Insight Editions · No. 186
The Ring of Truth
And Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry
Wendy Doniger
Wendy Doniger examines rings in Hindu and comparative myths, tracing their roles in marriage, memory, adultery, wealth, and stories about diamonds and money.
A study guide to The Ring of Truth by Wendy Doniger. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
Wendy Doniger's The Ring of Truth: Truth and Lies in Myth and Life. Rings signify truth, memory, marriage, deceit, and money across Hindu and cross-cultural stories.
Rings as signifying objects across myth and money
| Ch | Title | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Preface: My Family Jewels and Other Tall T | ~1619w |
| 2 | Introduction: The Signifying Ring | ~1148w |
| 3 | 1. Marriage Rings (and Adultery Rings) | ~9663w |
| 4 | 2. The Ring Fished from the Ocean | ~14834w |
| 5 | 3. Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory | ~11298w |
| 6 | 4. Rings of Forgetfulness in Medieval Euro | ~9875w |
| 7 | 5. Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring | ~11572w |
| 8 | 6. Pregnant Riddles and Clever Wives | ~14528w |
| 9 | 7. The Rape of the Clever Wife | ~16349w |
| 10 | 8. The Affair of the Diamond Necklace | ~8812w |
| 11 | 9. The Slut Assumption in the Nineteenth a | ~12390w |
| 12 | 10. Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend? | ~14280w |
| 13 | 11. Two Conclusions, on Money and Myth | ~9552w |
Preface: My Family Jewels and Other Tall Tales
Scarlet, Chapter 4 i always believed that my mother's brother Harry was a fence, though she insisted that he was a "gemologist." Every weekday of his life, well into his eighties, he went from his home in New Jersey into the Diamond Exchange in New York City; he also claimed to have invented a way of mak ing perfect diamonds, very cheap, and to have been somehow cheated, or threatened, out of his formula by the De Beers cartel.i Whenever Uncle Harry came to our house for dinner, after the dessert plates were cleared he would take out of his inside breast pocket a rolled-up piece of black velvet, which he would unroll and unfold to reveal a series of pockets, each containing a piece of lovely jewelry, or a few unset gems, particularly fire opals, all suspiciously inexpensive, no questions to be asked. My father would be pressured into buying some of them, and I still have several pieces that I cherish, though every time I wear one of them I glance about nervously in fear that someone will come up to me and claim ownership of it.
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Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in
Scarlet, Chapter 4 i always believed that my mother's brother Harry was a fence, though she insisted that he was a "gemologist." Every weekday of his life, well into his eighties, he went from his home in New Jersey into the Diamond Exchange in New York City; he also claimed to have invented a way of mak ing perfect diamonds, very cheap, and to have been somehow cheated, or threatened, out of his formula by the De Beers cartel.i Whenever Uncle Harry came to our house for dinner, after the dessert plates were cleared he would take out of his inside breast pocket a rolled-up piece of black velvet, which he would unroll and unfold to reveal a series of pockets, each containing a piece of lovely jewelry, or a few unset gems, particularly fire opals, all suspiciously inexpensive, no questions to be asked. My father would be pressured into buying some of them, and I still have several pieces that I cherish, though every time I wear one of them I glance about nervously in fear that someone will come up to me and claim ownership of it.
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So the dicey side of jewelry is in my blood. Throughout this book, footnotes (indicated by Roman numerals) will be used for cross-references; endnotes (marked by Arabic numerals) will contain biblio graphic and occasionally nonessential but too-good-to-cut information. xvi Preface xvi On the other side of the family, my uncle Leo wrote "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend."ii More precisely, Leo Robin was a kind of shirttail rela tive, the brother of my aunt Irma (Robin), the woman my father's brother Simon Doniger married, so he was not exactly, technically, my uncle, just an uncle by marriage, once removed.
But I knew him from family gath erings when I was a little girl, and he really did write the lyrics to all of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (and many other great songs, including "Thanks for the Memory" and "Beyond the Blue Horizon"). So stories about jewelry are also part of my family heritage. Stories often surrounded, like gift-wrapping, the jewelry that came to me.
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When my great-grandmother Franzi Baruch owned and ran the Hotel New York in Marienbad from 1903 to the 1930s, a Russian prince, short of the cash to pay his bill, allegedly paid by giving her his seven-piece harem ring, each piece adorned with a diamond, emerald, ruby, and small pearl, and she kept it through the years. The Hotel New York in Marienbad is no more,1 and Russia has lost its princes, but that ring was passed down in my family and came to me.
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And there are stories about some of the jewelry that my father gave my mother (cooler than the hot pieces that he got from Uncle Harry). When my parents were first married, during the Depression, there was not enough money for any ring at all. But years later, when my father had become a successful publisher, he had Cartier make a gold ring for her, studded with diamonds and rubies, a kind of retrospective wedding ring.
It was in the form of a "gimmel" ring,2 from the Latin gemelli, "twins": two rings joined together by a pivot so that when united they constitute a sin gle ring. Often there is a hand on each circlet,3 and when they are brought together the hands clasp. Sometimes there is a third ring, with a heart, which appears when the hands are separated, and on which are usually inscribed the names of the lover and his beloved, "Antony to Cleopatra." This was the form of the ring my father gave my mother.
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But he had the heart inscribed "REF to SHU," which was her favorite volume of the elev enth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), with its superb essays
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on Renaissance, Romanticism, Schiller, Schubert, Shakespeare, and so
There's a different sort of story about a gift from my father to my mother that happened in the summer of 1958, when the three of us were in Vienna and I went with my father to a store on the Ringstrasse where ii. Preface xvii xvii he bought three pieces of jewelry; at Christmas, he gave one to my mother and another to me, and I always wondered if he gave the third to a mis tress, a figure whose existence we had other reasons to suspect, but with out any hard evidence.
There's a story behind each piece on the charm bracelet to which my father added year after year-the ballet dancer that twirls, the windmill that turns; I could tell them like a rosary. After his death, my mother took my charm bracelet and added it to hers and wore the two of them as a necklace (including a little gold book which opened to say, "To Wendy from Daddy"), which I eventually inherited at her death. She also had another charm bracelet of which she said each charm-and there were many- came from a different lover of the courtesan who had owned the bracelet.
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It was my mother's idea to take my father's Phi Beta Kappa key and my Phi Beta Kappa key and have them made into a pair of earrings, which she (who had never finished high school, a fact that she bitterly resented) wore for years and I now wear. (It was, I realized years later, one of my moth er's many feminist gestures: the keys were designed for watch fobs that men would wear on their three-piece suits; she found a way for women to wear them too.) My mother had a great deal of good jewelry, but she also loved costume jewelry, plastic pins and earrings with Mickey Mouse or Mr.
Peanut on them, glass beads and necklaces of shells. She particularly delighted in mixing the real and fake jewelry together, to épater the sort of people who set great store on the difference between them. Not all the stories that jewelry tells are true.
When my husband and I honeymooned on Crete in 1965, we found in a little shop there an ancient carnelian stone carved with a centaur, which he later had made into a signet ring for me (another retrospective wedding ring). Now, many years after a bitter divorce, the loving inscription that he had had engraved inside it is certainly a blatant lie, but I still wear the ring. After all, I did love him once, and it's a charming centaur.
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There is also a story behind my bracelet of ancient Indian gold coins from the Gupta Empire (c. John Marshall, who had exca vated much of India in the early twentieth century, had given it to Penelope Chetwode when he wooed her back in the 1930s; she married another man (John Betjeman) but kept the bracelet. One day in 1968, when she and I were riding on the Berkshire Downs in England, our Arabian horses spooked and bolted.
Penelope was wearing the bracelet, which got tangled in the reins and fell off somewhere over the considerable distance of grass land that we traversed before we were able to pull up. The sun was setting; xviii Preface xviii the bracelet seemed hopelessly lost. But Penelope said a prayer to Saint Antony, patron saint of lost or stolen things: "St.
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(She had previously planned to leave it to me in her will.) As we cantered back over the path the horses had taken, the last rays of the sun picked out the gleaming gold in the high grass, and I still wear the bracelet. The rest of this book will not be about my own stories but about the stories that other people have told, throughout recorded history and all over the world, about pieces of circular jewelry, particularly rings. Yet my personal anecdotes do silhouette the book's themes.
The mutual imitation of real and fake, legal and illegal, marital and extra-marital jewelry is a per vasive motif. Marriage, jewelry, and faking it are joined at the hip in such folk wisdom as the old joke: "What's the difference between the first wife and the last wife?" Answer: "With the first wife, the jewelry is fake, and the orgasms are real." The circular form of rings and bracelets, miming the circle of eternity, persists in the face of human ephemera: lovers come and go, marriages end, Russian princes are no more, but rings remain.
The fairy tale of the miraculously lost-and-found piece of circular jewelry carries mythic overtones: would Saint Anthony have come through had Penelope Chetwode not generously pledged the bracelet to me should it be found? The jewelry in the stories I've collected here, like my own, pre serves (and sometimes erases) true and false memories, making promises that come true and that lie.
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Ring ladder 6
Introduction: The Signifying Ring
why are sex and jewelry, particularly circular jewelry, particularly finger rings, so often connected? Why do rings keep getting into stories about marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss and recovery, identity and masquerade?
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The Signifying Ring
why are sex and jewelry, particularly circular jewelry, particularly finger rings, so often connected? Why do rings keep getting into stories about marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss and recovery, identity and masquerade? What is the mythology that makes rings symbols of true (or, as the case may be, untrue) love?
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As I seek answers to these questions, each chapter of this book, like a separate charm on a charm bracelet, will con sider a different constellation of stories. The first seven chapters are about rings throughout history; in particular, they are all recognition stories in which a ring is a key clue. They deal with sexual rings (chapter 1), rings found in fish and found (with children) in the ocean (chapter 2), rings of forgetful husbands (chapters 3, 4, and 5) and clever wives (chapters 6 and 7).
Chapters 6 and 7 deal with a single theme- the "clever wife"- in cross-cultural distribution. Chapters 8 and 9 veer ever so slightly into stories about necklaces in particular cultures and par ticular historical periods: a treacherous royal necklace in eighteenth-cen tury France (chapter 8) and true-and-false necklaces in nineteenth-century English novels and twentieth-century American films (chapter 9).
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The final two chapters return to rings, to the invention of the mythology of dia mond engagement rings in twentieth-century America (chapter 10) and a concluding consideration of the cash value of rings and the clash between reason and convention in myths about rings of recognition throughout the world (chapter 11). xx Introduction xx Some of the rings in the stories that we will encounter throughout this book originally belong to men, and just about all the jewelry that women have, they get from men (sometimes they inherit it from their mothers, but not often).
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But both men and women tell the stories (though men are usually the attributed authors of the earlier texts). These stories drive my arguments about six basic points, three about the content of the plots and three about the function of the narratives: 1. Most of the stories take for granted what I am calling the "slut assump tion," that women get jewels only from men they sleep with (husbands or lovers).
Women use jewelry to their advantage in the stories, often to win (or win back) their husbands, while men use (or try to use) rings to wriggle out of promises to women. Men's concern for the paternity of their children, and women's for their children's legitimacy, drive many of the myths of rings of recognition. By overcoming reason, the myths allow us to believe what we want to believe about the power and endurance of sexual love and about our ability to rebalance the moral world.
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The tension between hard evidence ("reason") and the soft power of myth ("rationality") experienced by an audience is mirrored by a similar tension in the story itself. Different versions (or variants, or tellings) of much-retold stories sup ply us with a cumulative mass of different psychological details that together suggest deeper meanings of the myth. And comparing earlier and later variants allows us to see myths in the making, a process that we can then recognize in such contemporary examples as the invented tradition of diamond engagement rings.
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I must warn you at the start, in the spirit of full disclosure, that there are many sorts of rings, and stories, that this book is not about. It is not about the Scandinavian lore of the ring of power, the ring that allows the wearer to rule the world or become master of time and space, the evil ring that the bad guys want to possess and the good guys want to destroy. This is the ring that eventually ends up in the hands of Frodo via J.
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Political power, too, may sometimes be at stake here, for the woman who sleeps with the king (as many of our heroines do) knows that if her son becomes crown prince, she will be the queen mother. But the rings in this book always also have some connection with love and/or sexuality. When I was growing up, during and after World War II, we sent away for magic rings that had a secret password and a secret compartment in which to hide messages or forbidden substances, which in those innocent days were usually beetles, though we knew that in centuries gone by there actually were rings with concealed compartments full of poison (for the Borgias) or, in my day, Nazi, anti-Nazi, Communist, or anti-Communist microfilm.
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Heroes and superheroes, too-Dick Tracy, the Green Hornet- had and have magic rings. This book is not about those rings, either. Yet every ring in these stories does carry a message, albeit not necessarily in a secret compartment.
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1. Marriage Rings (and Adultery Rings)
Rings have been around for a long time. The ancient Greeks used rings as love tokens, though not as marriage rings.1 The Romans, too, used rings for love rather than marriage; some Roman rings, usually of iron (later of gold), with no gemstone, were associated with betrothal, though still not with marriage, and with no long-term commitment.
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Rings in History
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The Meaning of Rings
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But though some people in some stories misread a ring's signal, others do get it, and we can try to get it too. Some of the meanings of the rings in love stories are suggested by the unbroken circular shape of the ring, which promises a love that is infinite, constant, eternal. "I gave my love a ring that had no end… .
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Thus Swinburne also praised the espousal ring's "metal hard and durable, sig nifying the durance and perpetuity of the contract"8 (though gold, as we know, is relatively soft). These features integral to the ring seem to nomi nate it for its role of vouchsafing integrity and fidelity. Jewelry lasts much longer than a wedding dress, or even a marriage certificate.
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The ring differs from most other circular jewelry, necklaces and brace lets, in two significant ways: a ring needs no clasp for you to take it on and off, breaking the circle, and a ring often remains on your hand constantly, in contrast with more cumbersome jewelry that you usually take off at bedtime. (The same is true of bangles, which often share the symbolism of rings and are a commonplace in stories about women, sex, and marriage.)9 i.
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Marriage Rings
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The Ring of Truth
George Frederick Kunz, writing about rings in 1917, put it well: "While we may regard as superstition any fancy that the material ring possesses any magic quality, that lent to it by association or by memory is none the less real though it is only in the brain or heart of the wearer."17
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The Signet Ring
The ring as a signifier of identity is a material token; it doesn't change when we change, and so it is regarded as a guarantee of identity across time: if Solomon has Solomon's ring,vi he's Solomon. Sometimes the ring is carved in a special way or set with a distinc tive stone that makes it unique. Many of the rings in our stories are men's signet rings or seal rings, carved with the owner's name or initials or insignia-literally a signifier.
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Marriage Rings
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When Mehta Shah returned home he discovered the king's ring in his bed and thought Shila had been unfaithful to him. Immediately he ordered her to return home to her father's house at Agroha. Some years later, the maidservant confessed to Mehta Shah that it was she who had put the ring in their bed and that Shila had, indeed, been faithful to him.
Mehta Shah then rushed to Agroha to retrieve his wife and ask her forgive ness; but on the way to Agroha he collapsed and died.
known as the Shila Mata Shakti Mandir.22
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Stith Thompson, the Linnaeus of folklore, included in his wide survey of folk tale motifs (a cross between the periodic table and the Dewey Decimal ix. This motif bears a suspicious resemblance to several episodes in the medieval European romances; see chapter 4, p.
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Marriage Rings
7 7 System) an entire Tale Type (TT 560), "The Magic Ring," but also noted several widely distributed motifs involving (non-magic) rings of recogni tion (such as "H 94: Recognition by ring"). Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is about a man whose disfiguring sins are magically transferred to a painting, while he remains always the same; when he dies, he suddenly takes on the hideous form of the transfigured painting, which returns to its pristine form. The story concludes: "It was not till they had examined the ring that they recognized who it was." In real life, too, a metal ring is often all that is left to identify a dead person when the body has decayed or been destroyed.
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The Ring of Truth
8 generally wore it on a chain around her neck. These rings changed hands (or necks) quite often. In the film Dear Heart (Delbert Mann, 1964), the character played by Glenn Ford shows a friend his fraternity ring.
"Fun and games," he says, and then, "Look what happens when you turn it around; it becomes a wedding ring." The tension between "fun and games" and weddings is what much of this book is about.
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The Ring on Her Finger
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Bassanio then says, speaking of losing the ring that Portia had given him, "Why, I were best to cut my left hand off / And swear I lost the ring defending it" (5.1.177-178). Rings worn on the body are therefore legally almost as inalienablexiii as a limb-or a pound of flesh, for that matter. The ring was often regarded as a part not merely of the finger but of the heart.
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279, for the legal disposition of jewelry.
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She had, however, been warned by Elphin's bard, the magician Taliesin. She dressed one of the scullery maids in her own clothing and adorned the maid's fingers with her own best rings, including the signet ring that Elphin had sent to her as a token a short time before. Rhun drugged the maid so that she didn't even feel him cutting off her little finger, on which was the signet ring.
He had his way with her, and afterward he took the finger-with the ring on it-to the king as proof that he had violated Elphin's wife's chastity and cut off her finger as he left. The king summoned Elphin and showed him the ring and the finger as evidence that the one who had cut it off also lay with his wife. To this Elphin replied: "Indeed, there is no way I can deny my ring, for a number of people know it.
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Nor does it explain (for it cannot) how a woman's amputated finger proves that her chastity was violated. Upwardly displaced defloration?) Here, the evidence of the ring is separated from that of the finger, in this case a sign not so much of personal identity, which the sig net ring theoretically establishes, but of class: the owner of that finger is a working girl, not a lady. The king seems to believe the ring, though it 10
The Ring of Truth
10 is false-not in the sense that tin may masquerade as silver but because the ring appears to be a proof when in fact it is not, and the finger is. The king at first accepts the "proof" conventionally provided by the old myth of the ring of recognition because he wants to dishonor Elphin. And Elphin acknowledges the logical reasoning behind that proof: a number of people know the ring.
But the hard evidence provided by the finger finally breaks through the convention of the story,xiv a convention that the storyteller also constantly undercuts with a series of cynical asides ("the story says that" and "if the tale can be believed," etc.). An amputated finger with a ring (again with a bed-trick) also appears
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in The Changeling, a seventeenth-century play by Thomas Middleton and
William Rowley.37 And in a story collected in the nineteenth century from a village in the Auvergne, a telltale ring on the mutilated paw of a wolf reveals the true identity of what had appeared to be a human woman.38 In other stories a witch masquerading as a cat is revealed by the same mutila tion of the hand/paw.39
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The Sexual Ring
Jewelry is often imagined as part of the body. Think of all those metaphors that liken a woman's body parts to jewels: pearly teeth, ruby lips, eyes shin ing like diamonds, golden hair. Philip Roth, in Sabbath's Theater, rhapso dizes on the clitoris and concludes: "Why do they need jewelry, when they have that?
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What's a ruby next to that?" On statues of goddesses (I know the South Indian bronzes best, but it is true much more broadly), the bracelets and anklets seem part of their skin, more a part of them than any garment could be; this is especially true of statues of nude goddesses, even of naked women, who often wear nothing but jewelry. One of the earliest images of this sort that I know comes from the ruins of Mohenjo-daro in the Indus River Valley (now in Pakistan), from a great civilization that thrived c.
It is a tiny (10 cm.) bronze image of an impudent, defiant dancing girl, totally naked save for a chunky necklace and an assortment of bangles.
In the Yogavasishtha, a Sanskrit text from Kashmir in the eleventh-
century ce, a woman named Chudala uses her magic powers to transform herself into a man by day and back into a woman by night; as she changes into a woman, at sunset, she exclaims, "I feel as if I am falling, trembling, melting. I am so ashamed as I see myself becoming a woman.
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Benedetta com plicated matters by testifying that a demonic masquerader of this sort did in fact appear to her-not instead of Jesus, but in addition to him, two months after the display of the first ring, at which time another ring appeared on her right hand, not nearly as beautiful and brilliant as the xv.
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The Ring of Truth
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The scar that a wedding ring makes on a finger is the next thing up from circumcision, as a form of sexual marking. Indeed, a ring was more broadly regarded as a symbol of the male sexual body. Words for the male genitalia often refer to jewelry, as in the expression "the family jewels." The Tibetan word for the male genitals is "jewel" (nor bu), and the word schmuck means "jewel" in German and "genitals" in Yiddish (and, then, also in Yiddish, comes to designate a man who is a contemptible jerk, a creep-in a word, a prick).
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Marriage Rings
13 13 includes a poem on "A Ring," specifically a signet ring, which plays the part of the male sexual organ in this supremely erotic passage: Ring, to encircle my beautiful girl's finger, appreciated only in terms of the giver's love, go as a dear gift! Receiving you with glad heart, may she slide you straightaway over her knuckle: … Lucky ring, to be touched by my lady: now I'm sadly envious of my own gift. O if only I could, suddenly, be my present, by the art of Circe or old Proteus!
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The wearing of a ring has obvious sexual meanings, perhaps on the analogy between putting your finger through a ring and putting one sexual organ into another. Since Shakespeare's time, "ring" has been a slang term for the female genitalia,52 just as "jewel" (bijou) is in French. In the very last line of The Merchant of Venice,xvi Gratiano, punning on the finger ring that has played an essen tial part in the plot, promises: "Well, while I live I'll fear no other thing / So sore as keeping safe Nerissa's ring" (5.1.306-307).
About which David Bevington delicately comments, "As Gratiano bawdily points out xvi.
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The miller decided to take revenge on the knight. When the knight was away from home for a month at least, the miller called on the knight's wife. Knowing that she was in her bath, he brought a fine pike to her and insisted on presenting it to her himself.
She thanked him and sent it to the kitchen to have it prepared it for supper. Meanwhile the miller saw a large, beautiful diamond ring sitting on the edge of the tub, where the lady had placed it before bathing. The miller stole it and left.
Only later did the lady discover that she had lost the ring, and she was deeply upset, for the knight, her husband, had given it to her on their wedding day. Finally she summoned the miller, who assured her that he knew nothing about the diamond but then suggested that, since she had left her diamond at the edge of the bathtub, it must have slipped from her finger, fallen into the water, and worked its way into her body. He asked her to lie on her bed, examined her, and claimed that he could see the ring and would extract it.
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"Begin, then, handsome miller," she replied.
Marriage Rings
Not so; the tale moves in another direc tion, brilliantly satirizing the idea that a woman might lose her wedding ring in the deep waters of her own insatiable (and naive) sexuality and find it only in the course of an adultery. It may also be a blasphemous take on the disciple Peter, whom Jesus said he would make a "fisher of men." Here the fisher after diamonds is a fisher of women.
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Latin, Facetiae:
Franciscus Philelphus, jealous of his wife (zelotypus uxoris), was worried that she might go to bed with some other man, and so he watched her day and night. One night, in a dream (for we often dream about what has concerned us when awake), he saw a certain demon, who promised him a way to be certain of his wife… . "Take this ring and keep it carefully upon your finger; for as long as your finger is in the ring, your wife will never sleep with another man without your knowledge of it." Philelphus, awakened by joy, realized that he had his finger in his wife's vagina.
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That ring indeed allows a jealous husband to be sure that his wife will not be unchaste with out his knowledge.58 It is worth noting that Poggio leaves a loophole for the husband to let his wife sleep with another man with his permission; it protects him only from her adultery without his knowledge.
Melinda (in East Africa).60
Rabelais says that Hans Carvel, here evidently a Muslim, in his old age married the bailiff Concordat's daughter, a young, attractive, ardent girl, much too friendly to friends and neighbors. Suspecting that his wife might be unfaithful to him, Carvel, jealous as a tiger, gave her a chain enriched with pure Oriental sapphires. Still, he was worried, and Satan appeared and gave him the ring: "Grammercy, My Lord Devil," said Hans Carvel.
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But the story itself then became yet another coy locution; in nineteenth-century England, "Hans Carvel's ring" (or just "Carvel's ring") came to be a slang term for a vagina. The story continued to be retold by others, including Jean de la Fontaine (1621-95)64 and Matthew Prior (1664-1721). Prior's version has some charming doggerel in it.
He too turns the demon into Satan, who appears in the form of a barrister, from Lincoln's Inn:
The Vagina Monologues
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Marriage Rings
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The sex which one catches unawares xviii.
The Ring of Truth
20 and questions, and which, restrained and loquacious at the same time, endlessly replies. One day a certain mechanism, which was so elfin-like that it could make itself invisible, captured this sex and, in a game that combined pleasure with compulsion, and consequently with inquisition, made it tell the truth about itself and others as well. For many years, we have all been living in the field of Prince Mangogul: under the spell of an immense curiosity about sex, bent on questioning it, with an insatiable desire to hear it speak and be spoken about, quick to invent all sorts of magical rings that might force it to abandon its discretion… .
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The Rings of Wives and Courtesans
The patterns that link jewelry and the sexuality of women have detailed historical and sociological implications, but a ruthless structuralist can group the narratives of circular jewelry into two contrasting paradigms. Though they are ancient types, I will name them after the two film icons who seared my soul when I was a teenager in the 1950s: Doris Day (1924-) and Marilyn Monroe (1926-62). The Doris Day/professional virgin sce nario of legitimation ("Get the wedding ring before you go to bed with him") is challenged by the Marilyn Monroe / gold-digger scenario of illegitima tion ("Get lots of rings [or bracelets, or necklaces] before [and after] you go to bed with him").
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These two paradigms have different historical trajecto ries, one from the regulation of marriage by religion and the other from the survival strategies of women outside the confines of religion. The tension between them is the driving force behind the narratives. But both of them are grounded in what I would call the slut assumption: when a woman has a piece of jewelry, she must have gotten it by sleeping with some man.
Many of these tales (particularly but not only those about clever wives)xxi xxi. See chapters 6 and 7, pp.
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By contrast with the married woman, another sort of woman gets other forms of circular jewelry, necklaces or bracelets (or anklets), or other kinds of rings-the Marilyn Monroe jewelry-from men (plural), lovers or serial husbands, in payment for sleeping with them, which makes her lose her chaste authenticity. I would call these women courtesans, in the European sense of a woman of notorious beauty, often a famous actress or dancer, sometimes called a demi-mondaine; she is the mistress of a wealthy lover (or a series of lovers, or husbands, but only one at a time) who gives her valuable gifts, principally jewelry.
(The word "courtesan" in American English has overtones of crass prostitution that I wish to exclude; think Madame du Barry or Mata Hari, rather than Belle Watling or Polly Adler). The great courtesans-Dumas's Camille (Marguerite Gautier), Verdi's Violetta, Elizabeth Taylor, Mae West-have an authenticity different from that of the monogamous women, because their fabulous jewelry proves that they have many rich/famous lovers/husbands and thereby authenti cates their beauty and their charm.
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22 The much publicized number and value of the jewels worn by such women is the equivalent of the collection of garters that a certain sort of man used to show off, or the notches that he cut on his bedpost. A vividly mythologized instance of the female form of this tradition appears in Mary de Morgan's 1880 fairy tale, "The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde": the beautiful, evil princess refused to marry for fear that her husband would make her give up the magic that kept her beautiful; so she turned each of her suitors into a bright, beautiful bead strung on the gold circlet that she always wore around her neck.
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In one verse of a song, lyrics by Richard Wilbur, she sings: Pearls and ruby rings, Ah, how can worldly things Take the place of honor lost? Can they compensate For my fallen state, Purchased, as they were, at such an awful cost! Bracelets, lavalieres, Can they dry my tears?
Can they blind my eyes from shame? Can the brightest brooch shield me from reproach? Can the purest diamond purify my name?
Marriage Rings
23 23 But she quickly makes her peace with her jewels in another verse: And yet, of course, these trinkets are endearing! I'm oh so glad my sapphire is a star. I rather like a 20-carat earring!
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And the jewelry that a masquerading "clever wife"xxvi gets from the man she sleeps with proves that she is actually virtuous, not promiscuous, since it proves that her lover is her husband. In many tales of this corpus, beauty is a legitimating or, more often, illegitimating criterion. Translators know the old sexist saying, often attrib uted to George Bernard Shaw: translations are like women: if they are beautiful, they can't be faithful, and if they're faithful, they can't be beauti ful.
The circularity of jewelry, beauty, and jealousy is reduced to its logi cal absurdity in Isak Dinesen's 1934 short story, "The Roads Round Pisa" (a story all about circularity), when a man who prides himself on his knowledge of jewelry buys for his wife, an insanely jealous woman, a pair of particularly fine eardrops, "to set off the beauty of his young wife, who wore them so well." Then: "He had been so pleased to have got them that he had fastened them in her ears himself, and held up the mirror for her to see them. She watched him, and was aware that his eyes were on the diamonds and not on her face.
She quickly took them off and handed them to him. 'I am afraid,' she said, with dry eyes more tragic than if xxv.
In Anthony Trollope’s novel The Eustace Diamonds (1871), the protago
nist Lizzie Greystock refuses to relinquish the diamond necklace that her late husband, the aged Sir Florian Eustace, had given her; and when she sets out to snare another rich husband, she wears the diamonds to high light her beauty. In the Guy de Maupassant story, "The Necklace" (1885),xxvii Mathilde borrows a diamond necklace to make herself beautiful in hope of entrancing a rich man who will marry her and give her diamond neck laces. Jewelry and beauty play a game of doubles here: if women are beau tiful, men give them jewelry, which they want in part because jewelry makes them more beautiful, so that they can attract more men, to give them more jewelry-or, perhaps, a wedding ring, which magically trans forms the Marilyn Monroe type into the Doris Day type.
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2. The Ring Fished from the Ocean
The ring in the fish is one of the all-time top-ten narrative hits, topping the charts since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. Fish are the ultimate lost-and-found of the folklore world.
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The Story in the Fish
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When the man returned, they prepared the fish and in its stomach they found the gold ring. The mother said to her son, "I never lose anything." Her son, delighted, went to the spot where the Buddha was staying and asked him: "What is the cause of my mother's good fortune in never losing anything?" The Buddha explained that, in an earlier birth, his mother had lived alone in 26
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The Ring of Truth
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The return of a ring from deep water is also compared with the return of the dead in an old Irish story about a salmon, the protagonist of most Irish and Scottish fish stories: Findabair fell in love with Froech, against her parents' will, and gave him a thumb ring that her father, Ailill, had given her; she told her father that she had lost it. But Ailill found the thumb ring one day in Froech's wallet and recognized it and threw it into the river; Froech saw him do this and also saw a salmon leap for the ring and catch it in its mouth.
Froech leapt after the salmon and caught it by the gills. He sent the salmon to Findabair with instructions to her to cook it well, for he knew the thumb ring was inside the salmon and thought that it might be demanded of her that night. Indeed, Ailill asked Findabair to give him the ring and said, "I swear by the god my people swear by, you will die unless you restore it.
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That is why I demand it of you-I know you cannot produce it. That ring will not come from where it has been put until the dead come to life." Findabair sent her maid to look for the ring; the maid brought a platter into the royal house, and the salmon was on it. Findabair had cooked it well, and the gold thumb ring lay upon it.
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The Ring Fished from the Ocean
27 27 an old German folktale, which tells of a man who deliberately threw his ring into the Rhine river in the hope that a fish would swallow it and be brought to the king's table, where his sweetheart would recognize the ring and bring it back to him. This is the "Rhine Legend," recorded in Des
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Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”),7 a collection of anony
She was fat with eggs, gonna lay them any day. Sometimes the only way to catch an uncatchable woman is to offer her a wedding ring." The fish has become not only female (in contrast with the generally ungendered or male fish in most of these sto ries) but the speaker's beloved, pregnant like his wife. And suddenly this female fish conjures up, from the basic ring-in-fish scenario (you must get back the ring from the fish to get back the woman), the Doris Day scenario:i you need to give the woman (fish) a ring in order to mate (catch) her.
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Solomon’s Ring
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There are several versions of the
story of Solomon’s ring in the Hebrew and Arabic traditions. According
A mighty Jinn succeeded in gaining possession of the ring and, by its power, assumed Solomon's form, at the same time changing Solomon's appearance to such an extent that his people no longer recognized him and drove him from his kingdom. However, one of Solomon's ministers saw through the disguise of the Jinn and exorcised him by reciting certain verses of
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The Ring Fished from the Ocean
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But as soon as Solomon had given up his protecting ring, Asmodeus threw it into the sea, where a fish swallowed it. Then Asmodeus flung Solomon more than a thou sand miles away from Jerusalem, and palmed himself off as the king. Solomon wandered about in far-off lands, among strangers, begging his daily bread.
People thought him a lunatic, because he kept insisting that he was Solomon. But it was even worse when he met someone who recognized him, stirring up memories that made his present misery almost unendurable. After three long years, Solomon took a job as chief cook in the
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kitchens of the King of Ammon, and the king’s daughter, Naamah,
The Ammonite king had the lovers taken to a barren desert, in the hope that they would die of starvation there. Solomon and Naamah wandered through the desert until they came to a city by the seashore, where they purchased a fish. When Naamah prepared the fish, she found in its belly the magic ring belonging to Solomon, who recognized it, put it on his finger, and transported himself to Jerusalem.
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Nor is it said that Naamah recognizes him, just that she falls in love with him. It takes the magic ring to turn him back into his recognizable self.
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30 Louis Ginzberg expands upon the partial recognitions in another ver sion that seems to offer an alternative, less magical ending. In this tell ing, while the real Solomon was wandering far away, the members of the Sanhedrin (the religious assembly of men) noticed the false king's peculiar behavior and investigated the matter. Here again the women are part of the solution: the wives of Solomon and his mother Bath-sheba informed the members of the Sanhedrin that the behavior of the king had com pletely changed, and that he never allowed anyone to see his feet (for fear, of course, of betraying his demonic nature, since demons' feet, as every one knows, point backward).
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Reason, as usual, yields to magic.
Polycrates’s Ring
The stories we have considered so far belong to the dominant branch of the ring-in-fish genre, call it Type A, in which the ring is lost against the owner's will and is miraculously regained, to the owner's relief and delight, often bringing with it the desired mate (or, in variants that we will soon consider, child) that was feared lost forever. In the other branch of the ring-in-fish story, the polar opposite of the story of Solomon-call it Type B-the ring is something that the owner would wish to destroy if pos sible, something that is thrown away into deep water but returns against the owner's wish.
The defining ring of this type in European mythology is the ring of Polycrates, ruler of Samos,19 whose story the Greek historian Herodotus tells (c. 485-420 bce): "Polycrates had extraordinary good fortune but was advised to fore stall the jealousy of the gods by taking what he valued most, and which, when lost, would cost him the most agony of soul, and cast ing it away where it would never come to the world of men again. Polycrates had a signet ring that he wore continually; it was bound in gold, its stone was an emerald, and it had been made by a great
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The Ring Fished from the Ocean
Polycrates ordered a boat, went in it himself, and, when he was far from his island, threw his ring into the sea. Five or six days afterwards, a fisherman caught a fish so large and beautiful that he thought he should give it to the king. When the royal ser vants cut up the fish, they found in its belly Polycrates' signet ring.
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In her despair the innocent wife went and cast herself at the feet of St. Kentigern, Bishop of Glasgow, supplicating him to render her faithfulness manifest. The Bishop prayed, and in a few hours, a fisherman came to him bearing as a gift a large salmon he had just caught, and in the mouth of the fish was found the lost ring.
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Joycelyn, a monk of Furness (1175-1214), told this story, Figure 2.1 The Coat of Arms of the City of Glasgow: a salmon with a ring in its mouth.
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33 33 identifying the woman as the wife of King Rederech (also called Riderch or Rockerick). Queen Languueth desired a certain young soldier and easily made him sleep with her. Foolishly and shamelessly, she gave him a gold ring with a precious gem, which her husband had given her "as a special sign of his marital love." Even more foolishly, her lover wore the ring, and the king saw it on his finger one day when the soldier was asleep.
