Widow imagery on ‘The Gilmore Girls’

The Gilmore girls (of TV’s The Gilmore Girls) don’t have an awful lot in common with the thirteenth century Beguines. Paris Geller, on the other hand – Rory Gilmore’s nemesis, love rival, roommate, co-plotter and sometime editor – also attracts ridicule as a young woman who presumes on the privileges of widowhood.

Her affair with her professor, the novelist Asher Fleming, is treated by most people as a slightly tacky fling between a vain older man and a naive young student. Whilst Paris drops broad hints to Rory about her grand passion (“Mmm, I smell of pipe smoke…”) it is made pretty clear to the audience that Fleming regularly has casual affairs with young women who take his course.

When he dies suddenly (“When he…were you…?” “No, Rory. This great man was not laid low by my vagina.”) Paris goes into mourning, and is appalled that not enough notice is being taken on campus. She takes it upon herself to hold a wake for Fleming, complete with a stack of his last book and herself in dignified black, holding court on the sofa.

Though Paris is not treated as cruelly as Miss Havisham, her party is marked out as the culmination of her grandiose ideas about her relationship. Behaving as Asher’s widow is another one of Paris’ obsessive eccentricities, and the scene is undercut by the appearance of a beer keg in the background by two frat boys whom Rory hurriedly shoos away.

Paris may believe she is enabling the community to pay their proper respects to a great man of letters, whose loss she inevitably feels most keenly, but most of the people at the party think it’s a kegger thrown by some girl they’ve never heard of.

It’s a funny sequence, and Paris is given an unexpected emotional weight by Liza Weil, but the narrative makes it clear she is not entitled to widowhood, and no-one grants it to her. Apart from Emily Gilmore, admittedly, which does nothing to bolster Paris’ cause.

Funeral Blues

This tension between people who feel like widows, and the society which refuses to legitimise their view of themselves, is given another twist in the final example I’d like to discuss: the speaker in W.H. Auden’s poem Funeral Blues.

Performed so memorably by John Hannah in Four Weddings and A Funeral, the poem has become one of the most famous and popular elegies in English. In its best known version, the poem runs thus:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

There’s a noticeable shift between the second and third verses in the treatment of the death and its consequences. From demanding exaggerated outward ceremonies to mark the beloved’s death, the poem starts to imagine in both more personal and more cosmological terms.

If the first two verses concentrate on the public and social sphere (the area in which widowhood is bestowed and validated, as we have seen), the latter two are concerned with the relationship of one individual to the whole universe, and how that has been dislocated by another person’s death.

In both there is an anguished hyperbole, an awareness of the discrepancy between the speaker’s own feelings and the way the rest of the world sees the matter. The irony of the lines about the pigeons and the sun are directed inwards, sketching the speaker’s recognition of their lack of proportion alongside a refusal to countenance the idea that proportion is possible any more.

In some ways, it captures Olivia and Paris’ situation from both their own perspective and that of the audience watching them.

That pivot didn’t always shift the poem in this direction, however. The verses were originally composed for a play called The Ascent of F2, about a climber who dies whilst attempting a famously dangerous mountain, having been persuaded by the prospect of public glory and national pride. His lover speaks the lines, which share the first two verses with the later version, but then veer off like this:

Hold up your umbrellas to keep off the rain
From Doctor Williams while he opens a vein;
Life, he pronounces, it is finally extinct.
Sergeant, arrest that man who said he winked!

Shawcross will say a few words sad and kind
To the weeping crowds about the Master-mind,
While Lamp with a powerful microscope
Searches their faces for a sign of hope.

And Gunn, of course, will drive a motor-hearse:
None could drive it better, most would drive it worse.
He’ll open up the throttle to its fullest power
And drive him to the grave at ninety miles an hour.

The satire here is more obvious, and directly develops the first two verses’ slanted glance at the public commemoration of a death. They’re more clearly about the uselessness of marking someone’s funeral with great pomp, without being so specific about the internal emotional world which is being contrasted with those rituals.

Auden reworked the poem as part of a collection of cabaret songs for the singer Heidli Anderson. I find it difficult to read Funeral Blues, in the light of its earlier appearance (and alongside the other songs), without finding an implication that the singer is mourning a dead politician she had an affair with.

The pivot in the middle, from this angle, marks the shift between her satirical comments on the grandiose ceremonies accorded him, and her insistence that the person he really mattered to won’t be recognised during them.

The politics of widowhood

John Hannah’s performance of the poem during the funeral scene of Richard Curtis’ movie brings out this reading strongly. Putting Funeral Blues in the mouth of a gay man mourning his partner shows up the political dimension of the issue of who is regarded as someone’s “widow”.

The lines’ scorn for the rituals and regulations of public grief map provocatively across the character’s situation, legally barred from being recognised as the surviving spouse.

Anxieties around widowhood – and non-widowhood – are a recurring feature of literary history, taking various forms but often expressing the fears of a dominant group that they are losing the ability to define and control other people’s identities.

