Wednesday, February 10, 2016
she had a Desire to return to the Place
After the last post I thought of Haywood’s 1726 Double Marriage again, especially a section of one sentence, which came into my head, or some version of it, God knows I didn’t remember the words too well, but they were this: “ … she resolved to know the Truth; and as nothing but ocular Demonstration could convince her it was so, she procur’d herself a Suit of Men’s Clothes, and in all things equipt like a Youth of fashion, went in the Stage-Coach to Plymouth; having pretended to her Father that she had a Desire to return to the Place she came from in the Country …” – which deserves to be set next to this fragment from chapter one of the same book, “Alathia [the same ‘she’], had Beauty, such as, in Idea, enliven’d the Fancies of the celebrated Titian and Raphael, famous for their Representations of the Queen of Love” – so, wonder, how did she ... -- where did she find a wig? – did she look like one of Chardin’s young men who dream over their cards with epicene Elizabeth Peyton faces? -- and what if (this was actually my real first thought but I had to fill in the rest first) the aspect of Haywood that had worked in the theatre as actor and playwright had accepted that this line was a cue she could have used to show off her knowledge of costumes?
Extrapolatory swagger! At least a paragraph’s worth of tangent there. How did she coat over that extreme womanliness. But Haywood didn’t do it --
She has cued herself and not used the cue --
She is an author of restraint.
She has used the words “of fashion” after “Youth,” to explain the unusual shape of the boy teenager, the phrase “Queen of Love” being transformed here, by the words “of fashion,” into long-bodied, flexible, free-floating ambiguous grace, without the earlier implications of extreme unmistakable female shape, the womanly-coy “sweet disorder” of Alathia’s other self, page two, chapter one, and other phrases the author has used on her, all suggesting physicality, all capable of being replaced by a formation called “fashion.”
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i believe ladies fashions in the 18th c. were beyond weird; maybe from an objective view, she was trying to display the meaninglessness as compared to a real person? social mores then must have been, especially for women, like being in prison for life...
ReplyDeleteBetsy Thoughtless is her most detailed and rigorous description of that prison, at least out of the Haywoods I've read. (That book should be better known, especially by people who like Austen.) In the novellas she narrows it down to love and marriage. The one woman left standing at the end of Double Marriage thinks back over everything that has happened so far and comes to the conclusion that any further association with "that betraying Sex to which she owed her Misfortune" is likely to get her killed as well and therefore she will avoid them forever, amen.
ReplyDeleteso many traps and snares: living is like navigating one of those old english garden mazes; it's a wonder anyone ever grows old. makes a case for narcissism, i think...
ReplyDeleteKenneth Graham's Badger has the right idea: have a good heart and live in a burrow with clean plates. Then you only have to cover the problem of independent wealth.
Deletethat's actually a pretty good description of me now... maybe except for the plates, sometimes... and the wealth: more of a pension, really...
Deleteso: gravity waves. i guess we really do live in a quantum universe. to extrapolate: what if tiny changes in the past, like a new ribbon or an inch of hemline, caused other ladies to copy the "new look" in a logarithmic multiplication, cascading through the years, adding one little bit to another, until this social wave reached the 18th c. and the result was the bizarre dress fashions that were then the rage. but that's just fashion. what if the same principle applied in other fields, politics, science, et al and maybe that's what evolution actually is: a dissemination of accumulating quanta like particle decay. in which case time would really be an illusion, more like a gigantic tapestry in multidimensional space in which events apparently succeeding each other are actually all there at the same time. with only our five senses to perceive the reality, maybe we just can't see what's really happening and if this is the case, what if anything should we or could we do about it? nothing, i guess, but realize what reality actually is and quit destroying the planet and acting like idiots just out of the box. i'm a bit off-topic here, sorry... or maybe not!
ReplyDeleteHere's something that I wonder: if we accept that time is an illusion in the way that you describe, then doesn't it follow that the state you're positing as the real situation is only an illusion of the illusion?
Deletehaha! yes!: all you scientists pay attention! there's a reality behind quantum mechanics that you know nothing about! i love it... never thought about that, either...
ReplyDeleteI know effectively nothing about quantum mechanics, but it seems to be the point where the quest for what-is has taken people to the point of discovering, with scientific evidence, that they don't know, and potentially never will.
ReplyDeletethat seems a logical assesment; on the other hand, what else is there to do except push the boundaries...
ReplyDeleteI like it. I think it complicates the idea of progress. If this is progress then what do we mean by progress? If this isn't progress then what is it?
ReplyDelete