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Sexual Fables

Table of Contents
01 The Whores Revenge
02 The Judgment Of Paris
03 How To Look At A Naked Lady
04 A Tale Of Two Women
05 The Age of Consent
06 Homers Women
Sacred Prostitute
Dreaming the Virgin Mary
Spinster
Precious Bodily Fluids
Immortal Beloved
The Woman In The Bower
Voices And Saints
Life As Opera
Poison Pen Letters

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01. The Whores Revenge

The One Time Casanova Came to Grief
The Evidence: Marie Genevieve de Charpillon
The Case for the Prosecution: John Wilkes
The Case for the Defense: Havelock Ellis and Stefan Zweig
The Elixir of Life

Once upon a time there really was a man named Giacomo

Casanova. Born in Venice in 1725 and dead in 1798, for the
better part of the century he seduced amorous nuns, virgins
(some as young as 13), innumerable married women, two sisters
at the same time, a castrato (he turned out to be a she), he
traveled with a lesbian companion, he escaped from the dreaded
Leads prison in Venice, he displayed great skill in the magic arts
and he set new standards in libertinism. That is just the half of
it.
Scorpio
Rabbit-Hole

Jacques Casanova de Seingalt as he called himself in his

memoirs was tall, good looking with bright dark eyes and a
beaked nose. He was, you might say, the Valentino of his day.
He was also an intellectual who could hold his own against
Voltaire and he once wrote: Nothing on earth has ever had such
domination over me as a beautiful womans face, even if she is
only a child. Beauty, I have been told, has that power. He goes
on to argue, quite shrewdly, that perfect beauty does not exist
because beauty is in itself just a convention. So what has
always exercised an absolute sway over me is the living beauty
of a woman, but that beauty as it exists in her face. That is
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where the spell resides... Casanova once encountered one of

those beautiful faces in London and he came to grief with her.
This is the story of Casanova and the courtesan. For once in his
life he lost control and assaulted a young woman. The question
is: if he beat her up, was he justified? Is violence ever justified
between a man and a woman? And if it was, was there
something else at stake here?
THE EVIDENCE
Marieanne Genevieve de Charpillon was 18 years old when she
met Casanova in September of 1763. She was at the house of a
mutual acquaintance, escorted there by one of her great aunts.
Casanova must have been about 38 at the time. She knew of his
reputation as an experienced seducer and libertine but he was
now approaching middle age. Even so, she was fascinated by
him. They had met once before in Paris when she was 13, but
no doubt he had forgotten it because she hadnt gone to bed with
him. This time they flirted as the occasion demanded and she
teasingly warned him that he would fall in love with her if this
persisted.
She then took the liberty of inviting him to tea at her house but
he said he found the time inconvenient because he had an
engagement at Lord Pembrokes. Since Marieanne knew
Pembroke, she invited herself there instead. This is an
acceptable ruse in the game of love but it irritated Casanova. He
makes a snide remark about it in his memoirs, You think you
can make anyone you choose fall in love with you, and then
propose to play the tyrant? The scheme is monstrous, and it is a
pity you do not let men see more plainly the kind of woman you
are. Was this an overreaction written in hindsight or was it a
tease? At the time Marieanne laughed it off as mere ill humor.
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For she knew Casanova was attracted to her. His memoirs are
very revealing: Her hair was of a beautiful chestnut color and
of astonishing length and luxuriance; her blue eyes had a
languor natural to their shade and all the brilliance of a woman
of Andalusia; her skin, which had the tints of the rose, was of
dazzling fairness, and her tall figure was almost as finely
modeled as that of Pauline. Her breasts, perhaps, were rather
small, but of a perfect mould; she had white, plump, tiny hands
together with the prettiest feet and that proud and graceful
carriage which gives charm to the most ordinary woman. Yet
he seemed to expect Marieanne to fall at his feet and beg to be
another conquest. When she did not, he revealed his habitual
bitterness: if she was extraordinarily beautiful, then nature was
pleased to lie. The same might have been said of Casanova
himself!
They met again several more times and Casanova made sure she
noticed he was paying for everything. Still, she did not think it
was time to engage in intimate relations, at least until after he
had been introduced to her family. Several times he forced
himself upon her in public but Marieanne was as supple and
lithe as a snake, to use his words, and she managed to evade
him. But he had the cheek to visit her at home unannounced one
day while she was in the bath. The voyeur got a view of her
naked back and then practically all the rest of her when she
turned to ask her aunt, for she thought it was her, for a towel.
She barely got her hands in front of her body to shield herself
from his gaze and his deception put her out greatly. She angrily
demanded that he leave at once, and he must have felt a trifle
guilty because on the way out he contributed to her aunts
investment fund. The aunt was, you see, promoting a fund for
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the development of an elixir of life that the family hoped would

become their principal business enterprise.
When she met Casanova again, as was inevitable in such a small
social circle, he decided to treat her like a common prostitute
whereas she felt only love for him. She asked him, Is it true
you told Goudar to offer my mother a hundred guineas for me?
He retorted, Is it not enough? She was furious: Have you
any right to insult me? This degenerated into a sordid
argument about money and she finished up spitting out You
can come to our house, but keep your despicable money.
Conquer my love as an honest, straightforward lover, not as a
brute, for you must believe it now, I love you. Maybe she
overdid it because he muttered something nasty about her being
a born actress.
Still she kept him at bay. One night when they were alone and
he thought he was in for his reward, she knew he would become
more aggressive. She therefore changed into a tight neglige
and sat with her knees up to her chin, her arms crossed, her head
on her knees. Try as he might over the next three hours he could
not unravel her. He roughed her up, he hit her and tried to
strangle her, and the neglige ended up in shreds but there was
no sex! Did she tease him unreasonably? Probably. Did she
feel a bit mean about it at the time? Yes, but she felt that he
should win her love. Was that so unreasonable?

Marieannes mother was very upset when she was told of this
brutal behavior and she threatened Casanova with legal action.
Anyone could see that Marieanne was covered with bruises.
Marieanne went around to Casanovas house to show him the
bruises on her legs and her neck and shoulders but he practically
raped her again. Her bruises only seemed to encourage him!
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When he calmed down, he agreed to behave properly and set her

up in a house of her own and it is only fair to say that he did this
promptly. They also settled the assault charges out of court. A
pleasant evening together ensued but again, as things progressed
to the intimate stage, they once more got into a fight. Perhaps
she hugged him around the neck too tightly? He became too
aggressive, too Italian, and he let his emotions run amok. When
he had worked himself into a complete state this time he beat her
up properly. He hit her on the head several times and then
kicked her really hard, sending her sprawling across the floor.
She threw things at him and screamed blue murder until the
landlord came up to find out what was going on. He found
Marieanne with her nose bleeding violently all over the carpet.
At least she knew she got a few good blows in, but their
experiment in living together was over.

You would think that would have been the end of it but
Marieannes mother unwisely invited Casanova over to pay his
respects and to ensure there was no ill feeling. Once he had his
foot in the door again he kept coming back, bribing her with
gifts. Each time she resolved never to utter a word to him the
whole time he was there but how long could she keep that up?
As you can imagine, she began to feel lonely, under siege. At
one point she let him hold her and she found herself weeping
uncontrollably. He asked her whether she would ever feel
differently and she replied truthfully, No. To her relief he
departed immediately and stayed away for weeks.

Of course, they had to bump into each other again, and when
they did, he was agreeable and sociable. She even momentarily
considered the idea of resuming their relationship so long as he
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resolved never to force his attentions on her. As they strolled in

Vauxhall Gardens she pulled him down on the grass beside her
and they caressed each other affectionately. But he took this as
an invitation to have sexual relations right there in the gardens in
full public view so she had to put him off by promising to come
to him that night. He did not believe her and pulled out a small
knife and pressed it against her throat, threatening to kill her.
She pointed out that if he had her there on the grass she would
just lie prostrate until people came to find her and that she would
file charges. Thank god he became shocked by his own
temptation to violence and left off.

At any rate he came around to Marieannes house to argue about

some money her family owed him and he caught her half-naked
on the sofa with a good-looking young hairdresser that she had
been seeing, though there was really nothing in it. She found
out later that Casanova was outside watching the house for hours
and when the door opened he had slipped inside and launched a
storm of abuse upon her. He caned the little hairdresser and
smashed the presents he himself had given her, plus most of the
furniture while he was at it. Marieanne fled the house. She was
told he offered to pay for the damages and that he was upset on
hearing that she had become gravely ill. There were even
rumors that he considered suicide but she spotted him out in
public several days later so she doubted he was serious about it.
Such men seldom are.

What really outraged her family after all this was that he then
sued for money that he said they owed him -- obviously for
spite. They counter-sued for trying to disfigure a young and
pretty girl as the law books put it, but he got off and he got his
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money. What else would you expect from the English courts?
They are only there to look after the interests of the rich.

Casanova was never a suitable marriage opportunity for

Marieanne. She was young and still relatively innocent while
Casanova was a treacherous libertine. She could make a better
catch. He was not an especially generous lover and he was not
even an aristocrat like he pretended. She tried not to lower
herself to his level but she ended up getting caught in his vicious
circle. Beware being turned into a kept mistress. He beat her all
right and he tried to take advantage of her. She deserved better
than that.

THE CASE FOR THE PROSECUTION

The Lord Mayor of London, John Wilkes, would be the man to

defend Marieanne Genevieve de Charpillon against the
slanderous accusations of Casanova. During the events of 1763,
when Casanova was in London, Wilkes was not yet Mayor. He
was in fact abroad, kicked out of Parliament for his seditious
writings. Settling in Paris, he occupied his time by studying
that citys sexual wildlife and the court of Louis XV was quite
the place to see it. He only had to visit the Louvre, Versailles,
Fontainbleau to come to the conclusion that the French needed a
Revolution over there.

A decade or so later, he would develop a romantic interest in

Miss Charpillon and she became his mistress. A sweet girl, with
nice breasts, whatever Mr. Casanova had to say about them. He
felt they were well suited, and if he was as ugly as he was
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charming, then Charpillon was as beautiful as she was

dangerous. It was Beauty and the Beast.

Wilkes and the great Casanova shared certain attributes. They

both favored dalliances of short term expediency and damn the
matrimonial entanglements. They were both as interested in
having a good time with prostitutes as in extending the freedom
of the press and by God, both activities were related in the end!

Wilkes, on the other hand, was under no illusions about the real
Miss Charpillon. He knew she was born in Paris or eastern
France after her family had been kicked out of Switzerland in
1739 for running a famous brothel in Berne. They resumed the
family business in Paris and then, after 1759, in London. The
family consisted of her grandmother, Catherine Brunner, who
ran things; Brunners two sisters, one of whom had the sideline
in the immortality business selling the elixir of life; Miss
Charpillons mother; and Miss Charpillon herself. Wilkes
provided for all of them, something Casanova had failed to do.
That was his first mistake. A girl has to make a living. Her
familys notorious reputation -- which was probably worse than
Wilkes -- had prevented her from marrying into the aristocracy
or new money. But she suited Wilkes, although she did get to
be damnably expensive. It seemed to Wilkes that a mistress
could be defined as the attempt to duplicate, as well as one
could, a husband-wife relationship, but with none of the
obligations. A prostitute is the same thing except that she is
exclusively for sexual purposes and you dont have to wake up
to her bad breath every morning. So clearly by this definition
Miss Charpillon was his mistress. But Wilkes felt that Casanova
did not appreciate this difference when he encountered
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Charpillon 10 years earlier. What had he wanted from her that

he treated her like a prostitute? That had been his second
mistake. He had only been interested in conquest.

But there were other reasons. Casanova was a man of Venice, a

foreigner, and London was bad for him because he simply didnt
understand its ways and means, its passions and privacies. The
poor fellow Miss Charpillon thrust the dagger unerringly into
his breast and he did not know how to take it out, for in his heart
he was an incurable romantic. This was his third mistake: it hurt
his vanity that she wasnt really interested in him and so he was
resentful and he beat her up. This was his fourth and biggest
mistake. Violence is not acceptable in civilized society unless
you get away with it. He lost the game and eventually had to
flee England over some bad debts, contracting another dose of
gonorrhea on his way out.

In all fairness, if Casanova was not justified in beating her up

then neither was she justified in leading him on like that either.
In paying no heed to the proper rules of engagement they were
both equally foolish. But this case is not about defending Miss
Charpillon; it is about indicting Casanova. Of course he was not
a scoundrel so much as a silly sentimentalist. His skill, it
seemed to Wilkes, lay in his Italian style of flirtation: firing off
Cupids dart to catch the maidens eye, exulting in the perfect
hit, that moment in the exchange of glances. But many a foolish
fancy has been built on as flimsy an experience and that was
Casanovas trademark. He seems to have fallen in love at the
drop of a hat with most women and he was off into raptures in
his own private world. Wilkes knew instinctively that that was
not a good way to handle a woman like Miss Charpillon for she
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would exploit such a situation mercilessly. Poor Casanova made

the mistake of believing that sex can be a romantic exchange
when it is nothing of the kind. Consequently he seemed to find
English orgies rather mechanical and boring as if he expected
that next time things would be different. But sex is a temporary
loosening of all restraint, an expenditure of sexual energy.
Perhaps the English libertines were a cynical crowd, only one
step removed from the puritans with their glittering eyes
masking their sexual disgust, but they were never sentimental.
In the coming era, Wilkes felt, there would be no place for a
romantic narcissist like Casanova.

The encounter with la Charpillon was a turning point in

Casanovas life. Things would never be the same for him again,
not because he hadnt missed on going to bed with women in the
past, but because of the particular virulence of this encounter.
At a certain season in ones life, ones mortality becomes all too
apparent. If Casanova was an adventurer and trickster himself,
here he had been outwitted by a woman less than half his age. It
irritated him all the more that she seemed to have perfect
judgment in knowing where to hurt him, not because she was a
woman, but because it was inconceivable to him that so
beautiful a face could conceal a mind so treacherous and so
dangerous. More fool him.

THE CASE FOR THE DEFENSE

La Charpillons name as we know it from Casanova has come to

signify a manipulative bitch, a harpy, and let us not pretend
these women dont exist. When Casanova met his nemesis
those many years ago, the first phase of his life did come to an
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end. The defense does not deny this. Apocalypse. Catastrophe.

The great lover had come to grief. But though she seemed to be
a coquette, she really was Casanovas complete opposite.
Flirtatious at first, she revealed herself to be a woman who did
not enjoy sex, who instead used sex as a means to an end, an
economic transaction. For Casanova, money was a means to
obtain sex, while for la Charpillon, sex was the means to obtain
money.

The true coquette asserts her place in the world, that she exists,
that she needs to be allowed for, paid for, not ignored and she
gains pleasure from that. But la Charpillon was a
businesswoman, not a lover she was in it for the money, not
the love. She was death to the romantic game-playing through
which Casanova hoped to avoid coming to his metaphysical rest.
She was a vampire, a prototype for the next century. Charpillon
was a true cynic, while he was a true romantic. They were
opposites: a cynic believes in nothing except money; a romantic
believes in everything except money.

So which approach to life do you choose for yourself: cynic or

romantic? Havelock Ellis, the English sexologist, was a
romantic. In 1899 he published Affirmations, a collection of
essays in praise of lifes great affirmers, including Casanova,
Nietzsche and St. Francis. Interesting choices Ellis decided
that Casanova may have had his faults but he was a magnificent
piece of machinery and he lived life to its fullest potential. Ellis
gave intellectual legitimacy to sexual liberation during the
1890s right through to the 1920s. Indeed his defense of
Casanova, many years before Casanovas memoirs were ever
published in English, said much about his ability to see past
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stereotypes and hypocrisy. On the other hand, it is questionable

whether he ever experienced sexual intercourse himself, for
most of his life he was married to a lesbian, Edith, and his chief
sexual pleasure appears to have come from urolagnia,
urinating during sexual activity meaning she did it, not him.
This makes him a fountainist and a soulmate of Ulysses
Leopold Bloom. On the other hand, it does not invalidate his
defense, even if envy surely played a role here? In the wake of
the Oscar Wilde trial on 1895, Ellis was the first to defend
homosexual and lesbian (inverted) identities in a thoughtful
and scholarly way and he gave key moral support to the first
controversial lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, by
Radclyffe Hall, in 1928-29. It was promptly banned for
decades, but Casanova would have approved of it.

Viennese writer Stefan Zweig also chimed in. He published his

biography of Casanova, Stendhal and Tolstoy, Adepts in Self-
Portraiture, in 1928 (1930 in English). Zweig initially seems to
be in the mood to destroy Casanova - that famous charlatan,
that parasite on women. But he goes on to reveal this as irony:
What makes Casanova a genius is not the way in which he tells
the story of his life, but the way in which he has lived it. This
places the episode with la Charpillon in the right perspective. It
was not some terrible humiliation on which one may judge the
success or failure of a mans life - that is how Arthur Schnitzler
had cynically portrayed it in Casanova's Homecoming (1918). It
was merely a few months at a turning point in his life when he
suffered a few setbacks and dont we all? If he roughed her up a
bit, then she roughed him up too, and who is to say which was
the more aggrieved party? There are those who think any kind of
physicality between partners is abuse, yet most of the population
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indulges in it to varying degrees, and in the end it is the totality

of a life that matters. Casanova was a true prince among men
and if la Charpillon was no princess, she also achieved what no
one else achieved the humiliation of the worlds greatest lover.

Over the decades, and especially once his memoirs were

translated into English, Casanova gradually came back into
fashion. Reading the memoirs, it is apparent that he was never
particularly pompous, jealous or spiteful. It is quite an
extraordinary book! There are no rapes, not even of Miss
Charpillon. Casanova wanted only to be surrounded by beauty
and sensuality and he was disappointed only when life failed to
live up to his expectations. Casanova found women too
interesting as a species to be cynical about them and it is
precisely because he treated women so well that he was
successful with them. This is the one fact of his life that must be
set before anything else when judging him. Casanova is
therefore superior to Don Juan, who was a fictional character,
for women thanked Casanova after they made love! Don Juan
and Valmont were sadists, who were more interested in
degrading women, in destroying beauty. Casanova was able to
claim Four-fifths of my pleasure has always consisted in
making women happy. That is a profound statement, even
today.

If Casanova was a romantic it was because he had the good

fortune to have experienced true love once in his life, even
though he knew it was transitory. The woman in question was
Henriette, a beautiful young woman whom he met in his
younger days. Her role switching resembles Casanovas own
and perhaps they were both French spies at one time. If she too
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was a romantic, then she understood the limits of romantic love -

- after three great months together she left him. She wanted to
marry a husband who would remain constant in his sexual
attentions and his finances, just as she knew she herself would
not remain constant. If Casanova was her true love then she
knew equally that he could never be constant either. They were
equals. For such lovers the truest form of love is a fantasy you
carry throughout your life for your perfect sexual mate that can
only be diminished by staying together. Such a love is a
Romantic notion. It is also an intellectual and spiritual activity
as much as it is a physical one and it is never satisfied. That is
its point, although as the years go by, nostalgia sets in too.
Inconstancy in love exists only because of the diversity of
faces, Casanova once wrote. Such diversity, so many choices,
it leaves a slight trace of melancholy in his writing as if the
waters of Venice had permeated his soul, almost as if he knew
his world was being washed away by the French Revolution as
he wrote these words.

For all the talk of Casanovas defeat, the Devil himself could not
have improved on Casanovas revenge on Charpillon: he
purchased a parrot that he trained to screech Miss Charpillon is
more infamous than her mother in French. When everyone got
the joke it became the hot topic of conversation in London and
even la Charpillon thought it very clever. Her mother and aunts
were not so thrilled. They consulted lawyers but were told that
the law of slander did not extend to parrots. Charpillon was
cleverer. After Lord Grosvenor bought the parrot for her, she
wrung its neck. So much for freedom of speech!

THE ELIXIR OF LIFE

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The grumpy old ghost of Casanova still haunts the library of the
Castle of Dux. The Castle squats in western Bohemia, passing
through time like a ship passes through space, the clouds soaring
overhead. The ghost has been at war for many years with the
vicious little mediocrities employed at the Castle who barge in
from time to time to fling insults at him. He has rigged a trap
over the door into the library and next time, he plans to flatten
them with an avalanche of his heaviest German philosophy
books. The minions of his patron, the Count Waldstein, master
of the Castle.

Sometimes he is no longer sure who they are. Their clothing has

changed, become outlandish. Have more years passed than he
knows? Even the servants do not look like servants any more.
They always considered Casanova grandiose and pompous; they
had no manners, no style. He wrote long ago: The older I get,
the more I feel the destructive effects of old age; and I regret
bitterly that I could not rediscover the secret of remaining young
and happy for ever. Vain regrets! But he had discovered one
secret the secret of how to remain alive, even if it had frozen
him in his sixties. This was now, he calculated, the summer of
1938. Like Tithonus he now felt himself constantly dissolving,
then coalescing. It was becoming intolerable. He went outside
among the oak trees, knowing he had chosen unwisely:
immortality was a curse and he longed for it to end. He had
heard from a recent visitor, Sandor Marai, that Germany had
marched into Austria some months ago and all the talk now was
that Bohemia would be next.
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What no one knew at the time of Casanovas encounter with la

Charpillon was that he had destroyed her furniture because he
was looking for the elixir of life, which he knew to be hidden
somewhere in her house. He had reason to believe the family
had stolen it from the Count of Saint Germain when he was in
London a few years earlier (at least this was what the Count had
told him). For years Casanova had searched for it and now, as an
aggrieved investor, he felt he had the moral right to repossess it.
All that drama with Marieanne had been merely a distraction;
the irritating girl had become an embarrassment. He knew that
the family had not composed the elixir themselves; they were
businesswomen, not chemists. He also knew the formula was
not yet perfect. Indeed he suspected it was the same formula he
had once held in his hands many years ago when he was arrested
and thrown into the Leads prison. But in those days a quick sip
had made him feel ill for days at a time. Had the chemical
composition changed over the centuries? Had some important
ingredient decayed? Was it a hoax? Now that he had the bottle
in his possession again, he had tasted it one more time before
leaving London, but again he had fallen ill (in his memoirs
Casanova conceals its noxious side effects as gonorrhea).

As soon as he was well enough, he traveled to Paris. This time

he knew he had an opportunity and the means to test the elixir
but, unfortunately, there was not enough liquid in the bottle to
satisfy M. Lavoisier. Too many previous custodians had
sampled it and fallen ill Lucretius, Jesus Christ, Tristan and
Iseult. Fortunately they had not discarded the bottle for fear it
might actually be worth something. So the only solution was to
trace the history of the bottle and its precious contents back in
Venice to see if someone could recall the missing ingredient.
 18

He knew that both the mysterious figure named the Noctambule

and King Solomon were involved somehow, but his inquiries
would come up empty in Venice. It was only years later, as he
was reading a biography of Ninon de Lenclos that a thought
occurred to him: if the Noctambule had been around for
thousands of years, then possibly the solution lay back in
antiquity. He therefore devoted himself to re-reading the
classics and so it was that as he read Platos Phaedo he had an
epiphany: perhaps Socrates knew more than Plato was revealing.
This was not some idle conversation about the immortality of
the soul. He concluded that Socrates had drunk the hemlock not
to die but to achieve immortality and he had failed. No wonder
he had been so fearless; he had thought he could outsmart his
enemies. It occurred to Casanova that if life were a paradox, a
contradiction, how ironic then that the missing Key of Solomon
was, in itself, also a poison. And so, in 1785, Casanova tasted a
few drops of hemlock with the elixir and had an enormous and
immediate erection. The long awaited alchemical breakthrough
had been found. Repeated experiments left him somewhat
exhausted but there was also now a distinct sense of
rejuvenation. When he retired to the Castle of Dux, he was
convinced he now had the right formula, and as he set sail on his
memoirs, he also began to sip on the elixir of life.

Here he was at the close of one century and the dawning of

another, hoping to clear his name with you, the reader. He knew
his reputation would suffer unless he explained things in his own
way and writing was as good a means as any to preserve the
spirit of the past. He had chosen to write it in French because he
thought it would reach the widest audience. With his skill in the
magic arts he was fortunate in being permitted to view
 19

something of the future before he would live through it. He

knew in advance the fate of his memoirs and it did not give him
any satisfaction. After his official death, it would take until
1820 before his inept relatives got around to approaching a
German publisher and within a decade an abridged German
version would be selling well. But almost immediately a pirated
French translation appeared and sold even better. To counter
this the German publisher decided to print the original French
(between 1826 and 1838), again abridged of course, by an idiot
named Laforgue who cut out all the erotic bits and added some
unnecessary political commentary and psychological
explanations. Such are the twin curses of nationalism and
puritanism. But an even greater curse was to be alive to witness
such travesties while being unable to do anything about them.
The English and Italians, meanwhile, had to do without a
translation until the 1880's. Not that they appeared to care.

There was a dramatic surge of interest in the 1920s when a ton

of books about Casanova appeared and further translations
followed, but with all the risqu bits still cut out. For Casanova
this only confirmed that the present was not the revenge of the
past upon the present but the revenge of the present upon the
past. Civilization did not progress; it regressed. Such conceits
the present age lived with!

As Casanova drew level with his ailing biographers, Havelock

Ellis and Stefan Zweig, he knew that they too could see the
storm clouds steadily gathering above them. The Four
Horsemen were on the loose again. There were those who found
Ellis a cold fish, with his pasty white nude sunbathing and his
strange sexual habits, but there was respect and even affection
 20

now that he was dying. Ellis was racing to finish his memoirs
before it was too late. Zweig and his wife were now in England,
having recently fled Vienna when the Third Reich marched in.
Ellis would die the following year, shortly before war broke out;
Zweig and his wife would commit suicide in Petropolis, Brazil,
during the war. Depressed and homesick they believed
humanity had lost sight of its core values as the war took its
brutal course. The cynics were in charge again. Marai too
would take his own life, alone in San Diego, in 1989.

Casanova would not outlive them. On this day in 1938, he stood

under an old oak tree and wondered if he was older than the tree.
He thought it must be at least 200 years old. As he put his hand
on the rugged gray beard of the dragon beside him, he felt it all
dissolve away and momentarily he was gone.

He would not be around to know that his original manuscript

would nearly be destroyed in its Leipzig vault by Allied
bombers. He would not know that it would be 1960 before the
German publishers announced that the complete, unedited
memoirs would be issued, this time in French and German. The
uncut English language version trickled out between 1966 and
1971, translated rather prosaically by W.R. Trask. The original
manuscript is now in Paris in the possession of the Bibliothque
nationale de France. Filmmakers would weigh in too: Fellini
Casanova, released in 1976, is a scathing and sterile portrait but
it dishonors Fellini rather than Casanova. Literary historians say
Casanova embroidered his stories; others ask how one man
could have had it so good. But research backs up many of his
claims and the issue of reliability or truthfulness misses the
point: he successfully lived the spirit of his age and he made no
 21

apology for this in his memoirs. They are entertaining and

strikingly contemporary in that he is never judgmental or
exploitative and he frequently assisted those in need. How
many books in any era have a character like his friend the
flamboyant lesbian Marcolina?

Casanova, like Voltaire and Goethe, would have argued that

academics take their revenge on writers who enjoy sex by
damning them to Hell. Literary criticism is not about the fear of
emasculation and the castration of men. It is about modern
Charpillons, male and female, re-enacting that emasculation on
the male heroes they have discovered in literature. The
bourgeois university professor is secretly an authoritarian who
understands nothing of the true alchemy of the erotic arts. He or
she craves stasis and security (tenure), whereas Casanovas
life was just the opposite -- a series of assignations, of pleasing
different women and moving on, of being open to lifes rich
potentialities. A slug does not see outside its own garden.
Academics are mostly cowards because they are unable or
unwilling to defend the character they call a libertine and it is
not because they fear being seen to be encouraging libertinism.
It is not an excess of political correctness that silences them.
Rather, it is because they fear that sex is a dangerous force that
must be repressed or avoided altogether. Eccentricity is
discouraged, flirtation punished as lechery and sexual
harassment. Casanova had found that as he got older the
criticism intensified as if old men were not allowed to seduce
younger women occasionally. Did this mean a tragic decline
into dotage? No. He did not have to be turned into a symbol
overloaded with unnatural meanings. If he was a grumpy old
man, then that was merely the normal price of old age. His life
 22

did not peter out into sterility and despair. Seduction at his age
had been a heroic enterprise!

~::~

02 The Judgment Of Paris

How Ninon de Lenclos Cheated the Devil

On This Page:
The Noctambule
Power: On Its Virtues Madame de Maintenon
Riches & Fame: On Their Virtues Madame de Svign
Beauty: A Curious Concept Ninon de Lenclos
The Enlightenment Begins and Goethes Faust
The Judgment of Paris
THE NOCTAMBULE
Once upon a time, a young French woman named Ninon de
Lenclos was at home on Sunday morning when there was a
knock at the door. On the step was a little white-haired man
dressed in black. He introduced himself as the Noctambule
(Sleepwalker) and he said he was there to offer her a choice of
three things: the highest rank in the land, great riches and fame,
or eternal beauty. But she could choose only one
 23

Cynics will want to note that intelligence was not one of the
choices but let us assume that Ninon had that to start with. Like
Paris in The Judgment of Paris, and this historic scene is
occurring in Paris, Ninon chose eternal beauty.

The Noctambule required her to write her name on a tablet and

swear never to reveal this incident. She did so and he touched
her shoulder with his ring. He had wandered the earth for 6,000
years, he said, and she was only one of five women to whom he
had ever offered this choice and she would be the last. The
others: Semiramis, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Diane de
Poitiers. Because Ninon chose eternal beauty, he said, she
would always be young, charming, healthy and she would
conquer any heart she desired. He said he would return when
she had three days left to live, and then he disappeared, leaving
only a faint whiff of sulfur.

Perhaps this story is true? One sour critic claimed that it was
made up by a certain abbot who drank too much and who was
infatuated with Ninon, but what did he know?

The courtesan Ninon de Lenclos is virtually unknown in English

encyclopedias and dictionaries, yet she was one of the most
influential figures in 17th century France and it was Voltaire
himself who snottily observed, If this mania continues, we shall
soon have as many Histories of Ninon as of Louis XIV.
Curiously, English and American biographers, both male and
female, did take a keen interest in her in the early 20th century:
Enchanters of Men by Ethel Colburn Mayne (1909) and The
Immortal Ninon by Cecil Austin (1927), to name but two. But
after that the veil of silence falls once again, aside from Edgar
 24

Cohens Mademoiselle Libertine (1970). Only after 2000 did

more books appear that give her the respect she has long
deserved.

Women dominated French cultural life in the 17th century, to a

degree that may seem surprising today. It was French women
intellectuals who renewed the traditions of the medieval age and
the Renaissance, setting the style for the centuries that followed
with their invention of the salon, possibly the most significant
development in the rising importance of privacy and the
bourgeois arts. Ninon herself was born in 1620 to a middle class
family in the fashionable Marais district in Paris under the name
Anne de Lenclos, but throughout her life she was better known
as Ninon. She died more than 85 years later in 1705, by which
time she was considered a national treasure. Perhaps the fact
that she has been ignored in English-language histories is
attributable to sexism and chauvinism in that a courtesan would
never be considered a national treasure in England or the United
States?

The question is this: do the Noctambules choices still hold good

today? What do women want? Which gift should they choose
today: power, riches and fame, or beauty, or now can they have
it all?

POWER
On Its Virtues

As a young woman without a dowry, Ninon had four obvious

choices: to marry, to join the Church, to become a governess, or
become a prostitute. Of course she chose the last and least
 25

satisfactory of these -- prostitution which is why we must open

with a cautionary tale.

Ninon had a son by one of her many lovers. But the father
raised his son without him knowing whom his true mother was,
to protect him from the shame of it. When the young man
finally met Ninon, who must have been in her sixties by then, he
fell desperately in love with her. Though she had promised his
father never to reveal her identity, in an effort to calm her sons
passion, Ninon confessed the truth to him, and it had disastrous
consequences. He went out the back of her house and
committed suicide, for he could see that their love would never
be consummated. So you see, not only did Ninon not keep her
word, these were the consequences of not marrying to protect
ones children and ones reputation. By all means have affairs,
but do not forgo marriage and do not think of yourself all the
time.

By way of contrast, consider the case of Ninons contemporary,

Madame de Maintenon. She was first the mistress and then,
from 1684, the wife of Louis XIV, the Sun King, a much
smarter ascent up the social ladder.

Maintenon also may have received a visit from the Noctambule,

though history does not record this, for she was more discreet.
But it appears that she chose power, which is, in the end, all that
really counts. If you are a woman, the key to gaining power is,
and always will be, through marrying a rich man.

Maintenons career illustrates this point: early in her life she

married one of those rich men and educated herself in her
 26

husbands salon. Upon finding herself a widow, albeit with a

pension, she faced Ninons choices: nun, governess or prostitute.
She didnt particularly like men and she wasnt yet ready for the
nunnery, so she chose to become a governess. Luckily she
landed a job with the royal family, looking after Louis XIVs six
bastard children -- in secret. Thus began her remarkable upward
climb at the palace of Versailles.

Through her marriage to the King, Madame de Maintenon was

granted the power to make an impact on society and she acted
upon it, moving against the heretic Huguenots and the
flourishing trade in prostitution. In these actions, she sought to
reimpose a necessary order upon the anarchy breaking out all
over France. It was not religious or social intolerance; she was
born a Protestant and she came from the lower classes. Indeed
she identified with the poor and she could sympathize with the
spiritually lost. Only those who believed in chaos opposed her
desire for restoring law and order. Maintenon understood at a
profoundly personal level how lives, like countries, can spin out
of control. Religious fanatics seemed to be everywhere,
advocating this Reformation or that Counter-Reformation, on a
rampage, burning women at the stake as witches. Even
Maintenon thought they went too far. She fully supported
Louis crackdown to bring an end to it.

On more personal level, she led by example, dedicating her

energies to founding St. Cyr, a fashionable Paris girls school
which took in only girls from poor but noble families. It quickly
became a successful salon in its own right, offering a way out of
the sexual temptations placed in front of young girls. Maintenon
was forced to impose strict order eventually, but she did not
 27

consider herself prudish; she fully understood Aphrodites

appeal to women. She even accepted that prostitution was at
times the lesser of two evils. When the city authorities used
prostitutes in the fight against homosexuality, she begrudgingly
accepted it. Most of the houses of prostitution had been closed
in the previous century and now there was a real fear that
heterosexual marriage could wane because boy love seemed to
be so prevalent. Many prostitutes, female and male, operated
independently and it had become a lot more dangerous. Some
trailed around Europe after armies and they became every bit as
mercenary as the soldiers they solicited. Others set up shop in
the suburbs.

What saved Ninon was that the courtesan emerged as a better

class of prostitute who could wear fine clothes and keep a nice
house, who could chase after married men and often keep them,
and who worked in secret. (The word courtesan is simply the
original feminine form of courtier.) Generally older women
ran these business enterprises, mothers who were once
courtesans themselves, and a girl could make a good living. Not
that the neighbors were happy about this. Respectable working
class and middle class families began complaining constantly to
the authorities about the Ninons in their neighborhood and the
authorities were obliged to hire many more policemen to cope
with it. More than once Ninon had to flee to a powerful
protector when things got too hot. Things could get even worse.
In Italy there was the threat of a trentuna ("thirty-one" = gang
rape) arranged in retaliation by powerful men.

Maintenon urged Ninon to straighten out her own life before it

was too late, inviting her to live with her at Versailles. Together
 28

they could have established rules for women to live by and have
a significant impact on society. The form of power that Ninon
specialized in -- the power over mens sexual imaginations as
much as their bodies -- did not teach the importance of living up
to ones responsibilities in life and ensuring the protection of
family values. In the end, Ninon was a hopeless case: she was
always more interested in men than in women -- and many men
at that. There was nothing Maintenon could do for her.

RICHES AND FAME

On Their Virtues

Some would say that the second option, riches and fame, is the
least attractive of the three. Who wants to be rich and famous if
no one is afraid of you and no one is attracted to you? Well,
who cares? You can buy the company of the powerful and the
beautiful. Sex has always been for sale.

Ninon certainly understood that. In her earlier years, her love

life was keenly scrutinized and there was many a Right Bank
conversation about the exact sequence of her lovers this was a
matter of great interest in the City of Love. Only later did she
get herself organized, dividing her men into the payers, the
martyrs, and the favored. It was the last group who made it into
the bedroom. She never did become as rich as some of her
clients but she did become famous (or infamous) for her salon.

Ninons salon at 28 rue des Tournelles in the Marais soon

became the place to be for aspiring men about town and it was
never boring. According to the memorist, the Duke de Saint-
Simon, the word that summed up Ninon and her salon was
 29

integrity -- no cards or loud laughter, no arguments or

discussions about religion or politics. Ninon set the tone with
her lightness of touch and her appreciation for all forms of art
and culture, always spiced with wit and music (she played the
lute very well). She was not a snob either. Although her salon
was initially all male, in later life it attracted women from both
the aristocracy and the middle class who wanted to learn how to
live their lives as successfully -- intellectually and sensually -- as
she had done and mothers introduced their children there before
they were turned loose in society. Ninon was influenced by
Montaignes ideas of political moderation and she knew and
practiced Epicureanism, the honorable pursuit of pleasure. At
her own salon she was protected by her birds -- intellectuals
like la Fontaine and la Rochefoucauld, some of whom got to
sleep with her. She tended to be faithful in short bursts. All this
made her a perfect target for local preachers who railed against
decadence and immorality, yet she was a target more for her
free-thinking and intellectualism than for her libertinism.

Ninon in her heyday became the leading critic of the arts and
literature. Molire observed of her: She has the keenest sense
of the absurd of anyone I know. Some would say there is
nothing inherently superior about someone who writes their
ideas down for posterity (like Molire) over someone for whom
letter-writing and stimulating conversation are equally important
(like Ninon). We can get a glimpse of Ninons intellectualism in
her letters, for example the fine series to the Marquis de
Svign, the son of Madame de Svign, on the subject of how
to capture a lover. The inevitable happened of course: the
Marquis fell in love with Ninon instead.
 30

However, we dont want to praise Ninon too highly since she

was still sleeping with practically anyone she pleased, including
monks and priests, well into her eighties! Indeed, if we are
looking for role models, Madame de Svign herself offers a
preferable alternative to the path taken by Ninon. Isnt it better
for a woman to marry, in the hope that her husband will die
young, leaving her all the money, as happened to Madame de
Svign? By not marrying, Ninon achieved little more than any
dilettante. She deluded herself if she thought she could ever
change society on the basis of charm and wit alone. She also
failed for posteritys sake, for what great works of art remain as
a testament to her genius? What aristocratic title and property
did she ever attain? None. What was the nature of her fame?
As a courtesan? She barely rates in the history books.

BEAUTY
A Curious Concept

Ideas about beauty change through time. Consider the

lithographs of Ninon de Lenclos and wonder why men and
women found her so beautiful. She belonged to another age
when aesthetic ideals were very different. But if her beauty was
not resistant to time, then she did age gracefully at least.

One of Ninons critics once remarked, She never had much

beauty, but, above all, she had charm, and one of her lovers
said, Her mind is more charming than her face. Was charm
the gift of the Noctambule? Like many women today, Ninon
was alluring, seductive, sexy. Pure beauty is another matter:
men usually find it somewhat remote, even intimidating. Helen
of Troy was the best looking woman in ancient Greece but hers
 31

was a chilly beauty; men were only besotted with her until they
met the woman underneath. People wondered whether there
was a life of the mind behind the face and the body that
launched a thousand ships. If there was, she failed to convince
anyone beyond Paris.

Ninon chose beauty because it gets you the other important

things in life power, respect, riches, fame it is just a means to
an end. Prostitution is the same: women do not fall into it
because of a failed love affair or broken heart. Neither do they
do so because they are venal and unredeemable. They do so
because the lifestyle can offer financial and emotional
independence beyond what men are otherwise prepared to grant.
The courtesan was a rebel before she was a fallen woman.
Rightly the courtesan decided to live her life like a man, not as a
man, for what is a man of the church or a man of public life but
a whore? Ninon understood this at an early age. When she was
20 she wrote: I notice that the most frivolous things are charged
up to the account of women, and that men have reserved to
themselves the right to all the essential qualities; from this
moment I will be a man.

Women become courtesans because they have friends who are

doing it, full time or part time. For the successful courtesan, to
have an attachment to a richer client-lover means clothes, an
apartment, furniture, a carriage and horses, entertainment. Of
course you must use your beauty to add a dimension of danger,
intimidate men a little, reel them in. But how do you appeal to
men? Not just by being a clothes horse. Beauty always depends
on the intellect. Ninon, like other beautiful and intelligent
women, enjoyed friendship and good conversation more than
 32

sex or seduction. She had many lovers over the years and she
enjoyed sex, but her seductions were intellectual as much as
physical and this is one of the key distinctions between a
courtesan and a regular prostitute, which is not to say that all
courtesans were intelligent company or that they had the
freedom to live in the way they chose, but courtesans were able
to ascend to levels of society that prostitutes found closed off.

By way of contrast, Madame de Maintenon paid too high a price

for her power, for she constantly had to guard against losing
Louis favor and she was never happy. Her influence became
increasingly more religious, driving off the intellectuals and the
libertines. Many considered her a bigot and held her responsible
for the catastrophe of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in
1685, and whether that was really Louis doing, she did not
stand in his way. In a dialogue by Voltaire, he has her say to
Ninon, It was decreed I must be a prude and in the end that is
what she was. Ninon herself once said of Maintenon that she
was too awkward for love. Madame de Svign hardly
represents a better alternative: to hope your rich husband will die
young can turn into an impossible trap, where thoughts of
murder intrude. It galled Svign deeply that her son became
enraptured with Ninon.

Ninon was not interested in remaining attached to anyone for too

long; she liked interesting and good-looking men but there were
always others on the horizon. Men lose more conquests by
their own awkwardness than by any virtue in the woman, she
once wrote. A womans resistance is no proof of her virtue; it
is much more likely to be a proof of her experience. After all,
love is transitory, an illusion of the senses.
 33

So far as the nasty allegations go, the story of her son

committing suicide was made up by a hack writer. Ninon never
had any children, which didnt stop this story from making its
way into her biographies. So far as going to bed with randy
churchmen when she was in her eighties, Ninon was past
worrying about that by then. It is true that monks and priests
have made for very popular sexual partners because they are
safe, discreet, and accessible. But this story about Ninon only
reflects a certain churchmans wishful thinking. Legends have
always developed around beautiful women like Ninon because
the inadequate men and women who dream them up were never
privileged to share beds like Ninons. Beauty was clearly the
best choice even if, like the others, it did not last.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT BEGINS

You will remember that the Noctambule intended to return to

claim Ninons immortal soul. He did show up three days before
she died, but he went away empty-handed because Ninon, an
agnostic, apparently did not believe she had a soul to lose, and
so had nothing to give him. This deathbed scene in 1705 marks
the official beginning of the revolution known as the
Enlightenment.

Ninons fable of the Noctambule is interesting because it

reflected mans attempt to explain women not as goddesses from
another world but as enchantresses whose beauty just seemed
divine and magical, perhaps even diabolical. The story keys into
Christian and Romantic, not Classical, sexual fables. The
Noctambule is of course Mephistopheles, the Devil. Let us say
 34

that the Noctambule really did appear before her. She chose
beauty because she knew perfectly well that if she was beautiful,
then it had nothing to do with any supernatural explanation he
could come up with, however tempting that view was to others.
The world of science was coming.

As she lay dying, it was clear she had lost her beauty, even if she
still had her extraordinary femininity. Voltaire was introduced
to her back then -- he was 11 and she was more than 80 -- and
the great philosopher commented (much later) that Mlle.
Lenclos had all the ugliest signs of old age in her face, and her
mind was that of an ascetic philosopher. So much for eternal
beauty. But he made this snotty comment about a woman who
had generously left a lot of money in her will for him to buy
books, and one suspects he was just being facetious to cover his
own respect for Ninons intellect. How sharp the old lady was.
Even Voltaire was only 11-years-old once.

A century later, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would be drawn

to the story in his masterpiece Faust (Part I was published in
1808). Starring in the Ninon role is Faust, who has choices over
his destiny, while the Noctambule is played by Mephistopheles.
Goethe had other sources of course. As a boy he was impressed
by puppet shows in which Faust and the Devil sparred in an
eternal struggle over faith and mans salvation. Goethe, like
many before or since, experienced the sensation that if man
could defeat the Devil then he could also stand up to God.
Goethe was familiar too with one Georg Faust, who had made a
career for himself by boasting that he was a necromancer, just as
he was familiar with his contemporary Martin Luther, the true
 35

Faust figure of that century. Indeed it is not a coincidence that

Goethe set Faust's home in Luther's Wittenberg!

Goethes Faust was as racy for its time as anything ever written.
He arranges for Helen of Troy to be transported through time
and space for Fausts sexual pleasure and they even have a love
child together. Helen is romanticized as the perfect woman,
Greek beauty and harmony wrapped up in the one superb body.
But Goethe was not really that interested in Helen. He was
more interested in why there had to be all that killing at Troy in
the first place over a woman! Goethe correctly surmised that the
gods were behind it, since there was no other satisfactory
explanation. He also thought it fair that Faust be let off the hook
in his bargain with Mephistopheles, for why should Faust
surrender his soul? This infuriated the religious authorities and
other pompous German writers of the time who hated happy
endings, but it revealed Goethe as a child of the Enlightenment.
There were reasons for this.

Goethe had made a much-written-about trip to Italy in the late

1780s, when he was approaching his 40th year. That trip had
liberated him to be an agnostic and an erotic materialist and it
extricated him from the dead end of idealizing women who were
unavailable women like Charlotte von Stein. It was at this
time that he chose to live with, and he later married, a young
German woman from the working class named Christiane
Vulpius, repeating what Martin Luther (and Rousseau in France)
had done before him. While Christiane could never really share
fully in his intellectual interests, clearly their erotic attraction to
each other was enhanced by their differences, socially and
intellectually. Goethes erotic epigrams from this time are full
 36

of nudity, erections, masturbation and other steamy subjects.

Few academics ever look at that aspect of Goethes writing, just
as they ignore Christiane, although some have claimed to detect
a whiff of homosexuality there. Rich women snubbed him after
that, but Goethe knew that love, such as it is, was more
important than the artificial barriers of class, age, culture and
religion, and that loyalty freely given is what binds relationships
together. He understood that women were at least the equals of
men and in some ways superior and, because he believed this, he
publicly promoted the careers of many German women
intellectuals.

Goethe celebrated women in his concept of the Eternal Feminine

spirit that embodies all the women that Faust encounters -- not
just Helen but also the unpretentious and worldly Gretchen (who
resembles Christiane), the Virgin Mary, and so on. It is this
generous spirit that Ninon embodied; it is the spirit that would
become the basis for the growing sense of the privacy of the
feminine self in the so-called bourgeois century, the 19th
century. Intellectuals focus their attentions on the anxieties of
unrequited or ideal love, and Goethe wrote his fair share earlier
in his life. But the lesson we learn from Ninons life, and what
Goethe learned from Christiane, is that when we make a
judgment on someones life, what truly matters is how we live
our own lives. It matters how we use the choices available to us,
and how we make choices available to others. What does not
matter is adherence to prevailing social, political, religious or
academic orthodoxy.

THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS

 37

When Paris was forced to choose between those three gorgeous

goddesses back in ancient times, he could have had political
power from Hera, or warlike prowess from Athena, or he could
have had the most beautiful woman in the world from
Aphrodite. As we know, he chose Aphrodite.

Despite what the Iliad or the movie Troy would have you
believe, Paris was not only extremely good-looking, he was also
an honorable man, which is why the goddesses chose him in the
first place. For his part, he chose Aphrodite because she seemed
like the least dangerous option. Little did he suspect when he
was rewarded with the most beautiful woman in the world.
As with anything to do with the gods, she was a flawed gift, for
she turned out to be Helen of Troy and she was already married.
As was he, of course, for both had had arranged marriages
imposed on them. And though Helen was undeniably stunning
looking, she was not much of a match in intelligence. Rather
vain and frivolous actually. If her beauty was immortal and
eternal, it was all on the surface, a harmony of the parts. She
was, in a word, superficial.

And who is to say that Paris truly had a choice in the first place?
If indeed he had had a choice, would he have chosen a married
woman and a vacuous one at that?

Once this series of unfortunate events began to unfold, however,

her husband Menelaus wanted revenge upon Paris family. This
was understandable perhaps, not because he was jealous, but
because Helen was his property. But it led directly to the Trojan
wars and the eventual downfall of the House of Atreides. Helen
was right in one matter at least: she blamed Aphrodite for the
 38

affair with Paris, claiming she had always wanted to return to

her husband. For Paris own part, he was opposed to the war all
along, believing it solved nothing. He was an idealist, a rebel;
he only wanted to please everyone. He ended up pleasing no
one. The gifts of the gods were a curse. They had made him
participate in their charade, hurting everyone in the process. It
seemed to Paris that humans were just as vain as the gods, for all
they ever needed for a war was some petty excuse. That was all
Agamemnon was interested in.

