Questions:
- What have you gained permission to express via literature and art throughout your life?
- Of the art and literature pieces in this handout, what unsaid things are said here?
- Are they still taboo, or are they now passé & widely aired by the masses?
- Where are you still folded? Where is the culture still folded? (Refer to Rilke poem.)
Materials & explanation:
- Rilke poem (1875-1926, Bohemian-Austrian): … “I want to unfold./ I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,/because where I am folded,/there I am a lie” … Perhaps this quote speaks to the very drive behind the pen or paintbrush of time immemorial’s artists.
- Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1851-1904, American): an unanticipated reaction in the protagonist to death of a spouse due to her multitude of folded layers that unfold as a result of her husband’s presumed death. The unfolding turns out to be tragic in this case, vs. enlightening or uplifting.
- Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1508-1512, Italian) detail of God Creating Man: via an art history professor of mine, John Rawlings, I have arrived to consider the theory that Michelangelo was not simply a contrary grump but a contrary genius in the way that he may have been creating a grand spoof on Catholicism’s God-Creating-Man-surety by placing God inside a structure that very much resembles the human brain and brain stem, thereby offering those that would care to question such a grand portrayal of God being inside man’s mind, a human invention. Conjecture. But fun, and very compelling conjecture when you begin to analyze the painting.
- Euripides’ play Medea (summary) & Delacroix’s (1838, French) “Medea About to Kill Her Children”: the good mommy syndrome called violently into question by the multitude of layers that any mother willing to admit it can attest to being real and complex, to say the least. Not to say that acting out one’s emotions on one’s children is condoned, but I think Euripides’ 480-406 BCE (Ancient Athens, Greece) standpoint continues to ask the mothers of 2010 CE to be more forthcoming about their folded parts, in addition to the unfolded parts that they are overly proud to reveal (ie, loving, giving, selflessness). I think Medea today is a less relevant commentary on betrayal and jealousy than it is on the complexity that is a Mother.
- Brigette’s “Ode to a woman with white hair” (b. 1977): my own writing exploring the idea of the unsaid within the context of a personal experience with an older woman at the Wave one day…which cascaded into my reference point of my favorite grandmother who was born & raised in Berlin, lived through the war with it ending when she was in her early twenties, her fiancé being shot down as a German pilot, her being the recipient of Russian and American sexual violence in Berlin post-Hitler, marrying an American soldier to remove herself from it, moving to the US in the late 50s, forever pining for Europe, dying of vulvar cancer in 2003 in the US.
Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Robert Bly)
I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough
to make every minute holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will,
and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action,
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don't want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
And I want my grasp of things
true before you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that took me safely
through the wildest storm of all.
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The Story of an Hour
by Kate Chopin
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| detail of Capella Sistina, Vatican, Rome, by Michelangelo |
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| Delacroix's Medea About to Kill Her Children, Paris, 1838 |
Medea
Summary & analysis of the play by Euripides
This document was originally published in The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization, vol. 1. ed. Alfred Bates. London: Historical Publishing Company, 1906. p. 192-196.
Source: http://www.theatrehistory.com/ancient/bates018.html
The Medea tells the story of the jealousy and revenge of a woman betrayed by her husband. She has left home and father for Jason's sake, and he, after she has borne him children, forsakes her, and betroths himself to Glauce, the daughter of Creon, ruler of Corinth. Creon orders her into banishment that her jealousy may not lead her to do her child some injury. In vain she begs not to be cast forth, and finally asks for but one day's delay. This Creon grants, to the undoing of him and his. Jason arrives and reproaches Medea with having provoked her sentence by her own violent temper. Had she had the sense to submit to sovereign power she would never have been thrust away by him. In reply she reminds her husband of what she had once done for him; how for him she had betrayed her father and her people; for his sake had caused Pelias, whom he feared, to be killed by his own daughters.
"I am the mother of your children. Whither can I fly, since all Greece hates the barbarian?"
"It is not you," answers Jason, "who once saved me, but love, and you have had from me more than you gave. I have brought you from a barbarous land to Greece, and in Greece you are esteemed for your wisdom. And without fame of what avail is treasure or even the gifts of the Muses? Moreover, it is not for love that I have promised to marry the princess, but to win wealth and power for myself and for my sons. Neither do I wish to send you away in need; take as ample a provision as you like, and I will recommend you to the care of my friends."
She refuses with scorn his base gifts, "Marry the maid if thou wilt; perchance full soon thou mayst rue thy nuptials."
