woman-shaped emptiness

Godwin Baxter’s “woman-shaped emptiness” gives a bodily outline to a longing he remembers as beginning in infancy: he wanted not merely attention, but an imagined woman who would need and admire him as he needed and admired her. The phrase becomes a key to his account of desire, joining early loneliness to the idealized romance he constructs around Ophelia and the future self he hopes she will recognize.

Origin of the Longing

Baxter recalls that Sir Colin Baxter, the household’s nurses, and its dogs gave him more attention than most newcomers to the world received. Yet care did not satisfy his desire for a particular kind of attachment. Because so many adults fostered him, he says he formed no special bond with any one of them; he remembers at least three mature nurses taking turns feeding, washing, and clothing him before he could manage these tasks himself.

He qualifies the memory rather than presenting it as certain: he may be projecting an obsession from later life onto infancy. Even with that reservation, he says he cannot remember a day without the inward ache for someone stranger and more beautiful than anyone he had met at home. The phrase therefore holds both a claim about the beginning of his desire and an admission that memory may have reshaped that beginning.

Puberty and the Imagined Companion

Baxter says the longing intensified with puberty, which arrived with what he calls catastrophic suddenness. His voice did not break and remains mezzo-soprano, while his body developed the sexual characteristics he describes as typical of men. The recollection sets physical change beside an emotional need that anatomy alone could not answer.

When Archibald McCandless suggests that Baxter’s father had offered to provide him with a woman, Baxter insists that the offer missed the point. He wanted someone whose admiration and need were mutual with his own. In his account, sexual release could bring lasting satisfaction only when accompanied by prolonged stimulation of the higher faculties; desire was thus framed as emotional and intellectual as well as physical.

Ophelia and the Ideal of Recognition

Baxter locates the image that gave this longing a focus in Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, apparently left behind by one of Sir Colin’s patients. In an illustration, Ophelia listens to her brother while looking beyond him toward something wonderful. Baxter imagines that she sees him: not as the imposing stranger whom women in the park avoid looking at, but as the “inner man” he believes he will become.

The imagined recognition turns the phrase into more than a metaphor for missing companionship. Ophelia’s expression excites him more than her body or face because he reads it as admiration for a future self: the kindest, greatest doctor in the world, capable of saving her and millions of others. He even recasts the tragedy as a public-health crisis, imagining himself entering the Danish court to quarantine its principal carriers, improve the water supply, and guide the state toward health. The fantasy makes love the anticipated reward for professional usefulness, revealing how closely Baxter’s desire is bound to an idealized image of himself.