Paris has since been dismissed as a lightweight seducer, pushed

to sidestage by the noisy, flashy Achilles, the heroic Hector and
the wily Odysseus. He also has had to endure the idea that
The Judgment of Paris qualified as a male fantasy in which the
man could have had any woman he wanted and the women were
to be blamed for everything. It was all a lie. Paris liked women.
It was the gods -- male and female -- who were to blame for
making us their playthings. He would not be the last to confront
them.

~::~

How To Look At A Naked Lady

How Lady Godiva Got a Tax Break

On This Page:
Lady Godivas story
Peeping Toms story
 39

Hitchcocks Rear Window

Voyeurism
Privacy versus Property
ShareThis

Once upon a time Coventry was a nice quiet sort of place, when
being sent to Coventry meant being banished to obscurity.
Nowadays, the city has been struck by the tourism industry just
as much as any other city as it strives to reinvent itself.
Coventry now has an official Lady Godiva employed by the city
council and the town is awash in Lady Godiva festivals and
memorabilia signage, souvenirs and knickknacks scattered
around the city like mushrooms, along with the half-dozen local
historians who have arranged for the story to be authenticated.

Coventry obviously has reason to be grateful for its Lady

Godiva and her famous ride through town in the nude. But if
that is so, why does Godiva no longer recreate her ride each year
in the nude like she used to? These days she is fully dressed
and, in this fitness-conscious age, they have even added a half
marathon in her name. More importantly, why have the citizens
of Coventry banished their other famous citizen, Peeping Tom?
Tom was the only person who dared to ogle Godiva and he is
one of the few references to illicit looking that predates the
scientific and legal revolutions of 18th and 19th century
England, when looking became rude, even pathological.
Indeed today, while some people still use the words peeping
Tom, he has mostly been pushed aside by more fashionable
words like voyeur and pervert and "predator," first in
academic writing by way of Freudian psychoanalysis and later
 40

in psychology, journalism and popular writing. Godivas

reputation, on the other hand, has soared, but the most
interesting aspect of her ride nowadays is that it is no longer
politically correct to have her in the nude. So what is going on
here and who should we believe? Why did Lady Godiva ride
through Coventry in the nude in the first place and did Peeping
Tom indulge in a spot of voyeurism or has he been unfairly
maligned?

LADY GODIVAS STORY

Back in the 11th century, the Lady Godiva, as Countess of

Mercia, had personal charge over the good people of Coventry.
When these extraordinary events took place, they were being
burdened terribly by taxes. In order to arrange for tax relief, she
needled her husband Leofric at every opportunity until one day
he made her a rash promise. He would grant her request to
lower taxes only if she rode through town naked.

Clearly Leofric meant it as a joke for he considered his wife to

be practically a religious fanatic. So the very idea that Godiva
would agree to his challenge took him completely by surprise.
For the record, the real reason she rode naked through Coventry
is that she did it for her people. There was no other reason. But
there is simply no escaping the fact that she was driven to these
desperate lengths by a husband who consistently refused to
listen to her perfectly reasonable requests. He was your usual
paternalistic man. He elevated the female body to almost
mystical heights, which is why he conceived of the wager in the
first place, but he was totally unable to deal with the real woman
inside that body.
 41

Godiva planned her insurrection carefully, to ensure it would

play out the way she envisaged. She was thinking it over when
she remembered all the artists who had portrayed Mary
Magdalene in the nude, covered only by her long flowing hair.
It was then she decided that riding through the town in the nude
would create a double image: her nudity would be interpreted as
a sign of her humility and repentance before God and as a sign
of her sexual allure. She was certainly not ashamed of her
nudity. Long hair expresses a womans sexuality and hers was
not dead yet, whatever Leofric had to say about it. In fact, she
enjoyed flaunting the very thing Leofric thought he had the most
under control -- her body. Did she do it to get back at her
husband? Yes of course. This was his idea in the first place.
He set the challenge because he did not think that his virtuous
wife would dare and perhaps also because, as the years passed,
he had grown to have less respect for her. She wondered if he
cared either way. However, she knew he was shocked when she
accepted the challenge and thats when he tried to add more
conditions. He argued that the ride had to be through the
crowded market on fair day, but she objected that that wasnt
part of the original challenge. She felt that when it was over he
had to be rightfully humiliated. And that is what happened.

After the infamous ride was over, the official view around
Coventry was that she had risked her virtue and reputation for a
worthy higher goal. Her husband Lord Leofric, Earl of Mercia,
would be the first to concede that there is no higher goal than a
tax break, but he was shocked and disappointed when she
displayed her body in public. He was, after all, one of the most
powerful men in Anglo Saxon England and he had an image to
 42

protect. He was responsible for governing most of the western

and central region, which meant he had to raise taxes for the
king and this he did, efficiently. His wife, the Lady Godiva, on
the other hand, was practically a saint, and he had only meant
that if she was really keen to do something for her church and
her people, she should have stripped herself of some of her
possessions, not the clothes she had on. He had meant her to
face up to the fact that she had too many dresses and too many
shoes and that she should have given some of them to the poor if
she really wanted to do something practical! The whole thing
had been a silly misunderstanding and now it was a national
disgrace that would bring shame on Coventry.

In his heart, he simply did not fathom how she had come to do
it. He knew Godiva to be a deeply religious woman -- she had
an obsession with the Virgin Mary, rather than the wicked Mary
Magdalene. He supposed she must have decided this was going
to be a religious experience. Perhaps she saw an opportunity for
sainthood since saints got the nod for a lot less these days. Once
she got a lot of people around town talking about the power of
God at work, then she got some of those foolish young monks
over at the Benedictine monastery of St. Albans to spread the
story around that she was a candidate for sainthood and that he
was some stingy old fool. Monks are always looking for sexy
stories in order to get a following, otherwise no one would listen
to them. The whole thing reminded him of that story of the
Emperors New Clothes except in reverse: she took her clothes
off and had no one watch! Godiva was encouraging people to
treat it as a religious experience when it was nothing of the kind
and he had heard of at least one fellow who didnt think it was
either. That fellow had stuck his head out to have a look at her
 43

and now he was being persecuted by the fanatics from the local
abbey -- the same monks that Godiva had surrounded herself
with.

Leofric was forced to pretend the whole thing was a miracle,

which in a way it was, since almost no one did see her nudity.
But the worst thing about this was that he had to grant the tax
break. He doubted that Godiva gave a single thought to where
he was going to raise the extra 5000 a year to pay for her
extravagance. Women! This was not how a noblewoman
should behave -- it was undignified and unladylike -- and he
doubted he could ever trust his wife again. A woman should be
subservient to her husband; she should not seek actively to
humiliate him. As Ephesians 5: 22-23 states in her very own
bible: Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as
unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as
Christ is the head of the Church.

PEEPING TOMS STORY

Tom the tailor looked out that window for perfectly innocent
reasons. He had heard Lady Godivas horse neigh as she passed
by and he was concerned to see if she was all right. Nothing
wrong with a bit of neighborly concern, is there? Once he knew
she was fine, he pulled his head in again and wondered whether
she was truly naked. Well, who wouldnt? Its the natural thing
to do.

Tom also had been curious to see whether Godiva was riding
with or without a saddle because he was thinking that she must
be very uncomfortable without one, and if she was riding
 44

English style she may have been exposing herself rather more
than she intended. He thought she probably never gave any
thought to those things. Even with the long hair over her bosom
it cant have covered everything, though a wig might have done
the job he supposed.

How old was Godiva anyway? He never saw her up close. Was
she worth looking at in the nude? She may have been in her
eighties for all he could tell, but he did see that she was nude
and he thought she was flaunting it a bit. He wouldnt have
been surprised if old Leofric looked at his wife in a totally new
way after her ride and the whole episode may have done
wonders for their marriage. A few moral types had argued that
it was the horse that was naked, but Tom knew it was Godiva.
He did see that much.

At any rate, Tom got struck blind for his pains, presumably by
God, though whos to say? Most of you readers will feel he
deserved it no doubt because you think he really just wanted to
look at a naked lady. But this is unfair. He had been out of
town on business and had only recently returned that day and he
had not heard about the ban on looking out the window. So his
blinding is fairly severe punishment, dont you think? All he
could really see under her long flowing hair were her legs, but
there is no one who can confirm his version since she arranged
for the authorities to ensure everyone stayed indoors, and she
did it so early in the morning that hardly anyone was up. The
citizens cooperated only because they stood to benefit from the
tax break.
 45

All this took place not long before the Norman invasion of 1066,
which upended Anglo-Saxon England. The Lady Godiva story
probably was based on a folktale or earlier pagan fertility rites
associated with the May Queen. Coventry is located near the
Forest of Arden, after all, which has long been associated with
pastoral myths -- Shakespeares As You Like It for example.
Mix it all up and shake it around and you will extract the
wonderful story of Lady Godiva. During the medieval period
that followed, the monks were worried about the storys sexual
element and Robert Graves, in his book The White Goddess,
suggests that they tried to clean it up. Some centuries later,
during the puritan era, when the maypoles came down and the
mystery plays and pageants were stopped altogether, Lady
Godiva was another casualty.

Fortunately, with the Restoration of 1677, Godiva and Peeping

Tom were able to make a triumphant comeback in Coventry
and, for hundreds of years, Lady Godivas ride was recreated
enthusiastically in the town with some young damsel being
selected to play Godiva in the parade. The organizers usually
got her from out of town to make sure no one knew who she
was. People would have started assuming all sorts of things
otherwise. The most hotly debated topic every year was
whether she would really be naked this year, and the puritans
and conservatives always took a keen interest in making sure she
wasnt. But times change and so too do the traditions. Back in
1962, Godiva wore a skin-colored body suit and a long wig that
covered most of her charms. Nowadays, with children
watching, the official Godiva can flaunt it a bit when she wants
to but it has become rather tame. In this age of image
 46

marketing, Godiva is still Coventrys best tourist attraction and

public nudity is left for other locals to show off.

On one thing the local puritans and the liberals all agree.
Peeping Tom spoils the fun. The nickname has become
synonymous with pervert, and all those moralizers and armies
of senior citizens out there arguing that he was an
embarrassment to the town have won. They have taken down
his effigies, burnt his postcards and souvenir stands. He has no
defenders, he has been banished. Hence the origin of the
expression Sent from Coventry, which Toms enemies have
managed to have reversed over the years so that now everyone
says Sent to Coventry, meaning banished.

Tom may be just as ancient as Godiva. But the historians and

folklorists tell us that the earliest reference to him that they can
find belongs to the 17th century antiquarian William Camden,
just before the Restoration of Charles II. It was probably a joke
explanation for the blank unseeing eyes and agonized expression
Camden saw on a wooden statue of a man who was supposedly
Peeping Tom. Blank eyes because the paint had long since worn
off! But the puritans drew other conclusions: blinding was an
appropriate punishment for sin and that was that. The
playwrights and journalists loved him though. Some pointed to
the classical Greek story of how Actaeon saw the goddess Diana
bathing and got ripped apart by her Rottweilers for peeping at
her nudity. Tom was luckier and only got struck blind for his
pains.

But that wasnt the end of Tom. A comic opera called Peeping
Tom of Coventry appeared in 1784 and there were dozens of
 47

pantomimes and burlesques throughout the 19th century, and

even a Mascagni opera that was first performed in Milan in
1910. It wasnt the German bombing in World War II that
eventually banished Tom from town. It was the historians and
the feminists and the social workers, once they got a hold of him
and dissected him in a fit of political correctness. Nowadays he
is definitely in eclipse. What few statues and effigies there once
were in Coventry have all but disappeared and we will just have
to see how he fares in the future.

HITCHCOCKS REAR WINDOW

Alfred Hitchcocks Rear Window (1954) raises all the right

questions about Peeping Toms and voyeurism. Hitchcock
himself once remarked to Francois Truffaut that Jeffries is a
real Peeping Tom... a snooper, but arent we all? Are we
indeed? Hitchcocks biographer John Russell Taylor also quotes
him as saying a degree of voyeurism is only natural: the
filmmakers art and the photographers are based on it.

It would seem that if Hitchcock did not approve of Jeffs

occupation of photographer, then he did not approve of his own
vocation as a film director either. He must have been aware of
the pornography being shot by his peers. But he also could have
been speaking about todays TV cameras, which chase down
tragedy in our communities in what can only be described as
voyeuristic exercises. Media cameras are so often resented, not
only by other cultures around the world but also here in the
West, and this means that the voyeurs have won, doesnt it?
Most citizens have become resigned to the media getting what
they want, at somebody elses expense.
 48

In 1983, Rear Window was re-released in theaters (with Vertigo

and three other Hitchcock films), and an academic tempest in a
tea-cup erupted over Hitchcock and the nature of movie-going.
It was asked, is Rear Window about voyeurism and do the
movies cater to our guilty voyeuristic tendencies? Do we all
secretly lust after our neighbors and our co-workers, and if we
do, is that a bad thing? Heres a poll some college film students
took back then. Choose one:

Rear Window and movie-going are both inherently voyeuristic.

Rear Window is about voyeurism, but movie-going is not itself
voyeuristic.
Seeing is believing. Both are voyeuristic, but only to the degree
that people believe them to be. As Hamlet once said: "there is
nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
Neither is really voyeuristic. Rear Window is just a movie!
Quite reasonably 50% of the students voted for #1 and 50%
voted for #2. The agnostic option #3 was apparently too
abstract. No one chose the cynical #4. Was this proof that we
still live in a credulous rather than a cynical age? Or maybe it's
just film students.

If Hitchcock had decided that human beings are naturally

voyeurs and that filmmaking and film-going are both
voyeuristic, then he also displayed a perverse fascination for the
subject, meaning that he almost certainly counted himself
among the guilty.

Other filmmakers over the years have agreed, and given it

religious significance. Back in 1957, after Rear Window came
 49

out in France, directors Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol wrote:

We can never be hard enough on ourselves -- such is [the
films] lesson. Evil hides not only under the appearance of
Good, but in our most casual and innocent acts, those we think
have no ethical significance... This guilt which (Hitchcock) is
so skilful in bringing to the surface is perhaps less of a moral
than a metaphysical order. It is, as we have said... part of our
very nature, the heritage of original sin.

It is too easy to write this off to the naivety of an earlier age, or

to the fact that French Nouvelle Vague filmmakers never had
any fun. But it erupts periodically in contemporary America.
Today there are many who would agree with those French
directors and some of them are even film critics. Donald Spoto
wrote in his book about Hitchcock: the film exposes the social
contagion of a suspicious, prying view of others lives and the
corruption of the ideal of neighborly love to which this leads.
Neighborly love? Its not in any neighborhood I know.
Nowadays one can find a horde of psychologists and
psychoanalysts who will support Spotos thesis and argue that
modern life is the story of the embattled self adrift in a world
where there is no longer any privacy and that it is our own fault.
Dr. Robert J. Benton wrote that Rear Window turns the mirror
back around to face the audience, and we realize that we are
being shown our own manners and morals... Do we care, or is
Mrs. Thorwald interesting to us only if she is murdered? This
is a dark view of modern life. Hitchcocks human animal has
been desensitized by life in the concrete jungle, by sterile
architecture, by television and videogames, and the only
adventure left is spying upon ones neighbors?
 50

Not everyone is so pessimistic. Francois Truffaut also had a

Catholic upbringing and it was apparently a lot worse than
Alfred Hitchcocks. Nevertheless, he could see the dark strain
of masochism that pervaded Hitchs films. Truffaut questioned
why the activities in the film must be equivalent with Original
Sin. Arent the characters indulging in curiosity, detective work,
if you like? Even if one accepts the principle that it was
voyeurism, havent most people learnt to respect the privacy of
others? The critic Raymond Durgnat argued that what badly
needs privacy isnt usually done before open windows... Would,
one wonders, those morally fastidious film critics, if bedridden,
really turn their backs to the window and refrain from
speculating about their neighbors comings and goings Far
from seeing his voyeurism as sin, one may see it as also the
beginning of involvement and intervention. If Jeff and Lisa
hadnt spied on their neighbors, they would have failed in their
obligations to them, which is a far greater sin, is it not? One of
them could have been murdered before their very eyes and no
one would have done anything about it? Hitchcock, it would
seem, is arguing that this isnt right and that one must get
involved. A little voyeurism can be a good thing.

VOYEURISM

So are we all voyeurs? Once upon a time, the language of daily

life joined the looker and the looked at in the same sphere: they
were mutually dependent. Consider the word look: you can
look at someone (observer) and look nice (be observed).
One can peep through curtains into a larger space (active), and
one can peep into view like a flower (passive), which is to say
 51

that it presents itself to be viewed. One can do the same for

vision and view.

There are two things to say about this: (1) appearing in public
means acknowledging that one can both look and be looked at.
Circularity. That is a function of public life. But (2), and more
importantly, these definitions are not loaded with any
pathological meanings. How that has changed! Modern
psychology has put a wall up in the landscape with the invention
of the word voyeurism and the paraphernalia of psychotherapy
and counseling. One cannot simultaneously look and be looked
at when one is a voyeur. It is a one-way word. It requires
setting up an opposite: exhibitionism. So now we have
voyeurs and their victims, exhibitionists and their victims, in a
process that turns ordinary human behavior into a disease and
allows experts to intervene.

Consider the following dictionary definitions of voyeurism.

Websters says: (1) One whose sexual desire is concentrated
upon seeing sex organs and sexual acts -- called also peeping
Tom; (2) An unduly prying observer usually in search of sordid
or scandalous sights. American Heritage has (1) A person
who derives sexual gratification from observing the naked
bodies or sexual acts of others, especially from a secret vantage
point; (2) An obsessive observer of sordid or sensational
subjects.

These definitions were devised before erotic videos, DVDs and

websites became widely available, so if one watches a porn
website, does that make you a voyeur and what does that mean?
 52

Is it a bad thing? Apparently it is to all those who have set up

websites and clinics to help wean people off porn addiction.

Then there are the English dictionaries, who can be counted on

to be more authoritarian. The Oxford English writes: A person
whose sexual desires are stimulated or satisfied by covert
observation of the sex organs or sexual activities of others; c.f.
peeping Tom. This definition then recommends we look up
scopophilia, which is defined as sexual stimulation or
satisfaction from looking. Since this is something we all do,
then we are all scopophiliacs! The Encyclopedia Brittanica
takes the same tack but adds: Voyeurism is the reverse of
exhibitionism and thus the complex is often called scopophilio-
exhibitionism.

Bruno Bettelheim, the psychoanalyst and writer, took aim at this

monstrosity, seeing it as a horrible distortion of Freuds
writings. In his book, Freud and Mans Soul (1982), Bettelheim
argued that Freud himself had a relatively narrow definition for
voyeurism. In Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), voyeurism
was a perversion away from the all-important act of sexual
intercourse onto some substitute activity. This is the basis for
the Encyclopedia Brittanica definition cited above. But Freud
also acknowledged the sexual pleasure to be gained from the
ordinary, everyday looking that we do in the word schaulust.
Bettelheim pointed out that Strachey, Freuds English-language
translator, did us all a disservice by translating this into the faux-
Greek word scopophilia, (scopy = look, philia = liking; i.e. to
like to look). It has more than a passing resemblance to
hemaphilia, pedophilia, necrophilia, and coprophilia. No longer
 53

is it something we all do; it is now something we know we

shouldnt do.

But no one is listening to Bettelheim. According to the

dictionary definitions, looking at something sexually stimulating
(DVDs, magazines, websites) and taking pleasure from it is
actually a sickness, a disease, an addiction, and there appear to
be many people who subscribe to this viewpoint. It is equally
true to say that there are even more people who are torn between
their desire to watch and their fears about what that says about
them.

PRIVACY VERSUS PROPERTY

Rear Window is not even about voyeurism really. Nor is the

story of Lady Godiva. They are about the eternal conflict
between the right to property and the right to privacy. When
Jeff and Lisa looked out Jeffs window and thought they saw a
murder, they were exercising their right to do so, a right founded
on the right to property. When critics try to draw a line between
this and being looked at, they are, quite rightly, advocating the
right to privacy. But the two are fundamentally irreconcilable
since the line between them is drawn according to personal
preferences, as much as social or legal ones.

For example, if Jeff thinks he sees a murder and he screws a

telephoto lens on to his camera, has he stepped past his right to
property and violated the other apartment dwellers right to
privacy? Remember he was motivated by worthy ideals; he was
concerned that a woman had been murdered. Her curtains were
not pulled; hadnt she (or her husband) waived their right to
 54

privacy in this case? Furthermore, isnt it a social obligation to

protect a woman from spousal abuse?

If the right to privacy is often at odds with the right to property,

property authorizes the gaze while privacy refuses it. To own a
painting, a house, a lover, gives you the right to enjoy it, gaze at
it, display it, imitate it and be unrestrained about it. It may be an
illicit pleasure, such as the painting of a nude on the wall of a
great mansion, or a pornographic DVD. It is property that
allows you to define your private self in terms of what gives you
pleasure from looking at it. To have no property to look at
means you do not need privacy since there is nothing to protect,
nothing physical to take pleasure from. This is not an argument
for collecting excessive amounts of property; that produces the
sense of privacy that is often called paranoia. Neither is it an
argument for doing without property, for those who believe that
the privacy of ones own mind is sufficient are deceiving
themselves about what it means to be homeless, lost or
abandoned. Above all, privacy is a state of mind mutually
interdependent with property.

The mind may be the hardest thing for one human being to
deprive another of. You must drive them mad first and the
surest way to do this is to strip away all sense of property. But
even a supermarket cart can contain a kingdom. Alternatively,
you may be able to achieve the same effect by walling someone
off inside their own property. You can count on many
extremely rich people being among the loneliest on the planet.

Many have argued that the function of myth is to resolve

conflicts between irreconcilable opposites in our dualistic
 55

universe. In Rear Window, where the right to privacy and the

right to property collide, there is no resolution really. The film
allows you the opportunity to decide for yourself -- if it is about
voyeurism, then that is how you see it. If it isnt, then it isnt.
Seeing is believing.

In Muslim societies, representations of God are not permitted.

In the West, this is often dismissed as a sign of backwardness or
naivety. After all, Jesus iconography is pretty much able to go
anywhere nowadays. But the Muslim prohibition is rarely
understood for what it is a sophisticated view that argues that
representation drives out meaning, especially spiritual meaning.
It's like reading a great book and then seeing the movie version
and realizing it's nothing like your memories.

Could it be that in the West a profusion of messages ends up

producing clutter and noise, diminishing the value of everything
(Quantity drives out quality?). In Muslim societies, they
understand that to represent God and the Prophet is to debase
them. Such a belief relies upon a strong sense of dignity and
privacy that is significantly under-valued, indeed deliberately
eroded, in the West. Many Muslims have a horror of the Wests
consumerism, seeing in it a self-destructive urge that they want
no part of. It is a perfectly valid criticism. Curiously, this is
something that Christian fundamentalists have discovered too,
which is why some insist on going back to basics, as it were, to
focus on core spiritual values rather than succumb to the
distractions of a consumer society (i.e. property). They have a
lot in common.
 56

Modern Western consumer societies are based on the

increasingly rapid circulation of people in urban spaces (just as
they are based on the circulation of capital flows and ideas on
the internet). Community and neighborhood are becoming less
important, being replaced by the completely different concepts
of the mall and the theme park, which are like physical analogs
of popular websites or online videogames. Surveillance cameras
are popping up everywhere in public spaces, just as webcams
are popping up at home and on cell phones. Baseball and
football stadiums, which once unified communities, are
becoming less personally engaging for fans, being replaced by
television broadcasts into the home, obliging sports teams to get
into the business of showbiz to keep up attendance. The result is
increasingly impersonal. Some even equate this with
dehumanization and alienation. The increased circulation of
people in modern societies, both in real space and in electronic
space, has weakened the sense of self among many citizens and
increased the sense of violation that they feel. This is nothing
new really, for modern society has had to grapple with how to
protect privacy just as other societies have had to do in the past.
But no wonder the rich want to go and buy private islands
somewhere, why the upper middle class aspire to gated
communities and the middle and working classes have taken up
pornography and sexting. Its all about escapism and the term
voyeurism has emerged as part of the lexicon.

Fortunately you dont hear as much about scopophilia and

voyeurism these days, but it hasnt really gone away. For the
question remains: why do so many people embrace pseudo-
scientific words like these? Are they a panacea? In our world
today, irreverent and rebellious behavior is often misdiagnosed
 57

as ADHD and Autism, Ritalin is prescribed to do away with

annoying children, and child abuse by the Church, by
teachers, by parents or by a relative is treated with such hysteria
that the child is stripped of all defenses and forcibly compelled
to play and become a victim, thus confirming the nightmare.
We risk a great deal when we allow the experts in psychology,
psychiatry, pediatrics, education and the media to explain
things for us and make decisions for us that result in punishment
when there are alternatives available. They - and their
Inquisition bible the DSM - are our pathologists of gloom, the
ones who want to blind Peeping Tom. Words like voyeurism
create prisons in the mind and the best way to destroy those
prisons is to refuse to accept their validity, as Lady Godiva did
when she flouted convention. The most powerful idea is not the
idea whose time has come but the idea that everything in the end
is just an idea.
~::~

04 A Tale Of Two Women

Malinche as the Virgin of Guadalupe

On This Page:
Malinche and the Virgin of Guadalupe
La Casa Negro Pedro de Urdemales on Tepeyac
La Casa Colorada Pedro de Urdemales at Malinches house
La Casa Blanca Bernardino de Sahagn in Tlatelolco
La Casa Azul Frida Kahlo as Guadalupe
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MALINCHE AND THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE
 58

Carlos Fuentes was right, at least in the beginning. In his

introduction to Frida Kahlos diary, he describes her arrival one
evening in the opera box as an apparition of Coatlicue, a
jangling and magnetic performance by an ancient Aztec earth
goddess. He is proud of her, nonetheless! She expresses
Mexicos fierce national identity, its pride, its secret hurt, its
flamboyance and its fabulous fashion sense. But then he goes
on to talk about her pain, her defeat, her sacrifice and the
purification of Malinches sins via the Virgin of Guadalupe. It
is Fridas sexuality and her childlessness, served up with the
promise of redemption, those swirling waters that threatened to
drag Frida down throughout her life. Talk about sticks and
stones

Octavio Paz was more direct. He called Kahlo a despicable

cur. And so into the darkness we go with Kahlo as Malinche,
Eva, Celestina, la Llorona, the Weeping Woman, la Chingada,
the fucked woman That old mother, shes a whore really.
She sold herself to Stalin. Isnt it telling that so many of those
persecuted by the Inquisition were women? Paz joins its legions
as a 20th century Grand Inquisitor.

Kahlo despised this kind of thinking. She identified with

Malinche, of course, and Diego Rivera knew it, which may be
why his mural of Corts and Malinche is not nearly as negative
as Clemente Orozcos. Otherwise you would be hard pressed to
find Malinche anywhere else in Mexican painting or literature.

Back in the 16th and 17th centuries when Mexico was founded,
the evolution of the mother and the whore paralleled the ups and
downs of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic Counter-
 59

Reformation. If the Virgin started out passive and loving, as in

the madonnas of Raphael, thats what shapes the 1531 apparition
of the Virgin of Guadalupe in what is now the northern suburbs
of Mexico City. By 1550, however, with the Counter-
Reformation and smallpox in full swing, she became associated
with La Llorona, a mysterious ghost-like figure dressed in a
white shroud, wailing along the streets. It is a striking and
hallucinatory image. In some versions she is jilted by a lover; in
others she murders her children and then, driven mad by the
horror, she runs wildly through the streets calling after her
victims like some Chupacabra. In still other stories, she is a
ghost who returns to avenge herself upon those who have
wronged her.

Were these hallucinations defensive reactions against the

brutality of the Conquest? Did they reflect the profound grief as
entire communities were decimated by European diseases?
Were they expressions of frustration because the Spanish
authorities were opposed to the Virgin of Guadalupe? In 1569,
the fourth viceroy of Mexico, Martin Enriquez de Almanza,
denounced her as a cult for secretly worshipping the Aztec
goddess Tonantzin (who resembled Fuentes Coatlicue in Aztec
mythology). Were certain Spanish clergy participating in a
charade to convert the Indians? Guadalupes fate was by no
means certain during this time; she was a battlefield of the
passions.

Back in Old Europe, by the 1600s, the Virgin Mary had become
an avenger, Revelations Woman of the Apocalypse, stamping
out sin and the Churchs enemies (c.f. Rubens painting of 1623-
4). It affected poor Guadalupe in Mexico, for when her story
 60

appeared in print for the very first time, as late as 1648, she had
morphed into a justification for the Conquest, a touch of La
Llorona about her.

Ironically, Guadalupe also inspired the Mexican revolutionary

politics of the 19th and 20th centuries when her images were
carried on the banners of the Hidalgo and Morelos insurgents
against the Spanish and the Mexican governments and in
support of migrant farm workers in the United States.
Guadalupe had her revenge.

Into the 21th century, Nuestra Seora de Guadalupe remains

enormously popular, appearing even now on the posters of a
bitter Lpez Obrador. Yet it has been the nationalist intellectuals
who have suffered the most from an identity crisis. Paz, for
example, was marooned in the United States and France from
1943 onwards. In his 1948 poem Himno entre ruinas, he is
nostalgic for a lost mythical past when all thats left in the here
and now are desolate ruins. In his landmark study of Mexican
identity, El laberinto de la soledad, which he wrote and
published in 1950, he characterized Mexicans as hidden behind
masks, ashamed of who they are and where they have come
from. He may have had Kahlos Stalinist mask in mind, but it
makes a lot more sense today if read as if it is Paz himself who
is lost in the labyrinth.

Flesh and blood women do not appear to have suffered from an

existential crisis. Malinche and Frida Kahlo -- spanning the
biological and creative arc of mestizaje, mestizo and mestiza --
are the mothers of the modern Mexican and Latin American
identity. As contemporary Chicanas point out, there is pride and
 61

strength there, not an inferiority complex. Who but a patriarchal

man could think otherwise?

La Casa Negro Pedro de Urdemales on Tepeyac

Pedro de Urdemales, honorable Knight of Spain, paused to pick

some roses from the rocky path beside him. Curious, he
thought, who planted the Spanish roses? Who would have
bothered on this barren hillside? A mix of yellows, reds, pinks
and whites, poked their heads out from the blackened ruins
about him. It was December in the year of our Lord 1531 and it
was cold up here when the wind blew in from the mountains.
Near where he stood, all that remained of a broken pagan temple
to old gods lay, reduced to whispers, a burnt sacrifice to Spains
invading Christian gods. The ruins were a few years old now
and the black rocks had been overrun by scrubby vegetation. He
remained a few moments longer as rain began to fall in a mist,
wondering if the roses could be used in some way. He needed a
better scheme. Four days ago he had met with the woman in
Higuera Street and she had outlined her plan to him, but he was
the one charged with making it work.

The woman, Doa Marina, had told him how for two days
running she had surprised a villager on the hills here at Tepeyac.
It had been a strange enterprise. She had dressed herself up to
resemble the Virgin Mary, the holy Mother of Jesus, and she had
succeeded in terrifying the poor man both times. She told the
villager how she had come abroad in this new land, so far from
Spain, to see that a new church would be built upon this hill.
She had asked him to relate all this to the Bishop, Juan de
Zumrraga, and he would make it so. Twice she had appeared
 62

and twice the old man had told his vision to the Bishop and
twice the Bishop had refused. Proof is needed, the Bishop had
said. We need a sign from heaven. Doa Marina could see
that the Bishop was resisting being told what to do by an Aztec
peasant. Her informants told her this and she had decided she
needed a new plan. That was where Don Pedro came in.

Pedro stamped his feet to keep warm. He had found the villager
the day before, quite by chance. Disguised as a holy man, Pedro
was traversing Tepeyac when Juan Diego came running toward
him, begging him to give his uncle last rites. It occurred to
Pedro that if the goal was to create a new pilgrimage site here,
then what better way than ensure that the gullible Juan Diego
experienced a miracle? Could Pedro pull off healing the uncle?
They walked to the uncles village Tulpetlac, where Pedro
greeted the ailing man, Juan Bernardino, offering him a
hechiceria concoction of brandy and other herbs. It was another
case of typhus no doubt But rather than giving the man his
last rites, Pedro encouraged the family to strip the bed entirely,
explaining that bed lice were the problem. Well, it was a
gamble to be sure, but Pedro had learned over the years that lice
were responsible for most of the worlds woes and he thought it
might work, even if the lice were blameless. The family washed
Juan Bernardino and wrapped him in clean dry blankets and
sealed the roof from the drizzle. Don Pedro declared sternly that
Juan Bernardino would not die this evening and that while only
a miracle could save him, it was still premature to pronounce his
last rites. Pedro had left at that point to meet with Doa Marina.
So here he was now, standing in the rain, wondering if he was
being paid enough for all this. He was dressed now as a Knight
 63

and he was sure he would be quite unrecognizable to the

anguished Juan Diego.

Several hours later the rain had blown away and the sun was out.
It was turning into a beautiful day. As planned, Doa Marina
met up with Pedro and it wasnt long before Pedro saw Juan
Diego making his way across Tepeyac from the north. Was he
trying to avoid the place Dona Marina had appeared before him
on the previous occasions? Pedro had half expected it so he
positioned himself in a spot where he could join paths with the
peasant. After engineering this successfully, they walked
together, and Pedro steered him in the direction of Doa Marina.
On cue, as she had done before, she appeared before them with
the sun behind her, its rays catching the frilled edges of her
robes. As luck would have it, a rainbow formed in the distance.

Juan Diego, you know me well by now. I am Nuestra Senora

de Guadalupe, the Mother of the True God, through whom
everything lives, the Lord of all things, she declared in Nahuatl
to Juan Diego who, by now, was as terrified as on the previous
occasions. This beautiful Madonna-like figure descending
towards him was enveloped in a blaze of light. She continued,
and Pedro admired the smooth delivery even if he had no idea
what she was saying, Listen and let it penetrate your heart, my
son. Am I not your fountain of life? Are you not in the folds of
my mantle? In the crossing of my arms? Do not let the illness
of your uncle worry you because he is not going to die of his
sickness. At this very moment, he is cured. She instructed him
to climb the hill to receive the promised sign -- Castilian roses
growing in the stony soil and she told him to gather them
carefully. When he returned with the roses, she placed them
 64

carefully inside a cloak she was holding. She then folded it and
presented it to him, instructing him not to unfold his new cloak
until he stood before the Bishop.

La Casa Colorada Pedro de Urdemales at Malinches House

Don Pedro de Urdemales was first introduced to Doa Marina in

the great house in Coyoacn some days earlier. She seemed
tired and irritable at first, whisking him off to a quiet room near
the back where a canvas was spread on an easel. She needed to
produce a miracle, she said, and she had hired him for his skills
as a painter. Matienzo, Delgadillo, Nuno de Guzmn and the
others were out of control. Even Corts return the previous
year had not restrained them and the dream she and Corts
shared was dying as the country slipped toward civil war. The
overlords greed had resulted in thousands of Nahuas being sold
into slavery, torture and death for those who resisted, sexual
violence against local girls and excessive taxation for those who
put up with it all. Bishop Zumrraga appeared unwilling to stop
them. To make matters worse, an angel of death was stalking
the land, carrying away thousands more every year with pox and
pestilence. This was not what Doa Marina had in mind during
the initial Conquest and why now she thought a miracle was
required.

Don Pedro was to paint her as the Madonna, she insisted. He

had agreed to this because he fancied his skills as a painter. He
specialized in madonnas, having seen many of the works of the
masters in Italy. Indeed he thought he could improve on Sandro
Botticellis and Raffaello Sanzios The Crowning of the
Virgin and Leonardo da Vincis The Virgin of the Rocks, all
 65

of them far too cluttered, he thought. He favored the clarity of a

single figure in the center of the canvas. He recalled the portrait
of the Florentine woman who had stared back at him in da
Vincis studio: the Holy Mother would not stare back but there
was something in the look he wanted to capture. Pedro thought
to himself, I will paint her in my imagination as I desire
herAnd let the world think what it wants. Doa Marina had
brought him up short by reminding him that it was essential that
he Europeanize her face, for the Bishop would never accept a
painting of our Lady of Guadalupe if she looked like an Indian.
The cactus hemp parchment itself was brown, and that alone
would convey the coded message that this Virgin was a Nahua,
La Virgen Morenita. That appealed to Pedros sense of humor,
of course. He would do as she asked, but in the end he felt it
was the suns rays around the edges that would truly make this
his masterpiece, his signature work.

He wondered if Corts himself was behind this stunt. Was he

somewhere else in the house? Doa Marina was a distinguished
looking woman, even attractive in her own way. She was
clearly accustomed to authority, but she was a native after all.
Could she have come up with such a clever stratagem on her
own? It occurred to Pedro that Corts was from Extremadura
and the original Guadalupe shrine was in Cceres. If Columbus,
Cortes and the Franciscans who went with them worshipped
there before sailing westwards, then it would make sense if the
idea had occurred to Corts, not to Doa Marina. But they had
been together on and off for many years so perhaps she knew
more about Spain than he realized.
 66

While he painted her, she told him the secret Nahua codes. She
told him that the sky blue greenmantle with the stars
emblazoned upon it would symbolize that she was from an
Aztec royal family and that she had great power in this world.
But her hands were to be folded in prayer in keeping with
European traditions and her head would be bowed in reverence
to the God of all things. Her pale dress was the color of the
brown earth of Mexico, stained by the dried blood of its people
sacrificed during its creation. It was, she said, the story of life
through death, of new beginnings, of resurrection. The black
maternity band high around her waist meant she was carrying
the Christ child, a child of the New World, the first mestizo, like
Martin, her son by Corts, born eight years ago. The crescent
moon she stood upon symbolized Tonantzin, the Aztec earth
mother and moon goddess, but the angel supporting her would
provide proof that she was carried here from Heaven.

The painting went quickly, feverishly applied and it was finished

by the early morning hours. Exhausted but satisfied, they both
retired for the night. In the morning as they surveyed the
previous nights work, Doa Marina laid out her plan to create a
new pilgrimage site around this painting. The original plan she
had had was very simple: she hoped to encounter one of the
nave villagers who attended the Spanish church on the Feast of
the Immaculate Conception, December 8. But it had rained that
day and no dupe had come along The next day Juan Diego
had appeared and he was perfect! She had revealed herself and
her wishes for a new church to be built.

The problem was Bishop Zumrraga. After the second visit, he

had ordered several trusted aides to follow Juan Diego secretly,
 67

but they had lost him at a ravine by the hill. Doa Marina also
had spotted the spies and she reasoned she only had one more
opportunity to impress Juan Diego and snare the skeptical
Bishop.

That was where Pedro came in. He was to track the villagers
movements and waylay him on the path over Tepeyac to ensure
he crossed again at the critical spot where Doa Marina could
intercept him and make her final appearance. This is indeed
how it played out.

Pedro had listened to this extraordinary assignment back at the

Casa Colorada. He had heard Doa Marina speak of the magical
power and strength of women and how she favored the Virgin
Mary over Jesus Christ because she was a woman, a lover and a
mother. All along it had appealed to her sense of irony that the
great Aztec empire would be brought down by a woman
herself of course -- but also by her ancestors, by Tonantzin, just
as the great Spanish empire had been humbled by the Virgin
Mary, the Spaniards Achilles heel, for they could not resist her
power upon them. Of this much she was sure and Corts knew
it too. She had seen him take down the Aztec gods and put up
the Holy Virgin and seen the power it exercised over the
conquistadors. Jesus Christ on the other hand seemed to have no
appeal at all, and if her own people associated him with
Quetzalcoatl, then the general consensus was that he was an
alien invader returned from the sea to upset the apple cart. The
old gods were dead but the old goddesses were back, in all their
jangly and jealous rages. As he listened, Pedro kept his opinions
to himself; he was being well paid to do so.
 68

Flash forward many years, back to Old Spain, and Pedro was
present one day as the firebrand clergyman Father Bartolom de
Las Casas confronted an aging Corts about the events
surrounding the miracle of Guadalupe, asking whether he felt
badly about his role as a conquistador and whether he was
behind the whole Virgin thing. Corts brushed it aside of
course, but Pedro thought back to those days back in 1531,
remembering his visit to La Casa Colorada. As he had excused
himself that last time, the shadow of the great man could be seen
down the hallway. That was how Corts would be remembered,
he thought, as a flickering shadow on the wall, no more tangible
than that, just another symbol of the insignificance of human
actions in the greater scheme of things. Hopefully his painting
of Doa Marina would last longer than the memory of Corts

La Casa Blanca - Bernardino de Sahagn in Tlatelolco

In the candlelight, Friar Bernardino de Sahagn sat staring out

the window as shadows danced like devils on the trees outside.
Even here so far from Spain the presence of the Inquisition
made itself felt. It was 1536, Tlatelolco Mexico, in the newly
established Imperial College of Santa Cruz for the academic and
religious training of native youths. Sahagn was proud to be
one of its first teachers.

The conventional wisdom among the Spanish here was that the
Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe was a complete fiction. But what
could they do? The Indians were acting as if it was a miracle
and flocking to convert to Christianity. Should the Church
capitalize on this misunderstanding or was that dishonest? The
Inquisition certainly wouldnt approve. The appearance of Our
 69

Lady of Guadalupe had been to an Indian no less. It was like

Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection rather
than to Saint Peter. What of his own role? Was he a dupe of the
Indians in this matter? Were they all dupes?

The crucial moment had occurred some years earlier: Peter

denied knowing our Lord three times and you have denied the
existence of this miracle twice already. Will you do so a third
time? With these words the dubious character he knew as Don
Pedro de Urdemales had challenged Bishop Zumrraga. The
Bishop rightly had refused to be baited but Pedro had kept up
the pressure and the Church had been forced to concede the
miracle, for like it or not, they had been outmaneuvered. If they
wanted converts, they had to build the small church to
Guadalupe on Tepeyac, which the miracle called for, and this
they had done, in 1533. Now the natives were flocking to it in
such numbers that an expansion was being considered. But
things were not what they seemed to be. He had never felt so
unsure of himself. Were the natives pretending to be Christians?
Was Satan playing a capricious role in all this? Sahagn knew
he was smart but was he as smart as Satan, smart enough to
figure this out as a ruse? Smart enough to thwart it?

Bishop Zumrraga was gone now, back to Spain, and he had

strongly opposed relying on apparitions and miracles to convert
the natives. He had believed instead, as any man of intellect
would, in the superiority of this College, which would prepare
the way for an Indian clergy. But the Guadalupe cult was taking
on a life of its own quite apart from the College. Somebody,
and he had no idea who, had been very clever to identify the
apparition on Tepeyac with Our Lady of Guadalupe. How had
 70

they known to do that? The scheme was so diabolically clever

that he felt sure it had been thought through to its completion.
The fact that the apparition of the Virgin Mary was to a native
man and a simple one at that had made it so much easier for the
miracle to be accepted everywhere. He had gone around in
circles many times thinking about it.

Sahagn had recommended a new strategy to counter the native

Guadalupe, as if she were the Devil himself, and he had received
official approval. He would later write of this moment: It was
necessary to destroy the idolatrous things, and all the idolatrous
buildings, and even the customs of the republic that were
intertwined with idolatrous rites and accompanied by idolatrous
ceremonies The way to do this was to say that it had all been
a misunderstanding: Juan Diego had in fact said the apparition
was of Coatlaxopeuh, not Guadalupe. Because it was
pronounced quatlasupe, this had been misunderstood as
Guadalupe. That was wrong. As a pagan apparition, it had to
be stamped out. The Inquisition was very clear about this. In
April of 1531, it had been behind a decree banning historical
romances and picaresque tales (like Amads de Gaula) from
being brought from Spain to Mexico, in case their profanities
and leaps of imagination encouraged the natives and local
Creoles to engage in fanciful thinking for themselves. But the
decree had not worked for here he was now, embroiled in just
such idolatry.

There had been complications as well Perhaps not at first.

Everyone had agreed that Coatlaxopeuh was translated as
crushing the serpent, which confirmed for them how Corts
had crushed Quetzalcoatl, the Aztecs plumed serpent god. It
 71

also recalled how God could crush Eves serpent. But Pedro de
Urdemales had pointed out that the white-bearded Corts had
also been associated with Quetzalcoatl. So did that mean that
Corts was the one being crushed? Everyone had laughed at the
joke for it was true that Corts was now a man of the past. But
who had crushed him? Who, Pedro asked, if not the Virgin of
Guadalupe? Sahagns head began to spin all over again. He
should have realized the natives would misunderstand, but he
hadnt counted on Pedro de Urdemales. No doubt the natives
were secretly praying to their old mother goddesses of the moon,
Tonantzin and Coatlicue, not the Virgin. What a mess! The
Inquisition was asking more and more questions -- about the
painting, about Pedro de Urdemales, about native traditions
and he was supposed to come up with a solution? There was
none to be found.

La Casa Azul Frida Kahlo as Guadalupe

The house known as La Casa Azul is on Allende Street in

Coyoacn (Place of the Coyotes in Nahuatl), in the southern
suburbs of Mexico City. It was built by Frida Kahlos father in
1904 and it is a museum to her work nowadays, much visited by
her pilgrims. It also can be seen in her painting of 1936, My
Grandparents, My Parents and I.

It is a short walk from there to 57 Higuera Street, Malinches

house, nicknamed here La Casa Rojo rather than La Conchita.
But there is no sign to tell you Malinche and Corts once lived
there this is one tourist attraction that Mexico is not proud of.
The house has been restored and remodeled several times since
 72

the 1520s but locals believe some ghosts are better left
undisturbed. Malinches ghost is still strong here.

The ghost of Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderon de

Rivera hovers here too and stronger too than at La Casa Azul
which, like all museums, is barren of ghosts! Outside the house
there is a bronze statue of Kahlo and there are family
associations that go way back. Jose Vasconcelos, that
fascinating Mexican philosopher and educator, bought the house
in the 30s while he was in exile and he rented it out to (among
others) Lupe Rivera Marin, Diego Riveras daughter. Still
living there now are Rina Lazo who was Riveras assistant for
10 years and her husband, Arturo Garcia Bustos, who was a
member of the illustrious Los Fridos, Kahlos disciples.

Kahlos ghost still excites the same extremes of emotion today

that Malinches ghost once did, just as Riveras Rockefeller
Building mural did in its day Those emotions reconverged
with the release of the movie by Salma Hayek and Julie Taymor
in 2002 as some reviewers rushed to condemn the film for not
sufficiently emphasizing Kahlos pain, which only goes to prove
that Anglo critics too believe in La Llorona. Thats the current
dogma in art circles too stigmatize Frida as penitente sect
member, as La Doa Sebastiana, crucified by her early collision
with the street-car -- the paintings of grief and sorrow, like The
Two Fridas. Art critics and film critics join Mexican critics in
denouncing Kahlo as a crippled bisexual Communist or a
Stalinist feminist heroine, where the sneering is surprisingly
nasty. They are as tone deaf as the ideologies they accuse her
of. They rob her of her active resentment and fierce creativity
 73

and they render her into a passive victim, as if she were

imprisoned inside one of her paintings.

No doubt this is partly to compensate for the idolizing of her

fans, for Kahlo has so many! But it is Kahlos support for
Communism and Stalin that inspires the harshest barbs.
Ideologies promoting revolutionary struggle have long seduced
Latin American artists and intellectuals, but Latin American
realities almost have demanded this response as an ethical
alternative to the abuses of power by the Right. Kahlo, like
Rivera to a lesser degree, was an idealist and a Mexican
nationalist before she was a Communist. She saw the inequities
in society, both at home and abroad. Indeed her last public
appearance with Rivera was at a demonstration protesting the
C.I.A.s ouster of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz
Guzmn.

Kahlo and Rivera also saw the hypocrisies and self-indulgences

of the Party, which is why they were kicked out -- they were
simply terrible Party members. Like all great artists and this is
especially true of Kahlo -- it was always more personal than that
and her paintings say so. She used Communism (and paintings
of Stalin) for tweaking the noses of the rich just as she wore her
tehuana costumes to startle their eyes. Did she know inside that
Stalin and the Party had as much blood on their hands as the
Capitalists and the Fascists? There was no doubt some denial
going on, especially after Stalin brought personal destruction
down upon them with the assassination of Trotsky. But after
Kahlos death in 1954 and Riveras in 1957, the right wing
forces in Mexico proved they could be as brutal as Stalin,
reaching their historic low at Tlatelolco in 1968.
 74

Back at La Casa Azul, Kahlo was also very much aware of The
Most Holy Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Queen of
Mexico and Empress of the Americas. Not in a conventional
religious sense of course for, like Rivera, Kahlo did not believe
particularly in a Catholic God. But she drew on the religious
iconography of the country and she respected Guadalupes
revolutionary importance, her standing for the oppressed, her
symbolizing hope and unity. In her own struggle for integration
and harmony, the countrys preeminent symbol of virginity and
purity had a powerful appeal for her.