Barely controlling his impulse to kill the soldier, the king took the ring off the soldier's finger and threw it into the river. The soldier thought nothing of the ring. When the king asked the queen to show him the ring, she sent word to the soldier, but he replied that he had no idea where he had lost it.
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The king had the queen imprisoned, and she sent for Saint Kentigern and told him all, though he already knew what had happened. He ordered the messenger to cast a hook into the river Clyde and bring back the first fish that he caught. He brought back a salmon, which Kentigern had cut and gutted; he found the ring in it and sent it to the queen by that same messenger.
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34 Bishop Kentigern plays the role of the champion for the wife of King Rederech, perhaps because Kentigern himself was said to have been born of a mother who, falsely accused of unchastity, survived a double ordeal.iv Kentigern's tale therefore appropriately finds its place within the corpus of medieval courtly epics, where notorious adulteresses like Guinevere and Isolde find ways to prove their innocence by manipulating ordeals that depend upon miracles, the equivalent of the miracle of the ring in the fish.
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The (Not-So-) Fortunate Farmer’s Daughter
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When the child had reached the age of marriage, he took her to the seaside, intending to throw her in; but he relented, and threw his seal ring into the sea instead. He forbade her ever to see his face again, on pain of death, unless she recovered the ring. She became a cook in a noble family.
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But his revulsion is amplified to a point so extreme that he tries to kill her (Jones describes other frus trated attempts to destroy her from early childhood), and he does so for another reason-in a vain attempt to resist fate, as Polycrates tried to do, also in vain. The prospective husband's fury is deflected, however, from iv.
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The Ring Fished from the Ocean
35 35 the woman to the ring; as was implicit in the tale of the Kentigern ordeals, and is now here explicit, the ring substitutes for the accused woman. He hopes she will not bring back his ring, while of course she hopes that she will. Where he is Polycrates, she is Solomon.
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(This pattern extends to a number of the stories of lost rings in which the man wants to forget and the woman wants him to remember.)v An expanded version of the basic plot was published in ballad form in 1860. Here the knight, simply called "the Yorkshire Knight," does not wait for the girl, a farmer's daughter, to grow up, nor does he resist his first impulse to kill her; he takes the newborn infant and throws her into the river, where she floats on the tide until a fisherman finds her and adopts her.
We learn why the knight hates her: Says he, "If you live, you must needs be my wife; But I am resolved to bereave you of life: For 'till you are dead I no other can have, Therefore you shall lie in a watery grave." When she is "aged eleven full years" and "her sweet beauty began to appear," the cruel knight finds her again, takes her from the fisherman and, after a foiled attempt to have her killed by his brother, again takes her to a river and tells her to strip, "for this hour is your last." She begs him to spare her, but: He hearing the pitiful moan she did make, Then from his own finger a ring he did take, And unto this maiden in anger did say, "This ring in the water I'll now throw away; Pray look on it well, the posey is plain, And when you see it may know it again. I charge you for life, ne'er come more in my sight, For if you do, I shall owe you a spite; Unless that you bring the same ring unto me." With that, he let the ring drop into the sea… .
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She was a cook maid, and forgot all things past, But here is a wonder now comes at the last.
The Ring of Truth
36 As she a fish dinner was dressing one day, And opening the head of a cod, as they say, She found a rich ring, and was struck with amaze; And then she with wonder upon it did gaze. At viewing it well, she did find it to be The very same ring the knight threw into the sea. She smil'd when she saw it, and bless'd the kind fate But did to no creature the secret relate… .
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Eventually she finds the Knight, who says: "This hour's your last, to the world bid good night, For being so bold to appear in my sight." Said she, "In the sea, sir, you flung your own ring, And bid me not see you, unless I could bring That ring unto you, and I have it," said she, "Behold, 'tis the same that was thrown into the sea!" When the knight saw the ring, he did fly to her arms; He kissed her, and swore she had a million of charms. Said he, "Charming creature, I pray pardon me, Who has often contrived the ruin of thee.
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This moral holds true even when the gen ders are reversed so that a woman calls the shots, as in the case of Peter Güldenstern. He asked his beloved for her hand, but she threw her ring in a pond and said: "As unlikely as I am to find this ring again, so unlikely am I to become your wife." The ring was found in the belly of a fish, and Güldenstern was able to fulfill the condition-though she also made him build her a new house.34
The Child and the Ring in the Water
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I took you out of the fish's belly, but your own mother is still weeping for you." Eventually it was revealed that Pradyumna and Mayavati had been husband and 38
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A ring, sup plemented by the services of two bangle-sellers, is needed as evidence in a modern Tamil folktale, despite the fact that the hero takes elaborate pre cautions to ensure the recognition of his true love: A young boy was swallowed by a huge fish. A man found the fish and sold it to a raja's house. When the boy cried out for rice, they fed the fish rice, which the boy ate.
The boy grew up inside the fish and one day asked to be married to a young woman. The raja's people offered money to any woman who would marry the fish; a bangle-seller who had two daughters, the elder born of his first wife who had died, the second born of his present wife, gave the older daughter to the fish as his wife. One day she spied on him when he was bathing and had taken off his fish skin; she stole the skin and burned it.
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They lived together, and she became pregnant and was about to go to her parents' home to have her child, when her husband told her to put her clothes away where she could find them on her return. And he said, "Make your handprint on the wall with this sandal paste. Take my ring, and give me yours." She did, and both of the rings fit them both.
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When she went home, her stepmother pushed her down a well, dressed her own daughter in the older girl's sari and jewels, and took her to the fish-boy. "When they arrived, the husband saw that the ring she was wearing didn't fit her," and so he knew she wasn't his wife. Then he asked her to get the things his wife had hidden, but she said, "How am I supposed to know where they are?" He asked her to put her hand on the print made on the wall with sandal paste, but her hand didn't match it.
He realized that his in-laws had substituted her for his wife, but he didn't know where his wife was. So he kept quiet and refused to speak to the substitute wife. Inside the well, the girl gave birth to a boy, who grew up down there.
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One day another bangle-seller came by and fitted the boy with bangles. Then he went to the raja's house and told the fish-boy of
The Ring Fished from the Ocean
39 39 the boy and the woman in the well. The fish-boy buried the false wife up to her head and she died. The bangle-seller led the fish- boy to the well, where he found his wife.
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Sometimes the lost child (with or without the ring) is fished directly out of the water, not out of a fish, yet the plot still toes the line of the ring-in- fish story, as in this fairy tale entitled "Princess Carpillon," told by Marie- Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy (1650-1705): The infant Princess Carpillon was kidnapped. After some years, the girl escaped, but fell into a lake; some fishermen found her in the nets they had cast for catching carp, mistaking her for a big carp.
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When they saw her they were disappointed, but a childless king and queen adopted her. She delivered into the keeping of the queen a diamond ring that she had had from infancy. One day the queen, suddenly remembering the diamond ring Carpillon had given her, said to the king, "I always forgot to show you a ring the young shep herdess delivered to my keeping." "Is the stone beautiful?" said the king.
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"I only looked at it for a moment," said the queen, "but here vii.
The Family Romance
The child and ring found in water is a subset of a much broader range of recognition narratives of children lost and then found, with a ring left as an identifying token, often but not necessarily in water. Sometimes the child is abandoned because the mother is accused of adultery; the pre sumed bastard is thrown out but returns, with the ring, to vindicate the mother. In stories told from ancient Indian epicsx and ancient Greek and Roman comediesxi to the present day, rings serve to identify the lost child and to connect the child with the parents.
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The Indian text trans forms the Oedipus story from tragedy to romance.
The Pope’s Ring and the Fish
Incest lurks in the background of a surprising number of stories in this corpus, not so surprising, perhaps, when we consider that one excuse for incest is that the two parties involved do not recognize that they are child and parent (or, sometimes, siblings)-until they find the identifying ring (sometimes with the help of a fish). A letter and a key, as well as a ring (and two episodes of fishermen fishing out lost objects), identify the lost child in one particularly com plex and incestuous variant of the lost-child-and-fish story, Gregorius vom
Stein (Gregory of the Rock), a German narrative poem. The Minnesinger
1165-1210) wrote it around 1190,49 as an object lesson in religious renunciation: An orphaned brother and sister fell prey to their passion and had a son; the father went on a pilgrimage to repent of his sins, and died. The mother put the child in a box, with twenty gold pieces and a tablet detailing his incestuous lineage, and pushed it out into the 42
The Ring of Truth
There two fishermen in the service of an abbot found the box; the abbot opened it, found the child, and told one of the fisher men to raise the boy as his own son, Gregorius, together with the fisherman's natural son. One day Gregorius broke his foster brother's nose with the blow of his seal ring; the fisherman's wife, infuriated, blurted out the secret of Gregorius's birth and added, "Curse the fish that didn't snap him up when he was thrown away!" Gregorius started asking questions; he went to the abbot, read the tablet, and learned of his true birth.
He left, taking the tablet with him, and became a wander ing knight; he called himself the knight of the fish and had a fish embroidered on his coat of arms. He rescued a besieged woman, married her, and fathered two daughters. Eventually his wife dis covered the tablet and recognized it as the one that she had put into the box with her child; and so she realized that she was Gregorius's mother, as well as his wife.
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When he learned of this, he left to devote himself to a life of poverty. He asked a fisherman in Aquitania to row him out to a rock, chain his legs to the rock, and throw the key into the lake. The fisherman said that if he ever found the key, he would know that Gregorius was a holy man and that God had forgiven him.
Seventeen years later, the fisherman caught the fish and found the key in it. He unlocked Gregorius, who was taken away by two elderly clergymen who had been sent from Rome to find the next pope on a rock in Aquitania. Gregorius became pope and was given the Fisherman's Ring.
One day his mother came to visit the pope; she did not recognize him, but he recognized her and told her who he was, and that God had forgiven them. Gregorius's signet ring is just about the only object in the story that is not thrown into deep water, but it initiates the episode in which Gregorius dis covers his true identity, in the way that signet rings are supposed to reveal identities. Its peripheral importance to the main plot makes all the more significant the implication that Hartmann felt he must somehow include it, even in such an offhand way.
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In place of the ring, the tablet, which tells the whole story, again and again, is the official source of identity. The fish appears in multiple guises; when Gregorius takes it as his coat of arms, he means it to indicate that he came from a fisherman's hut, but it's also the fish that did not swallow him as an infant, a non-existent fish
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Rings of Incest
A ring is the key to a Jain didactic text composed just a century or so after the tale of Gregorius; the Jain story depicts an even more hor rendously convoluted incest scenario and is told, like Hartmann's tale, in the service of religious renunciation. It involves two signet rings belonging to identical twins with identical names (so that we will need to use an "ā" at the end of the feminine name to distinguish it from the masculine): A courtesan named Kuberasena bore a son and daughter, twins, and nursed them for eleven days, but her madam insisted that she abandon them.
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She made a signet ring for the boy inscribed with the name Kuberadatta, and a similar ring for the girl, marked with the name Kuberadattā. And then, terrified of the madam, she placed the two children in a casket studded with jewels and set the casket afloat in the waters of the Yamuna River. A pair of merchants found them, and each took one of the chil dren home, naming them after the names on the rings.
When the children were grown, the two merchants married the boy and girl to one another, "even though they seemed indeed to be twin brother and sister." One day Kuberadatta placed his own ring in his wife's hand; astonished, Kuberadattā said to him, "How is it that these rings are so like each other, just as our names are so similar? I fear that we are in truth brother and sister, and that we are not the two children of those merchants at all." They asked the merchants, and heard the story, and "they deeply regretted their marriage." Both of them were filled with the desire to renounce life.
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Kuberadattā became a Jain nun and hid her jeweled signet ring.
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44 Kuberadatta became a trader and went to the city of Mathura, where he met Kuberasena, his mother, but neither recognized the other. He became her lover and she bore him a son, named Kubera. Kuberadattā had developed supernatural knowledge and knew "the terribly improper things" that her brother was doing.
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She showed her signet ring to her superior and told her about herself and went to Mathura. She met Kuberadatta's son, Kubera, and told him everything; he realized that Kuberasena was both his grand mother and his mother, and that Kuberadattā was both his sister and his aunt. Then she gave him the jeweled signet ring, and "by that signet ring, … Kubera became enlightened and became a monk." Kuberadatta also renounced the householder's life and went into the forest.
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A ring facilitates rather than exposes incest in a tale composed by the Egyptian writer Yousef Idris (1927-1991), "House of Flesh,"52 a short story about a blind man who marries a recently widowed thirty-five-year-old woman who has three daughters between sixteen and twenty years old. Usually she does not wear the ring that he gave her when they married. When he remarks, one day, that she has started wearing it, she realizes that one of her daughters has worn the ring to masquerade as her mother in the blind man's bed.
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Eventually each girl asks to wear the ring for a day, to take "her turn in the game of the ring… . The one whose turn it is puts on the ring, also in silence." The blind man notices the difference between his partners in bed: "At first he would say to himself that it is women's nature that refuses to stay the same; for one time she is fresh and graceful like
The Ring Fished from the Ocean
45 45 a drop of dew, worn and depleted another, like water in a stagnant pond… . True, the ring is always there, but the finger that it encir cles is different every time. He almost knows, and they certainly all know… .
With silence, he began to confirm to himself that his partner in bed was always his spouse and lawful wife, true and pure, wearing his ring, young one moment and old the next, alternatively soft and hard, sometimes thin, sometimes fat… . No blame is there on the blind. Is there?" And that is how the story ends.
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The women know that they know, and the man pretends that he does not know. In contrast to this modern tale, all of the incestuous pairings in the Jain story and in the tale of Oedipus are innocent, unknowing; an unkind and unavoidable fate dooms these abandoned children to their unhallowed pairings and leads them ultimately to the cynical realization of "how topsy- turvy the world of sense objects is," as the Jain text puts it. This is also true of all the surviving characters in the German story-except for Gregorius's mother, who knew perfectly well what she was doing in the first pairing, though even she was innocent of incestuous intent in the second pair ing.
She alone, therefore, not Gregorius, is a "sinner," because she alone knows the sinful story from the start. Kuberadattā, too, understood what was going on before the men did, though not from the start. But the over whelming point of all of these stories is the power of chance to destroy even the consciously innocent and ignorant, and the power of rings and fishes to bring to light the buried, sinful, unconscious past.
Cinderella’s Ring
Though Freud, and most subsequent literary analysts (particularly Otto Rank and Joseph Campbell),53 concentrated on the fate of the male child in the Family Romance, the stories can also be read from the standpoint of the mother, the woman who gives birth to the hero, abandons him in infancy, and then, sometimes, marries him. And by far the most retold and widespread of all the Family Romances is about a girl: Cinderella. The element of incest is almost always erased from the Disneyfied vari ants told to children, but it is a prelude to the central plot in many other versions of the story: Cinderella's mother dies when she is very young, and her father vows to marry only a woman who looks just like her, or whose finger fits her wedding ring; when Cinderella grows up and turns 46
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Donkeyskin's father has a donkey that excretes jewels (per haps including rings), and this is the beast that her fairy godmother skins to disguise her. Her father proposes marriage to her, and she can't see anything wrong in marrying him; indeed, the Lilac Fairy remarks, "Every little girl wants to marry her daddy; it's a great idea." But the fairy prevents Donkeyskin from fulfilling this desire, not because of any concern about incest but simply because the fairy had had an affair with him herself years ago and admits that she now holds a grudge against him for leaving her; in the end, the fairy marries the father.
The Ring Fished from the Ocean
A ring hidden in food is the clue in the Scottish variants of Rashin- Coatie and Cap o' Rushes. In one telling (recorded in dialect) the prince is pining away for his lost love, and Cap o' Rushes, in the kitchen, who is that lost love, sends him a cup with his ring in it: "The young man he drank it and he saw the ring at the bottom. 'Send for the cook,' says he.
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[Cap o' Rushes appeared.] 'Where did you get this ring,' says he. 'From him as gave it me,' says she. 'Who are you, then?' says the young man.
In an American telling of the Donkeyskin story, the ring is not the prince's but her own, an atavism from her previous (and real) high birth, bringing the plot closer to that of the male versions of the Family Romance. This version also significantly increases the list of things that the ring can do. While Donkeyskin is in hiding as a lowly cook, a prince comes to the house and she cooks for him: "She cooked a real good dinner, and she forgot there had been a dia mond on her finger, and it slipped off and went into some soup… .
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Well, the prince he was eating this soup and he found this ring. And he just put it down in his pocket and didn't think much more about xiii.
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48 it." The fairy godmother made the girl beautiful for thirty min utes; the prince saw her and fell in love with her. "Well, he went all over the world to see if he could find whose finger this ring would fit. He thought that the ring he had found was hers." Finally he found Donkeyskin.
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Cinderella’s Fish
In the tale of Findabair and the salmon, and in variants of "the Fortunate Farmer's Daughter," a cooked fish serves as the locus of somatic memory, and several stories of the Cinderella type invoke the ring-in-fish motif. Here is one recorded in Kashmir in 1892: A young woman bathing lost her nose-ring, and a fish swallowed it; the fish was caught, brought to the palace, and the cook, surprised to find the nose-ring, showed it to the king. The king made a proc lamation asking anyone who lost a nose-ring to come to him.
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He found the woman, was charmed by her, and married her.65 xv.
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49 49 A variant recorded in North India (place unspecified) in the same period (1893) even brings in the telltale shoe, while keeping the ring and the fish: A young merchant saved the lives of four animals, who helped him to get a magic ring that put the services of four demons at his dis posal. With their aid, he married a princess, and they went to live in a palace on the banks of a river. One of her shoes fell in and was carried downriver to the field of a king; a fish swallowed it; a fisher man caught it; and the cook found in its stomach a shoe so beauti ful that he brought it to the king.
The king said that the wearer of the shoe must be his queen. An old woman in his service found the princess by sailing up the river in the direction that the fish had come from; she tricked the princess into getting her husband's magic ring away from him. The king then captured the princess and threw her husband, the merchant, in prison.
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A lock of hair replaces the shoe in a Tamil story that incorporates sev eral of the Cinderella motifs: A young man saved the life of a cobra and was rewarded with a magic signet ring that granted the wearer any wish. He wished for a beautiful girl with long hair; she appeared and they married. "One day, a hair from the wife's beautiful long braid fell into the river, a fish ate it, a man caught it and then sold it to the raja's cook who cut it open and saw the hair wound around a stick.
He unwound it and measured it-it was sixty feet long! 'If her hair is this lovely, think what the woman herself must be like!' said the raja." An old woman promised to bring the woman to the raja. She went to where the woman's husband was bathing and had taken off the ring; the old woman persuaded the wife to let her put on the ring.
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"Let her go to the raja," wished the old woman, and the young woman appeared before the raja, "who saw that she 50
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The ring, though a signet, never identifies anything at all; it just grants wishes.
Shakespeare’s Rings I: The Lost Child
Pericles Aspects of the Cinderella story shadow Shakespeare's Pericles (1607-8), a late romance in which jewelry, including a man's ring, plays a central part in the recognition of parents and their children. An incestuous father, a staple of Cinderella stories, haunts this play, which begins when a king, Antiochus, commits incest with his daughter. But another daughter's resemblance to her mother serves not to prompt incest but to identify her.
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When Pericles, the prince of Tyre, meets his long-lost daughter Marina, he remarks that she might be mistaken for his long-lost wife Thaisa: "My dearest wife / Was like this maid, and such a one / My daughter might have been: my queen's square brows; / Her stature to an inch; as wand-like straight; / As silver-voiced; her eyes as jewel-like …" And then, to Marina, "Thou look'st / Like one I loved indeed" (5.1.7-11, 125-126). A combination of physical resemblance and corroborating memo ries identifies Marina to Pericles.
Struck by her resemblance to Thaisa, but lacking any hard evidence such as a letter or a ring, Pericles submits Marina to a grueling, super-rational cross-examination involving proper names and narrative details, about her breeding, parentage, and so forth; and she gives all the right answers. Yet still he wavers, and finally he asks for the central name: "What was thy mother's name? tell me but that, / For truth can never be confirm'd enough, / Though doubts did ever sleep" (5.1.201-3).
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Only when Marina names Thaisa does he believe her.
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51 51 Thaisa had given birth to Marina during a storm at sea and then appar ently died of the childbirth. At this point Thaisa usurps the motif of "child put in a box at sea with identifying jewelry," which rightfully belongs to her newborn babe, Marina. But there is no need for Pericles to give the infant Marina the sort of jewels or letters of identification that abandoned infants usually have in fairytales, since he does not abandon her but takes her ashore himself and hands her over to a friendly king to care for her until he returns.
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Having thus dealt with Marina's birth, Pericles turns his attention to Thaisa's (supposed) death. He calls for "spices, ink and paper, / My cas ket and my jewels" (3.1.65) and has Thaisa placed in a box and consigned to the sea. Unconscious, she floats to shore and is revived and adopted by a fatherly physician/magician, Cerimon.
Cerimon notes that Thaisa is "shrouded in cloth of state; balm'd and entreasured with full bags of spices! The "passport" is a note, written by Pericles, that identifies Thaisa as his (dead) wife and asks the finder to bury the queen: "Besides this treasure for a fee, The gods requite his char ity!" (3.2,73-74). Cerimon revives her and says, "Madam, this letter, and some certain jewels, / Lay with you in your coffer which are / At your command.
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Know you the character?" (that is, the handwriting) (3.4.1-2). And she replies, "It is my lord's." So the letter invites a double recognition: Cerimon discovers that this is Pericles's wife, and Thaisa learns that her husband thinks she died in the storm (just as she had assumed that he died there). But Thaisa's jewelry goes on to play a more complex role.
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In an inspired Shakespearean innovation, Cerimon says that Thaisa herself is the jew elry: "Her eyelids, cases to those / Heavenly jewels which Pericles hath lost, / Begin to part their fringes of bright gold. / The diamonds of a most praised water / Doth appear to make the world twice rich" (3.2.100). The cliché of a woman with eyes like emeralds and so forthxvi here exposes and mocks the cliché of the recognition plot: her face itself is the gem by which a woman really ought to be identified.
The actual jewels do their work years later, when Pericles finds Thaisa again but does not at first recognize her (supposing her dead), whereupon Cerimon says, "Early in blustering morn this lady was / Thrown upon this shore. I op'd the coffin, / Found there rich jewels; recover'd her" (5.3.22).
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52 Cerimon does not mention the letter. Pericles seizes upon the mention of the jewels, and says, "May we see them?" (5.3.25). Before he can see the jew els, however, Thaisa speaks, and he recognizes her voice.
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Still he hesitates, and she looks at his ring and says, "When we with tears parted Pentapolis, / The king my father gave you such a ring." And Pericles cries out, "This, this: no more," and embraces her (5.3.40). But in fact he does ask for more, as he continues to test her as he had tested Marina, asking her the name of his second-in-command, and only then, when she gives the right answer, remarking, "Still confirmation" (5.3.54). The conventional evidence of the jewelry thus both does and does not prove who Thaisa is; as with Marina, other forms of hard evidence, including specific knowledge (the predeces sor of the security questions on modern websites), are also demanded.
The Winter’s Tale
Much of this plot reappears in The Winter's Tale, which Shakespeare wrote a few years after Pericles. The jealous Leontes, thinking that the daughter his wife Hermione has just borne was sired by another man, orders his servant Antigonus to have the child abandoned. When Antigonus, ship wrecked after a storm at sea, unwillingly carries out the order, he consoles himself by citing the folktales about abandoned children nursed by kites and ravens, wolves and bears.
And he names her Perdita, because she was lost at sea (just as Pericles had named his daughter Marina, because she was found at sea). The bears in this case ignore the child but not, alas, Antigonus, who, after leaving the child on the shore of Bohemia, is said, famously, to "exit, pursued by a bear" (3.3.53). It is human shepherds, not sheep (or other animals), who find the child and raise her.
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Antigonus leaves something with Perdita that he refers to as "these, / Which may, if fortune please, both breed thee, pretty, / And still rest thine" (3.3.48-49) (i.e., pay for your good upbringing and still be there for your dowry). The meaning of "these" becomes generally apparent soon after, when shepherds find the child and speak of "a bearing-cloth for a squire's child!" and becoming "rich by the fairies" and, finally, "Gold! But the detailed description of "these" comes only near the end of the play, when the shepherd says that the box found with the infant contains "such secrets … which none must know but the king" (4.4.759).
And what is in the box? "The mantle of Queen Hermione's, her jewel about the neck of it, the letters of Antigonus found with it which
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53 53 they know to be his character…" (5.2.32-36). These are the same sorts of things that were found with Thaisa (though not with Marina): a jewel and a letter from the king. The material objects are supported by the other common factors in fairytale recognition, physical resemblance and signs of nobility: "The majesty of the creature in resemblance of the mother, the affection of nobleness which nature shows above her breeding, and many other evidences proclaim her, with all certainty, to be the king's daughter" (5.2.37-40).
But before Leontes had any idea that Perdita was his daughter, he was in danger of committing incest. Leontes felt attracted to Perdita, and when Antigonus's widow chided him and reminded him that his long- dead queen was once "more worth such gazes / Than what you look on now," Leontes replied, "I thought of her, / Even in these looks I made" (5.1.226-227). And then Perdita's mother, Hermione, who, like Thaisa, had been presumed dead all these years, was discovered alive.
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Queen Hermione's "jewel" in Perdita's possession may or may not be a ring, but another ring supplies another piece of the puzzle in the final scene. Someone asks, "What, pray you, became of Antigonus, that carried / hence the child?" The answer is, "He was torn to pieces with a bear" (5.3.64-67), and a handkerchief and rings are cited in evidence. Setting aside the handkerchief, which might perhaps be used as evidence in some other play, we are left with the rings.
The Ring (and Child) in the Fish in the News
Lost rings are found surprisingly often in fish-not only in stories but in recorded history. The many stories in which a magic ring is found in the belly of a fish are the mythical expression of a perfectly banal hap pening: fisherman fish many things up out of the deep. Indeed, there are a number of anecdotes, in the Ripley's Believe-It-or-Not genre, testifying to the fact that fish really do swallow rings;68 fish, after all, swallow all sorts of stuff (recall the contents of the stomach of the shark in the film Jaws [Steven Spielberg, 1975]) and are particularly attracted to shiny lures.
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"Stomach Contents of a Man-eating Crocodile" was the title of an exhibit I saw once in the Science Museum in Kolkata; it was full of rings and bangles and necklaces, some presumably the remains of the men that the crocodile had eaten. There's a folk tradition in America that you should not wear flashy diamonds or shiny gold jewelry when you go swimming 54
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A ring often gets into the fish story, making it even fishier. Irony and cynicism characterize the use that Hollywood films make of the theme. In Big Fish (2003, Tim Burton), a boy's father tells a lot of tall stories, and his favorite is the one about how a great big catfish swallowed his wedding ring when he used it as bait on the end of a line that the fish snapped off.
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He got it back when he again caught the fish, who spit it up and then vanished back into the deep. His son says, "It never happened!" and calls it an "amusing lie" and an "elaborate mythology"; he complains: "When I realized of course that everything you said was impossible, I felt like a fool to have trusted you." Yet in the end, the son (supported by the director's eye view, inviting us to join him) regards the story of the ring in the fish as true and tells the even more mythological ending himself: he carries his dying father down to the river (the father hands his wedding ring to his wife as he goes in), where the father becomes the great catfish and swims away.
Many putatively true stories of rings in fish are attested in the mod ern period. The London Gent's Magazine in January 1765 carried this item about a Mrs. Todd, of Deptford, who, on a boat traveling to Whitstable, took off her gold ring and threw it into the sea, to make a point: "She said that, 'It was as much impossible for any person to be poor, who had an inclination to be otherwise, as for her ever to see that ring again.' The second day after this, and when she had landed, she bought some mackerel, which the servant commenced to dress for dinner, whereupon there was found a gold ring in one.
The servant ran to show it to her mistress, and the ring proved to be that which she had thrown away."71
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55 55 Note the realistic touch that it is in the process of dressing, not serving, the fish that the ring is found. (In real life, you clean a fish before you cook it. Some of the rings in these old stories appear in the fish as it is cleaned in the kitchen, but more often they are discovered when the fish is served on the table.
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But how did it get to the table with the ring still in its belly?) And note, too, the upper-class vow, damning the poor, that inspires the mock ordeal. Jump ahead two centuries, and consider this headline for an Associated Press item printed in the New York Times on October 23, 1934: "Texan Claims Ring Found in Cod as One Lost in 1906." This is how it went: "Dateline Boston. A ring found in the stomach of a codfish by a Boston fisherman last week was claimed today by the Rev.
Drake of the First Presbyterian Church of Orange, Texas, as one
lost by him while swimming at Corpus Christi, Texas, twenty-eight years ago… . The ring bore the inscription, 'Pat D,' the abbrevia tion of his mother's name, Patricia Drake… . Fishermen along the waterfront, however, were debating the possibility of the codfish being twenty-eight years old, although many have been known to live more than thirty years, they said.
Besides, they said, it's a long swim from the Gulf of Mexico to the fishing ground." By the twentieth century, one can detect a certain cynicism in the report age, even when (or because?) a clergyman is the witness. The heyday of ring-in-fish journalism/mythology was two decades ear lier, when the New York Times, on January 26, 1913, proclaimed, "Found His Ring in a Fish: A Perennial Romance." The story was long, but here are the highlights: "Telegraphic dispatches last week announced the good fortune of a man in New Jersey, appropriately named Gold, who went to Barnegat recently and caught a lot of fish.
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This was gratifying; but it was more than counterbalanced by the loss of a fine diamond ring which was dropped overboard while the enthusiastic disciple of old Izaak was making his lucky haul. On the day of the dis patch, however, he joyously displayed the ring to his wondering mates at the engine house-for he is a fireman when he is not a fisherman-and explained that the friend with whom he had 56
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56 shared his piscatorial triumph at Barnegat had sent him the day before a fine fish. It came by parcel post, and his wife at once set about preparing it for supper. Inside this apparently innocent fish was the lost ring." Mr.
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Gold met with some skepticism, but the reporter came to his defense: "The story was received with incredulity by the other firemen, and is still discredited in certain parts of the commonwealth of New Jersey. Their skepticism is an evidence that these people are not well read in history. The record of the world is full of instances which would testify to the truth-or at least the plausibility-of the Jersey fisherman." And the article then cites, as historical precedents, the tales of Solomon, Polycrates, and the Bishop of Glasgow, among others, and concludes: "In view of such a wealth of cumulative and venerable evidence is it possible longer to doubt the Barnegat incident?" Surely not.
Such are the uses of history, or, rather, mythological history. In real life, the odds are strongly against the possibility that among the rings that any given fish has swallowed will be the ring that you may have lost in the ocean. In real life, you don't look for your lost ring in a flounder.
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All of the ring-in-fish stories are both counterfactual and counterintuitive, promising a happy ending that could seldom have been the case.xvii But that way madness lies; the point of the story, and the reason for its extraor dinary popularity, must be found elsewhere than in the actual habits of gold rings and fish. A contemporary variant on the theme of the ring (or child) found in the fishxviii is the story of the message in a bottle cast out to sea and washed back to shore after many years.
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A real-life instance of this story began on December 27, 1984, when a seven-year-old boy threw a Pepsi bottle into the Gulf of Mexico in Clearwater, near St. The bottle was sealed with electrical tape and there was a message in it: "To whoever finds this letter please write me a letter and let me know.
Linwood Ave., Fairfield Ohio, 45014.” A Florida man named Don Smith
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The people who experienced the event knew how the myth should go. The poet Denise Levertov (1923-1997) also knew how the myth should go and translated it into her own life in her poem "Wedding-Ring," writ ten in 1978, some four years after her divorce. The ocean in her poem is a basket filled with lost objects, more precisely, objects that have lost their meaning: My wedding-ring lies in a basket as if at the bottom of a well.
Nothing will come to fish it back up and onto my finger again. It lies among keys to abandoned houses, nails waiting to be needed and hammered into some wall, telephone numbers with no names attached, idle paperclips. It can't be given away for fear of bringing ill-luck.
It can't be sold for the marriage was good in its own time, though that time is gone. Could some artificer beat into it bright stones, transform it into a dazzling circlet no one could take 58
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The Token Rings of Lost Children
In actual recorded history, a heartbreaking collection of tokens left with abandoned children can be seen in the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square, London, on the site of a home for abandoned babies who were raised and educated by the institution. Thomas Coram established the home in 1739; in 1954 the last children were placed in foster care.
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the Hospital for the Education and Maintenance of Exposed and Deserted
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Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.82 Oliver’s mother, dying in the work
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3. Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
We learn, from the tales of Solomoni and others, that you may lose your official identification, and hence your persona, your personal identity, if you lose your ring (identity theft). But in many stories, this straightforward fact leads to the quasi-magical idea of losing your memory of who you are, or your memory of your connection with a lover, if you lose a ring that was a gift from that lover.
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Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
We learn, from the tales of Solomoni and others, that you may lose your official identification, and hence your persona, your personal identity, if you lose your ring (identity theft). But in many stories, this straightforward fact leads to the quasi-magical idea of losing your memory of who you are, or your memory of your connection with a lover, if you lose a ring that was a gift from that lover. When you find the ring, you remember again.
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In this way, two sets of symbols, of personal identity and recognition on the one hand (the signet ring) and of sexual union on the other (the marriage ring), unite in a genre of myths about the identity of a sexual partner. Tom Zoellner writes of the engagement ring he gave to the first girl he loved: "It had a memory inside of it that could not be erased, at least not as long as it remained attached to the owner.
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But before we listen to this story, let's touch down for a moment in ancient India, to consider the broader mythology of rings and other jewelry in that culture. The first two chap ters of this book have provided a wide transcultural, synchronic survey i.
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Rings in Ancient India
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On the other side of the harem wall, a lover sending a message to a woman in the harem is advised to give her his seal ring marked with an impression.7 (The commentator explains that he leaves a ring with his name on it, marked with traces of his nails and teeth.)
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Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
63 63 The cultural connections between women and circular jewelry in India are complex. In Shudraka's play, The Little Clay Cart, also from the third century ce, the courtesan and wife use jewelry in ways that challenge European stereotypes: the courtesan lends her casket of jewelry to a poor man whom she loves, and when it is stolen from him his wife gives him her pearl necklace to pay back the courtesan. Eventually the stolen jewelry is found, and the courtesan returns the pearls to the wife.
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Sita’s Jewels
These and other Indian traditions about women and jewelry are assumed in the tale of Sita and Rama in Valmiki's Ramayana, an ancient Sanskrit epic poem (composed between 200 bce and 200 ce) that has remained central to Hinduism from the time of its composition to the present day. In this text, when prince Rama goes into exile, he takes his wife, Sita, with ii. A similar contrast between a true circlet of one gem and a false circlet of another marks several nineteenth-century European stories about true and false necklaces.
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The Ring of Truth
At first she starts to give away all her jewels, but she balks at the prospect of going away in rough garments, and in the end she wears her jewelry into the forest. Indeed, her jewels play an essential role in the plot at several points. Ravana, king of the ogres, schemes to carry Sita away.
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Jewelry, as usual, has a two-edged power to identify a woman as chaste (or unchaste). Later, when Rama sends Hanuman to Sita in her captivity on Ravana's fortress island, Lanka, the jewelry gives self-contradictory evidence. Hanuman first sees another woman wearing fine jewelry.
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Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
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In general, the married woman who wears jewelry in her husband's absence is a bad wife. But since Sita is a princess, jewelry is an essential part of her being; therefore, she remains a good wife even when she wears her jewelry in exile from her husband. In Nina Paley's brilliant animated film version of the Ramayana (called the Sitayana or Sita Sings the Blues [2008]), one of the male Hindu inter locutors on the soundtrack remarks at this point in the story, "She drops her jewelry along the way; it went all the way up to Lanka.