We might be tempted to mock the anxiety of medieval, early modern and Victorian societies who were so anxious to police the status of widowhood, and so strenuously exerted cultural authority stop people whom they imagined wanted to “play” at being widows. But there are articles and speeches being written right now in response to the prospect of equal marriage, which engage repugnantly in the same task.

Here she is:

V

VIRGIN

And your quaint honour turn to dust
And into ashes all my lust…

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress c.1640s

Virgin has a comparatively straightforward etymology: it derives from the Latin virgo (= ‘maiden’), whence the star-sign Virgo (apparently the sign of the shy, modest and meticulous, with a dash of perfectionism and anxiety). Its first sense (c.1200) is an ecclesiastical one: ‘an unmarried or chaste maiden or women, distinguished for piety or steadfastness in religion, and regarded as having a special place among the members of the Christian church on account of these merits.’

Like a virgin

Saint Lucy, with her eyes, as depicted in 1521

There are innumerable such virgins in Christian hagiography: Saint Ursula had an army of 11,000 virgin handmaids who all had their heads chopped off (in a bit of a pun-fail); Saint Cecilia (patron saint of music) managed not only to persuade her husband to forbear on their wedding night, but also to join the Christian cause along with his brother, and suffer death in consequence.

Saint Lucy consecrated her virginity to God, and, supposedly, tore her own eyes out and gave them to her husband (who had admired them) as a kind of macabre substitute for the marital debt. (Lesson: never admire your girlfriend’s essential organs).

And, of course, there is the arch-virgin much mentioned in these posts – the eponymous Mary, who gets a definition all to herself as virgin‘s fourth meaning.

Mary’s particular achievement – the Virgin Birth – is also considered of some importance in these definitions for virgin. It presumably lies behind the gloss ‘a female insect producing fertile eggs by pathenogenesis [without the input of a male insect]’ (1883), as well as virgin‘s simple equivalence with ‘pathenogenesis’ itself (1849) – a word with its origin in the Greek parthenos, also meaning ‘virgin’ and ‘genesis’ (= ‘creation’).

This – reproduction without fertilisation – though clearly associated with Mary in Christian tradition, is also arguably the origin of Adam, so it doesn’t have to be have an explicit cultural gender-association. Indeed, there is a Middle English citation for virgin that defines it as ‘a youth or man who has remained in a state of chastity’. But this is admittedly an unusual example among the definitions as a whole. 

A woman’s touch

A Vestal Virgin

If we go back to ancient Rome, we meet another sense the religious meaning of virgin can have: the very non-Christian Vestal Virgins, a group of highly respected women whose job it was to guard the ‘sacred fire’ and take care of the rituals and responsibilities that could not be dealt with by male priests.

They were so named because their duties were primarily to Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth and family, and, in consequence, the Vestal Virgins took on a role as kind of symbolic housewives to the whole of Rome.

Though they would be obliged to remain virginal throughout their time as priestesses, in the word’s second sense ‘a woman who is or remains in a state of inviolate chastity’, the vow only lasted thirty years, at the end of which they were free to marry (though most of them seem not to have been all that bothered).

This all said, while these saints and priestesses are all very much virgins in the most common sense of the word, the ecclesiastical meaning does not have to imply the sexual inexperience they normally connote, since ‘chastity’ simply means ‘clean, pure’ (from the Latin castus), and has no intrinsic connection with physical ‘intactness’, though it is frequently used as a synonym. In fact, the fourth definition for the second primary meaning of the word (where it can be used to describe things other than women) highlights ‘purity or freedom from stain’ and being ‘unsullied’.

If you cast your mind back to ‘M is for Marriage‘, you may remember that adultery means ‘pollution of the marriage bed’, suggesting by association that the marriage bed was a sacred – or indeed ‘pure’ – space. And indeed, marriage was widely considered invalid without consummation – something Henry VIII made much use of in his royal divorces – and, in consequence, the virtuous wife who dexterously trod the balance of Pure Marital Sex and Pollution of the Marriage Bed (whether by adultery as we conceive it, or by lusting after her husband) could be as much feted as the unmarried virgin (indeed, more so, if she proved herself skilled in housewifery and produced equally virtuous children).

The ‘sieve portrait’ of Elizabeth I, 1583

That said, a curious and related term first cited in 1644 was virgin widow, meaning a woman whose husband had died before the marriage could be consummated, and whose status was therefore ambiguously poised between virginity (in the sense of being unmarried) and widowhood (being left behind after the death of a husband).

This was Catherine of Aragon‘s position, as argued at her divorce hearing, during the painful period  after Prince Arthur’s death – languishing in a political and social limbo, waiting for something to happen, steadily running out of money and losing points on the marriage market.

Purity is a virtue of the soul

An excellent, though somewhat horrific, example of the noble wife trope is Lucretia, the virtuous spouse of Collatine, whose rape by the royal prince Tarquin so outraged Rome that it led directly to the establishment of the Roman republic. As a wife, Lucretia is not a technical virgin, but she is (as Shakespeare puts it in the oft-forgotten early poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594)) ‘Collatine’s fair love, Lucrece the chaste‘.

