women of mystery

The trope of the mysterious woman might lie in a form of latent sexism; to assume that women are “unknowable” implicates a mostly male intellectual laziness or the failure of imaginative empathy. When one thinks of Greta Garbo we immediately cast her off as a recluse; we fail to account that perhaps she had a greater tolerance of herself than she did of others. Harper Lee, similarly, was labelled a bit of a secret, seldom granting interviews in her time, shying away from attention; in effect, she was not actively rejecting the world as much as eloquently inhabiting parts of one that did not warrant permission or validation. “One can never be alone enough to write. To see better,” Susan Sontag penned in her diary. Now the Sontagian aloneness becomes a trope and a breathing, seeking, enlivening truth, a primary aesthetic, a sword against unnecessary, irrelevant association. But because of the way we look at women, a solitary woman is often given up for lost, a sad TV-dinner spinster, alone because of her moustached face, on account of her personality, her strident politics, her inability to please men, or to be desired by them. This, again, is where sexism comes in the way of seeing solitary women as stronger than those with large followings on social media. Or perhaps I am merely being politically correct; how often have other women thought this of their peers?

THE POWER OF ONE
The only woman more powerful than a popular woman is a reclusive one. While popularity relies on acceptance, envy and adulation, its strength is measured in relation to others: the more people who adore you, the more popular you are. To be reclusive, then, is to strip fame of its tinny muscle. A private woman, while enjoying the attention of many genders, may seek the attention of none. To be gazed at but to be free from the weight, solicitation and demands of this gaze is an odd kind of freedom. And to be free not only from the male gaze but to live and to flourish oblivious of all form of scrutiny signals satisfaction, fortitude and personal glory.

FAME FATAL
In the future, everyone will enjoy fifteen minutes of anonymity. Thanks to Kim Kardashian, the democratisation of fame has resulted in its complete devaluation. (It is testament to the volatility of our Warholian culture that she finds location in the same essay that draws on Sontag and Garbo.) One earned fame with talent. Today, fame is a talent unto itself, a triumph of symbol over experience. And so, a famous derrière stands up there as a public conversation starter, a like generator, a product placement coup, a brand ambassador of our collective lust and lousy judgement. Witnessed by millions, the Kardashian derrière turned into the opposite of a raunchy rump: it became something we derided and deplored, and it was utterly desexualised by its eminence. This is where what is concealed, what enjoys discretion, becomes crucial: fame is trade, but privacy is priceless. Essaying the role of courtesan in Umrao Jaan (1981), Rekha is bedecked in pearl-hued corseted anarkalis, with thick kohl-lined eyes that summon to mind a widowed swan, beautiful, bereft. Whether it is her love thick gaze or the glamorous modesty of her garb, Umrao Jaan is the anti-Kardashian: a character who traffics in flesh but refutes its easy, rude access.

I first encountered the work of Louise Bourgeois at the home of the writer John Berendt; one of her earlier works was installed in the top floor of his New York brownstone. The painting radiated a great plainness I would later see in the architectural simplicity of Zarina Hashmi. There was a child-like quality that recalled (Joan) Miró, and distant afternoons of laughter, free of adult hovering; a lemonade quality, deeply satisfying, simple. “You are born alone. You die alone,” wrote the shy American artist. “The value of the space in between is trust and love.” Never for a moment should we assume the woman who chooses aloneness is lonely; her solitude is refulgent with private meaning, and with the sort of exchanges that find an enduring glow in history, as indeed, Bourgeois was recorded for in posterity. “After the tremendous effort you put in here, solitude, even prolonged solitude, can only be of very great benefit,” Bourgeois advised a friend and mentor in a letter. The womb of artistic greatness is dark, fecund, difficult and all too secluded.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
What happens when a woman learns to be alone and, involuntarily, gathers the public label of a “mystery”? In book after book, Virginia Woolf creates characters full-bodied, impelling, chipped women who experience the grave electricity of interiority, what Joshua Rothman called “innerness” in his essay examining the sense of privacy that Woolf recognised in her characters. Their sexual motives are unclear oh, is the character devoid of desire entirely? Is the person few samosas short of a picnic, to want to live so wholly in herself so as to solicit little meaningful contact with the outside world, as if literary echoes of the author? And so Mrs Dalloway goes to buy the flowers herself, a wholly banal task, for an entirely superficial reason, a party! But as she does this she juggles the red balls of the past, the present, and the anticipated moment, and becomes the embodiment of time itself as the Big Ben chimes, time itself spills into her like the slowly poured treacle of eternity. “Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open,” writes Rothman. “Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance and the radiance of life is what makes it worth living.” Mysterious women make worlds out of themselves, they are presidents of the nation of privacy, raven-haired leaders of solitude, gazing into the crystal ball of a private universe, which is also all the universe, and now there is no need for another.

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