C

CHIVALRY

Chivalry is dead, but you’re still kinda cute.

– Nelly Furtado, Promiscuous (2006)

Chivalry. Not one of feminism’s most pressing issues, but definitely one of its more genteel debates.

Do you, as an attractive female who also happens to be a feminist, deign to take the seat that dude offers you on the crowded tube or laugh hollowly and stick your head back in your neighbour’s armpit? Is chivalry OK?

Personally, my view on this debate is always affected by the point that 99% of the men I’ve met who talk about chivalry with misty-eyed fervour are also the kind of Nice Guys who Really Aren’t Very Nice At All.

But that’s not for here.

What I am interested in is looking at its complex linguistic heritage.

Horses

What’s that sound in the distance?

Why, it’s the sound of clopping hooves – and chivalry‘s etymological root come to join us. Neiiigh.

Animal instincts. Photo by Hodge.

For though chivalry in English means (first definition ahoy!)  ‘the code of behaviour demonstrated by a perfect knight‘, were we French we’d replace ‘knight’ with ‘chevalier‘, or ‘horseman’ – from the root word cheval (= ‘horse’).

The knight, or chevalier, is in origin a nobleman on horseback who goes around rescuing maidens and fighting dragons. He is chivalrous in behaviour, displaying (the word’s second definition) ‘courage, honour, justice and readiness to help the weak’.

Key examples can be found in the legends of King Arthur and his horsebacked Knights of the Round Table – in particular Sir Gawain and the so-good-he-couldn’t-be-gooder Sir Percival (who later becomes Wagner’s Parsifal).

The chivalrous are those on horseback.

But it’s the secondary meaning of chivalry that we best recognise today: ‘courteous behaviour, especially towards women’ (that is, giving up your seat on the tube, which Percival would totally have done if he didn’t travel everywhere by cheval).

Courtly-powered lovin’

Chivalry – and the courtesy that defines it – is also the base idea behind courtly love, which the devoted may remember we addressed separately in the Alphabet Glory Days.

Charles I – Equestrian portrait by Anthony van Dyck

This is what the knights are doing when they’re not out fighting –  sighing for love among rose bushes, swooning at the touch of a ‘lily-white hand’ and definitely giving up their seats for a woman on the medieval commute.

And it was said to have been invented by a woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Before she married Henry II and brought her French customs over to England, Eleanor had a period presiding alone over a predominantly male grouping in Poitiers.It seems inventing an elaborate code of chaste devotion to a single lady – courteous behaviour, if you will – was a good way for Eleanor to bring these bored and potentially restless knights into order – and, I assume, to block potential sexual aggression at the same time (cf. the court of Elizabeth I, which saw a resurgence of ‘courtly’ devotion to ‘Gloriana’, the ‘Virgin Queen‘).

Courtship

With these courtly roots, it’s appropriate that, during the English Civil War, the word chevalier should lend itself so enthusiastically to the Royalist cause in fighting for king (and court).

In this context, the Cavaliers were enemies to the Roundheads and cousins to chevaliers via the Latin source-word ‘cabellarius’ (also meaning ‘horseman’).

The origin of this term is actually pre-war, in the grouping of courtly ‘cavaliers’ at the original Carolingian court (a bit like the courtly lovers at Poitiers).

These included the ‘Cavalier poets‘, a conglomerate of literary courtiers formed by the King himself, including Robert Herrick and Edmund Waller.

The term in this usage is ambiguous, though. On the one hand, cavalier was often used in allusion to the King’s refined (indeed ‘knightly’) sensibilities, which, incidentally, included a famous love of horses – as the many magnificent equestrian portraits of him attest.

But, in a pejorative sense, the cavalier poets were so named because they were famously ‘roistering gallants’ and ‘libertines’. This is cavalier‘s other meaning: ‘haughty, disdainful or supercilious’ or ‘offhand and unceremonious’ (a bit like wearing your hat at a ‘rakish’ angle).

So cavalier is almost a contraction in terms.

The Don

This is the very ambiguity we find in Mozart’s great libertine opera, Don Giovanni, written about 100 years later. The ‘Don’ is a nobleman and serial womaniser. He’s a standard-issue rake, in fact: we learn in the Catalogue Song that he’s seduced 1,003 women in Spain alone.

Sir Charles Grandison

He is throughout referred to in the Italian as a ‘cavalier’, understood (and, for us English-speakers, translated) according to context variously as ‘gentleman’ (nobleman on horseback) and ‘rake’ (careless womaniser) – as in the opera’s subtitle, ‘Il dissoluto punito’ (‘the debauchee punished’).