Saint Augustine posits that ‘purity is a virtue of the soul‘, and since body and soul are (in this reading) distinct, Lucrece can consummate her marriage while still retaining her essential ‘bodily sanctity’ because she is free of polluting lust in the process.

Unfortunately, Collatine spends so much time bragging about his wife’s chastity to the bros in the camp that he invites trouble:

Haply that name of “chaste” unhapp’ly set
The bateless edge on [Tarquin’s] appetite

Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

Lucretia is so traumatised by Tarquin’s subsequent rape that she stabs herself rather than ‘live impure’, widely considered by the (male) world to be a Noble Decision. This led to her immortalisation in literature and philosophy as a perfect wife, but also prompted Augustine to engage in some terrible rape apologism in the service of his broader argument (‘If she was adulterous, why praise her? if chaste, why slay her?’).

Saints and sieves

It is presumably a version of this chastity-of-the-soul idea so beloved by Augustine that lies behind the story of Tuccia, the Vestal Virgin who proves her virginity by carrying water from the Tiber in a sieve without spilling a drop (here she is depicted in 1555 with the sieve itself, and wearing an outfit that leaves little to the imagination, chaste or otherwise).

I suppose the idea behind the sieve story is that something that would normally flow through the porous surface is maintained ‘intact’, perhaps representing the pure soul within a porous body. At any rate, it became a key symbol of virginity, most notably in the ‘Sieve Portrait’ of the ‘Virgin Queen‘ Elizabeth I, who is also cited in the Dictionary as a definition of virgin in herself.

The last citation given in the dictionary for virgin, with which we will end, is from 1780, as ‘a fortress or city that has never been taken or subdued’. This has an obvious resonance with Lucrece, and the ultimately martial tale her story becomes – another link between feminine ‘closedness’ and men’s military convenience.

It’s hard to find a way to re-appropriate any of these ideas in a positive way. But maybe this transferred definition or fortresses and cities should make us think about Elizabeth I, who at least made them work to her own military and political advantage.

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, this is a gritty, bold production set in a women’s prison – and performed in a very small, intimate theatre space. This is almost punk rock Shakespeare, and occasionally it has some punk rock in it. If the Pussy Riot reference poster doesn’t clue you in already: this is a production with guts.

Julius Caesar isn’t a play I’ve studied in much depth, and I know plenty of other reviewers will do a better academic job, so I’m going to focus on what I liked about it:

1. More parts to female actors! Hooray! Also, the production necessitates a certain degree of queer/genderqueer acceptance, as both Brutus and Caesar’s wives play a significant part in the story. Get on board and get on with the plot.
2. The initial prison set-up is ingenious, and really adds a few layers for the first half – Caesar is a much-loved but bullying top dog in the setting. And one of the first things Frances Barber’s Caesar does when she comes on stage is smooch Mark Anthony (Cush Jumbo). Whoa! That makes… a lot of sense, actually, and adds a brilliant ambiguity to the characters’ different declarations of love for each other.
3. Did I mention punk rock? There’s a bit of live music with a drumkit on wheels used to brilliant effect.
4. The soothsayer is presented as the clearly-slightly-unhinged inmate who is usually seen carrying a doll and with her hair always in bunches. Adult-as-child is really unnerving and in this production, it adds a Cassandra-esque layer.
5. I admit it: at times I was perving. Holy hell, Cassius (Jenny Jules)’s abs are amazing.

One problem for me was that as the action scaled up after Caesar’s assassination, I wasn’t sure what to do with the prison setting. Part of my brain was still trying to work out what significance the setting still had – for best enjoyment you just need to leave that behind and focus on with the plot, but my brain couldn’t quite do it.

The setting and the tale make an interesting mix, but they don’t fit perfectly throughout. Brick it ain’t.

Also, there was an interesting dissonance between the ‘honour’ described (OK, makes sense) and the ‘love of Rome’ which motivated Brutus and Cassius (but why do you love this place? It’s… prison.)

But if the Torygraph is spitting bullets (twice) over the casting, you know you’re doing something right:

There is a certain poetic justice that Lloyd’s effort should find itself in direct competition with the classy, respectful and hugely entertaining all-male versions of Twelfth Night and Richard III, which are running in rep at the Apollo. These productions would undoubtedly have met with Shakespeare’s approval.

– Tim Walker, Telegraph 14/12/12

BUT WHAT ABOUT TEH MENS?

Dude, if you feel that threatened by affirmative action: there is everywhere else that you could go.

All in all this production is tough, gutsy and giving its all to sort out the massive under-representation of women in theatre.

And the modern, unpretentious setting gives you a huge amount to think about – above and beyond the plot of an already dense play. It’s on until the 9th of February.

Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies

This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looks at the moment immediately after Charles II reversed this rule, and it’s a fun little look at some portraits, caricatures and paraphernalia of women who were allowed on stage, ‘from Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons’. It’s focused on portraits, but there are some super little earthenware tiles with different actresses on them in Room 3. There’s also a facsimile of the Yellow Pages-style brothel directory, Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies; or, The Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar, illustrating the fall from grace of the once ‘Convent and Garden’ of Westminster Abbey – a bit too close to eighteenth-century Theatreland for PR-comfort. Since its reissue by the History Press this book has now achieved some cult status – the guy next to me, looking at it, said to his companion, ‘You know, Gladys: Harris’ List – that’s the one we’ve got in the toilet’.