Meantime, Aegeus, the ruler of Athens, arrives at Corinth from Delphi, Medea laments her fate to him and asks his aid; he swears that in Athens she shall find refuge. Now, reassured, she turns to vengeance. She has Jason summoned, and when he comes she begs for his forgiveness.
"Forgive what I said in anger! I will yield to the decree, and only beg one favor, that my children may stay. They shall take to the princess a costly robe and a golden crown, and pray for her protection."
The prayer is granted and the gifts accepted. But soon a messenger appears, announcing the result:
"Alas! The bride had died in horrible agony; for no sooner had she put on Medea's gifts than a devouring poison consumed her limbs as with fire, and in his endeavor to save his daughter the old father died too."
Nor is her vengeance by any means complete. She leads her two children to the house, and that no other may slay them in revenge, murders them herself. Very effective is this scene in which, after a soliloquy of agonizing doubt and hesitation, she resolves on this awful deed:
In vain, my children, have I brought you up,
Borne all the cares and pangs of motherhood,
And the sharp pains of childbirth undergone.
In you, alas, was treasured many a hope
Of loving sustentation in my age,
Of tender laying out when I was dead,
Such as all men might envy.
Those sweet thoughts are mine no more, for now bereft of you
I must wear out a drear and joyless life,
And you will nevermore your mother see,
Nor live as ye have done beneath her eye.
Alas, my sons, why do you gaze on me,
Why smile upon your mother that last smile?
Ah me! What shall I do? My purpose melts
Beneath the bright looks of my little ones.
I cannot do it. Farewell, my resolve,
I will bear off my children from this land.
Why should I seek to wring their father's heart,
When that same act will doubly wring my own?
I will not do it. Farewell, my resolve.
What has come o'er me? Shall I let my foes
Triumph, that I may let my friends go free?
I'll brace me to the deed. Base that I was
To let a thought of wickedness cross my soul.
Children, go home. Whoso accounts it wrong
To be attendant at my sacrifice,
Let him stand off; my purpose is unchanged.
Forego my resolutions, O my soul,
Force not the parent's hand to slay the child.
Their presence where we will go will gladden thee.
By the avengers that in Hades reign,
It never shall be said that I have left
My children for my foes to trample on.
It is decreed.
Jason, who has come to punish the murderess of his bride, hears that his children have perished too, and Medea herself appears to him in the chariot of the sun, bestowed by Helios, the sun-god, upon his descendants. She revels in the anguish of her faithless husband.
"I do not leave my children's bodies with thee; I take them with me that I may bury them in Hera's precinct. And for thee, who didst me all that evil, I prophesy an evil doom."
She flies to Aegeus at Athens, and the tragedy closes with the chorus:
Manifold are thy shapings, Providence!
Many a hopeless matter gods arrange.
What we expected never came to pass,
What we did not expect the gods brought to bear;
So have things gone, this whole experience through!"
This drama is a masterly presentment of passion in its secret folds and recesses. The suffering and sensitiveness of injured love are strongly drawn, and with the utmost nicety of observation, passing from one stage to another, until they culminate in the awful deed of vengeance. The mighty enchantress who is yet a weak woman is powerfully delineated. The touches of motherly tenderness are in the highest degree pathetic. The strife of emotions which passion engenders is admirably shown; and amid all the stress of their conflict, and amid all this sophistical and illusive commonplaces which work upon the soul, hate and vengeance win the day. Medea is criminal, but not without cause, and not without strength and dignity. Such an inner world of emotion is alien from the genius of the religious and soldier-like Aeschylus; Sophocles creates characters to act on one another, and endows them with qualities accordingly; Euripides opens a new world to art and gives us a nearer view of passionate emotion, both in its purest forms and in the wildest aberrations by which men are controlled, or troubled, or destroyed.
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Ode to a woman with white hair
by Sabine Brigette
You can throw the bottle away
and smell like your own skin
and reclaim what they taught you was something to hide and disguise in flowering scents that fill a room but leave you empty
leave you with lesions that will take you down before your time
with the whole room knowing that you don’t know yet that douching’s not good for you
and that you had a husband that liked you better when he could pretend you were a bottle to put himself into
rather than a woman with folds and feelings and fears and questions and something needing held, not washed away
he never knew about the Russians did he?
he only knew to climb on top of you
he never knew he wasn’t the first
he never understood why you died of vulvar cancer
but what you understood was your own sexuality days before you died
and it was yours again though they had cut it all away
because you could speak of yourself as a woman beneath men for the first time
and smile at the thought that it was different for your granddaughter.
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