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[We see an image of a big ring with an enormous solitaire diamond falling from the sky to earth, followed by other jewelry.] She has a lot of jewelry in the for est." They laugh. But the woman remarks, "No, do you remember, she's not wearing any jewelry, because she left everything in Ayodhya; she just came in her sannyasi [ascetic] clothes." And the male voice replies, "Don't challenge these stories." Wise advice. Clearly Sita's jewelry in this episode remains a problem.
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And tell him that when I see it, even in my misery, I feel better, for I feel as if I am seeing Rama.' " Rama takes it, begins to weep, and says, "My heart melts at the sight of this jewel. Sita's father gave her this jewel when she got married… . My beloved's beauty enhances the splendor of this jewel and today, when I look at it, I feel as if I am looking at her." Both Rama and Sita feel that the other is somehow present (with their parents) in their jewelry.
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Ratnavali, the Lady with the Necklace
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Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
Not wishing to anger the chief queen, he put her in the queen's service as a handmaid named Sagarika ("Ocean Woman"). She met the king and they fell in love. But she would not agree to keep meeting him, and the king said, "My beloved, who is like a jeweled necklace found by chance, slipped out of my hand before I could hang her around my neck." The queen imprisoned Sagarika, who gave her jeweled necklace to the Brahmin jester; the jester realized from its value that Sagarika must be of noble birth.
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Then the chief councilor of Ratnavali's father arrived; when he saw the necklace on the jester he thought he recognized it as Ratnavali's but decided that this might be sheer coincidence. Then Sagarika appeared, still in chains. The coun cilor, looking at Sagarika, said, "She looks just like the princess." And, recalling the necklace, he decided that this must in fact be Ratnavali.
The jester said, "As soon as I saw the jeweled necklace I knew that this was the property of no common person." The queen had Ratnavali's chains taken off, embraced her, and adorned her with her own ornaments. Sagarika, the Ocean Woman, is rescued out of the ocean-like a ring, or a fish. Her jeweled necklace suggests, if it does not prove, that she is Ratnavali, and it brings with it, as it surfaces, the usual submerged recognition.
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Like a signet ring, the necklace is here associated with a hidden name: Ratnavali at first is like a necklace (which the king fears he has lost), then is known to have a necklace (by which the king's minister recognizes her before the play begins, and her father's councilor half- recognizes her at the end), and finally is recognized as being named a necklace. The necklace is at first taken as evidence but is then ruled inadmis sible. When the chief councilor of Ratnavali's father arrives and sees the jeweled necklace, he remarks, "I know that necklace!
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68 on Ratnavali and the necklace now seen on the jester: princesses have so many jewels. The argument about the "speaking resemblance" deflects the power of the jewelry so that it isn't the essential clue, the single clue by which all stands or falls, after all, but merely one piece in a more complex puzzle of mistaken identity. The text simultaneously presents the traditional, for mulaic symbol of identity (the piece of jewelry that identifies the person in disguise) and mocks it: a piece of jewelry is a stupid way to identify someone.
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Though the hard evidence of the jewelry is undermined, the "soft" evidence of somatic memory is validated in the end. The truth that the necklace reveals from the start is not Ratnavali's identity (which is finally established by her face) but her class. (The connection is supported by the near-homonym of the Sanskrit words for noble birth [abhijana] and recognition [abhijnana].) As the jester remarks to himself at the end, "I knew that this was the property of no common person." She is the daughter of a foreign king, masquerading as someone of a lower class, the princess as the pauper-but wearing a necklace no pauper could afford.
Here the text suddenly plays the harsh light of reason on a traditional romantic theme: anyone who has a fabulous necklace of emeralds and rubies must be a princess, if not necessarily the particular princess you are looking for. (The flip side of this argument -the proof, in a finger with a ring, that the woman is not a lady-prevails in the Welsh tale of Taliesin.)v And Sagarika's class is eventually the key to her individual identity. In the end, class reconciles the queen to her fate: the knowledge that the Ocean Woman is in fact the Lady of the Jeweled Necklace forces the queen to welcome her as a co-wife.
The Rejection of Shakuntala
The tension between royal jewelry and an innocent girl of the forest, joined through the folk motif of the ring in the fish,vi is at the heart of the tale of Shakuntala and the ring of recognition. Here again the king's signet ring, like Rama's, is an essential clue (as it is throughout the genre of kings who use signet rings to seduce their female subjects),vii but unlike Sita and Ratnavali, the heroine of this story has no jewelry of her own.
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Neither a fish nor a ring appears in the earliest version of the story of Shakuntala, in the great ancient Sanskrit epic poem the Mahabharata (composed between 300 bce and 300 ce): When King Dushyanta37 was hunting in the forest, he came to a her mitage where he met a beautiful young woman named Shakuntala, the daughter of a sage and a celestial nymph who had abandoned her. He persuaded her to marry him by the rite consisting of noth ing but private, mutual desire,38 but she made him promise that if she bore him a son the boy would become king.
Then he left, prom ising to send for her.
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70 Shakuntala gave birth to a boy, and when he was six years old she brought him to court, saying to Dushyanta, "This is your son. Remember the promise you made long ago when we lay together." When the king heard her words, he remembered perfectly well, but he said, "I do not remember. Whose woman are you, you evil ascetic?
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I don't remember ever having had anything to do with you." She replied, "You know very well, your majesty; why do you say that you don't, lying like a common man? Your heart knows the truth, and knows your lie. A man who does something wrong thinks, 'No one knows me,' but the gods know.
If you do not do what I ask, your head will burst into a hundred pieces." She discoursed at length on the reasons a man should honor his wife, quoting the dharma texts, and concluding, "The son born from his wife is like a man's face in a mirror. Why do you reject your son, who comes to you of his own accord and looks at you with affection? Look on my son as your other self, as your reflection seen in a clear pond.
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What evil deeds did I do in a previous life so that I was abandoned in this life, first by my mother and now by you? I will go home now, but do not reject your own son." Dushyanta replied, "I do not recognize this son that you have. Who will trust what you say?
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Your son is too big, and too strong, to have been born as recently as you claim. Your own birth is low, and you look to me like a whore [pumschali]. All that you are saying makes no sense to me.
Go where you like." Again she tried, in vain, to explain the moral law to him, and then she left. At that moment a disembodied voice from the sky said, "The mother is the father's leather water-bag; the son belongs to the man who begets him. The mother brings forth a son and her own body is split into two.
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Support your son, and do not reject Shakuntala." Then Dushyanta said to his court iers, "I knew all of this perfectly well, knew that he was my own son. But if I had accepted him as my own son just from her words, there would have been doubt among the people." And he said to Shakuntala, "People would think that I had a bond with you because you are a woman, and that I had chosen this son for the kingdom.
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That is why I argued." Then he accepted his son and forgave Shakuntala for the harsh words she had spoken to him in her anger.39
Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
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That voice's statement about the importance of mothers is hardly feminist-it is of the "hen as a way for an egg to make another egg" school of embryology. But its surprisingly violent image of a woman split in two in childbirth evokes sympathy for mothers and suggests a widespread mythical response of a woman to a double-dealing man: her own literal bisection into two women or, less violent and more common, her performance of two women,44 herself and the woman she pretends to be.viii Surely there is irony in the text's statement that the king magnanimously forgave her for speaking to him in anger.
The Ring of the Bodhisattva
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72 certain aspects of the story, in particular introducing the theme of a ring. One of the Jatakas tells this story: King Brahmadatta of Varanasi was wandering in his pleasure groves when he saw a woman and fell in love with her. He seduced her and she conceived a child who was the future Buddha, the Bodhisatta.
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He gave her the signet ring from his finger and dismissed her with these words: "If it is a girl, spend this ring on her nurture; but if it is a boy, bring ring and child to me." She gave birth to a boy, and when he was growing up the children teased him, calling him "No- father." He asked his mother about his father, and she told him. At his request, she took him to the palace and said, "This is your son, sire." The king knew well enough that this was the truth, but shame before all his court made him reply, "He is no son of mine." "But here is your signet-ring, sire; you will recognize that." "Nor is this my signet ring." Then said the woman, "Sire, I have now no witness to prove my words, except to appeal to truth.
Wherefore, if you be the father of my child, I pray that he may stay in mid-air; but if not, may he fall to earth and be killed." So saying, she seized the Bodhisatta by the foot and threw him up in the air. The child, suspended in the air, told the king he was his son. The king stretched out his hands and cried, "Come to me, my boy!
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Thus the ring serves both as a proof of identity and as a kind of child support; this version recognizes the hardheaded value of a ring, a very early instance of the argument that diamonds are a girl's best friend.ix And when the king simply denies that the woman's ring is his, he demonstrates the obvious fact that jew elry doesn't actually prove anything at all unless other people acknowledge it.
Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
73 73 These reasonable considerations lead back into irrational religion, an act of truth reminiscent of the voice from the sky in the Mahabharata tale of Shakuntala: a miracle, a suspension of the law of gravity, which proves the identity of the child and epitomizes, like the judgment of Solomon (1 Kings 3.16-27), the liminality of the child torn between two parents. But whereas Solomon's proposal to split the child, which would kill it, smoked out the true mother in protest, and the voice from the sky in the Mahabharata spoke of the mother herself being split in half, the father here quite blithely accepts the possibility that his son may crash and die.
(The mother has faith that since the child really is the king's, he will be safe). This text spells out, as the Mahabharata does not, the king's total disregard for the child as well as the mother. Another Buddhist version in another Jataka story reverts to the more conventional assumption that the ring is an incontrovertible proof: when the seducer, this time the king's Brahmin chaplain, says to the child, "I gave your mother a token; where is it?" the boy hands him the ring, which the Brahmin recognizes and acknowledges.
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And although the woman in both versions of this story has no name, the son is named; indeed, each of the Buddhist texts is named after the child in that text. In the transition from the Mahabharata to these Buddhist texts, Shakuntala has lost both her name and her ability to discourse on dharma, both of which have been transferred to her son. A Buddhist tale from the Tibetan tradition also makes the mother a silent player: King Bimbisara, a notorious philanderer, had a liaison with the wife of a very rich merchant who was away on business, and she became pregnant.
She informed the king, who sent her a signet ring (anguli mudraka) and a brightly colored chiffon cloth, telling her that if the child was a girl it could remain with her, but if it was a boy she should dress him in the fabric, bind the seal ring around his neck and send the boy to him. After nine months had passed, she gave birth to a beautiful 74
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She fed him with ghee and honey, bound the seal ring around his neck, covered him with the cloth, and placed him in a chest. She gave the chest to her serving-maid, telling her to take it to the gate of the royal palace, light a circle of lamps around it, and stay off to one side until someone took the child. The maid did as she was told.
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But this woman, still unnamed, does the right thing: she sends the double proof, the ring now supplemented by a cloth, that will assure her son's recognition at the pal ace, even though she herself never appears there (presumably never to be recognized as the child's mother) and never says a word to the king (though she does speak to the servant girl). The ring says it all for her.
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The Recognition of Shakuntala
The poet Kalidasa, writing in the fourth century ce, was under the patronage of the Gupta dynasty, who traced their lineage back to the child of Shakuntala and Dushyanta, a child named Bharata-from whose name is derived the word used to designate India in most Indian languages to this day. Kalidasa had his work cut out for him to transform Bharata's father from a lying seducer to a sympathetic lover, and he fell back upon the tried and true device of the magic ring of memory and the curse of forgetfulness.
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Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
75 75 The new version of the story of Shakuntala combines all three of these rings. The first two were already widely known in the ancient world, lying right at hand for Kalidasa to pick up, like so many lost rings; he just had to draw the ring-and-fish out of the storytellers' ocean of tricks, through the technique that Claude Lévi-Strauss called "bricolage," the myth-maker's ability to take a piece of one story to mend another story.xi But Kalidasa needed to conjure up some sort of magic to get the king out of his dilemma, and he made use of the third type of ring.
This is what he came up with: King Dushyanta met Shakuntala in the forest, and they fell in love. She did not yet know that he was the king (he told her he was the king's minister in charge of religious affairs); then he offered her his signet ring with his name engraved on it. When her friends read the name on the ring and reacted with surprise, he said, "Do not misunderstand; the ring is a gift from the king." Shakuntala refused the ring at first, but eventually, after she had found out that he himself was the king, she slept with him.
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As he left to return to court, he placed his ring on her finger, telling her to count off one day for each letter of his name, and at the end he would send for her. Shakuntala, daydreaming about the king, slighted a short- tempered sage, who cursed her: "Since you were so lost in thought of some man that you had no mind for anyone else, he will not remember you even when you try to awaken him, just as a drunk does not remember the story that he told before." Shakuntala didn't hear the curse, but her friends did, and persuaded the sage to put limits on it: "The power of the curse will cease the moment she presents some ornament as a token of recognition." When the king failed to send for her, and Shakuntala discovered that she was preg nant, she set out for court.
Her friends advised her, "If the king is slow to recognize you, be sure to show him the ring inscribed with his name." Meanwhile, at court, the king's neglected queen was heard sing ing a sad song: "How have you forgotten your love?" The king, know ing that she was singing about him, was touched by her delicacy and sent his jester to her with a courtly reply. But then, suddenly alone, he felt the pangs of separation from someone he loved though he knew of no such lost love.
He thought to himself, "Even a happy xi.
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76 man may be overcome by passionate longing when he sees beauti ful things or hears sweet sounds. Perhaps he is remembering some thing he was not conscious of before that moment, the loves of a former life, firmly rooted in the impressions of lingering emotions." When the king saw Shakuntala, who was veiled, he wondered who she was; when he was told that she was pregnant with his child, he was full of doubt; and when she removed her veil, he said, "Did I take this beauty before, or not?
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No matter how hard I try, I cannot remember ever making this woman my own. And how can I accept her when she shows clear signs of pregnancy and I have doubts about being the one who sowed the field, as it were?" Shakuntala thought to herself, "When his passion has undergone such a change, what good would it do even if I were to make him remember? But I must prove my own purity." And she said to the king, "If you have doubts, thinking that I am another man's wife, I will dispel your doubt by this token of remembrance… .
My finger is not wearing the ring!" Her chaperone said, "It must have been lost when you went into the water at the shrine." The king smiled and said, "This is why people say that women are so cunning, like cuckoos who let other birds nurture their eggs." But he continued to waver: "Am I deluded, or is she lying? Which is worse for me, to desert my wife or be defiled by the touch of another man's wife?" The chaplain made a helpful suggestion: "Since it has been pre dicted that the king's son will be a sovereign of the world, wait until Shakuntala has the child and see if he has the marks of sovereignty." The king agreed, but Shakuntala ran away and was snatched up to heaven by the celestial nymph who was her mother.
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The king lamented, "Though I do not remember the sage's daughter, or any marriage, still my aching heart contradicts me." Guards dragged in a fisherman and charged him with having in his possession the royal signet ring and with having invented the tale that he found it inside a fish. But the king rewarded the fisher man and gladly received the ring. As soon as the king saw the ring, he remembered that he had married Shakuntala and had denied her in the delusion that overcame him when she had lost the ring.
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But, one of the women argued, "Such a passion should not need a token of remembrance or recognition." To which the king replied, "So, let me blame the ring."
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77 77 One day, in heaven on an errand for the gods, Dushyanta met the child that Shakuntala had borne. When a bystander remarked, "Miraculous, astonishing, the speaking resemblance between this boy and you," the king began to suspect that it was his own son. The boy had lost his bracelet while playing with a lion cub, and the king picked up the bracelet, to the astonishment of two bystanders, who recalled that it was a magic bracelet that no one but the boy or his parents could pick up; if anyone else touched it, it would change into a serpent and bite that person.
The skeptical king asked, "Have you yourself ever been eye witnesses to this transformation, with your own eyes?" To which the two women replied, "Many times." But the king was convinced only when the boy said, "You are not my father; Dushyanta is my father." Then Shakuntala entered and said, "Even after I heard that the bracelet didn't turn into a serpent, I was afraid to believe it." But when she saw the king she said, "He is not like my husband. Who is this man who defiles by the touch of his limbs my son, who was protected by that bracelet?" The boy said, "Mommy!
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This stranger embraces me and calls me his son." Then Shakuntala and the king began to argue: Dushyanta: "My dear, it is only fair that you should turn my cru elty to you against me, as I see that you now refuse to recognize me. The light of memory has pierced the darkness of my delusion …" Shakuntala: "It must have been the ripening of my past deeds that made you, who had been so compassionate, become so cold. But how did you come to remember unhappy me?
Ah, I see your ring." Dushyanta: "Yes, it was by getting back this ring that I got back my memory. It does seem to me strange that through a loosening of my memory, I denied Shakuntala and then, afterwards, as a result of seeing the ring, I understood that I had formerly married her." Shakuntala: "Thank goodness! My husband did not refuse me without any reason.
But I don't remember being cursed. Could I have been cursed without knowing it, when my mind was dis tracted by the separation? Is that why my friends advised me to show the ring to my husband?" Then a god explained it to her: "Your husband rejected you because of the curse that obstructed his memory; the reflection does not assume a shape on the surface of a mirror when its brightness is masked by dirt, but it finds its place there easily when it is cleaned." 78
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78 Dushyanta's amnesia is not total; it leaves traces, clues for the king to fol low. Shakuntala in the Mahabharata spoke of a son as the reflection of his father; here the clouded mirror reflection symbolizes the incompletely erased mental image, Dushyanta's only half-lost memory of his wife and son. The twist here consists in the fact that although the king gave Shakuntala the ring to make her remember him, its loss makes him forget her; the magic of the loss of the ring on her finger is projected, as it were, into his mind many miles away, like the ring that Hans Carvel put on his own hand in order to control his wife.xii To put it differently, Shakuntala's mistake (a trivial breach of ascetiquette) injures Dushyanta's mind.
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A transfer of this sort takes place when Shakuntala offers the king an easy out through the projected blame for his caddishness. In the Mahabharata, Shakuntala worries aloud if she might have committed evil deeds in another life that caused her to be abandoned first by her mother and now by her lover. In Kalidasa, too, she blames the ripening of her past deeds for his coldness.
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As Romila Thapar suggests, both the curse and the signet ring that restores the memory that the curse has erased are "stereotypical items of folk literature," and they are in "a contrapuntal xii.
Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
Dushyanta lies about the ring at the start, denying that it is his, just as he will later deny that Shakuntala and her son are his (fearing that, like a cuckoo, she wants to insinuate some other man's egg into his, Dushyanta's, nest-to cuckold him, as the cuckoo metaphor functions in English) and just as the king in the Buddhist tale denied the ring even after the woman returned to him. Even the spectacularly naïve Shakuntala expresses her distrust of the ring.
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But then Dushyanta forgets her because of the ring; the curse is a very convenient and rather suspicious excuse, as the cynical ladies in the court point out: "Such a passion should not need a token of remembrance or recognition." The king's reply, "So, let me blame the ring," is about as close to an admission of guilt as that sort of ruler, indeed that sort of man, will ever get. When he recovers the ring found in the fish, he insists that he rejected her because of delusion, or madness, or a dream, or a demon, or fate; and he regards his amnesia as a dream from which he has now awakened, though now he meets her only in his dreams.
This is tantamount to saying that she does not believe he has forgotten her but, rather, fears that he no longer loves her.
Later, she pretends not to recognize him at first, subjecting him to his own treatment. In the Mahabharata, Shakuntala is a wise woman who discourses on dharma; in Kalidasa, she is hardly more than a child and says little when the king accuses her of lying; indeed, most of her words reach us only because the king tells us she said them.
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80 Shakuntala meets the king at court, she has already borne the child that legitimates her. Kalidasa's Shakuntala, by contrast, goes to the forgetful king so quickly-at his suggestion, constrained by the number of symbols on his ring-that at her first confrontation with him she is merely preg nant, indeed barely pregnant. There is no child to back her up; all that she has is the ring, and since that is lost, she runs away.
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The story in the Mahabharata is about power and inheritance, but Kalidasa turns it into a story about desire and memory. In this new form, the story simultaneously plays upon our sympathy with Dushyanta when he suffers from his amnesia and our sympathy with Shakuntala when she suffers because of it. Unlike Dushyanta in the Mahabharata, who with cal culating common sense rejects the son who is unnaturally big and strong for his putative age, Dushyanta recognizes his son by a similarly unnatural quality, his ability to play with a young lion.
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Clearly this "proof" can be used by either side and is therefore no proof. But there are other signs of recog nition as well. The ring is doubled here not, as it often is, by a second ring but by another piece of circular jewelry, the magic bracelet that identifies the boy's parents-a kind of proto-DNA that, in mass production, would xiv.
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81 81 put an end to all tales of changelings, all Family Romances.xvi The king is skeptical about this trick, as is Shakuntala, who won't believe the evidence of the bracelet and thinks that the king "defiles by his touch" the boy whose bracelet was intended to prevent the touch of anyone but his father-until she sees the king with her own eyes. The king's skepticism seems to chal lenge the assertion that the bracelet turns into a snake ("Have you yourself ever been eye witnesses to this transformation, with your own eyes?" the king asks the onlookers), until, to our astonishment, they reply, "Many times." Both the ring and the bracelet do tell the truth.
Bystanders also note the "speaking resemblance," literally a "form that talks together" (the same term that was used to speculate about Ratnavali's necklace) between the boy and his father, just as Shakuntala in the Mahabharata had said that a man's legitimate son is like his face in a mirror. Kalidasa's Dushyanta responds instinctively to his son, even when his memory does not know that it is his son: "How is it that I feel love for this little boy as if he were the son born of my own loins?
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If my limbs thrill so to his touch, what bliss must he give to the man whose body gave him life?" In the same way, when the king first falls in love with Shakuntala, who is apparently of another class, he hopes that she may in fact turn out to be of his own class. He reasons: "Surely she is fit to be the wife of a man of royal birth, since the heart of a nobleman like me yearns for her; for the inner inclinations of good people are their authority to distinguish doubtful objects." And Dushyanta's "aching heart" remembers his mar riage to Shakuntala when his memory does not, attributing his tantalizing half-memory to a loose thread trailing from a previous life.
Nevertheless, Tagore continued, "The poet has left a small xvi.
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The Return of the Repressed
Our texts express two different views of the resurgence of the past-past loves, past memory-as it is symbolized by the ring retrieved by the fish: that it is harmful, something to be feared (the ring of Polycrates),xvii and that it is beneficial, something to be desired (the ring of Solomon, or Shakuntala). In both branches of the story, the ring in the belly of the fish reminds us that we cannot escape our fate, whether we fear it or desire it.
But in both cases, the ring that is symbolic of clouded memory is inevitably found, because it is an integral part of the person who loses it. Polycrates, whose ring came back even when he threw it into the ocean, is reincarnate in the Victorian Cruel Knight, who tried in vain to drown, and then to lose, both his ring and his future wife, with the moral clearly spelled out for us: "Tis in vain to alter what fate has decreed."xviii Oedipus learned this lesson the hard way: the prediction about his mother and father made him run away … to his mother and father and his complex.
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84 may all of us well seek to close our eyes to the scenes of our childhood,"68 which is to say, to repress those memories, to throw the ring of memory back into the ocean of the unconscious. He spelled this out years later (in
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1937) in Moses and Monotheism:
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The formation of symptoms at a later time indicates the return of the repressed, though it appears in a distorted form in these symp toms. Freud's scenario of recovering childhood memories appears in our myths as the recovery of a child, thought lost forever, from the oceanxix- the ocean of stories, as the great Hindu narrative compendium calls it (Kathasaritsagara), now mythologized until it has what Freud elsewhere70 called the "oceanic feeling" of religion. And the ring, when we do get it back out of the water, is not the same.
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Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
85 85 forms of the tale of the ring-retrieved-by-a-fish, the Polycrates syndrome and the Solomon/Shakuntala syndrome. Repression is to some extent a Bad Thing (it causes guilt, neurosis, and so forth), and the retrieval of the repressed thought (through dreams or psychoanalysis) may be therapeutic for the individual (the Solomon/Shakuntala syndrome). But the repres sion may be healthier for society in general; and even for the individual, the breakthrough of a repressed emotion may have tragic consequences, for its original force may be distorted and multiplied by an intensity built up through the years in prison.
Both aspects of the myth, and the theory, are embodied in rituals related to our mythology of precious things lost and found in water. On the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah there is a ceremony called Taslich, during which Jews traditionally go to the ocean or a stream or river to pray and to throw into the water bread crumbs symbolic of their sins, which they hope the fish will devour rather than bring back to them. But the Hebrew Bible (Ecclesiastes 11.1), advises us, "Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days." Which will happen?
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Which do we want to happen?
The Lost and Found of Rings
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This is the paradox of the valuable object. If it is not lost, 86
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That ring holds out the hope that the return of the desired mate, and/or the child, that we had feared lost forever, will be healing, and the hope that we our selves will not be lost when we die, that our children, or our words or works, will survive and, with them, something of our memory. For, of all the things that we lose, memory is the most precious; it is also the most recoverable, if one knows how to go about it, and is lucky.
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4. Rings of Forgetfulness in Medieval European Romances
We begin to see how the tales of circular jewelry come to intersect so often with the mythology of sexual deception in marriage, when jewelry identi fies a sexual partner. Some of the rings in these stories identify adulterers while others reveal true lovers and/or marriage partners.
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When He Lost His Ring
We begin to see how the tales of circular jewelry come to intersect so often with the mythology of sexual deception in marriage, when jewelry identi fies a sexual partner. Some of the rings in these stories identify adulterers while others reveal true lovers and/or marriage partners. And still others restore memory, or, when lost, induce forgetfulness.i When a ring is lost, it may make the wearer forget both identity and love, which is to say the identity of both the wearer and the beloved.
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As he died he gave her a ring and assured her that, as long as she kept it, her husband would not remember anything that had happened, nor would he continue to imprison her. He also gave her his sword and made her swear that no man but their as yet unborn son (Yonec) would ever possess it. She kept the ring and the sword, and they comforted her.
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She continued to live with her i.
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The Ring of Truth
88 husband for many years, but he never accused her of infidelity, nor ever insulted or abused her.2 This is a very useful sort of ring to have, even without the powers of filial identification that it has, in this story, bequeathed to the sword. The same sort of ring of forgetfulness is given to the wife rather than
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the husband in the thirteenth/fourteenth-century Gesta Romanorum:
"Fredericus, who reigned in a Roman city, had been a long time without offspring. Finally, by the advice of wise counselors, he mar ried a beautiful girl in parts far distant and lived with her in an unknown land and had offspring. After this, he wished to return to his field but could not obtain his wife's consent; indeed, she always repeated that if he abandoned her she would kill herself.
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Hearing this, the emperor caused two splendid rings to be made, and had engraved upon two gems images of the following efficacy: one of remembrance and the other of forgetfulness. Having set these in their appropriate rings he gave one-that of forgetfulness-to his wife, and kept the other for himself… . The wife began straight way to forget the love of her husband, and the emperor, noting this, journeyed back to his field with great joy, and never returned to his wife.
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Like the husbands in the stories of clever wives,iii this king forges a ring of memory and abandons the woman he impregnates. The twist comes in the dou bling and inverting of the ring, so that here he keeps the ring of memory and gives her the ring of forgetfulness.
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Medieval Rings of Forgetfulness
89 89 Such rings of forgetfulness, which often replace or are replaced by drugged goblets of wine, come into play in several related medieval cycles from Welsh, Celtic, French, German, and early English literature: the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Owein (or Yvain) and the Lady of the Fountain, of Tristan and Isolde, and (to be treated in a separate chapter)iv Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Each story is told in a number of dif ferent texts, and the stars of one often make cameo appearances as bit players in another.
Both Yvain4 and Arthur5 appear, for example, in the defense of Isolde, and Tristan pretends to have a sister named Brunehild.6 Each text tends to spell the names of the protagonists in a slightly different way; to simplify matters, I will standardize the spellings as Tristan, Isolde, Guinevere, Lancelot, Siegfried, Brünnhilde, and Yvain.
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and the Lady of the Fountain
Yvain (called Owein in the Welsh historical texts) was a historical king of the late sixth century, the son of Urien of Rheged, in what is now north west England and southwest Scotland.7 Well known from Welsh poetry and prose (particularly The Dream of Rhonabwy), he is called Iwenus,
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Ewen, Owein, Owain, Owain mab Urien, or Yvain in the earliest known
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Through trickery, he led her away to an isolated spot and raped her, as a result of which she conceived a iv.
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Thaney's pregnancy is unwanted, but the child that results from this unplanned parenthood became Bishop of Glasgow (a.k.a. Thaney's miraculous fountain-and little else-remains in Chrétien de Troyes's tale of Yvain (composed, in French, around 1177).
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But, like Dushyanta,vi the rehabilitated Yvain now has need of a magic ring: As Yvain entered a fortress, the gate dropped down, catching the saddle and the horse's haunches, which it cut off clean, trapping Yvain (and the front half of his horse) between this gate and the inner gate. There he met a woman named Lunette, who told him that she recognized him, as she had been to the court of King Arthur, where Yvain alone of all the knights had treated her courte ously.
She gave him the little ring and told him it had the power to conceal anyone who wore it, as long as he turned the stone into his palm. Then she led him to safety and kept him in her room. From his hiding place he saw the Countess of the Fountain, Laudine de Landuc, and fell in love with her; he met her and married her.
After a while, he longed to go with Gawain to Arthur's court. Laudine made him promise to return after precisely one year, v.
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91 91 warning him that her love would turn to hate after that. He pro tested that he could not know the future, that he might become ill or be held prisoner, that events might detain him. Still she swore, "If our Lord keeps you from death, nothing will stand in your way as long as you never forget me." And she loaned him a ring with a magic power in its stone: "No true and loyal lover can be cap tured, or lose any blood, nor have any evil come to him.
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As long as he wears it and holds it dear he will remember his beloved… . No knight has ever had it from my hand. I give it you only because of my love." Yvain rode off.
His body might follow the king, but his heart remained with her, joined to her own. Gawain, however, kept him so long that a year passed, and months after that. Then all of a sud den, when King Arthur came and was seated in their midst, Yvain was struck by an overwhelming thought; he realized all at once that he'd broken his promise and stayed beyond the time they'd agreed.
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Laudine sent a woman who accused him of being "disloyal, and a traitor, and a liar, and a deceiver, who'd deserted his wife and betrayed her… . You've forgotten it all, you couldn't be bothered to remember a thing… . She sends me to tell you never to come back, but only return her ring." And she took the ring from his finger.
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Yvain lost his senses and wandered for a long time. Another countess sent her maid to anoint him with a special ointment that cured him, so that his mind and memory recovered. She very much wanted to be his mistress or his wife, but he took his leave of her.
One day he came upon a serpent who had gripped a lion by the tail and was burning him up. Yvain cut the serpent in half and freed the lion. After that he took the road as before, and the lion stayed with him always.
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Eventually, Yvain came to Laudine's fountain. Sad and weary, he fainted, and his sword slipped from its scabbard and wounded him on the cheek. No metal mesh is perfect: the tip of the sword slipped through his shining mail and slit his skin, and he bled.
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As he recovered he bitterly accused himself for exceeding his year's leave and making his lady hate him. He found Lunette imprisoned by Laudine, who blamed her for Yvain's treachery. Yvain told Lunette who he was and offered to defend her, but insisted that no one should know his name.
With the help of his lion, Yvain won the battle against Laudine's knights to vindicate Lunette, and Laudine forgave her.
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92 did not recognize Yvain, she begged him to stay with her until he and the lion recovered from the wounds they had incurred in Lunette's defense. He refused, however, saying, "I could not stay here unless my mistress pardoned me, forgave me, and forgot her anger and displeasure." When he was gone, Laudine swore: "I swear, and you have my word, if he'll come to me here, without deception or deceit I'll do everything I can to bring about this peace… .
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(In a fourteenth- century story from the Welsh Mabinogion,12 she simply comments that he is the handsomest man she has ever seen; "If you had a lover," she says, "she would be the best of lovers.") The text thus invokes a common fai rytale motif: befriend a fairy when she is disguised as a lowly person (and Lunette's magic powers are evident in her ring of invisibility) and she will reward you with supernatural gifts. Despite this more promising start, Yvain continues to behave as a bounder (if not nearly as great a bounder as Ewen is in the Scottish texts), blithely breaking his promise to his wife.
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New things happen to him, and change him, but despite the moral improvement that his character under goes in the increasingly selfless adventures he undertakes,13 he gets up to his old tricks right to the very end. The "deceptive oath" (as Chrétien calls it) that Yvain tricks Laudine into making is needed because he has, magi cally and conveniently, forgotten about her for so many years; he blames the ring, but he also, rightly, blames his own fickleness. Since Laudine's ring prevents him from forgetting her, he must have remembered her when he nevertheless remained in Arthur's court; he only forgets her when she takes back the ring.
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His amnesia then lasts not long enough to get him into the sort of unconscious deception that embroils Dushyanta in Kalidasa's play, but long enough to inspire him to carry out the kind of conscious deception that Dushyanta enacts in the Mahabharata. In the end, he forgets that he forgot her; the story concludes, "He remembers
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93 93 none of his troubles, as they are driven from his mind by the joy he finds in his dearly beloved mistress." Chrétien does not tell us whether or not his dearly beloved mistress still remembers that (as she had complained to Lunette, quite recently) "he neither loves nor respects me." As is so often the case, the ring is double, here dividing up the qualities of identity/memory and invisibility. If you lose the ring of identity, other people don't know who you are; if you lose the ring of memory, you don't know who you are; and if you have the ring of invisibility, other people don't know that you are at all.
Rings of memory and forgetfulness are closely related to rings that bestow invisibility, perhaps on the principle of "out of sight, out of mind." Or, to put it differently, the ring may prove the physical identity of the wearer (if he has this ring, he is who he says he is), or conceal it from himself (when he loses it, it makes him forget who he is), or conceal it from others (it makes him invisible). The first ring that Lunette gives Yvain makes him invisible, and the second ring controls his memory of his lady.
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Lunette asks Yvain to give back the ring of invisibility when he has finished with it (when could one ever be finished with such a ring?); we never see him return it, but he does not use it again. Laudine gives him a second ring expressly in order to see if he has been unfaithful; this ring is designed not to make him remember her but, on the contrary, to protect him ("from imprisonment, illness, loss of blood, and danger in battle," according to another reading) only as long as he remembers her.
He forgets her, and so her servant woman takes the ring back again. When Yvain finally remembers his wife, it happens for no reason at all, "all of a sudden," "all at once." This first awakening is not, however, the last; the removal of the ring in this text does not restore his memory of the "adventure" with Laudine; au contraire, it drives him mad, so that he forgets again, and this second amnesia is eventually reversed by a magic ointment.
This final piece of the past becomes available to him through a magnificent metaphor for memory breaking back out through the bar riers of forgetfulness: the sword that slips through his armor. Only then does he bitterly accuse himself for making his lady hate him. The sliver of light from the past that is freed by the penetrating sword symbolizes what Freud would call "the return of the repressed."vii The breakthrough vii.
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94 is inevitable; or, as our text so wonderfully puts it, "No metal mesh is per fect." Nor, Freud would have added, any mental mesh, either. The ring is never blamed for Yvain's forgetfulness, a lapse that is highly over-determined. Even before he leaves, he equivocates, anticipating rea sons why he might not keep his promise to return, and Laudine warns him that the ring will not work if he forgets her, as she seems to know he will.
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But the text suggests another reason for Yvain to remain in court and to forget his wife: the strong pull of the male world of the Round Table. Yvain leaves Laudine not for another woman but for Gawain, with whom he later jousts in mutual disguise, "hating where he loves, loving where he hates," just as he maneuvers with his wife in ambivalence and in disguise. His horse split in two and a serpent split in two are double images of Yvain halved, torn between his love for Gawain and his love for Laudine; they supplement the violent image of his heart separated from his body when he rides away from her to join Gawain.