Thus, when Don Giovanni takes the pretty peasant girl Zerlina away from her finance, Masetto, to show her his castle (no, really), Don Giovanni ‘reassures’ the jealous Masetto by saying he needn’t worry – his fiancee is ‘in the hands of a cavalier‘.Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Masetto is afraid of. “Let the cavaliere make a cavaliera out of you!” he trumpets at the departing Zerlina – he knows what’s going down (this).

Court to City

Back to English climes.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Queen Anne halved the size of the English court and moved it out of central London.

In so doing, she ultimately ended up transferring power from court to city – and courtesy became civility (from the Latin cives (= the city)).

The White Knight accompanies Alice through the forest

This is the age of opening doors, watching your language and standing up when a woman enters the room. Chivalry has gone domestic; men are civil now in Britain. Only the hot-headed Italian Don Giovannis are still cavaliers.

But when Samuel Richardson wanted to depict a perfect (but domestic) Englishman, he still made him an aristocratic knight (Sir Charles Grandison). Jane Austen did too: her paragon of virtue (himself based on Sir Charles), is pointedly named Mr Knightly (Emma).By this point it’s faded away to a name rather than a title, but the gentleman still has a vestigial horse (if you will).

White Knights

Strangely enough, the vestigial horse becomes more literal in the modern age, in the form of the ladies’ proverbial ‘ideal man’ – a chivalrous gentleman. Mr Right is also a ‘knight in shining armour’.

He’s even a  Lewis Carroll-esque ‘White Knight’, a noble rescuer (as in the song ‘My White Knight’ from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, where the knight in question will, her mother thinks, ‘save’ Marian the Librarian from Old Maidery).

Remember when Grace first meets Leo – the Great Romance – in Will and Grace? He’s on a horse in Central Park. That’s how you know he’s a Big Deal Romance.

Never trust a man on horseback

And, to conclude very crudely, I suppose this is what happened to chivalry .

It became the polite behaviour of the  gentleman – enshrined in tradition and developed over a couple of hundred years to become our friend offering me a seat on the bustling 21st century commute and sitcom single girls dreaming of their ‘Mr Darcy’.

But I still hear the sound of clopping hooves. The fantasy may be more Sir Gawain than Don Giovanni, but you know what they say – the apple never falls far from the lexical tree.

• For more from the Alphabet of Feminism – a whole series of posts about language, gender and history – visit the Alphabet category. Contains lots of hand-drawn illustrations!

Yay!

Pixar’s first full length movie with a female protagonist is less than four months away from release. And, as io9 reported last week, the first scene is now previewable:

I’m really excited. ENGAGE INITIAL BURBLE-O-METER:

HURRAH!

• I remain so, so pleased to see a Pixar movie from the point of view of a girl character. Without exception, the entire Pixar canon – which I’m a huge, boxset-toting, scene-quoting fan of, for the record – features male protagonists, and while Jessie, Dory, and Ellie (who determines much of Up‘s story even though it’s via her absence) are all fun and compelling sidekick or partner characters, I’ve been waiting for Pixar to place a female character centre-stage. And now, after over 20 years, we’ve got one in the shape of Princess Merida, headstrong Scottish medieval archery whizz.
• Placing a female character centre-stage, of course, is not the be-all and end-all. Disney’s been doing it for years with their fairytale movies and resultant “princess” brand. They’ve finally brought the curtain down on their run of “princess” films with 2010’s Tangled, which I thought was charmingly smart, sassy and very happy, to a point, to send up its own canon. But it still operated very much within the constraints of that canon – it was, in places, a bit like Legally Blonde in Fairytale Land – and I’m hoping this will bust the box open juuuust a bit more.

BROW-FURROW!

