In the Labyrinth

Donald Hall: One Road

(Photos by Peter Zelei/istockphoto and John Robert Shepard)

This happened across my internet-desk one morning and I stopped everything to read it. The poet Donald Hall wrote a beautiful and very poignant essay "One Road" about a journey he took post WWII with his very young bride driving from Oxford to Greece by way of Yugoslavia. It is one of those effortless pieces of writing, that immediately draws you in and holds you captive to the end of the journey. It conveys the desire (and fearlessness) of the young to travel as a form of self-discovery. It is also a detailed travelogue of a world now much changed, and a graceful reflection on a life that is only possible from a great distance (Hall wrote this essay when he was 84). Take a moment and enjoy.

"In December of 1952 my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia. At the border crossing, on a two-lane macadam road with no other car in sight, we stopped to present documents that permitted us to enter Marshal Tito’s country. Walking back to our car afterward, we met a man heading in the opposite direction, toward Austria. He had emerged from a big black car, and he looked important, like a diplomat or a capo. Seeing the initials of national origin on our small Morris convertible, he addressed us in English. I held in my hand our confusing travel directions. We asked the man if Zagreb was straight ahead.

He shrugged, and told us, “There is only one road in Yugoslavia.”

The Challenge of Sharing an Office: Side by Side

My husband and I share an office -- a modest rectangular room in a small condo in Boulder -- noted for small apartments.  Here is how we each occupy our own space.

His side is so clean and Zen. Martial arts certificates in a neat row, the surface of his desk, quiet, waiting. 

And this is my side -- and, to be fair, made more mad by the 1970s mirror-closet doors! Even still, I am probably hiding small birds unseen in nests made of the left-over weaving thrums or behind the pile of books I have yet to read. I know it is a mess, but I enjoy it. 

 

The Menacing Virgins: The Commodification of Marriage and Birth II

    Here is an interesting perspective on the complexities of transforming a virtuous maiden into a chaste but sexually productive matron. "How does a maiden shift from bride to matron and" pay the marital debt?" Cristelle Baskins asks in her article "Il Trionfo della Pudicizia" (The Triumph of Modesty), a fascinating study of the economic exchanges negotiated before and after marriage. Baskins also examines the type of goods provided in the exchange that sought to educate the couple on their marital proper roles and reinforce the marriage bond through art.

    "In those negotiations concerning marital chastity, Elizabeth Cohen reminds us, the language of debt, payment, and exchange makes virginity a commodity. Fifteenth and sixteenth wedding furniture, including elaborately painted and historiated lettucci (beds), cassoni (dowry chests), and spalliere (wains-coating), is a domestic commodity employed in conspicuous consumption; it also offers an opportunity to examine Renaissance marriage ideology through the visual imagery geared for the primary spectatorship of brides and grooms." (118)

   Among the upper classes, it was expected that husbands would demonstrate their status and wealth by purchasing elaborately painted wedding furniture, commissioning religious paintings and sculptures, and deshi da parto (birthing trays), which were also painted and given as a gift for a new mother. It would also launch the future husband as a cultured man, purchasing expensive art. The subject matter of the art would have been carefully selected to reflect both the couples' status and "aimed to elucidate using example and perhaps even more concretely to inspire the conception of children and thus the expansion of the patriline. The most popular choice of art, it seems, was a reproduction of the Triumph of Modesty, a poem cycle written by Francesco Petrarca in the 1340s -- describing Cupid/Love being vanquished by Laura/Chastity and often appeared in horizontal panels on a cassoni.  

    "A fifteenth-century Florentine bride would have viewed Petrachan Trionfi on painted wedding furniture with a particular set of expectations and associations; her temporary triumph in the form of a bridal procession prefaced the conquest of her virginity and her transformation into a sexually active spouse...the Petrachan Trionfi trace a development from physical, sexual love to the renunciation of Cupid...For them (the brides), the state of innocence must be overcome but only by a chastened, disciplined conjugal love, not by the irresponsible, unpredictable passion inspired by Cupid." The art on the furniture was meant to "conceal the lack of fit between occasion and subject and thus, to blur the distinction between compliment and coercion...the pictures must simultaneously encourage the bride to abandon her fiercely maintained chastity to the needs of the patriline and yet, renounce illicit, physical passion."

But, to make sure the bride could be gently enticed, there was also an abundance of cassoni which, while it showed marriage events on the outside (and sometimes martial battles,) under the lid were erotic paintings of men and women nude doing the things married couples generally do when trying to create the next generation. More on the cassoni coming up with the next post (along with more on the art of the battle between Cupid and Chastity, cassoni, and birthing trays. 