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She placed on his head a crown of flowers which made him instantly lose his memory; his combats, his glory, Charlemagne and his court, all vanished from his mind; he saw only Morgana, he desired nothing but her. They made love blissfully for more than a hundred years, and neither of them aged at all until, one day, Morgana forgot herself and playfully snatched the crown from his head. Ogier regained his memory and lost his content ment; he missed Charlemagne and his own relatives and friends.
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Reluctantly, Morgana agreed to let him go, at least for a time, to
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The tales of Yvain and Ogier share the themes of the ring, the jealous fairy, and the unfaithful knight; the variables are the intimately related qualities of memory and aging. The cumulative story stands as a parable for the tragic interaction of sexual love, jealousy, and betrayal, on the one hand, and aging, memory, and a ring, on the other.
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Lancelot and Guinevere
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But when the ring of the true Guinevere was found, identical to the imitation, the masquerader was unmasked. The false ring in this story proves a dud, but false rings have much better luck in stories about Guinevere not with Arthur but with Lancelot.
daughter of King Brandegoris. Then:
Spurned by Bors, Claire asked her governess to help her. The gov erness, an old lady skilled in magic, said, "Here is a ring that I will take to him on your behalf. It has such great power that he will love you whether he wants to or not." The old lady went to Bors and told him that Claire had sent him the ring in the hope that he would wear it from now on, to remember both her and his mistreatment of her.
So Bors took the ring and placed it on his finger. As soon as he had put it on, his heart changed completely. "If earlier his heart had been cold by nature and virginal in thought and deed, now it desired what it had formerly shunned." The governess took him to Claire's bedroom, where he impregnated her.
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It functions as a drug, pro ducing a spell from which, when the ring slips off his finger, he awakens and is, understandably, miffed. In 1470, Thomas Malory told the same story, mutatis mutandis, about Lancelot and Elaine, but he split the function of the alibi ring in two, giv ing half to the ring and half to a drug in the form of a magic cup of wine. The relevant episode begins at a moment long after Guinevere had lured Lancelot out of his vow of chastity and they had become lovers, cuckolding
King Arthur:
King Pelles knew that Sir Lancelot would beget upon Pelles's daugh ter, Elaine, a son who would be Sir Galahad, the knight who would win the Holy Grail. Dame Brisen, Elaine's maid, told Pelles that Sir Lancelot loved only Queen Guinevere, but that she could make him lie with Elaine and think that he was with Guinevere. She sent a man whom Lancelot knew well, with a ring that Guinevere often wore and the news that she was at a nearby castle.
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97 97 Brisen told Sir Lancelot that she would bring Guinevere to him; she brought him a cup of wine, and when he had drunk it he could not wait to go to bed; and he thought that Elaine was Queen Guinevere. They lay together until morning; and all the windows and holes of that chamber were stopped so that no daylight came in. But as soon as Lancelot opened the window the enchantment was gone, and he knew his mistake.
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He needs no deeper magic to make him forget (like Bors) his vow of fidelity to someone else (God or Guinevere, as the case might be). Guinevere is at last persuaded that Lancelot was truly fooled; the ring gets him off the hook. In any case she may take comfort from the fact that he regards Elaine as merely the second most beautiful woman in the world.
Elaine, too, is innocent; she is merely her father's dupe. All is well, for a while, until Lancelot lets Elaine trick him into bed again-but that is another story.
Tristan and Isolde
The ring as a sign of identity and memory again works in tandem with a drug of forgetfulness in the tales of Tristan and Isolde, of which there are many versions. I will concentrate on the German text by Gottfried von Strassburg (1210), supplementing it with several others, particularly those of the Norman poet Béroul (c. 1191) and Thomas of Britanny (c.
1160 ce); and I will call the lovers by their German names.23 The tale of Tristan and 98
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When Mark could no longer pretend that he did not know about the affair with Isolde, Tristan fled from Cornwall to Arundel, where he lived with Isolde of the White Hands (the other Isolde). She fell deeply in love with him and constantly pressed him to marry her. He stayed with her for some time, but he resisted the temptation to sleep with her or marry her.
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(In Eilhart von Oberg's Tristant und Isalde, c. 1180, Caerdin, the brother of the other Isolde, tells Tristan that Isolde has prob ably forgotten him,29 thus projecting upon Isolde the forgetfulness that is in fact Tristan's proven weakness.) Eventually, Tristan yields to the urgings of the other Isolde, and marries her. But as soon as Tristan betrays Isolde with the other Isolde (by marrying the other Isolde), he betrays the other Isolde with Isolde (by refusing to consummate his marriage with the other Isolde).
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And it is in this second betrayal (or, if you prefer, un-betrayal) that a ring plays a decisive role.
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These medieval noblewomen knew their men all too well. Isolde's fears are well founded: though Tristan wears what is supposed to be a ring of remembrance (and though, according to the Norwegian adaptation of the story, he later had it engraved with the words of the oath that Isolde spoke at their final parting, when they vowed eternal love and fidelity),32 he forgets Isolde while he is wearing it, for he has it on when he promises to marry the other Isolde; only when it falls off does he remem ber Isolde.
In the twelfth-century La Folie Tristan d'Oxford, too, she gives him a ring; he leaves her and she thinks he is dead and that (when he returns in disguise) the man before her is a fool pretending to be Tristan- until he shows her the ring. Gottfried's text does not go on long enough to tell us what becomes of the ring, but Thomas's does. After Tristan has married the other Isolde, he goes to bed with his bride on the wedding night: They bring the maiden to bed, and Tristan has himself divested of the tunic that he is wearing, which is tight around the wrists.
As they take off his robe they pull from his finger the ring that Isolde had given him on the last day he ever saw her. Tristan sees the ring and enters on a new train of thought. Seeing the ring on his finger, he recalls the agreement which he made at their parting, when he had to go away, and he heaves a deep sigh from his heart: "I do not know to which I should be false, since I must trick, betray, and deceive one, or, so it seems, play false to both together!
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For this girl has come so close to me that Isolde is already betrayed.
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It sounded on the stones, and Tristan saw it. For he remembered the day when Isolde the Fair had given him the ring, and he was bitter with himself that ever he had accused her of treason; for now it was he that had betrayed, and he was bitter with himself also in pity for this new wife and her simplicity and beauty.
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In a French poem that nar rates just this one episode, Tristan himself comes to Isolde, in disguise. When she fails to recognize him but the dog does, Tristan complains to the dog (disguising his voice): "You have bidden me better welcome than she whom I so loved. Will she at least recognize this ring which she gave me?
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This little ring of jasper has never left me." At this point, Isolde sees the ring, opens wide her arms, and says, "Come! Take me, Tristan!" But Tristan continues to complain, this time to her, in his own voice: "Friend, how could you so long have failed to recognize me, longer than this very dog? Do you not feel how 102
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One day Tristan was mortally wounded by a poisoned spear. He knew that he would die of the poison if he did not send for Isolde, who had magic healing powers, but he could not do that himself. He sent Caerdin to bring Isolde to him secretly, saying: "Take this ring with you-it is our secret token… .
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Be sure that she sees this ring; for as soon as she has set eyes on it and recognized you, she will seek a subtle pretext for talking with you. Hide it from your sister so that she may have no suspicion of our love. I cannot love your sister, nor shall I ever be able to love her, or any other, so long as I shall love the Queen.
Isolde arrived, took his dead body in her arms, and died at his side.47 Tristan dies as he lives; his final words are a bitter pun, "Dearest Isolde," referring ostensibly to the woman with him, but actually to the woman who is not with him. He had betrayed them both and together they killed him.
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Isolde. Wagner’s Tristan is never unfaithful to Isolde, and Wagner’s
Isolde shuns the bed of her husband King Mark; thus Wagner preserves the physical fidelity, if not the moral fiber, of the two notorious adulter ers. Most relevant to our inquiry, Tristan is entirely exculpated by a love potion, which the maid, Brangane, slips into their drinks (in place of the poison that Isolde had instructed her to use). The magically spiked drink, like ordinary wine in other stories, supplies the irrational rationalization for their behavior: why would they fall in love, unless they were drunk (or drugged, or magically cursed), when Isolde hated Tristan and was betrothed to another man?
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The potion occurs in some of the earlier versions, too, and Béroul puts a spin on its effects, stipulating that Isolde's mother made its spell to last only three years. At the exact moment the time was up, both of the lovers were assailed by second thoughts, not about the morality or legal conse quences of their actions, but about the inconvenience: Tristan suddenly longed to be back at court (just as Yvain did)ix and wanted to give Isolde back to Mark if he could; Isolde began to mutter to herself that she had wasted her youth-or, as we would say, given him the best years of her life.
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Like Arthur, however, Mark is eventually forced to punish the lovers, and the story always ends in their death.
The Ring on the Statue
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Eichendorff (in Das Marmorbild).51
William of Malmsbury told the story in 1125,52 and Robert Burton retold it in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), in a story that he dates to 1058: "A young Gentleman of Rome, the same day that he was mar ried, after dinner with the Bride and his friends went a walking into the fields, and towards evening to the Tennis Court to rec reate himself; whilst he played, he put his ring upon the finger of a statue of Venus, which was thereby, made in brass; after he had sufficiently played, and now made an end of his sport, he came to fetch his ring, but Venus had bowed her finger in, and he could not get it off. Whereupon loath to make his company tarry at present, there he left it, intending to fetch it the next day, or at some more convenient time, went thence to supper, and so to bed.
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When he went to retrieve it, he found the marble finger bent, the hand closed upon the ring; when he went back to it later, the hand was open and the ring was gone. That night, in bed with Isabel, he felt, though neither he nor Isabel could see it, a cold carcass between them; it embraced him and kissed him and told him that he was her husband, wed by the ring. This happened a second night, until Rupert sought the help of a holy man named Austin, who conjured up a lascivious female fiend at a crossroad.
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Shakespeare’s Rings II: The Lying Ring
Robert Burton's version of the ring on the statue was composed in 1621, some five years after the death of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare participates in many of the same mythologies that underlie the medieval Romances, par ticularly the role of jewelry in supporting true or false allegations of adultery.x Cymbeline and The Merchant of Venice make fine use of this mythology. Even a greatly simplified summary of Cymbeline (1608-10), concen trating only on the theme of falsely incriminating jewelry, is still quite complicated: Imogen married Posthumus and gave him a diamond ring, whereupon he gave her a bracelet.
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Iachimo bet Posthumus that Imogen would commit adultery with him, Iachimo; he persuaded Posthumus to wager his diamond ring. Iachimo won his bet by entering Imogen's bedroom, hiding in a locked chest when she was asleep, then emerging and taking detailed notes on the contents of the room and the marks on her body, and stealing the bracelet. When Iachimo presented these "proofs," Posthumus resisted at first but was finally persuaded by Iachimo and gave him the ring.
Then Posthumus sent a man to kill Imogen, but the messenger spared her; she disguised herself as a man and escaped. Eventually, Imogen and Posthumus, both in disguise, were brought into the pres ence of the king. When Imogen saw Iachimo wearing the ring, she demanded that he tell where he got it (5.5.137: "That diamond upon your finger, say / How came it yours?").
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This prompted Iachimo to tell everyone the story of the falsification, which vindicated Imogen at last.
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107 107 Imogen says, as she gives Posthumus the ring at the start, "This diamond was my mother's: take it, heart; / But keep it till you woo another wife, / When Imogen is dead" (1.2.42-44). And he gives her in return the brace let that he calls "a manacle of love" (1.2.53). Thus Imogen unknowingly predicts the circumstance under which Posthumus will give away her ring, and he uses a metaphor of imprisonment that betrays the sort of jealousy that leads a man to lock up his wife.
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The double jewelry-the ring and bracelet-is highly sexualized: Posthumus says to Iachimo, "My ring I hold dear as my finger, 'tis part of it" (1.4.134), and Iachimo says, producing the bracelet for Posthumus, "It must be married / To that your diamond" (2.4.99). When Iachimo springs his trap, Posthumus at first dismisses the evi dence about the contents of the room ("This you might have heard of here, by me, / Or by some other" [2.4.77-79]), and even when Iachimo shows him the bracelet, Posthumus's friend Philario, invoking common sense, reasons with him, "It may be probable she lost it; or / Who knows if one of her women, being corrupted, / Hath stol'n it from her?" (2.4.115-117).
(Philario, at least, has read Othello, in which this is precisely what happens; Imogen's bracelet is the equivalent of the smoking handkerchief in Othello.) Agreeing with this at first, Posthumus says to Iachimo, "Render to me some corporal sign about her, / More evident than this; for this was stolen" (2.4.119-120), but then he rejects this argument, concluding: "She would not lose it; her attendants are / All sworn and honorable: they induced to steal it? No, he hath enjoy'd her" (2.4.124-126).
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And when Iachimo describes the mole under Imogen's left breast, claiming to have kissed it, and concludes, "You do remember / This stain upon her?" Posthumus replies, "Ay, and it doth confirm / Another stain" (2.4.137-140). Yet the vil lain is unmasked in the end. This is Othello as told by Melina Mercouri58- everyone goes to the seashore-or by Gioachino Rossini, in whose 1816 opera version Desdemona persuades Othello of her innocence and survives.
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The Merchant of Venice
In The Merchant of Venice (1596-7), the plot involving rings (supplement ing the more famous plots involving the three caskets and Shylock's pound of flesh) could be summarized like this: Portia marries Bassanio, and Nerissa, Portia's lady-in-waiting, mar ries Gratiano; each woman gives her husband a ring.
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108 men sail away to aid their friend Antonio, the women dress as a lawyer and her clerk and follow them. The "lawyer" saves Antonio's life and demands Bassanio's ring as payment; Bassanio resists but gives it to her; similarly, Nerissa gets Gratiano's ring. When the men return, the women berate them for giving away their rings, presum ably to women, but finally reveal the story of their disguises and give back the rings.
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The ring plot is echoed in the other two plots: when Portia's suitors are asked to choose between caskets of gold, silver, and lead in order to win her, Bassanio, wisely choosing the lead casket (in which Portia's portrait is found), remarks: "The world is still deceived with ornament" (3.2.74), not knowing that he, too, will be deceived with a (golden) ornament. Shylock's insistence that flesh can be the equivalent of gold resonates with the repeated statements that rings are part of the body,xi as when Portia refers to Gratiano's ring as "your wife's first gift, / A thing stuck on with oaths upon your finger / And so riveted with faith upon your flesh" (5.1.165-168).
The image of a ring as a part of one's flesh is echoed when Bassanio, unable to produce the ring that Portia had given him, says, "Why, I were best to cut my left hand off / And swear I lost the ring defending it" (5.1.177-178). But the rings also carry their conventional meanings of sexual posses sion and betrayal. When Portia gives her ring to Bassanio she says, "This house, these servants, and this same myself / Are yours,-my lord's!-I give them with this ring, / Which when you part from, lose, or give away, / Let it presage the ruin of your love" (3.2.170-173).
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As is so often the case, even as she gives the ring to him she rightly predicts that he will give it away, and that she will take that as a sign that he no longer loves her. His reply also anticipates the loss, even as he denies it: "But when this ring / Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence" (3.2.183-184). The rings are inscribed with short mottos called "posies." When Gratiano admits he gave away Nerissa's ring he calls it "a hoop of gold, a paltry ring, / That she did give me, whose posy was / For all the world like cutler's poetry / Upon a knife, 'Love me, and leave me not' " (5.1.146-150), thus mocking the inscription and, presumably, the sentiment it conveys.
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Nerissa replies in defense of that sentiment: "What talk you of the posy or the value? / You swore to me, when I did give it you, / That you would wear it till your xi.
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109 109 hour of death, / And that it should be with you in your grave" (5.1.151-154). Portia, too, defends all that the ring stands for: "If you had known the vir tue of the ring, / Or half her worthiness that gave the ring, / Or your own honor to contain the ring, / You would not then have parted with the ring" (5.1.199-203). Above all, the rings are taken as direct proof that a sexual act has taken place (and, later, that another will take place).
First, the women pretend to believe that their husbands slept with the people to whom they gave their rings. Then Portia links her own sexuality with her ring, as she threat ens, "By heaven, I will ne'er come in your bed / Until I see the ring!" (5.1.191), a line worthy of Doris Day.xii Then, speaking of the "lawyer" to whom Bassanio says he gave the ring, she swears: "Since he hath got the jewel that I loved, / And that which you did swear to keep for me, / I will become as liberal as you, / I'll not deny him anything I have, / No, not my body nor my husband's bed" (5.1.224-230).
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Portia invokes the paradigm of obsessive jealousy so often associated with the controlling symbolism of the ring, even while she evokes the many stories in which women sleep with men in exchange for rings. And then, when she gives the ring back to him, she says, "By this ring, the doctor lay with me" (5.1.259). The final line of the play (5.1.307) also makes an off-color joke about rings, punning on both "sore" (in the sense of the adverb "severely" as well as the adjec tive "painful") and "ring" (the ornament and the woman's sexual organ):xiii "Well, while I live I'll fear no other thing / So sore as keeping safe Nerissa's ring." The defense rests.
5. Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
The love triangle formed by Mark, Isolde, and Tristan parallels, in a num ber of details (you might say forms a triangle with), two other great medi eval triangles, that of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot (which we have encountered in passing)i and that of Gunther, Brünnhilde, and Siegfried (a triangle somewhat squared by Gutrune, Gunther's sister), which we will consider now. As the transactions with rings in the many variants of this story become so complex that even the actors within the story cannot always keep track of them, the reader may be forgiven for having to check back from time to time.
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Siegfried and Brünnhilde
The love triangle formed by Mark, Isolde, and Tristan parallels, in a num ber of details (you might say forms a triangle with), two other great medi eval triangles, that of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot (which we have encountered in passing)i and that of Gunther, Brünnhilde, and Siegfried (a triangle somewhat squared by Gutrune, Gunther's sister), which we will consider now. As the transactions with rings in the many variants of this story become so complex that even the actors within the story cannot always keep track of them, the reader may be forgiven for having to check back from time to time.
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The story is found in many different texts. We will consider here three thirteenth-century sources-the Norse Thidreks Saga1 and Völsunga Saga,2 and the Austrian Nibelungenlied3-and two from the nineteenth century:
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Henrik Ibsen’s Norwegian The Vikings at Helgeland (1858) and Richard
Wagner's German opera cycle, colloquially known as The Ring (more fully, The Ring of the Nibelung), which he produced between 1848 and 1876.4 The characters have different names in different texts, but to simplify matters I will generally call them by the names they have in Wagner: Siegfried,5
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Gunther, Siegfried wins Brünnhilde for Gunther. And third, Siegfried’s
In some versions, Siegfried takes the ring from Brünnhilde, in some he gives it to her as a kind of "linen- fee" or "morning-gift" in exchange for her virginity, if he deflowers her, or as a betrothal ring, if he doesn't. In others he does both, either taking back the same ring he has given her, or giving her a second ring after taking hers (but where does the second ring come from?). In addition to the five full texts that we will consider, there are a number of fragmentary ones, as well as "the missing and hypothetical 'Great Lay of Sigurd,' "11 known only from accounts in other ancient sources.
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Since this is apparently the text that would have told us precisely what happened to Sigurd in bed with Brynhild, I think "Great Lay" is a doubly significant title (though it might better have been called the "Great Lay of Brynhild"). The extant sources make various guesses about this central episode, the irritating grain of sand that keeps generating different pearls of variants. Tom Shippey summarizes the problems well: "But what did happen in that lost, original, complete version?
The story has baffled ancient and modern rewriters alike. In brief, it is agreed that King Gunnar asked his friend Sigurd to win for him the valkyrie Brynhild behind her ring of fire, and he did so, tak ing Gunnar's shape. Why, if he had already woken her and been betrothed to her?
He was given a potion of oblivion by Gunnar's witch-wife mother, and promised the hand of Gunnar's sister Gudrún. Just by crossing the ring of fire, or was something else involved? … And the critical point: how does Brynhild find out?
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Again, there is general agreement that Gudrún, provoked by a clash over precedence, tells her, and proves it by 112
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As a sexual predator, who furthermore betrays his friend and blood-brother. The neat solution has therefore proved unac ceptable."13 The neat but unacceptable solution is that Sigurd/Siegfried knowingly does all these things. The texts therefore keep trying to cloud his moral responsibility with rings and potions.
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Wagner's opera Siegfried was caught up in this quandary on the lev els of both text and hypertext: Siegfried cannot entirely repress (to use Freud's term)v his personal past (his mistreatment of Brünnhilde) nor can Wagner repress Siegfried's textual past (the Norse and German texts that tell of that mistreatment). The history of the text re-emerges, summoned by the magic ring; the repressed historical tradition returns to stain the hoped-for moral purity of the noble German hero. The two repressions- of Siegfried's past and the Nibelungenlied's past-converge and emerge when Wagner transforms the ambiguous past of the textual tradition into a metaphor for the inescapable ambiguities of the personal past of his ii.
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Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
The ring of golden fire that returns to the Rhine in the final flood is the return of the repressed on a cosmic scale. Let us trace the ring through five stages of the myth, before turning to another Wagnerian ring saga, the tale of Wieland the Smith, which sheds light from a different angle on the sexual connotations of the ring.
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Stage One: Thidreks Saga
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He mounts the horse and rides away. After leaving Brünnhilde, Siegfried meets Gutrune and marries her. Then Siegfried persuades Brünnhilde to marry Gunther.
On the wedding night Brünnhilde will not allow Gunther to consummate the marriage, and so the two men decide that Siegfried should deflower Brünnhilde but conceal his identity from her. Siegfried swiftly rapes Brünnhilde and, when morning comes, draws a gold ring from her finger and substitutes another. Gunther and Siegfried swap clothes again, and no one else knows what has happened.
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Siegfried later gives Brünnhilde's ring to his wife, Gutrune. When Brünnhilde sees her ring on the hand of Gutrune and learns that it was a gift from Siegfried, not Gunther, she realizes that it was Siegfried, not Gunther, who had raped her. This text makes a distinction between the sin of the deception (and rape) and the sin of adding insult to injury by telling people about it.
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Siegfried promises Gunther that he will not rape and tell. Some time later, however, the two women fight. When Brünnhilde insists that Gunther had taken her maidenhead, which she believes to be the truth, Gutrune displays Brünnhilde's ring as proof that it was Siegfried, not Gunther, who first took Brünnhilde, got her ring, and then gave it to Gutrune.
The evidence of the ring explains, apparently, how Gutrune knew about Siegfried's trick without him telling her: he gave her Brünnhilde's ring. The reader might well wonder why in the world a man would take a ring from a woman he has raped and give it to his wife, and all I can say is that other men in this 114
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The Ring of Truth
114 corpus of stories do it too.vi Moreover, in this particular case it may well be that the real Siegfried, the unbewitched Siegfried, really does want his wife to know, really does want to blow up the false marriage and return to his true love. And it is this Siegfried who works, beneath the radar of the magic spell, to make the ring tell the true story.
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Stage Two: Völsunga Saga
In the Völsunga Saga, Siegfried again kills a dragon and bathes in the dragon's blood, but this time the dragon is named Fafner, and Siegfried takes a golden ring from Fafner's hoard. He also obtains the great horse Grani16 (which, in the Thidreks Saga, he got later, from Brünnhilde). Only then does Siegfried encounter Brünnhilde.
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He comes to a mountain surmounted by a castle glowing with fire. He rides Grani through the ring of flames, enters, and awakens the sleeping Brünnhilde. He swears that he will marry her or no one else, gives her the dragon's golden ring as a token of his love, and rides away.
Perhaps under growing Christian influence and in order to avoid the promiscuity of the Thidreks Saga (in which both men bed Brünnhilde), the Völsunga Saga goes out of its way to insist that Siegfried most definitely does not rape Brünnhilde; he places his sword between them in the night (a symbolic action that we have also seen Tristan employ, when he had been Isolde's lover).vii
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But now Grimhild, the mother of Gutrune and Gunther, drugs
After this he rides away back through the fire to his companions, and he and Gunther change back into their own shapes.
Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
115 115 in effect, and like Dushyanta,viii a man who forgets his wife when he loses his ring. Eventually, Siegfried awakens from the drug. But only some time later does Brünnhilde learn the truth: One day, as they were bathing in the river, Gutrune told Brünnhilde that it was Siegfried, not Gunther, who "rode the wavering flames when you thought it was King Gunther.
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He lay with you and took from your hand the ring [that] you can now see here for yourself." Brünnhilde recognized the ring and became pale as death. She upbraided Gutrune for marrying Siegfried when he had promised to marry her, Brünnhilde, and she accused Gutrune of betraying her, because Siegfried was the better man. (When Gutrune had ear lier told Siegfried that she meant to ask Brünnhilde whom she had most wanted to marry, Siegfried asked her not to do it, or she would be sorry.) Brünnhilde also cursed Grimhild, because "she brought Siegfried the ruinous ale, so that he could not remember my name." Then Brünnhilde went to bed and lay as if dead.
When Gunther came to her she said, "What did you do with the ring I gave you? My foster-father gave me this ring at our last parting." Gunther did not answer this, and she then told him that she knew that Siegfried had won her, riding through the fire, and that she loved only Siegfried and greatly regretted that she was not married to him. Brünnhilde lies doubly, in an attempt to entrap Gunther in a lie, when she says that her foster-father gave her the ring that she gave to him.
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As we know, it was Siegfried who gave it to her (in their first encounter) and it was Siegfried-as-Gunther, not Gunther, to whom she gave it in the sec ond encounter. Gunther could not possibly begin to answer her question. Clearly, the ring is playing a more important role here, and its implications are becoming more complex, and murkier.
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The Ring of Truth
Ring ladder 346
This change greatly mitigates Siegfried's guilt, since he now cannot be said to two-time Brünnhilde. When Gunther says he wants to win Brünnhilde, Siegfried agrees to help him, on condition that, if he succeeds, Gunther will let Siegfried marry Gutrune. Siegfried then uses his magic cloak to stand beside Gunther in a contest to win Brünnhilde, invisibly augmenting Gunther's ability to hurl a boulder and leap a great distance.
When (as in the Thidreks Saga) Gunther is unable to force Brünnhilde to submit to him on their wedding night, he gets Siegfried to masquerade as him, wearing the magic cloak. But this time he makes Siegfried promise not to actually deflower her. Gunther watches from behind a curtain as Siegfried subdues Brünnhilde after a violent fight and draws a golden ring from her finger in such a way that she does not notice it.
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He also takes her belt, a symbol of defloration, but he does not deflower her. Gunther then takes Siegfried's place and consummates his marriage with Brünnhilde, whereupon she loses her supernatural strength. Later, Siegfried gives Brünnhilde's ring to Gutrune.
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At this point the poet says, "I do not know whether it was his pride made him do it. Later he gave [it] to his wife, and well did he rue it!" And indeed he does, as he does in the Thidreks Saga, where, as here, the ring comes not from a dragon but from Brünnhilde. Years later, the women quarrel, and Gutrune mocks Brünnhilde, say ing, "My dear husband Siegfried was the first to enjoy your lovely body, since it was not my brother who took your maidenhead.
It was a vile trick… . I prove it with this gold ring on my fin ger here which my sweetheart brought me when he first slept with you." Brünnhilde summons Gunther and the court and says, "I accuse your sis ter before you of having said for all to hear that her husband made me his paramour." Gunther asks Siegfried, in public court, to swear-not that he didn't do it but that he didn't tell: "My lady Brünnhilde tells me some tale of your having boasted you were the first to enjoy her lovely person-so your wife, lady Gutrune, avers." And Siegfried replies, "I am willing in the presence of your vassals to rebut with my most solemn oaths that I ever- said this to her." In this way, neither Siegfried nor Gunther ever actually
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Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
117 117 says that Siegfried did or did not take Brünnhilde's maidenhead, but their carefully hedged words allow both women to go on thinking that he did. Brünnhilde is totally powerless at this moment in the Nibelungenlied; she never accuses either of the men of doing her any harm, but merely brings the equivalent of a libel suit against Gutrune (which she loses). Brünnhilde suffers public humiliation on two counts: that Siegfried tricked her and that his wife has been shooting off her mouth about it.
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Gunther-who in the Thidreks Saga made Siegfried promise not to tell
that he had deflowered Brünnhilde and in the Nibelungenlied not to do it- hedges. Evidently he does not want the truth about his quasi-cuckolding to be made public. As for Siegfried, presumably he merely gave Gutrune the ring and she figured it out herself, so he wasn't actually lying.
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It may be the literal truth that he never did actually tell Gutrune anything, but of course he let the ring speak for him. As we have seen, rings often supply the voices for women's sexual organs.ix
Stage Four: Ibsen’s The Vikings at Helgeland
The Vikings at Helgeland, a play in four acts that Henrik Ibsen wrote in 1858, works fascinating changes into the plot. Now Brünnhilde (here called Hjördis) is the foster sister of Gutrune (Dagny). Ibsen's plot turns upon an intimate conversation between the sisters that contains a stunningly frank piece of sexual psychology.
Hjördis is a proto-feminist (a figure we know from other, later Ibsen plays) and the mother of a little boy. As for the ring, though the women wear it on their arms, Ibsen always refers to it as a ring of gold rather than a bracelet, surely in homage to the ancient myth. Here is how the part of the plot that concerns us unfolds: One night, when Hjördis (Brünnhilde) was drinking with Sigurd (Siegfried) and Gunnar (Gunther), and was "heated with the mead," she vowed that no warrior could have her as his wife unless he could kill the white bear that guarded her bedroom door and then carry her away in his arms.
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Gunnar confessed to Sigurd that he couldn't live without Hjördis but did not dare to attack the bear. So Sigurd, wearing Gunnar's armor, killed the bear. Hjördis thought he was Gunnar and gave him a golden ring from her arm.
The Ring of Truth
118 night together in her bedroom, and before dawn, he carried her to Gunnar's ship. Sigurd then married Dagny (Gunnar's sister) when Gunnar married Hjördis, and Sigurd gave Hjördis's ring to Dagny. Gunnar and Hjördis had a son, Egil.
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But Sigurd was secretly in love with Hjördis, and she with him, though they expressed only hostility to one another. Trouble arose between Sigurd and Gunnar, and Sigurd told Dagny that it was he, not Gunnar, who had killed the bear and taken the ring, which he begged her to throw away "to the very bottom of the sea," so that Hjördis would never see it. He admitted that he had spent the night with Hjördis, but insisted that he had kept his sword between them all night long.
Dagny refused to get rid of the bracelet-she said it was too precious to her, because of her love for him-but she promised to keep it hidden from all eyes, and never to reveal what he had told her. One day, however, Hjördis asked Dagny if she had ever felt an irresistible urge to fight alongside the men, and when Dagny replied, "Never! I, a woman?" Hjördis said, "A woman, a woman … !
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Ah, nobody knows what a woman is capable of!" But then, without drawing breath, she told Dagny that only once in her life had she felt a "shuddering ecstasy"19 in a man's arms, as her blood burned and her bosom throbbed, and that was the night when Gunnar killed the bear and crushed her in his arms until his breastplate burst. Knowing, as Hjördis did not, that it was Sigurd with her that night, Dagny became suspicious and jealous. Hjördis felt ashamed of having been married by force, and kept urging Gunnar to do deeds of valor that would bring her honor to wipe out her shame.
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When they were again all drinking together, Hjördis insisted that Gunnar was a greater hero than Sigurd, since Gunnar was the only one who had been able to kill the bear. Dagny, unable to brook this, shouted out, "The sword that lay drawn between you and the bear-slayer hangs at my husband's side-and the ring you took from your arm you gave to Sigurd. Here it is!" Gunnar admitted that this was true, and that he was a coward.
Hjördis and Sigurd confessed their love for one another and she persuaded him that they must both die, that it was not possible for them to stay married to people they did not love. Seeing in the sky a vision of two black horses approaching in the gathering storm - "One for you, and one for me!"-she killed Sigurd, who said to her,
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Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
119 119 as he died, "My life has been heavy from the hour I tore you out of my own heart and gave you to Gunnar." She cried out, "There is no hiding-place for me-except at the bottom of the sea!" and threw herself over a cliff. Learning that Hjördis had killed Sigurd, Dagny said, "So she hated him that much," and Gunnar concluded, "Then she loved me after all." The child Egil had a vision of his mother, Hjördis, riding off at the head of a herd of black horses, bearing the dead to Valhalla.
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Ibsen has complicated Hjördis's jealousy of Dagny by revealing her frus trated desire to fight like a man, indeed her scorn of traditional women's roles. Hjördis assures Sigurd that she much prefers death to the fate that would have been hers if they had married and she "had sat in your homestead weaving linen and wool for you and bearing you children." And when Sigurd protests that she is "soul-sick," and warns her that their enemies may be killing her son, she replies, "Let him die-my shame dies with him!" Though she herself throws down the gauntlet of physical conquest to any man who wants to marry her, she later resents having been married "by force." Ibsen directly and brilliantly links this twisted, ambivalent feminism to her sexual frustration-more precisely, to her subconscious knowledge (which Dagny understands as Hjördis does not) that she was sexually fulfilled only with Sigurd, never with Gunnar.
When Dagny finally blurts out the truth of the ring, she is revealing the truth of Hjördis's sexuality. Ibsen's Sigurd is exonerated in his sexual masquerade with Hjördis not by being drugged himself but, rather, by finding Hjördis drunk, appar ently too "heated by mead" either to know who she is in bed with or to remember, later, whom she gave her ring/bracelet to. And it is Dagny, not Sigurd, who, also apparently in her cups, breaks her promise not to tell about the seduction by proxy.
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Sigurd is thus exculpated of the sin of indis cretion by both of the women he sleeps with: Hjördis is in a mental fog the night they go to bed together, and Dagny indiscreetly blurts out the secret. (Though Sigurd has also committed an indiscretion in revealing it to her, he is not, in this text, violating a promise to Gunnar not to tell it.) Hjördis too reveals a secret, though she (unconsciously again) doesn't know what she is saying, when she speaks of her sexual experience with the man that she doesn't realize is Sigurd.
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But was Sigurd telling Dagny the truth about the sword in the bed, or just cribbing an excuse from the Völsunga Saga (or, indeed, from Tristan, 120
The Ring of Truth
120 who put the sword between himself and Isolde after they had in fact become lovers)? Did he merely hold Hjördis in his arms to produce her sexual ecstasy, or did he do more, as Dagny fears? The ring/bracelet as usual is taken as proof of the consummation of a sexual act, but, as we know, it often lies.
This golden band shares the implications of Polycrates's ring:x Sigurd says it should stay forever in the bottom of the sea (where Hjördis says she, too, belongs).
Stage Five: Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung
The ring itself comes from the bottom of the sea and returns to it in the end, in Wagner's version of the story. Wagner's opera Siegfried premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on August 16, 1876. It is the third in the tetralogy of The Ring.
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The basic plot follows that of the Völsunga Saga, with only minor modifications, though it adds significant psychologi cal details that go a long way toward cracking the Norse code of the old story. Siegfried gets the ring from the dragon Fafner (and bathes in his blood), but now he also gets from him the Tarnhelm (the descendant of the Nibelungenlied's Tarnkappe), the magic helmet that grants the wearer the powers of invisibility, shape-shifting, and instantaneous long-distance travel. He does not, however, know the powers that these magic objects have.
