WIDOW

I’ll say one thing: the war makes the most peculiar widows.

Rhett Butler, Gone With The Wind (1939)

Bootylicious

Widow is another Old English word, widewe (= widow…), which connects via the Indo-European vidhava, with the Latin viduus, meaning ‘bereft’ or (its other lexical descendent) ‘void’. This ‘vacancy’ at the etymological heart of the word seems perfect, if rather sad, since (as we all know) a widow is ‘a woman who has lost her husband by death and has not married again’.

'The Widow at Windsor' - Queen Victoria in 1863, after Albert's death in 1861

Anyway, the emptiness immanent in the word widow is materially rather ironic, since, in European history at least, a lucky woman whose family had thrashed out a good dower-deal at her marriage was, in theory, entitled to most of the death-booty – as long as she didn’t marry Shakespeare and end up with the ‘second best bed‘, or fall foul of anti-female legalities (as in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility).

But if we assume all has gone right and your wealthy husband has obligingly shuffled off this mortal coil and done nothing unexpected with his will, widowhood comes with a golden handshake. Even a little bit of money leaves you with a degree of important independence, and historical widows have frequently exploited this, becoming, in some instances, iconic political figures. Notable widows of history have included: Jiang Qing, wife of Chairman Mao and leader of the Gang of Four; the dowager Catherine de Medici, who machinated throughout the French Wars of Religion; Agrippina the Younger, super-Freudian mother of Nero; late-period Queen Victoria (dubbed ‘The Widow at Windsor’); Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife (and the most married queen in English history), whose main distinction is that she ‘survived’ … and even Jackie Kennedy Onassis, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Scottish Widows

On a more casual note, the independent widow was a culturally significant figure throughout European history, often dubbed the Merry Widow, as was the eponymous heroine of Franz Lehár’s operetta (1905). Not only does Lehár’s widow have her own theme tune, she also sparked a self-titled hat-craze, and attentive readers will note that this ‘ornate or wide-brimmed hat’ is worn at a rakish angle that rather suits Merry Widow‘s dictionary definition as a bereaved woman who is ‘amorous or designing’.

This idea goes back to the medieval age: the Scottish William Dunbar’s brilliantly phonetic poem ‘The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’ features a widow who sits in a field telling two married women she’s found from somewhere about the comparative excellence of her own state:

With him died all my dole and my dreary thoughts;
Now done is my duly night, my day is upsprungen,
Adieu dolour, adieu! My dainty now begins:
Now am I a widow, i-wis, and well am at ease…

William Dunbar, The Two Married Women and the Widow c.1490s

Anyone familiar with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath may recognise something of Alysoun’s archness here – unlike the other Older Woman, the old maid, the widow is a legitimately sexually experienced woman, often with a bit of money, who has, in consequence, less to lose than the young maiden. With this licence, the medieval widow is frequently presented as a bawdy sexual facilitator, and she is also free herself to run riot, cause scandals, wander around unchaperoned and facilitate other people’s sexual encounters with relative impunity.

The Wife of Bath, as imagined by William Blake

Staring at the Sea

Of course, it’s not all sitting in fields and enjoying your inheritance: the widow‘s independent fortune certainly makes her a target for gold-diggers – as is the case with every Margaret Dumont character in every Marx Brothers film ever. There are also lots of interesting cases in literature where you know the absent husband’s in trouble because the vultures are circling round his wife – Odysseus’ Penelope is for a time a widow in the word’s second sense: ‘a wife separated from (or deserted by) her husband’. In addition to this, she also has to contend with house full of Suitors drinking her out of house and home on the (misguided) assumption that Odysseus is dead, rather than simply shagging Calypso on an island far, far away.

Penelope’s widowhood also lurks at the back of the North American term Widow’s Walk, ‘a railed or balustraded platform built on the roof, originally in early New England, for providing an unimpeded view of the sea’, and a highly evocative phrase suggestive of young Scarlett O’Hara-style sea-widows, whose British equivalents would probably have been provided for by the financial services company Scottish Widows, first set up in 1815 as a way to provide for (sexy) widows, sisters and daughters whose husbands were lost in the Napoleonic Wars.

The Penelopean widow doesn’t really exist any more, but widow‘s second meaning has a more modern significance first spotted in Late Middle English – ‘a wife whose husband devotes most of his time to a specified activity and is rarely at home’. Some readers may have heard the term ‘World Cup Widow‘ bandied about last year – other examples the dictionary gives include ‘golf widow‘ (sweet jeebus, get out of that one sistah…) and ‘business widow‘. There’s also the more niche example of the ‘Secret Society Widow’ – the Museum of Freemasonry in Covent Garden has a rather nice clock on display that was presented to the wife of a member ‘in gratitude for her allowing her husband his Lodge nights’. Here there is a sense of these women as being passive blocks on enjoyment for someone else – the World Cup Widow is basically me moaning about having a sudden dip in loving attentions because there are men in ridiculous shorts running around on a screen in a noisy pub… Ahem. I digress.

