cliterature

This is the early stage of my work in progress, Femme. The basic idea is that the immature girl figure is the female ego. The right shoulder will be Lilith, the left Eve. It is about the old angel/harlot dichotomy. When the main options are the ends of a false dichotomy it becomes hard to…. become.

Which is all too deep for me. But once I ad some folliage and a snake I hope it will pass for far more meaningful than it is.  If I was a better write I would throw together some lines like Byron’s “She walks in beauty like the night.”  he was writing about how dark and light can, with innocent and true inner beauty, be effortlessly combined.

He was writing about a beauty seen when he was in mourning, an attraction to a woman who was his cousin, and a love of one woman shortly before he married another.  So maybe it was an ease he yearned for an imagined more than one any person obtains.  Or maybe it was simply that he to had long lost the innocence that allows it.

But we can still appreciate that quality if serenity when seen in others–or imagine it there:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o’er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek and o’er that brow
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,—
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.

I, on the other hand walk headless, with an imaginary Judeo-Christian ancestor in each shoulder. But what’s a girl to do :)

I wonder how many people walking in the ‘Take Back the Night’marches considered how literally the idea could be taken.  I mean, if you ask most people who the most powerful god in the ancient greek pantheon was, most people would say Zeus.  (Either that or give you that “you’re crazy look” and ask if you are a Satanist.)  But anyhow, Zeus was considered the greatest of the gods.

 But consider this, when it came to deciding how long a man would live, on god and one god only determined that–and Zeus only enforced her decision.  Atropos, or as the Roman’s called her Mortis.  She was the oldest of the Fates.  Her sister spun out each mortal life, and measured it’s length, but Atropos alone determine when it was cut off.  (An old lady with an enormous pair of sheers, what would Freud have to say about that?)

And Atropis was the daughter of Night (a.k.a. Nyx or Nox–pictured above by Edward Robert Hughes).  She was, quite literally the darkness, and the darkness was feminine.  Night is spoken of rather rarely.  Her children spread her legacy.  Her named offspring are the avatars of sleep, death, darkness, day, the air, blame, toil, misery, doom, dream, retribution, pleasure, madness and strife as well as the Fates.  Some of her children had fathers of her choosing, some had no father at all as she could give birth without any contribution from a man.

Atropis, Night, Lilith… history seems to be strewn with powerful female figures.  Some draw their power from the night, and some are banished there.  But better that than to live up to the one dimensional feminine ideal that follow.  The bright, blonde, bouncy heroine, the female without a shadow.  Maybe our progress towards the balanced female hero will necessarily take us through the darkness.  Perhaps the current vogue for but kicking, sarcastic, neurotic and promosicuous heroine s is part of that assimilation.

If we are to marry Eve and Lilith it is not the blessings of Zeus that will make the union work–it is the succor of Night and the forbearance of the old lady with the scissors.  Let there be female heroes again, let them leap fully armed from our head like Athena did from the cranium of Zeus.  Or let them be born by a woman with no input from a man at all.  Let there be female heroes that follow their own path, through light and through darkness.  Let their be urban fantasy, romance, ebooks and pinups.  Let there be pornography and let it be shameless.  Let there be be mood swings, inspiring dreams, arguments, deep breaths, daybreaks and the endless toil of writing through it all.

And if it is part of the greater whole, the root of female creation: by all means, let there be Night.

In Peverse Crimes in History the authors write “Countess Bathory is also of especial interest because she is a woman.” But there reasoning is not what you might suspect as they continue: “Female sadists and mass-murderers have been less frequent than males ones, though perhaps only because women have less often attained positions of power where large-scale crimes are possible.”  Bathory was a 16th century Hungarian countess and is often mentioned in relation to the invention of the modern notion of vampires, because she amused herself torturing and murdering and is often described in this book, and many others, as bathing in their blood.

It might seem that the importance of power, and its associated immunity, is clear in that Bathory was the only person directly implicated in the murders who was not executed as a result.  She was declared insane and walled up within her apartment to spend the rest of her life in isolation and darkness where she lived for four more years and died at the age of 54.  But there is another explanation, that her two son-in-laws didn’t want her convicted as her property would revert to the throne–and dammit they married for that castle and the meant to have it. 

Add to that–it is often said that Countess Bathory bathed in blood, the basis for her fame as a proto-vampire, but this does not seem to be the case.  This morbid detail arose in fables and tales that appeared after Bathory’s death and can be easily falsified as many documents relating to her life and the trial of her servants and associated are a matter of public record.  The closest accurate detail is that some of her victims were bitten, but there is no indication of blood being consumed or otherwise enjoyed (the vampire equivalent of ‘not inhaling’ at best).

So, maybe it is a good point that if more women had enough power to be kill over 600 people before anyone felt the need to intervene, more women might be mass murders.  But she achieved power from her noble father, retained by a noble marraige, was taught how to torture woman by her husband and (temporarily) escaped death through the actions of her daughters’ husbands.  And as for the bloo fable, it was suggested I suppose to explain how a women could be a mass-murderer.  What acceptable reason could they could come up with that would drive a female to such extremes?

Vanity.

 So there we go.  A woman so powerful she is now remembered almost entirely for something she never did.