Then, undisguised, unmagicked, he wins Brünnhilde for himself, climbing up through the ring of fire to get to her. He finds her asleep in her armor and mistakes her for a man until he removes her armor (and remarks, "This is no man!"20), whereupon she awakens and they fall in love. Perhaps because of some foreboding, he promises always to remem ber her, while she, with the same foreboding of forgetfulness that ani mates not merely the Brünnhilde of the Völsunga Saga but Isolde and the Lady of the Fountain,xi asks him merely to "remember yourself," and, she adds, "Remember the fire that blazed around my rock." He gives her the ring that he had taken from the dragon, and in exchange Brünnhilde gives him her horse Grane (an atavism held over from the Thidreks Saga horse, Grani).21
Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
Gunther hears of Brünnhilde and wants to marry her but has been warned of the fire that encircles her rock, and so he gets Siegfried to win her for him, bribing Siegfried with the promise of his sister Gutrune. No mother appears in this version, and so the siblings them selves (abetted by their half-brother, Hagen) make Siegfried fall in love with Gutrune, drugging him with a magic drink that makes him forget that he has already married Brünnhilde and given her a ring.
He is also magically transformed (by the Tarnhelm, whose powers Hagen explains to him) into the shape of Gunther, so that Brünnhilde does not know him. The Tarnhelm also transports him instantly to the flame-encircled mountain. Siegfried-as-Gunther passes through the flames and accosts Brünnhilde.
After a violent struggle, he seizes her and forcibly takes the ring from her, saying, "Now you are mine, Brünnhilde, Gunther's bride." He places his sword between them in the night. Then he brings her to Gunther and the two men change back into their own forms. When Brünnhilde arrives to marry Gunther, she is stunned to see that Siegfried doesn't recognize her, is about to marry Gutrune, and is wearing the ring that he gave her and that Gunther (as she thinks) has just robbed her of.
She faints, into Siegfried's arms, but quickly recovers when she realizes that he does not know who she is. The argument here is not between the two women, as in the other vari ants, but between Brünnhilde and her two lovers, Siegfried and Gunther. Gunther, genuinely perplexed, insists that he never gave a ring to Siegfried, but then he asks her, "But-do you really know the ring well?" This is a reasonable challenge: is it perhaps the wrong ring?
She does not answer, and Siegfried insists that he never took the ring from any woman; he got it from a dragon. Gradually Brünnhilde realizes what has happened, and she cries out, "Betrayed! Shamefully betrayed!" And, to Gunther, "Away, betrayer, betrayer of your self." The argument between Siegfried and Brünnhilde goes on and on like an Abbott and Costello routine ("You took that ring from me." "What ring?" "That ring." "This ring?" "Yes." "No, I didn't." "Yes, you did").
The inan ity arises because Siegfried and Brünnhilde are talking past one another, switching back and forth between the two different seduction episodes that Wagner has conflated: the first, when Siegfried-as-Siegfried rode through the fire and gave her the ring (which he is talking about), and the second, when Siegfried-as-Gunther took the ring from her by force (which she is talking about).22 122
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122 Later, Siegfried tells Gunther that he had not betrayed him; he wonders if somehow the Tarnhelm had let Brünnhilde see through the disguise. (This is Wagner's much-reduced version of what other tellings treat as Siegfried's broken promise not to tell about the trick-which Siegfried hedges, in those versions, by giving Gutrune the telltale ring). Eventually, Hagen kills Siegfried by striking him in the one place that missed the magic treatment when he bathed in the dragon's blood.
Siegfried's betrayal of himself, as well as his beloved and his friend, is the moral equivalent of that one vulnerable spot on his back. Through that tiny physical and moral opening (like the gap in Yvain's armorxii), the spear pierces and kills him. Brünnhilde takes her ring from Siegfried's corpse and puts it on her finger.
She calls for her horse, Grane; lights the pyre; cries, "Siegfried, your wife greets you!"; and rides Grane back into the circle of flames, to join Siegfried in death.
The Twilight of the Ring
The ring that Wagner's Siegfried gets from the dragon Fafner has a com plex history: together with the Tarnhelm, it was made out of gold that origi nally belonged to the Rhinemaidens. The dwarf Alberich stole the gold from them and forced another dwarf to forge from it both the Tarnhelm and a ring that is said to give its owner the power to conquer the world. The gods stole the ring (and the Tarnhelm) from Alberich and gave them to the giants Fafner and Fasolt in order to ransom Freyja, the goddess of love, fertility, and youth.
Alberich had put a curse on the ring: whoever obtains it will die. As if to prove the power of the curse, the giants quar reled violently over the ring. Fafner killed Fasolt and was transformed into a dragon, and that's the dragon that Siegfried kills to get the ring (and the Tarnhelm).
Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
Together in Wagner, as they always are, twins born from the same magic source, the ring and the Tarnhelm do indeed convey great power. Wagner combined Polycrates's signet ring of destructive power with Shakuntala's wedding ring of love,xiii but he set the two functions against one another: those who would use it for power must renounce love. In Norse mythology, the giant who built Valhalla had asked for Freyja, god dess of love and sexuality, as his payment, but in order to keep Freyja, the gods killed him.
In Wagner's telling, the gods do not kill the giant build ers (now there are two) but offer them the gold ring instead of Freyja; thus Fafner must, like Alberich, renounce love to have the ring. Yet when Siegfried gets the ring, it does not seem to stop him from falling in love with two women and getting into the kinds of trouble that sort of thing usually entails. Most rings are for winning love; some are for forgetting love.
How, then, you may ask, can Siegfried fall for Gutrune while Brünnhilde still has the ring? Perhaps the answer is that Siegfried, the real Siegfried, is not unfaithful; only when he forgets himself (i.e., becomes Gunther) can he forget her. The bewitched Siegfried, who magically for gets Brünnhilde, has not only taken leave of his senses, he's taken leave of himself.
The Ring of Truth
124 On the other hand, a man can harness the power of the ring only by giving up love altogether (though not sex, as the dwarf Alberich points out in a fine distinction: women will be forced by the lust of the dwarf whom they do not love). In Die Valkyrie (the second opera in the tetralogy), Wotan himself says he got tired of love (mere physical love) and went on to power, and he admits that he used love to force Erda (the earth goddess on whom he fathers the Valkyries) to tell him what he needed to know to maintain his power.
Siegfried gives the ring to Brünnhilde (whom he has both forced and won) as a token "of my faithfulness to you," and when one of the other Valkyries asks her to give the ring back to the Rhinemaidens, Brünnhilde says, "But Siegfried's love shines out of it to me, Siegfried's love!" (The ring, as usual, lies; Siegfried-bewitched-is soon to make love to Gutrune.) When Siegfried-as-Gunther comes to win her, Brünnhilde threateningly extends her finger with Siegfried's ring-his ring-and says, "You will never force me to shame as long as the ring protects me." But Siegfried now invokes the other aspect of the ring, the demonic ring that forces love: "Gunther will take his man's right, and you will marry him through the ring… . You now teach me how to take it from you." He seizes her and takes the ring from her.
Even at the end of his life, Siegfried teases the Rhinemaidens with the ring, unwilling to return it to them but still entirely unaware of its power. He dies in ignorance of the nature of the ring, but Brünnhilde never forgets it. She takes it from his corpse in their final ring transaction, and restores it at last to the Rhine.
The powers of the ring are established in the first two operas of the tetralogy, Das Rheingold and Die Valkyrie. The ring is the star of the cycle. Siegfried is just a bit player, along with all the other humans, not to men tion the gods and demigods.
Siegfried's ignorance of the identity of his true wife is not nearly as important as his ignorance of the identity of the ring, which he took from the dragon without knowing its power.
Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
125 125 enclosed in this ring." Still he gives it to her on their first date, somehow sensing that both the ring and this woman are very important to him, and on their second meeting he takes it back, not because he remembers or recognizes it (he does not) but because she has told him that while she has it, it will prevent him from accomplishing his goal, which is to take her for Gunther. To Brünnhilde, the ring signifies not just the identity of the man who seduced her but retrospective ownership: whoever has the ring had her; or, rather, as the two men in question seem to regard the matter, whoever has her has the right to the ring.
Brünnhilde's final equestrian leap into the fire triggers the destruction of Valhalla and the flooding of the world by the waters of the Rhine. The forces of Ragnarok, always waiting in the wings, find their tiny opening, the vulnerable spot, in Siegfried's moral and physical armor, and into that opening the heroine, assuming cosmic dimensions, rushes, tak ing the world with her. The horse in the flames that are then quenched by the rising waters is a transformation of a complex symbol that belongs to the ancient Indian version of Ragnarok, in which a mare triggers the final fire and the final flood.
(We may also see here a kind of pre-scientific theory of global warming: when it gets hotter, the icecaps will melt and there will be a flood.) The mare bears in her mouth the 126
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126 flaming seed of both the destruction and the ultimate recreation of the cosmos. Brünnhilde, closely identified with her horse Grani, is the doomsday mare, the filly with the flame in her mouth. Ibsen's Siegfried (Sigurd) wants to throw the ring to the bottom of the sea, which is precisely where Ibsen's Brünnhilde (Hjördis) also intends to end up.
When she jumps off the cliff, however, she joins the herd of wild black horses racing toward Valhalla. The astute reader will have noticed that in the Hindu story there is no ring at all. But the equine flame that is expelled to the bottom of the ocean, certain to return someday, becomes, in the Norse myths, a ring of fiery gold, and in Wagner's version that fiery ring is submerged deep in the Rhine.
It is unlikely that Richard Wagner knew the Indian sources of the myth of the submarine mare, though he had a vague, if passionate, acquaintance with Indian philosophy (via Schopenhauer, Schelling, and Nietzsche), enough to structure his ring cycle like the Hindu cycle of creation, which is more explicitly circular than the Norse myth. On the other hand, he was far more familiar with the Norse mythology of Ragnarok, and so he combined the Scandinavian tradition of the fire-breathing dragon (Fafner) in the watery depths with the German folk tradition of the Rhinemaidens.
To this already rich mix he added the concept of the fire and flood from
the Eddas.31
When Siegfried, in exchange for her horse, gives Brünnhilde the ring he took from the dragon Fafner, his action symbolically connects the two animals that are often combined in the Indo-European myth of the equestrian hero who kills the dragon (of whom Saint George is the most famous). And when, at the end of Wagner's cycle, Brünnhilde rides her horse into the ring of fire, which is then extinguished by the flood waters of the Rhine, the images are again conflated.
Wagner had all the pieces of the puzzle in his hands: the Hindu cosmology, the Norse cosmology, and, finally, the myth of Brünnhilde the eques trian Valkyrie. The story seemed to cry out for just one twist, to let Brünnhilde ride her own horse back through the flames to Siegfried, and it took Wagner's genius to add that final twist. He re-arranged the elements to re-invent a wheel of cosmic death and transfiguration, to make his own myth.
In the end, as in the cosmic myth of regeneration, the world returns to its primeval state, with the Rhinemaidens singing happily and playing with their gold as they did at the start of the first opera in the cycle, Das
Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
The narrative, too, is a ring. But it is a spiral, not a circle. The ring that goes back into the Rhine at the end has been reforged; it is a ring with a different history.
The difference is the loss, the tragedy: Siegfried has betrayed his one true love, and the world, when it rises again out of the waters of the Rhine, will never be the same.
Wieland the Smith
In Wagner's cycle the ring plays its conventional role as the key to recog nition. It does not provide an excuse for Siegfried, the husband who has forgotten his wife, or even wake him up, but it wakes her up, when she sees it on the hand of another woman. Though it ultimately unlocks the memory of a forgotten sexual episode, the ring is not blamed for the for getfulness, which is sometimes simply taken for granted (as in the case of the medieval Tristan)xiv but at other times (for Tristan as well as Siegfried) attributed to the effect of a mind-altering drink.
Yet in another of Wagner's works, which foreshadowed and even now illuminates the storyline of the Ring cycle, the ring is in itself a magic drug of forgetfulness straight out of the European romance cycles. This work is Wieland the Smith (Wieland der Schmied), written in the same year in which Wagner published his first draft of the Siegfried story (1848). Wagner knew that the tales of Siegfried and Wieland (who is known as Volundr in the Norse, and Wayland in the old English sources) occur
in all of the Germanic sources-Norse, German, and old English32-and
She disappears, and so does a ring Volundr had made for her, which he later recognizes on the hand of the king's daughter: the king had stolen it. The king imprisons Volundr and cuts the tendons of his legs. Volundr escapes and in revenge murders xiv.
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Overpowered by love, the poet and smith Wieland wrestled with her and won her, and they lived in blissful union. She gave him a ring and warned him that if he let her get it back, she would leave him; for though she loved him, she still desired her freedom, and the ring gave her the power to fly. Wieland made a number of rings identical to hers and hid her ring among them, but one day she found hers and flew away.
King Neiding ("Envy") captured Wieland so that he would work for him alone. He severed the tendons of Wieland's legs so that he could not escape. But Wieland forged wings and flew into the sky to join his wife.
As he left, he shot arrows into King Neiding's heart.38 Now there is no princess to seduce or rape, and there are no brothers to murder, only the king who has maimed him. Presto change-o, Wieland has been morally rehabilitated. The rape still hovers over the text, how ever, in the way that Wieland "captures" the swan maiden.
He maintains his power over her now not by hiding her "swan apparel," that is, her wings, the usual pattern in tales of swan maidens (destroying the obvi ous source of their power to fly), but by hiding the ring that she gives him, in place of the ring that he-who is, after all, a smith-gave her in
Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
(In the tale of Siegfried, too, the ring is sometimes given by her to him, sometimes by him to her.) The motif of apparently identi cal men or women standing in for one another (Siegfried for Gunther, for instance) here is transferred to the ring itself, now camouflaged among other, identical rings. Wagner told a much expanded and rather different version of the story in another prose draft of the libretto: Swanhilde, a swan maiden, fell to earth while her sisters, as Valkyries, continued their journey to the northern lands.
The poet and smith Wieland took her in. King Neiding's daughter Bathilde wanted Wieland for herself. She also knew, as Swanhilde did not, that the ring Wieland had made for Swanhilde had the power to give women the charm of love and men the strength for victory.
Together with her brother Gram, Bathilde forced her way into Wieland's lodgings and stole the ring. Then she burnt the house to ashes, and Swanhilde took flight. Gram captured Wieland and Neiding kept him impris oned.
Bathilde used the ring's magic powers to cast magic fetters on Wieland so that he desired her and forgot Swanhilde. Yet, when he heard the sound of Swanhilde's name, Wieland began to recover his memory. But Gram, too, was in love with Bathilde, under the power of the ring, and she had promised herself to him.
Still besot ted, Wieland killed Gram, and Neiding cut his sinews. Then, one day, Bathilde asked Wieland to repair her ring, which he recognized as Swanhilde's. Only now did his memory of her return in full.
The parallel suggests that Brünnhilde, too, is not only a Valkyrie but a swan maiden (like Sita and Shakuntala),xv a woman from xv.
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130 the other world who comes to her earthly lover, is betrayed, and returns to her own world. The flames that surround Brünnhilde are prefigured here in the reciprocal arsons: first Bathilde burns down Wieland's house, and then Wieland burns down Bathilde's house. A long way from Ragnarok, perhaps, but within the same cosmology.
The king's daughter, who was there in the earlier texts but did not appear at all in Wagner's first telling, now reappears with a vengeance; she is responsible for the swan maiden's flight, she alone knows the power of the ring and manages to steal it, and she two-times Wieland (with her brother!). Again Wagner has elided many of Wieland's nega tive traits: now Wieland does not desire Bathilde until she bewitches him, and though he does sleep with Neiding's daughter and does kill Neiding's (one) son, both of these crimes are justified: the son and the daughter are guilty of incest, and the daughter has entrapped Wieland with magic.
Where the poet of the Volundarkvida insisted that "he was more knowing than she," Wagner here not only shows that she is more knowing than he-she, not he, wields the power of the ring- but echoes the contrast between Bathilde and Wieland with an even more explicit contrast between Bathilde and Swanhilde, between the evil woman who knows the power of the ring and the good woman who does not. Now the parallels with the Ring become clearer. The incestuous couple Bathilde and Gram foreshadow Gutrune and Gunther (as well as the inces tuous siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried's parents).
One can hear, in the tale of Wieland, the seeds growing in Wagner's mind, and one can see him already manipulating the sources to erase the darker episodes in Wieland's record and make him no longer a murdering rapist but the blameless dupe of a woman who knows more than he does.
Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
131 131 The Wieland sources, like those for the tale of Siegfried, gradually upgrade the hero's moral character, transforming the cad into an innocent victim. All of the sources mitigate Wieland's caddishness by stating that the man whom he kills had cut Wieland's leg tendons, imprisoning him until he was able to forge wings. Wieland's acts of violence against women are in revenge for this hamstringing, two men expressing their mutual hatred in violence that they inflict upon one another not directly but indirectly, by injuring the women who belong to them.
This is a pattern that we will encounter again and again in transactions in which men trade women and jewelry in order to cement alliances between themselves.
The Rehabilitation of Cads
If we return to the mythology of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, and consider it alongside Wieland as well as the other medieval European narratives and the tale of Shakuntala and Dushyanta,xvi we see a pattern emerging. We might hazard a kind of historical development as we trace certain basic plots: in early variants, the man simply brazens it out, denying and rejecting the woman he has seduced, but later tellings exculpate the man by attributing his behavior to a convenient attack of amnesia.
The men who forget their wives sometimes blame a drug or a drink but more often place the blame on a smoking ring: its loss or, on the other hand, its evil power, clouds the memory of the man who conveniently "forgets" that he is married. In many stories, the protagonist (I hesitate to call him the hero) who loses a ring and forgets his bride knows perfectly well who his bed-partner is at the time he seduces (and, often, impregnates) her, but later on he projects a kind of retroactive amnesia over the event, claim ing that he was, in effect, tricked.
The bewitching potion or ring lets the cad off the hook; plead temporary insanity and you can get away with murder. Or we may be witnessing in these sequential texts not so much the rehabilitation of a cad as the invention of caddishness. In the early texts, a man could treat a woman any way he liked, and people (i.e., other men) naturally approved.
But slowly, over the course of centuries, standards changed, and Siegfried's bad behavior had to be explained away. We will have a good look at another ancient society with an appalling toleration for xvi.
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132 caddishness when we consider certain Greco-Roman plays.xvii We might also attribute some of the mistreatment of women to the ancient Indo- European bond of Männerfreundschaft, which binds a man to another man more strongly than to any woman. We saw this bond at work when Yvain stayed with Gawain instead of returning to his Lady, and when Tristan's bond to Mark (like Lancelot's to Arthur) ultimately drove him away from Isolde (or, in the case of Lancelot, Guinevere).xviii The sword placed between the loversxix proclaims the temporary triumph of that bond.
The move away from these ancient male bonds, and from the cult of the cad, may appear to indicate a growing concern for the feelings of women, a need to apologize for a man who breaks his promise; but it may also reflect increasing subjugation of women and concern for their chas tity, which widens the gulf, the asymmetry, between the acceptable infidel ity of a man and the unacceptable infidelity of a woman. The ring allows him, but never her, to be unfaithful.
And in the end, she always forgives him. This process is therefore not necessarily a sign of moral progress. It is just change: one form of oppression is exchanged for another.
To aban don a woman without lying poses one set of problems, while to lie about it poses another. We may argue about which is worse: shameless harm or dissembling harm. We may also look for other developments of this sort.
In the earliest versions of many of these stories, the man simply abandons the woman without any justification. In the revised version, he lies to society; social pressure makes him pretend to forget. But in the re-revised version, the man often actually thinks that he forgets; now he is lying not to society but to himself.
(Or, one might say, he is repressing his knowledge of his guilt.)xx At this point, the hero is caught between changing ethics, between old-fashioned patriarchal polygyny and a new romantic sympathy for the woman who is betrayed. Many stories suggest other forms of mental incompetence, offering other reasons for the clouding of reason, resorting to supernatural forces, ex machina, to extricate the plot from a human tangle: a curse, a magic potion. Love is something that may suddenly spring up, without warning xvii.
Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
But they still need magic rings to transform them from cads to heroes.
The Alibi Ring: Oxytocin
In many of the stories of forgetful men, the narrator is caught on the horns of a dilemma: Kalidasa wants to whitewash Dushyanta for his patrons in the Gupta dynasty,xxii and the narrators of the medieval stories of Tristan and Siegfried were hard-pressed to rehabilitate a cad en route to becoming an ethnic hero. In such revisions, someone has to take the rap, and the ring of forgetfulness is the fall guy. In the cycle of Yvain,xxiii the earlier texts tell a story of rape, and there is no ring.
Later, Yvain becomes an urbane courtier, and two rings get into his story, cleaning up his act. Sometimes- again Yvain is a prime example-the ring acts not as an alibi but as a com plete exculpation: the protagonist tries to break away from the past, tries to break a promise, sometimes but not always a sexual promise, but the ring makes him circle back into the past, as Alice kept going back in the door from the garden in Looking-Glass Land.
In cultures that honor the narrative convention of the ring, the ring offers a socially acceptable reason for doing what you secretly want to do. Rings, which often come packaged in fishes,xxiv are fishy excuses.
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134 expresses, long before Freud, repression and ambivalence: it gives the hero permission to violate the promise of monogamy that the ring also represents. The ring says, I love only you, but it also says, it is not my fault if I forget that I promised to love only you. The ring of forgetfulness justifies the violation not only of monogamy but of adulterous relation ships.
The hero is not even true to the woman with whom he is betray ing his wife (recall Tristan with two Isoldes). And it's not just a matter of a European courtly ethic using the ring/potion as an alibi required by a newly arrived high Christian ethic: it happens in ancient India too, where the ring justifies polygamy in a polygamous society where it should need no justification.xxv In some of the medieval stories, exculpatory rings are supplemented or replaced by potions.
But the earliest supernatural alibi for immoral erotic actions is what could be called the Aphrodite defense, after Penelope's argument, in Homer's Odyssey, book 23 (c. 800 bce), that the goddess of love was entirely responsible for Helen of Troy's adultery with Paris. Lady Love made her do it; the god or goddess of lust made her do it.
In the Strauss-Hofmannsthal opera The Egyptian Helen,44 too, deities are responsible for irrational passion, and there are twin drugs as well: one to destroy memory, and another to restore it. We can see the Aphrodite alibi developing in Greek literature: Euripides, in his Medea (431 bce), blames Medea for the crimes she commits when Jason jilts her, but Apollonius of Rhodes, in the third century bce, blames Aphrodite. For centuries after that, lovers continued to speak of a coup de foudre, a metaphor that sug gests supernatural intervention, Jove's thunderbolt, short-circuiting any possible moral qualms.
The ring, however, is folklore's drug of choice. "Forget me not," inscribed on so many rings, asks the lover not to forget that first intensity of feeling for the beloved. It is intended to ward against the mundane, gradual erosion of love.
The myth transmutes this gradual process into the sudden amnesia produced by the negative magic of the ring. As time passed, new techniques of magical amnesia were invoked, though they were still used in service of the same goals. In Mirage (Edward Dmytryk, 1965), the protagonist suffered from amnesia as a result of the shock of seeing his friend fall to his death from a twenty-seventh-story window; when the film was remade just three years later, as Jigsaw (James xxv.
Siegfried’s Ring and Wagner’s Ring
Apparently oxytocin, a hormone released during sex, produces attachment; more sex, more oxytocin, more love, the para digm promises.47
Men Are Like That,” James Collins cited the Yerkes study and suggested
A man and a woman sleep together, and then "the call never comes. It's as if he'd completely forgotten about her. Well, maybe he really has completely forgotten about her, and maybe it's not his fault: maybe he simply has a neurological disorder." And so, Collins remarks, "It is possible, then, that some male humans may be deficient in oxytocin and simply don't remember the encounters they have had with females the night before.
This could be the reason they never call… . Maybe it will make people think twice before engaging in a lot of negativity about 'caddishness' and 'big creeps.' "48 Thus a quasi-scientific argument can be made in defense of men who forget women they have loved and left. Perhaps oxytocin was the secret ingredient in all those rings of memory.
They can, however, furnish stunning evidence of the length and breadth of this inequality in the records of human history. Gender aside, what is the connection between amnesia and fidelity? Memory is an intrinsic part of love.
In Sanskrit one of the words for love (and for the god of love) is Smara, memory (the Sanskrit word is cognate with the English "memory"). Some myths imply that love is the true locus 136
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136 of memory, that to remember who your soul was in a previous life you must remember who you were in love with, that knowing/remembering your lover proves your identity, not just his or hers. To forget whom you loved, therefore, is to forget your very identity. Though few of us remem ber former lives or experience total amnesia, it is not uncommon for hus bands to forget their wives, and wives their husbands, in the emotional if not literal sense, and the myths exploit that experience.
Yet those same myths stand behind Harper when he says: "I do not know which is worse: to remember real love lost or to remember the deceptions of a love that was never real."52 Both, say the myths.
6. Pregnant Riddles and Clever Wives
As men use rings to wiggle out of tight spots, women can use rings in their counter-subterfuges. In the stories of forgetful husbands, the ring eventually cures the man's forgetfulness, though it often justifies it as well.
Ring hub 43
She Had Borne Him a Son
As men use rings to wiggle out of tight spots, women can use rings in their counter-subterfuges. In the stories of forgetful husbands, the ring eventually cures the man's forgetfulness, though it often justifies it as well. In the stories we are about to consider, the rings of the straying husbands ultimately bring them back to their wives, but not by jogging their memo ries.
And where children were of little or no concern to Yvain, Lancelot, Tristan, Siegfried et al. (or their lovers),i children are the key to the sto ries in this chapter (as they were to Shakuntala and to the protagonists of
Ring cycle 44
Family Romances).ii
Ring flow 45
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138 This myth has a very long shelf life indeed. As it travels through Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, numerous variations develop, which Carol Thompson Neely summarizes well: "The central task requires the production of an heir by the wife, and the supplementary tasks all involve obvious symbols of male and female sexuality-the obtaining of rings, swords, or the husband's stallion, the digging of a well … the filling of a trunk. In several of the tales, the wife in fact disguises herself as a man, gains access to her husband, beats him at cards, and offers to provide him with a woman… .
Her husband, who has stopped sleeping with her, taunts her: "How in hell on earth do you imag ine you're going to have a child by a man that can't stand you?" She replies, "That's a problem that I will have to work out." We might define the skeletal plot of the tale of the clever wife as the story of a wife who manages to get pregnant by a husband who (a) refuses to consummate his marriage, (b) denies that her child (when she gets preg nant) is his, and (c) is forced, by the recognition of a ring, to acknowledge his wife and child. The British upper classes used to apply the word "clever" to a man (usually of a lower class, or Jewish, or, during World War II, Japanese) who was glib, not to be trusted, an arriviste, not a true gentle man ("too clever by half").
Ring ladder 46
Pregnant Riddles and Clever Wives
Two different virtues are at stake: on the one hand, the subversive virtue of actively resisting, fighting for what you want, honestly or dishonestly; and, on the other hand, the noble, pas sive virtue of being innocent of sin. The clever wife, though spurned for her wit at the start, is praised for it at the end. Defending her marital fidel ity with a subversive intelligence, she proves that she is sinless as well as clever.
Ring compare 47
Muladeva and the Brahmin’s Daughter
One of the earliest versions of this story that I know is the tale of Muladeva and the Brahmin's Daughter. It is the final tale, the ultimate riddle, in a book rich in riddles, Somadeva's Ocean of the Rivers of Story (Kathasaritsagara). This great compendium of tales, composed in Sanskrit in Kashmir between the tenth and eleventh century ce, fed its streams into yet another great narrative ocean, the Arabian Nights, and was enriched in turn by stories from that tradition.
In the tale that concerns us, a Brahmin named Muladeva tells how he, a well-known trickster, was himself tricked: I went to Pataliputra with my friend, to test the cleverness of the people there. We saw a beautiful woman who made a fool of me with her riddles and embarrassed me. And I said to my friend, "I must certainly marry that clever woman.
I must pay her back for making such fun of me." We found out her father's house and went there in disguise. He gave her to me in the proper way. That night, in the bridal chamber, I laughed and reminded my wife of our first encounter.
When she heard that, she recognized me, and she smiled and said, "City slick ers trick country hicks like that." Then I said to her, "I hope you're happy, you city slicker. This country hick is going to abandon you and go far away, I promise you." To which she, too, made a prom ise: "I swear that you will be bound and brought back to me by means of a son fathered by you." When we had made these mutual vows, she turned her face from me and went to sleep, and I put 140
Ring hub 48
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140 my own ring on her finger while she slept. Then I went back to my native city, Ujjain, in order to test her cleverness. When the Brahmin's daughter awoke in the morning she did not see me but she found the ring with my name on it, and she real ized, "He has kept his promise and abandoned me.
Well, I will keep my promise, too, and abandon all regrets. His name, on this ring, is Muladeva, a famous trickster. Everyone says he lives in Ujjain.
That's where I'll go." She lied to her father, saying, "My husband has already abandoned me. How can I live without him? So I will go on a pilgrimage, to torment this cursed body." Unwillingly, he gave her his permission.
She went to Ujjain, dressed as a courtesan named Sumangala, set up an establishment, and became famous there. But she turned away all of her suitors, including my friend, and I became curi ous and went to see her. I entered and saw my own darling, whom I did not recognize because she was wearing the clothes of a cour tesan.
But she recognized me again, and received me like a trick ster courtesan. Then I passed the night with her, the most beautiful woman in the world, and I became so bound to her by passion that I could not leave the house. She, too, was bound to me through sexual passion, and never left my side until, after some days, the blackness of the tips of her breasts showed that she was pregnant.
She then forged a summons from the king and left me to return to Pataliputra. Though I was in love with her, I did not follow her, because I supposed that she belonged to someone else. She gave birth to a son.
When he was twelve years old another boy said to him, "No one knows who your father is, for someone or other fathered you when your mother was wandering around in foreign lands." Embarrassed, the boy asked his mother, "Mommy! Who is my father, and where is he? Tell me!" And his mother, the Brahmin's daughter, thought for a moment and said to him, "Your father is named Muladeva.
He abandoned me and went to Ujjain." When she told him the whole story, the boy said, "Mommy, I will bind him and bring him back, and so I will fulfill your promise." He went to Ujjain and recognized me from the description his mother had given him. Then he stole my bed right out from under me while I was asleep, lowering me gently onto a pile of rags on the floor. When I woke up I felt a mixture of embarrassment, laughter, and amazement.
I went to the market place and wandered around,
Pregnant Riddles and Clever Wives
141 141 and I saw the boy selling the bed. I asked him, "What price will you take for this bed?" But he replied, "You can't buy it for money, you crown-jewel of tricksters, but by telling me a marvelous tale never heard before." I said to him, "I will tell you a marvelous tale never heard before. If you understand it and admit that it is true, you may keep the bed.
But if you do not, you must give me the bed. And you will have shown that you must be an ignorant bastard." The boy won the contest and said, "So I have conquered you, and you are my slave." Then he bound me and took me back to his mother in Pataliputra. When she saw him she said to me, "My husband, today my prom ise has been fulfilled.
You have been bound and brought here by a son fathered by you." And then she told the whole story, in front of everyone. Her relatives all congratulated her on having achieved her wish through her wisdom and having a son who had wiped away the stain on the family honor. And I, having achieved my goal, lived there with my wife and son for a long time, and then returned to Ujjain without them.
He appears throughout the Ocean of the Rivers of Story not only as a thief but as a thief 142
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Muladeva's boy, an even greater trickster than his father, proves his identity not merely with words but with a most literal "bed- trick" that surpasses his mother's: he steals the bed out from under his sleeping father. In one variant, the boy plays a different literal bed-trick: he sneaks into his father's bed-chamber, spreads sleeping powder, and steals all the jewels. Finally, "he even undid the legs of the couch which were inlaid with precious coral, and instead put under the bed the strong plan tain stalks!
Pregnant Riddles and Clever Wives
It is as if the boy takes the place of the ring, the other piece of evidence in the tale. The boy's clever ness identifies him as the true son not just of his father the thief but, even more, of his mother the clever wife. She is the riddler and trickster who uses her head, as well as her body, to trap her man, both at the start of their courtship and in its final resolution.
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144 man's ring instead of trading for it. Yet Muladeva admits at the end that she is an exception to the general rule of such appearances. The moral that he culls from his story is one of grudging misogyny: not all women mis behave all the time.
Thus all three members of Muladeva's nuclear family are tricksters. The "mutual vows" that Muladeva and his wife exchange are not, as in our parlance, marriage vows, but vows to deceive one another. Muladeva's son mockingly calls him "the crown jewel of tricksters," but Muladeva is out- tricked not only by his tricky boy but by his tricky wife (who is described, at one point, as a "trickster courtesan," in two senses-that is, a woman who pretends to be a courtesan, and also a courtesan who tricks people).
At various points, Muladeva and his wife see through one another's tricks. She does not, apparently, recognize him when he comes in disguise and lives in her father's house for four months, but she recognizes him on their wedding night. Muladeva fails to recognize her at the central meet ing in Ujjain, simply because he cannot process the fact that his wife- whom he has, after all, only bedded once, and even then did not touch-is a courtesan.
Only at the end does he recognize her, through her deeds and her words: the promise fulfilled. We never learn her name at all, or her father's or her son's. She is just the Brahmin's daughter.
But, significantly, she gives herself a vi.
Pregnant Riddles and Clever Wives
145 145 name-Sumangala-when she becomes a courtesan. Does this mean that her masquerading identity as a courtesan is her only true indepen dent identity? "Sumangala," however, is not a courtesan's name; it is a married woman's name, or, more precisely, the word you use to bless a married woman: "May you be Sumangala-Well-Favored." So in calling herself that, she is giving Muladeva a clue that she is his wife.
Other Indian Variants
As in the tale of Shakuntala,vii the ring plays little or no role in this ear liest Indian version of the tale of the clever wife, but a ring is central to later versions. Muladeva's ring reveals the father's name only to the mother. In other tellings, however, it reveals to the whole world the father's connection with both his wife and his son.
Often the ring is flanked by two other pieces of jewelry. Sometimes, before the disguised wife will sleep with her husband, on three separate occasions, over three years, in three different cities, she demands that he give her first his pearl necklace, then his diamond necklace, and finally his ring,29 or his diamond necklace, signet ring, and breast-ornament,30 or (on two occasions) his ring and handkerchief,31 and years later she produces them, along with the grown child (or children). In a Moroccan variant, he gives his disguised wife first his ring, then an anklet, and finally a necklace.
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146 Three pieces of jewelry, though with only one child, appear in a South Indian oral tale retold by A. Ramanujan, who called it "The Wager": A king's son came upon a local man's rich daughter; she was utterly beautiful, and he stopped and posed a riddle, but she out-riddled him. He flew into a rage and said, "You don't know who you're talk ing to.
So I'll marry you and shut you up in my basement. If I don't, I wouldn't be my father's son." She coun tered, "King's son, I'll marry you then and I'll get your own son to tie you up to the post in the marketplace. If I don't, my breast is no breast." He told his father how she had insulted him, bandying wager for wager, and concluded, "So I must marry her and teach her a lesson." His father tried to reason with him, saying, "That's no good reason to marry anyone." Moreover, the king pointed out, she was not of their caste.
But the prince insisted, and the king arranged the marriage. Meanwhile, the prince had an underground basement house built for his bride. When she came to the palace, the prince didn't even look at her.
He sent her to the basement house and shut her up in it. Then he went to another country in search of a new bride, married again, and lived with his new wife quite happily; they had several children. Meanwhile, with the help of her father, the girl escaped from the basement, learned acrobatic dancing and black magic, performed for her husband (who did not recognize her, though again he was struck by her beauty), and allowed him to seduce her.
She stayed with him for three nights, and made him give her the ring on his finger, his necklace, and his dagger. She returned home pregnant, gave birth to a son, and raised him, teaching him all the arts she had learned. One day she told him the story of the two wagers, and the boy asked the central question: "If my father never came here, how did I come about?" And she told him about the acrobatic dancing.