Nell (c.1651-87) opens this exhibition – a talented comic actress, although she is popularly most recognised for inspiring Charles II’s last words ‘Let not poor Nelly starve’ (she survived him by barely a year, fact fans). There are two portraits of her here, in both of which she’s got her mammaries out. This exhibition would have these as evidence of her ‘skillful manipulation’ rather than ‘brazen hussydom’; the second portrait shows her naked to the waist and looking directly at the viewer with a gaze at once languid and challenging. You might be reminded of Manet’s Olympia, condemned as ‘vulgar’ and ‘immoral’ on its first exhibition at 1863, mainly because the nude is looking directly at the viewer rather than obligingly turning her head away for better ogling comfort. And indeed, such a tension between looking and being looked at probably underscored a lot of the moral uncertainty about the early actresses.

Later on, we get Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), powerful, tragic grande dame. She appears in Room 3 painted by Thomas Lawrence as public intellectual, tutor to the royal children – and at a vantage point that forces us to look up at her imperious face, rather than to avert our eyes from her naked bosom. This is hung alongside a number of grandiose actress-as-Muse paintings, large as their themes, and also including Muses of Comedy and society amateurs like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

But even in the late eighteenth century ‘actress’ still wasn’t a career you’d want for your wife. Thespiennes like Elizabeth Ann Sheridan (1754-1792) and Elizabeth Farren (1759-1829) – both exhibited here – gave up their acting careers, on request, upon marriage. While the eighteenth-century gentleman was not renowned for being into female careers in general, the issue here seems to be more ‘other men looking at your wife’ than anything else: after all, these men were ‘forward thinking’ enough to marry an actress in the first place. Perhaps they were nervous of the number of early actresses, like Nell, who had affairs with kings and nobles. If so, they had a good few hundred years of uncertainty left: Edward VII was still pretty into actresses at the turn of the twentieth century. ‘I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship’ he complained to Lillie Langtry (1853-1929), eliciting the tart response ‘And you’ve spent enough in me to float one.’ (It may have been such impertinence that led to her replacement by another actress, Sarah Bernhardt, shortly afterwards.)

Dorothy Jordan in travesti - engraving after the John Hoppner painting in this exhibition

But, as this exhibition shows, one of the primary moral gripes with these early actresses was actually about something a bit unexpected: the travesti roles many of them built careers on. There are some fascinating visual representations in this exhibition of actresses – like Dorothy Jordan (1761-1816), whose bosom apparently ‘concealed everything but its own charms’ – in their famous ‘breech’ roles, both Shakespearean (stalwarts like Twelfth Night and As You Like It) and just… male (Tom Thumb). It seems that, after decades of young boys aping womanhood, the first actresses set themselves the challenge of continuing the noble tradition: it was conscious decision, rather than occasional dramatic necessity, for many of them to adopt the travesti.

The Immodesty here implied resulted in endless caricatures, many of which are exhibited here. My favourite was entitled ‘An Actress at her Toilet; or, Miss Brazen Just Breecht’ – though perhaps even stranger were the portraits of various male actors, including David Garrick, in drag – enormous hoop and all – as a kind of forerunner to the pantomime dame.

Take a feminist friend and thrash it out in the Portrait Gallery café with their superior yoghurt and granola, says this reviewer. And visit John Donne on the top floor, if he’s not gone into cleaning yet.

• The First Actresses runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 8 January 2012.

“Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We NEED it to stand on this earth as men and women.”

Whedon in response to every journalist who has ever spoken to him. (Source: The Wellington Young Feminists Collective)

We NEED equality. That’s an incredible statement. It’s those capital letters which impress me – ignore that it’s a now-rich white guy saying it and look at the passion in those words. He’s saying that equality is not optional. It’s not something for only people with too much luxury and free time to turn their attention to.

And he makes it clear that this belief comes from his parents teaching him that the rights and respect we should give to ‘people’ don’t only apply to straight, white, cis males who behave in approved ways. It certainly doesn’t immediately stop applying to 51% of the human race – all other human beings get those rights as well. Why is this concept so revolutionary after all this time? Why are we having to campaign to stop homosexuality still being illegal in so much of the Commonwealth, for a start?

I certainly feel equality as something we ‘need’. I’m unable to hold my head up as a man while my country treats people in all the bigoted, ingrained ways it still does. It seems blindingly obvious to me, but in my case didn’t come from sentiments in the home growing up, or from the attitudes of my parents (who keep surprising me with how socially conservative they are). Yet the UK is far ahead of many others: I’m visiting Belgrade (the capital of Serbia) right now and the government recently decided not to allow a Gay Pride march because they wouldn’t be able to protect the marchers from massive violence. At least they’re not one of the countries handing out prison sentences, or death sentences.