• I think it’s interesting that Pixar have chosen, as far as I can tell, to make their first girl-POV movie begin from a starting problem of an arranged marriage tradition, and the synopsis as it stands (it’s on the io9 page) hints that they’re going with Little Mermaid-style tropes of “headstrong young woman consults wise woman for advice to avoid patriarchal problem; things go wrong”, and so on. Being critical for just a moment, I do think it would be good in the end to get to a Disney/Pixar film where female characters are not lone figures in a world of predominantly male characters, or on quests where the aim is to fight the male status quo. Or as one commenter on io9 put it, “I’m still waiting for the movie about the girl who doesn’t have to prove she’s awesome or that she’s as good as boys”. It makes me want to cheer and bounce off my chair when Merida fires that final arrow in front of all those shocked dudes, but I’d also quite like to just see her … go on a quest that isn’t about Defying Sexism. Lone Female Crusaders are all over our screens with relative frequency, from True Grit‘s Mattie Ross – who has a lump-throat-making scene where she packs her bags for adventure and stuffs rolls of newspaper in a man’s cowboy hat to make it fit her head – to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo‘s Lisbeth Salander (arguably the ultimate Lone Woman On A Vengeful Spree for our time), and I’d like to see more scope for women in Hollywood stories to get to interact a bit more with other women – beyond, for example, “but mother, WHY can’t I do X” and “yes, sorceress, I will make this dodgy deal with you!” at the very least.

BACK TO HURRAH-ING!

• Buuuut the fact remains that this scene still makes me go misty eyed and wibbly at the slightest provocation. I love how it looks and feels, and it’s got Billy Connolly (playing Princess Merida’s warlord dad, with whom she seems to have a pleasingly co-conspirator relationship rather than what I call the King Triton Model, though this does mean relations with mum aren’t looking cosy), Emma Thompson, Julie Walters (the wise woman conflict catalyst!) and more on board. It’s been co-authored by two women (for anyone casually interested in the gender balance of the creative team) and I’m honestly so excited (IT HAS A BEAR IN IT I LOVE BEARS I HOPE SHE DOES NOT SHOOT THE BEAR) that I’m really glad it won’t be long now.
• ENTIRELY SPECULATION, BUT ANYWAY: On the fairy tale riffing front, I’m pleased to see such an obvious Robin Hood folklore moment referenced in the scene above – he, of course, splits an arrow just like this in his own quest to win Maid Marion, and in this version the princess is out to win…her own hand. Neat. Since it was originally titled The Bear and the Bow, so presumably has a bear of some importance in the story, it’s also got me wondering whether it’ll draw on beast stories like East of the Sun, West of the Moon or Brown Bear of Norway. The idea is that the woman goes on a journey and finds a man/foils a curse along the way. That might not happen in Brave at all, but since the opening problem is marriage-related I’d be surprised if no options around the topic came up, and if it doesn’t happen like that, that’ll be an attempt at subversion in itself. Either way, I think with the final title being Brave I’m optimistic about how it’ll turn out for Merida.
• THERE IS A HORSE IN IT AND HIS NAME IS ANGUS. I love Disney’s horses. They’ve carved out a noble niche as providers of bathos and irony over the years from Samson through to Maximus. ANGUS, I HAVE HIGH HOPES FOR YOU. (Although I kind of wish you were an Elspeth, maybe? I mean, Maximus would’ve been fine as… Agrippina, you know?) Oh God, now everyone’s going to think I’m really weird. Uh. Moving on.
• Conclusion: Any road, I think my DVD shelf can take one more Lone Female Crusader in this instance. See you in the cinema.

I was also inspired by a question from @FeministInti to her twitter followers: do you know any folk songs that feature gender-based violence? The answer is yes, AND HOW. In a few moments we had amassed enough for a limited edition CD box set of traditional songs about rape, domestic violence and murdered women.

It tends to be these songs that a lot of modern folkish artists have picked up on. Yes, I’m looking at you Nick Cave. And you, Decemberists, although I love you. There are also a lot (a LOT) of waiflike folk girls with guitars singing about how love is like a cloud or they’re not sure which handbag matches their heart, as parodied by Bill Bailey.

As an antidote to the murdery and misogynist on the one hand and the mindlessly insipid and pathetic on the other I thought I would take this opportunity to share and celebrate some traditional songs in which women come out on top.

Note: Because the songs are hundreds of years old in some cases there’s quite a lot of variety over names and lyrics. I managed to find versions of nearly all of them on Spotify and have made a collaborative playlist so y’all can add any others you find: Kickass women in folk songs.

Cross-dressing adventurers

'The Female Sailor' broadsheet from the National Maritime Museum

Now THIS is what I’m talking about – songs about women dressing as sailors, hunters and highwaymen, whether to find their true love or just for kicks. Some of them sound a little unhinged: like Sovay, who is prepared to blow her lover’s head off if he gives up the love token she has given him. But the heroine in ‘The Golden Glove’ is very endearing as she cleverly arranges matters so that she can marry the man she loves (and “enjoy” him, as she sings gleefully).

If you’d like more stories of derring-do like this, I recommend Dianne Dugaw’s Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850.