The son managed to get into the palace and steal the silver legs off the king's golden bed, as well as every piece of jewelry the queen was wearing from all over her body. He disguised himself as the bailiff's son-in-law and slept with the bailiff's daughter. And then he tricked the king into letting him tie him up in a bundle of dirty clothes.
When a crowd gathered, he untied the king, who looked at his captor, amazed, for the young man looked just like him.
Pregnant Riddles and Clever Wives
147 147 thief and king, it was hard to tell who was which. Only their ages gave them away. The young man sent for his mother, who told everyone about the wager and displayed the dagger, the necklace, and the signet ring that had once belonged to the king.
Like Muladeva's son, the boy brings off a literal bed-trick, but this time he also steals the queen's jewelry (which might have been expected to lead to yet another subplot of identification-by-jewelry, but doesn't) and even throws in a sexual bed-trick (with the bailiff's daughter), to prove that he is not just a thief but a sexual trickster like his mom. And in this version, the boy himself asks the riddle that is usually stated only by the husband and the clever wife: How did you get pregnant-with me-if your husband "never came here?" as he delicately words it.
A contemporary Tamil folk telling is so truncated that it works only if the storyteller can assume that the listeners are familiar with the full ver sion, evidence of its wide popularity: A raja went to a village to find a bride. He asked a woman a riddle, and she asked him another in return; neither could answer the oth er's riddle. "So the prince said, 'I'm going to marry you and lock you up in prison until I find the answer to your riddle!' To which, she said, 'I'll marry you, but if I don't have your child, without you even knowing about it, then I'm not the woman I think I am.' She made this pledge, but he married her anyway." He locked her up in a stone prison, where he visited her, chewed betel nuts, and enjoyed himself.
But she dug a tunnel and escaped to her parents' house. " 'This stupid raja won't recognise me,' she thought and disguised herself as a dancer, with her father as her teacher. Soon the raja called them to dance in his assembly, and when she danced he was infatuated." She spent one night with him, and in the morning she asked him for his ring and riding whip as souvenirs.
She returned to the stone prison via the tunnel, and eventually gave birth to a son, who grew up in his father's house.
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148 One day the boy stole the raja's golden bed right out from under him, and tricked the raja into hiding in a sack. "When the raja's men … saw the raja's son, they thought he was the raja himself! He was sitting on the raja's horse… .
Then the son beat the sack with his riding whip… . But when they opened the sack in the pal ace, they found the raja, and still they couldn't tell the difference between him and his son. 'Who are you?' they asked the raja's son.
It is she who, like Muladeva's wife, makes the impossible vow, which she later refers to as a "bet." Unlike the prisons in other stories, this one does not isolate her at all; the raja visits her there and apparently sleeps with her, which is what seems to be implied by the chewing of betel (an essential part of love-play in Indian literature, like the post-coital cigarette in Western erotic conventions) and the euphemism that he "enjoyed himself." Nevertheless, she disguises herself to get pregnant by him (remarking, cynically, that the raja is too stupid to see through any disguise), just as she does in stories where he has not already slept with her, and he is later surprised that she managed to get pregnant, apparently forgetting his own nights with her. It is as if the old pattern of the bed-trick hangs on even when a new twist has made it superfluous.
She gets from him, along with his ring, not his horse (as often happens in other variants) but his whip, which her son has-and uses-when he tricks his father, though the son now also has, inexplicably, the horse. Though the raja did not notice that the dancing girl looked an awful lot like his wife, everyone does notice that the bed-thief looks just like the raja. And when the raja finally demands an explanation, she merely shows him the ring (and the whip!) and assumes that he will now remember-what?
The night they spent together, or the well-known tale of the Clever Wife? In the Muladeva story, the wife sets the task herself, and she not only satisfies her own condi tions but out-riddles her husband and makes a fool of him.
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The core of the story, with the bed-trick and the vindicating ring, appears in an Indian folktale about the god Shiva and his wife the goddess Parvati. Recall the disguised cooks in the Cinderella stories and Solomon stories, in chapter 2, pp.
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150 Their marriage is celebrated in myth, literature, and ritual throughout the Hindu world. Annual festivals reenact every phase of the marriage, from the courtship through the wedding and even beyond, to the bride's annual return visits to her father's home, celebrated at the festival of Durgapuja in Bengal. But the solemn joy of these celebrations is frequently undercut by acknowledgment of the problems that bedevil even a marriage literally made in heaven.
This time she makes a paste of charcoal and water and smears it on her face to make herself black. Then she dresses as a woman of a forest tribe, a Korpalu, a person of very low caste. Shiva approaches her, but she protests: "Oh, my!
What kind of a way is that to speak to a Korpalu?" "What difference does it make if you are a Korpalu? You are a human being, aren't you? Our blood is the same, is it not?" argued Shiva.
"What you are saying is not right," answered the woman. I am a Korpalu." Then Shiva and the woman remained in the forest together for two days and three nights. On the third day, Shiva said, "I'm going now, Korpalu." "If you are going, go," she replied, "but just one thing.
If I get pregnant, who will pay for my expenses?" "I will provide for your needs. Here is a golden knife, a silver case for lime, and a silver snuffbox. I also have a golden ring with my seal.
Use them for your expenses if you get pregnant!" said Shiva. "Now I am going back to my palace, Korpalu." Shiva ran home by one path, while Parvati ran home by another. When she reached her house, Parvati quickly took a bath and combed her hair.
Before she even had a chance to put on her sari, however, Shiva arrived home. She said, "I have the feeling that you had a good time with a forest woman." "No, I didn't," said Shiva. "Didn't you have sex with a Korpalu?" asked Parvati.
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151 151 left here you took your golden knife, your silver box for lime, and the silver snuff box. Didn't you give those things to the Korpalu?" "I didn't give them to her," said Shiva. "Don't say things like that about me.
I didn't do it!" "Don't lie to me!" said Parvati. "A Korpalu came here and gave those things to me!" "Where did you see her?" asked Shiva. "She came here and gave them to me," repeated Parvati.
The ring seems almost an atavism in this story, a convention that has no actual effect. When she masquerades as the Korpalu, she does not ask explicitly for the ring, but she asks for something, and what else would he give her? (In a Himalayan folktale the woman has hardheaded misgivings and explicitly asks for the ring as she says to her departing seducer, "The male of the species is very bad.
Parvati appears to Shiva doubly disguised, as a human and as low-caste. Shiva dismisses both problems, lying by saying that he is a human (he is a god, as she immediately reminds him) and lying in the eyes of Hindu caste law by saying that all human beings are equal when it comes to sex. Parvati thus uses sex and jewelry to deconstruct the power of a husband, the power of a god, and the power of caste.
Tamar and Judah
The Muladeva story is not the oldest of the texts that follow the skeletal plot of the story of the clever wife. The assumption that a ring is proof of sexual consummation is deeply embedded in still older texts, such as the tale of Tamar and Judah in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 38.12-26, c. Tamar fits the criteria of the core definition of a clever wife, for she becomes pregnant as the result of a bed-trick and later, when accused of adultery, identifies the father by his ring.
But this version is slightly off- center, for Tamar departs from the pattern on an important point: the man she sleeps with, Judah, is not her husband, and he does not (therefore) explicitly challenge her to become pregnant by him. The central incident could be summarized thus: Tamar married Judah's eldest son, Er, but Er died leaving her childless. Under Jewish law the second son, Onan, had to marry his brother's widow, but he refused to give her a child and he died too.
Judah then promised her that she could marry his third son, Shelah, when he grew up, but Shelah grew up and Tamar was not married to him. A long time afterward, Judah's wife died, and he went up for the sheep shearing. Then Tamar took off her widow's garments, covered her face with a veil, and sat by the road, where Judah saw her and took her for a harlot because she had covered her face.
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154 version of Genesis 38.18, Judah's seal is explicitly said to be a ring: Tamar asks him to give her his daktylion (finger ring), his hormiskon (necklace or a signet cord), and "the rod that is in your hand." The fact that Judah's seal ring is one of three pieces of identification, like the tokens in so many tales of clever wives, further supports the classification of this tale with them. Since Judah is not Tamar's husband, his feigned "forgetfulness" comes before the seduction, when he "forgets" to give his son Shelah to Tamar.
And so, like other clever wives, Tamar is determined to become pregnant by hook or by crook. Judah's threat to burn her to death when he thinks she is illicitly pregnant also puts her in the company of the adulteresses, or alleged adulteresses, forced to undergo an ordeal by fire. Like Kalidasa's Shakuntala, Tamar is barely pregnant when she confronts the father of her child.
The ring is all the proof she has, in contrast with other versions such as the tale of Muladeva, or the Mahabharata version of Shakuntala, where there is a son whose cleverness or resemblance proves the encounter. Judah unknowingly accepts Tamar as a substitute for the prostitute who is substituting for Judah's dead wife, while Tamar knowingly accepts Judah as a substitute for Shelah (who is already also substituting for his older brothers). But Judah allows himself to be tricked, for he too really wants the child, as well as the sex, though he must insist that she has violated the law.
All in all, Tamar qualifies with the other clever wives, but the Hebrew Bible takes the story in different directions, polemical and political, thus deepening our understanding of the meaning of the theme and broadening our range of options for its implications in other aspects of human life. The biblical text regards the testimony of Judah's ring in Tamar's hands as definitive proof, but that testimony is challenged when the story x.
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155 155 is retold in The evidence of Judah48 (second century bce) and narrated by Judah himself. He prefaces the tale by insisting that he was drunk when he encountered Tamar in her disguise (as he may have been in the Hebrew Bible, too). Here is the central incident: "I went in unto her, and she conceived.
And when I called her I heard also the secret words that I spoke in my drunkenness while sleeping with her. And I could not kill her, for it was from the Lord.
Judah is so drunk that he does not recognize Tamar. He even blurts out secrets that she later throws back in his face. He then recognizes her privately as the woman he had slept with, but denies it publicly because he thinks no one else knows.
He suggests that she might have gotten the pledges (and, pre sumably, the pillow talk) from another (treacherous, colluding) woman. This perfectly logical, reasonable argument (though it's a lie) seems not to have occurred to Judah in other texts, including the Hebrew Bible. Even here, after having thought of effective ways to deny her claim, in the end Judah confesses the truth of his own accord.
Reason (bolstered by cynicism, not unrelated) also creeps into the story
of Tamar in Thomas Mann’s retelling. When Tamar, in disguise, demands
a pledge from Judah and he promises to send her something later, she remarks, "A man says that beforehand. Afterwards he is a different man and remembers not his former word. I must have a pledge."50 Of course, afterward it is she, not he, who will be a different person.
in India and the mediation of Moorish Spanish retellings. We’ve noted
When the Count died and left his son (now the Count) in the hands of the king, Bertrand had to go to Paris to see the king, and when Gillette's father died soon after, she longed for an excuse to go to Paris to see Bertrand. Rich and alone, she refused her many suitors, for she could not forget Bertrand. When she learned that the king was suffering from a fis tula, she thought that not only would this furnish her with a legiti mate occasion of going to Paris, but that, should the king's ailment be such as she believed, she might manage to have Bertrand as her husband.
She took to horse and went to Paris; the king promised that, if she cured him, he would marry her to any husband she would choose (except a member of the royal house). She cured the king and said, "Then, my lord, I have earned Bertrand de Roussillon, whom I began to love even in the days of my childhood and have ever since loved over all." The king deemed it a grave matter to give
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157 157 him to her; nevertheless, having promised her and unwilling to break his promise, he sent for the Count. Bertrand, who had seen and recognized Gillette, knowing her to be of a lineage far below his quality, refused (though she seemed to him very fair). Forced to marry her, he went off to the wars in Florence, and she returned to Roussillon, where she managed his estates wonderfully.
When she sent for him, he said, "I will return thither to abide with her when she shall have this my ring on her finger and in her arms a son by me begotten." Now the ring in question he held very dear and never parted with it, by reason of a certain virtue which it had been given him to understand that it had. The Countess (as Gillette was now), pretending to go on a pilgrimage, went to Florence. There she found out that her hus band was in love with a certain unmarried woman, and she told the woman's mother her story and bribed her to help her, offering her money that would allow her daughter to marry.
Gillette told the mother to send to the man and ask for the ring; and then, she said, "If he sends you the ring, you must give it to me and then send to him to say that your daughter is ready to do his pleasure; then bring him here in secret and privily put me to bed with him in the stead of your daughter. It may be God will vouchsafe me to conceive, and in this way, having his ring on my finger and a child in my arms of him begotten, I shall then regain him and abide with him, as a wife should abide with her husband." The mother got the ring (although this seemed somewhat griev ous to the Count) and adroitly put Gillette to bed with Bertrand, in the place of her own daughter.
In these first embracements, most ardently sought by the Count, the lady, by God's pleasure, became with child of two sons, as her delivery in time made mani fest. Not once only, but many times, did the gentlewoman gratify the Countess with her husband's embraces, contriving so secretly that never was a word known of the matter, the Count all the while believing himself to have been, not with his wife, but with her whom he loved. Eventually, the Countess gave birth to two male children, most like their father.
She presented herself, the boys, and the ring to her husband in public, told him the story, and he from that day forth ever honored her as his bride and his wife and loved and held her dear over all.55 158
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158 Bertrand rejects Gillette because, like the Cruel Knight in the ballad,xi he regards her as both lower class and foisted on him against his will. In the end, the identifying factor is the boys' uncanny physical resemblance to their father, as well as their mother's possession of the father's ring. Whereas, in the Muladeva tale, that ring merely reveals to the mother the identity, more precisely the name, of the father, in Boccaccio, as in many of the vernacular variants, it reveals to the father, and to the whole world, the identity of the mother.
Its "virtue" (never specified) may well be its ability to reveal the truth, to revive lost memory. Boccaccio makes the son into the twins who recur in many folk vari ants56 as well as the Bible (Tamar gives birth to twin boys). But he also, most significantly, doubles the women.
Muladeva's wife (who fakes a pilgrimage, as Boccaccio's heroine does) simply pretends to be a courte san, but there is no particular courtesan whom she or Tamar replaces, nor do the women in the folktales substitute for other actual women. But in Boccaccio's story there is a particular woman-"a certain unmarried woman"-whom the husband desires, and whom the wife replaces. The double women remain in a film based upon the Boccaccio ver sion, one of four vignettes in Decameron Nights (Hugo Fregonese, 1953).
She said, "How can I when you will not stay with me?" to which he replied, sarcastically, "You're a doctor; work a miracle." Isabella went to Florence and arranged secretly to replace, in bed, Maria (Joan Collins), a young woman whom Bertando was wooing. He gave the ring to Isabella-as-Maria, and she accidentally lost (in the bed) a blue earring, which he picked up. Then she slipped out of the bedroom and the house.
In the morning, Maria was shocked to find Bertando in her bed; she knew nothing of the trick. He tried to give her "back" the earring, thinking it was hers, and she threw xi.
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A comedy of misunderstandings ensued, and the people of the house threw Bertando out, believing that Maria had had a change of heart between the night and the morning. When Bertando returned to Spain and found that Isabella had had a baby, he accused her of infidelity. She showed him the ring, but it meant nothing: "You bought it from Maria," he insisted.
She maintained that she had been the woman in the bed in Florence. He laughed and said, "You're a cold fish. You're a doctor dressed as a female.
How could a doctor kiss me as Maria did?" Then Isabella became seductive and started to kiss him. As her face came near him, he saw that she was wearing the other blue earring. He was convinced by this and kissed her passionately.
Boccaccio (played by Louis Jordan), who appears as the narrator on the frame of the story, swears that Bertando (also played by Louis Jordan) became a model of fidelity. In this rather crude, proto-feminist variant, Bertando scorns the pro fessional woman (he will not "stay with" her, the equivalent of other euphemisms such as "cannot stand" her or "never came" there) and makes explicit his belief that such a woman cannot be a satisfying sexual partner. He gives a nice twist to the riddle in his taunt that she might use her medi cal powers to get pregnant by him, imagining, perhaps, some scenario of stolen sperm and in vitro fertilization.
Bertando is not persuaded by the hard evidence of the ring, against which he invokes the commonsense logic ("You bought it from Maria") that we recognize from The evidence of Judah. But he is persuaded by the hard evidence of the earring; in the end, the jewelry (enhanced by the soft evidence of the kiss) carries the day.
Shakespeare’s Rings III: The Riddle of the Ring
When Shakespeare retells the story, there are two rings. Shakespeare probably took the basic plot of his story from William Paynter's 1566 compendium, Palace of Pleasure, which contained Boccaccio's version of the story.58 W. Lawrence discusses the debt that the play owes to folktales dealing with "the clever wench,"59 but Howard C.
Cole cautions us against following Lawrence's Oriental trail and pooh- poohs any analogue "likely to turn up on the banks of the ancient Ganges."60 Certainly, old-fashioned tale-tracking, merely pointing out the themes that came from India, ex oriente lux, cannot enhance our appreciation of the 160
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160 beauty of Shakespeare's language and thinking, or illuminate his deep soundings into the dark sides of human psychology. But folklorists chas ing their tales can explain some of the otherwise puzzling atavisms in the plot and certain perplexing aspects of some of the characters.
All’s Well That Ends Well
Let me begin by reminding the reader of the rather complicated role of the two rings in All's Well, in a kind of ring-centric CliffsNotes version: Helena healed the ailing king and chose Bertram as her reward; the king also gave her a ring, which she always wore. Bertram unwillingly complied with the king's wish; he married Helena but said he would not sleep with her until she presented him with a son and with the ring that he never took off.
He went away to Florence and there made an assignation with a young woman named Diana. Helena followed him to Florence and persuaded Diana to allow her, Helena, to get into bed with Bertram in the dark, instead of Diana. They did this, and Bertram did not notice the difference.
Before the tryst, Diana had insisted that Bertram give her his ring, and he did so, unwill ingly; then Helena, in the night, gave him her ring in return. When Helena eventually confronted him with her pregnancy and the king demanded answers about both rings, Bertram swore he would love her forever.
Scholars call All’s Well That Ends Well one of Shakespeare’s “problem
plays," and one of the problems is the conceit that Bertram doesn't real ize he's in bed with Helena instead of Diana when Helena takes Diana's place in the dark bedroom. Shakespeare plays with the conventions of non-recognition, depicting Bertram as an "in the dark all cats are gray" kind of guy, but chooses not to challenge the folktale's assumption that he does not recognize his wife. I have another problem with this particular variant.
Why does Helena, a real smart gal, persist in loving the spectacularly inadequate Bertram? The two questions are interrelated: one might ask, why does Helena persist in loving a man who doesn't recognize her in bed? All's Well That Ends Well does not end well at all.
Helena gets Bertram, but Bertram is no prize and doesn't want her. The folk tradition supplies at least a partial answer: the
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161 161 clever wife wants to get her husband back even though he rejects her; that's the convention, that's the way the story goes. But this, we may assume, also had a kind of psychological truth for Shakespeare. Women, and men, sometimes stay with people who treat them very badly indeed.
Helena continues to want Bertram, even when Diana-who admires Bertram's good looks and bravery-tells Helena (not knowing that she is married to Bertram) how she pities Bertram's wife for being married to a philanderer who detests her. Even at the end, when the king has Bertram cornered, and Helena turns to Bertram and shows him the ring and the letter with his challenge about ring and child, he turns from her to say his very last lines not to her but to the king, and they are, "If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, / I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly" (5.3.314-315), lines that ring as hollow as any in English theater.
And instead of spitting in his eye, Helena just says, not to the king but to Bertram, "If it appear not plain and prove untrue, / Deadly divorce step between me and you!" (5.3.316-317). An ominous note on which to begin a marriage. There are significant differences between the Italian and Shakespearean tellings.
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162 or five generations, as Helena said, but for six. She concludes: "This is his wife: / That ring's a thousand proofs" (5.3.198-199). To win the ring from the reluctant Bertram, Diana equates it with her virginity: "Mine honour's such a ring; / My chastity's the jewel of our house, / Bequeathed down from many ancestors" (4.2.45-47).
The ring that is a sign of male succession is balanced by the jewel of the maid enheadxii that assures the purity of that male line. Diana's chastity is her "ring"- a symbolic evocation of a chastity ring or chastity beltxiii-that can be used in bargaining for Bertram's ring. The maidenhead for which men literally lose their heads in other Shakespeare plays about bed-tricks (such as Measure for Measure) here causes a man to lose his ring.
The ring that Helena gives to Diana and Diana gives to Bertram is used in a mock wedding ceremony of exchange. Diana tells Bertram, "On your finger in the night I'll put / Another ring, that what in time proceeds / May token to the future our past deeds" (4.2.61-63). Like other clever wives, Helena anticipates a moment when the ring will be used to unmask what amounts to fraud; but Bertram, as usual, doesn't get the point, doesn't see what the fraud is.
The king then recalls a most odd thing that Helena said about her ring, which exactly parallel Bertram's oath concerning his ring: "She call'd the saints to surety, / That she would never put it from her finger, / Unless she gave it to yourself in bed, / Where you have never come, or sent it us / Upon her great disaster" (5.3.108-112). The words of this speech echo Bertram's oath: "the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off" (3.2.55-56).
The two conditions under which Helena said she would part with the ring collapse into one; the fact that Bertram has apparently "never xii. Recall the identification of rings with women's sexual organs, in chapter 1, p.
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163 163 come" to her bed is itself the "great disaster." Not realizing that it is the fulfillment of the first of Helena's conditions, rather than the second, that explains Bertram's possession of the ring, the king accuses him of having killed her. The unwitting Bertram replies, appropriately enough, with a reference to the first rather than the second condition: "If you shall prove / This ring was ever hers, you shall as easy / Prove that I husbanded her in bed in Florence, / Where she never was." (5.3.124-127).
Again, the words exactly echo Helena's oath (itself an echo of Bertram's oath): "unless she gave it to yourself in bed-Where you have never come" (5.3.110-11). When Bertram has gotten himself into terrible trouble about Helena's ring, Diana displays Bertram's ring, which he admits having given to her. But then, just when he thinks he's in the clear, Diana blandly suggests, "Send for your ring, I will return it home, / And give me mine again" (5.3.223-224).
Bertram says he does not have her ring (Helena's ring). The king then asks Diana to describe it and she identifies it as the ring that is on the king's finger, the ring that the king had given Helena, Helena-as- Diana had given Bertram ("This was it I gave him, being abed" [5.3.228], Diana sweetly lies, though later she tells the truth: "I never gave it him" [5.3.275]), and Bertram has just given the king, in a kind of chain familiar from folktales or Schnitzler's La Ronde.
Hence the complex logic governing the exchange of rings in the dark: Bertram's father's ring is given unawares to Helena, the 164
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Where Muladeva's wife uses her son as the essential helper, Helena (who does not yet have a son) finds her male helper in the older generation. Helena's ring therefore adds weight both to female independence and to female dependence. Bertram's ring poses a riddle, as it did in Boccaccio.
Bertram writes to Helena, "When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband: but in such a 'then' I write a 'never' " (3.2.55-58). This riddle (How can you get the ring if it never comes off?) doubles the more basic riddle: How can you get a child if you never sleep together? On the surface, Bertram is saying, "I dare you to get this ring I wear," but John F.
The associations are the reverse of what we might expect: the sexy mistress should be named Helena, the chaste wife Diana. But Bertram is a twisted fellow and requires a twisted bed-trick. Helena's mission is to combine the two wrongly separated aspects of a single woman, in this case to bring out the unthreatening nature of the chaste young mistress to neutralize the overpowering threat of the sexu ally mature wife.
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Near the end, when it has been falsely announced that Helena is dead, Diana says of Bertram: "He knows himself my bed he hath defil'd; / And at that time he got his wife with child. / Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick. / So there's my riddle: one that's dead is quick" (5.3.299-301).
The myth breaks through at this point, reminding us that this is a story not only about philandering men and clever women but about the mystery of dead women giving birth to live children, "quick" having the double sense of "alive" and "pregnant"-that is, having life within you. It is also about the mystery of a woman giving birth to herself, for Helena-as-Diana is not the same woman as Helena- as-Helena: Helena-as-Diana is able to seduce Bertram and demand things from him as Helena-as-Helena never could, and the Helena at the end of play who takes Bertram back is now not merely clever but wise.
At the very least, she is wise to Bertram. Is All Well That Ends Well? The clever wife gets the child.
But is that the happy ending? Does she really get what she wants? The usual legal process is for a woman to get a ring and then get a baby; the usual physical process is first sex, then baby.
To have the baby but not the ring is, of course, the defining situation of every unwed mother, the fate worse than death that haunted all those Doris Day films.xiv The narrative paradox of the clever wife reverses this process, requiring the woman to have a baby (and a ring) in order to get the sex. Of course here too the sex must come first; it merely appears to come second.
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166 The question of inheritance, which is generally viewed as a male prob lem -"Give me lots of sons just like me"xv-is also a female problem: "Let my children inherit." This is, in fact, the main point of the Shakuntala storyxvi and other tales in which the woman demands, before she will sleep with a king, not (or not only) his ring but his promise to put her son on the throne (and thereby, incidentally, to give her the status of queen mother). The king does not want to acknowledge the child of the abandoned wife.
The clever wife resembles Shakuntala in her concern for the legitimacy of her child (and in the role of that child in getting back her husband), but Shakuntala's weapon is not cleverness but moral justice. These stories condemn the husband not for sleeping with other women, since philandering is considered the norm, but for not sleeping with his wife, for failing to fulfill his duty to impregnate her. This duty is a matter of law in ancient India-the husband must sleep with his wife during her fertile period73-and is implicit in many European texts.
Many a clever wife shares with forgotten or betrayed wives the sadness of having a husband who will not sleep with her, though most of the wives in the stories hope to satisfy primarily their desire for a child and only secondarily their desire for a husband's love. She may win his body for a night, long enough to make a child, but some of the stories tell us that she also desires his desire, or even his love. The woman who marries the king of Kashmir comes to him in disguise because, "It happened, how ever, that she loved him,"75 and at the end of another Kashmiri variant, the husband capitulates completely and declares, "You are the master, I am the pupil.
Forgive my conceit, love me again thoroughly."76 Even the xv.
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She has won her husband's respect for her perseverance and ingenuity, but this is likely to be a temporary, or even Pyrrhic, victory. Two patterns are at work here: Muladeva's wife is using her husband to get a baby, perhaps even stealing his substance to give her what she wants, while Helena uses the baby to get the husband. The two aspects of the clever wife's goal are reflected in two aspects of European adultery law: "adultery" is a crime because it "adulterates" both the lineage of the child and the wife's affection for the husband.
Folklore tends to emphasize the goal of fertility and babies, literature the goal of love; but in some sto ries of both genres, the two goals are inseparable. In these stories about the tension between illicit eroticism, on the one hand, and legal marriage and progeny, on the other, circular jewelry expresses the circular paradox of marital sexual rejection. The husband desires both an erotic encounter and a legitimate child, but not always from the same woman.
To close the circle his wife must circle back to become the person she knows she is, the person he cannot see until she transforms herself there and back again: his erotic partner. And indeed, it may well be that he does know, subconsciously, that this "other" woman is in fact his own wife, so that he satisfies both of his desires at the same time. The logical paradox, the catch-22, is for the wife to get the child before he loves her.
Once she solves that riddle, she wins. But do we accept the idea that the clever wife's husband loves her after she has borne him a male child? That depends very much on the very different cultural and individual expectations of the women in different variants of the tale.
In some texts, even, perhaps, in the tale of Muladeva's wife, the husband is, in the end, quite pleased to have such a clever wife, precisely the quality on account of which he rejected her in the beginning. Shakespeare's Helena, rejected and wronged, must, in the words of Zwi Jagendorf, imitate her "desired rivals, tolerate more or less consciously the xvii.
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The clever wife must bring into a single focus the often clashing personae of what Freud stereotyped as the Madonna and the whore, or the virgin and the whore-or Diana and Helen. But she must also reconcile the wife and the mistress, not quite the same thing. The wife is undesir able for many of the reasons we have considered, but also, and perhaps primarily, because the husband knows that she is his wife, that he must desire her in order to have a child.
The tales of clever wives argue that for both the man and the woman, marriage may be the best revenge.
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169 169 Often the upper-class wife attempts to overcome her husband's paralyz ing respect through a change in class (she dresses like a whore) or culture (she dresses like a foreigner). Most of the clever wives' adventures take place away from home, where you leave your context behind. You are your self only at home, in your surroundings; you go abroad sometimes pre cisely in order to become someone else.
Memory is preserved in a social context and disappears with the loss of context. The clever wife is usually "foreign" not merely in the explicit political sense (she may wear the cos tume of another culture-Helena goes from Paris to Florence, Muladeva's wife from Pataliputra to Ujjain) but in the psychological sense of alien ation or defamiliarization: she makes herself strange to her husband, and hence desirable, no longer the boring legitimate partner, but fresh again. The fantasy of the wife-as-mistress is the Ur-form of the Marabel Morgan "Total Woman" approach to spicing up a marriage (an approach that has, more appropriately, been called the "Totaled Woman"), in which the housewife dresses up for her husband in a sexy negligee (or leather- and-chains, or French maid apron-and-garters).
But, as we have seen, when the wife, rather than the mistress, is of a lower class, that, too, can be the reason for her rejection. Too high or too low, too clever or well connected, or simply not his own free choice, she seems to begin in a no-win situation. Her only way out is to escape from all of these superficial labels and turn her cleverness from a liability into an asset.
Becoming someone else, she makes him see who she really is. And by getting his ring, she proves it. The stories pit men's power against women's cleverness.
No matter who actually sets the terms of the test, he always has the power, and he always leaves her. But she is always clever enough to trick him into coming back.
7. The Rape of the Clever Wife
Ring cycle 49
Rape and Rejection
Several of the stories we have encountered involve sexual violence, sometimes explicit rape. The "jewels" that Diderot's magic ring caused to talk told the truth about a rape.i Dushyanta's seduction of Shakuntalaii amounts to a rape, one scholar has argued, because Shakuntala was i.
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It emerges clearly enough from aspects of the mythology of Tristanv and of Siegfriedvi that bear re- examination. When Tristan puts his sword between himself and Isolde, King Mark reads it as evidence that they have been chaste, though in fact they are lovers. Tristan has, however, refused to consummate his marriage with the other Isolde, though there is no sword between them.
His use of the sword is therefore the manipulation of a symbol to conceal the truth. As for Siegfried, in the Völsunga Saga, Ibsen, and Wagner, where Siegfried most definitely does not rape Brünnhilde, he takes his sword and lays it unsheathed between himself and her when they sleep, and later he swears by that sword that he never touched her sexually. Rape and sexual rejection are uneasily intertwined throughout the entire Siegfried corpus.
Both rape and the sword in the bed iii.
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In this chapter we will focus on tales from the ancient Greco-Roman world and from Arabic and Turkish culture. In making explicit the latent theme of sexual vio lence, these stories are twisted into new patterns, as the storyteller finds it necessary to re-arrange other factors in the story, including chronology, agency, and even gender. Yet all the main themes are still there, like the cards in a shuffled deck: the rejection, the masquerade, the child, and the signet ring.
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Menander and Terence
Two Greco-Roman comedies, from the fourth to the second centuries bce, develop versions of a story that seems to have the makings of a tale of a clever wife. As in the story of Tamar and Judah, there is no explicit challenge or riddle, and the women's roles are reversed: a man rejects his wife until another woman, taking his wife's place, helps him to rediscover his lost ring and his abandoned, unknown son. Everything in the Greco-Roman narratives turns out quite differently from most stories of clever wives,vii in part because the assumptions of the Greek and Roman audience are so different from those of India or Elizabethan England.
In this world, the introduction of an explicit rape turns the plays into what amount to anti- clever-wife stories or clever-wife stories played out in Looking-Glass Land. The first play is The Arbitrators (Epitrepontes), by Menander, who lived and wrote in Athens from 342 to 290 bce; the second is The Mother-in-Law (Hecyra), by Terence (a.k.a. Publius Terentius Afer), a Phoenician born in vii.
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173 173 about 190 bce in Carthage (North Africa). Terence based his Latin play upon Menander's Greek play,7 but there are major shifts in the plot. His play is known only from fragments, but these amount to more than half of the play and happen to contain the essential ingredients of our story: the masquerade, the baby, and the ring.
Here is a summary of just those parts of the plot; the first paragraph sum marizes what has happened before the play begins: While Charisios was on an extended trip away from home, just five months after his marriage to Pamphile, she had given birth to a baby. Pamphile gave the inconvenient baby to her nurse to aban don in the forest. Charisios heard what had happened and, though he loved Pamphile, he left her, moved into the house of his friend Chairestratos next door, and brought in a hetaera (courtesan), Habrotonon.
In fact, Charisios had actually fathered Pamphile's baby four months before the wedding, in an act of drunken rape. But neither he nor she had seen the other's face in the dark, so neither of them (nor anyone else) knew who the baby's father was. As the play opens, Chairestratos's slave brings on an abandoned baby that he has received from a shepherd, together with a necklace and other pieces of jewelry, tokens.
The slave gives the baby to his wife, who takes it into their house, while the slave and the shepherd dispute the ownership of the tokens. Onesimos, Charisios's slave, arrives and recognizes one of the tokens as a ring belonging to his master. He takes it but hesitates to show it to Charisios because it identifies him as the father of the abandoned baby.
Onesimos knows that Charisios had lost that ring at the night festival of Artemis, a women's festival, when he was drunk. He reasons that Charisios must have raped a girl and lost his ring in the struggle, and she must have taken the ring and, after she gave birth, abandoned the baby: "Find the girl, show her the ring, and you'd have clear proof." But no one knows who the mother is. Habrotonon, the hetaera, overhears all this.
She tells Onesimos that she had been at that same festival of Artemis, and that a very pretty girl, whom she did not know but would recognize if she saw her again, had been raped, returning to the other women sob bing, filthy, her clothes torn to shreds. Still neither Onesimos nor Habrotonon will tell Charisios about all this without more proof. Habrotonon takes the ring and tells Charisios that she herself had 174
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174 gotten it when she was raped at the festival of Artemis. Charisios thus learns, and admits, that he was the father of the baby found with the ring, but thinks that Habrotonon was the mother. When Habrotonon meets Pamphile she recognizes her as the girl she saw at the festival of Artemis.
Still, a ring, as usual, ultimately establishes the identity of the husband's shameful (if marriage-saving) rape of his (future) wife, which he had forgotten because his mind was blurred by drink. The man who first seduces a woman and then marries her is of course a familiar figure. The man who rapes, rather than seduces, his future wife is not so common, and the man who does not know that he was the one who raped the woman who was to become his wife is quite a rare bird.
The transposition of the sexual encounter back to a moment before the (unconsummated) marriage leads to a major inversion of the agency as it appears in most other versions of the story: it is he, not she, who initiates this encounter, and indeed she is raped and impregnated not only against her will but, like him, without knowledge of the identity of her partner. The double amnesia is produced without any magic ring, just simple dark ness and wine. The ring here, as so often, plays a double role, intended to identify the abandoned child but actually identifying the father.
The first role is made much of in the play, which takes its name from the arbitration of the argu ment over ownership of the jewelry found with the child, jewelry at first variously described not as a ring but as a necklace and ornaments, golden
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175 175 things (Menander 301-309), and, most significantly, tokens (331), literally "things to be known" (gnorismata),10 the Greek word for objects by which a lost child, and his parentage, could be identified. The slave who brings the child onstage remarks, "His mother, wherever she is, gave them to the child to keep until he was grown," and he goes on to cite antecedents in Greek plays, particularly a tragedy in which a goatherd found the twins Neleus and Pelias, and showed them, when they were grown, the "pouch of tokens," which eventually proved that they were kings.