Making a statement that I feel personally affected by inequality against groups I’m not technically part of is usually the point at which I’m told I’m not allowed to have an opinion – that I just have ‘White Middle-class Guilt’ for example. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that guilt as long as it leads to campaigning and action instead of the typical corresponding middle-class ‘slacktivism’. The idea that those outside of the group in question shouldn’t feel strongly about an issue would mean that straight people can’t be against homophobia – it’s ridiculous. And Whedon says so:

The misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who is confronted with it.

The imbalance affects him, and everyone else. Equality isn’t something to be sorted out after we tackle the other issues of society, it’s not an optional nice-to-have on top of the cake, it’s an urgent and real NEED which affects the whole population.

Whether or not you think Whedon succeeds in promoting gender equality in his movies and TV, that speech is still stunning. Every time I post the link new friends find it for the first time and are awed, and others feel the need to pass it on once again. Five years later and it still needs saying, so (almost exactly a year after that first BadRep post I made on it) I wanted to quickly share it in case we have even one or two of you who will see it fresh and feel inspired.

In less feminist-focused recent Joss news, he’s just filmed a version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in 12 days with a lot of his friends, which means people like Amy Acker (Angel‘s Fred) and Alexis Denisof (Wesley) as the lovers Beatrice and Benedick. Nathan Fillion and Fran Kranz are in there too. Oh, and he didn’t tell the press until shooting was finished, when it got ‘casually’ mentioned on Twitter. I’ve been a fanboy of his work for a while now and still can’t watch those two leads in the last season of Angel without blubbing, so the chance to see them in romantic roles is exciting.¹ Also, he’s formed his own studio to make micro-films, and has a supernatural romance called In Your Eyes already planned. And then there’s his horror-comedy “Cabin in the Woods” starring the guy who played Thor and Whedon peeps Fran Kranz, Tom Lenk and Amy Acker again, which was actually completed years ago but will be released by the now-bankrupt MGM in April 2012. But you knew that already.

1. For an extra frisson of excitement there’s the mystery of whether Joss can actually stand for characters to be happy, or whether he’ll just re-write Shakespeare and kill them all. You never know.

Y

YES

and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

– James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

She asked for one more dance and I’m
Like yeah, how the hell am I supposed to leave? […]
Next thing I knew she was all up on me screaming:
Yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeaah
Yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeaah

– Usher, ‘Yeah’ (2004)

YES! Have finally managed a pretentious appropriation of pop culture as an epigram. Ludacris fill cups like double-Ds.

yes i will yes

Ahem. Yes is the last of our Old English words. It’s gise or gese, meaning ‘so be it’, perhaps from gea, ge (= ‘so’), plus si (=’be it!’), the third person imperative of beon (= ‘to be’). In this form, yes was stronger than its Germanic cognate, yea (much like today) and, apparently, was often used in Shakespeare as an answer to negative questions. We could do with one of them nowadays, no? How many times have you answered a question with yes when you mean no? (‘Doesn’t she….?’ ‘…Yes, she doesn’t’).

The penultimate word in our Alphabet, yes is frequently one of the first words we learn on earth; its meaning is clear and unequivocal, by turns disastrous, passionate, exhilarating, loaded and humdrum – but always positive in the full sense of that word. It is almost invariably repeated, as in Joyce (and Usher) – ‘yes I will, Yes’, the successive affirmations underlining and confirming the first – just like a signature under your printed name, if you listen to Derrida

Sure ‘Nuff n’ Yes I Do

James ‘Awesome Glasses‘ Joyce apparently made much of his novel ‘novel’ Ulysses ending on this, which he considered ‘the female word’. The final chapter, ‘Penelope’, often also referred to as ‘Molly Bloom’s soliloquy’, is 42 pages of just eight sentences, wherein Molly, wife of Leopold Bloom, muses to herself in bed.

For those who have better things to do than wrestle with a modernist doorstop, as the wife of the novel’s ‘Ulysses’, Molly is a counterpart to ‘Penelope‘, wife of Odysseus / Ulysses and conventional model of marital fidelity. The similarity expires fairly quickly, since Joyce’s Penelope is having an affair with ‘Blazes Boylan’, but nonetheless her chapter is often named after Ulysses’ wife. It begins and ends with this yes, and in a letter to Frank Budgen, Joyce explained that ‘Penelope’ rotates around what he considered the four cardinal points of the female  body – ‘breasts, arse, womb and cunt’ – expressed respectively by the words because, bottom, woman and yes. Some of the comparisons are clear – the womb has long been seen as synonymous with ‘woman’ (however reductively); bottom / arse – ok; because / breasts… um?; yes / cunt – hmm.

I suspect this last pairing has a lot to do with the affirmation of sex: interaction with this organ should be one preceded by yes and punctuated with repetitions of this confirmation (yes yes yes). (Why James Joyce, you filthy…). We see a similar thing in Usher (first time for everything): the repeated yeah, yeah, yeah is a sexual affirmation – ‘How the hell am I supposed to leave??‘. This is about a female seduction (‘she’s saying “come get me”!’), but one that we suspect will not end in when-i’m-sixty-four style knitting by the fire. For one thing, we learn that Usher already has a ‘girl‘, who happens to be ‘the best of homies’ with this club seductress; for another, Ludacris announces they will leave after a couple of drinks because they ‘want a lady in the street but a freak in the bed’. So actually, the art of being a lady lies in effectively concealing a consent that, in private, becomes loud, repeated and unstoppable.