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego,

Me and Senor Xolotl (view), which Kahlo painted in 1949 is her
finest painting. A beautiful and haunting Madonna image, it
shows her in the love embrace of an earth mother whom
observers usually identify with Coatlicue or Tonantzin
(Mexico), protecting and nourishing her, held within the wider
embrace of the universe. I have always been tempted to view
the central figure holding Frida as Malinche and the masked
androgynous figure in the background as Coatlicue or
Tonantzin. Frida is holding a baby Diego Rivera, but for all his
all-seeing eye, Frida is the center -- this is the center of the
universe as she sees it, as indeed we are all at its center,
wherever we are, and she is humbled by this, just like the
pregnant Guadalupe is humble in her painting. Compare this
with the cocky Quetzalcoatl, with D.H. Lawrence and his
plumed serpent and with the pessimism of Paz and Fuentes.
There is no Quetzalcoatl here, no male deities in transcendence
or falling to the earth. This is a painting of female power and
coming to terms with life and motherhood:
 75

Frida/Malinche/Tonantzin is the earth and the moon, fertility

and childbirth, the cycle of birth to death and Diego is her child.
This painting unifies the conflicts of her life, it celebrates
oneness with the universe, the idea that the dueling pieces are
really in synch by being part of the same whole. It is Frida as
Guadalupe.

05 The Age of Consent

Adam and Eve and the Forbidden Fruit
Adams Diary: on Dantes Inferno and Miltons Paradise Lost
The Serpents Diary: on Edgar Allan Poes The Fall of the
House of Usher
Satans Diary: on Nabokovs Lolita
Eves Diary: on Dylan Thomas
God's Diary: on why He is not The Great Dictator
Once upon a time gods came down from heaven to the earth in
search of sex with young women. We have no reason to
disbelieve this since the Greek myths confirm that Eden after the
Fall was a place of impatient gods and voluptuous young
women. It was Mark Twain who wrote: The sweeter sex, the
dearer sex, the lovelier sex was manifestly at its best, then, for it
was even able to attract gods. Real gods. They came down out
of heaven and had wonderful times with those hot young
blossoms. The Bible tells about it. It does indeed, in Genesis
6.

But as we know, God had second thoughts. While Zeus

cavorted with Europa (and lets not forget Ganymede) and
Poseidon had dozens of consorts (including Pelops), and the
goddesses were not left out (Aphrodite especially), God decided,
 76

I will wipe out from the earth the men whom I have
createdfor I am sorry that I made them.

The Fall, it turns out, was all a big disappointment, not only
because Eve gave Adam the apple but also because of what their
descendents got up to afterwards in Eden.

They were only following Gods instructions to Be fruitful and

multiply (Genesis 1), which they did of course, but they
brought the Flood down upon themselves (Genesis 6-8),
followed in short order by the destruction of the Tower of Babel
(Genesis 11) and Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19). As Twain
put it, Adam and Eve now knew what evil was, and how to do
it and God was angry.

Genesis, in other words, is a sexual fable about the Age of

Consent Gods consent allowing humans to have sex a
consent that evidently was withdrawn before being reinstated
with Abraham. So saucy questions push themselves forward:
were Adam and Eve supposed to know what they were doing?
Before the snake arrived, clearly they didnt. Were they
supposed to see sex simply as a duty and not enjoy it? We know
they did. Did God simply abandon humans after giving his
blessing to Abraham and leave them to sort it all out? We have
been dealing with this mess ever since.

For traditionalists, the Bible says that sex should wait for
marriage, but the textual evidence says otherwise. As Twain
well knows, Genesis is wildly provocative, full of tales of
drunken nakedness, incest and polygamy, which is why it has
been debauched enthusiastically by many other books ever
 77

since, a measure of its stature perhaps, from the Book of Enoch

to Paradise Lost to Twains Letters from the Earth and so on.
We long have been told that sex is all about Sin and humans
have had to make the best of it, arguing over the appropriate age
to indulge in it. But if the age of sexual activity keeps getting
younger and the legal Age of Consent keeps going up, isnt there
a new fissure here, a new Abyss, where more and more people
are falling into Sin?

ADAM'S DIARY: ON DANTES INFERNO

AND MILTON'S PARADISE LOST

Tuesday

I received a message from Satan today. The snake dropped it

off. Said that now Im 16 he wanted me to hear his side of the
story. After all this time? In the message Satan claimed he
never actually did anything with me back in the Garden.
Claimed he was never there, officially speaking, no matter what
Milton had to say about it, and he wanted me to read Philip
Pullmans His Dark Materials. Said it presented a fair and
accurate picture of what had happened. I doubt it. I have been
reading Dantes Inferno, which is where I think he belongs, in
the 9th circle of Hell.

The snake, of course, has its own ideas. It proceeded to tell me

that Satan had molested me in the past, but none of it technically
was illegal, and even if God had tried hard to come up with
something that would stick, the fact was that he hadnt
succeeded. So, the snake wanted to know, if it wasnt illegal,
why had God gone from Genesis to Apocalypse? Even now He
 78

was planning The End of the World! A flood was coming, the
snake said, and we would all be drowned. The world would be
washed clean of the filth introduced by all these earlier chapters
and He would start a new chapter. What, the snake wanted to
know, had we done that was so terrible that we all had to die?
Clearly the snake was trying to get on my good side. It must
have heard about what Noah is up to and burnt its bridges with
Satan. It also said Milton was right and it blamed Eve for
everything that had happened back in the Garden. It also
dropped hints about what Satan was interested in doing with
baby Cain. Was this what it was all about? Satan as every
parents worst nightmare, a monster, because now he wants to
molest our infant children? We get blamed for bad parenting
and our world is destroyed?

Wednesday

I have been trying to find out what it is that Michael Jackson did
that was wrong. Dont get me wrong, I think whatever he did or
didn't do, it was wrong, but the angels cant tell me why exactly.
They have been speculating about a hierarchy of evils:

Was it because he was an adult sexually preying on a teen?

Was it because he was an adult in a position of power sexually
preying on a teen?
Was it because the teens might be below the current Age of
Consent?
Was it because the sex was homosexual?
Was it because he always denied his feelings and he proved
himself either naif or a hypocrite?
 79

The strange thing is, the angels clearly are having sex among
themselves yet they cannot tell me which of these crimes is the
worst?

Thursday night

A dream-crossed twilight in the Garden of Good and Evil I

had a dream once, or maybe it was many nights and one dream?
Ghastly figures shimmered in my room and I was unable to
shake them off. I grew alarmed as they simply stayed there, out
of reach. After a time I found I had crossed through the mirror
after them for dreams dont answer to the rules of time and
space and now I was in the air, looking back at myself. In this
mirror world I found many beds alongside mine, all seemingly
identical, stretching in every direction, where dreamers like
myself were locked in their own galaxies, universes, vortexes.
At some deeper level I knew the sleepers would be there till the
End of the World and that I, Adam, was not the first one there.
These were not reflections of my own image, for I could see
dark hooded shapes hovering over different beds, bees to their
nectar, whispering. Many were down low on the sleeping
figures

This is how I met Lilith, my night visitor, my vampire. Lilith of

the long hair and lips like sugar. At night he would come with
the others and whisper to me. Only once was the dream sexual,
my sex was transformed into a ghoul that floated off somewhere
to hover over another bed, out of my sight. If the hooded shapes
were ghouls, then they were angels too. Then Eve arrived
ashore from dangerous seas and I never had that dream again.
 80

Friday

In a way, the Michael Jackson scandals or Miltons whipping

at Christs College for that matter was about all of the evils the
angels came up with. The angels say that adults (like
themselves) should not prey on teenagers (like me), yet they say
they need to protect us from other adults. So that means they
want to protect us from themselves because they cannot trust
themselves?

It is a vicious circle. The angels talk about our Original Sin,

but they seem to be talking about their own. They talk about
punishing each other and banishing the evil-doers, in the same
way we were banished from the Garden by God. They warn us
about identity theft and they offer free fingerprinting, but what
use is that if they are the guilty ones?

Saturday

Eve and I leave today to visit Noah to see how he is getting on

with the Ark. God seems to be determined to scare us all to
death with this talk of the End of the World as we know it. I am
afraid of losing what little we have. After we were cast out of
the Garden, Eve and I had to start all over again; Descend, so
that you may ascend, the angels mocked. But, having lost
everything themselves, you would think they would be more
understanding. Satan calls me a petit bourgeois. Sometimes
he sounds like God.

Sunday
 81

Eve and I stumbled through Dantes dark woods before we

understood evil. The snake it was who argued that while sex is
fun, it would be more fun if we tried it with somebody else. He
whispered in our ears that God keeps referring to sex as the
forbidden fruit, since apparently sex reminds Him of fruit. The
snake argued that once you have tried one fruit, well, you want
to try another and that leads to, well, too much fruit. Neither of
us was interested in having sex with male angels, but eventually
one of them got to Eve and raped her Miltons key insight in
Paradise Lost in my opinion and the Naked limbs and
showred roses became the pornography of his day. We hid
ourselves away but God felt we had betrayed him and we felt he
had betrayed us. The snake was right: a secret is like
pornography. Now it is all out in the open. It is better, I think,
that we know about peoples secret identities. We need to know
about the secrets in the closet, however disgusting they are. In
retrospect, Eve and I started too young and had children before
we were ready. If we had known what sex was all about, we
would not have felt compelled to try it so early. I think the Age
of Consent should be 17 or 18, but with a Romeo clause.

THE SERPENT'S DIARY: ON EDGAR ALLAN POE'S THE

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
Monday

Why in all the scholarly accounts of Genesis do they never

mention sex? Its all about fruit! Obviously the Tree of Life
was a metaphor for sex and the creation of life, not just
knowledge. But knowledge about what? Sex of course.
 82

There is something else to sort out. In Genesis there was no

Fall. Not in the Torah, not in the Old Testament, not in the
Quran. So whose idea was this anyway? Why do humans
insist on there being a Fall at all? If there was a Fall, from
where to where? Humans started in the dirt and they return to
the dirt. Now, as we all know, Moses didnt really write
Genesis, but few people know that it was actually a pair of
angels, J and P, who did write it, although Satan chipped in a bit
too, and this is really their story. As they reflected on their own
sad fall from the Heavens to the Earth, they projected it onto
humans, blaming God for it. Isnt everything autobiographical,
in the end? This is why the angels pretended that the fruit was
forbidden, so that they could write a tale about disobedience and
punishment, their own disobedience of course, and their own
sense of being martyrs. But, jealous hypocrites that they were,
they kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden and said God did
it.

The humans went one better. After they learnt to believe that
they had fallen out of the Garden, they added Original Sin.
This surely has something to do with that human tendency to
imagine the worst of ones fellow human beings, the human
thirst for self-torture, Poe called it. On top of that, Saint Paul
and Saint Augustine wanted to justify their own importance in
life, whereby the church would save the sinners through
delivering the grace of God. I am sure God thought this was a
terrible idea, though He never said so. But they thought they
could improve on the original story, which is why Saint Paul and
Saint Augustine invented sin, which they linked to death, to get
everyones mind off the sex. But the only sins the saints were
worried about were their own, which they were desperately
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trying to exaggerate, so that they could brush aside the

disappointment of their own rotten sex lives and their fear of
death.

These angels, J and P, werent the brightest stars in the sky

given all the repetitions and contradictions. Who but the angels
would have attempted to pin the blame on God for the generally
disappointing way human beings had turned out and for the
Flood that wiped out most of the Nephilim? Who but the angels
would have referred to themselves as the heroes of old, the men
of renown? Who but the angels would have been so
patronizing toward Eve (He, Adam, shall be your master)?
Who but the angels would have resented humans gaining so
much power (Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know
good and evil.)? Who but the angels would have written
Genesis as if God were cursing humans for the disastrous way
events unfolded? And who but the angels would have pinned
the blame on me, a humble serpent?

The fact is that there was no sex in the Scented Garden at all
when I got there. I introduced the young couple to it, for that
was what God intended. The real Original Sin, if we have to
have one, was that the angels made sex evil and the saints kept
the myth going.

Tuesday

Edgar Allan Poe was a latter-day fallen angel and he understood

this. It is why he knew to accuse the other angels of the death of
Annabel Lee. Critics always have struggled with Poe the angel,
perhaps more than any other American writer, as Jacob does in
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Genesis 32, for they seem to misunderstand the religious

dimension. Poe lived his life in the shadows between worlds, a
visionary scientist on the one hand who was fascinated by
astronomy -- The plots of God are perfect. The universe is a
plot of God he wrote in his masterpiece Eureka (1848) -- and a
magician and conjurer of illusions on the other, where walls
came tumbling down, the raven flew out and was unable to find
land and instead croaked Nevermore, and where we find
ourselves in the dirt and the dust again, as Poe did. There is
humor too, for what else is The Fall of the House of Usher
(1839) but a comical satire on the religious pretensions of
humans, from Dante and Milton to the American brand of
Transcendentalism? The Fall of the House of Usher is a story
about an insane Jesus and the Magdalene (Madeline) and the
scene at the Tomb and it is a story about the Revelation of the
Apocalypse, but it is most amusing as a story about an undying
Adam and Eve, isolated and alone in their enormous mansion, a
ruined paradise immediately before the Fall, where God has
abandoned them to their own incestuous and demonic delusions.
I believe it was Echo and the Bunnymen who captured this best
with Bring on the dancing horses, headless and all alone

Wednesday

So what do I have to say about the Age of Consent? Poe

married Virginia Clemm, his cousin, when she was 13 and he
was 27. What does age matter really? The Virgin Mary was
only 13 when she conceived Jesus. Charlie Chaplin was
sleeping with (Lo) Lita Grey when she was 16 and Oona ONeill
when she was 17. Many of the young women (and boys) in
Renaissance art were under todays Age of Consent, as were
 85

Adam and Eve and most of todays teenagers. Sex is wasted on

most humans over the age of 40 anyway.

Thursday

Lilith was right about Adam all along: men, whether they were
gods or humans, really were and are beasts. Feminist art history
tells all about it. What is to be done? Are we any the wiser for
knowing that men are beasts? Do we like the fact that they are
beasts? Can they all be put in prison perhaps? Theoretically it
may be within reach. Approximately 1 in 32 Americans is now
in prison or on parole, so if the definitions of sexual abuse can
be widened still further, perhaps by raising the Age of Consent
to be the same as the Legal Drinking Age, this speedily will
bring up the number of male sex offenders. Or humans could
just ban Sex altogether Just Say No To It before it destroys
Western civilization. This puts it nicely in line with the official
government policy of sexual abstinence, for if all the men are in
prison, naturally abstinence will be the rule, except in prison
perhaps. But are the women really so different from the men --
are congresswomen and female teachers just as likely to be
sending erotic IMs to their male and female pages and students?
I dont know the answer to that but I do know a lot of men who
wanted to be in that blonde Florida teachers class. I say raise
the human Age of Consent to 21 or ban sex altogether.

SATAN'S DIARY: ON NABOKOVS LOLITA

Saturday
 86

The Cherubim are nowhere to be seen. How typical. Is it

Shabat? I have been thinking about Eve all day and my flaming
sword is erect.

The earths best kept secret, which I plan to share with you, is
that men, throughout their adult life, are most physically
attracted to nymphets around the Age of Consent. For all those
myths about True Love and fidelity in marriage, and gaining in
wisdom and maturity, the fact is that adult men have always
secretly hungered for sweet 16-year-old girls, or, if they are gay,
for sweet 16-year-old boys. The age does not have to be exact,
of course, and there are always the exceptions the aesthete (the
liar), the perverse (the selfish), the neutered (the confused) and
the dead (the dead). But your average healthy adult male of the
human species still wants his Eve, or his Adam.

This news is not received well by adult women who, quite

naturally, are skeptical that such a thing could be true. From
their TV and tabloid viewing they know that married men
divorce them for younger women and that men seem to be
genetically more predisposed to have affairs, whether it is true
or not. But adult women also cannot bring themselves to be so
cynical about their men that they could even entertain the idea
that mens sexual desires are constantly and biologically fixed
upon 16-year-olds, give or take a year or two or three. They will
never get a straight answer out of their men on this subject.
Only the brave ones or the fools -- would ever confess.

Or they could put it into literature. This is the ironic truth of that
fine book, Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita. Conservatives think of
Lolita as pornography. Yet strange things happen when you
 87

read the literary critics for they never respond directly to the
conservatives charges. Why is it pornography? You need to
ask? Nabokov writes about pedophilia because he felt those
sexual desires toward teenage girls himself. Takes one to know
one and all that Of course pedophilia is one of those demonic
sexually predatory words that eliminates everything in its path,
so the smarter critics avoid it, but they use code words like
iniquity and perversion and even crime and then wander
off up the garden path to talk about language games and
solipsism. The ones who do mention pedophilia also rush
directly off stage to change the subject Lolita reflects darkly,
in a crooked enough mirror, the artistic desires of his creator
(says one). OK. But thats it? None of Nabokovs defenders
get past that to discuss Nabokovs own desires, physical as
much as artistic, other than ascribing it to his characters quest
for aesthetic bliss. Why? Did Lolita spring from his mind
like Athena from Zeus brow? If Nabokov was a happily
married man did he never feel those urges, or when he wrote
Lolita was he too old to feel such desires with intensity and that
made it ok, or was it because great writers are not supposed to
feel such embarrassing urges at all? Or was it perhaps because
critics cannot admit the obvious because it is self-incriminating:
for men are attracted to perilous nymphets, and they are
attractive indeed. Nabokov understood this because he was an
honest man. This is the real message and the real genius of Lo-
lo-lo-lee-ta For Lolita is about sex and sex keeps you alive
VV knew this; Vra knew this. Play great Russian music very
loudly here

Nabokovs own words in 1956 (his Afterword to Lolita) are

more revealing than his critics 40 and 50 years later. Sexual
 88

innuendo hangs in the air with words like throbbing and

rising, the hilarious discussion of what pornography is, and
lines like But after all we are not children. One critic came
close with his muttered verdict of Lolita: Old Europe
debauching young America meaning Nabokov is debauching
his prissy Freudian biographers and critics and it is funny as
well as true.

The crime Humbert Humbert apparently has committed

against Lolita is to deprive her of a childhood and her
freedom, leaving her with the shrunken expectations of a
life unfulfilled. And this in an age of floods, holocausts,
famines, wars, refugees forgive me for thinking this is
misplaced sentimentality. It buys into HHs own shrunken
expectations, his own lost childhood, his own lack of freedom,
his own Romantic calling as a self-described monster. If the
shoe fits

Nabokov places Lolita in a hilarious moralistic framework that

mocks literary critics, for they are moralizers too, both the attack
dogs who criticize him for pedophiliac porn and the lap dogs
who say Look, all the characters die. Nabokov mocks
conservatives by committing the unpardonable sin of talking
loudly about the forbidden and enjoying himself while doing it.
He mocks his academic fans by presenting them with a double
bind, like the old have you stopped beating your wife yet?
First, he invites the reader to participate in erotic sex between an
adult and a 12-year-old, reminding them all the time that its
wrong, and teases them on their hypocrisy for enjoying it. For
critics its supposedly excruciating not only do they feel
obligated to hate the sex, they also have to worry about
 89

Nabokovs own moral hygiene as well as their own Their

guilt is misplaced; their attitude hypocritical. Why is it wrong
for a writer to experience such desires? Why is it wrong for
them to experience such desires? Nabokov ratchets up the
pressure by making Lolita only 12, just out of reach, hovering
far below the Age of Consent, but there is nothing wrong with
that. Felix culpa.

The only thing that is wrong is that academic writing has

banished sex. Instead we get Love just the authoritarian idea
that one must love only God or ones spouse or ones soul-mate
and nobody else. The criticism is implied, of course: Don Juan
and Casanova are of the Devils party, unsatisfactory, selfish,
abusive and I take that personally! But why romanticize Love
with one person when others would do just as well? Arent all
lovers interchangeable really? HH pretends, at the end, that he
is sincere in his love for Lolita, but he is lying. He knows that
other lovers were possible. Lolita was interchangeable with
other nymphets. Thats life. But literary critics either believe
HH at the end or they sound just like him, writing primly about
Lolitas fate, as though the Age of Consent or losing your
virginity or having an affair is a Rubicon after which life will
never (NEVER!!!) be the same again. Makes you wonder what
happened at their own deflowering? Must have been a disaster.
Fleurs du mal! Why should anyone be destroyed once theyve
crossed over? Do humans have to become aliens to their past
lives? Annabel Lee in the tomb? Perhaps they have in
unintended ways while teenagers do not understand adults, the
reverse is truer still, for adults certainly do not understand
teenagers. Im hating all the faking and shaking while Im
breaking your brittle heart
 90

All things being said, I have succeeded in my lifes work. There

are Heavnly breasts everywhere and Lolitas have become the
creative engines of Western culture. Its not the gadget
technocrats or those maudlin mandarins of the media. Teenage
girls circulate sex in an eternal gyration around the triple
polarities of Puberty, The Age of Consent and Motherhood.
Their obsessions sometimes turn to revenge, rancor, retaliation,
cruelty, indifference but why not? It leaves parents breathless
though, unfortunately, not lost for words, for they redouble their
efforts to exercise control to play God. Having been God the
Creator at their childrens birth, they are reluctant to give up the
role. As William Blake said, Those who restrain desire, do so
because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. I say abolish
the Age of Consent altogether.

EVE'S DIARY: ON DYLAN THOMAS

Sunday

Being a teenager is about keeping secrets from parents. Secrets

are little betrayals but we see them as necessary evils. We have
a Dont ask, dont tell policy.

I am talking about sex, of course, and keeping it a secret from

God, since we have no other parents to speak of. We keep sex a
secret because He has never understood that meaningless sex is
wonderful. In His Creation, everything is supposed to be
meaningful. True, Im not sure that sex is really meaningless,
because now I have two children. But I still consider myself a
kid I am 15 and meaningful sex sounds like no fun at all.
 91

God wants us to raise the Age of Consent until we take it more

seriously, to punish us, I think, but He has forgotten what its
like. He resents the fact that sex is so much fun that we forget
all about Him. He thinks sex should only be for parents. But
Adam and I were enjoying it long before the snake arrived to tell
us we were expecting a child.

I say this because the snake caught up with me again today. It

wants me to confess that I slept with Satan and that Cain is
Satans child. Some things should remain secret, whether they
happened or not and, like I said, Im not telling.

This obviously is why Dante makes a point of ignoring me in

Canto IV, while saving everybody else. As for Milton, he
knows what happened. He is that rare poet who understands that
adults who are sexy and seductive like Satan are by far the
best able to communicate with others, to empathize, to insinuate,
to excite and to seduce. Just look at you with burning lips/
Youre living proof at my fingertips Milton equates this with
evil. This is the forbidden knowledge, the dangerous gift that he
wrestled with in Paradise Lost as his eyesight failed. Perhaps he
was envious? But he understood the old and secret wisdom and
most adults do not. They do not notice the sexual energies
blowing around and through us and they do not understand the
potential for evil that is in all of us.

If seeing evil is one thing, defeating it is another. Adults have no

faith in kids. They dont understand or respect kids ability to
reshape reality imaginatively, to develop spiritual armor for
themselves. You can see this from the way adults interact with
kids -- ALL kids and not just their own because they have
 92

forgotten their own childhood, a frontier they cannot cross back

over. But kids only need the encouragement to believe in
themselves. Christ said Whosoever therefore shall humble
himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of
heaven. And Dylan Thomas said: Before the children green and
golden/Follow him out of grace... Wake to the farm forever fled
from the childless land./Oh as I was young and easy in the
mercy of his means,/Time held me green and dying/Though I
sang in my chains like the sea...

Monday

Exile from the Garden sings in our memory and memory is the
gift of salvation.

Tuesday

So what then of the snake? He talks about Edgar Allan Poe and
The Fall of the Louse of Usher, but he wants to say that Adam
and I have an incestuous relationship since I was supposedly
created from Adams rib. The snake has it all wrong of course.
Look at the unnamed fool telling the story. If there was an
original Fall, then feeling guilty about it is a waste of time. We
are all fallen angels... Whats done is done and we will do better.
But this is also why the Age of Consent should be lowered to
match the Age of Puberty so that we are not criminals. This
assumes, of course, that sexual knowledge is not forbidden!

Wednesday
 93

Adam and I left the Garden for good reason. When we were
inside we were frightened by the whispering, threats muttered
about Satan terrorizing us, taking advantage of us, abusing our
trust, and we raised the walls around the Garden higher, but evil
was already inside. We became lonely and we turned on each
other. Only later did we realize the angels were doing most of
the whispering and that everything inside had become sterile,
dead, and so we fled. We fled for the world of real life and
death, we needed the cockleshelled paths of that applepie
kitchen garden, ducking under the gippos clothes-pegs,
catching an apron on the blackcurrant bushes, the beanrows and
onion-bed and tomatoes ripening on the wall

Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall

GOD'S DIARY: ON WHY HE IS NOT THE GREAT

DICTATOR

God always gets the Last Word. First off, I am not responsible
for the Book of Genesis and I am not interested in World
Domination.

I am responsible for the Garden of Eden or, more precisely, the

original Garden, not the version in Genesis. The original
Garden -- in the beginning -- was rooted in one place. It was to
ensure the genesis of all seeds and plants, animals and insects,
and their exodus into the world. Genesis is my story of
evolutionary biology, from the original seed creation in the
Garden and its dispersal, and by and large the human writers got
that part right. Once the humans put down roots themselves,
and agriculture and cities developed, they erected monuments in
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my honor, but fewer and fewer wondered whether I was being

fair to the other species, and whether the bounty of the garden
should be shared, for the humans began to think it was all about
them.

Once catastrophe struck, as it always does, it seemed to the

humans that I had moved their precious Garden somewhere
else. Later interpreters of Genesis, rightly obsessed about
human arrogance and human sin, dressed it up in the trappings
of the Fall, for fall they had to barbarian invaders as
empires collapsed into anarchy, buildings fell into ruins and
humans fell into exile in Babylon, in Egypt, in Jerusalem, in
Rome. After that, they realized that I do indeed move the
garden around and they longed to find it again. Nostalgic for a
lost Golden Age, they named their new farms, cities and empires
Eden, Zion, the New Jerusalem, Gods Own Country and after a
time, they forgot what any of this meant. Eden became
confused with the garden itself and genesis was moved to the
laboratory

Last century I placed the garden in England, in Sissinghurst, and

for a time before that at Niagara Falls and in Independence
Missouri, at Woodstock, near Oxford in England, rural France,
coastal Italy, the countryside around Vienna, on Mount Zion in
Jerusalem, and an island in the Mediterranean. Eden at the
moment is the United States and the secret garden is in Los
Angeles, California for the simple reason that I love the classic
comedies, especially Charlie Chaplins The Great Dictator.
Adored the scene where Adenoid Hynkel dances with an
inflatable globe of the world. If the world is a ball/A ball in a
 95

game/With no rules at all./And just as I wonder at the beauty of

it all/You go and drop it/And it breaks when it falls

The Americans drove Chaplin out in the 50s and now they talk
about putting up more walls Once walls go up, I move Eden
and the garden inside it, leaving only dust. Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Washington
Unreal.

It is human nature to want to own Eden, to put up barriers

against others who want to see inside it, to put up signs saying
Private Property: Keep Out! No Trespassers. This ruins the
essence of what is in the garden in the first place: a place for
genesis and dispersal. They have built gardens to honor the
original lost garden but these gardens are sterile monuments to
human vanity -- Versailles, Hyde Park, Central Park, Zen
gardens they are all the same they have walls around them
too, visible and invisible, to keep in whats in and to keep out
whats out, a fake order upon the chaos.

This human preoccupation of building up walls and tearing them

down again came to mind recently with the latest sexual abuse
scandals in Eden. Sexual abuse is a violation, a rape, an assault,
a smashing of the garden walls, with child marriage being
particularly awful, yet the walls were built there long before, by
the fears and frenzies of the childrens parents, and the other
overactive guardians with their flaming swords. For many
artists and writers, against the backdrop of global war and
pestilence, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, their solution has been
restoring the walls. They are the gardeners, like Eve, the
utopians: Dante and perhaps Milton and Blake, C.S. Lewis and
 96

his Narnia, Tolkien and his Middle Earth, T.S. Eliots Little
Gidding and Disney castles in the forest. Their stories of lost
innocence and the fall from grace are about human dreams of
redemption and returning to The Promised Land. Maybe...

Then there are the agnostics and the atheists. Apparently walls
mean nothing to them, especially once the walls have been torn
down, and they would have flown over them anyway. They
have always wanted to eat Augustines pears or Moses figs or
Mohammeds bananas or the Hindus rose-apples or the
immortal Chinese peaches or whatever they thought they would
find in there because, well, again like Eve, they just wanted to
eat them. That means Poe, Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Dylan
Thomas and Nabokov to name but five so far. Let me add that
beautiful and ineffectual angel Shelley. For all of them the
falling towers were about Shelley's Ozymandias, about Empires
Decline and Fall and they were happy among the ruins. But
their careers involved exile, depression, alcohol and drug
addiction, drowning, sensational court cases, psychiatric
hospitals, family members who died young in the fire-bombings
of WWII or the Holocaust...

Even though I cannot agree with them, I have a soft spot for
them because at least they have a sense of mischief! They can
believe in everything and anything if they want to, even me.
Their lives are about secrets and risk passion and desire lived
in its cracks and on the wing. Their lives (and their art) are a
mockery of living life defined by invisible walls and they have
never taken redemption too seriously.
 97

Living life in fear only produces more regulations, and

regulations repress desire and produce banality, and in the end
that produces, inevitably, rebellion and more risk and more
secrets and the closets burst open again

Genesis is a sexual fable of the child becoming an adult and the

adult losing the sense of what it means to be a child. That is the
real Fall Exiles and artists, travelers and tramps have
understood this because they have known all the props kicked
away. Things did not work out so well for Poe and Dylan
Thomas, but Twain did all right. Chaplin went back to Europe
in 1952 to Vevey, Switzerland when the U.S. revoked his visa.
The nymphs are departed By the waters of Leman I sat down
and wept. Nabokov went to live in Montreux in 1960, just along
the lake from Chaplin. They would die within five months of
each other in 1977, gods returning home after visiting the earth,
the devils playground, Eden, America.

06 Homers Women
Why did it take Odysseus 19 Years to Get Home from Troy?
Odysseus
Calypso
Circe
Nausicaa
Penelope
The Passion of the Christ
ODYSSEUS
Once upon a time, in the middle of nowhere, a middle-aged man
washed ashore on a lonely island. Almost 19 years earlier, he
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had set out from his home to fight at Troy. But Troy fell 10
years ago and now nine more have elapsed and still Odysseus
hasnt reached his home on Ithaka, his wife Penelope and his
son Telemachus.

The journey from Troy would normally take three weeks in

good sailing weather, across the Aegean Sea, around Cape
Malea and up the Ionian coastline to Ithaka. But Odysseus has
angered Poseidon and the sea-god has killed off his men,
banished him to his fate as an eternal wanderer, a refugee, an
exile, never quite home. In many ways he is a modern figure,
who appeals to 21st century daydreamers in much the same way
he did more than two and a half thousand years ago when
storytellers recited the Odyssey from memory.

Aquarius Lu-the-
Wanderer

Odysseus is a symbol for the earths peoples who have been

scattered across its seas in an earthly version of the Big Bang.
We live now in an age when the old gods from the ancient times
have been toppled Poseidon is dead -- and now man hopes,
fears he has become god. Yet the Odyssey is modern in quite
another sense: isnt it fair for the modern reader to ask whether
Odysseus also prolonged the journey for his own reasons? The
women he met along the way, perhaps?

CALYPSO

The ancient gods were afraid of Calypso, of what she would do

if mortals started drifting ashore on her island of Ogygia. Most
 99

men, upon encountering her, would never return to their wives.

Once word got out, other men would be abandoning their wives
and going in search of perfect women and who knows where
that would end?

Only one man was ever washed ashore though, and when he
was, Odysseus was impressed. Homer writes that Calypso was
a nymph, immortal and most beautiful, who craved Odysseus
for her own. She must have been an appealing sight for a man
in middle age. She did not wear on his nerves as the witch Circe
had done the year before. She did not grow and change and
mature as the young princess Nausicaa would do. She would
not judge him or seek to control him in the way his wife
Penelope would do. Was she the perfect mate? Does a wise
man really seek the perfect woman and if he does, is he wise to?
Do only fools believe in perfect soul-mates?

But seven years have passed on Calypsos island and he is

marooned. One day, with Poseidon away from Olympus in
distant Ethiopia, the goddess Athena, Odysseus protector,
quickly petitioned Zeus and the other gods to rescue Odysseus
from the grasp of Calypso. In the ancient Greek world such
decisions required consensus. Zeus and the gods agreed that
something must be done and Hermes was dispatched to inform
Calypso that she must release Odysseus. Did Odysseus really
beg the gods to allow him to escape from Calypso or is that
Athenas version of the story? The later parts of the Odyssey
are narrated by Odysseus himself, so we dont know who is
telling us this first part of the story when it claims his heart (is)
set on his wife and his return.
 100

When Hermes comes to Calypso to release Odysseus, she

protests You gods are unbearable, in your jealousy: you stand
aghast at goddesses who openly sleep with men, if ever one of
them wants to make a man her bedmate. Her strength and her
independence shake the foundations of the ancient world and its
patriarchs. Perhaps only a goddess could say such things to a
god; a human woman would not have dared. But the decision of
the gods is final.

Calypso sits in her garden at the edge of the cave she calls home.
The air is thick with the scent of flowers and a natural spring
trickles past her feet. The birds are singing, she has a great fire
blazing. She moves to her loom, weaving and singing, in the
hope he will decide to stay of his own choice. She weaves the
siren threads of domesticity, contentment, stability, the rejection
of warfare and mens pursuits. Calypso even promises him
eternal youth, immortality like her own yet, instinctively, he
finds it all too feminine, too suffocating, and he wanders away
through the trees to the stone seat on the cliff top to scan the
bare horizon of the sea. Toward the end they had almost been
fighting: long ago the nymph had ceased to please. He had
begun to avoid her and just sat staring out to sea the way he
always did when he was homesick. That is what everyone does
sooner or later when lovers grow apart they stare out to sea --
and even perfect sex and ambrosia arent enough in the end.
There has to be friction.

So, like the mistress who watches her lover go home to his wife,
Calypso watched him go on the morning tide. She would not
have helped him build the raft. He did not say goodbye and she
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did not seek him out to make him say it. Seven years together is
a long time and some things are better left unsaid.

Odysseus knew that he must move on. This was just an

interlude in the natural progression from birth to death, where
we are all alone to pursue our fates. He chose to leave, and that
is why the gods helped him, and why Calypso gave in.
Although a goddess, she did not do it without experiencing a
deep anger. But she understood his wish to grow old, to
experience conflict and heartbreak again, to step out of the
stillness into the "black ocean" streams that will take him
homewards, the following wind on his shoulder. The cycle of
life should not be interrupted for too long or the poem itself is
threatened. If Odysseus had stayed with Calypso there would be
no poem.

Perhaps for this reason Calypso has never won the hearts of the
male translators who over the years have had quite definite ideas
about getting Odysseus back home to Penelope. Some have
played up the psychoanalytical implications: did Calypsos
island remind him of the womb he was running away from all
his life? Certainly Odysseus complains of the pains of rebirth
that were deferred constantly while he lived with her. Many
have claimed that her name means enfolding or concealing,
even obliterating -- all sexual metaphors of the kind popular
with psychoanalysis. Or was it that the thread she wove -- the
myth of the perfect relationship, the perfect woman would
mean that he would lose everything else that made him a man?

There is a fundamental sadness associated with Calypso. She

has never been invited back into other myths and legends.
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Arguably, one could say that she reappears in the distant future
as the mysterious and the lonely enchantress the Lady of the
Lake in the legends of King Arthur, Venus in the Tannhuser
legend and perhaps in Tennysons more vulnerable The Lady of
Shalott. Goddesses who defy time and space are rare in western
literature. They dont get married and they dont have kids but
they probably want them (The Lady of the Lake kidnaps
Lancelot as a child). They just pop into stories occasionally and
then disappear again, which is totally unfair of course.
Odysseus had had a child and fulfilled his debt to society so why
couldnt he have stayed with Calypso and had another child or
two? The critics would have us believe that her dangerous
appeal lies in her timelessness, the oblivion, the denial of self,
and these can be a powerful siren call in the 21st century when
many western men no longer know what they want. However,
one could equally argue that second marriages are just fine,
thanks, and Odysseus would have been happy with her if only
the storyteller had given him a choice in the matter.

CIRCE

Before Odysseus ever got to Calypsos island, he stayed a year

with another beautiful goddess, Circe, and how different she was
from Calypso. When his black ship first encountered her island
of Aeaea, he had no idea where he was and we dont either, but
he still had his crew with him when he arrived.

Odysseus sent an advance party inland to scout out the island

and they soon found Circe, the sea witch, who entertained the
bullies hospitably. She fed them, sang to them, flirted with
them, all the while encouraging these distant travelers to forget
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their homes and their wives. Thats one of the paradoxes of

travel; it always reminds you of the home you left behind. But it
can be assuaged with alcohol and sex and drugs, and Circe knew
her drugs. When she waved her long magic wand, presto, she
turned them all into grunting swine, the archetypical image of
men in the thrall of sexual heat. If this isnt the origin of the
term sexist pig, then it ought to be.

Could Circe ever find a real man? Eventually Odysseus came

looking for his crew and he seemed to know how to overpower
her sexually. This was only because Hermes, sneakiest of the
gods, gave him an antidote to her drugs and no doubt some
precise instructions on a seduction sequence that would appeal
to her. The antidote turned out to be moly, a small herb black at
the root but with a milky flower (garlic, speculate the scholars).
Circe liked a natural man, an earthy man, a man who was a
match for a fertility goddess. She lived in an open plan house of
well polished stone and shiny doors surrounded by forest and
she could charm wild animals -- the wolves, the lions who lived
on her island -- and so too she charmed Odysseus. Into her arms
came this rugged handsome fellow, his hairy chest guarded by
those piercing eyes. He was wiry and weather-beaten, like a
hunter, hard, tangible, scented. Her erotica must have a touch of
the perverse and she made love that way. In her terrific bed he
learned of the future frights he would encounter with similarly
dangerous feminine figures: the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis.
She taught him to understand that these are all projections of
masculine fear and disgust with womens sexuality. Men must
learn to hate themselves before they can love women. Odysseus
went along with it for a whole year and it was only when his
crew became impatient that he agreed to leave.
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There was a lot of sexual tension on Circes island and this

appealed to late Renaissance witch hunters who found Circes
(and Medeas) everywhere, but she had her defenders, like
Torquato Tasso and Giordano Bruno. But it was modernist
writers such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound who fully embraced
her. The Circe of Joyces Ulysses is a nightmarish hallucination
of role reversal and sadomasochism. Circe puts in an
appearance as Bella Cohen, mistress of the local whorehouse,
helping Bloom get in touch with his feminine side and satisfying
his longing for punishment by turning him first into a woman
and then into a pig! Only through ritual humiliation and
castration can Bloom emerge out the other side purified and
ready to go back to his wife. Why he needed to go through all
this and why he needed to be Jewish, we will never know, but it
seems to have been important to Joyce. Ironically, Ulysses was
published originally by two women (the American Sylvia Beach
and her partner Adrienne Monnier), who launched it in France,
in the English language no less, in 1922. They succeeded where
another woman in England and two women in the United States
had already tried and failed. Beach got no satisfaction for her
pains; Joyce took the money and ran. But why should she have
been surprised? The lessons were there in the novel.

Circe was also Ezra Pounds favorite in The Cantos of 1948.

She was his compromise halfway between those flirtatious
bitches the Sirens and the unattainable goddesses Aphrodite and
Athena. Circe represented the sensual world, she was seduction,
she was the sexual act itself. Its no coincidence that when he
wrote The Cantos, Pound was still living with his wife but
seeing his lover, Olga Rudge. So again Odysseus takes center
 105

stage: he enjoys his time with Circe but apparently it was

necessary for him to transcend the merely sensual and return to
his wife.

Feminist writers eventually came to rescue Circe, and if

Penelope is their choice today, Circe was their favorite in the
early fifties, particularly for Southern women writers. Eudora
Weltys Circe has magical powers and a wicked sense of humor.
A fifties housewife, she has discovered feminism and is just
waiting to take flight. Resentful at being tied to her island, she
wishes she could be a wanderer like Odysseus: Ever since the
morning Time came and sat on the world, men have been on the
run as fast as they can go... But, alas, to be unappreciated by
this magical wanderer: I swayed, and was flung backward by
my torment. I believed that I lay in disgrace and my blood ran
green, like the wand that breaks in two. My sights returned to
me when I awoke in the pigsty, in the red and black aurora of
flesh, and it was day. In the end, it is Odysseus who leaves and
Circe who stays, sickened, with child. It is a powerful story
with great expressiveness but no feminist breakout here; we
have slid back into the kitchen sink of melodrama with its hurt,
malice and rejection, where men are always beasts.

Margaret Atwoods Circe is more resentful still: One day you

simply appeared in your stupid boat, and the relationship
careens downhill from there with a strong suggestion of violent
abuse: Holding my arms down/holding my head down by the
hair/mouth gouging my face/and neck, fingers groping into my
flesh. Did Odysseus try to rape Circe? Then there is Katherine
Anne Porters Circe, a beautiful, sunny-tempered, merry-
hearted young enchantress (whose) unique power as goddess
 106

was that she could reveal to men the truth about themselves by
showing to each man himself in his true shape according to his
inmost nature. For this she was rightly dreaded and feared; her
very name was a word of terror. Porter allows Circe to have
sexual power, a casual black humor, all the better to deal with
the wily Odysseus. How dare he act cold and aloof in bed when
she is tender and loving. How dare his men complain to him
behind her back about how bored they are on her island. They
are lucky to get fed at all! If Circe enjoys superiority over the
weakness of men, it is not in an arrogant or egocentric way; it is
simply that she is smarter than they are. One day, will Odysseus
see that and will he be back, alone? Isnt this what wise men
want: wise women?

NAUSICAA

Nausicaa was with her handmaidens throwing a ball around

down on the beach. Several were washing clothes nearby when
Odysseus appeared out of the bushes with no clothes on. Just an
olive branch held discreetly in front of the embarrassing parts.

It must be quite difficult to listen to a naked man and take him

seriously, but Nausicaa was nothing if not modern. Does the
sight of a man scare you? she asked her handmaids. But they
fled the moment the olive branch slipped a bit. She called after
them, Would that such a man might be called my husband,
which may have been an indiscreet thing to say since she was
single and it set off another round of gossip. Her friends and
family were all saying she was beautiful and that she had a
sweet nature but this hadnt got her a husband, had it? Was he
the One? Nausicaa arranges for Odysseus to go into town to
 107

meet her parents, the king and queen, where he can tell his story
for posterity and she says she will follow. No need to feed the
gossips by going together.

When Odysseus washed up there on her island of Scheria, here

was an opportunity to be had. Did she miss it? Should she have
invited Odysseus to stay with her? This is her first and last
appearance in the Odyssey but on such flimsy material Samuel
Butler decided in 1897 that she must have written Homers
entire poem. His case is built on the fact that most of the
Odyssey is told by Odysseus in the palace of Nausicaas
parents, so clearly she was there to hear it. This also encouraged
Robert Graves to expand on it in his novel Homer's Daughter
(1955). Other male translators have confessed their love for her
in suitably extravagant terms -- Japanese animation genius
Hayao Miyazaki takes her name for one of his heroines. What is
a girl to do? Would Nausicaa have preferred being given credit
for seducing Odysseus or for having authored the Odyssey?
Does the Odyssey actually have a womans point of view? We
dont know who Homer was or even whether Homer was many
people, but some claim he was blind, because he may be the
blind storyteller who appears in the Odyssey at this point. But
the thread being woven here is the one that is not being woven:
Nausicaa never weaves a story herself. She is still young,
unmarried, tabula rasa for an old married guy like Odysseus and
maybe she never could have worked out as a marriage partner
for him.

One imagines that if she had indeed written the Odyssey, she
would have written herself a bigger and better part. She would
have developed it as a subtly erotic encounter between a man
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who was nostalgic for his lost past and a young woman looking
for a real man. It would not have been filled with vulgar sex,
Circe style, but with suitably romantic scenes between two
lovers who deeply respect one another. While that may have
been Nausicaas fancy, was that Odysseus? Sure, he would
have been attracted to her but could it have lasted? That doesnt
stop her modern fans from having a riot anyway. In Joyces
Ulysses she is played by Gerty MacDowell, who does a
sentimental striptease in front of the hero Bloom while Bloom
masturbates! Bloom is grateful for her helping him feel like a
man again.

Nausicaas island is presented in more realistic terms than either

the pleasant lonely reverie of Calypso or the tempestuous orgy
with Circe. It is half way to Ithaka without any unpleasant
complications such as suitors or an unfaithful wife. It is full of
peace and plenty. She is, you might say, a very clever final
temptation. It should have appealed to a middle aged man who
sought to be rejuvenated by a younger woman. Isnt that what
all middle aged men want anyway? So why didn't it work?
Because Odysseus wanted more than what a beautiful young
woman wanted for him?

PENELOPE

Lawrence of Arabia (T.E. Lawrence) was one of the many

translators of the Odyssey. So self-conscious was he about
being the 28th to try his hand at it that he used a pseudonym,
T.E. Shaw. What did that old misogynist see in the Odyssey
that he wanted to translate it?
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Was Lawrence attracted to Odysseus, that cold-blooded

egotist, as a homosexual ideal? Did he like the theme of the
wanderer and worry about the fate of manly freedom in a world
of feminine distractions, the kind that were pressing in upon
Lawrence in the aftermath of World War I. Disgusted by the
domestic bliss that ends the Odyssey, he thought it a major
anticlimax. He never thought through the situation, however, to
refashion the story so that it arrived at a different conclusion.
He was a traditionalist at heart. What if Lawrence had been
attracted to women? Could he have matched Odysseus up with
any of the women he met along the way -- the sea witch Circe,
the lonely goddess Calypso, the maiden Nausicaa -- or was
Odysseus always destined to return to his long-suffering wife
Penelope? Were these women, including Penelope, merely
femme fatales designed to tempt the hero away from the ways of
the world back to the domestic life, to being no more than a
good husband? Were they lustful and seductive, overly
controlling, seeking to entrap our hero? Is entanglement just
another way of saying fear of commitment? In the Land of the
Dead, the ghost of Agamemnon, murdered by his wife upon his
own return from Troy, says to Odysseus Do not be too easy
even with your wife, nor give her an entire account of all you are
sure of. Tell her part of it, but let the rest be silence. That was
typical of Agamemnon of course he just did not understand
women.

The Odyssey is about more than just the return to house and
hearth. It is about a mans choice of ideal sexual partner, it is
about the compatibility of sex and marriage, it is about how a
man exercises his freedom before returning ultimately to where
he started from. The Odyssey is about rebirth and the search for
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a new identity but it is also about loyalty. Now that he is middle

aged, whom should he spend it with second time around if we
were to give him that chance? What was it Odysseus wanted?
What do men want? It would seem that Odysseus chose
Penelope, his wife. Why?

It was all right at the beginning, but once Troy fell she had
expected him home. They hadnt been married long when he
left and Telemachus was just an infant. As the years passed, the
news stopped coming. She did a lot of crying. By the time
Odysseus came home to Ithaka, he had been away 19 years and
she had not had a sexual partner in all that time, she was losing
her looks and feeling older, and she didnt have a close
confidante, a defender, a husband. She could fairly accuse him
of desertion. Would any woman wait as long as she did? True,
there were distinct advantages to being single, to being a widow.
She was still comfortably well off, which made her a desirable
catch for the suitors and at least she had a choice. She was
flattered by the attentions of so many good-looking young men.
In fact, this is what Antinous accused her of in public -- that she
enjoyed it -- and this was true for a few years at the beginning.
She had to adopt delaying tactics but she would never give in
and choose one of the suitors because that would have brought
the reasonably pleasant situation she was in to an abrupt end.
And, she would have found Odysseus on her doorstep the next
day! She also knew the other suitors and townspeople would
criticize her the moment she chose anyone.