Sovay

“Sovay Sovay all on a day
She dressed herself in man’s array
With a brace of pistols all at her side
To meet her true love, to meet her true love, for did she ride”

• Full lyrics
• Spotify: Pentangle – Sovay

When I Was A Fair Maid

“When I was a fair maid about seventeen
I listed in the navy for to serve the queen
I listed in the navy, a sailor lad to stand
For to hear the cannons rattling
and the music so grand”

• Full lyrics
• Spotify: Triona Ní Dhomhnaill – When I Was A Fair Maid

The Golden Glove

“Coat waistcoat and trousers the young girl put on
And away she went a-hunting with her dog and her gun
And she hunted around where the farmer he did dwell
Because in her heart oh she loved him so well”

• Full lyrics
• Spotify: Alva – The Golden Glove

Bold William Taylor

“Then the captain stepped up to her, pleased well at what she’s done;
He’s gone and made her a bold commander, over a ship and all its men.”

• Full lyrics
• Spotify: Patrick Street – William Taylor

Cowgirls

Just a couple of examples – ‘I Wanna Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart’ is basically about a woman who wants to be a cowboy, the ‘sweetheart’ of the title is purely incidental, and ‘Belle Starr’ is about a real life wild west fugitive who had a number of famous fugitive lovers.

I Wanna Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart

“I wanna pillow my head by the sleeping herd
while the moon shines down from above
I wanna strum my guitar, and yodellaheehoo,
that’s the life that I love!”

• Full lyrics
• Spotify: Patsy Montana – I Wanna Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart

Belle Starr

“Eight lovers they say combed your waving black hair
Eight men knew the feel of your dark velvet waist
Eight men heard the sounds of your tan leather skirt
Eight men heard the bark of the guns that you wore”

• Full lyrics
• Spotify: Pete Seeger – Belle Starr

Bold and crafty women

The Crafty Maid and Lovely Joan outsmart their arrogant would-be seducers and make off with their horses. Sally Brown kicks the ass of the Cruel Youth, saving her own life and avenging the deaths of the ‘pretty maidens’ who went before her, and the Bonny Lass of Angelsey dances the king and 15 of his knights out of their swag.

The Crafty Maid’s Policy

“But as soon as the maid she saw him a’coming
She instantly then took her pistol in hand
Saying “Doubt not my skill, it is you I would kill
I will have you stand back or you are a dead man.”

• Full lyrics
• Spotify: Frankie Armstrong – The Crafty Maid’s Policy

Lovely Joan

“She’s robbed him of his horse and ring,
And left him to rage in the meadows green.”

• Full lyrics
• Spotify: Heather Wood – Lovely Joan

The Cruel Youth

“Lie there, lie there, you cruel young man,
Lie there lie there,” said she
“Six pretty maidens you’ve drowned here,
now go keep them company.”

• Full lyrics
• YouTube: Gerri Gribi – The Cruel Youth

The Bonny Lass of Angelsey

“She’s taken all their bucklers and swords
She’s taken their gold and their bright money
And back to the mountains she’s away
The bonnie lass of Anglesey”

• Full lyrics
• Spotify: Paddy Tutty – The Bonny Lass Of Anglesey

Silver Dagger

The woman in Joan Baez’s version of the Silver Dagger decides not to risk getting her heart broken by keeping clear of love altogether. Whether she’s right or wrong, I like that she makes a choice.

“My daddy is a handsome devil
He’s got a chain five miles long
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he’s loved and wronged.”

• Full lyrics
• Spotify: Joan Baez – Silver Dagger

Thanks to my main song sources, Mudcat and Creative Folk!

J

JADE

Stones on Parade.

A word that may suggest stones or horses, depending on your point of view. Naturally, these senses are distinct, and jade is  accordingly given two separate entries in the dictionary.

Jade Burial Mask of King Pakal (Mayan), National Museum of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, via flickr user chaostrophy.

The first refers to the stone, itself a hybrid of ‘two distinct minerals’, which ‘for their hardness have been used for implements and ornaments’. These two, Nephrite and Jadeite, originate in different languages (lithos nephritikos and l’ejade respectively), but connect at the identical meaning ‘kidney / colic stones’, in allusion to jade‘s perceived medicinal properties. Famously fascinating to Chinese artists in particular, from as far back as the Shang dynasty, jade was also valued for its hardness and concomitant indestructibility (hence its use in burials, as in the Mayan example on the left) – much more than a simple gemstone.

