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lafcadiosadventures · 2 years

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Madame Putiphar Readalong. Book One, Chapter Five:

Debby has gone to bed fully dressed, wakes up at 1 o’clock in the morning, leaves for the forest through the hardest route, taking pains to avoid being followed. Her state of mind is still shaken, given how she constantly feels like she is being followed, only to find nothing when she turns. It is true that the strange shadows and sounds in the woods confuse our senses at night, but is it really her perception playing tricks on her?

Also within: gender non conforming couples, hair and fashion as resistance to imperialism, marriage vows, and Debby’s other half.

Debby hears an ancient melody. It’s her Patrick’s voice. Yet, she is cautious, reaches their meeting point and yells out their conveined password: “To be!” to which Patrick replies: “Or not to be!” (iconic)

The catholics are playfully blasphemous, Pat calls her “Deborah full of grace and punctuality”, to which she replies she is “blessed among all women” because her Lord is with her. Love is their religion.

Debby regrets bringing bad news to Patrick, who seems so happy, but Patrick actually already knows what has been happening in the Castle. Lady Cockermouth has already informed him of it while trying to ward him off. In an effort to put him in his place, the countess has insulted him, tutoyé’d him and called him “Pat”. Later Lord Cockermouth himself has hit him on the forehead with his riding crop. Debby reveals her bruised shoulder to him, they both blame themselves for the other’s pain and misfortune. But like Debby says, their fates are entwined, If one of the two’s fates is fatal, it will surely drag the other to a fatal end.

Patrick mourns their careless days. The time for frolicking and herborizing has passed. The time has come to take action and fight for their freedom. Patrick’s speech is of course political. The furrow between them has been dug by the aristocracy. Debby is “one of theirs”, and Patrick is “one of the people”. And adulthood complicates it all. When they were children class seemed to matter less. Debby’s uterus and children are also property of the aristocracy. As adults, Patrick’s caresses become an outrage and a stain, a potential damage to Deborah’s biological capital that must be preserved for her future husband.

Patrick reflects that although they are still teens, they will have to live on memories as old couples do: during Cockermouth’s stay in the colonies he was allowed to love her, study from her books, herborize with her, polemize and quarrel, make controversies on botanical classifications (I am sorry but I love this so much, it goes beyond the romantic trope of linking the lovers with nature, they are huge nerds, and I adore them) learning the pharmaceutical properties of the local plants, planting and caring for some of them together... loving each other, loving their country, its soil, its vegetation. But the Aristocracy has dug the furrow between them, separating them “like Romulus from Remus”, and like for Remus himself, crossing back to Romulus means Death. But Debby corrects him, they are both deep in the furrow and must climb out of it together.

Debby contemplates Patrick, who has started walking up and down under the moonlight, hard at thought. He looks like a spectre, or like the unavoidable picturesque traveller added for scale in landscape paintings. (any time is a good time to make a dig at artistic clichés)

The narrator describes Patrick so we can gaze at him along with Debby. He is tall, blond, has fine features (the description is vague enough to allow for reader input) The only thing that marked him as a plebeian was a lacking of rude shamelessness. He wore simple clothes, resembling the traditional costume of the area. His hair was arranged in glibs, traditional irish matted braids, usually paired with a shaved nape and undercuts, and he wore a crommeal moustache. (a traditional Irish moustache, usually paired with a beard, outlawed by English colonisers who at one point forbade anyone who did not speak English or had hair above their lips inside the city walls.)

Patrick makes quite a contrast in these garments and hair styles. Even to his compatriots, who complied to English fashions and took him for a madman.

But the narrator tells us Patrick had consciously decided to become a living monument to his beloved elders, to times long gone.

Only Debby appreciates this revindication through dress and hair, and she calls him her cooleen, an already old-fashioned word for beloved. (just like the word calignero in provençal, says Borel, bringing the uniformization of language debate back to France)

Borel uses language, fashion and hair to reflect on cultural colonization. He considers weekly fashions trivial fads for sheep to follow. However, folkloric and indigenous fashions are always meaningful, and that is why colonizers take pains to forbid them, to uniformize, to modernize and civilize (albeit only in appearance, while keeping the colonized in a subjugated position, with only a patina of modernity, modern looking vassals and/or clients)

I hear echoes of Montaigne’s Des cannibales in this tirade by the narrator. Montaige quotes Claudianus: “The only real victory is that which forces the enemy to admit its defeat”. He talks of conquests that are shameful for the tyrants. They can only win in tangible force, but the conquered remain undefeated in their spirits. Borel talks here of captive peoples, who are nevertheless free in spirit because they maintain their dress and refuse the colonizer’s language (this is of course not a matter of choice, you cannot blame a people for their cultural genocide when the stakes are so high and the forces so unbalanced. Also, cultural genocide is never, never total and absolute. Something always endures, in covert, hybrid ways...) Language and dress, Borel claims, are the key way in which the colonized are assimilated to the colonizers. It seems naif, reductionist. But he is referring to -attempts of- acculturation, cultural colonization, as current today as ever. From first world powers exporting their mass media everywhere, to uniformization of language and customs applied from within country borders. The idea is to bit by bit deprive the colonized of their autoctonous means of expression. Clothing styles, language, movies, music, art and literature, are all borrowed from the aspiring masters. They emit everything that’s good, enjoyable, trendy and valuable. Dressing like the colonizer, speaking its language, creates a false sense of fraternity between colonizer and colonial.