Penelope wove her web during the day and unraveled it at night.
Weaving has been the work of women since ancient times and it
is now a feminist metaphor for womens creativity and the
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stories that were never heard when the focus was on the
husband. Repression equals silence, as they say. Penelopes
quest was no different from Odysseus but she had no rudder
no god -- to guide her into the unknown. Her quest stands for
the refusal of the violence that inhabits the men. Women will
stop weaving only when the violence ends. Penelope chose to
resist, weaving just the one story, a story that excluded the
suitors. It is the unfinished story of women in a sea of mens
stories. Penelope is todays single mother.

So she kept delaying even after Odysseus came back because

she wanted to explore her own ambivalence about his return.
Did she even want him back? He was in disguise but she
recognized him immediately, even though the Odyssey is vague
on this point. At the very least she wanted him to demonstrate
to her that he was the same man, and perhaps also that she was
the same woman. So she checked his memories, she insisted he
shave and bathe, and she measured his performance in bed. She
only agreed to recognize him after she had looked at his scar in
that very private place. She handled this situation well and the
characters of the Odyssey considered her wise.

In the end the gods had their own plans for them. Those plans
required that the suitors all be killed and a bloody massacre was
the result. Penelope felt no remorse over this sacrifice: the
suitors deserved it. They had exploited her, eaten her out of
house and home. It almost led to the slaughter of their relatives
as well but the gods made it clear this was the end of the cycle.
Odysseus and Penelope would live into their old age together.
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Depending on how one looks at it, marriage in the Odyssey can

be regarded as a degraded institution, a metaphor of death. How
else can you explain Helen of Troys unfaithfulness or
Clytemnestras murder of Agamemnon or Odysseus 19 years
away? The Odyssey is not about the triumph of marriage after
19 years separation; it is about the fact that it took him 19 years
to return. The women of the Odyssey do not entrap men; men
entrap themselves in their own illusions and deceits. The Greek
writers who came after Homer knew this; they were very cynical
about Odysseus motives. Dante placed Odysseus in the Inferno
for being a dissembler, for being dishonest, both with himself
and with those he loved. Frank McCourt called him a draft-
dodger.

For all the gods interference, Penelope held the future in her
hands for a few hours and she could have chosen to destroy it as
Clytemnestra did. The marriage survived only because
Penelope chose to recognize her husband; imagine if she had
refused him. This is the bittersweet taste that permeates the end
of Joyces Ulysses, as Molly Bloom lies in bed reminiscing
about life, lovers and Leopold Bloom snoring in the darkness
next to her. She has hardly been loyal and faithful but she does
still want to hold on to her Ulysses. And will Odysseus be gone
again shortly and will Penelope sit there waiting for it to happen
all over again as if it never ends?

Dante in the Inferno sends Odysseus off again with his crew,
beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the equator where they all die
in a maelstrom, just short of Purgatory's mountain. Tennyson's
Ulysses wants once more "To sail beyond the sunset, and the
baths/Of all the western stars." In Nikos Kazantzakis' The
 113

Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938), Odysseus leaves home for

Sparta, Egypt and beyond, dying in Antarctica.

But these are the pessimists. Homers Odyssey can also be

looked at as a reaffirmation of marriage and the loyalty that
develops between spouses no matter what happens. Penelope is
Homers image of feminine faithfulness. She is supposed to be
powerful but melancholy. She is supposed to have great
practical intelligence and the ability to think strategically. This
is no better demonstrated than when she says think what
difficulty the gods gave [us]: they denied us life together in our
prime and flowering years, kept us from crossing into age
together. These are some of the most powerful lines in western
literature and they speak to anyone in middle age and beyond.
Their message is unmistakable: the blame lies with the gods, not
with ourselves.

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST

Perhaps the least appreciated aspect of the Odyssey is its

foreshadowing of the most influential sexual fable of them all --
the Christ story -- which would also be written in Greek. The
Odyssey and the Gospel stories are similar in that they are both
spiritual quests, written with great power and drama.

They are also different, of course, in that Christ accelerates the

process dramatically toward a confrontation with God, plus
there is only one God and not many, and in the Odyssey there is
no resurrection after death. But the similarities are stronger.
For example, in Homer, Odysseus frequently is referred to as the
seed of Zeus just as Jesus Christ is referred to in the New
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Testament as the Son of God. Both stories accept that life is a

spiritual journey, where it is important to avoid the temptations
of food, drink and seductive women. Maybe the Odyssey, like
the New Testament, can be read in Augustinian terms as a story
of conversion? True, Odysseus succumbs many times where the
Jesus of the New Testament does not but then whos to say?
Maybe Jesus did sleep with Mary Magdalene? Modern writers
seem more than willing to accept that Jesus encountered many
beautiful women along the way and they argue that celibacy was
Saint Pauls (and later Saint Augustines) contribution to the
Gospels and the Catholic Church.

Odysseus himself is a prototype of the Christ figure. First,

because in always moving on, in seeking to return home,
Odysseus chooses death, rather than immortality with Calypso.
Jesus did so too although he may have believed that immortality
would come to him anyway through the Resurrection. Jesus
chose death on his own terms rather than life on somebody
elses terms, just as Odysseus did. Both choose death with an
act of rebellion, a very human act. Also, Home might as well
have been Heaven. Second, the trials Odysseus faces at the
hands of the gods resemble the trials that Jesus faces centuries
later in the build-up to the Crucifixion. In the Odyssey they are
stretched out; in the Gospels most of the action is compressed
into the Passion. Third, Homer allows Odysseus take revenge
on the suitors when he gets home to reestablish the order of
things but his true adversary throughout the book is the Gods
themselves Poseidon, Zeus, the Sun God. Jesus faces similar
agonies where Caiaphas and the high priests may as well be the
suitors carousing in Ithaka, but Jesus true adversary all along is
the Jewish God himself and it is mans assertion of divinity that
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is being tested here. My god, my god, why have you forsaken

me? has always had a complex meaning, for Christ is
challenging God himself to respond to him. Perhaps he never
did?

The most surprising thing that emerged in the debates about Mel
Gibsons film The Passion of the Christ in 2004 was how little
the two religious communities, Christians and Jews, spoke to
each other in the same terms. There opened up a vast gap that
until then had been quietly repressed by mutual consent. This
gap revealed how incomprehensible the others religion truly
was. Despite decades of well-intentioned inter-faith dialog,
Christians simply did not understand that the events of two
thousand years ago mean very little to contemporary Jews other
than as an excuse by Christians to practice anti-Semitism. This
is primarily because dominant cultures or religions seldom take
the time to learn anything about minority cultures or religions
and the minorities often prefer it that way. Many Christians,
raised with their own image of Jesus (as a warrior or effeminate
or Black or tortured) have never understood what it meant that
Jesus was in fact Jewish. Indeed some have expressed honest
surprise when they realized this in adulthood. They had seen it
but not seen it. Conversely, Jews simply did not understand, or
perhaps preferred not to understand, the revolutionary
symbolism involved in those events that sundered Judaism
forever. They did not understand the role of self-sacrifice and
martyrdom that are at the heart of the Christian religion and they
wrongly focused instead on what they did understand: anti-
Semitism. In Judaism, notions like martyrdom and self-sacrifice
do exist, but in todays religious context they sound like suicide
bombers; they are incomprehensible and the equivalent of
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heresy. In Christianity they are symbolic of the human

condition: Christs act of atonement was supposed to be an
example for others, not to be followed but to be contemplated
and rejoiced in.

What both communities have long had in common, ironically, is

that neither fully came to terms with Jesus Jewishness. Sure,
there were some rabbis through the years who argued that Jesus
was, in fact, a good Jew, and should not be lumped in with what
Christianity has become, but to most Jews he was a symbol of
Christianitys dominance and persecution since Roman times.
Christians were forced to place the revelation of his Jewishness
up against what they thought of Israel and the Jews in their own
communities. Disbelieving Jews wrongly wrote this off as just
another form of anti-Semitism (how could they not know Jesus
was Jewish?). But Christians also failed to appreciate that
early Christianity quickly became a Greek and later a Roman
religion that systematically marginalized the Jews and their God
as a competitor and that hasnt really changed. Christianity
eroded and displaced the pagan gods and became identified with
European imperial power, spreading across the globe just as
Islam would do centuries later.

The question of who killed Jesus is irrelevant if the prosecution

and Crucifixion were violent Jewish events. Indeed there were
no Christians at this point. In this story, then, it is God who kills
Jesus and thats its point. For those who are uncomfortable with
the idea of a vengeful God, let me put it another way: if Jesus
knew he was going to certain death, indeed he sought it out, is
there any inherent difference then between martyrdom and
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suicide? Blame God or blame Jesus, if you must, but do not

blame the Jews or the Romans.

Many would not agree with any of this, especially the idea of
blaming God. Jewish services mention God frequently even if
the main focus is on life lessons and the most sacred icon is the
Torah scrolls. Christian services of all denominations, on the
other hand, differ from this by emphasizing Almighty God
with the tinge of a threat, as if we are still living in the Roman
Empire and owe allegiance to Caesar, who was after all
supposed to be divine too. Instead of the Torah, there is the
sacrament (communion) of bread and wine, as if to remind the
penitent and the sinner that this will be your body if you
transgress. It wouldnt be until the Reformation and the
breakaway Protestant churches were formed that the emphasis
would be less on God the Father and more on God the Son, less
on Christ on the cross and more on the empty cross itself. Even
Catholics have trouble understanding Protestant thinking;
imagine how hard it is if youre Jewish. It is not surprising then
that the two original communities Jews and Christian Jews --
have grown so far apart that their descendants have enormous
trouble understanding the others ceremonies, iconography and
symbolism.

Have we got a long way away from the Odyssey? Not really.
One of the greatest failings of western philosophy is that it
inherited the absolutism and authoritarianism of traditional
Jewish and Christian religious thinking but discarded the
multiplicity of views that the ancient Greeks identified with their
many gods. The result has been an astonishing inability in the
West at recognizing subjectivity. To pronounce an opinion on
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another culture should always be placed against whether one has

the right to do so in any given context, and if one assumes the
right, what does that say about you and your willingness to
understand others? This is something that many non-western
societies have always better understood because they have
retained an appreciation for the multiplicity of viewpoints that
derives from, for want of a better term, a pagan view of the
world. For example, Maori people of New Zealand have the
concept of turangawaewae, literally a place to stand. This
term explicitly requires that before anybody opens their mouth
in public, they need to identify themselves. In other words, the
legitimacy of what someone says may be compromised by who
they are, where they are from and why they are saying it.
Although this principle is enshrined in western law (the concept
of legal standing), it apparently does not apply anywhere else,
for example, in letters to the editor about political or social
issues that appear in our daily newspapers. Imagine if every
letter carried an ID of ethnicity and religious belief: wouldnt
that explain a lot? The names and cities of the writers are not
enough. Like Prometheus before him, Odysseus himself was
one of the first to challenge those with pretences to objectivity,
to telling the truth, to doing what youre told because God
says you have to. Thats what got him in trouble in the first
place, but he did get home in the long run.

Sacred Prostitute
Mary Magdalene: Was She or Wasnt She?
Sacred Prostitute
Mary Magdalene in the Bible
A Good Jewish Girl
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Symbolic Virginity
The Whore of Babylon
Once upon a time, it was said that after Christs death, Mary
Magdalene sailed the great Mediterranean seas accompanied by
two other Marys in a rudderless boat with no sails.
Miraculously they came ashore at the charming little town now
known as les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, literally the Saint
Marys of the Sea, on the south coast of France near where the
Rhne River joins the Mediterranean.

In those days it was part of the prosperous Roman colony of

Gaul and definitely part of civilization. But, in tying the rudder
in place, Mary Magdalene was seeking to follow the voyages of
Odysseus, to see where the wind and the gods might take them
and they had ended up here.

Of course, one might conclude that there are too many Marys in
this story because they are so easily mixed up. There is Mary
Magdalene herself, then Mary of Bethany, who had a sister
named Martha and a brother named Lazarus, whom Christ had
risen from the dead. All of them may have been in the boat.
Then we have the Virgin Mary, Jesus saintly mother, who
wasnt in the boat, but who is said to have had two half sisters
known as Mary Jacobi and Mary Salome, and they were in the
boat. Some say that Saint Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy
Grail were also on that boat but that is another story.

On the south coast of France they believe there were three

Marys in that boat: Mary Magdalene, Mary Jacobi and Mary
Salome. They also believe that Marys boat voyaged first along
the north African coast, where they picked up a black servant
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girl named Sara, generally known as Sara the Egyptian or Sara-

la-Kali (Sara the black), before they washed ashore in Gaul.
The church at les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is still a popular
pilgrimage site in the Camargue, where they celebrate the arrival
of the Three Marys every May and October and the relics of
Saintes Mary Jacobi and Mary Salome are said to be there to this
day. The Gypsies have their own festival there in May, since
Sara became their patroness and her relics are there too. But this
prompts a question Dan Browns readers have long been asking:
just what exactly was this ex-prostitute up to in that boat?

SACRED PROSTITUTE

In 591 AD, Pope Saint Gregory I (the Great) announced that all
those Marys in the Bible (other than the Virgin Mary) were one
and the same person -- Mary Magdalene. Gregorys
announcement certainly simplified a lot of things and it suited
the French of le Midi just fine.

They had long believed that Mary had sailed to France in order
to spend the last 30 years of her life evangelizing the Provence.
It was well known that she later retired to the grotto of Sainte-
Baume in the Alps of Provence, and this in turn became another
pilgrimage site. We know all this because, miraculously, in the
11th century, the Cistercian monks of Vzelay in Burgundy
discovered that Mary Magdalenes bones had been in their
monastery all along, moved there from the grotto for
safekeeping from Muslim invaders. As they hoped, Vzelay
became yet another pilgrimage site and it was from the steps of
this old cathedral that the Second Crusade would be launched by
Bernard of Clairvaux (more on him later). Not to be outdone,
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the monastery of Saint-Maximin near Sainte-Baume claimed

that, no, in fact they had had the authentic relics all along (thats
four pilgrimage sites so far, if youre counting). The great
rivalry between the two monasteries that followed was only
decided last century when scientists were called in and the
results favored St. Maximin, whose bones were determined to be
of a Mediterranean woman from the right period. They added
that her face was very beautiful, though one wonders how they
figured that out.

Today, of course, the Catholic Church dismisses these stories as

fictions and the Eastern Orthodox Church and most Humanist
scholars since the 16th century have argued that the many Marys
described in the Bible were different women and that none of
them ended up in France. They say that if Mary Magdalenes
travels after Jesus death can be traced at all, then she died in
Jerusalem or she accompanied St. John the Evangelist and the
Virgin Mary to Ephesus in what is now Turkey, where both
women died as missionaries. This is all very well but it gets in
the way of a good story.

Mary may not have stayed in France permanently. There is a

story that she returned to Jerusalem with her friends and, while
they were there, her colleague Saint James was martyred by
Herod. Obliged to flee once more, they set sail for Spain under
Marthas leadership and accompanied by St. James head!
There, in Spain, they successfully evangelized the entire
country. The famous shrine at Santiago de Compostela in
Galicia in the west is dedicated to him (Santiago being Spanish
for St. James). Regrettably, the religious authorities have
never clarified what became of his head. At any rate, Mary must
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have returned to Provence. There her work would one day

inspire Saint Teresa of Avila, who is worshipped at Spains
other major pilgrimage site.

Puritanical intellectuals and religious fundamentalists will insist

otherwise, but the beauty of the great stories of each and every
culture is that they may be changed and fought over. People
constantly embroider simple tales into beautiful tapestries and
then the political, religious and academic authorities attempt to
regulate them. In les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Mary
Magdalene is not a legend belonging to the folklorists or a
history belonging to the historians or even an exclusively
religious figure. She is a tradition belonging to the people and
they seem intent on keeping her alive.

In contemporary French life, or at least in le Midi, they have

remained fond of Mary, who is and always will be the patron
saint of prostitutes -- Marie Madeleine, prostitue sacre. She is
a powerful symbol of love and rebirth. She is all women. If she
were alive today, she would be a wicked version of Mireille
Matthieu.

MARY MAGDALENE IN THE BIBLE

So was Mary Magdalene just another prostitute? For centuries

there wasnt much controversy about it. Few even thought of
her as Jewish. In the Bible we read that she was present at the
Crucifixion and the Resurrection and little else, but we assume
that Christ saved her from a life of sin and turned her into a
believer.
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Over the last 50 years, many scholars, both male and female,
secular and religious, have complained that much has been left
out of the Gospels (Good stories) by Matthew, Mark, Luke,
John... and Paul. The gospel writers stand accused of patriarchal
values because they left out the saucy details. The scholars have
asked a series of provocative questions: what exactly was Jesus
relationship with Mary Magdalene? Was their relationship
sexual? Wasnt it normal for young Jewish men to be married
by the time Jesus and the disciples were preaching in the
Galilee? If so, why there is no mention of their wives, aside
from Peter's? Was Mary Magdalene, in fact, the leading apostle?
Was she married to Jesus? Was Jesus a widower or divorced?
Were there infertility problems? Was Jesus rather too interested
in women? Was Mary older, with one marriage already behind
her? The disciples themselves were mostly under the age of 20.
Was the Crucifixion an elaborate deception and were Jesus and
Mary married later after the fuss died down and they had three
children? And what exactly was Jesus relationship with
Lazarus (the one you love John 11)? Above all, was Mary
ever a prostitute and, if she was, what was the nature of her
special mystique that she has incited all these scholarly
reinventions? Was she from someplace else altogether, like
Egypt? Was she black? Has the true story been suppressed?

There is a manuscript known to religious scholars as the Gospel

of Philip, which was recovered in Egypt in 1945. It is said to
have been written by the Valentinians, a 2nd century Christian
sect, who placed a greater value on marital sexuality than on
virginity. This is an interesting distinction. In this manuscript
they refer to Mary Magdalene as Christs partner and
spouse and that he often kissed her on the mouth. This is all
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the more startling given the early Christian writers horror of

sex. In another manuscript, the Gospel of Mary, which was
rediscovered in Egypt in 1896, an even more intimate
relationship is hinted at. Then there is the controversial
fragment known as the Gospel of Jesus' Wife, which is the size
of a business card, in which Jesus is quoted referring to his
"wife." The context appears to mean Mary, but most experts
believe it isa forgery. Regardless, who were those early
Christian provocateurs the Gnostics -- who wrote such
extraordinary things and why were their views suppressed so
successfully from history?

The negative view of Mary Magdalene prevailed for what now

seems like political reasons. Throughout the Middle Ages and
into the Renaissance there was a deluge of stories, sermons, and
paintings of Mary the famous sinner and penitent woman. One
imagines that for better or worse, religious and artistic figures
wanted to inject sexuality into the debate, rendering Mary
Magdalene as almost as important among Jesus women as
Mary, Jesus mother. For most, the Magdalenes story was a
powerful moral lesson for others to learn from. A prostitute was
clearly a good model for women to avoid and men and women
must keep their distance from each other. But, equally, there
must have been many with subversive intentions, who wanted to
find a way to inject sexuality into daily life. The logical next
step -- which we see today -- is to argue that she wasnt a
prostitute at all. Either way, the sexuality of Mary Magdalene is
coming to assume just as prominent a role in the Christian
church of today as it did in medieval times.
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As every critic has been quick to point out, there is just one
problem with all this: there are so few references to Mary
Magdalene, and women generally, in the New Testament Bible.
Feminist theologians think they know why. They argue that in
the early years of the Christian church there was a power
struggle between Mary Magdalene and the apostle Saint Peter,
who was regarded as Jesus Number Two. They argue that Peter
had a lot to do with the fact that the original gospel writers left
out all the interesting personal details about the women in the
apostles lives. Whether this was to respect the womens
privacy in keeping with 1st century proprieties or to minimize
the role of Mary and the other women and emphasize his own
primacy, we will never know. Saint Luke blandly writes, in
chapter 8, verses 2-3 of his Gospel, that the women were
assisting (the men) out of their means. Does Luke mean just
the cooking and washing or did some of the wealthy women
whom Jesus met also contribute financially? One theory has it
that most of the apostles were married and their wives traveled
with them, but perhaps it was the wealthy independent women
like Mary and Salome who bankrolled the enterprise. It seems
unlikely that this was the limit of their roles in building this new
religious faith.

To many Christians today these questions are sacrilegious, but to

feminist theologians it is bracing stuff, for the simple reason that
the Catholic Church has resisted allowing women priests on the
grounds that none of the apostles were women. That is a
mistake. Sexuality has always been repressed by church
authorities and we all know where that has led in recent years, as
one scandal after another of sexual abuse by priests has erupted
into public life. Evidently there were quite a few women in
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Christs life too. Perhaps missionary work was compromised by

scandals with prostitutes? Perhaps Christ was unable to resist a
pretty face? Surely women flocked to him every time he opened
his mouth, if his oratory was so magnetic.

The first reference to Mary Magdalene in the Bible is in Marks

Gospel, in the longer (and disputed) ending of chapter 16. There
we read that Jesus had cast seven demons out of her. This is
where her problems began, for everyone assumes, as Mark may
have meant them to assume, that this means she was a prostitute.
Some scholars have connected the seven demons and the seven
deadly sins, as if she had them all. If one takes a more
psychological approach, perhaps she suffered from epilepsy and
a mild form of manic depression. Whenever she had an attack
and started writhing on the ground, some people evidently
thought it was sexy and took it as an invitation to take advantage
of her vulnerability.

Surprisingly, that reference in Mark is the only time Mary

appears in the Bible by name in any role before Jesus death.
But there is another earlier incident that has become identified
with her and it appears in all four Gospels. For example, in
Lukes Gospel 7:36-50, when Christ was in Capernaum he was
invited to dinner by Simon the Pharisee. (The Pharisees were
Jewish religious nationalists who resisted the Roman occupation
and maintained they were more religious than anybody else,
which is why they got their reputation as hypocrites. They are
still around today.) Simon also invited a woman known in the
town to be a sinner to be one of the dinner guests, perhaps in
order to tempt Christ. While Christ reclines at a table, this
unidentified woman weeps as she stands by him and her tears
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fall on his feet. She wipes them with her hair, kisses them and
perfumes them with oils. For Simon the Pharisee this was a vile
erotic spectacle of the fallen woman with her sensuously long
hair and the extraordinary dinner guest. Simon acted
scandalized in front of the other dinner guests, but Christ turned
the tables on him by defending the woman, arguing that as she
felt repentant she was therefore pure of heart, implying that
Simon, who believed himself to be pure, was a sinner. Simon
missed the point of course.

It may well be the same occasion that is described, only slightly

differently, in Mark 14:3-9, Matthew 26:6-13 and John 12:1-8.
The dating of these events and the details vary but could this be
Mary Magdalene? In John, the woman actually is identified as
Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus and Martha that we met
in the boat. She anoints Jesus feet and dries them with her hair
(in Mark, the woman anoints Jesus hair, not his feet). This is
where Pope Gregorys pronouncement that there was only one
Mary Mary Magdalene -- comes in, for it certainly simplifies
things. But if this woman wasnt Mary Magdalene, why
suppress the role of Mary of Bethany and her sister Martha?
Conspiracy theories abound and some would say that the sisters
were in on the planning that would lead to the Crucifixion and
Resurrection, in fulfillment of the Messiah prophecy, something
the male apostles had no inkling of and which they may have
opposed. In other words, were Mary Magdalene, Mary and
Martha, Salome and other women, the true founders of
Christianity and did sexuality play a larger role in Christs
ministry than has been acknowledged?
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After Christs crucifixion, Mary Magdalene is referred to several

times by name and everything turns on whether she was the first
to see the risen Christ. If she was, then this certainly boosts her
case, for that means he chose to reveal himself to her, rather than
to the men important symbolism for the rise of the new
church. According to Saint Paul, who probably wrote first, and
gospel writers Mark, who wrote second, and Luke, who wrote
fourth, Christ made his first appearance to Saint Peter.
Subsequently, however, Matthew (who wrote third) and John
(fifth) both said it was to Mary. This difference of opinion is
crucial. Feminist writers argue that when Mark wrote his
Gospel, he came to a halt at chapter 16, verse 8. By stopping
there, they argue, Mark deliberately eliminated the verses (9-20)
in which Mary Magdalene tells of her experiences seeing the
risen Christ. The feminists claim that Mark and Luke just
couldnt bear the fact that Christ appeared to a woman first.
They conclude that when those verses are restored, they qualify
Mary as the leading apostle. Most Bibles now include these
verses (Mark 16: 9-20), believing them to be inspired, even
though the editors are fairly sure Mark didnt write them. Thus
Mary trumps Saint Peter who, after all, was the one who in a
moment of weakness denied knowing Christ three times, while
Mary and the other women risked their lives going back to the
tomb to anoint Jesus body. We presume that Saint Peter won
the power struggle, laying the foundations of the Christian
church while Mary went off into exile.

A GOOD JEWISH GIRL

If we pursue another line of thought, Mary grew up like any

other good Jewish girl living in the Galilee. She was born into a
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wealthy Sadducean family living near Tiberias, the Roman

capital of the area, where originally she may have observed
traditional Jewish religious values. Tiberias was a lovely resort
town of thermal baths, gymnasiums and the good life.

Marys last name was long thought to be derived from Magdala,

a small resort town just along the lakeshore that developed a
racy reputation. The reason for this may have been that the
Sadducee families, unlike the Pharisees, believed in mixing in
with Greco-Roman society and in adapting themselves to their
culture rather than resisting it. Many families became wealthy,
and perhaps Mary dressed in the latest fashions, as did her
friends. Ancient and medieval painters give her long auburn
hair to enhance her sexual allure, which is very flattering of
them but, stereotypes aside, perhaps she had no need of auburn
hair to attract men. Perhaps they came readily enough.

Before she met Jesus, she may have had her heroines from the
dominant culture, including Cleopatra. In Cleopatras case it
had ended in a tragedy, a forced suicide in the previous century.
But she had been a powerful queen and young people still
believed, as they always will, that great changes were in the
wind. The prophecies certainly pointed that way. Mary would
have been familiar with the stories of Esther and Judith, two
courageous Jewish princesses. Then there was Salome (no
relation to Mary Salome), who had made herself forever famous
imitating Judith when she asked for the head of John the Baptist
and got it.

There is almost as little known about Salome as there is about

Mary. We know her from Matthew 14 and Mark 6 and although
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the names are Greek, Salome too was Jewish. The story begins
when Salomes mother divorces her husband and marries his
brother. John the Baptist strongly condemned the marriage,
which resulted in his arrest, ordered by King Herod, the
governor of Judea and the most powerful man in the land. A
short time later, when Salome dances before Herod, he is so
impressed that he offers her anything she wants. Following her
mothers advice, she asks for the head of John the Baptist. That
is when things get interesting: did Salome fancy John, a
somewhat older and charismatic man? Did her mother fancy
him? What kind of sexual thrill can be derived from having the
severed head of ones love object delivered on a plate?
Certainly Oscar Wilde thought it had potential and, after
extensive research into all the famous paintings on the subject,
he dramatized it in the play Salom, most of which was written
in 1891. These days it reads as a sexual fable of homosexual
desire, just like the more celebrated The Picture of Dorian Gray,
which he published the same year. Wilde improvises wildly,
with Salome lusting after John and Herod lusting after Salome
and shes dead by the end. Wildes play is completely over the
top of course, but Wilde himself fits the Salome role, projecting
his berserk passion for Alfred Douglas, destroying his love
object in order to capture it. But the play did ensure Wildes
lasting fame in Europe, where his true masterpiece The
Importance of Being Earnest did not.

Initially Mary Magdalene was not a celebrity like Salome but

she may have been tarred with the same brush. Unlike Salome,
Mary may have resented the fact that her fellow Jews cultivated
the mentality of a colonized people, believing that only the
women showed any willingness to resist. The fact that she went
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to parties at the Roman palaces in Tiberias may have been

enough for traditional Jews to start calling her a whore, which
was a bit hypocritical, since it didnt stop a few of them from
sleeping with her, including Judas Iscariot. Well, so the story
goes. Greeks and Romans had fewer reservations about sex. In
fact, they didnt even have a word for sin. Compare that with
the New Testament, written in Greek by Jewish intellectuals
where the Greek word for sexual love, eros, does not appear at
all. Saint Peter, for one, could not read or write Greek, but Mary
could. On matters like homosexuality, for example, Jewish
culture was deeply resistant while Greeks and Romans
considered it a more acceptable lifestyle choice.

At a certain point, though, Mary may have become sick of all

this. It took its toll on her physically and psychologically. She
started taking an interest in the Jewish activist, Jesus Christ,
whom many saw as a successor to John the Baptist. Salome also
showed interest, possibly appalled at what she had done and she
became basically your typical teenage runaway rich girl. Luke
mentions it in his Gospel, not that he bothers to go into any
detail. Jesus offered both women a way to make sense of the
hostility they felt from their own people, a meaning to life.
Most commentators think Marys relationship with Jesus was
platonic and that despite her physical charms (and his), the
relationship was intellectual and spiritual, not physical. They
may have been right, for all we know. Jesus was a sexual
revolutionary but did he need to consummate his sexual nature?
For some people, simply being together is emotionally satisfying
enough, so its not so easily dismissed. It certainly took courage
on his part to associate with single and foreign women.
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SYMBOLIC VIRGINITY

Mary Magdalene as a fallen woman, like Eve the vile seducer or

Jezebel or Delilah, who betrayed their men, is a lot more
interesting than Mary the apostle. How great it is to read Martin
Luthers words: Mary loved Christ with a hearty, lusting,
rutting love. Rutting is such an evocative word, suggesting
Circes pig sties and out-of-control carnal affections. Mary does
not fit into the Bibles notion of the good woman.

As everyone knows, there are only two acceptable roles for

women in the Bibles world: mothers and virgins, ideally both
together in the same person, as with the Virgin Mary. That is
why the Church has labored mightily in the Virgin Marys honor
over the centuries and built cathedrals of Notre Dame to her all
over the world. Then there is the unacceptable woman: the
whore the other Mary, Mary Magdalene. She has no
cathedrals but she has lots of churches, for even she is
redeemable.

For virginity can be restored symbolically, it would seem,

through penitence and Gods grace. That is why, in the works of
the great medieval painters and wood-carvers, Mary is generally
seen weeping, either for her past sins or in her great relief. Even
in medieval times this was all considered a bit excessive,
resulting in the word maudlin (which is derived from
Magdalene). But symbolic virginity is still important -- even
today, judging by the number of stories about women from more
traditional cultures who have been known to fake virginity
before their marriage by surgical and other means to protect
themselves against their husbands suspicions.
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Symbolic virginity was extremely important back in the Middle

Ages. For example, in the monasteries of Provence and
Burgundy, the holy fathers turned Mary Magdalenes shame into
a sacred ritual of olfactory ecstasy that practically mimicked
sexual ecstasy. The Cistercians considered the act of anointing
with perfumes, oils, ointments and incense to be vitally
important to their spiritual lives and its easy to see why. Who
would argue that perfumes do not exert a powerful erotic charge
on us? The tradition spread northwards from Provence where
the heat and the scent of lavender and jasmine can be
intoxicating. There were those who argued that feminine
perfumes and the makeup used by Provenale women needed to
be condemned regularly. That is also why the Magdalenes
anointing Christ three times has become the subject of vast
scholarship seeking to understand this troubling erotic
dimension. For, unfortunately, feminine charms can lead the
brothers to their destruction. Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux,
whom we met elsewhere, was obliged to ban his monks from
seeing even their own mothers and sisters. As sons of Adam
they must repress their sexual desires when Eve called, they
must inflict physical discomfort on themselves and transfer their
desire onto the sensual pleasure of inhaling deeply. As they
reflected upon the scent of perfumes wafting on the air and
listened to the preachers sermon, they could approach God in
humility. The incense had to be completely pure. Just as
Marys own life was purified, incense could fill the house like a
sinners repentance filled their souls. Anointing became a
metaphor for conversion. But the other equally important reason
was that the brothers retained their virginity while also
experiencing sexual release.
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Mary Magdalenes feast day is July 22. On that day, Saint

Bernard always lectured the prostitutes in the hope of lighting
the fires of salvation within them and he encouraged his brothers
and sisters to establish Magdalene houses all over Europe to
offer fallen women a new way of life. Mary Magdalene was a
powerful symbol in the fight to stem the growing tide of
prostitutes who were swarming all over Europe. Mary never
caught on further north in Europe, where they take life more
seriously, but she did manage to enter Britain through the dark
tales of King Arthur. She is sometimes associated with Morgan
le Faye, the enchantress who was Arthurs sister, and with
Guinevere, the Magdalene queen weeping bitter tears in her
castle at Camelot after her disastrous affair with Lancelot.
Today these sites in France, Britain and Spain have great appeal
to the modern pilgrim, who these days is just as likely to be an
agnostic tourist as a practicing Catholic. One couldnt do much
better next vacation than to try out the popular pilgrimage route
from Toulouse to Santiago de Compostela, or Vzelay down to
little les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer or the heady perfumes of
Provence.

THE WHORE OF BABYLON

Dan Browns The Da Vinci Code is relevant to Mary Magdalene

notably for its idea that Jesus Christ and Mary were married, had
children and, of course, descendants who are around today.
Brown pulled his ideas together from a variety of sources that
were already out there, notably the 1982 bestseller Holy Blood,
Holy Grail, by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln (two of them sued
Brown). Like Brown those writers tapped into broad intellectual
 135

currents that have flowed underneath and alongside the

dominant stream, not just for the last few decades but for two
millennia.

If their stories are indeed true, and who is to say they arent,
well it doesnt really matter, since the more important point is
that the official histories we have been handed down are fictions
too, just like the hoaxes described above. Many of the latter are
wonderful New Age nonsense, including the notion of the
Sacred Feminine that has appeared in countless feminist writings
since the 1960s Mary Magdalene's womb as the Holy Grail
anyone? They are a lot of fun though, a point that was missed
equally by religious fundamentalists and the highbrow critics of
The Da Vinci Code.

A similarly intriguing idea can be found in Lynn Picknetts

Mary Magdalene: Christianitys Hidden Goddess (2003), in
which she argues that there is a strong possibility that Mary was
from Egypt or even Ethiopia, implying that she was black.
Mary was, she writes, a black goddess-worshipping
priestessa lover of Jesus and his spiritual equal, if not his
superior (p.241) and she may have come from the town of
Magdala in Ethiopia. Not only did the Catholic Church suppress
her story from the gospels by selecting only the source material
that suited their agenda, they altered everything else as well.
Picknell asks whether Jesus and his circle were a group of
unpleasant, if charismatic fanatics? Certainly they were
considered fanatics at the time and still are by many Jews today
(do many Christians know this?). Were they conjurers and
charlatans too? At the very least they wanted to shake things up
in the ancient world.
 136

The issue here is not whether the stories promoted by the Pope
and traditional Christian churches are right or wrong. The issue
is that we now have a ferment in intellectual and cultural history
at the beginning of the third Christian millennium that duplicates
the one two thousand years ago after Christs death and one can
well ask whether history is repeating itself. Even the issues and
positions are the same! Traditional believers line up with Saint
Peter and Saint Paul stridently defending the Bibles literal truth;
in their corner is Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ.
Agnostics, when they can be bothered, would prefer to line up
with Mary Magdalene and the Gnostics; in their corner is The
Da Vinci Code, insidiously re-imagining all this fabulous raw
material so as to bind us in an altogether different human chain.

There is a mainstream Christian message in The Lord of the

Rings: The Return of the King, where director Peter Jackson is
faithful to the Tolkien novel. He fails, deliberately it would
seem, to shape it into a Christian fundamentalist message, but
the material was there for him to draw on. Imagine Aragorn as
the warrior king of the fundamentalist Christians, wreaking
vengeance on the unbelievers, as in the apocalyptic Left Behind
novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. One does not have
to be a believer to want occasionally to participate
enthusiastically in Christian fables like these. That said, as
heads begin flying through the air in The Return of the King,
one could be forgiven for muttering, arent Orcs people too?
Vengeance is yours, saith the Lord but how many invading
infidels needed to be decapitated? Gaza anyone? The killing
did not hurt the film at the box office, for many fundamentalist
Christians embraced the films clear message that evil must be
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destroyed. However, in thankfully minimizing Aragorns role as

The King (it is called The Return of the King after all) and
emphasizing Frodos sacrifice as the Christ figure, about good
guys triumphing over bad guys through humility and personal
struggle, the film delivers a mainstream Christian message.

The agnostic vision is at its best in Philip Pullmans trilogy His

Dark Materials, which amounts to a major attack on
Catholicism, where it's Adam and Eve without Original Sin. In
the Harry Potter novels of J.K. Rowling, Christianity and other
world religions largely are banished until Deathly Hallows, with
its hints of Christian resurrection, revealing at last that Rowling
herself is a Church of Scotland believer. The dark satire of the
Church-like Ministry of Magic and the vicious Inquisitor of
Order of the Phoenix clearly are a Protestant vision. Rowling's
brilliance lies in her belief that Evil destroys itself and Good lies
in the renunciation of power. Harry didn't kill Voldemort; he
killed himself. There is a similar dark irony at work in George
Lucas films: the Jedi may be the good guys in Star Wars but
they are the hated Republican police in The Phantom Menace
and The Attack of the Clones

Two thousand years ago the Roman Empire totally dominated

the Mediterranean world, adopting Christianity since it couldnt
defeat it. The Empire succumbed eventually and repeatedly to
barbarian invasions from the north and the east, but the
Church of Rome survived. And then we had the Dark Ages -
a ridiculous term coined by believers in Church and Empire
when it was also a necessary process of decentralization and
dispersal that allowed for different views and peoples to
flourish. (Academics now use the dubious term Late Antiquity
 138

instead.) It also saw the rise of an Islamic Empire that stretched

from Morocco to India. Will the result be similar this time
around when American and European cultures mount new
crusades against resurgent Islam, when new empires like China,
India and Brazil are on the rise, and when there is a new influx
of migrants from Latin America, Eastern Europe, North Africa
and elsewhere that is radically reshaping demographics?

Agnostics and believers will continue to fight bitterly over this.

Agnostics have been forced into the unenviable position of
promoting restraint and internationalism, lining up with George
Lucas Rebels, with Harry Potter, with the Reformation, with the
dispersal of power and knowledge. No wonder they are casting
around for alternatives. Complexity, like the United Nations, is
its own worst enemy. Like Rome before it, the West must
decide whether it believes in Fortress America and Fortress
Europe or whether it should adopt a periodic flexibility and
openness to change. Flexibility, like agnosticism, doesnt make
for a good bedtime story but its clearly the better way to go.
Unfortunately, like Rome and the Holy Roman Empire before it,
like Austria before World War I and Germany after it, the West
for the moment has chosen the clarity of the Dark Side,
Rowling's Dark Mark and Batman: The Dark Knight, and it has
repeated the same mistakes.

Believers insist on simple truths. They have lined up with

Empire, Authority and the forces of Law and Order, with taking
the fight to Afghanistan, Chechnya, Palestine, Iraq and Iran and
leaving them in ruins if necessary, for isnt that what past
empires have done? George W. Bushs presidency was always
about stabilizing the Middle East and nation-building in Iraq,
 139

even if the reverse turned out to be true. Millions of Americans

loved their warrior president for his crusades just as the Romans
loved their warrior Emperors. Today, many Americans who do
not consider themselves religious will not tire of these wars until
the bloodshed has killed millions more. Although it is the war
on terrorism that is fundamentalist, rather than them, if they buy
into it, then they too become fundamentalists.

George Bushs war was a crusade because that is how it was

perceived outside the West, where they make less and less
distinction between Christian, Jew and Agnostic, foreign aid
workers and foreign mercenaries. Just as the Biblical Christians
perceived Imperial Rome as the Whore of Babylon, and the
Protestant Reformation identified the Pope in Rome as the
Whore of Babylon, so too the America of George Bush came to
be perceived as the new Whore in Babylon.

Dreaming the Virgin Mary

Theodora and the Architecture of the Divine
Sailing to Byzantium
The Divine Elevator
Dreaming the Virgin Mary
The Architecture of the Divine
The Emerald Tablet
The Cathars
Diva
bluegoldwhiteredgreen
 140

Once upon a time, you could snare a man using binding spells
and astrology. You inflamed his heart, his soul, his liver and his
spirit. You invoked an angel to seize him and bind him and you
made him your slave. You wrote out the spell, you spoke it
aloud and sealed it with a kiss. When Venus was in the House of
Aries, you stripped before him and became his harlot. Or
perhaps you waited for the conjunction of Mars, Mercury and
the Moon in Pisces, the Christian sign.

Pisces

Things are so different these days.

When she was a child, when dreams visited her, those night
visitors fluid and mysterious, they slipped through the opening
and closing of the sea gates. She dreamt she was in a chain of
dreamers and so she wondered, as she walked the city walls,
whether she too was being dreamed.

We are borne away on the ebb tide by a male God, by Christ

who is our Savior and our guide into the afterlife. But the first
principle is that the Virgin Mary comes before the Son. We enter
this life with a woman, with Mary, the Stella Maris, rolling in
from stormy seas on our half-shells, our half-moons, and it is
Mary who carries us to Jesus at the end. Women are the Alpha
and the Omega Amen.

Sailing to Byzantium
 141

If the Virgin Mary had not existed, it would have been necessary
to invent her...

With the sky darkening under smoke, a galley slid out to sea and
the young woman on the deck looked back at the land, fading
beyond the wake. In the old city the cleansing of the churches
and monasteries was underway by Paul the Jew. Forget the
past. It is always behind you. Constantinople lay ahead and a
rendezvous with the Demon King, the proud and moody figure
who now disturbed her dreams at night, those nights when she
was with a man or when she awakened to rock the baby to sleep.
A squall washed over the boat and Theodora embraced it as the
rain came down. She was going home. She was 25 years old,
still beautiful, a woman with a colorful past

The reputation was all true of course. When she was 15 she had
made her name in Constantinople with her rendition of Leda and
the Swan, stripping off her clothes and lying down before her
audience. A sacrifice and an invitation. Dozens of men
followed.

In Alexandria and Antioch she saw that there was more to life
than pornea and akatharsia. Become a spy for the Emperor, said
a friend. Believe in Christ as her lord and savior, said another.
Study the Hermetica and Hermes Trismegistus warned a third.
Theodora didnt think so. Why should these male figures
relieve her new craving any better than the old ones? Her
craving drew her to the Anti-Christ in her dreams for, when you
got right down to it, weren't dreams more revealing than politics
or religion?
 142

Theodora was still a pagan. She believed in the stars and the
moon above Byzantium. She believed that whatever happened in
the Heavens was reflected down here on earth. She believed in
Dame Fortune and in the gods of the Hippodrome. Life was
governed by the four chariot-racing factions: the Reds, Whites,
Blues and Greens. Life had always been about color and the
pageantry of the senses and the Hippodrome was its grand
cathedral, where Fate ruled and emperors stumbled.

Still, nowadays the 12 Zodiac signs were being pushed aside by

the 12 Apostles - Christianity couldn't be ignored. In the
Hippodrome the Orthodox now supported the Blues and the
Monophysites supported the Greens and it was difficult to avoid
taking sides (Theodora had ties with the Blues).

But what place was there for women in all this? The patriarchs
said that women could not worship at the altar. God forbid they
should be menstruating. Eves sin must be atoned for by women,
they said, and their sacrifice must be the wrenching pain of
childbirth. Men were not called upon to sacrifice equally, and if
Jesus experienced such pain when he was sacrificed upon the
Cross, wasnt that just another excuse for letting men off the
hook? She had sacrificed her own son by leaving him in
Alexandria in the care of Patriarch Timothy. That the Virgin
Mary had sacrificed her own Son in the same way was not
enough. This masculine theology left no place for women
except martyrdom.

Theodora was fascinated by the central question of the age: was

Jesus human or divine? In the West he was human; in the East
he was Divine. Heresies both. But in Constantinople he was
 143

both. Perhaps everyone, including Jesus, had both divine and

human natures -- didnt every one of Gods creatures? Surely
that allowed a place for women, for weren't women human and
divine too and, if that were so, then surely God was both male
and female...

The Divine Elevator

For centuries the churches of Sophia and the Virgin Mary stood
on opposite sides of the Old City of Constantinople...

The Virgin Mary's church was a basilica along the Golden Horn
just outside the old city's western walls: St. Mary of Blachernae.
Inside St. Mary of Blachernae were its sacred springs, where
emperors bathed and washed away the sins of Eve. Water...

blue

Across Istanbul on its ocean side stands the Hagia Sophia (or
Aya Sofya), which Justinian and Theodora built between 532
and 537. Light poured in from the high windows and reflected
off the walls and colored marble. From ancient times, the sun's
rays expressed the wisdom of God and one contemporary
observer likened the Hagia Sophia to being inside a spiritual
lighthouse (a pharos). Another said the golden dome was
suspended from Heaven by a golden chain. The effect was
deeply spiritual, he said, a sense of floating weightlessly
between Heaven and Earth, embodying both, and situated
between this world and the next. The church contained the entire
universe, in all its beauty and its symmetry, West and East, and
 144

Christ and the saints were present among them, for really this
was Heaven on Earth. Bathed in its radiance, the candles, the
singing, the incense, the icons, worshippers experienced the holy
Sophia decending from the Vault of Heaven like a white dove
(Christ was conceived via a white dove) and so they too could
dream of ascending to Heaven with her. Light...

gold

For all you read that Sophia is not a woman's name and that it
means "wisdom," it has always carried strong feminine
associations in Greek and Gnostic thought. Indeed divine
wisdom was associated with women well before the ancient
Greek oracles and Old Testament Judaism (the Shekhinah). But
the Church began to absorb Sophia into Jesus, pushing away the
ancient feminine goddess wisdom she represented.

Mary or Sophia? Baptism or Resurrection? Birth or death?

Water or light? The Moon or the Sun?

Moon Sun

In Justinian's eyes, Sophia was more interesting than the Virgin

Mary. To him the Sophia was Christ and Christ was an aspect of
God's divine light. Justinian was often to be seen in the Hagia
Sophia at night, hoping to see angels. He never slept those years.
He would leave his body behind in bed to keep his wife
company, while his head prowled the Hagia Sophia. They never
had any children but then Theodora was known to support
abortion.
 145

Dreaming the Virgin Mary

How is it that with the rapid ascendancy of the Virgin Mary

during the early Christian centuries that she came to dominate
Jesus physically in mosaics and icons? How did Mary become
the all-powerful Mother, while Jesus shrank to a small child in
her arms?

In one sense the answer is obvious: Jesus himself could not be

shown upon the cross. In another sense, apocryphal literature,
the devotions of ordinary people and powerful Byzantine
empresses all played a role here.

Many centuries earlier, there had been a miracle! Mary's house

was found at Ephesus. Byzantine women of all classes rushed to
embrace her, as they embraced Artemis before her. Some of the
men, St. Ambrose, for example, seized on her virginity and
humility to elevate male monasticism and celibacy over the
heads of the women, who after all could not be expected to
remain humble virgins (Eve and all that...). This had the desired
effect of pushing women back into their proper place: marriage
and motherhood. The patriarchs increasingly separated the
Virgin Mary from real women, putting her out of reach with the
miraculous notion of "perpetual virginity." It was a dangerous
idea though: by the Council of Ephesus in 431, at the instigation
of the Empress Pulcheria, who claimed to be a virgin herself, the
Virgin Mary became no less than the Mother of God, the
Theotokos. Could Theodora build on this and reclaim
motherhood, not just virginity, by making it divine too? Joseph,
 146

her husband, must disappear of course and Jesus must become a

small child.

Virgo

Sophia and the ancient goddess wisdom associated with her had
been being pushed aside already, her roles usurped by Christ, the
Son of God, the Logos, the Word. If once she had been those
emanations of light that created the universe and the life beating
in every human being, now Sophia was no more than a Holy
Ghost found in the writings of the Gnostics.

The Virgin Mary, on the other hand, was a star rising above the
waves like Aphrodite before her. Queen of the Seas, Queen of
the Heavens, Queen of the Virgins: the Cult of the Virgin Mary.

Theodora had seen images of Isis nursing Horus in Egypt. There

was a similar icon of Mary and Jesus in Constantinople that had
been painted by Saint Luke (and donated by Pulcheria). Such
images, Theodora decided, were the most powerful that ever
existed and so she lobbied for their display in churches and the
fortified monasteries around the scattered empire. You can still
see some of those icons today, for example at St. Catherine's
monastery in Sinai. The Virgin Mary also must dominate
religious icons in private homes and her power must be
grounded in scripture:

Revelation 12:1, "A great sign appeared in the heavens; a

woman clothed in the sun, and the moon beneath her feet; and
on her head a crown of 12 stars."
 147

Revelation 12, the 12 stars, the 12 tribes of Israel... It happened

over many centuries, even before Theodora accelerated it. The
Virgin Mary became a transcendent figure, leaving behind her
baptismal role and becoming associated not just with the earth
and the seas, the fertility of the crops and rain from the sky, the
roses and lilies, with beginnings. She came to be associated too
with endings, with salvation. Now she offered something for
everyone. If the Annunciation was the story of how the Virgin
conceived Christ with light that did not rupture her body, then
the Assumption was the story of her going into the light at the
end of days. For many she would become the Gate to Heaven
itself, even the Co-Redeemer. Other goddesses would no longer
matter. From birth and baptism, she had become death and
resurrection. Moon and Sun. Water and Light...