And, he adds, "One man avoided marrying his sister through tokens, one found his mother and saved her, a third his brother" (340-343). The first of these examples is a reference to a lost play by Menander, a little self-referential, intertextual joke about incest, which haunts these stories of Family Romances.viii The mother, Pamphile, intended the jewelry to do what it usually does: identify her child to the finder as of noble birth. But by including the ring in the bundle, she unknowingly identified the father as her own husband.
The men in arbitration do not notice the ring, but Onesimos does, and describes it in detail: it is a finger ring (daktylion), gilt over iron, with a stone carved with a bull or a goat (appropriately macho animals for Charisios), and letters saying that it was made by Kleostratos (388). Onesimos is absolutely certain about the significance of the ring, but Habrotonon is not. First, she doesn't recall whether the woman she had met at the festival had a ring or not, and second, she doesn't think that the ring proves that the owner of the ring was the rapist.
For, she points out, "Someone else could have gotten the ring from him as pledge, and then lost it-who knows? Or else he lost it gambling, or gave it up in some transaction-a million things like that can happen when men are drink ing" (500-510). This is the reasonable argument that keeps cropping up in these tales of recognition.
And, as usual, it proves wrong: the ring really does identify the rapist. At the very end of the play, Onesimos quotes a line from a lost Euripidean tragedy, the Auge, in which Heracles rapes Auge at a night festival. She bears a child, and the identity of the father is discov ered by means of a ring he had left with her (1125).
Onesimos says, at the end, "And now they've recognized each other and all is well" (1123). As usual, how well it all is depends on one's point of view. The most troublesome point for a contemporary reader is the atti tude to the rape.
When Habrotonon tells how she plans to get Charisios viii.
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176 to confess, she says she is counting on the fact that he's pretty drunk, but also, "I'll flatter him with the things that girls always say, like, 'Oh how bold and rough you were! How brutally you threw me down, and tore my clothes' " (528-530). It is disquieting to hear that this is a how a man would like to hear a woman react (or pretend to react) to a rape.
Charisios's attitude is only slightly better. When he learns that he is the father of the child, he says, "Look at me, the cad. I myself commit a crime, fathering a bastard child.
Yet I felt not a scrap of mercy, showed none to that woman who had the same bad fortune. "That woman" refers to Pamphile, and the "bad fortune" is her conception of a child out of wedlock. Charisios does not yet realize that it is his child, but he believes that he and his wife are victims of the same situ ation, ignoring the difference between the fact that he raped, apparently quite brutally, the woman he impregnated, while Pamphile, he presumes, either willingly took a lover or was herself raped.
Not at all the same thing. And he continues in this vein, now addressing himself: "You slimy scum, you won't tolerate a woman's forced misfortune, though you stumbled in just the same way yourself. And she'll treat you tenderly, while you insult her.
You're a crude, heartless brute" (913-920). The self-flagellation is all very well and good, but when Habrotonon tells him, "It's your wife's own child," his first reaction is, "I wish it were" (956). That is, he would be happy to learn that he (rather than someone else) had raped his wife, Pamphile.
This problematic attitude remains in Terence's adaptation of Menander's play, though Terence made some interesting changes. The name of the wife, Pamphile, is turned into the name of the husband, Pamphilus, while the wife, renamed Philumena, never appears on stage at all. Habrotonon's imagined masquerade as the girl Charisios raped (all that is left of the usual wife-as-courtesan bed-trick in the clever-wife pat tern) is entirely erased.
The wife's father, who played a central role in the Menander play, is replaced by the wife's mother, the (husband's) mother- in-law who gives Terence's play its title. Now the rape takes place just two months before the marriage, and the birth seven months after. And now the telltale ring belongs not to the husband but to the wife.
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177 177 which he had seized from her by force, he gave to his girlfriend, the courtesan Bacchis. Subsequently he set out for Imbros with out having consummated his marriage. Philumena, now pregnant, was taken back to her own home by her mother on the pretext of being ill, so that her mother-in-law might not learn of her condi tion.
Pamphilus returned, discovered the birth and kept it secret, but refused to take his wife back. His father blamed the affair with Bacchis for alienating the couple. While Bacchis was defending her self against that charge, Philumena's mother, Myrrina, happened to recognize the ring.
But then she offers to expose the baby at once, so that it won't be any trouble to 178
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178 him (380 ff.)-although this would presumably not be necessary if he did in fact agree to pretend to acknowledge the child. Still Pamphilus refuses to take back his wife, even though he feels the strong pull of their companionship and love. He resolves to stifle that love, as he stifled his love for Bacchis (400 ff.).
Privately, he wants to take his wife back, but public opinion forces him to reject her. This is the inversion of the situation of his marriage to her in the first place, publicly required, privately rejected. Myrrina then tells us that Philumena failed to seize anything from her assaulter by which he could afterward be identified, though he took the ring from her finger (570 ff.).
She seems to be citing the folktale; she regrets that her daughter, presumably not so well up on her folklore, did not play her role correctly, failing to grab the piece of incriminating evi dence (preferably a ring) that the wife-as-mistress conventionally reveals at the end of the story. Instead, in another reversal of the standard plot, the rapist gets her ring. At this point, the two key women players, Bacchis and Myrrina, meet in order to exonerate Pamphilus, who has been accused of adultery.
Pamphilus's father has censured him for spurning his wife not for any known fault in her but rather presumably because he is still sleeping with Bacchis. And so Bacchis is asked to swear to Philumena and her mother that she has not been sleeping with Pamphilus since his marriage, which is the truth (another significant departure from the folk theme, which depends upon the husband's adultery after the marriage). While Bacchis is giving her testimony, Myrrina just chances to see her ring and recognizes it as Philumena's.
Then Bacchis remembers that about nine months ago (!), Pamphilus had come home drunk with that very ring, which he gave to her (Bacchis). He said he had assaulted a girl in the street (he didn't know who she was) and had pulled the ring off in the struggle. Now Bacchis tells the story, revealing that Philumena's child is Pamphilus's own son (810 ff.).
The meeting of the two women thus unexpectedly exonerates not the husband but the wife, though this had not been the purpose of the meeting for either of them, since Bacchis knew nothing of the pregnancy and Myrrina knew that it was still a well-kept secret. Bacchis and Pamphilus rejoice at this discovery. Bacchis takes credit for giving Pamphilus great happiness and many blessings, saving his son, "whom he nearly lost through his own fault," and his wife, with whom he thought he would never live again (810 ff).
Pamphilus says, "If this is really
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179 179 true, I'm in heaven, the most fortunate of men, so lucky in love!" (850 ff.). What is wrong with this man? Why was he, we might ask, so stupid in the first place as to give his mistress the ring that he had stolen from a woman he raped?
Siegfried, too,ix gives his wife the ring he had taken from Brünnhilde after either rap ing her, seducing her, or tricking her (depending on which version of the story you read), and, as usual, the ring "proves" that he did whatever it is that he did. Indeed, we may well ask a variant of Fletcher's question about the men in many of the stories of clever wives: Why, if you don't want to be recognized as an adulterer, give the girl the ring at all?
Cultural context goes some way-though, in my humble opinion, not nearly far enough-in justifying Pamphilus: since rape is an acceptable macho thing in his world, he experiences no guilt when his rape of his wife becomes public knowledge. Pamphilus may have given the ring to Bacchis because he assumed that the woman he raped, a woman of some status, would never meet Bacchis, a courtesan. The expectations set up by the folktale and here overturned are not surprising in Greco-Roman comedy, in which the girl almost always ends up with the man who raped her.
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180 plots and characters, and the formulaic response-"Oh, I'm a daddy!"-is pasted into this particular scene even though it is not really appropriate here. Indeed, Pamphilus is relatively sensitive, compared to the common run of men in these plays. We may see problems in Pamphilus's moral world, but within that social world, he is behaving normally.
He may not be a cad as far as his own culture is concerned, but if you ask me, the whole culture is a cad. Worse than that, Terence's protagonist (I can hardly call him a hero) is delighted to learn that he not only raped his wife (well-his friends would say-he was a bit the worse for the liquor, of course, and boys will be boys) but robbed her (even drunkenness is surely no excuse for that, hardly a crime of passion, let alone gentlemanly behavior).
How, then, can he say, "I'm in heaven" (more literally, "I am a god," deus sum) and "lucky in love" (literally, "so lucky to be so full of the gifts of Venus," fortunatior venustatisque adeo plenior)? Why is he inca pable of guilt? It is as if he remembers the rape and robbery only long enough to legitimate his son.
He does not remember them long enough to apologize to his wife. He cannot apologize to her because she is not there. Menander's Pamphile speaks quite a few lines; Terence's Philumena never says a word.
She does nothing but give birth to a son, offstage. Nor, even in what is reported of her, does she do anything to exonerate herself; when she has a child
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181 181 she makes no attempt to make the husband acknowledge his paternity (either at the time when he rejects her or when her pregnancy is first revealed), because she does not know about it. Instead, other women- her mother and her husband's mistress-bring the truth to light, still inadvertently and unknowingly (could we say unconsciously?). This, too, can be blamed on the cultural context.
In Greek plays of the fourth century BCE, and the Latin plays based on them, women can't be clever wives because they can't go out and perform sexual seduc tions. Older wives, and courtesans, do have agency in Greco-Roman plays-hence the importance of the mother-in-law, and of Bacchis. But Philumena does not play the role of the typical Roman wife; she is the virgo, a different type, the young virgin who is always passive.
In the conventions of this theater, such a girl can never appear on stage to talk about her sexual experience; it has to be told in third person. Often she never appears at all. The true agent of the discovery here is really no single person at all (though Bacchis claims credit, and Myrrina actually makes the discovery) but the ring-this time not the husband's, but the wife's.
The ring is really the only one in the play who knows the story. In the dark, both husband and wife are fooled, but the ring knows and tells the truth. As Bacchis puts it, "And all this train of discovery was set off by a ring!" (810 ff.).
These two plays, by Terence and Menander, raise a conundrum of chronology. Since their plot lines reverse, in essential ways, the plots of almost all the other recorded variants of the tale of the clever wife, I am inclined to call these differences deviations from the prototype. But since Terence and Menander lived long before the authors of almost every other version of the story-with the notable exception of Genesis 38-it would be more correct to say that those later versions deviate from the earlier Greek and Latin prototype.
In that case, the evolution of the tales of clever wives could be said to follow the pattern of the tales of Dushyanta and Siegfried:x in the earliest versions, the male protagonist is a terrible cad, but in the later versions his character has been, at least in part, white washed. I would, however, prefer to regard the Greek and Latin plays as an entirely different subtype of not-so-clever wives, since the wives play little or no roles in them, and to regard Tamar as the earliest Clever Wife of the primary sort.
the prince of Malava and the princess of Swan Island:
A prince of Malava named Shridarshana married a princess named Padmishtha and enjoyed all pleasures with her. A merchant found, on the edge of a tank, an image of the god Ganesha, carved out of a jewel. He gave it to that prince, who, recognizing that it was priceless, set it up in a very splendid manner in a temple, as an act of devotion to the god.
Ganesha, pleased, had his servants (ganas) bring Shridarshana in his sleep to Anangamanjari, the princess of Hamsa-dvipa ("Swan Island"), who had begged the god for a hus band. The ganas did as he told them. The prince and princess woke up and fell in love and told one another their names and lineages and where they lived.
They quickly shed the mistaken idea that they were merely dreaming, but they exchanged jewels in order to make certain. And though they were full of desire, and eager to consummate their union, the ganas put them to sleep again. As soon as Shridarshana fell asleep, his desire unsatisfied, they took him and carried him back to his own palace.
He awoke and saw himself wearing a woman's ornaments and thought, "What is this? Where is the daughter of the king of Swan Island?
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183 183 is that heavenly room? It cannot be a dream, for here are those ornaments on me; so it must be some trick of fate." While he was engaged in these speculations, his loving wife Padmishtha woke up and questioned him and comforted him, and so he passed the night. On the next day, he appeared wearing the ornaments marked with the name of Anangamanjari.
His people tried in vain to find out where Swan Island was, and the prince pined away. Meanwhile the Princess Anangamanjari woke up and remem bered what had taken place in the night, and saw her body adorned with Shridarshana's ornaments. And she thought, "These orna ments prove that I cannot have been deluded by a dream, and they fill me with love for an unattainable object." When her father saw her wearing the ornaments of a man, marked with his name, he called for an envoy, who went to Malava and brought Shridarshana
to Swan Island. Shridarshana and Anangamanjari married and
The djinns (one male and one female) think that (a) each is surpassingly beautiful (the male djinn admires the woman, and the female djinn, the man), and (b) they look very much alike. The djinns bring the lovers together for one night and then part them, leaving them to find one another again. Unlike Shridarshana and Padmishtha, these lovers consummate their love on the first night, and this time there is no ring.
Instead there is an elaborate series of tests by which the hero proves that he was in bed with the woman: the taste of the pomegranate he cooks;xii the reconstruction of an entire room, with all of his clothes, xii. Recall the role of cooked food as an identifying sign, in chapter 2, p.
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184 that he recognizes; the extraordinary sight of a hunchback upside down in a latrine; and so forth. The number and detail of these proofs of identity bear impressive testimony to the power of the signet rings that, in so many other stories, accomplish the same goal, either with or without magic. The dream ring lives on in the American cinema.
In the film of Peter Ibbetson (1935, Henry Hathaway), based upon a novel by George du Maurier (1891), Peter and the woman he loves are separated, but they meet in their dreams. When he questions the reality of her presence in a dream, she says, still within the dream, "I am here… . If I promise to send it to you tomorrow, then will you believe?
Unless I'm really here now, I couldn't promise to send it to you. You'll get this ring tomorrow." The next day, she sends him the ring; when he sees it, he says, "It's real," and the man who brought it says, "Of course it's real. It's a ring." But Peter counters, "It looks like a ring.
It's the walls of a world." As in the Arabic tradition, the hard evidence of the ring validates the soft evidence of the dream.
Husband Qamar
Although the characters in it think they have dreamed it, they do actually (magically) meet. In this it is closer to the Indian tale of the prince of Malava. Moreover, in this story, the woman is the one who does the raping, or, rather, stages a homosexual rape of her husband.
The rings play different, though still essential, roles: King Shahraman had a handsome son named Qamar al-Zaman. The King wanted his son to marry, but Qamar insisted, "Father, I have no wish to marry, nor am I inclined to women, for I have read tales of their guile and heard verses on their cunning." When xiii.
Meanwhile, the beautiful Princess Budur, the daughter of the king
of the Interior Islands of China, had said, "I have no wish to marry, for I am a sovereign princess who rules over men, and I do not wish any man to rule over me." Her father imprisoned her in a tower. Two djinns brought Budur to Qamar's tower in her sleep, to determine which was the more beautiful. They laid her beside the young man.
They looked very much alike, as if they were brother and sister. First the jinns awakened Qamar, who was stunned by Budur's beauty and desired to make love to her. He undressed her but could not awaken her, for the djinns kept her asleep.
He wondered if this was the woman his father wanted him to marry, or if his father had sent the woman to test the sincerity of his resolve. He therefore refrained from touching her, but as a souvenir, he took from her little finger a valuable ring and placed it on his own little finger. The ring was inscribed with a verse that began and ended thus: "Do not think that I have forgotten your vows… .
By God, I will remain with you always." Then he turned his back to her and went to sleep. The djinns then awakened Budur, who assumed that Qamar was the man her father had wanted her to marry. She, in turn, tried to awaken him to make love, but again the djinns kept him asleep.
When she saw her ring on his little finger she cried out, "I love you, and you love me, but you turn away from me out of coquetry. You came to me while I was asleep, and I do not know what you did to me, but I will not take my ring from your finger." Then she took his ring from his finger and put it on her own and kissed his mouth and hands and every spot on his body, even his penis.
She took him in her arms and embraced him, but felt ashamed of her own desire, and fell asleep. The djinns returned Budur to China. At dawn, when Budur and Qamar awoke alone, each remembered the other and saw the ring, but each was told that no one had been there in the night.
After three years, Budur's stepbrother entered the harem disguised as a woman. He spoke to Budur and promised to help her find her prince. He brought Qamar to the kingdom of Budur's father, and Qamar sent Budur a letter, enclosing her ring.
They met and were married; they made love, and slept in each other's arms until the morning.
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186 Then Qamar persuaded Budur to return with him to his father in his own country. One day on the journey Qamar came upon Budur asleep; desiring her, he began to remove her pants, whereupon he discovered a blood-red jewel that she had kept tied to the ribbon of her pants and hidden in her most precious part. He took the jewel outside to look at it in the light, and a bird carried it off.
Qamar fol lowed the bird and did not return. Budur awoke to find that he had gone and had taken the jewel, without knowing its secret power. Fearing that her servants would make bold with her if they knew her husband was gone, Budur put on some of Qamar's clothes and a turban like his, veiled the lower part of her face, and departed.
No one discovered her identity, for she resembled Qamar so much that everyone took her for him. In this guise she journeyed to the City of Ebony, where the king said to her, "I have not been blessed with a son, but I have one daughter, whose face and body resemble yours in beauty and grace. Will you be willing to live in my country?
I will marry you to my daughter and give you the kingdom." Budur-as-Qamar agreed to this, but when she failed to consummate the marriage, the prin cess, Hayat al-Nufus, said, "I fear for you from the king, for he has resolved that if you don't take my virginity and consummate the marriage tonight, he will depose you and banish you from his country; he may even become more enraged and kill you." Budur- as-Qamar revealed that she was a woman, and Hayat said, "I will not divulge your secret." She took a chicken, slaughtered it and smeared herself with its blood. Then she took off her pants, and cried out.
The women of her family went in to her, and her waiting women let out trilling cries of joy. After some time, Qamar found the jewel that was the cause of his separation from his wife. He hid it in a cask of gold on a ship that was to take him to the City of Ebony, but the ship sailed with out him.
When it landed, Budur-as-Qamar, now king of the Ebony Islands, found the jewel. Through it she discovered Qamar's where abouts and sent her men to capture him and bring him to her. When Qamar arrived, Budur-as-Qamar said to him, "I love you for your surpassing beauty and grace, and if you grant me my desire, I will grant you more favors, make you more prosperous, and appoint you vizier, just as the people made me king, in spite of my youth." When Qamar heard this, he felt embarrassed and blushed until his
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187 187 cheeks seemed on fire, and he said, "I have no need of favors that lead to sin." Budur-as-Qamar kept arguing with him, reciting many obscene verses about men who prefer anal sex (with boys or with women) to full frontal sex with women. At last Qamar became convinced that there was no escape from compliance with the king's will. He said, "O King of the age, if you must do it, promise me that you will do it to me only once." He opened his trousers, feeling extremely embarrassed and shedding tears in fear.
Budur-as-Qamar smiled, took him with her to bed, and said, "After tonight, you will experi ence nothing offensive again." Then she bent over him, kissing and embracing him and wrapping her leg around his. When Qamar dis covered that she lacked male genitals, he said to himself, "Perhaps this king is a hermaphrodite, being neither male nor female." So he said to her, "Your majesty, you don't seem to have a tool like other men. What then moved you to carry on like this?" When Budur-as- Qamar heard this, she laughed until she fell on her back, and she said, "O my darling, how quickly you have forgotten the nights we spent together!" Then she revealed herself to him, and he recog nized her as his wife Budur.
So he embraced her and she embraced him, and he kissed her and she kissed him, and they made love. Then he began to remonstrate with her, asking, "What made you treat me like this tonight?" She replied, "Do not reproach me, for I only did it in jest, to increase the pleasure and joy." Qamar married Hayat al-Nufus, and Budur, who was not jeal ous, willingly became her maidservant and co-wife. Qamar ruled his people well and lived with his wives in happiness and delight and fidelity and cheerfulness, spending one night with each in turn.
He leaves without consummating their union. Searching for her, he sends her a letter, enclosing her ring. He marries her, but again leaves her.
Budur disguises herself as a king and seduces Qamar, who does not recognize her in her disguised form.
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188 she reveals herself to him and he welcomes her. She bears him a son who becomes king of her country. The husband's refusal to sleep with his wife, in the folktale, appears here first in the form of Qamar's refusal to marry any woman at all and then in the episode in which he abandons Budur when he steals her jewel.
Significantly, he likens the ring's power of proof to that of a blood-stained sword as proof of a killing, and says, "How could all this be a lie, when the matter of the ring is true? Were it not for the ring, I would have thought that it was a dream. This is her ring on my little finger at this moment.
Look at the ring, your majesty, and see how valuable it is." The fact that the ring is valuable is part of the
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It convinces her that she didn't dream their encounter, and it convinces her stepbrother, too. When he hears that Qamar had exchanged rings with his dream woman, he puts two and two together. But Budur never uses Qamar's ring to convince any one else, and so she is locked up in the harem as a madwoman, until her stepbrother rescues her.
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190 engraved with unknown figures and characters, which would function to identify her. Andras Hamori has this to say about it: "The indecipherable jewel snatched from the hero by a predatory creature might be an image of anxiety about sexual possession, of a worry (justified by later events) much like Gratiano's about Nerissa's ring.xvii Or, the failure to read the inscription on this intimate jewel might be seen as an encoding of fears of inadequacy. ('He does not know its secret,' says Budur).
The skeleton plot of the clever wife thus provides a framework that reveals Budur as the heroine of the story. Budur breaks out of the initial conventional situation of amazing physical identity with her lover to become a most unconventional woman, and someone quite different from him in every way-more active, more xvii.
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Yet she can only accomplish her goal of union with him by pretending to be him, using her cleverness to play upon the convention of their identical beauty. And in the course of her maneuvers, she threatens to rape him. As jewelry is often strongly gendered, the exchange of rings (and other things) amounts to a kind of minor cross-dressing, which may have inspired the more extensive cross-dressing in tales like that of Budur and Qamar.
Budur may well blame Qamar for having left her (and robbed her: she comments, blandly, "It seems that he has taken the jewel and gone") as well as for turning his back to her in bed on their first encounter. Qamar's initial rejection of Budur leaves her with the suspicion that he might have raped her in her sleep: "You came to me while I was asleep, and I do not know what you did to me." Budur both loves and hates Qamar.
Her unexpressed (repressed?) resentment for being rejected, twice, may best explain her quite evident sadistic pleasure in tormenting Qamar when he thinks she is the king. She plays the trick on her husband in order to exert power over him as he had exerted power over her, to put him in danger of being raped just as his absence had put her in danger of being raped. Her own rather lame excuse xx.
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For when each of the two women has borne and raised a son, each woman falls in love with the other's son, propositions him, is rejected, and accuses the boy of rape. Qamar believes the women at first and orders the boys killed, but they are spared and prove their inno cence with the help of the fathers of Budur and Qamar. We know this as the "Potiphar's wife" scenario in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 39), and the Greek myth of Phaedra, in which rejection is reprocessed as rape.
It is yet another example of the combination of these two sexual scenarios that appear to be polar opposites. The tale of Qamar and Budur conflates the two sexual extremes in two different ways: first, a mock rape as a revenge for rejection (Budur-as-Qamar with Qamar), and then the accusation of rape made in revenge for rejection (the two queens' calumny against the two sons). When Budur-as-Qamar teased Qamar about forgetting how she was in bed, she laughed "until she fell on her back," precisely the sexual posi tion for a woman that the obscene poems explicitly rejected (advising the women to turn over on their stomachs) and that therefore may be an invi tation for sex in the missionary position.
The little touches of revenge in Budur's trick are bitter. In their first encounter, she had touched his penis and felt ashamed; now she gets him to touch what he thinks is her penis, and enjoys his confusion when it is not there. Her revenge extends into the last part of the story, when she almost makes him destroy his son (by the other wife) by claiming that the boy had raped her.
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193 193 however, the raison d'être of the more typical clever wife, and Budur does have a son, though for a while he is a problem rather than a solution. The blithe assertion that Qamar "lived with his wives in happiness and delight and fidelity and cheerfulness, spending one night with each in turn," evokes the Middle-Eastern tradition that goes awry in the Hebrew Bible, in the story of Rachel and Leah, and fares little better here, where the "fidelity and cheerfulness" is certainly short-lived.
The fact that the solution to all of this transvestism and quasi-incest is to send the women home to live with their fathers might give a Freudian pause, but Qamar, too, ends up in his father's field, and it was in order to return to his father that Qamar left Budur in the first place. Here I think the return to the fathers indicates little more than one more example of the virulent misogyny (and in this case the literal patriarchy) of the story.
The Vizier’s Daughter
A clever wife cross-dresses in a story that has no rape but does develop, in extraordinary detail, a kind of sexual violence that may provide an expla nation for the sexual violence in other versions of the tale that we have considered. In this Turkish variant, collected by a German anthropologist in the late nineteenth century, the woman has no name except a generic patronymic; as Muladeva's wife was just the Brahmin's daughter, this woman is the Vizier's daughter. We can recognize her as a clever wife through the motifs of the seal ring, the riddle, the cleverness, and the mas querade of the rejected wife: A certain prince had a Vizier, who was the father of a twelve-year- old daughter.
Hearing the maiden's cleverness praised, the prince called the Vizier to him and propounded a riddle, which the Vizier was to answer within three days or lose his head: What is a kid at ten years, a fox at twenty, a wolf at thirty, a tiger at forty, a halter at fifty, and "halted" at sixty? After three days had passed, and the Vizier could find no answer, his daughter gave him the solution: a human child, frisky as a kid at ten, sly as a fox at twenty, brave as a wolf at thirty, strong as a tiger at forty, lazy and slothful as a horse in a hal ter at fifty, and at sixty, "halted," unable to do any work at all.
When the prince discovered that the Vizier's daughter had given him the answer, he said, "If that is the case, the maiden will do for my wife, and I will hold her above all my forty wives." She demanded that, 194
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194 before they were married, the prince should bring her a white ele phant and a man without sorrow. The elephant was procured from another prince within a year, but for three years the prince searched in vain for a man without sorrow. Finally he came upon a ruler who drank wine in the midst of his assembled people, laughing and joking.
When the prince asked this king if he was, as he appeared to be, a man without sorrow, the king invited him to come home with him. There the prince saw the king's very beautiful wife, and beside her a foul, black giant50 and two children. When the woman saw the king, she said, "What are you doing here?" and boxed his ears and drove him out of the house.
Then the king explained: "This woman is my wife, and the giant is my slave. When I took some medicine during an illness, I lost my virility and could not satisfy my wife, and so every day she begged me to set her free to take another man. I told her not to leave me, since I was the King and would lose face if the people learned of this, but to find a handsome young man and live with him.
And so she lives with this giant and bore him two children, and kisses him whenever he comes near her, but kicks me out. No one has greater sorrow than I." The prince returned home and called the Vizier and said, "I have found no man without sorrow in all the world, but even so, give me your daughter." The prince then married the Vizier's daughter, but did not live with her. Instead, he went off hunting, announcing that he would be gone for nine years.
As he left, he gave his wife an empty chest, sealed with his seal, and he commanded her to fill it with gold and silver without opening it, and he gave her a mare that, he commanded, must give birth to a foal that was just like his black stallion. He also told his wife that she must bear a child, instruct him well, and send the child to him, mounted upon the foal. Then he rode off on his stallion, taking his seal.
After he had been gone three days, the wife attired herself like a prince, dressed up four hundred maidens like men, and rode out after her husband. She pitched her tent near the place where he was staying, thus attracting his attention. Hospitalities were exchanged, but the prince did not recognize his wife in disguise.
The prince proposed that they should play "Dame" (checkers), and after a while the wife-as-prince proposed that they play for a stake. So each wagered his horse, saddle, trappings, and seal.
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195 195 won, and retiring to her tent with the seal, she let the black stallion cover the mare. Opening the chest, she filled it with gold and silver and re-sealed it with her husband's seal. She then sent the stallion, trappings, and seal back to the prince.
The next evening, the wife-as- prince proposed that they play for a woman. She purposely lost, and told the prince that she would send him a beautiful female slave. Retiring to her tent, she then assumed that disguise, and came back to her husband.
He was aroused by the wife-as-slave-girl and lay that night with her. Then they drank spirits, and the prince became drunk. The wife-as-slave-girl gave the prince a box on the ear.
Angry and drunken, he chased the wife-as-slave-girl away from his tent. She collected her retinue and returned home. After nine months, nine days and nine hours, she bore a son, and the black mare bore a foal.
She instructed the son well, and had him tutored by a mullah from the age of five. At the end of the nine years, the prince returned. The Vizier's daughter sent her son to meet his father, riding on the black horse.
The prince was told that the boy was his son, born of the Vizier's daughter. At first he was angry, thinking that the child was not his own. Then his wife showed him the chest, told him that the horse on which the boy was riding was the issue of her mare and his own horse, and that he had fathered the boy during the night he had spent with her when she was disguised as a slave-girl; she related the whole story.
Because she was exceedingly clever and well taught, he exalted her above all his other wives. After he had lived with her for many days, he finally died.51 The king's seal on the treasure is probably a seal ring.
At the very least, it plays the role usually played by the seal ring: to stamp and identify the person who slept with the woman. The (gold) sealing ring is conflated with the sealed box of gold as a symbol of virginity, like the sealed trunk that is
the symbol of Imogen’s chastity in Cymbeline.xxi
Here, something has gotten into that trunk, though it remains sealed, a metaphor for the womb and for the surface of a woman that the true lover must penetrate. This is precisely what her husband cannot do: he fails to recognize his wife either when she is de-sexualized (as a boy) or xxi.
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196 hyper-sexualized (as a slave girl). The male costume may also account for the unusual aggression and agency of the woman in this version of the story: it gives her the courage to challenge the men. The riddle that the prince poses for the Vizier is about the decline of human life.
It is answered by a second riddle, which the Vizier's daughter sets for the prince in return, on the same general subject-the inevitability of sorrow. This second riddle turns out to have two answers, one of which is also about decline, now sexual decline, the tale of the impotent king. And this raises the issue of sexual performance.
Though the prince searches in vain for a man without sorrow (a vari ant of the old Buddhist parable of the impossible task given to a woman who prays for medicine that will bring back her dead child-find a house in which there has been no death),52 what he finds instead is the reason for the man's sorrow: his wife has taken a lover. The prince learns this lesson so well that he rejects his own wife, who reappears in disguise and boxes his ears just as the wife of the impotent king had boxed his.
But in the end the prince comes to realize the half-full optimism of Muladeva's story:xxii there is at least one woman without evil, or, as the prince puts it here, one "exceedingly clever and well-taught" woman, the exception to the rule. This is the male view, of course, the dominant view of the storyteller. But we may also find women's voices in male texts,53 and the woman's voice here tells another story: as in the tale of Muladeva's wife, the hus band, in the end, is proud of his clever wife.
A feminist twist in this tale is apparent in the unusual feature that the wife of the king cannot be satis fied or impregnated by her husband, not because he rejects her (as the husband of the clever wife does) but because he himself cannot perform. Unlike the clever wife, who jumps through hoops to win the privilege of her husband's sexual favors, the wife of the impotent king simply takes up with another man she fancies, a common-sense move that short-circuits the entire conventional scheme of the folktale.
The storyteller may not approve of it, but he includes it, thus perhaps inadvertently allowing a fifth column of proto-feminism to slip into his story. Why do none of the clever wives, including the one in this very story, the Vizier's daughter, think of this simple but elegant solution to the problem of the rejecting husband-go and get pregnant by another man? Because of the double problem of inheritance and inherited characteristics.
There has to be proof that the husband is the father of his son.
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These two supplemental births are also bound together by the motif of black skin: the main protagonists are presumably fair-skinned, but the stallion and mare as well as the lover of the impotent king's wife are black. And the illegitimate children of the black lover? Are they, too, black, like the stallion's foal?
Blackness in the foal serves as proof that it was sired by the king's stallion; presumably the children fathered by the black lover are also black. The black children of white wives (or the reverse, in the case of Persinna, the Ethiopian queen)xxiii cause ter rible problems in many myths,56 and that may explain why more women didn't take the uppity queen's route: there is great danger in attempting to foist off non-resembling children as legitimate heirs to the throne. (Recall the king's fear that he will lose face before his people, evidence that there is some force of convention holding his authority in place.) Most wives of men who may have been impotent or simply unsatisfac tory wouldn't have wanted to risk having other men father children who might be rejected.
The main proof of the paternity of the clever wife's child, however, is not just the existence of a horse and a sealed treasure but words: the clever wife tells him the story, and he knows she is right. Her story takes the place of his seal ring as the final arbiter. "And then she told the whole story, in front of everyone," says the tale of Muladeva's wife.xxiv Though the Vizier's daughter does not act as willfully as does the wife of the impotent king, she has a power (or, if you prefer, agency) that is extreme and complete.
Monia Hejaiej recorded a variant, still entitled "The Vizier's Daughter," in early 1990:57 The Vizier's daughter, 'Aysha, out-riddled the king to save her father's life. When the king asked for her hand in marriage, she xxiii.
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198 guessed that he was motivated by anger because she had embar rassed him and forced him to spare her father. She told her father, "I don't think he really wants to marry me. I can see what he's up to.
He wants to take his revenge … and now he wants to kill me." Still she agreed to marry him, but took the precaution, in advance, of having a secret tunnel built between her father's home and the palace. The king and 'Aysha married, but immediately he locked her up in a small cell. When, months later, he went off on a trip to Sfax, she said, "I have a sister there who is very like me.
Give her my love." She then escaped through the tunnel, dressed as a man, and arrived in Sfax before him. Dressed again as a beautiful woman, she tricked him (and her father the Vizier, who did not recognize her, either), slept with him, and asked him to give her something as proof that he had spent the night with her. He gave her, on three successive visits, over three years, his royal armband with his seal, his royal chain of office with his seal engraved on it, and, finally, his royal ring with his seal engraved on it.
On each occasion she slept with him and nine months later gave birth to a son. One day, news reached 'Aysha that the king was going to marry his cousin. She found out when the bride's trousseau ceremony was to be held, dressed each of her children in one of the three pieces of royal insignia, and sent them there to mess things up.
At that point the woman narrator says: "Her marriage was unconsum mated, so how could she have children?" The children then save their mother not through any extraordinary skill (like thieving) or even by their
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199 199 resemblance to their father, but simply by behaving like children, naughty, spoiled children at that: they break up the place. The actual proof then comes not through the child(ren) but through the ring. The naughty children are a touch that a narrator who was a mother may well have contributed, and the voice of the woman narrator of this version is strong, adding details not found in other versions told by nar rators who are male or of unknown gender.
Now the Vizier's daughter has a name, 'Aysha, and each time she gives birth, "The baby crawled, toddled, held to the wall and walked. In real life a child grows in a year or two, but just in a couple of words in a tale." As in other Muslim variants, each child is put in the care of a mullah, or of "a tutor who was entrusted with his religious education and general knowledge," but this time he is also, first, put in the care of a wet nurse.
After all, she was legally his wife." This is, of course, part of the charm of the tale of the clever wife-the husband gets to have all the fun of committing adultery without actually breaking the law-but few texts bother to spell it out. This text also interjects reason at three critical points. First, it accounts for the "strange" woman's uncanny resemblance to 'Aysha by creating an imaginary sister and letting family resemblance explain the doubling.
Second, it has 'Aysha explicitly ask not just for jewelry but for proof-why? Why is he not suspicious of this request? Or, rather, why, in all the other versions, does he give the jewelry to her without being asked?
Just payment for a night's services? Why not cash, or at least a woman's jewelry, not a man's ring? And, third, 'Aysha asks not just for his jew elry but for his royal insignia, as proof that her lover was the king.
These details retrospectively inspire us to ask similar reasonable questions about all the other versions that gloss over these practical matters. We will return to these questions.xxv xxv.