A Horse of a Different Colour

Jade‘s lexical half-brother form is of unknown origin, though possibly connected to ‘yaud’ via the Icelandic ‘jalda’ (= ‘mare’). Its first citation appears around 1386, and here jade is glossed as ‘a contemptuous name for a horse’, or ‘a horse as opposed to a riding horse’. Its pejorative status may explain its feminine etymology: mares were generally used in Days Of Yore for more everyday work than that chosen for stallions and geldings, losing their rights to many of the Sexy Jobs (racing, fighting, hunting, fishin’, shootin’) because of their perceived Attitude Problems, especially during estrous.

I am, alas, no equine expert so I cannot claim to know how much of this derives from suspicious anthropomorphism and how much from observable truth. It sounds as dubious as similar assertions that ‘all’ women are mardy, but if some horse-fancier out there can prove otherwise, well, I bow to your superior wisdom, and toddle back tail-drawn to the dictionary, where it is safe and warm.

Bring On The Dancing Horses.

More vaguely, jade can signify a rather delicious list of equine insults: ‘a roadster, a hack, a sorry inconditioned wearied or worn out horse; a vicious, worthless, ill tempered horse’, but (and the dictionary is very specific on this point), it is only ‘rarely’ applied to a donkey. In extended meaning, it can be ‘generally’ applied to a horse in a kind of affectionate usage ‘without depreciatory sense’, where its main appearance is in Renaissance comedy. Thus, in Jonson’s beautiful Alchemist (c.1610), the servant Face resents being made to ‘stalk like a mill-jade’.

Alas, since the decline of horses as a major method of transportation, the utility of a catch-all insult for useless specimens has come into question, and nowadays the word is rare. We are left with the slightly more familiar sense, arriving in the 1550s, as ‘a term of reprobation applied to a woman‘. In this instance, it is unclear exactly what it means: its citations largely sound like tautologies, as in ‘an expensive jade of a wife’ (from the Spectator in 1722), and I suppose its significance is in extending the ‘useless’ tag of the original equine. Indeed, given the dictionary’s conservative tendencies over citations (and the early date for this last term) we can assume that these first and second uses of jade are feeding off each other, and probably almost synonymous.

However, like its original horsey meaning, jade as a woman can also be jocular, apparently in alignment with ‘hussy or minx‘; and this latter may, incidentally, derive its playfulness in extension from another animal origin, mynx (‘a puppy’) and / or the Middle Dutch minnekijn, meaning ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart’. We might also think of Minnie, herself a sort of feminist icon, if you will.

Oh, Man.

But one of the surprising things about this surprising word is its gender neutrality: thus its third meaning, in application to a man, ‘usually in some figure drawing from sense 1’, that is, (here we are again) back to horse insults. This is the usage it has in The Taming of The Shrew, an early Shakespeare release that titularly plays with subordinating occasionally recalcitrant beasts and frequently riles audiences with its ostensibly despicable gender-politics:

Petruchio: …Come, sit on me,
Katherina: Asses are made to bear, and so are you.
Petruchio: Women are made to bear, and so are you.
Katherina: No such jade as you, if me you mean.

William Shakespeare, The Taming Of The Shrew (c.1590-4) II.i.198-201.

The ‘Shrew’, Katherina, here dubs her ‘Tamer’ a jade in this third sense, playing with the punning meanings of ‘bear’ that have immediately preceded. Asses are made to bear; so are women. Oh ho. Fun with zeugmas.

But Katherina gives as good as she gets, Minnie-style, using jade to succinctly imply that Petruchio is the sexual equivalent of ‘a sorry, ill-conditioned or worn out horse’ (which in asexual extension gives us jaded as ‘worn out, cynical’ – probably the only form of this word still in common use). That the horse in question may have began lexical life as a ‘mare’ seems contextually unimportant, since nowhere in the history of sexual politics is a woman expected to ‘keep up’ or indeed do much more than ‘fall back’. Nonetheless, it is interesting that the male should be attacked here on explicitly sexual territory, which also draws attention to jade‘s arguable antonyms, ‘stallion’, and ‘stud’.

So where does jade leave us now? Sometime around the 1970s, it was the first sense of the word that spawned the (unisex) name meaning ‘jewel’ or ‘precious stone’, as indeed jade the gem now endures in everyday language. But the flip-side of this now almost obsolete word is its punning sexual suggestiveness, where it is interesting to note that this is one ostensibly female word that turns back to bite its male accusers. A jade’s trick indeed.

NEXT WEEK: K is for Knickerbocker