The Architecture of the Divine

Religious architecture is meant to illustrate the divine. The

divine itself is invisible and so the invisible is at least as
important as the visible. Solomon's temple inspired the Jews, the
Pantheon inspired the Romans, the Hagia Sophia inspired the
Byzantine Orthodox (and the Dome of the Rock and St. Mark's
in Venice) and St. Peter's in Rome inspired Roman Catholics.
There is majesty in the invisible. God the Architect.

Abbot Suger of St. Denis claimed that his cathedral (consecrated

in 1144) was "some strange region of the universe which neither
exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity
of Heaven." He was echoing the Byzantines, for in the great
Gothic cathedrals of Western Europe, colors reflected spiritual
 148

states and the colors in the stained glass were designed to show
the light of God, in the reds and the blues, the greens and the
whites. They were the windows of Heaven.

When you are inside a great Gothic cathedral looking up at the

pointed rib vault, Mary's ribs, then it is not only to feel the
ascent of the soul to God, but to feel the power of the Virgin
Mary to humble you, to press you down upon the stone floor.
The light never shines so brightly at floor level in Chartres or
Reims or St. Denis. This architecture is designed to overwhelm
you and drown you at the bottom of the pool. There is no water
in here, but Chartres was built on the site of a sacred spring to a
pagan goddess (as was Lourdes). The Virgin Mary is
everywhere: the madonna ascending behind the altar, the Dark
Madonnas in and above the crypt, the Sancta Camisia cloth, the
labyrinth and the rose-patterned stained glass windows. By
1200, Mary had become more powerful than Jesus, a stern
vision of stone, water and light, guarded by fierce gargoyles, but
real religious women were becoming more marginalized here
than ever.

There was an alternative to all this...

The Emerald Tablet

In Alexandria, Theodora may have been acquainted with the

mysterious text known as The Emerald Tablet. Even as Justinian
persecuted pagans, closed the School of Athens and rededicated
Isis' Temple at Philae to Mary, the Hermetic texts and astrology
persisted among the people and the elites just as they do today.
 149

The Emerald Tablet had a significant impact on the Islamic

world and medieval Europe. It may be brief (read it here), but it
gives us the pagan version of creation, how all things below
reflect those in the Heavens and vice versa. The macrocosm and
the microcosm. Such ideas were compatible with Christian
beliefs: the idea that the heavens were a circle overhead in
which planets and stars revolved just meant they were placed
there by God. In many Gothic churches Zodiac signs appear in
the windows or on the floor, including Chartres, Vzelay and
Canterbury. But in another sense they were not compatible: in
Christian theology, this world was inferior to Heaven's and you
had to be "saved" to go there and most people got there only via
the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

In keeping with the idea that this world was inferior, many
Christians believed that this world was just a dream, an illusion,
and God was to be seen only in occasional mysterious figures of
light visiting the earth... Angels. Many pagans agreed with this
but they were more interested in the way the sun and the moon
held sway over human bodies filled with fluids, in the tides of
the sea rising and falling and the waxing and waning of the
moon, the flooding of the Nile, and so too the womb, the breast,
the penis, menstruation and ejaculation... Physics. The old
Hermetic texts told of Isis' tears, of blood and roses, of Hathor,
the cow-goddess of the Milky Way. These were the colors of the
life force, the food of the womb. White + Red transmuted into
symbol.
 150

Early Christians had to adapt to this, of course, hence the

Eucharist (White + Red). But by medieval times there was a
twist: instead of Jesus' body it was the white milk from Mary's
virgin breasts and the red blood of the crucified Christ. It was
said that Saint Dominic found grace in a cave near Toulouse
when he drank Mary's breast milk as he was given the rosary. St.
Bernard of Clairvaux said he was sprayed with her breast milk.
Christ's blood was detected in bloodstones, the red speckling the
green. More amazing miracles!

If White was the color of grace, Red was the color of love, of
passion, of Mary the red rose, of art and magic. Fire...

red

Fire was the key for the alchemists too as they labored over their
furnaces and flasks. The Philosopher's Stone was red like a ruby.
But what then were the key ingredients to produce it? Some
worked with metals, changing them from black to white to gold
to red, or so they said, while others saw that human life was
produced in a woman's womb after all, just like Jesus was, so
what about milk and blood? Semen and menstrual blood were
white and red. Could they play a role? Perhaps the fiery phoenix
mattered less than the white dove - the symbol of Venus - was it
semen? Some alchemists donated their own semen and the
married ones enlisted their wives for the menstrual blood. But
surely Mary couldn't breast feed unless she menstruated? And
did semen inherently contain Original Sin? Problems,
problems... Those alchemists worked their way into a dead end.
Perhaps green was better than red?
 151

The Emerald Tablet wasn't about extracting gold from lead

really. It was about extracting the life force, the spirit, the divine
spark, from the physical body. Pure essence... The metaphor was
a precious jewel, an emerald, for green was the color of life.
Earth...

green

Water + Earth + Fire + Air/Light

Blue + Green + Red + White/Gold

The four signs.

Five if you split Air/Light into two, as the Neo-Platonists and

alchemists did, hence the Ether, the Quintessence, the Fifth
Element, different from Air. Could it be called "Light"?
Alchemist and scientist Robert Fludd (early 17th C) didn't think
so; he said that ether was "subtler than light." Echoes here of the
Sophia... Some associated it with magic, with Hermes, with Art,
the creative instinct...

There was really a sixth element too. Gothic cathedrals were all
about freezing Time... Christian theologians understood this,
which is why the great Gothic cathedrals are really visions of
order placed on what seems like the chaos of daily life.

There was one group who rejected all this while they shared the
passion for mysticism and a relationship with God.
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The Cathars

This world is a dream. Satan made our evil, fallen world and he
is abroad in the land. He claims he is God and where is the real
God anyway? In a parallel world of Light, through the looking
glass. There is no resurrection of the body for us to look forward
to. If our souls fail to escape the dark snares of the material
world, we will be reincarnated back into it. Jesus and Mary
cannot save us. They are not human anyway - they are angels,
mere illusions of God, sent to warn us of Satan's dominion
among us.

Cancer

Good and evil are locked eternally in a cosmic circle and we are
all celestial spirits traveling through space and time. If we hope
for salvation we must refuse meat, refuse sex, refuse to build
churches, refuse Baptism by water and accept the invisible
world of the Light.

But hardly anyone did... The population of the Cathar areas in

Languedoc skyrocketed and the Pope was not amused.

The horrific massacres of the Cathars at Bziers (1209) through

Montsgur (1243-44) and the Terror of the Inquisition occurred
in conjunction with the triumph of the Virgin Mary at Chartres
Cathedral (built 1194-1223), and the time when the Holy Grail
legend flourished (1180-1240), the time of chivalry and the
troubadours, the Knights Templar and the Crusades. This was an
astonishing astrological and cultural collision: the diverging
 153

strains of Catholicism tearing each other apart between the twin

conjunctions of Uranus and Neptune.

Uranus Neptune

The Cathars, or Albigensians, like the Bogomils in the East,

refused the transcendent Virgin Mary of the Church of Rome
("the mother of fornication"). They refused her advocates Saint
Bernard and Saint Dominic: after all, hadn't the Virgin Mary
tried to snare Jesus in material form in her womb? They even
saw Catholic priests taking concubines in their villages. But
today most people who are interested in the Cathars focus on the
Cathar monks (the "perfecti") as if they were Grail heroes. As
with the growth of Christian monasticism a millenium before,
those austere Cathar elites who were opposed to sexuality were
largely male and just as patriarchal in their beliefs as the
Catholic Church they professed to despise. No matter that
women technically were allowed to become "perfecta," and
many did, the most famous being Esclarmonde de Foix; they
remained secondary to the men.

If there is any silver lining here, for the ordinary people of the
Cathar lands, and especially for the women, the Virgin Mary
was in fact worshipped and she was (and is) the Dark Madonnas
of southern France and northern Spain and she summoned up all
the ancient pagan fertility beliefs of the earth they lived upon.
This Virgin Mary was the people's goddess and the irony of the
Cathar massacres is that this Dark Mary survived.

Diva
 154

Isn't this the paradox of any good idea? The Virgin Mary
became an institution of power and control, a diva. By the 16th
century her cult was out of control, although this may have
helped her pull off the destruction of the Turkish navy at
Lepanto in 1571.

Once upon a time, religions used to create enchanted worlds.

Catholicism may not have satisfied the Cathars but it has its
relics and holy water, stained glass windows and rosary beads...
The centuries have passed and for the secular these icons have
become cliches. But science has no heroes or heroines. It's
impersonal. Ghosts in the machine. Art has partly picked up the
slack, but how many films can you name that celebrate the
Goddess or the Virgin Mary these days?

Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva (1981) is one of those films. It is

shaped to resemble a dream where everything is enchanted: it is
shot in blue, because that is the color of dreams and Beineix has
reflections pop up in glass counters or in dark sunglasses or
Citroen headlamps. Color symbolism is as crucial as
Catholicism and the sun and moon. Diva is dreaming the Virgin
Mary...

Jules is a young Parisian messenger boy with wings on his crash

helmet instead of his feet. He is Hermes the likable thief, and he
"steals" the voice of a beautiful black opera singer, by making a
pirate recording of her in concert. He knows she would never
permit this, because she regards any form of recording as a form
of "rape."
 155

Mercury

The thief has played a colorful role in mythology from

Prometheus on. This kind of Art - essentially piracy -
annihilates. It leads to chaos. On the other hand, without Hermes
the thief there would be no spread of technological advances or
artistic expression. It is a conflict that can be resolved only
through the magical powers of Art alchemy really -
represented in Diva by the magician Gorodish, and friend Alba.
He brings order to chaos, with his beautiful white Citroens, his
jigsaw and wave machine, and the enchanted castle at the
lighthouse. She is a 14-year-old Vietnamese Ariel who roller
skates in glossy mini-skirt and steals jazz records. Ironically,
the real heavies claim to believe in order: "Order is all that
counts," but it is an authoritarian interpretation more in line with
their other comments: "I hate Beethoven I hate elevators I
hate cars," which are a running joke.

The diva remains an inspiring figure even as she is clearly a

lonely one. This is the fate of the Virgin Mary of today, Mater
Dolorosa, undermined by Vatican II, pushed aside by feminism
and The Da Vinci Code's upstart Mary Magdalene, and ignored
by the many. Mary is joining the fallen world of the Cathars.

Aquarius

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world

without end. Amen.
 156

Spinster
Why Jane Austen Never Married
On This Page:
She has not met the right person Cassandra Austen
Temperamentally unsuited to marriage Harris Bigg-Wither
Spinster Jane Austen
What would Emma have said?

Once upon a time the famous writer known as Jane Austen

decided not to get married. Not a vital issue in this day and age
perhaps, but Austen was one of the finest novelists of the
English language and all her heroines end up safely in the arms
of a husband by the final chapter. Austen was a highly
intelligent woman and she wasnt bad looking, so why did
things turn out so differently in her own life? We know that she
received a marriage proposal from a gentleman named Harris
Bigg-Wither toward the end of 1802, that she accepted, and that
the following morning she told Harris that she had changed her
mind. Why?

Many have speculated about Austens reasons but no one knows

for sure since she never wrote about them. Or did she? At the
time, Jane was 27, Harris 21 and about to become a clergyman.
Perhaps his age or his profession was an issue? He was a family
friend from the neighborhood she loved, and his sisters were
close friends -- it could have been a good match, given her
choices. But she turned him down flat and one wonders whether
there were other factors at work. In 1995 allegations surfaced
that Austen was a lesbian and involved in an incestuous
 157

relationship with her older sister Cassandra. While this is a

colorful theory, it arose out of a misunderstanding of an
academic paper on Austen, and it points instead to our own
cultures thirst for scandalous sexual fables. It points to exotic
explanations tailored to suit a sexual or political agenda.
Perhaps it never occurred to people that in those days sisters
often shared a bed? Hollywood and the British film and
television industry also leapt into the fray with a seemingly
endless stream of adaptations of most of her novels, even
Northanger Abbey. Austen's fans are writing handbooks,
cookbooks, sequels and retellings... Melodramatic as all this
sounds, the most interesting question that remains is: Why did
Austen decide against marrying Harris?

The year was 1802, the dawning of a new century and England
was at war. Across the English Channel, Bonaparte had
Europe on the run and Trafalgar and Austerlitz were just around
the corner. In Germany Romanticism was awakening a national
identity. Goethe was at home in Weimar working on Faust
while Beethoven was in Vienna writing the anguished diary
entry known as the Heiligenstadt Testament in which he comes
to terms with his increasing deafness and the power of music to
move the soul. Ireland was restive after being forcibly united
with Britain and the first steamship was traversing the Clyde in
Scotland. In the Americas Jefferson was President of a rapidly
expanding and newly independent United States. John Wilkes
and Casanova were dead; George Sand would not be born until
1804 and Charlotte Bront would not be born until 1816, the
year before Austen died. Austen herself had completed several
novels already but the first would not be published until 1811.
So why did she never marry?
 158

SHE HAS NOT MET THE RIGHT PERSON

Cassandra and Jane Austen were seeing out the end of the year
1802. They had been shuttling around the various members of
their extended family, scattered along the south coast of
England. If Napoleon had ever wished to invade, he would have
run into the Austen women ready to repel the French boarders.
The sisters found themselves, after a time, back at their old
family home at Steventon in Hampshire, where their oldest
brother James and his wife Mary were now living. While there
they took the opportunity to visit their old friends the Bigg-
Withers. Out of the blue, it seemed, Harris Bigg-Wither made
his marriage proposal to Jane. She accepted with surprising
speed, but the next morning informed him that she could not go
through with it.

This startling announcement turned things upside down. Jane

and Cassandra took the Bigg-Wither carriage back to the old
house as fast as it would go, accompanied by three distraught
Bigg sisters, and there followed an emotional goodbye in the
hallway. Jane and Cassandra demanded that their brother James
take them back to Bath that very morning although they knew
this would mean he would miss his preaching the next day.
Some things are more important than keeping the local
congregation of harpies happy and so a substitute was quickly
found. They were not about to stay in that neighborhood a day
longer with Harris on the loose.

Cassandra reflected on this turn of events as they settled back

into the slow routines of Bath. She had opposed the match
 159

herself though she confessed she was no wiser on why Jane had
changed her mind. More to the point, she wondered why Jane
said yes in the first place. There were distinct advantages of
course. For one thing, Harris was a gentleman of good
character, he had solid connections, he owned property and he
had a worthy position in life. By marrying him, Jane would no
longer be a burden on their fathers limited financial resources
and she would, if anything, have been able to look after their
parents in their declining years, as well as Cassandra if she
remained unmarried, as seemed inevitable. Jane would have run
a sizable household, had children and enjoyed the genteel
country life in a location she always loved. In other words,
when she changed her mind she knew the risks. For when her
father died, they, along with her mother, would be very poorly
off. Of course there was always the possibility of a second
chance but who can say where Fate will take us?

In Cassandras view, the institution of marriage was changing to

accommodate radical new ideas like Love, Friendship, and
Passion, but it was still essentially a business arrangement.
There was nothing truly wrong with that but it did make it
harder to satisfy the romantics among them, in which Cassandra
included herself. The right person was supposed to have
property and a title and, once married, if husbands wanted to
satisfy their more basic urges, they were supposed to go to
mistresses or prostitutes. It was not a wifes responsibility
apparently. Unless they were clergymen of course. Harris
would have been a good choice from that point of view -- he
would have been faithful. However, he had a stammer, a mean
temper, he was a bit reclusive and he was not especially good
looking and his health was poor. All right, that is a lot of
 160

negatives. The fact is, Jane was not in love with him.
Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying
without Affection, she wrote to one of her nieces.

There is no doubt that Jane knew what Passion was. The

previous year she had met a young man whom Cassandra
believed had touched Janes heart. This event had taken place
over several weeks in the summer at the beach. He was
charming and handsome and Cassandra felt sure that he had
fallen in love with Jane. I believe that, if Jane ever loved, it
was this unnamed gentleman; but the acquaintance had been
short, and I am unable to say whether her feelings were of such a
nature as to affect her happiness. Cassandra recalled he too
was a clergyman and his brother was a doctor or a naval officer.
Unfortunately, a marriage proposal never came and the two
families parted with the expectation of meeting again soon.
Instead, they received a letter from his brother saying he had
died suddenly. This certainly leaves room for speculation. Was
Cassandra imagining there was more to the relationship than
there was? Had he really died or was this an excuse to extricate
him from commitments he may have made unwisely to Jane?
Whatever the explanation, we will never know, but it is fair to
assume that Jane did know what passion was and Harris Bigg-
Wither wasnt it.

No woman should ever trust that she will find Love after
marriage if it isnt there in the first place. Sadly, most young
men and women rationalize to themselves why they have ended
up married to someone they do not love and Cassandra for one
had decided she would rather avoid this foolishness. Her Father
and Mother had tried to marry her off of course. They had
 161

moved to Bath the previous year for that very reason and
Cassandra knew they quietly entertained the noble idea of
finding husbands for their wayward daughters. Cassandra and
Jane did not enjoy letting their parents down. They were both in
their late twenties and, yes, they were still available!
Unfortunately Bath had been rather short on eligible young men
this year and the sisters had had to face the fact that they were
not the best catch in town. They had very little dowry and the
few young men who had called on them seem to be unnerved by
their own lack of financial resources. Singularly lacking in
drive, they would never win any young lady of worth. Perhaps
it was just a sign of the times? All the attractive young men
were either serving in the military, or married off already, or
they were as flaky as pastries.

TEMPERAMENTALLY UNSUITED TO MARRIAGE

In Manydown, Hampshire, Harris Bigg-Wither, the rejected

suitor, had his own reasons for being disappointed. Many years
later, in reflecting on how he had almost married Miss Austen,
he might have taken consolation from the fact that she became a
cynical old maid. This was not a criticism really, at least not to
Harris, for old maids ran the country in their formidable and
quiet way and remaining single was a perfectly acceptable
lifestyle choice. But there were other reasons why he felt
relieved at his narrow escape.

Harris had made Jane a realistic and practical offer of marriage

and she had refused. He supposed this was because she thought
she could do better and that it was he who was temperamentally
unsuited to marriage. Yet it was she who suffered from a
 162

permanent distemper toward the entire enterprise. After her

death he was privileged to lay eyes on some of her old
correspondence and had stumbled across the following: So
Miss B. is actually married, but I have never seen it in the
papers; and one may as well be single if the wedding is not to be
in print. Was she serious? In another letter, she had written,
Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a
dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I
suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.

This was pretty shocking! He had tried to read her other novels
to discover further proof of this dark view of life, but he could
not say for sure what she was saying. The fact that she did not
deal with marriage or sex, but rather the prelude to the both of
them, proved how little she knew about them. Not that he felt
resentful, but the more he thought about it, the more he felt he
had narrowly escaped a life of torment, for this old maid had a
vicious sense of humor. He had dropped this offer of marriage
in her lap, and she had had the opportunity of approaching it
from a rational as well as an emotional point of view. She was
not forced into it. Perhaps he was not the ideal marriage
prospect but there was no threat of sexual intimidation or sexual
desire hanging heavy in the air between them. He recalled the
manner in which she damned every remotely passionate
encounter in her novels, and the marriages she depicted were
even more awful. He concluded that marriage simply did not
interest her personally and that she preferred womens company.
Was he being unfair? He didnt think so.

Frankly, Miss Austen could be terrifying. He knew she could be

prickly, that she did not always respect her mother as she
 163

should, and he had heard she was cruel toward her nieces.
Imagine if she had taken it out on him? Harris would never care
to be one of those people who gossiped about others, but he
wondered, if they had married, whether their first year would
have been filled with visions of her coming after him with a
carving knife? Too Gothic? In his mind the root of all this was
the constant battle between the sexes. Miss Austen liked to
point out to him that it was the men who made decisions about
womens lives and how marriage was tied up with money and
property and class. He did not accept her view that he was
conservative politically and snobbish socially. He saw things
for how they were. The country gentry to which they belonged
really the landowning class of England were Tory in their
political beliefs, and this was the bedrock on which Englands
stability rested. There would be no French Revolution here.
Harris thought women should stay out of politics, and the most
honorable profession for someone such as herself was to be
good a wife to a clergyman or a lawyer or an officer in the army
or navy, like Miss Austens own brothers. It was also clear to
him now that Miss Austen did not like the prospect of having
children. Since those events in 1802, he had gone on to marry,
and Harris and his wife planned on having as many children as
the Good Lord would grant them. He could say with certainty
that Miss Austen would never have been very successful raising
10 children -- as he and his wife would be.

Harris knew that Miss Austen had tried to keep the world from
knowing she was a novelist but word had leaked out somewhat.
What a waste of time it was writing such books! Harris did not
think Miss Austen accurately captured their lives. The novels
were stuffy; they lacked any manly virtues. Every scene seemed
 164

to take place in the drawing room and never progressed to the

bedroom (which was fine with him) or even outside the four
walls. Harris himself preferred robust adventures about the
great missionaries in Africa. Miss Charlotte Bront had Miss
Austen down right: I should hardly like to live with her ladies
and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses, she once
wrote to a friend. Miss Bront was a true Romantic of course;
she demanded some Passion in her reading. Harris could see
that Bront despised Austen and that she knew how she could
have improved on these novels, retelling them through first
person narration and injecting some real emotion. Other writers
agreed. Mr. Anthony Trollope criticized Miss Austens
characters restraint and lack of passion, for this robs the reader
of much of the charm which he has promised himself, and Mr.
Henry James wrote that her women were all Small and second-
rate minds. Miss Austen was simply incapable of the deeper
and nobler insights into human nature, especially in her men
characters. She was just too cynical. D.H. Lawrence, whose
books would otherwise have disgusted Harris, called her an old
maid, unpleasant and snobbish, while Somerset Maugham
remarked that she was the daughter of a rather dull and
perfectly respectable father, a clergyman, and a rather silly
mother. How did she come to write Pride and Prejudice? The
whole thing is a mystery. Harris agreed.

SPINSTER

Jane Austen sat at the desk in the living room of the family
home in Bath to do her writing, working quietly, methodically.
Publicly she was not known as a writer, merely an unmarried old
maid, and although she was not expecting anyone in particular
 165

to come through the door, it was still too early to let others
outside the family know of their little secret. And so she
scribbled away on her sheets of paper and hid them every time
someone came for a visit. She could always pull her letters to
the top if anyone became suspicious.

Austen recently had completed a revision of Northanger Abbey

and now she was sketching out two new novels. The first, The
Watsons, was frankly autobiographical, but eventually it would
frustrate her and she abandoned it. The other, a parody of
Gothic novels, expanded on some of the themes of her earlier
work. This time she mischievously had Harris Bigg-Wither in
mind. She would capture his moodiness and his awkwardness
around women and yet enhance his appeal a little. He would be
the master of the house but he would be unmarried, possessing a
dark secret that would be revealed near the end of the book. Her
heroine would be like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey,
poor in riches but rich in imagination, a plain Jane. The hero,
Mr. Bell, would propose to her and she would accept and then
would come the bombshell that would blow it all apart. Perhaps
the romantic couple would not end up together? Austen worked
quietly away over the next few years, reshaping her encounter
with Harris Bigg-Wither in a satiric direction, but she would not
live to see it published. Indeed the manuscript, which was
called Thornfield, disappeared in the next few years during one
of her frequent travels around the south of England. She
assumed it was lost or destroyed. In fact, her ailing father had
lent it to a clergyman colleague who claimed to know a
publisher. While her father was well-intentioned, the
manuscripts disappearance had only upset Jane. It would
 166

surface years later under another name but by then it was

completely altered.

There were other matters on her mind, however, that pushed the
lost manuscript from her mind. This had been a dangerous time
for all of the family in the aftermath of the French Revolution
and the onslaught of Bonaparte, and there were any number of
political opportunists around arguing for revolutionary change.
Even among Austens own circle, the events across the Channel
cut close to home. Everyone knew someone who had been
guillotined and for the Austens it was cousin Eliza de Feuillide,
who had lost her husband to the guillotine in 1794, leaving her
with an invalid child and little income. Every family in England
had a son in the navy or the army keeping Bonaparte in check.
What, in the end, was the value of a Revolution if everyone
ended up in a worse situation than before? The Austens
followed political events closely and everyone in the house read
and discussed Edmund Burke passionately, but they read not
only to endorse such views but to understand the times they
lived in.

Even the role of women was changing along with the times. In
the previous century, marriage had been more of a tragedy than
a comedy. Austen never felt she had been presented with
adequate choices: it was either get married or become a
governess or a teacher. Failing that, she supposed she could
have aspired upwards into high class prostitution, except she
knew she didnt have the body or the temperament or the
background for it. She was the daughter of a clergyman after
all. There was always music and the stage but for those you
needed some talent and neither meant financial security. That
 167

left marriage which, to quote someone else, was a kind of death,

the death of a womans individual worth. One could even
literally die in childbirth. Though she believed that for the sake
of peace and quiet in the home, wives should defer to their
husbands, she did not believe they should be their slaves. The
institution of marriage was essentially a materialistic
arrangement and Love played barely any part in it. She resented
the pressures, the expectations, the prejudices and the small-
mindedness that came with it. This was something new: a sense
that one need not marry at all in order to be happy. So she took
long walks, traveled constantly and wrote and wrote and wrote.

What was also new, what gave her pride and pleasure, was the
growing assertiveness of Englishwomen, who were starting their
own quiet English Revolution. Intuitively, Austen had rejected
Harris Bigg-Withers marriage proposal because she had always
received enough emotional support from the company of other
women, particularly her sister Cassandra, but also her mother
and her friends. This gave her a freedom that was (or is) never
understood or appreciated by those who turn up their noses at
sisterhood and spinsterhood. This new freedom gave her the
privacy she needed to write and it was her writing that gave her
the emotional expression she felt she needed. Who needs a
husband for that? If she were married she would be expected to
run a household, bear a dozen children and then raise them. She
would have no privacy, no time to write and without a doubt no
imagination left. It would have destroyed her. Because her
father was a clergyman she had been luckier than most in having
the advantages of a library, an important factor when women
were otherwise disadvantaged by being prevented from studying
at university, but it was the company of women that gave her a
 168

diverse group of characters on whom she could test her

storylines and from whom she could derive a steady supply of
raw material.

Even after she was published, Austen always considered her

privacy to be paramount. For this reason she used the
pseudonym A Lady. She was content to leave it to wealthy
women to worry about publishing their letters and diaries under
their own names if they dared (they usually opted to destroy
them). But Austen did not have the appetite to cope with the
hostility of her critics. There are always going to be those who
have absolutely no idea what you are saying and who proceed to
tell everyone in their reviews how they would have written the
book. Austen suspected the real reason she upset so many of
them was that she did not take the follies of her life and times
seriously enough. Irony is indeed a much misunderstood writing
style. She was also irritated by the ugly class snobbery where
everyone and everything was rated for its value. Even women
were rated purely in terms of their conjugal and maternal roles.
It was the same viciousness directed against spinsters. Even
the word itself conjured up visions of her spinning thread rather
than writing, yet she also knew it was being a spinster that kept
her mind sharp. It was being a spinster that validated her life
experiences. It allowed her to be the spectator, the outsider
looking in, and it amused her that the prevailing assumption was
that she was only of value to society if she had children.
Women with children seemed to be able to talk about nothing
else and, in her own heart, Austen knew she was not fond of
children. Indeed, her novels were her children.

WHAT WOULD EMMA HAVE SAID?

 169

What would Emma have said? She would have said, Reader,
she did not marry him! She would have said that Jane made
the right choice this time, that marriage proposals are the most
critical moments in Janes novels and that not everyone says yes
the first time, for very good reason. In fact, Janes novels are
about first impressions and second chances, the twin anchors
that steadied her own short life.

Take Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennet discovers that first

impressions can be misleading. She rejects her man, Darcy,
when she wrongly judges his character. It is only later, when
she realizes he is perfect for her, that she accepts his offer of
marriage. For Emma, the moral of Elizabeths story, was that
prejudging a potential lover allows pride and prejudice to get in
the way. The fact is, we never know to whom we are truly
suited until the decision is made and the deed is long done.
Married couples can grow together or grow apart; it can go
either way. The odds are about the same as gambling. Jane
realized this when she accepted Harris offer but she decided her
first impressions, of the match, if not of his character, were
right. Her pride and prejudice asserted themselves during the
night. Was she right to call it off? Emma thought so. Why
marry for the wrong reasons? Of course, marriage to Harris may
not have been so bad. Life takes us all in strange directions and
who is to say that life with Harris would have been so
suffocating? One of Janes other characters, Charlotte Lucas
(whom hardly anyone saw again once she got married) accepted
an offer very similar to the one Jane turned down and she didnt
change her mind. But then Charlotte was a practical girl; she
 170

understood that marriage was more important than the man.

Obviously Jane felt differently.

Fanny Price of Mansfield Park turns Henry Crawford down flat,

much to the surprise of her family. But Emma thought that was
a smart move because Henry was infinitely unreliable. Fanny
goes on to marry someone else for love -- the clergyman
Edmund Bertram -- and she gets to live at Mansfield. Evidently
Fanny knew what she was doing. If Jane never married, then
its fair to say that unlike Fanny, she never found a man who
was smart enough for her. Certainly Harris did not match up.
Emma considered this a significant point. Many women choose
not to marry although they have their chances. Some, once
divorced, do not remarry. Why do they hold back, despite the
pressure they undoubtedly feel? Is it really for lack of choices?
It isnt because they are cynical about men (which they are) and
it isnt about sex. It has more to do with a desire to remain
solitary because the life of the mind can be satisfied in other
ways. It involves a choice an honorable choice. It means
protecting oneself from the messy entanglements of love and
romance, which can take up far too much time and energy.

Emma herself was interested in those messy entanglements, of

course, and she ended up marrying for love. She had that
second chance after failing in all her own marriage-making. She
was no fool though: A woman is not to marry a man merely
because she is asked, or because he is attached to her... It is
always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever
refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to
be ready for anybody who asks her. Was that what Harris
Bigg-Wither was thinking when he proposed to Jane? Did he
 171

think she should have been grateful for his offer of marriage and
accepted it?

Persuasion is the great novel of second chances, the second

chances that Jane herself would never have. Its principal
character Anne Elliott was 27 when her former lover, Captain
Wentworth, returned. Seven years earlier, Annes family had
dissuaded her from marrying him because he had no fortune.
She was desperately in love with him, but she was overruled.
Elopement was not an option. When he returned the second
time, with a fortune in hand, her family were relieved to put
aside their visions of Anne in spinsterhood and so the lovers
were reconciled. The money no longer really mattered. Emma
felt a twinge of jealousy because Anne was the first of Janes
heroines not to accept a marriage proposal based on property.
Anne is introduced to a couple, the Crofts, whose great marriage
is based on mutual friendship and respect, not on rigid social
roles that humiliated women. Jane may have felt the same way
about her parents apparently successful marriage. But she
could never have settled for a marriage that was defined by a set
of principles she thought was obsolete.

Emma was no intellectual but she could see that their world was
undergoing radical changes. Those genteel country houses and
villages they had grown up in were being overrun by the modern
industrial age, with factories, roads, canals encircling them and
dividing them. Emma could see that traditional marriage values
were being overrun in much the same way. If all Janes
heroines ended up married by the end of their books, then it was
also true that many women did not, including Jane herself, and
even in the novels, Jane could not guarantee that her characters
 172

marriages were going to work out anyway. Was marriage really

that essential? Leave it to the Romantics that followed Jane
Austen to abolish irony and agonize instead over the personal
crises of their central characters rather than whether they ought
to get married.

Emma knew instinctively that Jane knew what she was doing
when she rejected Harris Bigg-Wither that morning in 1802.
For Emma knew that Jane did not need to marry him. She
would come to terms with remaining a spinster, even if at times
it made her feel like burning the house down. There were times
though when she wondered about her lost manuscript from that
unsettled time in her life between 1802 and 1805, when Harris
proposed to her and when she lost her Gothic novel about the
young Jane Eyre.

Precious Bodily Fluids

Shakespeare's Worst Italian Plays
Romeo and Juliet
Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
Once upon a time, Italy had the most advanced civilization in
Europe. During the Renaissance it was common for events there
to make their way into literature and, from there, into other
countries' literatures. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, for
example, was based on an Italian poem and, while he made up
certain characters like Mercutio, he had other Italian sources to
draw on.
 173

This is one of them. On the evening of 3 July, 1582, in Mantua,

a young Scotsman named James Crichton left the house of a
woman and stepped into the street and was set upon
immediately. Some say that what happened next was just a
drunken brawl that got out of hand. Others say that Crichton and
his friend drove off their assailants. There are those who say that
when the last man removed his mask, he revealed himself as
Prince Vincenzo Gonzaga, the 19-year-old son of Crichtons
patron, the Duke of Mantua.

On seeing Vincenzo, Crichton dropped to one knee and,

following the codes of courtesy, presented his sword, hilt first,
to the Prince. Vincenzo took the sword and ran Crichton through
the heart.

blood-stain

Crichton was only 21. Famous throughout Europe for his

intelligence, his good looks and his fighting skills, he had
challenged the intellectuals of Paris, Genoa, Padua and Venice
to debate and defeated them. He had challenged a man who had
killed three of the finest swordsmen of Mantua, dispatched him
and distributed the prize money among the families of the
victims. It was for these reasons Crichton had been invited to
stay in Mantua, the city of Virgil, to tutor the Duke's son.

Now he was dead. His body was examined by officials and

hurriedly placed in a tarred coffin and buried in the church of
Santi Simone e Giuda on the via Domenico Fernelli. (Or so it
was said: a few years later, new poems from Crichton turned up
in Milan and rumors spread that he had faked his death.) Back in
 174

Mantua, Prince Vincenzo apologized to his angry father, but he

was exonerated because his sword was judged to have been
shorter than Crichton's. Perhaps it had been an accidental
stabbing? The Prince went on to become the Duke of Mantua
and Monferrato and his court was filled with music, art and
beautiful women. Crichton's murder would be forgotten.

Scottish-flag

Not in Scotland. One of those Scots, the supremely gifted Sir

Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, would claim, more than 70 years
later, that Shakespeare had Crichton and the Duke in mind when
he created the duel between Romeo, Mercutio and Tybalt. Not
only that, he said, when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, he chose to
call the-play-within-the-play "The Murder of Gonzago," as an
ironic riposte to Vincenzo Gonzaga. (Verdi would tackle the
subject too, in Rigoletto, in which the Duke of Mantua is said to
be based on Vincenzo.)

Urquhart reveals in his book Elixir of Eternal Life (1651) that

Shakespeare himself was in Mantua during the so-called "lost
years" and that he discovered the truth of Crichton's murder.
This is much debated in academia, of course, for we know that
travel to Europe was effectively banned at the time, but
Urquhart puts to an end all those old wives' tales about how
other people really wrote Shakespeare. If it were true, he says,
why didn't someone expose it earlier? Urquhart goes on to
reveal how Shakespeare revised his plays constantly. Indeed,
Shakespeare was writing ur-ly versions of Romeo and Juliet,
Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello in the late 1580's and this was
well known in Italy during the decade that followed. It did not
 175

make Shakespeare popular with the Italians and so they ignored

him.

This then is the story of Shakespeare's worst Italian plays.

Verona

Romeo and Juliet: the Shakespeare version

Romeo and Juliet is, above all, a work of anti-Italian

propaganda, written to belittle the royal family of Mantua and
the role of the Code Duello in Italian society. It is by an
Englishman who appears never to have used his own sword,
even in anger. We know from agents in London that the man has
a sword. Why has he never used it? Scholars, of course, seem to
think that duels are beneath them, believing that men who wear
rapiers should be afraid of goosequills. This is an amusing folly
that Shakespeare embraced, whereas gentlemen like Edward de
Vere (and even Ben Jonson) did not.

Consider how the play unfolds. At the beginning, Shakespeare

stages a common street brawl and follows this up with Mercutio
ridiculing duels as the idle activities of young hotheads - The
pox of such antic, lisping, affecting fantasticoes. Clearly these
young men do not follow the Code and whether Shakespeare
understands this is unclear. Why though does he have Mercutio
contradict himself and draw his sword on Tybalt, the hero of the
play? Mercutio provokes this fight. Why is the Code mocked in
this way?
 176

Cast of players here.

Mercutio is stabbed under Romeos arm in what apparently is

designed to be an accident, as if we can blame the stars, or the
Pope, or God. As if that were not enough, Tybalt himself is
killed immediately afterwards. What is Shakespeare asking us to
believe here? That Mercutio is a hypocrite or that he simply lost
his mind, in some Queen Mab flight of fancy?

More likely that Shakespeare thinks the Code Duello and

duelling are the wrong way to resolve conflicts and that they are
sign of Italian decadence. However, while duels are still illegal,
they are necessary. We live in a world of street fights and family
feuds, in a world of faithless women, and men without honor, a
world of feigned anger and frivolous challenges tossed out at the
drop of a hat. Duels are still the best means of resolving personal
conflicts and they foster a sense of responsibility. Who among
us wants to go back to the days when you had to hire some
gangland thugs to do the dirty work of enforcing justice?

We do not believe Shakespeare ever visited Italy, and yet he

thinks it amusing to accuse the great Italian families of petty
dynastic quarrels, bad marriages, poisonings, corruption,
impotence and the like. He is a fine one to talk. The truth is that
the English indulge in these vices, and probably worse. The
Spanish Tragedy is another such work, insulting Spanish honor.

A commoner like Shakespeare could never grasp what is at stake

simply from reading Il Cortegiano or Gerusalemme liberata or
listening to Crollalanza's sexual fables in the tavern. Perhaps it is
envy, or perhaps it is ignorance. Either way, as the Duke might
 177

well say of Shakespeare, "If I do see thee here in Italy, I will

murder thee too."

Mantua-coat-of-arms

Romeo and Juliet: the Italian version

According to Duke Vincenzo, the young Scotsman in Mantua

over-stepped his mark because she was not his woman to have
and, like Mercutio, he foolishly provoked a fight. In not
following the Code, Crichton was stabbed accidentally in a
common street brawl that was all a misunderstanding. A '"pure
misadventure" the Duke would call it.

Context is important here. The year before, in April 1581, Prince

Vincenzo married the Princess of Parma, Margarita Farnese.
Unfortunately, their marriage remained childless. Margarita was
unable to perform her duties because of a tragic deformity of the
hymen and Prince Vincenzo, understandably, began to consider
an annulment. In May 1583, the marriage was annulled formally
on grounds of non-consummation, with the Princess accusing
Vincenzo of impotence. But it is very revealing that she ended
up in a nunnery.

Vincenzo now planned to marry Eleonora di Francesco de'

Medici, from Florence, his cousin and a more suitable match.
There was a slight delay while her family insisted he be put
through various tests to prove his virility. The tests were
thorough. The first involved performing with an orphan girl in
the presence of eight women and a set of guards, priests and
agents. Surprisingly, Vincenzo couldn't concentrate, or perhaps
 178

she was ugly, so the Medicis agreed to a second test, with

another orphan girl. This time Vincenzo was successful, perhaps
because all the witnesses but one were behind screens. The
exception was a doctor who had to examine Vincenzo during the
act to confirm the erection and penetration. The Medicis were
fully satisfied when the results came in and the royal couple
married in April 1584 and they had many children. In 1608 he
created a new Order of Knights of the Most Precious Blood and
the same year he financed an expedition to the New World to
seek out powerful aphrodisiacs to enhance natural virility. What
else is man's fate but to transform himself from beast into
transcendent erotic being? Vincenzo also led three campaigns
against the infidel Turks in Hungary. This is a man of honor.

Paris-coat-of-arms

Hamlet: the Shakespeare version

There are bodies everywhere by the end of Hamlet, piled on

stage like a plague cart. Laertes' poisoned sword and a goblet are
used to dispatch the remaining cast. Before the bodies are
removed and the ordinance shot off, we can imagine the tolling
of the bell and red crosses on the doors and street fires choking
the air inside the theater. It is as if Hamlet were staged in a
Plague Village, or during the Saint Bartholomew's Day
Massacre, or in Hell frozen over.

This play is, they say, about murder and revenge. The
groundlings embrace the bloody spectacle and the clowns, if
only to take a break from the bear-baiting and the whorehouses.
For the rest of us, Hamlet is about poison - the shadow of the
 179

plague which has infected everything. Qu'il ne faut pas juger de

nostre heur, qu'apres la mort.

Hamlet is a winter's tale of secrets and ghosts, Macbeth without

so much blood, Romeo and Juliet without the sun. Verona in
summer lies stinking under a dark blanket and there is a
quarantine in Mantua that leads to Romeo's suicide. Choler -
yellow bile - is the dominant humor of the play.

yellow-bile

In Hamlet, though, it is black bile - the plague erupts even into

the speeches: "If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for
thy dowry" and Hamlet gives it to Ophelia in lines like rapier
thrusts. She is soon dead. Others follow.

To what purpose? For Shakespeare the plague, like poison, is

not just a metaphor for lovesickness, but for the flattery, lies and
deceit that pass for conversation among the rich and powerful.
Drink up the monarch's plague... Something is indeed rotten in
Elsinore. Nous veillons dormants et veillants dormons. Indeed,
did Hamlet, the "ambassador of death" bring the plague with
him from Wittenberg, or was it there already? Was that the
poison that killed his father? ("There is a sickness/Which puts
some of us in distemper... and it is caught/Of you that yet are
well.") Hamlet is cornered by "chimeras and fantastic
monstrosities" at every turn. He struggles to escape them but
Death finds him anyway, for his Creator has conspired against
him.
 180

With Hamlet, Shakespeare murders his own hero. Worse, he

takes down the entire play along with him and expects the
audience to participate. When Hamlet rages at us in speeches
that are all out of joint with events, it is as if Shakespeare has no
other goal than to go beyond all the previous Hamlets, beyond
all the other overwrought Elizabethan revenge tragedies, by
piling upon the story all those lofty wind towers. The result is so
top-heavy it falls over. Now everyone wants to prop it up again
by offering their own theory about Hamlet's character. The play
is, as they say, the Mona Lisa of literature and just as
maddening. If there is some catharsis here, it is Shakespeare's
own, not ours.

There are ways to survive a plague, at least for the rich, not the
least of which would be to stay away from Elsinore. Hamlet
returns not once but twice.

Bordeaux-coat-of-arms

Hamlet: the French-Italian version

Montaigne never visited England. If he had done so, and seen an

early version of Hamlet at Bankside, it seems unlikely he would
have admired it. He may have found it an exercise in sadistic
cruelty. It was not Montaigne's way to give in to disgust: "I will
follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help
it," he once wrote.

It also seems likely he would have viewed the story through

recent events in France - the coup d'tat by, and then murder of,
the Duc de Guise in 1588 by the guardsmen of King Henri III,
 181

and the subsequent murder of the King himself the following

year. Indeed, pretty much everyone is dead at the end of both
stories.

Montaigne's Hamlet is, we might say, a Medici murder mystery,

both French and Italian, but not Danish or English, for France at
the time was "ravaged by disease, famine, and public disorder.
No wonder young nobles of (Montaigne's) generation ended up
as exquisitely educated misanthropes," to quote Montaigne
biographer Sarah Bakewell.

The cast of players in Paris (the "Three Henri's") is here.

Several Popes set the tone by sanctioning regicide. This

primarily was directed at Elizabeth I, and she retaliated with her
own assassins. The Italian influence extended to family
dynasties arrayed across Europe. In France, Henri, the Duc de
Guise was the son of Anna d'Este of Ferrara (and nephew of
Duke Alfonso II). King Henri III was the son of Catherine de'
Medici, the most powerful woman in Europe for much of the
16th century. Henri of Navarre (the "third" Henri, who
succeeded him) would marry Marie de' Medici.

Montaigne was drawn into these events against his will, arrested
and released. There are similarities between Montaigne and
Shakespeare in how they avoided such politics. Montaigne:
"There is some consolation in dodging, one after another, the
successive evils which have us in their sights, only to strike
elsewhere around us." He also asks "whether it is lawful for a
subject to rebel and take arms against his prince..." It is Hamlet
who asks, for Shakespeare: "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to
 182

suffer/The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,/Or to take

Arms against a Sea of troubles..."

To act or not to act. Montaigne mostly chose to defend

moderation and human limitations and the virtues of mediocrity
- "I propose a life ordinary and without lustre," he wrote. He
meant it. He tried to put it into practice when he retired in 1570
("I abstain") at the age of 37. It was like Rosalind in the Forest
of Arden, except that for Montaigne exile was in a vast mansion
on the Dordogne River. But it was not for long: the St.
Bartholomew's Day Massacres raged across France and found
their way to his door. By the 1580's, when he was already
famous, he was even less able to "dodge" religious conflicts.
This is consistent too with Shakespeare, who became a celebrity
in Elizabethan London, but who shunned controversy and the
limelight, which is, perhaps, the reason we know so little about
him today.

Montaigne was unable to evade the plague when it overran the

Bordeaux area in 1586-87, brought in by invading armies. To
flee or not to flee. To stay would have meant death and to leave
meant abandoning the peasants to their fates. He had seen
people dig their own graves and lie down to die in them, so he
chose to take his family on the road for six months. He was 53 -
already a year older than Shakespeare when the Englishman
died. A third to a half of the population around Bordeaux died
while he was away.

bubonic-plague
 183

Death, for all the dreams of the alchemists, could not be dodged,
and Montaigne gave much thought to knowing how to live well
despite it. Only he could have written a line like, "Je veux que la
mort me trouve plantant mes choux." This mix of melancholic
and sanguine humor remained with him all his life, even as his
kidney stones were driving him to distraction. His best essays
come from this time, notably his witty and frank digressions
about sex, marriage, impotence, dildoes and other fancies (here).

When the end came, in 1592 at the age of 59, it was quinsy that
killed him, a complication of tonsillitis and a particularly
horrible way to die. This time he must have felt more like
Hamlet, trapped in his mad creator's sadistic tragedy.

Republic-of-Venice-coat-of-arms

Othello: the Shakespeare version

That Shakespeare could write a terrible play like Othello, in

which we are asked to trust him that Desdemona is an innocent
victim, flies in the face of all we know about women, for why
should we believe that women are to be trusted any more than
men?

Shakespeare's source material was Cinthio, who worked for the

Este dukes of Ferrara and usually we are drawn to Italian stories
because there is no end to the villainy and deceit. In Cinthio,
however, we have a very poor guide. Remember, in Hamlet,
Macbeth, King Lear, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night and
All's Well that Ends Well, and perhaps Arden of Faversham, if
he wrote it, Shakespeare appears to understand why women can
 184

never be trusted. They are just as likely to be fishing in their

neighbor's pond as the men. Indeed they have been known to
murder them as well.

Worse, Shakespeare has chosen to present Othello from

Desdemonas point of view, a strange exercise to say the least,
because we know she has not been, nor could she ever be,
faithful to Othello. You will recall Iago saying: Come on, come
on. You are devils being offended,/Players in your
housewifery, and hussies in your beds? Iago is a comic figure
of course, the fool who speaks the truth to Lear, a Sancho Panza
to Othellos Knight. Desdemona, too, knows perfectly well that
Othello can "tenderly be led by the nose/As asses are."
Unfortunately, Shakespeare would do the same for us by
dangling a pretty face before us and leading us by the nose to the
slaughter that follows.

Such a virtuous woman as Desdemona never could exist, of

course, except in the febrile imaginations of a Dante or a Tasso,
a King Lear or a Don Quixote. In Othello, 'tis true she is not a
whore like Bianca, but there are signs Desdemona takes drugs
and that she soon will tire of Othello. Even her own father
Brabantio warns Othello that she is "So opposite to marriage
that she shunned the wealthy curled darlings of our nation" and
later he warns him "Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see.
She has deceived her father, and may thee." Iago has it right
when he says (to Roderigo), "When she is sated with his body,
she will find the error of her choice: she must have change, she
must." Indeed it is because Othello realizes this that he calls her
an ill-starred wench and other names.
 185

Shakespeare, of course, woefully tries to conceal the truth. She

is the very picture of innocence, which she insists on constantly,
a sure sign that she is being sluiced by someone else. Othello
knows he cannot trust her - the "forked plague" of her infidelity
and his cuckoldry. When the "lost" handkerchief saga turns into
a bloody farce, "the raven oer the infected house, we have sat
through this plague to what end? To curse other men?