Kiss me in the shadow of a doubt

Anyway, here we reach the flip-side of the Merry Widow, best exemplified in Alfred Hitchcock’s personal favourite of his own films, Shadow of a Doubt (1943). This features Joseph Cotton as the ‘Merry Widow Murderer’ with a venomous attitude towards these ‘horrible, faded, fat, greedy women’ that may be extreme, but nonetheless exemplifies the idea that a widow‘s financial independence actually renders her ‘useless’ and a hindrance to earthly happiness (read: money) for everyone else. On this, there’s an interesting little typographic significance of widow first recorded in the mid-twentieth century – she is ‘a short last line of a page or column considered undesirable’. That is, the widow represents a kind of hangover, something that is surplus to requirement, and no longer neatly slotted into a clear, neat unit.

A Black Widow spider.

As well as being targets for Hitchcockian serial killers, widows can also adopt this role themselves of course – the black widow is a criminal female whose widowhood is assumed to have been – shall we say – voluntary. This phrase originates from the black widow spider, a venomous North American spider, especially Latrodectus mactons, ‘the female of which usually devours its mate’. A fear of female power and often source of grim fascination, this term works rather interestingly with notable Rock Widows – Courtney Love, whom many genuinely accuse of having murdered Kurt Cobain; Yoko Ono, who was never really a popular fave to begin with; Priscilla Presley and even Faith Evans, widow of The Notorious B.I.G. and the brains behind a dodgy reworking of The Police.

These inevitably take on an important role as mediator of their husbands’ glory, and living blocks on libel, speculation and marketing opportunities. Courtney Love famously ‘released’ her husband’s suicide note to Nirvana fans and Yoko Ono wasted no time in putting together a posthumous Lennon album after his murder (reportedly showing up in the studio the very next day). The vitriol these women have variously attracted presumably relates to a sense of the widow as a figure standing between fan and artist, with a hefty inheritance and a team of lawyers. It also compares curiously with the hatred or suspicion directed at many of the Political Widows with which this post began.

But ultimately there are as many different types of widow as there are widows. This post has attempted not so much to categorise them as to suggest a few ways people have regarded them: Jackie O (tragically graceful); political dowager (devious and suspect); the rich survivor draped in Chanel and gullibility – and a middle-aged Scottish woman sitting in a field, really quite content with her lot.

Next week: X is for X

VITRIOL

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697)

This Corrosion.

Vitriol is more properly known by its scientific name: sulphuric acid. Or additionally, ‘Any of various sulphates of metallic elements, especially ferrous sulphate.’ The only reason I get to do it for V is because the late c13th had a rather fanciful approach to science (no offence guys), and dubbed this chemical vitriol, from the Latin vitreus (= ‘of glass, glassy’). Cos, in certain states, sulphuric acid looks ‘glassy’. Geddit?? Ahem. Actually, there’s nothing whimsical about vitriol in its everyday life: it’s extremely corrosive (hi, GCSE Chemistry), and has an exothermic reaction with water, basically meaning it dehydrates anything it comes into contact with… but then liberates extra heat through the very process of reacting with water, causing more burns. Nasty.

Catherine de Medici, attributed to Francois Clouet, c.1555

Of course, like its sibling term acid, vitriol is also a lovely little example of a word whose literal and figurative meanings have almost equal prominence in modern English. Thus, around 1769, vitriol started meaning ‘Acrimonious, caustic or scathing speech, criticism or feeling’ and – naturally – this sense was in figurative relation to sulphuric acid’s ‘corrosive’ qualities. These are the same corrosive properties that made sulphuric acid every murderer’s friend throughout criminal history – every Wikipedia fan given to perverse procrastination knows about John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer, who dissolved the bodies of his victims in a bath full of acid (but was eventually dobbed in by a couple of stray gallstones and part of a denture)… Shudder.

My pain, your thrill.

Anyway, vitriol has apparently been around since ancient times, but came into prominence during the late c19th, owing to its use as a cleaning product. Of course, since it was suddenly considered fine for trying at home, it was easily purchased at your local chemist by every housewife on her weekly shop.

In this context, I’ve always thought of vitriol as a pendant to arsenic, a household poison used for pest-control, cosmetics and suicide (if you’re French, bourgeois and in a Flaubert novel). Particularly suggestible Victorian women would mix this one with chalk and vinegar to improve their complexion, with occasionally fatal consequences for their hapless spouses. History is correspondingly full of tales of malevolent arsenic-armed females, including the eighteenth-century Mary Blandy, who put it in her father’s tea so she could marry her lover. (In a little pendant of my own: she continued to take tea herself in prison – and to receive visitors for tea – apparently unencumbered by squeamishness, or the leg-irons she had to wear as a murderess on death row).

