{"id":14117,"date":"2013-10-23T07:15:17","date_gmt":"2013-10-23T06:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/?p=14117"},"modified":"2013-10-23T17:04:44","modified_gmt":"2013-10-23T16:04:44","slug":"veiled-threats-widows-and-pseudowidows-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2013\/10\/23\/veiled-threats-widows-and-pseudowidows-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Veiled Threats: Widows and Pseudowidows (2\/2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part 1!<\/a><\/p>\n

Widow imagery on ‘The Gilmore Girls’<\/h2>\n

\"Paris\"<\/a>The Gilmore girls (of TV’s The Gilmore Girls<\/strong>) don\u2019t have an awful lot in common with the thirteenth century Beguines. Paris Geller, on the other hand \u2013 Rory Gilmore\u2019s nemesis, love rival, roommate, co-plotter and sometime editor \u2013 also attracts ridicule as a young woman who presumes on the privileges of widowhood.<\/p>\n

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 (\u201cMmm, I smell of pipe smoke…\u201d) it is made pretty clear to the audience that Fleming regularly has casual affairs with young women who take his course.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s widow is another one of Paris\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a kegger thrown by some girl they\u2019ve never heard of.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019 cause.<\/p>\n

Funeral Blues<\/h2>\n

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\u2019d like to discuss: the speaker in W.H. Auden\u2019s poem Funeral Blues<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
\nPrevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
\nSilence the pianos and with muffled drum
\nBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

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

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

There\u2019s 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\u2019s death, the poem starts to imagine in both more personal and more cosmological terms.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

In both there is an anguished hyperbole, an awareness of the discrepancy between the speaker\u2019s 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\u2019s recognition of their lack of proportion alongside a refusal to countenance the idea that proportion is possible any more.<\/p>\n

In some ways, it captures Olivia and Paris\u2019 situation from both their own perspective and that of the audience watching them.<\/p>\n

That pivot didn\u2019t always shift the poem in this direction, however. The verses were originally composed for a play called The Ascent of F2<\/strong>, 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:<\/p>\n

Hold up your umbrellas to keep off the rain
\nFrom Doctor Williams while he opens a vein;
\nLife, he pronounces, it is finally extinct.
\nSergeant, arrest that man who said he winked!<\/em><\/p>\n

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

And Gunn, of course, will drive a motor-hearse:<\/em>
\n None could drive it better, most would drive it worse.<\/em>
\n He\u2019ll open up the throttle to its fullest power<\/em>
\n And drive him to the grave at ninety miles an hour.<\/em><\/p>\n

The satire here is more obvious, and directly develops the first two verses\u2019 slanted glance at the public commemoration of a death. They\u2019re more clearly about the uselessness of marking someone\u2019s funeral with great pomp, without being so specific about the internal emotional world which is being contrasted with those rituals.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>, 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t be recognised during them.<\/p>\n

The politics of widowhood<\/h2>\n

John Hannah\u2019s performance of the poem during the funeral scene of Richard Curtis\u2019 movie brings out this reading strongly. Putting Funeral Blues<\/strong> in the mouth of a gay man mourning his partner shows up the political dimension of the issue of who is regarded as someone\u2019s “widow”.<\/p>\n