Naples-coat-of-arms

Othello: the Italian version

If Shakespeare really had wished to write an Italian tale of

jealousy and murder, he would have been better advised to write
up the celebrity murder that gripped Naples in 1590. Carlo
Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa and celebrated musician, murdered
his beautiful wife Donna Maria dAvalos and her handsome
lover, the Duke of Andria, when he caught them in flagrante
delicto.

It appears the Prince was forced to act once rumors of her

infidelity had become widely known. Being an artist, he stage
managed the execution, pretending to be away on a hunting trip,
before returning (stage right) to find the lovers sleeping in bed,
whereupon he murdered them both.

blood-stain

Now it may be that the rumors of his wifes infidelity were

spread by a treacherous family member, and it may be that the
Duke of Andria was married with four children, and it may be
 186

that the Prince stabbed Donna Maria multiple times, shouting as

he did it, "She's not dead yet!" and it may be that the body of the
Duke was found dressed, oddly enough, in Maria's night dress.
The depositions survive to this day and they agree that there was
blood all over the place. The murders were the sensation of
Naples for months and they were celebrated by many, including
the great Torquato Tasso.

Now, perhaps the Prince did not murder them himself? Perhaps
he left it to his assassins to plunge in the daggers and leave a
trail of torn bodies and bloodied sheets. Perhaps he just had his
servants do it? Can a man blinded by jealousy and rage stand
aloof? Lovers and madmen have seething brains. The legend
says that afterwards he arranged for the bodies of the lovers to
be displayed for the public to see, in front of the Palazzo Sangro
di Sansevero as if to say, the honor of the Prince of Venosa is
now redeemed. He then fled to his castle of Gesualdo in
Avellino, which is understandable because Donna Marias ghost
was spotted in the old palace and outside in San Domenico
Maggiore, muttering "The candles are all out. it will be rain
tonight.

This is, then, the tale of a man driven to murder his wife in a fit
of jealous rage. It turns out, though, that they were cousins, and
she was six years older than him, and this was a dynastic
marriage to produce an heir. If they failed at that, their estates
would fall into the hands of the Papacy. When she did produce a
son, she considered her work over. "Moro, lasso, al mio duolo,/E
chi pu darmi vita,/Ahi, che m'ancide e non vuol darmi aita!" He
learned to take his pleasure elsewhere, some said with young
men, others said with music and chronic constipation.
 187

He was never prosecuted, though, but he did penance with an

occasional whipping. Years later, he remarried (another joyless
marriage of spousal abuse) and they had more children, but he
re-dedicated himself completely to his music. He died in 1613
the same year as Cervantes and Shakespeare - probably a
suicide, after his son by Donna Maria died in a horse-riding
accident. The Prince was only 47. His body is interred in the
Church of Ges Nuovo in Naples. Or at least it is supposed to
be; the body may never have been moved from his castle town...

Madrid

Othello: the Spanish version

How then should one tell of a wife's murder? Cinthio's story is a

lurid pot-boiler in which "the Moor" and "the ensign" together
bludgeon an innocent Disdemona to death, smash her skull
and cover up the murder. It wasn't much for Shakespeare to
work with. He improved the story, no doubt, but he gave the
villains Spanish names and backgrounds, as if everyone is a
Morisco refugee - Othello, Iago, Roderigo. It's an insult to
Spanish honor just like that dreadful The Spanish Tragedy.

Miguel de Cervantes never engaged in such sadistic storytelling,

despite what Nabokov had to say about it. Perhaps it was
because Cervantes had fought a duel himself as a young man
and been forced to flee to Rome, and because he lost the use of
an arm at Lepanto. Wisely, he preferred a comic approach, to
tell the stories of regular people, rather than the nobility, the
dreams of dreamers and how everyone else must deal with this,
 188

all the while keeping an eye out for Church inquisitors. Sexual
jealousy is one of his preferred themes - for example in El
Celoso extremeo (The Jealous Old Man from Extremadura) in
Exemplary Novels; the play The Labyrinth of Love, and his
famous tale El Curioso Impertinente in Don Quixote (here).
Cervantes mocks those who cannot trust their lovers, or those
who cannot forgive their spouses, or those who do not spend any
time with them. He understood all this, having lived it for
himself, and perhaps he might say that Spanish husbands do not
kill their wives any more than other men do. They get jealous
but they take their wives to court like other men do, or their
wives take them to court as other wives do, or the men learn to
live with their wives. Sometimes they discover it is much better
that way.

Cervantes own marriage to Catalina de Salazar y Palacios in

1584 lasted the rest of his life. While Cervantes himself was in
and out of prison and embroiled in lawsuits, none of them were
filed by Catalina herself or her family. When he married her, she
was 19 and he was 37 and a war hero. The biographies are
scathing. The marriage was a mismatch for the first two decades
he was rarely home in Esquivias and this appears to have been
as much by choice as by financial necessity. They never had
children. Was that by choice? Was she unfaithful? It is unlikely.
In 1590, Catalina joined the Order of the Most Holy Sacrament,
really a vow of chastity, and she received the habit of Secular
Franciscan Tertiary in 1609. Even in later years, her relationship
with her husband was much like that of a widow. When they
were reconciled, they do not appear to have been emotionally
close, but who can say? The biographers do not know.
 189

Cervantes himself may have been faithful when he traveled.

There was that affair with the actress Ana Franca de Rojas in
Madrid that produced his daughter, Isabel de Saavedra. She was
born the year Cervantes was married and we know of no
infidelities after that. Isabel careens through the Cervantes
biographies as a woman who used sex to get ahead in hard
times. Could she be trusted? Not at all - by the time they were in
Valladolid, the Cervantes women had something of a reputation.

Cervantes himself may have been celibate, which has given rise
to theories of impotence and homosexuality, none of which are
very persuasive. He was old school, a man of honor, who
became a Secular Franciscan Tertiary in the weeks before he
died. He understood why men make fools of themselves over
women and why women might just take advantage of that.

London-coat-of-arms

King Lear: the Shakespeare version

It is difficult to care much about the fate of Hamlet or Orphelia

or Lear or Othello or even Desdemona, but Cordelia is another
matter.

She dies in her father's arms, the truth-teller murdered off-stage

on Edmund's orders. Lear's words "A plague upon you,
murderers, traitors all!" recalls the moment in Romeo and Juliet
when everything begins to unravel. But this is Lear's story, not
Cordelia's. The spirit of hope she represents is shunted aside in
the interests of the Machiavellian villains and the apparent need
to revel in the horrors of what happens in a time of civil war.
 190

Jerusalem Delivered this is not. Even when some voices speak

up - like Lear himself - "that way madness lies; let me shun that;
No more of that..." - it is far too late. Madness is where he is
headed anyway and most of these characters end up dead. There
is no redemption, such as we might find in As You Like It and
Measure for Measure and Shakespeare's last great plays The
Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest. Instead, the world
of King Lear is a fallen one. We are locked up inside Torquato
Tasso's insane asylum.

Ferrara-coat-of-arms

King Lear: the Italian version

The Italian King Lear spent his last years raging from city to city
- Mantua, Rome, Naples, Florence - and then back to Rome at
the end. When he died in the convent of Sant'Onofrio in
Trastevere in April 1595, he was only 51, one year short of
Shakespeare.

Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata was published in 1580, at which

time Montaigne visited the melancholy madman in Ferrara, in
the Ospedale di Sant'Anna. Tasso, the lunatic, the lover and the
poet, who saved his heroes in Gerusalemme liberata but who
could not save himself. Montaigne left very much unimpressed
with the younger man. He would write of how "countless minds
have been ruined" in the same way as Tasso, overreaching in the
realms of religious and poetic ecstasy and the supernatural. Was
he mad by this time or just eccentric? Did he see ghosts like the
martyred Hamlet? Was he a devout Catholic to the end? Was he
still resentful at his patron the Duke Alfonso II or at Leonora
 191

d'Este? Was he in love with her or was that just for show and he
preferred dalliances with boys? He was another Mona Lisa of
literature. Interestingly, he had an older sister named Cordelia
(Shakespeare's own Cordelia resembles one of those strong
Medici or Este or Gonzaga women).

Claudio Monteverdi surely encountered Tasso in Mantua, since

he started working there around 1590 and perhaps he would
have prescribed music to heal the sick man's soul. That was how
Monteverdi saw his vocation. It was not a new idea - Marsilio
Ficino had translated what he took to be the original songs of
Orpheus in the belief that music could heal the sick. Could it put
us in harmony with nature, with the music of the spheres, with
God? Could it make us forget? Tasso was always in a state of
decay, with skirmishes fought across body and mind on a daily
basis. He could never forget that he stood behind a dam that
barely kept the rotting at bay. Monteverdi's music made it
possible to forget all this.

It is a paradox though. Monteverdi married a singer Claudia

Cattaneo in 1599 (here) and they had several children together.
Everything seemed to come together in February of 1607, when
L'Orfee was performed in the Mantua carnival. In this earliest of
operas, which tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, a castrato
performed the role of Proserpine and possibly other parts, which
gave the opera an otherworldly sound. Orpheus crosses the Styx
and enters the kingdom of the dead, the kingdom of words, and
he banishes the shadows with song. But on his way out he
forgets and drops back into time, making his famous mistake,
looking back to see if Eurydice is following him. He loses her.
In consolation, he is taken up into the sky where he can gaze
 192

upon her forever, a celebration of immortality through God's

forgiveness.

L'Orfee is about love and loss and the power of music to heal the
human spirit when words fail. Because words on a page create
only ghosts, shadows that we constantly chase after, songs on
the other hand create something that allows us to forget time.
Songs encourage the idea of cheating death for a while.

But Claudia died in September of that year. The family had

always struggled to get by in Mantua. Monteverdi never
remarried.

How to deal with grief, how to express it in music? There is no

redemption in the melancholy madness of a Shakespearean
tragedy like King Lear, in which music is mostly absent. Such
art is profane. Without redemption, God does not exist.
Monteverdi, however, still believed in redemption. A few years
later, while he was still in Mantua, he composed one of his best
works, Vespers (or Vespro della Beata Vergine), which was
published in Venice in 1610. This is the kind of music which if
heard in a beautiful place of worship reconnects you with God.
Even today, there are many who attend church and find God
only in the harmonies, not in the prayers, not in the icons, not in
the sermon and not even in the architecture.

In 1613, his contract over, Monteverdi moved to Venice to

become the highly respected conductor at San Marco Basilica,
where he remained until his death in 1643. During those years in
the cosmopolitan city he was very successful and he was well
paid for it. He continued to compose, including his tribute to
 193

Tasso, Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda in 1624 (he

seems to have enjoyed composing secular operas more than
religious music); he encouraged his sons in their careers; he
survived an Austrian invasion in 1630 that destroyed 12 of his
opera scores and a plague epidemic in 1631; and he became a
priest in 1632. During these years, Venice's aristocratic families
built the first ornate theaters as we know them today, for their
own private pleasures, of course, and the first of the great public
opera houses opened in 1637.

Music has always been able to, if not exactly bring back the
dead, then it can cross into the land of the dead. In pre-Christian
times, it was well accepted that the oral traditions of the people -
including music, songs especially - evoked the secret language
of the winds. Listeners shaped characters and events in the wind,
using their own imaginations, fostering a sense of magic and
mystery and collective belonging. The music and songs
remained at the level of dreams and other intangibles, however.
With the arrival of the written word and the rapid spread of
painting and sculpture, we have diminished the realm of the
intangible and rendered it physical and manifest. What we once
dreamed of, now we have lost. In Monteverdi's thinking it is part
of our Fall, our flight from Eden. Yet we do have one thing left -
the spirit of music which, like the spirit of hope, was the last gift
to leave Pandora's Box.
 194

Immortal Beloved
Beethovens Love Letters
The Immortal Beloved Letters
The Early Candidates for the Immortal Beloved
The Later Candidates
Recent Theories
Letters to Unknown Women
THE IMMORTAL BELOVED LETTERS
Once upon a time in old Vienna, the great composer Ludwig von
Beethoven passed away quietly at his home. Back then, in 1827,
his friends were going through his drawers when they found
three letters tucked away in a hiding place. They were
addressed to his Immortal Beloved (unsterbliche Geliebte in
German, which some prefer to translate as Eternal Beloved).
So began a mystery that has never been solved. Who was the
mystery woman? Elsewhere in Europe, things were relatively
quiet, with the Battle of Navarino over; George III, Napoleon
and Byron were dead; Goethe was now 78, and people still
believed in True Love.

There is no doubt they are real letters, not exercises for an

unfinished opera, but there is some question as to whether they
were actually sent. Perhaps he had second thoughts? Why else
would letters end up back in his possession? In the 19th
century, love letters could be returned to their authors once a
liaison was terminated.

There are only two clues to go on. The first is that one of the
letters is dated Monday, 6 July, and there were three years when
6 July fell upon a Monday: 1801, 1807 and 1812. The second is
 195

the mention of a town beginning with the letter K and, although

we know Beethovens whereabouts with some accuracy for
many periods of his life, there is ambiguity surrounding the
three years mentioned above. Is it to a woman visiting Karlsbad
(now Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic), in which case the hotel
records for those years can be checked, or is it some other town
near Vienna beginning with K such as Klosterneuberg, or
Korompa (now Doln Krup, Slovakia)?

The letters may not be the great masterpieces of romantic

writing that some Beethoven scholars have made them out to be,
but they suggest he was a good writer with a keen awareness of
when to employ romantic hyperbole without falling into clich.
They also have generated a controversy that has obsessed
dozens of writers. This includes clever forgers who enjoyed
writing their own letters, misdirecting earnest Beethoven
scholars (in 1890 and 1911). They also have been made into a
movie, Immortal Beloved (1994), starring Gary Oldman as
Beethoven and they now have many websites devoted to them.

So who was this woman that he calls his Immortal Beloved?

Some have argued that she was a quick intense flirtation that
went nowhere just as fast. Others feel that she must have been
someone he saw often at a particular time in his life. They argue
that we should focus instead on why the relationship did not last.
After all, why does he use the German words for eternal and
faithful if not to suggest a long-term relationship, or is this just
poetic license for an ideal woman his muse who never
existed in the flesh?
 196

How old was he when he wrote them? Was he 31 and young at

heart, infatuated perhaps, which would mean he wrote them in
1801? Or was he closer to 37 and in the midst of his most
creative and fertile period, in the year 1807? Or was he on the
other side of 40, in middle age with deafness now roaring and
whistling in his ear, in 1812?

THE EARLY CANDIDATES

It was around 1800 when Beethoven produced his first

symphony and became famous. He was 30-years-old. Various
attractive young women entered his life as piano students and
three of them are candidates for the Immortal Beloved in 1801:
the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, and Therese and Josephine
Brunsvik, the two daughters of the Count of Brunsvik. A
portrait of Giulietta was found with the three Immortal Beloved
letters in the hidden drawer and there was a portrait of Therese
on his wall. The candidates for 1807, and this date is the least
likely of the three, include Josephine (again), and perhaps
Therese (again), and another confidente, Countess Marie
Erddy, whom he may have met as early as 1802.

Giulietta Guicciardi

Anton Schindler, Beethovens biographer from his own era,

thought that the Immortal Beloved was a young heartbreaker
named Countess Giulietta Guicciardi who burst into
Beethovens life in 1800 when she was 16 and he was 30. She
had recently arrived from Italy with her family and she was
young, sexy and vibrant. Greatly impressed with his musical
genius, Giulietta did not mind his middling looks and general
 197

untidiness. One can speculate that Beethoven was not a good

teacher; his head full of his own melodies. He cannot have been
impressed with the playing abilities of his richer students, but
then how did he deal with the allure of the young woman sitting
before him. What must he have been thinking? Presumably
music and erotic thoughts collided? Was marriage ever
discussed? Since Beethoven had no title and no money, let
alone what everyone perceived as his eccentric nature, her
family would have objected to any match. Schindler feels
Giulietta was no more than a coquette, an adventuress, like
many young women at that age. She had a beautiful body,
delicate features, great skill at flirtation and there was never any
doubt that she could find herself a good husband. For that
reason, she probably did not really want Beethoven and perhaps
he knew it. A pleasant interlude did occur between the two at
Korompa (a town beginning with the letter K), but she seems
to have found it little more than a flirtation.

Beethovens relationship with Giulietta appeals to romantics.

The beautiful Moonlight Sonata, which is dedicated to her,
captures the spirit of their relationship: it sounds like moonlight
on rippling waters. (This title was not Beethoven's but rather that
of a music critic in the 1830s, but the name stuck.) Beethoven
wrote to his friend Wegeler in November 1801: You can
scarcely believe how desolate, how sad my life has been for two
years; my defective hearing has haunted me like a specter and I
have fled from people, have had to appear a misanthrope when I
am so little like one. This change has been wrought in me by an
adorable, enchanting maiden who loves me, and whom I love;
again after two years there are happy moments, and for the first
time I feel that marriage could make me happy. Unfortunately
 198

she is not of my station in life. This almost certainly refers to

Giulietta. But what also comes through in his writings from this
time is the collision between his musical ambitions and his love
for women, and music must always come first: For me there is
no greater pleasure than to practice and to display my art.
Though women stimulated and inspired his music, they could
also drive him to distraction. Women were to be both his muse
and his destroyer.

The onset of his deafness is crucial. After his break with

Giulietta, he went on to write the traumatic letter of 1802 known
as the Heiligenstadt Testament, named after a village northwest
of Vienna that has now been swallowed up by the city. This last
will and testament lays out Beethovens thoughts about his
deafness and whether it meant he could find transcendence
through music. This seems to be consistent with his beliefs in
freedom, musically as well as politically. Freedom from class
oppression, freedom from the old musical tyrannies, and
freedom from infatuations with women perhaps! At any rate, he
emerges stronger for it, and he never marries: Had I chosen to
give up my vitality to this love, what would have remained for
that which is noble, better?

Giulietta married Count Gallenberg in November of 1803 and

they left Vienna for Italy. The Count was also a musician,
though clearly not of Beethovens caliber and it seems the
marriage was not a particularly happy one. Beethoven then
plunged into one of his greatest symphonies, the Eroica 3rd
Symphony, and perhaps we have Giulietta to thank for that, as
much as we have to thank Napoleon Bonaparte. Years later, in
1822, he did meet Giulietta again when she returned to Vienna
 199

and he recalled the encounter in a letter of 1823 in this way:

She loved me, and even more than her husband... He was,
however, more her lover than I...

Therese and Josephine von Brunsvik

Schindlers biography of Beethoven was published in 1860 and

he actually knew Beethoven. But scholarship moved on after he
championed Giulietta. A second influential biographer,
Alexander Wheelock Thayer, published various volumes of his
own Beethoven biography between 1866 and 1908, and in those
volumes he favored Therese (Tesi) von Brunsvik. If we were
to choose music for her, one critic has nominated Fr Elise on
the grounds that a copyist misread Elise for Therese and because
the score was found later in her possession. However, Therese
would be dropped from favor after her letters were discovered
and published in 1946, indicating that she probably never loved
Beethoven, though they had corresponded for years. She called
him a good human being, which was probably true, but these
are not the words of a lover. She never married. (There would
be another Therese - Therese Malfatti - see below...)

A better case can be made for her sister, the Countess Josephine
(Pepi) von Brunsvik. We are not talking here about a quick
and intense infatuation like Giulietta, but a deep and lasting
commitment between two lonely souls. The best evidence is the
testimony of her sister, Therese, who wrote in her diary in 1860
that the Immortal Beloved letters must have been addressed to
Josephine whom he loved passionately. A number of
Beethoven biographers agree.
 200

Beethoven first met Josephine in 1800 but her mother married

her off that year to the 50-year old Count von Dehm. It was not
a happy arrangement. For one thing, he hated music, and the
young Josephine must have found consolation and inspiration in
her lessons with Beethoven. Fortunately for her, the Count died
in 1804 and many believe that for several years after this,
Beethoven and Josephine were close. Beethoven spent much of
the summer of 1806 at the Brunsviks country estate of
Martonvsr, 18 miles from Budapest. There he deepened his
relationship with Josephine but there is no evidence of anything
more than affection in her letters. It was an enchanting spot: the
woods along the lake, the old world clothing and leisurely
rhythms of life, far from the hustle of Vienna. If we have to
choose a piece of music to capture Josephine, why not the idyllic
Pastoral Symphony, no matter that it is dedicated to someone
else and that inspiration may have come from the Helenental.
Whether because Beethoven did not really intend to marry, or
because of pressure from her family, or because she wanted a
real father for her four children, Josephine von Brunsvik and
Beethoven never consummated the relationship and they
stopped corresponding regularly after 1805. He may have tried
again in 1807, and certainly the years 1807 through 1809 were
Beethovens happiest years, but there is no further evidence to
go on.

Josephine married again in 1810 and again this was not a happy
marriage. Her husband got into financial difficulties almost
immediately, placing great strain on the relationship and he left
her in June of 1812, the very time when most scholars believe
the Immortal Beloved letters were written. It helps explain why
Beethoven continued to take an interest in Josephines affairs
 201

and she in his. Her unmarried sister, Therese, looked after

Josephines children during this time, while Josephine remained
in Vienna, and in 1813 Josephine gave birth to another child.
Evidently she slept with someone else and some say Beethoven
was the father. Other biographers vehemently reject this.
Whatever the truth of this, it points to a strong bond that
persisted over the years, making her another excellent candidate.

THE LATER CANDIDATES

The earlier Beethoven biographers were perhaps over-keen to

defend their heros honor but there are other candidates who
could just as easily fit the bill: the Countess Marie Erddy in
1807 and 1812 and Therese Malfatti, Amalie Sebald and
Dorothea von Ertmann in 1812. And then there was his sister-
in-law. Of course the lists do not stop there: there was Bettina
Brentano who introduced him to Goethe that year and
Magdalena Willman, a young singer from Bonn. It is perfectly
feasible that he was in love with more than one woman in 1812.
Within seven years Beethoven would be totally deaf and he
remained a bachelor throughout his life. When he died in
Vienna in 1827 he was aged 57.

The Countess Marie Erddy owned the estate of Jedlesee, on the

east side of the Danube in what is now a northern Vienna
suburb. Beethoven first turned to her after his disappointment
with Giulietta Giucciardi, and he spent much of his time there
over the next few years. The Countess would have been 27 in
1807, by which time she had been separated from her husband
for 6 years, and Beethoven was 37. It seems like a good match.
In 1808, arguably his best year, the Countess was allowing him
 202

to entertain friends at her house, hosting concerts and genuinely

relaxing. Couldnt his happiest years have been in the company
of the Countess? Certainly this is the view of Beethovens
women biographers, Dana Steichen (Beethovens Beloved,
published in 1959), and Gail S. Altman (Man of His Word,
1996) and a prominent Immortal Beloved website. Beethoven
and Erddy remained friends for many years, but she is regarded
as the most mysterious of Beethovens women we just dont
know enough about her. Beethoven dedicated his trio in D
Major, The Ghost (Opus 70), to her, which is only appropriate
for it has the ghosts of Macbeth about it. Erddy would be
expelled from Austria in 1823 during one of Metternichs
crackdowns on the Hungarians and she lived in Munich until her
death in 1837.

In 1811 or 1812, Beethoven met Therese Malfatti, the daughter

of one of his doctors. She may have been about 18-years-old
and it is possible that he proposed to her but her family turned
him down. We know he wrote at least one warm letter to her:
Commend me to the good will of your father, your mother,
although I can yet lay no rightful claim to it... Now farewell,
honored T., I wish you everything that is good and beautiful in
life. Keep me in remembrance, and fondly -- forget that wild
behavior -- be convinced that no one can wish you a freer,
happier life than I, even though you take no interest... in your
most devoted servant and friend, Beethoven. She left the
country soon after and married someone else, in 1816. Hardly
any chemistry there, it would seem, but he must have tried it on
with her, with all that wild behavior.
 203

Then there was Amalie Sebald, a talented singer from Berlin

who was 24 in 1812 when Beethoven was 42. He had met her
the previous year in Teplitz (now Teplice, Czech Republic),
another spa town, and there are seven letters Beethoven wrote to
her in which he makes excuses for being sick. The relationship
seems superficial and directionless. She calls him a tyrant in
one letter; not a good sign. A similar case can be made against
Dorothea von Ertmann.

It seems more than likely that the Immortal Beloved was already
married. Could she be the woman referred to in this letter of
March 1816 to his friend and student, Ferdinand Ries: All good
wishes to your wife; alas, I have none; I found but one woman,
and her I shall never possess, but that has not made me a
woman-hater. Put all this together and the portrait of
Beethoven that emerges is of a crusty old man who chased
younger women in a feckless unstylish way that he knew was
doomed to fail, but that his real love was a married woman.

Johanna Reiss

Ludwig von Beethoven would have been perfect material for

Sigmund Freud. Some of Freuds successors, the
psychoanalysts, came to the conclusion that there was really no
Unknown Woman. Dr. Richard Sterba, a colleague of Freud in
their Vienna days before the Second World War, and his wife
Edith, gave much thought to this mystery. They produced a
book, Beethovens Nephew, in 1954, in which they offer a
psychoanalytic account highly critical of Beethovens behavior.
They point out that after the death of his brother Karl,
Beethoven fought the widow, Johanna Reiss, in the law courts
 204

for guardianship of his nephew, and that he nearly drove his

nephew to suicide (in the Helenental in 1826). For a time, the
Sterbas even considered the idea that Karls wife, Johanna, was
in fact the Immortal Beloved.

Building their case, the Sterbas also argued that not only was
Beethovens deafness caused by the physical abuse inflicted on
him by his own father, but that Beethovens own vicious cruelty
toward Johanna and his obsessive control over his nephew can
only be explained by the fact that Beethoven and Johanna had an
illicit liaison that fell apart in Karlsbad at the time the Immortal
Beloved letters were written (she was there too?). The Sterbas
bombshell is that his nephew was actually their son! It was this
theory that would become the thesis of the Hollywood film of
1994. There is, however, little evidence to support it, but it is
certainly colorful. Beethoven goes to extreme lengths to
criticize Johannas pernicious tendencies. She tried to infect
everyone, even the most innocent people, with her moral poison
(and...) her hellish yet stupid activities. What supports the
Sterbas case is that Johanna actually named her daughter (by
another man) Ludovica, which is the female form of Ludwig. It
would seem that Johanna was a powerful and proud woman,
every bit the match for Beethoven. Some biographers --
Solomon for example -- defend her fierce love for her son,
suggesting that it was her stout resistance that brought an out-of-
control Beethoven back to an even keel. For Johanna, why not
Ode to Joy from the Ninth Symphony, for while its musical
roots lie in Beethovens earlier years, this also accords with the
fact that he was long acquainted with his sister-in-law.
 205

But was Johanna also the Immortal Beloved? In the course of

their investigation the Sterbas concluded that the Beethoven who
wrote those ugly words to Circe probably never sent the
Immortal Beloved letters.

RECENT THEORIES

Antonie Brentano and The Princess Almerie von Esterhazy

In all this wild speculation there is a surprising absence of good

detective work and literary analysis, compensated for by lots of
wishful thinking. Indeed it wasnt until Maynard Solomons
influential 1977 biography of Beethoven that we were able to
get information about the stagecoach passenger lists, hotel logs
and police records of July 1812. Lo and behold, a new
candidate emerged: Antonie Brentano.

Antonie, who was born in Vienna, had returned to live there in

1809. She met Beethoven and they became friends. She was
also married with four children, frequently in ill health and
unhappy in her marriage. Solomon details how the letters to the
Immortal Beloved refer to a rendezvous in Karlsbad, Bohemia,
and everything seems to fit, including reports of the weather at
the time, the initials used to refer to people, and other
documents. It is an ingenious explanation, undermined only by
the fact that apparently none of Beethovens contemporaries
noticed the relationship under their very noses. In recent years,
a similar case has been made by Jaroslav Celada for the Princess
Almerie von Esterhazy; originally proposed in 1960, it has now
been translated into English.
 206

While it cannot be automatically assumed that Beethoven was

referring to Karlsbad, psychologically both candidates ring true.
The letters are fascinating if read as the end of a relationship and
this would be appropriate when we consider that he retained
these letters in a hidden place. Was it the make or break
moment in the relationship? Was Antonie prepared to leave her
husband? Did he rebuff her when he realized that this was
indeed what she intended? Was he hoping the Princess Almerie
would marry him, despite the long odds? Would marriage
interfere with his freedom to compose? Did he feel his deafness,
irascibility and bachelor habits made him a bad choice for a
husband? Whatever the reason, the first letter to the Immortal
Beloved emphasizes words like necessity and the sacrifices
that each must make, especially her. It seems like Beethoven is
discouraging the Immortal Beloved from expecting too much
from their affair. Is he rationalizing the impending failure of the
relationship? He goes on at length about his difficulties
traveling through the forest but what is truly on his mind are the
difficulties posed by their relationship. He is presenting himself
as the busy man of affairs, the Famous Composer, and Goethe
and other famous men gave similar reasons for avoiding
marriage. Still, it sounds like an excuse. His expressed desire to
live together just does not ring true. The first letter ends with
the underwhelming Your faithful Ludwig and the last letter
ends like a brush off: Farewell. Is he setting impossible
terms? Is he being insincere or simply resigned? It is the letter
of a man who wants to keep a woman interested in him, attached
to him, yet he apparently does not want the woman to want more
from him because he does not think it can last.
 207

But does he then regret his words, even try to reverse them?
After all, he doesnt want to lose her, though he senses that may
be coming. He knows she is hurt by his indecisiveness, his
coolness. The Immortal Beloved letters are the only ones where
Beethoven uses the more intimate form Du rather than Sie
when writing to a woman. He is trying to maintain the
relationship through his declaration of intimacy. He wants to
persuade her that their love can still embrace these separations
and vexations. But he is contradictory because he is imposing
most of these on her. One minute he wants his freedom, the
next he is wishing they can be together. The letter reads like the
romantic hyperbole of the heroic genre, as if he would rather
that the friendship could stay the way it is. No wonder it didnt
work out. He would irritate any reader, whoever she was.

The relationship was over by September. Antonie, who had

become pregnant again (in June), would leave Vienna with her
husband in November, as all the women in his life would do.
Beethovens romantic aspirations were never the same again
after that, and the stories of his infatuations with women
diminished from this time, as he slid forever into middle age.
Solomon argues that all these rejections by the women in his life
had a cumulatively devastating effect on Beethovens pride,
eroding his manhood. This is way over the top and it spoils an
otherwise excellent book.

However, it did take its toll on Beethoven. There is a diary

entry in 1812 on the subject: Submission, the most devout
submission to your fate, only this can give you the (self-)
sacrifice -- for your obligation. O hard struggle!... You must
not be a man, not for yourself, only for others. For you there is
 208

no more happiness except in yourself, in your art. -- O God, give

me the strength to conquer myself; nothing must chain me to
life. In this way with A. everything goes to ruin. Whether the
A. is indeed Antonie (it is not clearly an A), the important
thing here is that Beethoven is feeling rueful after another
relationship, perhaps his most intense yet, has gone adrift, but he
is rationalizing this as the price he has to pay for his composing.

Some years later, he would dedicate the Diabelli Variations

(opus 120) to Antonie - it was written in Mdling, near Vienna,
where he frequented his favorite pub, The Three Ravens.

LETTERS TO UNKNOWN WOMEN

Beethoven remains an enigmatic figure who has escaped all his

biographers. Goethe, who met him in 1812, referred to him as
an utterly untamed personality. In many ways the man who
emerges in the pages of his biographers is a patronizing
stereotype, where his character is sacrificed to his musical
genius or to tortured psychoanalytical explanations of his love
life or to bourgeois ideas about untidy bachelorhood and
constantly revolving apartments. But individuals often display a
consistency between their musical beliefs, their political beliefs
and the way they behave toward the other sex and this is
apparent throughout his career.

At 22, he was excited by the French Revolution: the spirit of

change was in the air and it comes through strongly in his music.
The storminess and sense of romantic melancholy mark it off as
profoundly different from Mozart, who had died in Vienna the
 209

year before Beethoven got there. During these years -- the

1790s -- many considered him pretentious and arrogant, even if
his closest friends were fond of him. But his instincts were
accurate: the world was changing dramatically and he felt like
Faust struggling against an adversary that could not yet be
identified.

The psychoanalysts concede that Beethoven was a Romantic.

They know he was much impressed with Goethes masterpiece
of German romanticism, The Sorrows of Young Werther. The
hero of that novel had been driven to suicide by his futile love
for a young woman whom he has idolized. Similarly the heroine
of Beethovens one opera, Fidelio: Married Love (1805), is
Leonore, who disguises herself and breaks into the prison where
her husband is kept. She rescues him and in the process exposes
the tyrant who is responsible for imprisoning him. It isnt just a
tale set against the Terror in Paris; it is also an expression of
Beethovens desire to be rescued by an extraordinary woman.
Such an idealized Woman is common enough in every
generation of men, and it seems that Beethoven was prepared to
believe in Her.

But Beethoven also had a puritanical side that prevented him

from forming any real-world attachments; he claimed to a friend
that he could never have composed Don Giovanni or The
Marriage of Figaro because they were too wanton. Several
biographers claim he made use of the services of prostitutes
from time to time, which in turn led to the charge that he
contracted gonorrhea. In fairness, this is a charge others have
denied, saying that he was fascinated by prostitutes, but he never
slept with them.
 210

Could Beethoven ever have married? Was he in fact happier

imagining idealized women rather than marrying real ones,
always in love with someone, but too clumsy to win her?
Perhaps he was only interested in women he couldnt have? We
have here the classic fortress mentality, an obsession with moral
purity, an ongoing sexual conflict between desire and fear, with
the inevitable self-punishment that follows. In many ways, he
fits the description of a perennial bachelor, unable or unwilling
to form a lasting relationship. Certainly, many women found
him unattractive and too eccentric. He couldnt flirt, he couldnt
dance, he was not a great dresser. Sometimes he resorted to an
awkward ear trumpet. This would have made him nervous
about marriage, especially when he found himself bellowing at
beautiful and desirable young women.

But Beethoven was exciting too and there were many women
throughout his life who adored him. His musical genius and his
passion made him attractive, in a wild kind of way, to many
women, and he liked their company. In fact, he was a man who
preferred womens company over mens and they were vital in
stimulating his musical composition. As one friend later
commented, He was frequently in love... but generally only for
a short period. He may have never wanted to proceed past the
point of intense flirtation anyway. He wanted more from life
than to be locked into a set relationship and he lived life hard
until he encountered the next woman who would engage him
and inspire him, always aware of the risk this entailed, for he
could become obsessed, as anyone can be.
 211

All agree that Beethoven often behaved badly with married

women and that there were other women that he took an
irrational dislike to. He thought both his brothers had made bad
marriage choices. Yet as anyone who has been in divorce court
can testify, the legal battles with Johanna Reiss dont seem that
out of the ordinary once one allows for the intensity of the
emotions involved. The vicious methods employed to get ones
way, from outright lying to involving high powered lawyers and
influential friends, are still around today. In later years he
would rail against Metternichs police-state, but he was left
alone by the secret police because he was deemed too famous
and eccentric to be a real threat.

Too often ignored in all the biographies, however, is that

Beethoven also had a hearty laugh he could enjoy life when he
wanted to and this sense of joy is captured in his best music.
This is more revealing than all the pages about his awkwardness
and his eccentricities. At the end of the day, the mystery of the
Beethoven Immortal Beloved letters is equally interesting for
what it says about us: our desire to solve amorous mysteries that
pique our curiosity, especially as they might reveal how famous
men and women truly feel about their lovers and their spouses
and the sense of lost opportunities that are always implied. It is
the idea that mysteries like these frustrate and fascinate the
biographers and historians, for they are of course the same
people who shudder at supermarket checkouts when they see
contemporary scandals and mysteries exposed in the tabloids
(Sensational discoveries at Beethoven Mansion. Did he have a
secret lover ?
Beethoven has love child)
 212

The Woman In The Bower

A Murder at Woodstock: Fair Rosamond vs Eleanor of
Aquitaine
Fair Rosamonds story
Queen Eleanors story
King Henrys story
The Scent of Roses Crushed
The Princess of Clves and the Prophet Mohammed

Once upon a time, a young maid named Fair Rosamond was

murdered by jealous Queen Eleanor in the royal palace of
Woodstock, near Oxford. Despite the best efforts of King Henry
II to keep his women apart, evidently he had failed. The
question that remains: who was the villain of the piece?

Was it Rosamond Clifford the mistress, or the unfaithful King

Henry of England or his vengeful wife Queen Eleanor of
Aquitaine? Over the centuries there have been many tales of
jealous lovers killing the object of their affections and todays
television news and tabloids thrill to exposs of husbands killing
their wives, wives killing their husbands, mistresses hiring
contract killers to shoot their male friends wife, and so on.
Crimes of passion are always difficult to explain, which is of
course why they are so interesting. But how was it done back in
the 12th century?

It was widely known at the time, throughout both England and

France, that Henry was having an affair with young Rosamond
de Clifford. Eleanors spies reported the goings-on to her in her
castle at Poitiers, to which she had now retired. It seems that as
 213

the affair persisted, she became angrier, since Henrys past

affairs had never lasted long and this new infatuation appeared
to be growing more intense. Eleanor decided to act, stealing
into England with her knights, headed for Woodstock, where
Henry had his mistress hidden away. The palace was deep in
the forest and its approaches were constructed like a labyrinth
designed to foil Eleanor, should she ever decide to do what she
was doing now. Alas for Rosamond, a silk thread had become
detached from a needlework chest that the King had given her
for embroidery. Once the Queen discovered it, she was able to
follow it to the heart of the labyrinth and surprise the young
woman. The Queens soldiers quickly overpowered the single
brave knight who was there to protect her and at last Eleanor
confronted her nemesis. She offered Rosamond a choice
between a dagger and a cup of poisoned wine. Rosamond
apparently chose the poison and died, and that was the end of
her, or so the story goes.

FAIR ROSAMONDS STORY

King Henry had first taken a liking to Rosamond, the daughter

of one of his knights, nine years earlier. Her father, Walter de
Clifford, had a castle on the Welsh border and Henry probably
met her there during one of his occasional wars of pacification
of the Welsh, who quite unreasonably wanted to remain free.

Fair Rosamond of course was very beautiful, an English rose,

though her name means Rose of the World in Latin. Henry
was drawn to her softer form of femininity, so different from his
wifes, for Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine was the kind of woman
who made men behave respectfully whenever she was around.
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An overbearing, vindictive woman, wrote Jane Austen

biographer Elizabeth Jenkins in 1955, taking sides with
Rosamond in her book Ten Exciting Women, depicting Eleanor
as the kind of woman that strong men like Henry run away from.
Katherine Hepburn was the perfect choice to play her in the
Freudian-inspired film The Lion in Winter (1968) about their
later years together, as was Glenn Close in the 2004 remake.

In Rosamonds town of Bredelais, the peasants and ordinary

working people had ways of courting so that couples had a
chance of finding out whether they could get along together.
Things seemed to work a little differently among royals.
Rosamond knew Henry was a womanizer long before his arrival.
Indeed it was common knowledge that he had mistresses all over
the kingdom. This pained her father deeply for he saw the way
the King looked at his daughter and he knew where it would
lead. He knew other fathers had kept their daughters out of the
Kings sight; should he have done the same? Yet it appears the
King genuinely did fall in love with Rosamond and she too
could find it in her heart to love him, though she was frightened
she was sinning against God. The predicament aroused intense
emotions in her he was the King, after all. She tried not to
commit adultery in her heart because adultery was a mortal sin,
but women are the weaker sex, just as prone to sin as the men, if
not more so. She also knew she did not have to look further
than the Queen to see who was encouraging the immoral
behavior that was all around her, for everyone knew the Queen
had her own affairs.

Rosamond could not see how love and marriage could be

compatible. The royal marriage, for example, seemed little
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more than a business arrangement. Henry and Eleanor clearly

had married each other to produce a male heir and make their
kingdom bigger. It had nothing to do with love. True, the King
and Queen were both good administrators, he was a good soldier
and she was very cultured in her own way. Perhaps they had
liked and respected each other at first? Married now for many
years, they had eight children to show for it. But people grow
apart and a long marriage does not satisfy our sexual or spiritual
natures. Once the Queen had produced male heirs, they both
considered themselves free to pursue their own affairs, and
Rosamond assumed this was what Eleanor was doing now that
she had moved back to Poitiers.

Between 1165 and 1174, with Eleanor out of the way,

Rosamond traveled with Henry whenever she could, but at a
certain point the affair became public knowledge and it turned
nasty when Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) wrote a
scathing public attack on Rosamond. His real target was Henry,
because of the Kings frequent wars against Wales, but the main
casualty was Rosamond. He mocked the Kings mistress as
Rosa-immundi, Rose of Unchastity and everyone enjoyed the
joke. For Rosamond, it was too much and she brought the affair
to a close. She joined her sisters at Godstow Nunnery and she
did not hear from the King again. Inside the walls, she was
unaware of the rumors swirling around the country of her
imminent murder.

Rosamond herself only ever wanted to be a nun. She prayed

that one day a courageous woman would write a book that truly
reflected what she believed, a book like Christine de Pizans
City of Women. That book describes a womens utopia where
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the Virgin Mary and other virgin martyrs are in charge, not the
men, and where there is shelter for all good women. These
women warriors will repel the spiritual assaults of the men just
as women like her had had to repel their sexual assaults in the
real world. There was strength in sisterhood, in virginity, in
chastity. While she was unable to draw on them in this world, to
resist the King, her comfort would come through prayer and the
divine grace of God now that she was safely inside the Nunnery.
She hoped and trusted she could attain salvation once again.

QUEEN ELEANORS STORY

Queen Eleanor was one of the most extraordinary women who

ever lived, the subject of many biographies and, in her time, the
talk of Europe on account of her two marriages: first to King
Louis VII of France and second to his rival, King Henry II of
England. But when she gave birth to her last child in 1166, it
was a difficult child named John, who would distinguish himself
signing the Magna Carta.

Queen Eleanor was 45 years old and King Henry was 34. After
15 years of marriage, she had had enough. Initiating their
separation, she moved back to Poitiers. It was not because she
planned to indulge in more affairs, free from interference,
though this had its appeal; it was because she still had a
kingdom to run.

For the next nine years, Eleanor would hear occasionally about
Rosamond. She had to accept that this was the first mistress
Henry had taken seriously. Poor girl, obviously a virgin when
he seduced her. Eleanors spies told her that Henry had
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arranged for a procuress to lead the young woman astray,

exciting her sexually with drawings before he stormed the castle
moat. But Eleanor never met Rosamond and what her husband
did in his own time at this point was his affair, as far as she was
concerned.

Rosamond was now living at Woodstock. Eleanor had stayed

there frequently. It was really more of a comfortable hunting
lodge than a palace. Henry had leopards and lions running
around in the park to enhance its wildness. Even deeper in the
forest, at Everswell, there was a bower and a garden that Henry
had built originally for Eleanor, not long before they were
separated, in one of his intermittent efforts at being romantic.
Henry had landscaped the garden to tell the story of the doomed
lovers, Tristan and Yseult. What was he trying to say with this?
In the original story, when the lovers were separated, Tristan
communicated with Yseult by placing twigs in a stream that ran
through Yseults bower, which was in an orchard surrounded by
a huge wall. Perhaps he was prescient about the future of their
marriage, for soon they would barely be communicating
themselves? At any rate, the story would become source
material for the idea that Rosamond was hidden inside a bower
inside a labyrinth inside a palace inside a forest.

Eleanor in truth had nothing to do with Rosamonds death. Over

the years, ridiculous stories emerged that seemed designed to
blacken Eleanors reputation nonetheless. She wondered
initially if Henry had put the English historians up to it, just as
his ill-advised remarks inspired four reckless knights to
assassinate Archbishop Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The
stories were certainly wild. But Eleanor was contemptuous of
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such fables. What would have been the point of killing

Rosamond anyway? She kept Henry occupied! If Eleanor had
truly felt like revenge, she could have forced Henry to send
Rosamond back to the nunnery. From what she heard,
Rosamond would have preferred that anyway.

In Poitiers, Eleanor was able to pursue her own career again.

England was such a wet and dreary place after all. The English
were envious of life in southern France its culture and
civilization -- and she was its patron and symbol. She had learnt
the way of the troubadours from her grandfather who was quite
a bawdy poet of love in his own right. His poetry had been
unsubtle, sexually crude, worldly. He did not express the
ethereal or the spiritual art that flowered in the words of the
great troubadours of her generation, but he did inspire Eleanor.
Like her daughter by her first marriage, Marie the Countess of
Champagne, Eleanor tried to introduce new ideas of chivalry
and culture to her excessively masculine world, so that women
might have more of a say in their lives. Romantic and sexual
love had to find an outlet somewhere and this is why she
encouraged the idea of the medieval Lady, as a contrast with the
ever-present Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene. Women should
be able to wear cosmetics and enjoy fashion and independent
thinking. If a woman wanted to have an affair then that was her
business. The men did it. Hopefully the customs of courtly love
might disarm the mens aggression. If a man had to listen to
songs of love and romance, and if he had to catch the eye of an
attractive woman, he was much less likely to rape his way to
self-satisfaction and a male heir. He might even learn that
women have rights too, he might learn to be discreet, and that
the social order might be better protected from a profusion of
 219

bastards if the incidence of adultery could be reduced. It was

not the fact that Henry wanted to spend more time with the
virgin that annoyed Eleanor, but the fact that the English now
were pinning the blame for Rosamonds death on her.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was careful not to leave any records behind

that might be misinterpreted -- no letters, no papers, no poetry.
The unintended consequence for her, however, was that for
centuries in English literature it was Rosamond, Rosamond,
Rosamond all the time. Eleanor herself attained the status of
monster, demon, temptress and adulteress, and even murderess.
Ironic, isnt it? The husband has the affair and everybody
blames the wife for it.

KING HENRYS STORY

King Henry II of Anjou, the husband, was actually Norman

French, but in the popular imagination of olde England he was
all right. While Henry himself was no saint, and he would have
been the first to recognize this, he did believe that the most
sympathetic character in this whole sad affair was surely poor
Rosamond. There are good reasons for why the story is known
as Fair Rosamond, not Fair Eleanor. Eleanor (or Alienor in
olde French) was a jealous alien witch and if she didnt
exactly poison Rosamond, then she poisoned her mind and
everyone elses.

By contrast, Henry liked to think of himself as a romantic man.

The forest bower of Tristan and Yseult had been his idea. The
bower was as beautiful as a fairy tale -- a very sensual place, full
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of fragrances and birdsong. But it was designed to keep Eleanor

out and Rosamond in. He knew it and Eleanor knew it.

Henry had mourned Rosamond when she died in 1176 at

Godstow Nunnery. It was said that she became a nun on her
deathbed, but in a way she was always a nun, dwelling sadly on
her misplaced sense of guilt. Her grave at Godstow would
become a shrine for many young women who saw in her a
romantic Magdalene figure. Things were marred only when a
nasty old bigot, St. Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, showed up at her
grave and ordered the remains of the harlot be removed to the
cemetery like everybody elses.

For Henry, the contrast between Rosamond and Eleanor was

stark. Where Eleanor came from, there were no limits to their
ambitions and passions and he knew Eleanor for the threat she
was. Many years before Eleanor was born, her grandfather,
Duke William IX of Aquitaine, fancied a viscountess with the
curious name of Dangereuse. The fact that they were both
married proved no problem for William. Just like in the
legends, he kidnapped her from her husbands castle of
Chatellerault and carried her back to Poitiers, and Dangereuse
approved of the idea! Nothing like an abduction for adding
spice. William set her up in her own tower attached to his castle
and the affair soon became public knowledge. His jealous wife
tried to enlist support from the Church and other disgusted
parties to get Dangereuse moved out, but she did not succeed
and the wife left in a rage. Dangereuse already had three
children by her previous marriage, and she was able, some years
later, to marry off her oldest daughter to Williams oldest son,
thus marrying her family into the dynasty. These two became
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the parents of Eleanor of Aquitaine. The moral of the story is an

ironic one: William and Dangereuse had a romantic appeal to
the young Eleanor when she was growing up. But now the roles
were reversed: Eleanor was playing the role of the betrayed
wife, not the beautiful mistress carried off in her lovers arms
and installed in his tower of love.