"Il Trionfo della Pudicizia: Menacing Virgins in the Italian Renaissance Domestic Painting" by Christelle L. Baskins in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, by Marilyn Migiel (Editor), Juliana Schiesari (Editor)

The Menacing Virgins: Chastity Before and After Marriage, I

    Menacing Virgins (ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie) is a beautiful collection of essays on 16th-century attitudes and traditions regarding female chastity and conjugal sex before and after marriage. These customs are inscribed by two other considerations: the honor of the household and virginity as a form of commodity that engenders an exchange of goods, debt, and payments. The bride should exhibit the virtues of her status: vagine, onesta, casta, virginity, honesty, and social class.  When marital sex becomes a requirement of marriage, purity should be expressed through public modesty and private sexual restraint. In this first half of the essay, Cristelle L. Baskins examines (mostly male) attitudes toward female sexuality in the Renaissance. (*note to self, compare these attitudes to the women writers of the period.)

    Research Notes from "Il Trionfo della Pudicizia: Menacing Virgins in Italian Renaissance Paintings" by Christelle L. Baskins: 

    Quotes from the 14th to the 16th century, written by men on the proper behavior for women, reveal a concern should the wife fail to behave illegally, she would, in effect, betray her husband's honor and that of her children. And probably, financial concerns as marriages saw exchanges of money and goods before weddings, brides contributing dowries (paid out over time only if the union remained a moral activity), husbands providing housing, and copious amounts of art and wedding furniture. (*note to self -- look up more information on the "Desco da Parto" birthing trays given as a wedding gift for the bride.)  

    Paolo da Certaldo: compares a woman's virtue to a beautiful flower and a husband's crown." (14th C). Francesco da Barbaro tells wives to "at least seem to be chaste in that sort of temperance from which chastity is derived...lust and unseemly desire are harmful to their dignity and to their husbands even when they say nothing about it." ("On Wifely Duties" 1416) (117).  Leon Battista Alberti: "Nothing is so important for yourself, so acceptable to God, so pleasing to me, and precious in the sight of your children as your virtue. The woman's character is the jewel of her family...per purity has always far outweighed her beauty. (Delle Famiglia, 1440) (117) Baldassare Castiglione's dialogue, "Il Cortegiano" (1528), ponders the construction of exemplary female virtue in the service of men. In the dialogues debating women's chastity, Giuliano de Medici challenges a misogynist Gasparo: "But if you acknowledge the truth, you surely know that of our authority, we men have arrogated to ourselves a license, whereby we insist that in us the same sins are most trivial and sometimes deserve praise which in women cannot be sufficiently punished unless by a shameful death or at least perpetual infamy." (117)

    By the middle of the 16th century, the ambivalent attitude toward female sexuality intensified as "every gesture towards purity of the text or the body risks further contamination and pollution. Virginity emerges in Renaissance discourse, then, as a site for the exercise of misogynistic assumptions about women's limited capacity for sexual restraint. "  Francesco da Barbaro echoes an ongoing need to contain his wife's sexuality by requiring that even in her thoughts "...see that you never want another man to share this bed but me." 118)

A Few Thoughts on The Swan Maiden Narratives

Rediscovering earlier notes for my article The Swan Maiden's Feathered Robe -- I always like to circle back to these notes because they continue to offer insights. These were notes made from BF LEavy, In Search of the Swan Maiden: A Narrative on Folklore and Gender.

I have long been fascinated by the "Animal Bride" stories for their narrative tension. So often in fairy tales, rites of passage narratives lead to the successful initiation into adulthood and marriage. But Animal Brides prove more of a cautionary tale -- and seem to end as often in misery and unhappy marriages.

One of the more interesting observations I came across in my reading is a quote from Bruce Kapferer in Barbara Fass Leavy's In Search of the Swan Maiden that Animal Bride stories (such as Selkie or Swan Maiden stories where the animal bride is coerced into marriage by the theft of her animal skin) present a paradox of women's lives in the tales:

Women, "believed to be more quickly prone than a man to revert to a state of nature...are nonetheless entrusted with the task of rooting man in culture and raising her children in such a way as to prevent behavior threatening to society as a whole." It's an interesting idea when we recall the marriages of Selkies, Kitsune, Mermaids, and Swan Maidens -- where the seemingly compliant brides actually retain their wild natures under the veneer of domestication and the presumed pull of children. The tension is never resolved in the story -- the domestic and the wild are never integrated, except in the children who possess both human and animal traits -- and more often those children revert to animal form and follow their mother.

If we consider that the body of narratives in any society generally cluster around areas of the greatest social conflict in a community -- rites of passage to adulthood, marriage, and the birth of children -- it makes sense that there will be stories that serve to affirm and encourage the listeners to embrace social expectations, just as there would be tales that would explore the emotional devastation of such unions gone awry -- because they can and do matter in the real lives of the listeners. 

Illustration : Swan Maidens, JM Landin, Themes of Swan Maiden Lore