Yes Indeed

Coming my way? The 'Easy Girlfriend' Poster, 1943-4

This is a well-trodden path, and all part of the old idea of how consent given too easily (yes yes yes) – or, in some cases, even given at all – is liable to get females into trouble. A less well-trodden example is Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), which devotes several hundred of its thousand or so pages to what happens after the protagonist has proposed to his fiance: though she has accepted the proposal, she fears that to ‘name the day’ herself – or even to consent to a ‘day’ suggested to her – would be to show a forwardness disturbing in a woman. Disturbing perhaps, but probably a relief to the exhausted reader, for she manages to suspend her final consent to ‘thursday a month hence’ for an entire blushing, confused volume of this hefty tome.

We can go further back, of course: in Shakespeare-times, Juliet fears Romeo will think she is ‘too quickly won’. To correct this, she offers to ‘frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay‘ (no no yes), artificially constructing a well-won consent where positive affirmation already exists (history does not record whether or not Juliet was ‘a freak in the bed’). Many would-be Romeos have seized on such fears to assume (or convince themselves) that this is just what their ladies are doing when they give an unequivocal ‘no’, so seduction narratives are littered with lovers assuming their lovers really mean yes when they reply in the negative – examples have spanned Austen’s Mr Collins to modern day Mills & Boon. Apparently, in the latter case, one is supposed to find this irresistible.

Go No More A-Roving

We’re teetering around something rather insidious here, and one aspect of this finds its expression in a 1940s propaganda poster. The ‘Easy Girlfriend’ anti-VD advert placed the blame for the Second World War venereal epidemic squarely with the momento-mori type be-hatted skull (a sexually experienced re-appropriation of the medieval Death and the Maiden trope). ‘The “easy” girlfriend spreads syphilis and gonorrhea’, it blazed – she who says yes too easily is to be shunned by polite society, and will be – naturellement – riddled with disease. Of course, syphilis’ original spread throughout Europe had followed the path of the Grand Tour, but this must have been because Venetian prostitutes were taking expensive package holidays throughout France, Spain, Rome, Switzerland and Turkey, mustn’t it, Lord Byron?

So while you probably disagree with Joyce’s view that yes is an intrinsically female word, it’s certainly one whose utterance is littered with potential problems for women. Yes means yes.

NEXT WEEK: the Alphabet returns for its final installment – Z is for Zone

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

QUEEN

To sour your happiness, I must report
The queen is dead.

Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1611) V.5.3400

Queen is one of the few Alphabet words with a firmly British origin, but it makes up for its lack of Latinate pedigree by being extremely complicated. So this is the part where the rap breaks down – it comes from the Old English cwen, the proto-Germanic kwoeniz, and (follow it back far enough) the proto-Indo-European gwen (= ‘woman, wife’). Proto-awesome, man. In this form it coincides rather nicely with the Greek gyne, meaning ‘woman, wife’ (thus gynecology, misoGYNy, gynophobia, and indeed gynocentric), and a whole host of other languages that I don’t think we need all up in our grill just now.

My Family and Other Animals

The interesting thing about these origins is their relation to another word: quean, originally a variant form of queen, meaning then ‘woman, female’ but now mostly an ‘effeminate homosexual man’ (cf., er, queen). Its etymology is similar, but with more emphasis on the insults: thus, quean‘s forebears include the Middle Dutch quene (= ‘older woman’), the Dutch kween (= ‘hussy’) and the Middle Low German quene (= ‘woman, wife, old woman’). It eventually gives us ‘a promiscuous woman’ sometime around the sixteenth century.

Anne, later Queen Anne, at the time of her marriage, 1683.

As is often the case, plenty of forebears inevitably only leads to plenty of embarrassing cousins, and many of these roots (cwen and the Greek gyne in particular) have also been claimed as parents to cunt ( =  ‘the vulva or vagina’), spelled quaint and sometimes queynt by Chaucer, just to illustrate the fluidity of ‘cw’, ‘qu’ and ‘cu’. When you know that portcwene ( = literally ‘a public woman’) means ‘prostitute’, the association of quean / quean and cunt may perhaps become somewhat clearer: it’s what you might call synecdoche. This may also throw some light on quean/queen‘s gay associations: inevitably, words that suggest penetration of the female (pussy, bitch) are eventually seized upon to denigrate an ‘effeminate’ man. Queen as ‘a flamboyant homosexual’ is from the 1920s (as is queer, which originally means ‘oblique, off centre’), thus coinciding with a modicum more gay visibility than its sixteenth century usage.

But it’s not all doom, gloom and back to the Unmentionables: let’s talk thrones. English is unusual in giving a queen her own word, and not simply feminizing king (= ‘of noble birth’) – compare the French roi and reine, from the Latin rex and regina. Nonetheless, the first definition of a queen in the dictionary is as ‘a king’s wife or consort; a lady who is wife to a king’ but the second sense, as ‘a woman who is the chief ruler of a state, having the same rank and position as a king’, is Old English itself, so the two definitions are likely to be essentially simultaneous.