So why did the story develop all the garnishings? Because, as

Henry feared, Eleanor eventually turned on Henry and conspired
with her sons, her allies and their armies to seize the throne from
Henry. The English have never forgiven her treachery; Eleanor
was seen as a usurper. Just as she stole into the bower to murder
Rosamond, metaphorically at least, she and her sons sought to
destroy the kingdom. Eleanor was the serpent whose nasty bite
poisoned everyone around her. In the end, Henry was obliged to
have Eleanor locked up in the tower of Chinon castle in the
Loire Valley for months. He then put her under house arrest in
various castles around England for many years, which in a
manner of speaking made for an interesting twist on our
morality tale of the lady in the bower, for Eleanor got to live in
Rosamonds bower. Sometimes revenge is sweet.

THE SCENT OF ROSES CRUSHED

Charles Dickens thought he had the final word on Fair

Rosamond. In his Child's History of England (1851-53) he
writes: There was a fair Rosamond, and she was (I dare say)
the loveliest girl in all the world, and the king was certainly very
fond of her, and the bad Queen Eleanor was certainly made
jealous. But I am afraid -- I say afraid, because I like the story
so much -- that there was no bower, no labyrinth, no silken clue,
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no dagger, no poison. I am afraid Fair Rosamond retired to a

nunnery near Oxford, and died there, peaceably. In other
words, there is not a shred of evidence to support the idea that
Eleanor was responsible for Rosamonds death, whatever
popular folklore has to say about it. Eleanors biographers
agree.

But who cares? Fair Rosamond is a wonderful tale of feminine

jealousy. In this story we have two women fighting to the death
over a man. Imagine Eleanor storming into the sanctuary and
there we see Rosamond weaving or spinning in her bower. She
is singing while she works, like Rapunzel. Tradition would cast
a man as the invader, for a bower is an open invitation for the
hero to scale the walls and ravish the women inside, like
William took Dangereuse. But here it is Eleanor, playing the
male role, who storms the sanctuary and instead kills her rival.

This story always carried within it its own possibility of

reversal. Could Rosamond find a way to poison or stab
Eleanor? In medieval times many women lived in their own
quarters, sewing and embroidering, out of the reach of men, and
some had secret knowledge of poisons and potions. They could
be considered dangerous to men if they decided upon revenge.
While they could heal, they could also kill.

During the 16th and early 17th centuries, the poets and scholars
mostly just blamed Eleanor, accusing her of immorality, for
leading the beautiful young woman astray. A couple actually
punish the Queen but most are content to weigh the relative evils
of the two women and come out in Rosamonds favor. Henry
gets off scot-free. At this time, poets bored with the story
 223

became far more interested in the engineering of Rosamonds

labyrinth: was the entrance underground, how many doors and
corridors were needed to create it, how much stone and timber?
With the absence of passion, the architecture becomes more
important than the murder.

During the 17th century, the chapbooks sold by itinerant traders

traveling throughout the villages of England continued to show
Rosamond as the virtuous beauty, slow to be seduced, but
ultimately led astray by a false governess. Not Henry though.
Never Henry. The theme of the fallen woman doesnt go out of
style.

Then at the end of the century, a shift appears. John Bancrofts

play of 1693 has Rosamond die in Henrys arms and it is
flippant about her. A few poets and playwrights went further
and took Eleanors side against Rosamond. From a dramatic
point of view this is a mistake since innocent victims make for
more pathos, but this was the heyday of satire. In Joseph
Addisons mediocre opera of 1707, Eleanor considerately uses a
sleeping potion, not poison, so that Rosamond can be dispatched
to the nunnery without a fuss and Henry and Eleanor can be
reconciled. It was a failure, needless to say. The theater-going
public wants blood and excessive displays of passion or they
wont show up. It was also around this time that Woodstock
disappeared. The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough tore it
down in 1704 to build their new palace; apparently the Duchess
was not a sentimentalist and Blenheim Palace now sits on the
spot. For the rest of the 18th century, the story was neglected,
though a few narrow-minded moralists used it to attack
licentiousness.
 224

In the 19th century, the story makes a comeback. The

Romantics adored Rosamond, preferring to keep her alive if they
could, as long as someone else got killed off. Barnet (1837)
switches things around so that Rosamonds father rescues her
heroically in the nick of time before she drinks the fatal poison!
This is emotionally unsatisfying: who wants Dad getting
involved? Better to imagine Henry as the vile seducer and
Rosamond as the beautiful heroine on her knees before Eleanor
the witch queen, pleading for her life. Add the knives and the
poison, then place the story inside a labyrinth recalling Ariadne
and Theseus flight from the Minotaur. It is a tale rich in
operatic possibilities.

Tennyson returned to the subject decades later with his play

Becket (1884). In it he decides to have Henry marry Rosamond,
then keeps her locked away in the bower so that she will never
hear of his bigamous marriage to Eleanor. He then has
Archbishop Thomas Becket steal into the labyrinth, save
Rosamond from Eleanor (and Henry) in the nick of time and
sweep her off to the nunnery. Becket is later killed in the
cathedral and Rosamond is last seen praying over his dead body.
Not a bad twist, but no future as an opera.

In the 20th century, the lesser-known English poet Michael Field

portrayed Rosamond as a country girl who, when confronted by
Eleanor, chooses the dagger over the poison. This just doesnt
ring true, but then Field turned out to be two women using a
pseudonym. Putting the story to better use, the poet John
Masefield has Dark Eleanor poison Fair Rosamond and ever
after she is haunted in her dreams by the scent of roses
 225

crushed. This is a nice touch -- to make her suffer from a

guilty conscience. But even if the poets did their best to keep
the spirit of the Romantics alive, the ruthless biographers and
historians have since regained the upper hand and rehabilitation
of Eleanor has prevailed. As her biographer, Alison Weir, puts
it, she was one of the great heroines of the Middle Ages -- and
Rosamond is banished to obscurity once more.

THE PRINCESS OF CLEVES & THE PROPHET

MOHAMMED

In this day and age, when people learn their spouse has been
cheating on them, they behave much the same way Eleanor did.
They want to murder them, or the lover, or both, or at the very
least toss them out of the house. Murder can be messy. Eleanor
found out about Rosamond and she may have vowed to kill her,
but not because of the affair itself, for Henry had had affairs
before, as had she. Rather, she felt this way because his
relationship with Rosamond seemed to be turning into
something more than a mere fling. Isnt that what most married
people fear the most when a casual affair metamorphoses into
the real thing?

Would Eleanor have benefited from a frank conversation with

Henry? Would Henry have benefited from a frank conversation
with Eleanor? Yet is honesty ever the best policy? Perhaps
there are tactical advantages to confessing ones love for
somebody else before the spouse ever finds out about it.
Perhaps a confession can save a marriage. However, history
seems to say otherwise, if the objective is to keep the squabbling
married couple together. Dishonesty may be a better policy in
 226

that sometimes a spouse doesnt want to know. Even if they do

know, it may be better for their state of mind if they never find it
confirmed.

In the 1678 novel La Princesse de Clves, a confession produces

an unfortunate result. In this novel, which was written by the
Comtesse de la Fayette, a contemporary of Ninon de Lenclos,
the Princess confesses to her husband that she is in love with the
Duc de Nemours. She does so because she respects her husband
enormously and the marriage is by all standards a highly
successful one. She has resisted the temptation to stray till now
out of loyalty to her husband and to her oaths. But she also
wants to make sense of her powerful feelings. Unfortunately,
Nemours is outside the window and he hears her confession. He
doesnt keep the news private and the married couple is
devastated by the gossip. Very much in love with his wife, the
husband is so upset by the false rumors of his wifes infidelity
that he dies of unhappiness.

Now the way is free and clear for the Princess to pursue the
relationship with Nemours. But she chooses not to and instead
favors abstinence for the rest of her life. Her reasons are
interesting. For one thing she feels somewhat guilty that her
husband died for love of her and thus there is the matter of
integrity. For another, she doesnt want to sully the powerful
memories of her love affair with Nemours by watching them
fade and tarnish as all such infatuations inevitably do. But in
this case, if her honesty is not the best policy, then it certainly
resolves the situation. It hurts everyone involved but at least she
emerges feeling she is vindicated to some extent. One wishes
her husband had displayed a little more fortitude and that the
 227

Duc de Nemours had been more discreet, but that is not what
happens in reality. Is it?

In early 2006, a Danish newspaper which had published

cartoons of the prophet Mohammed stirred up a worldwide
controversy over what it is acceptable to say in public.

The moderate Muslim world in this fable resembles the Princess

of Clves: many Muslims are attracted to the energy and
openness of the West (the Duc de Nemours) but are reluctant to
flirt too openly for fear of upsetting the Islamists (her husband).
Unfortunately, certain elements in the West (like the Duc) are
fed up with the Islamists (the husband) and they publicly flay
Islam and the prophet Mohammed and prescribe a lot more
democracy for the Muslim world (i.e. let us have an affair
openly). The result? Traditional Islamists are enraged and
many die in fierce protests across the globe (the husband dies).
Moderate Muslims are put on the defensive and forced to
renounce their interest in democracy (as the Princess does). The
West pronounces shock at the explosion of rage (the Duc is
shockedshocked).

Are we all better off for this? Again, the best solution might
have been discretion, but that is not what happens in reality. Is
it?
 228

Voices And Saints

Was Joan of Arc a Virgin?
The Archangel Saint Michael
Saint Catherine of Alexandria
Saint Margaret of Antioch
Voltaire

Once upon a time, virginity had true spiritual power. Not in

todays cynical world, perhaps, for it is difficult to persuade the
modern Western reader that in medieval times, as in many
cultures today, an extremely high value was (and is) placed on
female virginity because of its associations with purity and
beauty. This is why Saint Joan of Arc was known in French as
la Pucelle, literally the Maid, the Maid of Orlans, meaning
that she was a virgin.

Joan of Arc was not made Frances national saint, however, until
1920. Why did it take so long? For one thing, it could never be
confirmed that Joan was indeed a virgin, and virginity was a
prerequisite for sainthood, or even for that matter that she was a
woman. For another, there was the vexed question of which
France she represented. She came from the outrider provinces
after all and France at the time looked like a great jigsaw puzzle.

Most 15th century reports agree that Joan was a good-looking

young peasant girl, strong physically and with great endurance.
But we also have reason to believe that a number of women in
the late medieval period grew modest beards or dressed as men
in order to escape from their families or from disastrous
marriages. Some even entered monasteries as men -- or went
 229

on pilgrimages or, as in Joans case, became soldiers. It would

be an easy slide to the assumption that perhaps she was a man.
But we know from her contemporary, the Duke of Alenon, and
others who testified, that they had seen her undressing. Her
breasts were beautiful, he said, and why should we disbelieve
him? At her trial in 1431, her judges deemed that an additional
inspection was necessary and if she indeed had turned out to be
a man in drag, her judges quickly would have concluded she was
from the Devil and burnt him at the stake without a trial.

Beard or not, I think it is safe to assume Joan was a woman.

Most of this controversy can be attributed to inquisitorial zeal --
to finding reasons to justify burning her at the stake. The judges
certainly came to the conclusion she was a woman, so they
turned their attentions to the other key question of the age, Was
she a virgin? This is her story.

THE ARCHANGEL SAINT MICHAEL

Many centuries earlier, back in the time of Merlin, there was a

prophecy that foretold that France would be lost by a woman
and saved by a virgin. As everyone knows, the foolish woman
who lost France was the mother of the current Dauphin, Queen
Isabeau of Bavaria, who had sided with Burgundy and the
English, and who now had gained control of most of the north,
including Paris. It would be the Maid of Orlans who would be
the virgin who saved France at the age of 19, supported by
another powerful woman, Yolande of Aragon. But we are
jumping ahead.
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When the Maid was 13, a young peasant girl growing up in the
charming village of Domrmy in the Lorraine, she was visited
by the Archangel Saint Michael. France was wracked by civil
war, villages were burning, crops destroyed, partisans executed.
As the 19th century French historian Jules Michelet would say:
She realized the full meaning of war. She understood this anti-
Christian condition; she was horror-stricken at this Devils
misrule under which every man dies in a state of mortal sin.

Something had to be done about it. The traditional patron saint

of France, Saint-Denis, had proved to be a disappointment too
isolated in Paris perhaps and Saint Michael had stepped into
the breech. Was this the time foretold in the book of Revelation,
thought Joan? As the new standard bearer of Christs armies,
Saint Michael remained vigilant against the return of the
Antichrist who could come at any moment. As that prophetic
book says: There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels
fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
and prevailed not. Saint Michael had been drawn in on the side
of the French and, in his mind at least, Joan seemed nothing less
than a virgin saint put on Gods earth to save France. But at first
Saint Michael merely told her to be a good girl and to go to
church regularly. He did not elaborate. Evidently he wanted
only to impress upon her the power of the armies of heaven, by
taking the form of the stained glass image in her local church,
arraying behind him a host of angels in full battle dress. She
was impressed, as any young person is when confronted by
chaos all around them and the means to do something about it.
This was when Joan first felt the calling of a warrior. She was
ready to ride the four horsemen into history in the coming war
for the liberation of France.
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Capricorn

Joan of Arcs initial objective in 1429 was to persuade other

knights to accompany her to Chinon to meet the Dauphin and
from there she hoped to lead a unified French army into battle at
Orlans. Over the next year, she successfully carried this out,
raising the siege of the town and routing the English armies at
Patay. These were spectacular, seemingly divinely inspired
victories, helped in no small way by the fanatical loyalty she
engendered in her own troops (many of the regular soldiers were
in fact mercenaries with dubious loyalties). Joan represented
old-fashioned chivalric values grounded in religious faith
combined with a dynamic will for taking the fight to the enemy
instead of sitting around talking about when to retreat. The
French armies were able to advance to Reims in the following
year where the Dauphin was crowned King Charles VII of
France. Her brief military career came to an end when she was
captured shortly afterwards in May (of 1430) by the
Burgundians, who sold her to the English six months later. The
English kept her as a political prisoner and then put her on trial
in Rouen.

We do not concern ourselves here with the conclusions the male

trial judges came to; they were in the service of the English
Crown and their French collaborators. Instead we turn to
something much more important: the two medical inspections
she had to undergo during her brief but illustrious career, for as I
argued above, the critical issue was whether she was a virgin. If
she was, this would confirm the famous prophecy and her purity
before God; if she was not, then she was a fraud and the war for
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the liberation of France was a fraud. Everything else was just

politics. The first inspection had occurred earlier at Poitiers by
the Kings mother-in-law and the noble ladies of the French
court and while they may have been predisposed to lie, all doubt
was removed the second time. This inspection took place in
Rouen, by the English noblewomen no less, and they had no
reason to lie. They stated that the barricade was still in place.
While Joans purity was certified by her enemies, it would not
save her life, for she was too dangerous a symbol. After a year
in prison, la Pucelle, the Maid of Orlans, died a martyrs death,
burned at the stake in 1431.

Yet events were set in motion that day in Rouen that would end
the Devils rampage across France. To the Archangel Michael,
Joans death was a necessary if painful blood sacrifice. At heart
he was a military man, he followed Gods orders, and his orders
were to see that she was burnt at the stake as a martyr so that
France would be roused to anger. This would happen, as the
repercussions of an invalid and rigged trial and the rage felt by
many French men and women, resulted in a massive dislocation
of the English and Burgundian plans. Michael had an
appreciation for the beauty and clarity of this moment. He knew
that Joan had never actually killed anyone in battle, so he
conjured up a miracle to capture it. As the Maid gave up her
spirit to God, he arranged for a white dove, flying from the Ile
de France to soar above the city of Rouen before disappearing
into the blue skies of the West. In an alternative version, an
English soldier by her in her last moments at the stake said that
when she died, a white dove flew out of her breast and flew
toward France. At any rate, within five years the English armies
were on the run, to be driven out of France forever, and setting
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the stage for a unified France. The fulfillment of the prophecy is

rousing stuff, particularly those visions in the sky. Saint
Michael would go on to have his image emblazoned on all
French standards and his shrine at Mont-St.-Michel, which the
English failed to capture, would become one of the most
impressive landmarks in Europe. Later in the century he would
go to Spain to lead the fight against the Muslims based in
Granada, before seeing service in the Americas, as San Miguel,
angelic warrior of Catholic imperial Spain. Joans reputation, on
the other hand, would not be vindicated for many centuries to
come.

SAINT CATHERINE OF ALEXANDRIA

If it had been up to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Joan would

not have been raped in this way. Like Saint Michael, she had
visited Joan out in her fathers fields one soft sunny day.
Catherine had not wanted to frighten her so had taken the guise
of a young peasant girl with orange hair, descending from a
cloud. She hovered in a tree while her companion Saint
Margaret alighted in another tree. They were accompanied by
the sounds of celestial music and the scent of sweet perfumes
wafting in the air.

Joan knew the two saints immediately of course; all young

women knew Saint Catherine as the patron saint of needlework.
The women conversed and then continued to meet regularly
every week to discuss matters of theology that the deeply
religious girl wanted answers about. But the time came when
Catherine had to deliver her message from Saint Michael:
Orlans is under siege by the English and God wants you to
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become a warrior maid and save France. Catherine had

suggested to Michael that Joan be allowed to choose a less
militaristic solution, but Michael had very set ideas and he
claimed to be operating on direct orders from above. Saint
Catherine herself commanded a loyal following among young
religious girls and if she had had her way, she would have
trained Joan in the ways of the mystic, not the warrior, but she
had no choice. Initially Joan was doubtful, but over the next few
years she gained in confidence for the task ahead, even as
Catherine wondered if her heart was truly in it. Catherine taught
her to cut her hair like a man and wear mens clothes as she had
done and she stressed to Joan the importance of remaining a
virgin. This proved easy, for she doubted Joan liked men. Joan
was only 17, so young and trusting. What followed was
systematic rape in Catherines view a betrayal by all who
knew her.

When Joan finally was burned at the stake, Catherine saw that
her heart remained full of blood and could not be burnt despite
all the oils, sulfur and charcoal heaped upon it by her
executioners. This was a sign that physically at least she was a
virgin when she died. But in Catherines mind, Joan had lost her
virginity to the men symbolically, which is to say that she felt
Joan had been raped, psychologically and spiritually. War
brutalizes us all, but its principal victims are women.

Catherine herself was born into a respectable upper class family

in Alexandria and was lucky enough to receive a good
education. When she refused to marry the Emperor on the
grounds of her prior marriage to the infant Jesus, he put her on
trial against 50 pagan philosophers. She engaged them in
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metaphor and she was proud to say that she vanquished them all.
In a rage, the Emperor had all 50 of the philosophers burnt alive
for, remarkably, they had become filled with the holy spirit and
wanted to become Christians. He then had Catherine stripped
and beaten with scorpions, thrown into prison, tortured by
hunger, and finally chained to a spiked wheel which
miraculously broke apart when they strapped her onto it (this is
the origin of the fireworks known as the Catherine Wheel). The
Emperor shrieked with frustration and had half the court
beheaded before turning his attention once more to Catherine.
Off with her head! he yelled and his goons rushed her. When
they cut off her head she bled holy milk, its sticky whiteness
splashing on their clothes and staining the floor. As you may
know, such milk can flow only from virgin breasts. Angels then
carried her body to Sinai where it exudes perfume to this very
day.

Through the centuries, Catherine remained nostalgic for what

Joan might have become. The way of the mystic is the way of
feminine wisdom, strongly life-affirming, not destructive.
Spiritually oriented women, Catherine argued, must create a
private space for themselves as mystics, where the inner life of
the self is more important than the outer world of military and
political power, which will always be dominated by men.
Women can express this inner life through their bodies, which
contain the magical powers God bestowed upon them, especially
through the virgin body which is the purest, most sacred shrine
on Gods earth, for it is the source of life. Virginity inspires and
intimidates men into behaving with proper respect for women.
It is for this very reason that there have been many women saints
and Christ himself was often described in feminine form.
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Virginity can be an erotic and sensual experience in its own

right, but it is not simply the sublimation of sexuality through
denial. It is the essential first step upward toward a transcending
spiritual union with Christ. At the second step, a certain level of
pain and suffering through careful dieting may be required.
Women are not forced to do this by male religious authorities.
This is not masochism either. On the contrary, young anorexics
and bulemics believe that their pain brings them closer to God,
for self-inflicted suffering imitates Christs own pain and
suffering on the Cross. Saint Catherine is therefore the patron
saint of anorexics. Modern women have a tendency to suffer
guilt and remorse when they diet, instead of regarding it as a
healthy spiritual process. Such suffering is unnecessary if
modern women can learn that through the pain of the Eucharist
and fasting that they can attain that higher mystical state.
Women must learn to renounce food while the men must
renounce power.

Unfortunately Joan of Arc enjoyed a good feast. She could have

followed in the grand tradition of the great female mystic saints
like Catherine of Siena before her and Theresa of Avila after her
but she failed to restrain her appetites. Consequently Joan put
her own sainthood in doubt for many centuries. But in the end
she too qualified. The Church needs women warriors just much
as it needs mystics.

SAINT MARGARET OF ANTIOCH

The other saint in the tree at little Domrmy was Saint Margaret
of Antioch. Like Catherine, she refused a forced marriage when
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she was 15 by claiming she was the virgin bride of Christ. She
wasnt technically a virgin by then, but that turned out to be
neither here nor there.

Margarets father was the chief priest of the pagan cult that had
married her off, and the cults unsavory reputation allowed the
Governor to have her thrown in prison where she was savagely
beaten. Later, while sitting in her cell, she was attacked and
swallowed by the Devil himself who had assumed the form of a
huge dragon. Sexual implications aside, the important thing is
that Margarets faith held and the dragon spat her out as
indigestible. He then changed shape into a handsome young
stud, thus obligating Margaret to go on the attack. She tackled
him and threw him to the ground. Proud demon, lie prostrate
beneath a womans foot, she yelled. It must have felt good.
But the authorities felt threatened by this independent streak and
they tortured and stripped Margaret and finally beheaded her.
This sometimes happens when men are rejected by women. At
any rate, the story about the dragon is the source of Margarets
reputation as the patron saint of women in childbirth. Margaret
wasnt Joan of Arcs favorite saint but she liked the dragon
story.

Margaret did not consider Joan a virgin when she was burnt her
at the stake, but she was a virgin in the sense that she had never
been with a man. After all that horse-riding and fighting, could
it have been otherwise? Where Saint Michael and Saint
Catherine were a little vague about the physical inspections,
Saint Margaret knew it for the charade it was. After all, the
Kings mother-in-law and the Duchess of Bedford could hardly
have been expected to know what they were looking for. Of
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course they found the hymen; they too wanted to believe in the
miracle of la Pucelle. There is reason to believe the same thing
happened at her trial in 1431, with the result that Joans judges
were forced to probe for other heresies. They found the idea of
heavenly Voices quite natural but what they really wanted to
know was whether her Voices were from God or from the Devil,
and they hated the idea that a woman would wear mens clothes
or involve herself in politics. The cross-dressing in particular
opened up potential charges of heresy. Joan did not recognize
their authority to try her on these charges and this drove them
into a fury. She refused to fall into their snares and deflected
anything that might incriminate her. The English lords lewdly
suggested that they would rape her when they paid her visits, but
she always managed to elude their grasp. In the end, after she
promised not to wear mens clothes again, the English guards
took her own clothes from the cell and left her only mens
clothes. The end was now in sight.

Joans military and political successes had made her the talk of
France, indeed Europe, rallying more troops to the French side.
The poet and scholar Christina de Pisan was moved to write, just
after the lifting of the siege of Orlans and before her own death:
What honor to the feminine sex... the kingdom, once lost, was
recovered by a woman, a thing that men could not do.
Furthermore, once she was captured, Joan articulated an equally
brilliant intellectual defense against her inquisitors, turning the
questions around on some of the most influential religious
figures of the time. Indeed there were many religious scholars
in Rouen for her trial and throughout France who saw the trial
for the sham it was.
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Like Catherine, Margaret did not feel it was necessary that Joan
die in order to liberate France. It never is, but somehow it
always turns out that way when male saints are directing events.
In Margarets view, women-hating was at the root of the
Churchs thinking about sexuality and spirituality through the
centuries. How else to account for the success of Eve, Delilah,
Mary Magdalene, all women associated with sin and sex who
were invoked in sermons throughout the Middle Ages. Most of
the time, male clergy were able to ignore women, but there were
undoubtedly times when they were forced to confront their
temptations, which is why many clergy became sadistic, to Joan
as much as to Margaret or Catherine. Female masochism and
hysteria become understandable options for women who can see
no other way out. The male clergy tried to soften this by
increasing the number of women saints and by creating the cult
of the Virgin Mary, essentially a cult of virginity and chastity for
women. But this meant that men had managed to split women
in two: saints and sinners. Either way, women were identified
with their bodies, with the demands of the flesh, which like all
human forms could rot away. Similarly, men denied women
political power on the grounds that since women were obsessed
with their bodies, they were unsuited to the intellectualism
required for it. Still, the Virgin Mary cult successfully attracted
huge numbers of women into the Church and many religious
women cleverly subverted this cult, turning it away from the
physical into the metaphysical. Not all women intellectuals
approved of those idealized images of the Virgin Mary, which
for them came across only as the reflections of male icons and
symbols.
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Joan, you will recall, saw neither the Virgin Mary nor Mary
Magdalene in the fields of Domrmy. Rather, she saw saints
that empowered her -- saints that threatened the established
political and religious authorities. These stories took on
additional force as local folklore added overlays, for example
that Joan never menstruated, which her supporters saw as proof
of her semi-divine nature, for that meant she was more like a
man. Some added that she never sweated, never had bad breath,
had no dandruff and never excreted.

The blurring of those fixed identity lines in medieval times

between men and women is intriguing. Women apparently were
not good enough as women, let alone as men! The Church even
proposed the curious idea that religious men could be better
women than women, which is why Christ is often portrayed in
feminine terms, to remind men that if they wish to enter heaven,
they have to become weak and humble -- like a woman. Some
men even had the nerve to recommend that women should
become more like men. For many ascetic religious women, they
saw no choice but to punish themselves. If they did not get
blamed for causing impotence in men, sex with the Devil, and
what not, they were harder still on themselves. It would get
worse. Later in the century the Inquisition would arrive in full
force and witchcraft and heresy trials would accelerate.
Muslims and Jews would be next.

VOLTAIRE

For Voltaire, Joan was not a virgin when she died. While he did
not know exactly when she lost her virginity, he thought the
smart money was on the debauchery that followed the Kings
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coronation in Reims. This helps to explain why she did not hear
from her Voices again after that, until her trial.

Voltaire first raised these issues in his poem, La Pucelle (The

Maid of Orlans), which he started writing around 1730. While
living at Cirey, not far from Domrmy, he fleshed it out further.
His Joan is a sexy tavern girl of 27 who pretends shes 16, and
the plot turns on how long she can avoid being raped by the
English, and by her own knights for that matter. Many of them
testified later that they had indeed tried to grab at her breasts and
been slapped for their trouble. He has a fine old time skewering
Joans image as Catholic virgin martyr, which is why he never
had the poem published. It is true Voltaire added a little
nakedness here and there and a little vulgarity to spice it up, but
he liked Joan and he was much more critical of the hypocrites
who served with her and condemned her to death -- the Church,
the monarchy, old people who rewrote history to suit
themselves. History is, after all, nothing but a parcel of tricks
that we play upon the dead, someone once wrote (a quote
sometimes erroneously attributed to Voltaire).

Voltaire would get into trouble for this poem many years later
during a three-year stay in Berlin at the court of King Frederick
II (the Great). Voltaire decided that Frederick not only had
ambitions to conquer French poetry but all of Europe as well. In
their conversations, Frederick could not but be reminded that
Joan was from Lorraine, one of Frances more Germanic
provinces and at that time an independent duchy. Perhaps he
sincerely believed that Joan could be enlisted as a mercenary for
hire in the interests of Prussian nationalism. He saw that far
from being the Peacemaker her adoring fans had always claimed
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her to be (on the theory that only through war can there be
peace), he also saw that she had become an emblem of war. She
embodied the idea that peace needs to be uprooted periodically
through war in order to bring about change. Voltaire had to flee
Berlin in 1753, not only because he had completely alienated
Frederick by now with his continuous jibes at the homosexual
atmosphere at Sanssouci Palace, but also because pirated copies
of his poem about Joan were circulating and he was being
blackmailed by erstwhile friends to whom he had lent a canto or
two.

In the subsequent century, conservative French Catholic

monarchists would argue that Joan was sent by God to restore
the unity of France and the legitimacy of the Church and that if
anyone was responsible for Joans death, it was the damned
English. Popular folklore chipped in with more embroidery.
One of those tales tells how Joan was the illegitimate daughter
of Queen Isabelle of Bavaria (the Germans again) and Louis of
Orlans! Smuggled out of Paris, she was raised in secrecy in
Domrmy and it was her royal blood that gave her the power to
persuade many noble knights to escort her to see the Dauphin.
This pops up in a popular book charmingly titled Operation
Shepherdess (published 1961). In another story Joan avoided
being burnt at the stake by escaping from her English captors
and living another 18 years in relative obscurity. Well, it is as
good a theory as any.

But why was Joan of Arc so appealing to the Germans? In

Friedrich von Schillers tragedy of 1801, Die Jungfrau von
Orleans (The Maid of Orlans), she plays the French national
heroine and ends up dying in battle instead of at the stake. This
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is of course more suitable to the interests of German

Romanticism. Loyal French historians like Michelet went to the
rescue and the French Catholic Church, on reading him, took up
Joans cause from 1869 onwards to actively petition the Vatican
for Joan to be made a saint. This viewpoint gained ground
against the skeptics and republicans through the rest of the 19th
century. From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth,
she came to symbolize right-wing jingoism, national and racial
purity myths in short, Fascism. There is something terribly
sad and ironic about this, for if there is one metaphor that
emerges out of the many in the context of virginity, it is
betrayal. For Joan was betrayed all along the way, not least by
the Dauphin and the French military commanders -- in short, by
adults who could not, or would not, appreciate that a teenager
could succeed where they could not, and who preferred political
intrigue over military action.

Joan would be exploited (raped) again in the Dreyfus Affair of

the 1890s, a watershed in French political life that divided
liberals and conservatives (more here). As nationalist
sentiments intensified, the Fascist Right hijacked Joan as one of
their own. The liberal French novelist and poet Anatole France
tried to capture Joan back for rationalism in 1908 by arguing
that her mysticism was just a form of hysteria and neurosis
brought on by the religious excesses of the late Middle Ages.
Good try but it hurt her case as much as it helped it, for the
psychologists then got to work on her sexual identity problems,
lesbian tendencies, and so on, to explain away why those knights
never got anywhere with her. But she found unexpected support
from gentle cynics like Mark Twain (1896) and George Bernard
Shaw (1923), whom she seduced into writing glowing tributes
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the true inheritors of Voltaires spirit. They opined that they

wished they had known Joan better, in a manner of speaking, but
you will recall that they had terrible love lives.

By the time Joan became a saint in 1920, she was sponsoring at

least three cults that were converging in the unifying image of
French nationalism: the Catholic saint, the republican anti-saint,
and the populist peasant girl heroine. It would be interesting to
try to argue that France was symbolically unified in 1920 like
never before or since. If Fernand Braudels argument that it
wasnt the French Revolution that unified France but the railway
train, then time-wise this would seem like a good fit. However,
as political dissension grew again through the 1920s and 1930s,
so too did Joans image split apart again into the various cults.
In World War II she was again claimed by the Germans
sponsoring Vichy France, who appealed to traditional rural
Catholic values, portraying her as a symbol of national suffering
with the potential for redemption in case they lost. (In Spain
they were doing the same with Teresa of Avila.) The
Communists staged another rescue mission, proclaiming Joan a
rebel and a freedom fighter against the Germans. But the most
emotionally satisfying moment in the whole sorry saga occurred
on Liberation Day, May 1945, when Charles de Gaulle and his
soldiers marched to her statue in Paris and all the metaphors
converged as one. De Gaulle was exceedingly clever when he
adopted the Cross of Lorraine as the symbol of Free France.
Whatever Joans evolving reputation, Lorraine was now
certifiably French and not German and de Gaulle understood
better than anyone the mystique of her image in rallying France.
Since World War II, she has been claimed again by the
Catholics and the Fascist Right, with Le Pen and the National
 245

Front arguing that if Joan expelled the English, she could help
the French get rid of the Arabs. However, it is that arresting
image of De Gaulle on Liberation Day that redeems Joan for all
time.

Joan of Arc was the superhero of her age and as with all
superheroes, fights have raged over her and perverse cults have
sprouted like mushrooms. This is not surprising, given that her
story is a fairy tale with a grotesque ending. Traditional France
has kept it alive partly because she was one of them, partly
because her devoutness remains impressive in a secular age and
partly because constantly improving on the original is a
traditional French pastime.

Life As Opera
From Lola Montez to Mata Hari
Lola Montez and Richard Wagner
Tristan and Isolde
Carmen La Mogador
Manon
Salome Mata Hari
Turandot

LOLA MONTEZ AND RICHARD WAGNER

Once upon a time, in Starnberg near Munich, Richard Wagner
was working on pre-production for his groundbreaking new
opera Tristan and Isolde. The year was 1865. Across Europe, in
Paris, Georges Bizet was on a train to the nearby village of Le
Vsinet. Unlike Bizet, Wagner was feeling very self-satisfied.
His moody opera had been completed five years earlier and still
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it had not been performed anywhere. But at last an invitation

had arrived, from King Ludwig II of Bavaria Ludwig was a
huge Wagner fan summoning him to Munich to mount the
kind of extravaganza that Wagner always intended for this
opera.
Wagner was single again; his wife had left him for good this
time. Life now was to be lived in a state of perpetual crisis. He
was broke, of course, and he knew he was not welcome in most
of the great cities of Europe. But things were looking up. As he
prepared the opera for rehearsals, he recalled how the
adventuress Lola Montez had careened around Europe 20 years
earlier, before she too had settled in Bavaria. Lola crept into his
thoughts often these days. She was only four years in the grave
and the strange connection between them haunted him. Wagner
was well on his way to becoming the celebrated composer
whose music would dominate the late 19th century world, while
Lola Montez never would be heard of again. But there had been
strong and ironic resemblances between them.

Their careers had been launched at the same time -- Wagners

with a successful performance of Rienzi in Dresden in 1842 and
Lolas with a Spanish routine during intermission in The Barber
of Seville on the London stage in 1843. As they both became
better known, they moved in the same fashionable crowd and
Wagner began monitoring Lolas progress. Inevitably, they
collided one day in Dresden, whereupon he sized up his
doppelganger. Lola was in the company of Franz Liszt -- we
only have her word for it after a series of whirlwind marriages
and affairs in India, London, Paris, Warsaw and St. Petersburg.
She hardly noticed Wagner of course and he resented it. The
genteel set seemed entertained by Lola, who had so little respect
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for the niceties of polite society -- a cynicism she kept all her
life, even as she enjoyed its decadence. Wagner knew she was
never really accepted by them; dancers were forever on the
borderline. But it seemed to make no difference! She was
uniformly roasted in the press (when they werent being paid
off) and audiences booed and hissed most places she went, yet
this did not dent her ability to draw a crowd. Far from it, for her
appeal lay in the tease whereby the audience was incited to
participate and react, in the venerable tradition of music hall and
pantomime. Frequently she became the main draw!

Wagner found this irritating. Her kitsch dance routines with the
castanets and fans and extravagant costumes were the
embodiment of everything that was wrong with contemporary
opera. She was a lower-class tramp with a mean temper, and
though she wore great clothes (something he appreciated), he
could not understand her popularity. He had not been surprised
when Liszt dumped her in Paris. Perversely though, after an
initial fiasco, Lola had been embraced enthusiastically by the
Parisians and she stayed on to enjoy it. Wagner was envious.
Paris was the most fashionable place to be and being popular
there meant something. But after a duel resulted in the death of
her lover, she was obliged to leave Paris in a hurry, and so she
had come to Bavaria. A story not unlike Wagners as he fled
from his creditors, one city after another.

Lola first imposed herself upon the good citizens of Munich in

October of 1846. There is a famous legend of how she first met
the King, Ludwig I (Ludwig IIs predecessor). She sought out
the cafe in town where Ludwigs chief adviser took his coffee in
the morning and contrived to fall off her rented horse at his
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startled feet. Of course he sprang gallantly to the ladys

assistance, and it wasnt long before he was promising her an
audience with the King. When the big day arrived, Lola
overheard Ludwig in the next room trying to get out of the
meeting so she raced past the two guards and strode in front of
the 60-year-old Ludwig. The story varies a bit at this point.
Some say that as she was standing in front of Ludwig he asked
Nature or art? a question that could well be asked of many of
todays celebrities. She took up a stiletto letter opener from
Ludwigs desk and cut her blouse open to prove there was no
padding. Perhaps she had the stiletto in her clothes for just this
very moment? Others report that as the guards wrestled with
her, her dress was torn off the shoulder and that she ripped the
other shoulder off for good measure, baring her full breasts
before his royal gaze. At any rate Ludwig was impressed.

No surprise then that within the year Lola was running the
government of Bavaria, or at least ordering it around. But, true
to form, she also went out of her way to cause offense. One
could argue that the Bavarians needed a shake-up, but it also
seems evident that Bavarias conservatism provoked Lola to
new excesses. In the end it was the nationality issue that
became her downfall: she manipulated Ludwig into granting her
Bavarian nationality, the titles of Countess of Landsfeld,
Baroness von Rosenthal, Canoness of the Order of St. Therese,
her own villa, and 20,000 florins a year -- all at taxpayers
expense. Her enemies complained bitterly, National feeling is
wounded; Bavaria believes itself to be governed by a foreign
woman, whose reputation is branded in public opinion. With
all of Europe already in an uproar -- this was 1848, the year of
revolutions -- the king unwisely dismissed his government.
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Things went from bad to worse and the college students did
what students do best -- they protested and then rioted. The king
revoked his naturalization order and Lola was forced to flee
across the border, disguised as a boy. Ludwig was not able to
hold on to his throne, but the citizens felt that they could forgive
the old man his follies.

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

For Wagner, Tristan and Isolde would represent everything that

Lola Montez was not. The opera would continue a theme he had
been working on in the earlier Tannhuser and Lohengrin the
search for the perfect woman, the ideal soulmate. It was a
worthy theme that had interested intellectual men through the
centuries. For Wagner, as with Beethoven and Goethe, it had
real-life implications: it turned on the question of how he should
behave with women whom he adored physically and spiritually
but who were married to other men. In other words these were
women he could not, or should not, have.

Perhaps for this reason, Wagner was drawn to the story of

Tristan, Isolde and King Mark, the tragedy of a love triangle
gone bad. Wagner by 1865 was himself in just such a triangular
relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Von Blow Hans von Blow
was his conductor but it was the wife Cosima von Blow who
was spending most of her time with him. (She asked her
husband for a divorce in 1868 and he eventually granted it. It
was finalized in 1870, by which time Wagner and Cosima
already had three children together. They married later that
year.)
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It seems the inspiration needed to compose Tristan and Isolde

had come earlier, from his time spent in Zrich and Venice in
1858-59 in the company of the magnificent Mathilde
Wesendonck. It seems equally likely Wagner never slept with
Mathilde, who was married, but she apparently called forth in
him that hopeless passion and exquisite torture that comes from
experiencing Tristan and Isolde. It is the ever-shifting distance
between desire and denial the woman one desires yet who is
faithful to someone else. This tension (influenced by reading
Schopenhauer) afforded a glimpse of what Wagner took to be
nothing short of the meaning of life, whether one called it the
infinite or immortality or oblivion or death (liebestod). For
Wagner, opera could focus us on that feeling. It inspired a sense
of surrender to what sometimes can turn into overwhelmingly
powerful passions. If the opera fan could not feel those desires,
then the more pity them. Wagner felt that through music one
could achieve a virtual disintegration of the self. One could
experience rapture, transcendence, orgasm and then peace of
mind, something many music critics feel he comes closest to in
Tristan and Isoldes second act duets and its finale. By that
time, Isolde has dropped dead over Tristans body. Its not for
everyone.

How ironic then that Wagners most adoring fan the young
King Ludwig II -- loved Wagner and his operas with a lusty
passion that mocks Wagners lofty pretensions. Ludwig was
almost certainly homosexual and the snottier courtiers had
Wagner picked out as one of Ludwigs boys, earning him the
nickname Lolotte, a reference to Lola. The legends abound,
and it seems that Ludwig on occasion enjoyed himself recreating
the erotic Venusberg scenes from Tannhuser at the court.
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Another time, Wagner caught Ludwig parading around the

palace with the Swan Knights of Tannhuser and on one
particularly ugly day, Wagner had found him dressed up to
resemble Lola Montez. Whether this was to tease the courtiers
and bureaucrats or to tease Wagner, or whether Ludwig was
simply making an ironic commentary upon a celebrated moment
in Bavarian history, he did not know. At the present time
Ludwig was enthusiastically suggesting that he cast himself as
Isolde with Wagner as Tristan, for horsing around the castle.
How many other composers had this problem with their patron
Wagner wondered? Certainly he knew Voltaire had had to keep
the young Frederick (the Great) at beyond arms length.
Unfortunately Wagners own flamboyant taste in rich colors,
silks, furs and perfumes didnt help. One of his nastier critics
would perceive an aura of homosexuality vibrating throughout
the music of his operas. What could you do with critics like
this?

At the end of 1865, Tristan and Isolde was performed

successfully in Munich and Wagner felt vindicated. Yet, true to
form, he was fleeing Bavaria within months, all good will used
up and deeply in debt once again. The irony here is that Wagner
was repeating the flight of Lola Montez in 1848, running away
from a Ludwig. Damned if he would dress up as a girl though.

For Wagner, the highest state one might aspire to with Lola
Montez was being eaten alive by her, which had its merits. Yet
they were really little different from each other both were
impetuous and arrogant, reckless spenders and restless spirits at
heart. Lola had been a rival for the worlds attention in the
worst possible way. While music critics have lambasted
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Wagners extravagance and his ego, fewer have acknowledged

his ability to cultivate his public image, just as Lola did, and for
a decade she had been better at it and, as a result, more famous.
Word of her death in New York had reached Europe quickly a
true measure of her cultural impact perhaps? Wagner
considered her the most vulgar spirit of the age in which he now
found himself. There was something soAmericanabout her.
How appropriate she go and live there. Lola had been a
burlesque of womanhood, a painted and jeweled harpy who was
all facade and no substance. Her body, her physicality, her lusty
desires, her narcissism had been the very opposite of the ethical
and spiritual values he felt people should aspire to. Indeed
Europe seemed to be turning into everything tawdry that Lola
had stood for. Of course Wagners impact on late 19th century
music would be enormous and Lolas ultimate impact on
contemporary culture would be minimal, yet at the time she was
an equally valid symbol of where 19th century European culture
was headed

CARMEN

Back in 1865, Georges Bizet was on a train from Paris to the

outlying village of Le Vsinet where his father had bought some
property. On the train he met a woman who had an edge on him
when it came to being somewhat famous. Her nickname and
stage name was la Mogador and she too had bought land near
the village and so they would become neighbors. In the years
since then, the village has been absorbed into the Paris suburbs
but this was once a quiet place where dancer Josephine Baker
made her home and just across the Seine in Louveciennes is
where Anas Nin made her home.
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The woman on the train, Cleste Mogador, is one of those

marvelous colorful figures who bursts out of the Bizet
biographies, proving more interesting than the composer
himself. She was 41 while Bizet was 27, but she could still
catch the attention of men with her looks. She was wasp-
waisted, supple as a willow, lively as a linnet just pock-
marked enough to suggest a slight resemblance to the Venus de
Milo, wrote one contemporary. Was she the inspiration for the
music of Bizets Carmen? Certainly Mina Curtiss, Bizets
principal biographer, thought she was.

Born Cleste Vnard in a working class Paris suburb in 1824,

she had run away from home at the age of 13 to get away from
the attentions of her mothers lovers. Able to survive only as a
prostitute, by the age of 16 she was ensconced in a bordello
where she entertained the by-then dissolute poet-lover Alfred de
Musset as a client. Too ambitious and proud for the bordello,
she quit after de Musset took her on a date to a restaurant and
sprayed a bottle of seltzer water all over her for his amusement.
She decided to be a dancer instead, at almost the same time Lola
Montez made that same decision. There were few other ways a
gal could aspire in that social system.

It was while entertaining clients in the ballroom that she gained

her nickname, after the Moroccan city that the French Navy had
shelled recently. Of Clestes virtue it was said, It would be
easier to defend Mogador. Moving on from the ballroom, she
became famous as a circus rider at the Paris Hippodrome,
admired for her acrobatic stunts, before she successfully snared
an aristocratic husband. His family was horrified; after all
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Cleste was still registered as a prostitute. Her husband

remedied that blot on her character by filling out the requisite
paperwork, but then proceeded to go through her finances as
well as his own and she was obliged to write her memoirs to
help pay the bills. Those memoirs were suitably scandalous and
they sold very well (Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, declared the
supportive Dumas pre). But her husband fled to Australia
where he assumed the post of French ambassador. La Mogador
sailed to visit him and it is curious to think of her in Australia
around the same time as Lola Montez. Her husband died in
1858, and after that Cleste took up an interest in the opera,
going on to write and produce a series of operettas as well as
novels, plays, songs, poems. The Bizet biographer dismisses her
as a poor mans George Sand, but this is elitist snobbery.
Financial success came when she staged a version of her novel
The Gold Robbers (Dumas pre did the transcription), and it
became a smash hit among working class audiences. She was
able to buy the property at Le Vsinet with the proceeds and this
is how she came to meet Bizet and inspire him. When he
composed Carmen some years later they had long gone their
separate ways, but who is to say whether she was the inspiration
for Carmen?

The original Carmen story was written by Prosper Mrime,

who had long been interested in Spain as well as in the south
of France and the Gypsies. The women were so exotic by
contrast with Paris and that mattered to Mrime, who was a
ladies man. He claimed first to have heard the story on a visit to
Spain in 1830 from the Countess of Montijo, who would
become his lifelong friend. He also admired and wrote about
Cervantes, whose novela La Gitanilla (The Gypsy Girl) features
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a beautiful heroine named Preciosa. But the fact that Carmen

wasnt published till 1843 when Lola was making out like
Carmen may have accelerated his desire to get the story
published. He has a great line for Carmen: Women are like
cats; they dont come when you call them and do come when
you dont. His Carmen, like Lola, used her body in public as a
sexual weapon, flaunting it, knowing that men were drawn to it
and she indulged in stormy love affairs.

A generation later, what would appeal to Bizet about such

women was their feminine physicality and vitality, their energy,
their strength, their being true to themselves, and this appears in
his operatic heroines lArlsienne, Djamileh (based on a de
Musset poem) and Carmen. Wasnt that what opera was all
about anyway, not Wagnerian slow death by oblivion? In
Bizets own life he was not so lucky. Carmen was first
performed in 1875 and he would be dead within the year at the
early age of 37, from a failed heart and depressed that his
marvelous opera had not succeeded as he had hoped.

In critical terms, Bizet helped begin the verismo style of

opera, realistic in its portrayal of the seedier side of life. He
wanted a sense of naturalism to his opera, where the stage
served as a public space for examining and even sanctioning
immoral behavior, at least by governing class standards, so his
factory girls smoke cigarettes on stage, and his heroine stabs
another cigarette girl to death. Depending on whom you read,
this can be the story of an honorable soldier who falls apart
while Carmen remains both moral and subtle, always honest
with herself, refusing to follow bourgeois sexual codes. She
knows her sexual powers and how to use them, but she isnt
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promiscuous. But then there are those critics who discern a

coldness and a contempt for men, as well as blatant, unsubtle
sexual display. That kind of criticism has not gone away since
the opera opened, upsetting Paris opera-goers, when the critics
called Carmen a harlot and the hero Don Jos vile and odious.
They could have been talking about Lola Montez, word for
word or todays teenagers for that matter.

Carmen was as revolutionary in its own way as Wagners early

operas had been. But Wagner could not have made an opera out
of Lola Montez, for she was a survivor, a cat o nine lives, even
if she died at the young age of 39, whereas Wagners lover-
heroes had to die an ennobling tragic death at half that age. But
a French composer undoubtedly could work lust into his musical
score. If Wagner could have the royal Tristan and Isolde killed
off by other royals, Bizet could have his definitely non-royal
heroine killed by her equally non-royal lover in a steamy and
stormy emotional climax.

Curiously, Bizet found his music constantly being described by

the press as Wagnerian and it was the Germans, from Brahms
to Bismarck, who embraced his music far more enthusiastically
than his fellow Parisians did. Perhaps it was all that
Mediterranean sunlight in Carmen that the Germans responded
to? Perhaps it was a clever act of musical colonization?
Wagner actively promoted national unity and pride with chilly
northern myths because they possessed neither unity nor pride
themselves something Bismarck was able to exploit. Wagner
himself was on the barricades in Dresden in 1848 and, in the
subsequent years, though his operas and his writings primarily
appealed to the avant-garde rather than the streets, they played a
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role in unifying Germany. His music seemed as muscular and as

inevitable as Prussian armies as they rolled across Europe. The
French, on the other hand, looked abroad and southwards
because they already had more than enough unity and pride.
Indeed they had an empire to maintain. But they reeled from
one political crisis to another.