Another evocation of Montaigne. Borel: “the Irish still dream of insurrection, even when their neck is under their enemy’s foot”. Montaigne: “(...)“if you fall to the ground fight on your knees.” (Seneca) (...) He who while exhaling his last breath stares still into his enemy’s eyes with disdain and pride, that one falls defeated, not by us, but by Bad Fortune; dead maybe, but unbeaten.”

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I have been often surprised by how Borel rejects a lot of the common sense of his days. Here he declares that receiving feminine education was actually good for Patrick. (we are talking of a man who would not have recieved any other education in the first place, but there’s more than that to it. Borel alludes to culturaly assigned gender roles based on biology)(you can skip the next 3 paragraphs about femenine education in europe in the 18th c)

[Feminine education was lesser than that of men in most cases. Although education varied a lot from place to place and from social classes, girls were taught to read and write and mathematics in the 1700’s, but usually did not learn history, philosophy or latin. (i am basing myself on Diderot’s “je” in Rameau’s Nephew and his biography by P.N. Furbank)(but I wish I was familiar enough to go into the Wolstonecraft vs Rousseau debate on Rousseau’s Émile) they also learned dancing, playing the piano, singing, drawing, sewing, reading, some kind of etiquette too. Diderot claims teaching his daughter mathematics, history and philosophy was seen as an excentricity, common sense said it was unnecessary, even bad for women to know more than what they needed. Even Diderot’s wife was against this unconventional education for their daughter.

Rousseau's Émile starts promisingly enough claiming both boys and girls are children, and that it's absurd to have two names for creatures who resemble each other so much. But that degenerates soon enough. He soon lays a strong distinction on how boy’s and girl’s educations should be: women only need enought strength to do everything gracefully. "The exaggeration of feminine delicacy leads to effeminacy in men. Women should not be strong like men but for them, so that their sons may be strong."

An earlier author like La Barre, pleas for equal education for women, claims giving them equal education would reinvigorate the nation. (and Diderot talks of how France, Europe is willingly depriving itself of potential geniuses when denying equal education to women. Even Rousseau admits the few women allowed to make careers have never failed to shine and excel in their fields...)]

But Borel means here gender roles as well. Patrick was educated in etiquette and enunciation as Debby, so he speaks like a girl and maybe gesticulates like one too. He spoke with grace and elegance, and had become discreet. His appearance, percieved as wild, was very much in contrast with very graceful, delicate, effeminate manners. And for Borel this is a positive. In the same way that Debby’s company and education have effeminated Patrick, Patrick’s masculinity has also influenced Debby’s gender presentation, making her a bit masculine and that is also extremely positive in this book.

[This seems to allude to the perfect androgyne couple trope so beloved by Romantics -I’ve seen this a lot in Balzac who takes this from Swedenborg, who might have been inspired by Aristophanes humorous explanation of the origin of love in Plato’s Symposium/the Banquet? -> (soulmates exist because the primitive humans were dual beings. We had no backs, we were a single being conformed of two people blended in one. Aristophanes explains sexual orientations claiming the dual beings were conformed by two women, two men or a woman and a man. But the gods had them separated because these primigenian humans were too strong. So that’s why we are born alone nowadays, forced to search for our half which might be anywhere in the globe.)]

Their characters are described as complementary, Debby is passionate and impulsive, Patrick is usually calm and reflective. This is not attributed to an essencialism (!) these aren’t any intrinsic feminine and masculine qualities. They simply have what the other needs, just like Aristophanes’ proto-humans. Their opposition is also taken to their physical features. Debby has dark skin, black eyes, eyebrows and hair. The difference is also taken to the hair styling. Debby has to be proper and wear her hair tied up, ribboned and powdered.

But they have one trait in common: they both dream and are hungry for adventures.

[(tick “comparison to a sculpture in the Romanticism bingo card”: Patrick turns to Debby who is looking just like a funereal monument by Canova. My edition informs me Canova was first hailed as a hero by the Romantics, but later on dropped because his work was considered too cold and static)(his most iconic work might be his Cupid and Psyche which is very neoclassical but graceful and light, really pretty)(not a funereal monument but this Maddalena penitente seems really fitting, also adjacent to romantic interests and themes)]

Patrick resolves to leave alone. He doesn’t want to tear Debby away from her status and confort without being able to offer her stability. He suggests France, a country of which he has a very idealized, rosy eyed image. He thinks irishmen are loved and well received there. Especially if they intend to work as priests or soldiers. So Patrick proposes to leave first, get a job and have Debby join him once it’s safe. She refuses. She not only cannot bear the idea of being separated, but also has the imperative reason that is the final suitor her father expects her to marry under pain of being sent to a correction facility for women in England. She literally needs to leave now. So they agree to leave together. For France. Debby also idealizes France (we will see if our author does? Does he share the same exalted feelings for his nation we can find in authors like Balzac, Hugo, Diderot, who while being extremely critical, can also write in all earnestness that Paris is the brain of France and France is the Brain of the World? We shall see what kind of future France, royalist France has stored for our protagonists)

They agree to leave in the distraction of Cockermouth birthday party, at midnight. They kneel and exchange vows that are both catholic and pagan, their witnesses are God, Nature, Earth and the Heavens. Debby gives Phadruig her grandfather’s ring. They both thank the Desolate lands for having lent them so many times their discreet shadows. Their moans will never disturb them any longer. They blend into a violent embrace, they do not notice where they are standing any more until they feel the water of the torrent has already reached their knees. This peril only could break the spell that possessed them.

When returning to the Castle Debby once again has the impression she is being followed. But this time she almost certainly is. She looses her shawl, when she turns to pick it up, the shawl is gone. She hears a shot and screams out. Her fear is confirmed: the postern gate she had locked before leaving was now open.

#madame putiphar #long post #text post

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