Vitriol throwing in Le Petit Journal - image from http://theatredamned.blogspot.com/

These cases are part of a long tradition of female poisoners going back to Catherine de Medici and the Emperor Augustus’ wife Livia, both politically powerful women who were the subject of (probably apocryphal) rumours of poisonous ingenuity. Livia supposedly killed Augustus by poisoning figs that were still on the tree (the last in a line of such crimes, if you like a bit of I, Claudius. As everyone should.) and that old gossip-monger Alexandre Dumas describes how Catherine de Medici used to poison casual household objects – ranging from books and gloves to lipsticks – to relieve herself of Inconveniences who just happened to be breathing.

The logic behind this tradition seems clear enough: unaccustomed to the brutalities of war and macho posturing, the female murderer is nonetheless skilled in the arts of household management, food preparation and cosmetics. Her arsenal is correspondingly domestic, and widespread reporting of female poisoners presumably relates to a kind of fear of the unknowably deadly potential of the home (and all it represents), not to mention the oft-observed ‘fact’ that the female of the species will tend towards silent attack, backstabbing and general wiliness when settling her battles. The bitch! Thus, like vitriol, poison too has a transferred sense: to be poisonous is to be ‘deeply malicious, malevolent’ – ‘sly’ – in a way which is almost antonymic to simple ‘brutality’.

Don’t look back in anger.

But in the late 1800s something changed, and there was an apparent epidemic of vitriol throwing in addition to arsenic poisoning – so much so, that it got its own verb: to vitriolize was to ‘throw sulphuric acid at a person with intent to injure’. Thankfully, this verb is now ‘rare’ (although on this, see more below), but its usage was overwhelmingly nineteenth-century. Moreover, a cursory look at newspaper records reveals these were overwhelmingly perceived to be female crimes against an erstwhile lover or a rival. A ‘crime of passion’, in fact, in a way that poisoning (slow and subtle) is not. My pal Stewart has recently started resurrecting the Parisian Grand Guignol, a Parisian theatre of horror whose depiction of acid-throwing was only one of many acts of mutilation presented onstage between 1897-1962, and I’m quoting him quoting Anne-Louise Shapiro:

In the 1880s, vitriol began to acquire the symbolic associations traditionally linked to poison; l’empoisonneuse was joined by a new rhetorical (and actual) figure, the vitrioleuse. […] Women who were dangerous through their very domesticity – who transformed the ordinary and the womanly into the menacing – underscored not only female duplicity but male dependency.

Anne-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in fin-de-siecle Paris

The Grand Guignol play La Baisir dans la Nuit hinges around a disfigured acid victim exercising (literal) eye-for-an-eye revenge on the lover responsible for his wretched state. This sort of thing is perhaps to be expected in a ‘theatre of horror’, but vitriol throwing also appears in the broadly passion-free Sherlock Holmes stories, most fully in the Adventure of the Illustrious Client (1924) where the crime in question is perpetrated by a Fallen Woman on her Base Seducer – over ten years after the frequency of cases had prompted calls to make the purchase of vitriol more difficult.

Anyway, this ‘Kitty Winter’ is full of vitriol of both kinds: as Watson puts it, ‘there was an intensity of hatred in her white, set face and her blazing eyes such as woman seldom and man never can attain’, and her hysterical ranting and raving against the ‘instrument of her demise’ is – throughout the story – placed in opposition to the calm and aristocratic air of her Don Juan’s next victim. Throughout the story it is made clear that vitriol throwing is the sort of thing possible only for a woman full of a special kind of fury – and, as Watson makes clear, that fury is something ‘man never can attain’. The lambs.

The interesting thing here, of course, is the transition from silent, wily domestic poisons to public acid attacks that hinge around the old adage that ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ (a misquote from Congreve that endures to this day). This, of course, is a woman armed with vitriol of one kind or another, and the idea was clearly much-repeated, because by the mid-century we also had the word vitriolic, meaning… well… ‘like vitriol’. That said, it is frequently unclear whether this is vitriol in a literal or figurative sense: in 1919 the Sarah Palin of the nineteenth century, Mary Kilbreth (President of the American National Association to Oppose Woman Suffrage), questioned Emmeline Pankhurst’s patriotism on the grounds that Pankhurst and the Suffragettes had led a ‘reign of terror’ that involved ‘bombs, kerosene and vitriol throwing‘, but whether she meant words or household cleaner remains tantalisingly unclear.

Unfortunately, for many around the world today vitriol is all too literal. This article has been interested in exploring the criminal female in history but – in the UK and abroad – acid attacks are still common, particularly (but not exclusively) as part of a culture of ‘honour violence’ directed against women. While it would be disingenuous to suggest exclusivity on either side, it does seem that these are increasingly male-on-female attacks in contrast to the apparent gender-split in the nineteenth century. This article has a rather good summary of the current situation, and recommends places you can find out more, including the Acid Survivors Trust.

NEXT WEEK: W is for Widow