The English the English the English are best.

Yes, over here on Albion’s chalk-ringed shores, we’ve had no less than seven reigning queens. By contrast, even pre-1789, the hated French would never let Ringo have a go – lol Salic law – and all their famous female royals were lowly consorts (Margaret de Valois, Catherine de Medici, Marie Antoinette…), although Henri IV was several degrees more awesome than any English king, ever. Look at how pleased with himself he is! But I digress.

However positive the existence of historical female monarchs on this royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle, the residual physicality of queen in relation to cunt is still lurking around, and the body of the queen has always carried a significance that goes beyond everyday concerns about legitimacy (although those are there too). Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves, queens to Henry VIII, were both publicly subjected to a series of intimate questions (and threatened physical examination) about their wedding-bed virginity, genital health and sexual history, and that’s before you get into discussions down the pub throughout history about When The King Is A Queen (thus Edward II roundly condemned for A Weak King and put to an ‘ironic’ death), and the reigning queen‘s menstrual cycle and likelihood of producing a royal heir.

This last was an issue that clearly dogged even those English queens ruling in their own right: in 1554, Mary I was declared to be with child, triggering thanksgiving services and country-wide celebration, until over a year later her belly decreased in size and the ‘pregnancy’ was revealed to be a humiliating ‘phantom’ (pseudocyesis), caused by her intense desire for an heir. After a second false pregnancy two years later, she died (possibly from a uterine tumour) in 1558.

Elizabeth I carrying a sieve, the traditional accessory of the Vestal Virgins. c.1583

A couple of hundred years later, amid some of the most spectacular changes in British history, Mary ‘Williamanmary’ II and her sister, Anne, were competing to be the first to bear a child, and, in consequence, were rarely on speaking terms. Mary had an early miscarriage which may have permanently impaired her ability to have a baby, while Anne (despite being fairly definitely gay herself) had six children who died, eight still-births and four miscarriages. Meanwhile, a few Georges and a William later, Victoria‘s famous fruitfulness was widely seen as a positive statement about British greatness in an imperial age: the truly maternal monarch, whose offspring gave England royal relations in Hesse, Prussia (though post-1914 we didn’t talk about that), and Russia (oops).

Queen Of My Heart.

But, of course, we (along with everyone else, ho ho) have not touched on Elizabeth I, the ‘Virgin Queen’, Gloriana, etc who managed to make a virtue of childlessness by representing the immaculate body of the queen as the symbol of a healthy nation. Bang on cue, queen‘s third meaning is ‘a female whose rank or pre-eminence is comparable to that of a queen; applied, for example, to the Virgin Mary, to the goddesses of ancient religions or mythologies, or to a woman as a term of endearment or honour’. This is the sense it has in Twelfth Night when Viola is ‘Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen‘, in which context it has something of lady about it, just ramped up to full throttle: someone who is also the ‘chief  ruler of a state’ is indeed a mistress par excellence.

It was this tradition that Elizabeth milked till it had no more to give, presenting herself as the adored lady at the centre of a courtly cult of virginity, an age which produced Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Walter Raleigh’s The Ocean To Cynthia, as well as hundreds of portraits depicting Queen Elizabeth as immaculate goddess and virgin. Her fleshlessness was only exacerbated after 1592, when the elderly queen stopped sitting for portraits at all, forcing artists to work from earlier templates of her face, creating an eternal ‘Mask of Youth’.

So queen is a word that fuses sexuality and a microscopic focus on the body (where more so than in its use to attack people for what they like to do in the bedroom?) with a kind of awestruck ‘Glorianian’ respect. Those who sit on this lexical pedestal are perhaps a little wonky: it is unfortunate that queenly success seems attainable only for those rulers who have produced litters of miniature monarchs and the one who maintained a virginal ice-princess sort of deal. But then, looking back over England’s history (and, of course, its present), it is cheering to see that Women Have At Least Done It. Now if we could just fix that male primogeniture business…

NEXT WEEK: R is for Rake

N

NANNY

Sonic Nurse

After the army of Important Academic Languages, and their Distinguished And Layered Relationship With Modern English, we reach this. Nanny has no real relation to Latin, Greek, French, Middle or even Old English, but derives from ‘a child’s corruption of the word nurse‘, tellingly akin to mamma. Nurse, it must be granted, has slightly more pedigree: it derives from the twelfth-century Old French term norrice, via the Latin nutricius (= ‘that suckles, nourishes’). It first appears in 1530 as a verb ‘to suckle’, and as a noun fifty years later, where it has the meaning we probably use most often: ‘one who takes care of the sick’.

Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, in Gone WIth The Wind. Image from http://www.gonemovies.com/

Nanny is first cited as an independent word meaning ‘a child’s nurse-maid’ in 1795, whence it proves itself as fluid as you would expect, also encompassing a quasi-proper name, Nana (Cf. Katy Nana in Mary Poppins, and the Newfoundland dog in Peter Pan). In 1830s America, we meet another deviant form of the same idea: mammy, a dialect corruption of mamma referring to ‘a black woman who looks after white children’. In extended form, mammy refers to a racial stereotype: ‘the loud, overweight and good natured black woman’, epitomised (in proper name form) in Gone With The Wind, and controversially brought to life in an Oscar-winning performance by Hattie McDaniel (above, right). And it’s not all the Americans: this phenomenon has certain similarities to the British use of native women as nursemaids in colonial India, ayahs, so named in reference to the Hindi word meaning ‘nurse’.

Dude Ranch Nurse

All this leads back to one place: the whistleblowing potential of an infant’s cries, in this instance naming the truly maternal figure in their formative years. But then, of course, until the late eighteenth century (the nineteenth, in France), no fashionable woman would even consider nursing her own child: on the contrary, wet nursing (sending your kid out to be suckled by a hired breast) was so common as to be automatic. Newborns were generally sent away for up to two years to be nourished, at a rate of anything from a few shillings a week to between £25 – 50 a year.

The reasons were as varied as the price, spanning the apparently trivial (social custom, and the desire to return to public life ASAP); the medical (fears for the mother’s health after the strain of lying in sans twenty-first century advantages), and the ‘medical’ (the widespread notion that sex with a nursing woman would damage her milk and therefore the child, and the belief that conception was impossible during this time anyway). It also seems possible that rampant infant mortality may have contributed: parents would send their children away until they had survived their most dangerous years, rather than invest emotional energy in a little’un who might well leave you before their first birthday.

That said, the enduring influence of the nanny qua mother-figure lasted long into the twentieth century, albeit mostly among the mega-aristocracy: The King’s Speech (2011) imagines the future George VI to have been closer to his nannies than his family; one of these, Charlotte Bill, was famously also an effective mother to his autistic and epileptic younger brother, Johnny (re-created in the 2003 BBC serial The Lost Prince).

Maggie’s Farm

Louis XIV of France painted with his wet-nurse, by Charles Beaubrun (c.1640)

The women who actually did all this nursing were inevitably of a lower social class than their clients – if not a different race – although they could earn good money (and possibly a nice pension) in the process. Here we tumble into a parallel nanny universe: the word in its more formal sense originating from another proper name. Through a bit of shuffling, good old Ann became first Nan and then Nanny, in which incarnation, around 1788, the word came to simply connote femininity, as in Nanny-goat (= ‘a female goat’, on which see also ‘Jenny Wren’ and ‘jenny-ass’). Like Doll, Nan’s trajectory suggests commonness, generic feminine identity, and while the dictionary is specific on the two nannies‘ separation, its stated origin in an infant’s mouth is by definition uncertain, language development fluid, and the connections between milking and the farmyard in need of little exposition – compare the nineteenth-century term baby farmer, a lower-class wet nurse happy to let her charges die because her one-off fee encouraged little else. The term was always pejorative, and synonymous with the dangerous, non-nurturing female.

In contrast, we have the nannies who stayed with one family for generations (like the mammy and the ayah abroad): these last are inevitably conventionally ‘older’ than their baby-farming colleagues, and presumably played a more extended mothering role. It is these strange insider-outsiders who appear in literature as bawdy and decrepit old women, inevitably depicted as their job title suggests: firmly on the side of the children they raise, to the extent that they will happily aid their improper sexual dalliances. It is thus that the Nurse appears in Romeo and Juliet, and in Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes. The suspicion inevitably directed at these figures is certainly class-based: wet nursing’s detractors had been arguing for years that by withholding mothers’ milk parents risked their children absorbing working-class mannerisms – and criminal tendencies – from their surrogate teats.

Na na na na na.

The next stop for the nanny is in the inter-war years, with representatives including P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins, the poems of A. A. Milne, and Noel Streatfeild‘s legion of sexless ‘cottage loaf’ Nanas. Streatfeild’s children are almost invariably orphaned, and their Nana-figure keeps them nourished through ‘nursery ways’, a stubborn lack of sentimentality, and a feeling of permanence sadly lacking in the increasingly fragmented world of war-torn Britain. A similar idea is repeated in the 1964 Disney film of Travers’ novel, which makes the significant decision to backdate events to 1910, when the focus is on ‘moulding the breed’ for future colonial greatness:

A British nanny must be a general!
The future empire lies within her hands.
And so the person that we need
To mould the breed
Is a nanny who can give commands!

Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964)

In so doing, Disney’s film situates the nanny as part of ‘tradition, discipline and rules’, nurturing Britain’s future rather than its children, and flying in the face of its very etymology.

Mr Banks’ song does, however, lead us to the final stop on nanny’s childishly simple word-journey: its modern incarnation as the Dreaded Nanny State (first appearing some time between the fifties and sixties). Always an opprobrious term (attempts to re-appropriate it have met with derision)  critics of government intervention ranging from the welfare state to the smoking ban hark back to the nanny to point up ‘mollycoddling’, the infantalisation of the people (who are presumably thus reduced to the baby-talk of the nursery) returning to childhood with a fussy female at the helm. Wash your face, dearie.

NEXT WEEK: O is for Ovary

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