There is something else here though: why did Wagner never

make women the central characters while French composers
took the opposite tack? Indeed, the essential difference is that
Wagners operas celebrated dying heroes while French and
Italian opera celebrated dying heroines. Wagners characters
seem doomed by Fate in the same way that the others are
doomed by debilitating diseases like consumption. Not in
Bizets operas. His heroes and heroines are agents of their own
downfall and they know they are responsible for their own
actions.

This invites a question: does it mean anything? Nietzsche

thought so. After initially embracing Wagners music, from
1878 onwards he turned against him, damning Wagners
Teutonic myths and Scandinavian monsters, seeing in them
everything he found sick and decadent about European culture
and German culture in particular. Nietzsche wrote that music
is a woman and that Wagners sensuousness made the spirit
weary and worn-out. Music as Circe. It is music that makes
you sweat; it is evil, subtly fatalistic. Is there a whiff here
of what would come -- the descent into the horrors of World
War I and World War II or is he over-reaching? (How ironic
then that Wagner had been busy blaming the ruination of music,
and much else, on the Jews - in the infamous essay Das
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Judenthum in der Musik, written in 1850 but widely available

from 1869.)

Nietzsche liked Bizet though. It wasnt important that Carmen

dies at the end; that was merely a dramatic convenience in a
century when somebody had to die in order to produce
heartrending arias. What was important in Carmen was that
there was no imminent betrayal by Fate, as there is in Wagner,
or by the body as there is in, for example, La Traviata. Disease
stalked Bizet and his wife, as well as Chopin, Nietzsche and
others in this chapter; it also stalked the body politic of France,
Italy and Spain throughout the century as they suffered one
indignity after another. For Nietzsche, the triumph of Carmen
was that it transcended all that with its physicality and,
simultaneously, its lightness of touch. Carmen, like Lola and la
Mogador, evoked the warm sun and rich colors of Spain, the
passions of the Mediterranean world, the Gypsy life, the triumph
of the body over death -- the very opposite of everything
Wagners operas stood for and everything Nietzsche was afraid
of. Freed of these physical limitations, women like Carmen,
Lola and la Mogador appeared to have free agency, long before
the era of womens suffrage. It also didnt hurt that they were
their own best publicists. They could wear Oriental turbans and
slippers (a la The Arabian Nights) and Spanish costumes (a la
Carmen) if they felt like it. They could stage dramatic scenes
and romance their lovers as George Sand did for Mrime, as
Lola did for her lovers, as Wagner did every day of his life, as
Madame de Stael did by shocking people with her costumes and
her cleavage. Others assumed mens costumes and exotic
foreign costumes at a time when European imperialism was
spreading over the globe. These were acts of sabotage -- the
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work of cultural vulgarians. It was as if life and art were one, as

if life were an opera. This fascinated the European public and
so these women became celebrities, inspiring women outside the
opera house in the real world.

MANON

The femme fatale who emerged in the Europe of the 1880s

appears in the Jules Massenet opera Manon (1884) and the
Puccini version Manon Lescaut (1893). Manon herself was the
creation of Abb Prvost back in 1731, a working class girl
whose looks dazzled the men and who wanted to make her own
way in society as Lola and la Mogador would do. Massenet
himself had a happy and a successful lifelong marriage to his
wife, Ninon, and despite the rumors to the contrary, he may well
have been faithful to her. But as he well knew, the publics
appetite was not for faithful husbands and wives but for Eve,
Mary Magdalene, Salom and Sappho. Give them what they
want, he thought.

It is the age-old conflict between the courtesan and the priest,

between voyeurism and guilt, that drives the plot of the best
operas, including Manon, which is about how a voluptuous
young woman brings an earnest young man to grief. It begins as
a tale of young love: a coquette and a naif who wants to become
an abb. She seduces him and spends all his money, they part,
they are reunited, and there is an obligatory tragic ending.
Massenet was accused of setting a French story to German
music (they meant Wagner again), but in fact it was the attempt
to capture Manons eroticism in music that most attracted and
challenged him. Eroticism in music was new and exciting, just
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as it was in painting and sculpture, and there was definitely

something electric in the air during the 1880s.

Civilization survived the Gay Nineties as the late Victorians

gave way to the Edwardians and France was wracked by the
Dreyfus trial and the Catholic Church was in full retreat. Just to
stay fashionable one had to be androgyne or bisexual, a sadist or
a masochist, a lesbian or an invert, or even a transsexual or
hermaphrodite. This was the heyday of the Folies Bergre and
the Moulin Rouge, Mistinguett, La Goulue and Jane Avril,
Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Gabriele
D'Annunzio, Octave Mirbeau, Andr Gide, Paul Valry, Anatole
France and Claude Debussy. Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth
Arden and Madam C. J. Walker took make-up out of the theater
and launched their cosmetics lines for respectable women.
Lesbians were fashionable -- the American Natalie Clifford
Barney, the wild girl from Cincinnati, was host of the
Amazons salon, a mostly lesbian avant-garde group of artists.
Then there was Sigmund Freuds friend, Lou Andreas-Salom
who, apparently, never consummated her marriage in all those
years and, of course, Freuds psychology was as much as
anything an attempt to explain what all this sexual confusion
was really about.

Manhood itself was in danger, some said, from radical women.

Many of them were even demanding a vote! The way had been
opened for women to aspire to ecstasy, to express themselves
freely, to switch between the traditional roles of mother, sister,
mistress, wife. It meant trouble and the opera house was the
perfect place to do it in, with actresses and singers taking the
lead. On stage they expressed heightened emotions and violent
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passions and they were sanctioned to do it. As they were

performers, they were not playing themselves but fictional
characters. On stage, as they say, anything goes. Of course, the
private self had to be held to a higher standard of integrity.
Oscar Wilde failed to understand this and ended up in jail.
There would be others who would meet an even worse fate.

SALOME

On October 15, 1917, Mata Hari was executed by firing squad

on the grounds of the Chteau de Vincennes, on the eastern
outskirts of Paris, after being convicted of espionage for
Germany. It was said that when she was arrested, she welcomed
the police officers stark naked and invited them all into bed with
her. It was said that she went bravely, refusing the blindfold and
standing perfectly still. It was no doubt a traumatic experience
for her young firing squad, since she was staring straight back at
them. Arrayed in the latest creations of the Paris fashion world,
as the guns fired, she collapsed in a heap of petticoats. One
soldier was said to have remarked, There is one who knows
how to die. Execution as the ultimate performance.

It may not all be true, but of such material legends are born.
Mata may have been in on a plan to load the guns with blanks
but real bullets were substituted at the last minute, an act of
treachery straight out of Tosca. Others say she blew a kiss to
her executioners, a last act of bravura, while still others say that
just as the guns were about to fire, she ripped away her blouse
and displayed her breasts for her executioners (something she
never did during her dancing career). Maybe they would have
had to pause, check the breasts, and mentally ask whether they
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didnt look too bad for a woman of 40 something. OK, that last
bit is made up, but the legends are hilarious.

The oddities did not end there. Because no one would claim the
body of a spy for fear of being arrested themselves, it was
donated to science and who knows what the medical students at
the University of Paris thought of it as they picked their way
through the remains of the vital organs shattered by a hail of
bullets.

These legends enraged Natalie Clifford Barney, who became

determined to get to the bottom of it. She tracked down the
commander of the firing squad and discovered that almost none
of it was true, other than that Mata Hari had gone out with style
and with pride. Barney had been one of the first to invite Mata
to dance and perhaps it was because she was a foreigner that she
quickly understood what a travesty the trial and execution were.
Certainly no one else was prepared to contradict the panic and
paranoia spreading at the time. Everybody sweated.

Those views of Mata Hari persisted well into the 1970s, when
she was still considered a German spy by many in France. She
was a major celebrity when she died, but she had suffered
through tough times to get to where she was.

Born Margaretha Zelle in 1876 in Leeuwarden in the

Netherlands, she was married in 1895, had a son in 1897 and a
daughter in 1898 while living in Java (then a Dutch colony), lost
her son in 1899 and was divorced from her abusive husband in
1904. Mata Hari was created in 1905 out of necessity. She
had to survive and Paris seemed the place to do it in. Her frank
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sensuality and her apparently terrific body were perfect for a

dancer. The name she chose, Mata Hari, meant Eye of the
Sun or Eye of the Morning in Malay. When she danced she
would evoke the sacred rituals of Javanese temples and she
called herself the sacred courtesan of Shiva, god of destruction.
If her geography was a bit mixed up, she did seem to know all
the sex manuals of Asia. In her private life it was said she
stripped naked and danced with a snake for her most intimate
lovers in an amorous intoxication. She aimed to express the
mysterious Sphinx-like side of femininity -- sexy but dangerous
in whatever operatic setting would draw an audience.

The French writer Colette thought she was a transparent fraud

but conceded that Mata knew how to use her body for maximum
sexual effect. Others from the smart set those around
Diaghilev for example -- were much more critical, patronizing
her as really not that beautiful, vulgar even, with no personality.
Just as Lola Montez had been dismissed, so too Mata Hari was
never fully accepted by the High Art crowd, indicating that class
played a major role in all this. Even today, feminist writers
dismiss her, opening themselves up to charges of elitism. But
back then, Mata Haris working class physicality and
sensuousness may have enhanced her erotic appeal to the idle
rich and to others who appreciated that she was different from
the other dancers. Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.

It was with the act of striptease, exoticized and glamorized, that

Mata Hari made her name, especially her rendition of Saloms
Dance of the Seven Veils. The act of striptease and dancing
naked were symbolic of the new century, an aggressive throwing
off of all restraint. It matched the late imperial mood in Europe,
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which had forcibly colonized most of the globe and now was in
the mood to explore erotic conquest as well. Sexually
provocative dancing, especially the striptease, was perceived as
being more than merely bourgeois male sexual fantasies; it was
defended as avant-garde art. It could be mercenary and
confrontational, or it could also be subtle and self-creative.
Either way, it was exclusively the bourgeois rich who got to see
it, who claimed it as a new art form in order to distinguish it
from its working class and libertine equivalents. The cynic
would say that if a woman took her clothes off in a private
showing, one could always call it ART by pretending that it
revealed a womans feminine self to the male or female voyeur
just as a great painting like Mona Lisa might reveal her spiritual
side, but in a sense the striptease did reveal something. Rich
men and women could inhale the feminine self, as it was
revealed, and this was liberating to a generation of men and
women who did not undress before their own wives or
husbands. The exotic foreign quality was a bonus.

The great dancers and strippers made up the stories of their lives
and it was almost as if those layers of personality were coming
off too, along with the soon-to-be-abandoned corsets. That was
the essential appeal of Lola Montez, la Mogador and Mata Hari:
it wasnt just the erotic charge of the physical striptease but that
these women were genuinely interesting to their audiences.
Who were they really? What did they want in life? Were they
all they were cracked up to be? How did they have the nerve to
throw off all restraint? The striptease was not just a metaphor
for what any performer was supposed to do on a stage reveal
character -- it was also a metaphor for the stripping of illusions
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and excess psychological and religious baggage that marked this

era.

The striptease supplanted opera as avant-garde art and

voyeurism remained a relatively private affair and is so even
today. It has been public only to the degree that the performers
know their act is for others private consumption. Yet the need
to be seen, to be viewed as an object of sexual desire is still what
drives the striptease it is essentially a performance. Over the
years acting and dancing have become more publicly erotic.
The need for eroticism is grounded in the reality of our lives, by
the increasing separation between private housing and public
streets, by the fact that true privacy is confined to the bedroom
or wherever the DVD player or the computer is, and by the
decrease in daily physical intimacy. Striptease provides a
window on the private passions, a mirror for those who can
experience it personally and a release for those who cannot. It is
not true to say that this always involves men watching women.
It is also untrue to say that erotic voyeurism is a one-way
transaction. In the striptease, the looker may be at the mercy of
the looked at, and a reversal is possible, where the woman can
intimidate the man, where the man can perform for the woman
or another man or a woman for another woman as Mata Hari did
at Natalie Barneys.

So was Mata Hari a spy? The biographers are divided. Clearly

there was not enough evidence in the dossiers to have convicted
her and those disposed to a guilty verdict only felt that way
because they knew she consorted with powerful military and
political figures in France, Germany and elsewhere, so how
could she have been otherwise? They reasoned that she must
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have traded in secrets as she traded in sexual favors pillow

talk. Others dismiss those secrets as gossip that anyone could
have picked up in the cafes and it was anything but secret. The
war was going badly for France and scapegoats were needed,
preferably foreigners, and she was known to hang around with
German diplomats and military officers and that made her a
target. On the other hand, there may be evidence to support the
charges she was German agent H21. Either way, the French
government, the public and press were in a race to the bottom.
Paranoia was widespread and spies were spotted everywhere,
as indeed they were elsewhere in Europe. The old order was
dying and with it Mata Haris world. Whether she was a spy or
not, she must have resented the fundamental unfairness, the
transparent rigging of the trial by a hypocritical and failed
regime. Once she knew she was going to die, she went with
dignity. This bears a striking resemblance to another famous
execution. Was it just a coincidence that within three years,
Joan of Arc became the patron saint of France? She too had
been put on trial and executed for dubious reasons. Is there
much difference then between treason and heresy?

The striptease is a metaphor, if ever there were one, for the rot
occurring in the traditional stabilizing belief systems at the end
of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. Christianity,
Islam, Imperialism and Family Values were being radically
undermined. This is reflected in the transition from the
adventuress living her life in public, in the opera house, to her
darker figure, the femme fatale, who was a much more private
and shadowy figure. Her frank sensuousness may have been in
tune with European High Culture, with its thrill-seeking and its
mix of cynicism and sentimentality. But when World War I
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came, Mata Hari failed to grasp that the forces of darkness were
closing in on her, just as Oscar Wilde had failed to recognize
similar signs back in 1895. When she was arrested as a German
spy, and then shot, the adventuress had become a martyr. But
was she the end of something from the 19th century or the
beginning of a new legend for the 20th? And what would
happen to the opera after Mata Haris death?

TURANDOT

In Viareggio, Italy, Giacomo Puccini had his own Mata Hari

weighing on his conscience. Back in 1909, Puccinis insanely
jealous wife, Elvira, had accused him of an affair with her maid,
Doria Manfredi, and mounted a nasty campaign of slander and
lies against Puccini and Doria that went on for months. In the
end, Doria resigned and moved back home rather than endure it
any further. Still Elvira kept it up, to the point where half the
country had heard about it. In despair, Doria committed suicide,
like one of the characters in his operas. Puccini protested his
innocence, but the country split into two opposing, accusatory
camps. Only when the doctors autopsy revealed Doria to be a
virgin did the fog begin to lift. Was there more to it? It seems
unlikely that we will ever find out. But Puccini contemplated
legal separation from his wife, while Dorias family filed suit
against her. Elvira was sentenced to five months in prison,
before the case was settled out of court. Puccini could never
quite forgive his wife after that, though they were reconciled
later in the year.

Turandot was composed many years later against the backdrop

of these meditations. It was first performed in April of 1926 at
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la Scala, minus the concluding duet, for Puccini had died before
completing it, in 1924. The operas story was based on what
some believe was a Persian fable but Puccini located it in
ancient Peking to give it a timeless and universal quality. For
the politically minded, it could have been set in Saddam
Husseins Iraq, or anyplace else that has experienced a Reign of
Terror. For the Princess Turandot has vowed to exact revenge
against all men for an original sin committed against her
ancestress. She has therefore set three riddles for her suitors,
and any suitor who cannot answer the riddles is beheaded. The
kingdom is dripping in blood and Turandot herself has become a
virgin ice queen a beautiful but cruel avenger. As the opera
begins, the last suitor, the Prince of Persia, is being executed. A
new prince, young Calaf, arrives in Peking, but he is in disguise.
Instantly smitten with Turandots beauty, he wants to try his
hand at answering the riddles. His father and the young slave
girl, Liu, try to talk him out of it. Liu is in love with him but
Calaf doesnt know it.

Calaf successfully answers the three riddles (the answers, it

turns out, are Hope, Blood and Turandot) but now Turandot
fears being given over to this foreign prince with no name. So
Calaf comes to her rescue by setting a riddle for Turandot in
return: if anyone can find out his name, he will agree to his own
execution as if he had failed the riddles. That night no one
sleeps as the search is carried out (no one would want to during
the marvelous aria Nessun Dorma). When Calafs father is
captured and threatened with torture, Liu steps in to save him
and is tortured in his stead, but courageously she refuses to
reveal Calafs name. Turandot is curious about where she gets
her strength to resist and Liu responds, Princess, it is love.
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When the pain becomes unbearable, Liu criticizes Turandot to

her face before grabbing a soldiers dagger and taking her own
life. Everyone is appalled: so much blood has been spilt already
but this time its different, for this woman has died for love.
Calaf criticizes Turandot at first but then kisses her on the mouth
and it would seem that she becomes his. At the court, she
declares, I have discovered the strangers secret and his name is
-- Love. The Reign of Terror is over. But this last part isnt in
the opera, because it stops with Lius death unfinished. Like
Iraq.

So why do men fall in love with ice queens and not the women
in front of their eyes? Who is the hero of this story Calaf, Liu
or Turandot? The libretto suggests that it is the power of Calafs
love to melt Turandots cold heart, so that ice becomes fire, and
life triumphs over death. But this explanation flies in the face of
the emotional impact of the opera, for it is clear that Liu is the
true heroine of the opera, not Turandot, just as Madame
Butterfly is the heroine in her opera. Puccinis operas defend
the brave young women who are destroyed in the course of the
story by forces greater than they, but none more poignantly than
Liu. She is completely Puccinis creation and she gets some of
the best music too. But it has greater resonance in that Puccini
was mindful of the suicide of Doria Manfredi and innocent
victims everywhere. There is a sense of atonement, sympathy,
pathos, even rage that drives Turandot that is not there in the
other operas. Turandot herself chooses to be the victim of the
original sin, but equally she is the cause of the current series of
riddles and the blood it spills and one might see the shadow of
Elvira, Puccinis wife, behind this chilly figure.
 270

A number of music critics make the connection between Doria

and Liu (to be fair, many do not). I have yet to read anyone
make the connection to Mata Hari, and Puccini only saw her
perform that one time in Monte Carlo. But in the early 1920s,
as Puccini wrote Turandot, Europe was still coming to terms
with the barbarism of what had occurred during World War I
and the traumas that would not heal, least of all in Italy, where
Mussolini was on the rise. The Great War had absolutely
horrified Puccini. He was criticized because he had showed his
distaste for it (by being facetious) while everyone else was
plunging headlong into it. When the War was over, while he
always had a fondness for the monarchy, the church, the old
ways, this did not mean he automatically embraced fascism or
nationalism, or rejected them for that matter.

That kind of rigid thinking was exactly what had brought about
the suicide of Doria Manfredi, the one person who had behaved
honorably throughout the whole fiasco. It was that kind of
malice that had brought about the death of Mata Hari nine days
before the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace. Like Mata
Hari, Puccini believed in individualism, not mass ideologies. He
believed in the right to go hunting and to drive fast cars, he
believed in the right to flirt and the intoxications of love and
lust. Mata Hari was a symbol of love, and in Paris in 1917 that
was the ultimate transgression in a political culture of death.
Cynics may argue that Puccini was just a womanizer and that he
allowed himself to be used by Mussolini, but people behave in
love the same way they behave in politics and he made them
both the backdrop to Turandot. He understood the relationship
between them.
 271

Puccini was pessimistic that humanity could ever achieve

harmony again. It is somehow fitting that harmony is almost
achieved in Turandot, but it isnt, because the opera is
unfinished, and some critics argue that the happy ending was
beyond his ability to deliver. The onset of the modern world
would be dominated by the great ideologies: bolshevism,
communism, fascism, nationalism and the like. This was a
discordant time. In the theater, the concert hall, the opera house
and the music hall, things were in rapid decline. Turandot
would be the last great opera and no one would live happily ever
after.

Poison Pen Letters

The Strange Tale of Agatha Christie

On This Page:
A Publicity Stunt
Revenge
Amnesia
What would Harley Quin have said?
Murder in Mesopotamia
Poison Pen Letters
ShareThis
Once upon a time in the middle of a bitterly cold winter, a young
Gypsy man was out walking near Guildford, southwest of
London, when he found an abandoned car down an embankment
and reported it to the police. It was early in the morning, a
Saturday, in December of 1926. When the police arrived, they
were able to identify the owner of the car from an expired
 272

drivers license left inside, indicating that it was the famous

writer of detective fiction, Mrs. Agatha Christie. Also left in the
car were a fur coat and various personal belongings, which
suggested that the driver may have left poorly protected against
the cold. The police paid a call to the Christie house near
Sunningdale, Berkshire, to inquire as to her whereabouts and
were told by her staff that she had driven off after l0 p.m. the
night before with no word on where she was going.

Agatha Christie was not rediscovered until 11 days later.

What happened in the interim? How could one of the countrys
most famous writers simply disappear and no one know what
happened to her? There was intense speculation about her
motives throughout the rest of December and into 1927. Then a
wall of silence descended for half a century. In her
autobiography of 1977, published one year after her death,
Christie skates past it as if it never happened. In 1978, the
subject was reopened with the publication of two books. The
first, The Mystery of Agatha Christie was a biography by Gwen
Robyns, and it was written without the cooperation of the
Christie family, indeed it faced their active opposition. The
second, Agatha, was a speculative novel by Kathleen Tynan that
was subsequently made into the Michael Apted film of 1982
starring Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman. A flurry of
biographies followed, notably the authorized biography by Janet
Morgan in 1984, and it is fair to say that they all have different
theories about Christies disappearance. This is one mystery
that has never been solved and it is better than any of her novels.
The question then is, What exactly was it that she did and why
did she do it?
 273

A PUBLICITY STUNT

One of the first journalists to investigate was the 20-year old

Lord Ritchie Calder. Although his job was to be curious about
Christies disappearance, he also knew a good story when he
heard one. Christie was a household name after her mystery
novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd became a cause clbre
earlier in the year. So the press gave her disappearance banner
headlines in every newspaper in the country.

By the time Calder got on to the story, the police were dragging
a small lake near where the car had been found and thousands of
volunteers were fanning out over vast areas of Berkshire, Surrey
and other counties. This particular lake, known as the Silent
Pool, was interesting because it had put in an appearance in an
earlier Christie story and on that occasion a young womans
body had been found in it. Was Mrs. Christie staging one of her
stories or was she in the pool, Calder wondered? The police
dragged and dived it twice but came up empty. Calder knew
from reading Roger Ackroyd that the story begins after a woman
has committed suicide. At the same time, there were dozens of
eyewitness reports, all of them contradictory, just like in a good
Christie mystery. The press, the police, and the public were
considering three possibilities at this point: (1) that the author of
Roger Ackroyd had disappeared because she wanted to stage a
publicity stunt that would further her own career, or (2) that she
had committed suicide, or (3) that her husband had murdered
her. Calder relished that last possibility -- imagining the Queen
of Fiction murdered by her husband and her body hidden away
behind the vicarage.
 274

It wasnt long before the police and press knew that Christie had
suffered setbacks during the past year. Her mother, to whom
she had been very attached, had died a few months earlier and
Christie had gone to live in the old family house in Torquay
while it fell apart around her. You could almost say that the
house stood in as a metaphor for her own life; perhaps she
suffered a partial breakdown? This was seen as nothing unusual
for a woman of 36; most people experienced it at some stage of
their lives. At the same time, her marriage to Archie Christie
was coming apart. They had married during the Great War and
Calder wondered if they had really been that compatible in the
first place. After 12 years of marriage the Christies had a 7-year
old daughter and financial security but absolutely no chemistry.
By November, not long before her disappearance, Agatha
Christie knew Archie was having an affair with Nancy Neele,
whom Agatha had met once or twice. There are varying reports
on what happened next but it appears that on the morning of
Friday, December 3, Christie and her husband had an argument
and he packed his bags to spend the weekend with Miss Neele in
Godalming. Archie had apparently asked Agatha for a divorce
and she had rejected it. She didnt believe in divorce but she
was unable to find a way to break the impasse.

So everybody waited... and waited. It was nearly a week later

before word came in that Christie might be in Harrogate in
Yorkshire. Calder was able to learn that several staff and guests
at the Hydropathic Hotel, one of the larger establishments in this
old spa town, felt that one of their fellow guests, a Mrs. Teresa
Neele of South Africa, bore a striking resemblance to the photos
of the red haired Mrs. Christie published in the newspapers.
Apparently this Teresa Neele herself agreed with other hotel
 275

guests that there was a resemblance to Mrs. Christie and they

laughed it off, but all the same she took a keen interest in the
latest newspaper reports on the search. Calder hurried up to
Harrogate ahead of the police and confronted Teresa Neele in
the Hydro Hotel before Christies husband got there to check for
himself. The woman did not deny being Mrs. Christie, but
claimed to be suffering from amnesia, a story Calder did not
buy. As he later stated publicly, there was no Teresa Neele
lurking in the self-possessed woman he met. This is supported
by the fact that Mrs. Christie had apparently lost a diamond ring
at Harrods in London the week before, and she wrote to them
from Harrogate describing it and asking it to be forwarded to
Mrs. Teresa Neele at her hotel, which Harrods duly did. She
would have lost the ring as Agatha Christie, so why was it
Teresa Neele who retrieved it from Harrods? Calder also
discovered that she had a money belt on her, which not only
explains her spending freely in Harrogate but also some
premeditation. When Archie Christie arrived in Harrogate to
identify his wife, courtesy of the Yorkshire police, she did not
deny being Mrs. Christie, but she continued to claim she was
suffering from amnesia and that she had no idea how she came
to be in Harrogate.

Calder had no doubt that a gifted writer like Christie could pull
off a stunt surrounding her disappearance. The press have
always been a fairly cynical bunch, but thats based on
experiences close up with human nature, such as it is. Calder
also knew that Christie had begun a relationship with Collins, a
very savvy publishing firm, who knew the value of good
publicity. Like most of the press, Calder assumed that the sharp
intelligence displayed in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd must be
 276

at the root of her disappearance, and this was supported by a

most unlikely source -- her husband -- in the week that followed.
He declared to the Daily News: My wife said to me, some time
ago, that she could disappear at will and would defy anyone to
find her. This shows that the possibility of engineering her
disappearance was running through her mind. The fact that he
said this to the press upset a lot of people but he had one
advantage they didnt: he knew he hadnt murdered his wife.
Archie Christie also told the press that suicide was not part of
his wifes moral philosophy of life and was therefore out of the
question. Archie turned out to be right, though he was roundly
criticized for his tactlessness, so the point is, she did know how
to stage her disappearance.

Given the way things played out, is there any reason to doubt
that the whole affair was a brilliant example of how to work the
press, the police and the public? This stunt began gestation as
Agathas coup de grce to Archie, her way of saying All right I
will concede, but I will take you all with me. The police
behaved like her good Inspector Japp, dogged but lost up the
garden path when faced with Machiavellian marital intrigue.
But Calder thought that there was more to it and he began to
wonder if he had been outfoxed and outclassed. As with other
members of the press, he had focused floodlights on all the
people who knew Christie, people she felt she could no longer
bear -- Archie, his family, their mutual friends. While he knew
that Christie was deeply hurt by the breakup of her marriage and
she desperately needed privacy, he could not help but notice that
the effect was striking: it was all to her benefit. The public took
Agathas side against her husband right from the start. How did
she engineer that? Her husband certainly helped this along with
 277

his initial declaration to the press: There is no question about

the identity. It is my wife. She has suffered from the most
complete loss of memory and I do not think she knows who she
is. She does not know me and she does not know where she is.
I am hoping that the rest and quiet will restore her. I am hoping
to take her to London tomorrow to see a doctor and specialists.

Why was the public so willing to give Christie the benefit of the
doubt even when he described the cynical calculations of their
creator in the newspaper those strategically placed clues and
the amnesia? Calder had to admire how it was done. While it
succeeded in embarrassing her husband and it would engineer
the eventual divorce on her terms, it was also a masterstroke of a
publicity stunt that would enhance her career greatly.

After it was all over, Nancy Neele took herself off on a long
cruise to duck reporters, and she married Archie once the
Christie divorce went through in 1928. As for Mrs. Christie, she
met and married her second husband, the archaeologist Max
Mallowan in l930 and she was much happier for it. Calder
wondered whether they could all look forward to some of
Christies forthcoming stories being about unfaithful husbands,
their mistresses and wronged wives

REVENGE

Mystery and crime writers took a different view from everybody

else. Let us entertain the idea that Agatha Christie wanted to
create more than a publicity stunt. Let us say, instead, that
although she was emotionally distraught, she actually did stage
the whole event primarily to embarrass her husband. That was
 278

the gist of Edgar Wallaces piece for the Daily Mail during the
11 days she was missing.

Wallace wrote that this was a typical case of mental reprisal

on somebody who has hurt her. To put it vulgarly her first
intention seems to have been to spite an unknown person who
would be distressed by her disappearance. That she did not
contemplate suicide seems evident from the fact that she
deliberately created an atmosphere of suicide by abandonment
of her car. Loss of memory, that is to say mental confusion,
might easily have followed but a person so afflicted could not
possibly escape notice... If Agatha Christie is not dead of shock
and exposure within a limited radius of the place where her car
was found, she must be alive and in full possession of her
faculties, probably in London. It is impossible to lose your
memory and find your way to a determined destination.

At the moment Wallace wrote this, Christie may have been

sitting in her hotel room with her feet up and a little champagne
to celebrate how well things were turning out! She had planted
her clues: several letters she had written before driving off into
the night, one of them to her husband, and one of them to her
secretary asking her to cancel her appointments for the
following week. When she crashed the car she was fairly close
to where her husband and Nancy Neele were staying. Was she
driving there to spy on them, to satisfy in her own mind that her
marriage was truly over? Did she crash the car deliberately
within a reasonable proximity of their house to draw the medias
attention to it when she disappeared? And why choose the name
Teresa Neele unless it was to ensure that her rivals name
became known all over the country? Hardly a coincidence.
 279

Archie Christie, who was known to hate fuss, now found his
unfaithfulness slyly hinted at in every paper in the country.

Agatha Christie believed in Justice rather than the Law: in her

heroes Poirot and Marple rather than policemen like Inspector
Japp. Even murder was justified if it removed a more dangerous
threat to society, and the idea is there in most of her novels,
notably her final Poirot novel Curtain (1975), published the year
before she died. She would have felt that Archie needed to
suffer, not because he had personally betrayed her, which would
have been purely selfish on her part, but because he had
recklessly embarked on an affair and ended a marriage that, like
it or not, was founded on the principles that held society
together. She hated divorce and was especially concerned about
the children affected by it. Does this make Christie a social
conservative? Not necessarily, or perhaps only in the libertarian
sense where individual actions may be morally justifiable if they
right a wrong. The unfolding of events showed her to be an
unselfish and ethical woman whose behavior was entirely
praiseworthy. She just did it with greater style than most of us
are capable of.

The mental breakdown story that followed was concocted for

public consumption so as not to humiliate her husband and his
family more than was necessary. It seems equally likely that the
immediate family never knew her true motives, and she may
never have confided in them, partly to avoid hurting them
further and partly because she no longer felt she had to tell them
anything at all. Let bygones be bygones. In this view, Agatha
Christies disappearance was a defiant act of self-assertion
directed at her husband and his mistress, of saying HERE I
 280

AM. Do not think that I accept your desertion. I am a fighter

and I resent being dumped for another woman. This was a
clear case of revenge but it was by no ordinary scorned woman.

AMNESIA

In any conflict of the human heart, there must be a place for

psychological analysis that takes human frailty into
consideration, in even the most intellectually determined
individuals. When her husband asked her for a divorce, Agatha
Christie felt a deep sense of humiliation at the impending
destruction of her marriage and she felt a strong desire to
withdraw from the scene of her pain. She wanted to get away
from the place and the people who had hurt her the most. In a
rather tragic way, this must also have meant her own daughter,
Rosalind. She retreated to a place where no one would find her
so she could rebuild herself emotionally, on the assumption that
they would begin to look for her, and hopefully her husband
would care enough to be in the lead. It was not to be.

One must remember that before all else, Agatha Christie disliked
the press and she was painfully shy. In her autobiography, she
refers to journalists as faithful dogs and rats, and she writes,
I had felt like a fox, hunted, my earths dug up and yelping
hounds following me everywhere. Throughout her life Christie
was obsessively private. The very first sentence in Janet
Morgans authorized biography is, appropriately, Agatha
Christie valued her privacy. The publicity stunt and revenge
explanations are just too super-rational to be taken at face value.
One must remember that during the 1920s, the general public
needed to lionize new heroes after the horrors of the Great War
 281

had eliminated soldiers as its heroes, and this helps explain why
Lord Calder and Edgar Wallace were so keen to sensationalize
their heroine and exaggerate her Machiavellian powers. Morgan
points out that Calders claim to have met Christie ahead of
the police is willfully misleading; indeed he may not have had
an actual conversation with her at all.

One must look instead to the psychological explanations that

emerged after Christie was found. Upon leaving Harrogate with
her husband, she submitted to psychiatric examination,
including hypnosis, and was able to fill in some of the gaps
between wrecking her car and being found in Harrogate. The
sequence of events was this: after the accident she walked into
Guildford and caught an early morning train to London. She
was dressed only in a skirt and cardigan, and she may have had
some blood on her face. She had a cup of coffee at Waterloo
Station and saw a poster advertising Harrogate spa, so she
bought a ticket for there. Several doctors and a psychiatrist
diagnosed this behavior as typical of a hysterical fugue,
wherein an emotionally overwrought woman could experience a
breakdown as a solution to her anguish. For her future welfare
she should be spared all anxiety and excitement, they said.
Psychiatrists examining the case in retrospect revised her
condition to concussion-fugue. This condition can be
epileptic, or traumatic (brought on by a blow), or hysterical
(brought on by internal stress). Christie appears to have suffered
from a combination of traumatic and hysterical fugues. If
witnesses saw blood on her face when she arrived in Harrogate,
this suggests that she was concussed by the accident in the car.
It also explains why she left her warm clothes behind in the car.
Combined with her already overwrought condition, concussion
 282

tipped her over the edge into acting out physically what her
mind was unable to deal with. It is typical in such cases that the
patient does not remember what she did, hence the amnesia.
Morgan argues that people who have experienced hysterical
fugues all have a strong propensity to fantasize and that
Christie was a prolific and ingenious fantasist... for whom the
border between the real and the dreamt was thin. Imaginative,
shy, intuitive, Agatha had all the characteristics of those who are
capable of hypnotizing themselves at will. It was perfectly
possible for her to have lost her identity and yet to have gone
about the business of catching trains, shopping, and the like.
Under unreasonable strain, deeply unhappy with herself, she
might have induced a loss of memory.

The key to the enigma is Agatha Christies love of privacy. She

refused formal interviews and public appearances throughout
her life, and while this in itself is not so surprising, since so did
other well-known women writers, it does suggest a deeper
motivation. She wished to protect her private self, her writing
self, the self that was traumatized by the death of her mother and
the break-up of her marriage. This is all very English of course
but it is also consistent with her emotional detachment from her
characters. In a Christie novel the puzzle remains central and
you are unlikely to find Christie hiding in any of the characters.
This almost deep-seated love of privacy kept her from fully
engaging with the world around her and it helped produce the
shattering events of 1926.

WHAT WOULD HARLEY QUIN HAVE SAID?

 283

The truth of what happened in December 1926 is actually less

interesting than the squabble that has developed over it since
then. The more that is written about Agatha Christies
disappearance, the less we know for sure. There is no official
view on what happened and the biographers are split across the
three explanations: the publicity stunt, the desire to get revenge
on her husband, and the psychological breakdown. They are all
persuasive and all three were probably true to some degree.

The trouble with either the publicity stunt or revenge theory on

its own is that it turns Christie into some kind of Superwoman
who controls events the way the author controls her characters.
This argument is only persuasive if you believe that events
luckily worked out her way and she was able to capitalize on
them. Does this ever happen in the real world? Perhaps Lord
Calder and Mr. Wallace had this kind of order in their own lives,
but the rest of us do not, especially when we are emotionally
stressed. Still, it is a view that some Christie biographers find
convincing, even while conceding that she may have had a mild
breakdown.

The Christie family, Janet Morgan and the majority of

biographers, on the other hand, subscribe to the psychological
breakdown theory. Morgan argues that she was much tougher
and seasoned after this experience, but at the time, she was
totally distraught at losing her husband. This theory has the
disadvantage of robbing Christie of her strength, and turns her
into a more passive figure controlled by her family, her in-laws
and her biographers. The self-hypnosis story they have come up
with is unintentionally patronizing. The situation cannot be
explained away by saying Christie had a propensity for
 284

fantasizing. True, Christie was more than a little intrigued by

the fictional possibilities of amnesia and hypnosis. However,
there is no special reason to trust the family. They seemed
overly concerned to head off the idea that Christie manipulated
the crisis to inflict pain on others, including them. Morgan
despises this view but it suits her purposes that Christie can be
fitted into the ordinary woman box. Biography, like history, is a
form of rhetorical warfare. In our hearts we all want to believe
that our own book is superior to other peoples, for envy is the
root of all literary evils.

We can also reject the suicide theory proposed in the Kathleen

Tynan novel and Michael Apted film, Agatha. Suicide is not
psychologically convincing because anyone who has wrestled
with Christie through one of her novels could not believe she
would ever think of suicide. Read her Harley Quin short story,
"The Man from the Sea," published in The Mysterious Mr. Quin
(1930). I think of it as her finest short story, a masterpiece that
confirms her husband was right. She believed that suicide was
not morally acceptable in a civilized society, and one should
face up to ones responsibilities without trying to destroy others.
Furthermore, the Dustin Hoffman character is incompatible with
all the available evidence. Agatha went to Harrogate to drink
the waters of life, the aqua vivae, which like nepenthe could
make her forget the past, or at least allow her to reconstruct her
memory and her future along more practical lines.

In the end, Christies true success is as the disappearing author.

Her disappearance in 1926 was an attempt to make time stand
still for 11 days -- time enough for her to recompose her future
life in the same way she composed her novels. Time did not
 285

stand still for others, of course, but it did for Christie. Having
come to terms with her destiny she would go on to write books
in which she would disappear in a clever weave of masks and
magic tricks. All the great genre writers of popular literature
have done this through the centuries, from fairytales to the
modern horror film, with just as many of them intent on leading
the reader astray as on instructing them on the right path.
Christies mysteries are not inferior novels of limited
psychological complexity; they belong in an entirely different
literary tradition that has existed all along, parallel to the
psychological tradition, and it doesnt make any sense to
compare one through the lenses of the other. Think the Bible
rather than the Odyssey, the Gothic novel rather than Jane
Austen, Alfred Hitchcock rather than Orson Welles.

In keeping with this, Christie did not like the rich set or the
academics and intellectuals; she was an upper middle class and
unsentimental pragmatist and she had a more powerful
imagination than her detractors. She relished skewering post-
imperial Britain with its white, Protestant and class-conscious
society into which she injected the effeminate foreigner Poirot
and the sneaky provincial busybody Miss Marple. Her heroes
including Harley Quin -- snared the guilty and subjected that
society to a critique of its own hypocrisy and its deceit, while
also simultaneously feeling a deep affection for it. Intellectually
she would turn to the Mediterranean world and the Middle East
to find relief from the narrow provincialism that had become
Britain. In retrospect it took the disaster of divorce to open her
up to lifes rich possibilities. But she did live happily ever after.

MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA
 286

Traumatic events may take years before they surface in an

authors writing. Christies disappearance certainly appears to
have surfaced in the work of others, whether it was intentional
or not. Hitchcocks film The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Daphne
Du Mauriers novel Rebecca (also in 1938) and the subsequent
Hitchcock film, all turn on the fate of a disappeared woman.
Both artists had to be aware of their more famous competitors
crisis of 1926 and they give an ironic twist to the concept of
disappearance, explored in the context of the thriller and the
melodrama.

This was a time when the really interesting novels and

Hollywood films had an ensemble cast, where anyone and
everyone could be implicated in crimes of passion until someone
sorted it all out. This could be a Hercule Poirot or a Miss
Marple or some young innocent who stumbled across the scene
of the crime. It was a time when those ensemble casts as often
as not were internationally diverse, strangers in a strange land, a
style that has been lost from much contemporary fiction and
filmmaking.

But the real fascination lies, of course, in what Christies own

writings tell us about her disappearance and how she viewed the
charged dynamic between men and women, particularly the
notion of revenge. Christie critics and biographers have not got
very far in analyzing her mystery novels, looking for clues to the
enigma of 1926. Yet, is there any reason to believe that she
would not have done so, cleverly obscuring things of course, as
one would expect from the Queen of Mystery? Her biographers,
indeed her own husband, thought that the Mary Westmacott
 287

novels were the most autobiographical, but this is simplistic.

These novels only confirm the theory that Agatha was the victim
in 1926. No one has looked hard enough at her mysteries and
studied what she has to say about revenge. This is not to suggest
that Christie was a vengeful person; rather that she used her gift
to explore her own feelings of resentment, her sense of violation
the powerful emotions that drive her best mysteries.

Murder in Mesopotamia was published in 1936, a full 10 years

after the disappearance. On its surface, it is a classic Christie
murder mystery but it is also one of her finest novels, with
layers of cultural and historical commentary that transcend the
narrow focus of her English village mysteries. It is a delicately
woven tale of the English upper middle class tourist abroad in
the wonders of the Middle East and it has many shrewd things to
say about imperialism and racism. Christie was a woman who
understood both these evils. Her best writing reveals she
rejected them in her heart, although by and large her irony is
misunderstood and underestimated by her critics on this point.

In Murder in Mesopotamia Christie has written something that

crosses the great divide between the genre work and the
psychological novel and it sits half way between. Like the
archaeology project that is the excuse for arranging an ensemble
of suspects together, the novel arranges to have a dead body
before too long and then sets off into the past, into the
archaeology of a life, a personality. The character at the center,
the murder victim, is Louise Leidner, a woman with a
mysterious identity that becomes the center of the enigma. The
other characters revolve around her, like extras in her play, even
after shes dead. She is a character in flux, continuously
 288

reinventing herself. This drives the others to distraction, since

their own identities are destabilized by hers and they become
like stage actors in her play, like Christie was at the center of her
own mysterious disappearance. Louise is a kind of female
Iago, says one character, for her puppetry behind the scenes.
She was a clever woman and she was bored and she
experimented -- with people like other people experiment with
chemicals. My God, though, that woman was an artist! There
was nothing crude about her methods. But was she so clever if
she called death down upon herself at the hands of a vengeful
ex-husband? In many ways, Louise is the very antithesis of
Christie. Louise is a beautiful woman whom men find sexually
magnetic, a woman compared with Keats La Belle Dame Sans
Merci, endowed by Nature with a calamitous magic, says
Poirot. Louise Leidner is a tragic figure. She could also be
Nancy Neele. Christie herself had other charms.

Here then is Christie exploring feminine psychology with an

autobiographical edge on it. She is Louise Leidner and she is
also the figures of Amy Leatheran and S. Reilly and H. Poirot
and the others who are the satellites around her. If all the
worlds a stage, then this writer plays them all by turns, but they
are only important for how they reveal Louise and who killed
her. Poirot, like Christie, understands that the key to
understanding the enigma is that feminine emotional problems
of this sort are sometimes just a blind for the twisted male
psyche that is manipulating her, just as Christie felt manipulated
by her husbands infidelities and the public embarrassment that
she knew inevitably would follow her disappearance. That
twisted male psyche turns out to be Dr. Leidner, who is not only
her current husband but her ex-husband as well! Agatha tests
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the readers credulity a bit here: Leidner is the same man Louise
had been married to for a few months back in 1918 when she
was 20. She had betrayed that man to the authorities on the
grounds that he was a German spy who had betrayed Britain.
The story was that he had been executed but this was never
corroborated. Shades of Mata Haris demise perhaps? Many
years later, like Odysseus in front of Penelope, Leidner returns
in a new guise as an American archaeologist, and with a partial
disfigurement. Once satisfied that she does not recognize him,
he awaits his moment to murder her. He still loves her though;
this is a crime of passion. Leidner himself is like an empty
space in the novel, in no way a target, just as Archie Christie
avoided the limelight till it was focused on him. Behind the
mask, Leidner, like Archie, wants to be rid of his wife and he
turns out to be the real killer.

Isnt that the real twist on the Christie divorce? This man wants
revenge on the woman he was once married to, who had
betrayed him for no better reason than because she wanted him
out of her life. Flip the male and female roles and you have the
Christie divorce. With a twist of the knife, we could say that
Christie herself was also playing the Dr. Leidner role, savoring
the revenge, and sticking it to her ex-husband. The implication
here is that a mystery writer indulges in revenge. Christie is
clever to disguise the machinery: Leidner is caught by another
Christie persona, Hercule Poirot, and he too could be said to be
Christies intellect and conscience. All this is revealed by a
clever commonsense English hospital nurse, Amy Leatheran,
who describes in resolutely chronological order what she failed
to grasp as it unfolded at the time. The fairy tales woven around
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the Leidners are faithfully voiced by Amy, in characteristic

Christie misdirection.

The second novel to look at is The Moving Finger (1942),

published during the war years. This mystery novel is inferior to
Murder in Mesopotamia because its misdirection is easier to see
through, its setting does not have that sweep that you find in her
novels set abroad, and her storyteller is not especially appealing,
but it develops more fully a key Christie motif: poison pen
letters. They had put in their first appearance in Christies The
ABC Murders (1935) and then again in Murder in Mesopotamia,
where Leidner used them to threaten Louise to prevent her from
remarrying until he can snare her for himself. But poison pen
letters are at their most nasty in The Moving Finger, which is
suffused with the fears and phobias of war-time Britain.

Is the mystery novel itself a poison pen letter to the reader?

Like Citizen Kane, these novels are at their best when they are
like poison pen letters motivated by and directed at a real
target, whether personal (Randolph Hearst, Archie Christie and
Nancy Neele) or generalized (paranoid patriots, selfish egoists,
unfaithful spouses). The moving finger picks at scabs and
exposes wounds. This is archaeology of a different sort.

POISON PEN LETTERS

Poison pen letters can go beyond revenge; they can kill. The
power of romantic obsession easily slides into the stalker who
writes threatening letters or fires off text messages or posts a
mortal threat on a website. Such messages gain greater power
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when written anonymously. If taken to their logical outcomes,

they can literally kill.

Beethovens secret stash of letters to an apparently real-life

Immortal Beloved never killed anybody. The fascination there
lies in to whom they were addressed, not in who the letter writer
was and how obsessed he was. Love letters falling into the
wrong hands can lead to nothing more embarrassing than public
ridicule, just as George Sand worried about her letters to Chopin
being published. There were others who chose to avoid scandal
altogether by concealing their lovers identity in fiction.

Stefan Zweigs story Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922) is

different. In this story there is a secret admirer and her letters
kill their intended target. In Max Ophuls film version of 1948,
Louis Jourdan stars as a dilettante pianist and Joan Fontaine
plays the young woman who is in love with him. One rainy
night in Vienna, Stefan is returning to his apartment, knowing
that he has a duel at dawn. He plans to avoid it by escaping
town, just as he has escaped from commitments all his life. But
a letter from an unknown woman has arrived that will plunge
him into flashbacks. This letter, though written with love, is a
poison pen letter, for it will result in his death, even if that is
really not her intention. As he picks up the letter, Lisas
voiceover begins: By the time you read this letter, I may be
dead. Two hours later, when the movie returns the man to
present time, everything has changed and he is engulfed in grief.
He has lost a son he never knew he had and now a lover as well
possibly a true lover and he realizes he never knew or
appreciated what he had. But he should have known, and now
that he does know, it is too late to do anything about it. He has
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been selfish. He has failed a test of his humanity the capacity

to experience romantic love -- and this failing apparently can be
fatal. If there is a simple symbol in the movie of the woman and
her own fatal love, it is the white rose, a sad yet beautiful
evocative image that recurs in the movie.

In this cynical age, it might seem a little over the top. Does
anyone die for love these days? Maybe not very often, or maybe
not often enough. The romantic imagination is undervalued. It
has great power if you are young or nimble enough to indulge in
it or if you are older and able to experience the nostalgia
associated with lost possibilities, of love squandered, of the
healing power of memories, perfumes and favorite songs. But
many older people die from it, when one partner goes first and
the other quickly follows. In Zweigs own writings, it turned
out badly: they turned into poison pen letters that ultimately
killed him too, when he and his wife committed suicide, while in
exile in Brazil. Agatha Christie would not have approved.