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200 Most interesting of all is what is not in this version, the dog that doesn't bark,60 another use for intertextuality. 'Aysha cross-dresses as a man, but she never encounters her husband in this form, as Budur does. Even in the nineteenth-century version of the tale of the Vizier's daughter, the encounter that the wife-as-prince has with her husband is merely an asexual prelude to the sexual encounter that she has as slave girl.
Why does the storyteller put in the cross-dressing and then drop it? It is not such an essential traditional element of the plot that she could not leave it out, though it is popular enough to slip in uninvited, as it were. What is 'Aysha's motivation for cross-dressing?
Perhaps just to travel in safety, the explicit reason given in several other variants. But, just as this variant inspires us to ask questions of other variants, so, too, other variants, such as the tale of Budur and Qamar, where the sexual encounter takes place while she is still cross-dressed, shed intertextual light on the atavistic, truncated episode of cross-dressing in the tale of the Vizier's daughter.
Parental Imprinting and Uncertain Fathers
The tale of the Vizier's daughter raises the issue of sexual deficiency. In other tales of clever wives that we have considered, too, the sexual rejection that the wives experience as the back of the man in bed or the empty pillow is also a dramatic expression of his sexual deficiency. The juxtaposition of rejec tion and rape in the Greco-Roman and Arabic tales that we have just consid ered reveals the sexual ambivalence of the man (and, in the case of Budur, the woman) who perpetrates the rape.
Performance anxiety is often relieved by a subordinate woman with no legal connection, a woman of lower class (or caste, in the Indian examples) or another culture, the woman the clever wife often pretends to be. In such an encounter, the ring bears witness to the man's performance and the woman's pleasure. If we consider the fear of inability to perform or of sexual deficiency as an ingredient in male rejection we may gain new insights into the rel evance of the signet ring in these stories.
For to the man's fear of defi ciency we must now add his uncertainty about the paternity of his son. When the husband in one South Indian variant that we have considered declares that he will shut his wife up, he says, "If I don't, I wouldn't be my father's son." It is surely significant that the scene in the Ramayana where Rama sends Sita away forever comes right after the moment when, shortly after he has brought her back from the island where the ogre Ravana has
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Muladeva doesn't know who the father of his son is, either. The men in these stories are desperate to find proof that they are in fact the fathers of the children that their wives bear, and with good reason: they believe that their own survival depends upon it. A Sanskrit text from perhaps as early as the eighth century bce expresses the belief that the father actually is reborn as his son: The father enters his wife; he becomes an embryo inside her, who is now his mother.
The father thus reproduces himself the way a stamp might imprint a coin, and indeed the metaphor of coinage is often used to refer to a false woman.xxviii Thus in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale,xxix the lethally jealous Leontes says to the son of Polixenes (the man he wrongly suspects of father ing his, Leontes's, child), "Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince, / For she did print your royal father off, / Conceiving you" (5.1.124-125). The related metaphor of the signet ring imprinting the unique signature of a man lies at the heart of the story of the clever wife.
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202 Paternal nervousness is often expressed through the metaphor of stamp ing the embryo with the father's seal. This is yet another meaning of the seal ring. Aristotle is, as so often, the original culprit: he and his followers believed that the father, with his semen, stamps the female matter (made from menstrual flow) to produce his image in the fetus.
We have noted the recurrent statement, in the tales of clever wives, that the son uncannily resembles his father. As Shakuntala puts it, "The son born from his wife is like a man's face in a mirror… .
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203 203 your reflection seen in a clear pond."xxx The son is, in a sense, what Saint Augustine called a "worsened resemblance,"69 a second-rate copy, while the mother is, in this model, either invisible, or implicated in this copy ing process through the stigmatizing of resemblance itself as the "mother of falseness," or, finally, vindicated in her chastity by the "proof" that her son was not fathered by some man other than her husband. The visual criterion is essential in this pre-DNA world, in which paternity is difficult if not impossible to establish; the husband imprints his image on his child even as his identity is imprinted on his signet ring.
And the need to be reassured of that stamp of approval fuels the father's paranoia. The plot thickened when70 it came to be widely believed that the image of what a pregnant woman saw or even imagined, and in particular what ever frightened her,71 would stamp itself upon the embryo she was carry ing and leave a mark on the child. Thus a woman who thought of her lover while being impregnated by her husband might give birth to a child that looked like the lover.
After all, if a man's child is the spitting image of his best friend, there is a more logical explanation than maternal imprinting. But then it was argued that a woman who knew this would think of her husband while in the arms of her lover, in order to xxx.
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The ghost of this mythology hovers over these stories of clever wives, which regard the father's signet ring as proof of paternity, against all logic, because the father in the stories (often telling the stories) wants something hard, like a piece of jewelry (which, after all, can get lost but not so easily broken as a heart), to prove what can in fact never be proven: that the child is his own. Even though shamed, he is happy to have the son, and to have seen his wife prove her fidelity; he accepts the lie that "the ring proves it's your kid" because he so dearly wants to believe that it's his kid.
One might hope that DNA would lay this ghost to rest at last, but alas, no. DNA can offer proof of paternity and is resorted to by a surprisingly high number of nervous men, many of whom turn out to have good cause
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As Robert Pippin has put it, "It is as if, apart from false biology, there is no real history. The 'proofs' are as much a tangle as the oral pledges; the evidence of the ring is always ironic, as if sexual life travels in this little sealed capsule through historical time. Romantic/sexual love is an arche typal domain of deep, fundamental uncertainty.
The vulnerability is greater than any other human domain, the need for proof cor respondingly the highest and the frailest."80 It is far more difficult to prove chastity than to establish paternity. There is no scientific proof of chastity. The evidence of a signet ring, however flimsy, is probably as good as it gets.
8. The Affair of the Diamond Necklace
In previous chapters of this book, rings have occupied the center ring. But as we move into modern Europe and America, in the final three chap ters, we'll enlarge our scope to include jewelry more generally, particu larly necklaces, simply because some of the best jewelry stories from this period happen to be about necklaces.
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The Affair of the Diamond Necklace
But necklaces are taken off more often than rings. They are designed to please someone's eye other than the wearer's, and because they are larger, they are often showier and more costly. All of this makes a difference in the narratives.
In this chapter we will dip into recorded history, unique and datable events, to consider a great eighteenth-century scandal involving a diamond necklace. But we will find ourselves dragged back, inexorably, into the field of myth.
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Marie Antoinette and the Scene in the Bower
The "Affair of the Diamond Necklace" (sometimes called "The Affair of the Necklace" or "The Queen's Necklace") is the name given by historians to a scandal that raised French hatred of Marie Antoinette to a fever pitch, an episode that they regard as so important that one would presumably not i.
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The Affair of the Diamond Necklace
Source: © The Trustees of the British Museum.
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The Affair of the Diamond Necklace
Jeanne soon made her acquain tance and called her the Baroness d'Oliva, a near anagram of her own name, Valois. Jeanne persuaded Nicole to participate in what she represented as a little joke for the amusement of the queen: on August 11, 1784, Jeanne told the cardinal that she had arranged an assignation for him with the queen. It was to take place that evening in a secluded bower of the garden at Versailles, sometimes known as the Bower of Venus (Bosquet de Venus), because there were plans to set up a statue to Venus there.
(The statue was never made, and the bower was later called the Queen's Bower, "in memory of this particular night.")20 That moonless night in the Bower, the cardinal met Nicole, who was dressed like the queen. She gave him a rose and said, "You know what this means." Immediately they were interrupted and the phantom woman fled.
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210 left alone with his rose and his fantasies, believing that he had met with the queen. On January 29, 1785, Jeanne went in for the kill. She persuaded the cardinal that Marie Antoinette wished to purchase the diamond necklace and wanted him to act as her secret emissary, because she did not want it known that she had indulged in such an extravagance.
Rétaux forged documents from the queen, agreeing to the price and the method of pay ment. Jeanne then gave these documents to the cardinal, who conveyed them to the jewelers. The cardinal pledged his own credit to pay for the necklace in installments, and he made a substantial down payment.
On February 1, 1785, the jewelers delivered the necklace to him. He took it to Jeanne's house and handed it over to a man he believed to be the queen's valet. It was, however, Rétaux, who, together with Comte LaMotte, took the necklace to London and Amsterdam, where it was broken up and sold.
King Louis XVI, in what is generally regarded as an act of great stupidity, decided not to hush up the affair. On August 15, Assumption Day, almost exactly a year after the meeting in the Bower of Venus, the king summoned the cardinal and asked him to explain it all. When the cardinal displayed the letters signed "Marie Antoinette de France," he was mocked for not knowing, as an ambassador and a prince of France, that royalty never use surnames.24 ii.
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211 211 What became of the diamonds? Jonathan Beckman's guess is as good as any: "Diamonds are hardy things, and history does not scar them. Somewhere, anonymously, in a Swiss safe or around a neck, reconfigured into earrings or brooches or a mortuary statuette of a beloved Doberman, they sit, unperturbed by the anguish they caused."25
The Official Trial
The king imprisoned the cardinal in the Bastille. Three days later he sent Jeanne there as well. A trial took place, over nine months, in which many of the facts emerged, as well as many fictions.
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212 The court did not believe any of them. On May 31, 1786, the cardinal was acquitted of the charge of having fraudulently acquired the neck lace, though he was stripped of all his offices and exiled to the abbey
of La Chaise-Dieu in Auvergne. Nicole Le Guay was acquitted too. She
The Affair of the Diamond Necklace
It offers an eccentric version of the much-chewed-over theme of royal extravagance-the queen shitting diamonds in her hurry to escape-and a telling instance of historical compression: the Affair is the original cause of the queen's incarceration-Marie Antoinette can never escape it, just as she fails to escape the palace. The neck lace will always haul her down."55 214
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It was Jeanne's memoirs, of which 1,500 copies were at once smuggled into France; more were to follow, perhaps 10,000 iii. Figure 8.2 A cartoon from c. 1791, artist unknown, depicting the diamond neck lace falling on Jeanne from between Marie Antoinette's legs.
Source: Artist unknown/© RMN-Grand Palais/Bibliotheque Nationale Paris
Alexandre Dumas
Many of the subsequent fictional and semi-fictional tellings of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace follow not the historical record but the rather dif ferent story that Dumas told in The Queen's Necklace (Le collier de la reine) in 1849, right after the French Revolution of 1848. Dumas picks up the accusation made by the libelle-that the cardinal did sleep with the woman he met in the Bower of Venus-as well as the accusations made by Jeanne, namely, that the queen wanted the necklace and negotiated with the cardinal for it.
In Dumas's version of the story, the allegation that the queen was present in the Bower is more important, as it was in the mind of the public (and of the king), than the allegation that she bought, or received, the diamond necklace. And for Dumas, both accusations are true in spirit though not in the flesh: the cardinal thinks, wrongly, that he has slept with the queen, and the queen thinks, wrongly, that she can have the necklace. Dumas's Marie meets personally with the cardinal on several occa sions and asks him to negotiate secretly to buy the necklace for her; she mistakenly believes that she will be able to get the funds to pay for it.
Dumas's Jeanne-who is actually in Marie Antoinette's confidence, which makes her betrayal all the more damnable-facilitates all of these meet ings. The cardinal brings the necklace to the queen. But when she realizes that she will not have the money to pay for it after all, Marie tells Jeanne to return the necklace to the jewelers and get a receipt.
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216 As for the love affair, the night tryst in the Bower of Venus is the key to the whole story for Dumas, who makes it into a consummated bed- trick: the cardinal actually goes to bed with the prostitute that he mistakes for the queen. But it happens rather differently this time: the cardinal (rather than Comte LaMotte) meets Nicole (here called Oliva Legay; let's call her Oliva) at a masked ball and talks flirtatiously with her; when her mask slips for a moment, he thinks he recognizes the queen and makes sly (and to Oliva incomprehensible) German references to Schoenbrunn, Marie's palace in Vienna.
Jeanne observes this and realizes that the cardi nal is in love with the queen. Several other people say that they saw the queen at the ball, and the rumor reaches the ears of the queen, who denies it; she was with the king that night, as he affirms. But now she knows that she has a double.
Jeanne arranges the tryst in the Bower of Venus, proposing to Oliva
Olivier sees Oliva with the cardinal in the Bower and mistakes her for the queen. The queen pro tests her innocence and argues, "I have already been injured through the resemblance to me of some woman, I know not who, but who is like her unhappy queen."67 She goes into the park with Olivier that night, to see if
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217 217 they can find the girl, but no one appears there. They, however, are seen together, and now people testify that they saw her in the Bower with the cardinal, both on the occasion when Oliva (whom they mistook for Marie) was there with the cardinal and on the occasion when Marie was there with Olivier (whom they mistook for the cardinal). Everyone, including the cardinal, thinks that the queen slept with the cardinal.
The jewelry is a false proof of identity: it seems to prove that the cardinal was the queen's lover. The identical double is a better, truer proof: Nicole's existence proves that the queen was not the one who was the cardinal's lover. Dumas turns this part of the story into a recognition comedy, and indeed the recognition does acquit the queen 218
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In the 1938 film Marie Antoinette (with a script by Donald Odgen Stewart, among
others, including F. Scott Fitzgerald), Norma Shearer is Marie and the
ever villainous Henry Daniell is LaMotte (with Jeanne reduced to a bit part). The film adds two significant jewelry episodes. Before the episode that concerns us, Marie appears wearing a large, but not spectacular, dia mond necklace.
She wagers the necklace in a bet that she can get the newly arrived Swedish Count Axel Fersen (Tyrone Power) to go to a party with her. He refuses and, when he discovers that she has gambled away the necklace, scolds her.iv On the next day, the Austrian emissary remarks that her mother is angry at her because of her extravagance, and mentions "a necklace costing 200,000 livres." Marie laughs and says, "Which I lost tonight on a wager." And then the film adds a ring: after Count Fersen has become her lover, she gives him a large, domed signet ring, which he sends to her when he comes to rescue her as the Revolution begins.v She gives it back to him when he visits her in prison and he gazes at it on his finger as she goes to the guillotine.
It is the last thing we see before the camera pans up to the sky, presumably to heaven. The rest of the film sticks fairly closely to the historical record. Rohan is duped by Jeanne, as usual, though with a significant twist: in the scene in the Bower, instead of receiving a rose from the woman he takes to be the queen, Rohan actually hands her the necklace in a box, saying, "Your majesty, the commission with which you honored me… .
Dare I hope that the past will be forgiven?" to which she replies, with Pythian ambi guity, "You may hope." When he is later called before the king (Robert Morley) and queen, and insists, in her presence, that he had placed the necklace in her hands, she indignantly replies, "I haven't addressed a word to you in eight years. How could you possibly believe that I would employ iv. An episode that may have been borrowed from Daniel Deronda; see chapter 9, p.
An episode that may have been borrowed from the medieval tale of Tristan; see chapter 4, p.
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219 219 you as a go-between to buy a necklace behind my husband's back? Your presumption is criminal." When Rohan is exonerated, she realizes that she is doomed. The Duc d'Orléans (Joseph Schildkraut) says to the king, "Take care, Louis, that that necklace doesn't twist around your fat neck and choke it."77
Fact and Fiction
And there was even hocus-pocus involved: the slippery Count Cagliostro, a notorious magician and all-around charlatan, was implicated with the cardinal in detailed but inconsequential ways; he testified in the trial, and was exonerated. The whole story sounds like one of the tales that fill this book: it begins when a man (Louis XV) plans to give a necklace not to his wife but to his mistress; then a low-born, promiscuous woman substitutes in the dark for a virtuous queen, with a man from whom she gets a fabulous piece of jewelry.
Jeanne must have heard such stories, and they may have inspired her to stage the scene in the Bower of Venus. Marie Antoinette was inno cent, but then so were the women, including queens, in so many of our stories, accused by smoking pieces of jewelry that they eventually turned to their own defense. Rose Bertin, Marie Antoinette's dressmaker, called the scene in the arbor "a story that would barely be credible in a bad novel." 220
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220 It reminded her of La Fontaine's fable, "Le Magnifique,"81 based on a story by Boccaccio, in which a young woman closely watched by her husband can signal her love to her young lover only by silently dropping a rose to the ground. The plot also echoes that of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: a court clown who believes that a noblewoman is in love with him falls for a forged letter and is tricked in a garden. But it was closest to opera buffa, with "a complicated plot, disguises and mistaken identities, purloined let ters, elegant settings, and luscious female characters.
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Tragic history as it repeats itself becomes not farce (as Marx said it did)94 but grand opera and pulp fiction. The fictional background might have affected not only the trick that Jeanne engineered but the way in which Rohan fell for it, according to Beckman: "Rohan was easily beguiled by Jeanne because the assignation in the bosquet tallied with the fables he told himself: it confirmed his own seductive prowess, but it also cast him as the hero of a romantic adventure.
The lawyers' melodramatic trial briefs were heavily influenced by Diderot's famous fairy tale,96 "The Indiscreet Jewels."vi
Beaumarchais and The Marriage of Figaro
But the legal briefs were even more influenced by Pierre-Auguste Caron de Beaumarchais. Indeed, the historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) believed the fabricated story about the queen watching Rohan kneel before d'Oliva, "though the only evidence he could adduce in his favour was Marie Antoinette's fondness for performing plays by Beaumarchais."97 vi.
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Then: In response to Count Almaviva's insistence that Susanna grant him a rendezvous in the pine grove, his wife decided to stand in for her maid. Lamenting the loss of her youth and of Almaviva's love, Rosina expressed her hope that she would win him back with this trick. She dictated a letter to Almaviva, ostensibly from Susanna, agreeing to meet him in the grove that night.
At the appointed time, Rosina and Susanna entered the grove, each disguised in the other's clothes. Almaviva wooed Rosina-as- Susanna, and he gave her a diamond ring as a token of his love.
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223 223 Then he said, "Let us conceal ourselves in here." "In the dark, my lord?" asked Rosina-as-Susanna. "That's what I want; you know I don't want to go there to read," he replied. Figaro (Almaviva's valet and Susanna's fiancé) arrived and realized what was happening.
He and Susanna-as-Rosina recognized the count's voice and pretended to make love. Almaviva, searching for Rosina-as-Susanna, found them and believed he had caught Figaro and Rosina together. He gathered witnesses, accused Susanna-as- Rosina, and refused to forgive her, but his vengeance was cut short by the arrival of the real countess in her own clothes.
He humbly apologized to her, and she forgave him. She gave the diamond ring to Susanna. The diamond ring does not fulfill its conventional function of revealing the identity of a disguised lover.
All that happens-in Beaumarchais-is that Rosina gives the dia mond ring to Susanna at the end. In the opera, the ring never reappears after Almaviva has given it to Rosina-as-Susanna, and never provides any evidence of the masquerade. The ring seems to be left over from some formulaic requirements of the folktale on which the play is based, and some productions attempt to bring it back in a final reappearance.
In the final scene of the 1993 Theatre du Châtelet production of the Mozart opera, Rosina gave the ring back to Almaviva, rather than to Susanna, and that is what made him ask her to forgive him. But the ring is superfluous here, since the final recognition vii.
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224 is just a straightforward identification of people: while Almaviva is refus ing to forgive Susanna-as-Rosina, the real Rosina comes out of the place where he had just tried to seduce Rosina-as-Susanna, and he sees the two women together, in a sense, cross-dressed. Instantly the classic moment of recognition washes over him and he crumples to his knees and begs her forgiveness. Nobody bothers to ask questions about jewelry.
The Ghosts of Versailles
John Corigliano's 1991 opera The Ghosts of Versailles (with a libretto by William M. Hoffman) ambitiously combines the plot of the Beaumarchais/ Da Ponte Marriage of Figaro and the plot of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, plus that of the third and final play of Da Ponte's "Figaro" trilogy, The Guilty Mother (La Mère Coupable). Perhaps inspired by the knowledge that Marie Antoinette herself had actually performed the part of Rosina, Corigliano brought the two women together in his work, substituting Marie Antoinette's diamond necklace for Susanna/Rosina's diamond ring.
Corigliano constructed an opera-within-an-opera: in the outer frame, in history, Marie Antoinette is dead, and the ghost of Beaumarchais is in love with her ghost. Beaumarchais's ghost announces that he has written an opera, which (like The Guilty Mother) takes place years after the end of The Marriage of Figaro, in the autumn of 1793, during the Reign of Terror. Rosina and Susanna have grown old and moved from Spain to France, where Marie Antoinette is in prison awaiting her execution (which took place on October 16, 1793).
Beaumarchais says that by the power of his art, the words and music of this opera-within-the-opera, he can change the course of history and rescue Marie from her death in the French Revolution. He explains that in the opera-within-the-opera, Almaviva, now the Spanish ambassador to France, and a close friend of the queen, will sell her diamond necklace to the British ambassador for a million pounds and use the money to spirit the queen away to London and then to the New World.
But Figaro disobeys Beaumarchais's script, for he regards the queen as an arrogant traitor. He steals the necklace from Almaviva, intending to sell it and use the money to help the Almavivas escape to freedom. Beaumarchais himself now enters the opera as a character and demands the necklace, but Figaro refuses.
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225 225 Figaro, "You are my fantasy!" and drags him out of the opera-within-the opera into the historical scene of Marie's trial. Beaumarchais plays the Public Prosecutor and charges Marie with "squandering enormous sums for your pleasures and intrigues," a reference to the Affair of the Necklace. Figaro now realizes how unfair the trial is, resolves to help Marie, and returns to the opera-within-the-opera.
However, just as Beaumarchais is about to release Marie from prison, outside the opera Marie's ghost tells his ghost that she does not want to change history. He protests-"Almaviva brings her to London. A new age dawns!"-but she insists, "I had to stay, Beaumarchais, and I had to die." She tells Beaumarchais that she loves him and wishes to remain a ghost with him throughout eternity.
As the historical Marie is beheaded and the Almavivas sail off in a balloon head ing for the New World, Beaumarchais's ghost places the diamond necklace around the neck of Marie Antoinette's ghost and kisses her hand. The necklace is at the heart of this two-layered plot. At the start, the ghost of Beaumarchais tells the ghost of Marie: "With your necklace I shall change your past.
I shall show you history as it should have been. I'll make you live again." He borrows the necklace in order to work its magic upon the past, first by creating the opera, then by using the necklace to finance the escape. He succeeds with the first step, conjuring forth the opera as he chants, "Diamonds!
I see diamonds," but Marie stops him before he can complete the second step. Does he fail because she refuses to be saved, or because the magic of jewelry has its limits, or because no one can change history?
Asimov’s Norby and the Queen’s Necklace
Norby and the Queen's Necklace is a book for children that Isaac Asimov wrote, together with his wife Janet Asimov,105 in 1986, five years before The Ghosts of Versailles. It shares with that opera the hope of going back into the past to save Marie Antoinette. This time the mechanism is not art but science, not opera but a futuristic technology of time travel, the sci-fi equivalent of memory.
For the ring now picks up again some of the magic powers it had in the medieval romancesviii and in some fairy tales, the viii.
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226 mythical power to cloud memory but also the scientific power to transport people through time and space. Here's the plot: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an exact paste replica of the Queen's diamond necklace; though of "enormous historical value" it is "only junk," which the jewelers, Boehmer and Bossenge, had made to show to possible buyers of the real necklace. Because the real necklace was "stolen, broken up, and the individual stones gone," the paste replica is "the only physical reminder" of the famous necklace.
When a girl named Albany, playing the part of Marie Antoinette in a skit at the Museum, puts on the fake necklace and fastens it, she and her friends are transported back in time, to February 1, 1785, the day the necklace was delivered to Cardinal de Rohan. They land in Boehmer's shop and accidentally knock the real necklace out of his hand. Albany picks it up and suddenly van ishes with it as well as the fake necklace.
Boehmer calls the police and the other children are thrown into the Bastille. Eventually they and Albany escape and, traveling forward in time, arrive back at the Museum. While they're cooling their heels in the Bastille, the children discover that the museum's replica of the necklace was actually a replica of the replica, which some alien had invented to use as a time-travel device; it worked only when someone put it on and fastened it.
The original replica (which had remained in the jeweler's shop) was made of fake silver and fake dia monds; the replica of the replica was made of extra-terrestrial plastic. This plastic necklace had recently been found in the trunk of the descendants of some Frenchman who had emigrated to England and then to America (perhaps Comte LaMotte?). When the children had broken into the past, they had taken the real dia monds from the jeweler's shop, preventing the necklace from ever reach ing the thieves.
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227 227 children prefer the altered version of history, but then they realize that despite the Reign of Terror, the French Revolution was a Good Thing; and in any case, this alternative history has to be erased. And so they escape from the Bastille. Like Corligliano's Beaumarchais, the children fail to save Marie Antoinette.
In each case the necklace is both the culprit in history and the hope of redemption from history. But in both cases, it fails. All that is left is yet another story.
9. The Slut Assumption in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
In late nineteenth-century stories, a woman's acceptance of jewelry given by a man with no official right to her proves that she is unchaste and/or immoral; inexpensive necklaces from good men are sharply con trasted with expensive necklaces from bad men. Jewelry now has become the enemy, no longer the savior.
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and Twentieth Centuries
In late nineteenth-century stories, a woman's acceptance of jewelry given by a man with no official right to her proves that she is unchaste and/or immoral; inexpensive necklaces from good men are sharply con trasted with expensive necklaces from bad men. Jewelry now has become the enemy, no longer the savior. Guy de Maupassant (1885), Henry James (1889), and Somerset Maugham (1925) added to this base, which women novelists had created, elaborating on the tension between real necklaces obtained in immoral ways and fake necklaces obtained in moral ways.
Why these reversals of values at this time? It is perhaps not a coincidence that this last group of stories by men arises at a time when women were agitating for their rights. The stories may also reflect class anxiety: a recurring theme in late nineteenth-century French nov els is the shop girl who now dresses so well that she can pass herself off as a lady.
And the two are directly connected. The assumption in these texts is that if a woman is seen wearing fake jewelry, she may well have bought it herself. But if she sports a new piece of valuable jewelry, she must have gotten it by sleeping not (like the clever wives)i with her authenticating husband i.
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229 229 but with an illicit paramour. Let us call this the slut assumption. It was explicitly applied to Marie Antoinette, in the eighteenth century,ii and con tinued to plague women ever after.
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Chains in Mansfield Park
The slut assumption, alive and well in the twentieth century, was taken up in novels early in the nineteenth century. Two necklaces stand for two moral worlds in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814). The impoverished Fanny Price, in love with the virtuous Edmund Bertram, is wooed by the wealthy but irresponsible Henry Crawford.
What Austen calls "the almost solitary ornament in [Fanny's] possession" was an amber cross that her brother William had brought her from Sicily, though he had not been able to afford to buy her a chain for it. As Fanny was dressing for a ball, Henry's sister Mary Crawford casually offered to give Fanny one of her own neck laces for her cross; it was "of gold, prettily worked." Fanny resisted-she had just wanted a plain chain-but Mary put the necklace on her.
Only then did Mary mention that she had received the necklace from Henry. Astonished and confused, Fanny took the necklace off. Mary chided her: " 'Do you think Henry will claim the necklace as mine, and fancy you did not come honestly by it?
or are you imagining he would be too much flattered by seeing round your lovely throat an ornament which his money purchased three years ago, before he knew there was such a throat in the world? or perhaps'-looking archly-'you suspect a confederacy between us, and that what I am now doing is with his knowledge and at his desire?' " ii.
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230 Fanny gave in and accepted "this doubtful good of a necklace." When she returned home, she met Edmund, who also gave her a chain for the cross, "a plain gold chain, perfectly simple and neat," given "as a token of the love of one of your oldest friends." And Fanny replied, "This is the only ornament I have ever had a desire to possess." She confessed to him that she wanted to return the other necklace, but he persuaded her to wear it to the ball, and to keep his chain for another occasion. She found, however, to her joy, that William's cross would not fit on the necklace from Mary (ultimately, from Henry), but fit perfectly on Edmund's chain: "Having, with delightful feelings, joined the chain and the cross- those memorials of the two most beloved of her heart, those dearest tokens so formed for each other by everything real and imaginary- and put them round her neck, and seen and felt how full of William and Edmund they were, she was able, without an effort to resolve on wearing Miss Crawford's necklace too." One could not hope for a more exquisite description of the emotions stirred by jewelry, the one associated with two good men (her brother and her beloved-or, rather, three, for the cross, of course, is also associated with Jesus) and the other with two not-so-good siblings, Mary and Henry.
Clearly Fanny felt that in being tricked into accepting a gift of jewelry from Henry she had been tricked into accepting him as a suitor. (The trick did not succeed: she married Edmund.)
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Jewry and Jewelry in Daniel Deronda
Two necklaces, one of inexpensive stones from a good man, one of dia monds from an evil man, are the key to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876). The necklaces, which play an essential part in the moral redemp tion of Gwendolen Harleth, act as "emotional stimulants."4
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The “Memorial” Turquoise Necklace
Deronda first met Gwendolen when he saw her pawning a necklace to cover her gambling losses. He redeemed it and sent it (back) to her. The necklace, with three large, fine turquoises, was already laden with human mean ing: the turquoises "had belonged to a chain once her father's: but she had never known her father; and the necklace was in all respects the ornament
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231 231 she could most conveniently part with." Later, when she and her mother were suddenly impoverished and selling what they could, they agreed not to sell the necklace. Not much else of value was left for Gwendolen to keep, her stepfather having carried off her mother's jewelry and disposed of it. But this turquoise necklace from her father, a man who had never been there for her, was redeemed by Daniel Deronda, a man who was to be there for her throughout the great crisis of her life and to redeem her as well.
In replacing her turquoise necklace, Daniel also replaced her lost father and became the voice of her conscience, her (parental) superego. The necklace had meaning for Daniel, too. On several occasions he thought about "the little affair of the necklace" and finally admitted to him self that he was fighting against an "impetuous determining impulse … to carry out to the last the rescue he had begun in that monitory redemp tion of the necklace." When Gwendolen eventually married, her hus band, a rather horrid and controlling man named Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, sensed the value that Gwendolen placed on the "memorial" necklace, and on an occasion when she was wearing it as a bracelet he confronted her with it: "I suppose there is some understanding between you and Deronda about that thing you have on your wrist."
The “Poisoned” Diamond Necklace
The other necklace, the diamond necklace, both reflected and intensified the dark side of Gwendolen, who was torn between her better self, repre sented by the turquoise necklace, and her lower self, represented by the diamonds. The diamond necklace was a gift from her husband. Now, Grandcourt had given his mother's diamonds, worth "some thousands," to his long- time mistress, Lydia Glasher.
When he had suggested that the diamonds would be safer in a bank, Lydia had refused, saying, "If you ever marry another woman I will give them up to her: are you going to marry another woman?" And at that time, he had no such intention. But then Grandcourt began to court Gwendolen. One day a woman who was "unmistakably a lady, and one who must have been exceedingly handsome," accompanied by two children, accosted Gwendolen and said: "My name is Lydia Glasher.
Grandcourt ought not to marry any one but me. I left my husband and child for him nine years ago.
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232 Those two children are his, and we have two others-girls-who are older. My husband is dead now, and Mr. He ought to make that boy his heir." The two women's eyes met, and Gwendolen said proudly, "I will not inter fere with your wishes." But she did: she so desperately needed money that she married Grandcourt, making all sorts of excuses to persuade herself that she had every right to break her promise to Lydia.
Grandcourt now wanted to recover the diamonds that he had promised to Gwendolen, and so he went to see Lydia. While they spoke, "the stagnant thought in Grandcourt's mind all the while was of his own infatuation in having given her those diamonds." Lydia assured him that she would keep her promise to give the jewels to his wife: "If you will tell me where you are going on the wedding- day I will take care that the diamonds shall be delivered to her without scandal." And so, on her wedding day, Gwendolen received a packet, with a letter: "These diamonds, which were once given with ardent love to Lydia Glasher, she passes on to you.
You have broken your word to her, that you might possess what was hers… . You have chosen to injure me and my children. He had meant to marry me… .
Shall you like to stand before your husband with these diamonds on you, and these words of mine in his thoughts and yours?" Gwendolen threw the letter into the fire. The casket fell on the floor and the diamonds rolled out. "They were like so many women petrified white." This is a wonderfully chilling image of the woman who has sold herself for diamonds and has become frozen into them.
Grandcourt, too, "felt sure that Lydia had enclosed something with the diamonds, and that this some thing, whatever it was, had at once created in Gwendolen a new repulsion for him and a reason for not daring to manifest it." And Gwendolen vowed to herself never to wear those diamonds: "They had horrible words cling ing and crawling about them, as from some bad dream, whose images lingered on the perturbed sense." By accepting the diamond necklace she had sold herself to Grandcourt and knowingly destroyed Lydia. But one evening Grandcourt insisted that she put on the diamonds.
He took them out of the jewel box and put them on her, and she thought, "Doubtless he had been used to fasten them on some one else… .
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233 233 privilege this is, to have robbed another woman of!" When Deronda met her again, Gwendolen was wearing the "poisoned" diamonds: "The words of the bad dream crawled about the diamonds still, but only for her: to oth ers they were brilliants that suited her perfectly."
The “Memorable” Ring of Lost Fathers
Just as Lydia brought out the evil side of Gwendolen, so the "good" woman, the Jewess Mirah Lapidoth, became part of Gwendolen's redemption, when, after Grandcourt's death, Gwendolen, inspired and tutored by Deronda, dedicated herself to a life of service to others. Mirah too is associ ated with diamonds, not the necklace but Daniel's diamond ring. In a sub plot we will not explore here, Daniel saved Mirah's life and they fell in love.
Daniel attempted to find Mirah's family and discovered that people who might be related to her owned a pawnshop. He contrived to gain entrance into their circle by saying that he wished to pawn "a fine diamond ring." Right from the start, the ring helped him find Mirah's family. A classic ring of recognition, the diamond ring had been given to Daniel by the man who held the secret of his birth and the identity of his unknown parents.
Daniel had been adopted and raised by Sir Hugo Mallinger (Grandcourt's uncle), and he thought he might be Sir Hugo's illegitimate son. But then he received a letter from a woman who asked him to come to her in Italy. She wrote, "Bring with you the diamond ring that Sir Hugo gave you.
I shall like to see it again. Your unknown mother." Daniel traveled to Italy to meet her, and she told him that the ring he was wearing was his father's. That is how he learned that he was not Sir Hugo's son at all, but the child of Jewish parents.
The ring had found Daniel's family. Now that he knew he was Jewish, Deronda felt free to marry Mirah. When he returned to England and visited Mirah's family, he took off his "heavy ring" as he entered the house, and put it on a small table, saying, "I have been wearing my memorable ring ever since I came home… .
But I am such a Sybarite that I constantly put it off as a burden when I am doing anything." This ring, like Gwendolen's "memorial" turquoise necklace, which reminded her of Deronda, was "memorable" in the sense that it awakened memories of Deronda's father. But Daniel now finds that memory a burden, and casts off the ring-which falls into the hands of another father who functions as a human abyss, Mirah's abusive father, Lapidoth.
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234 Lapidoth had almost destroyed Mirah years ago, and now he had come back into her happy life, threatening to destroy it again by extorting money. On this occasion, he entered the house unseen just as Deronda cast off the ring. Lapidoth saw it and took it, calculating that he would not go to prison for stealing it, for his children would never prosecute him for taking it.
He disappeared, presumably forever, never to plague them again. And so, just as a necklace led Daniel to replace Gwendolen's lost father, the ring from Daniel's lost father finally lost Mirah's unwanted father. This is a recogni tion tragicomedy, with a vengeance.
Guy de Maupassant and Henry James
In many stories, fake diamonds pretend to be real. But in a string of European stories, real jewels pretend to be fake, in order to protect the "reality"-that is to say, the good name, the chastity-of the women who wear them. In Guy de Maupassant's story, "The Necklace" ("La Parure," 1885), a beautiful woman named Mathilde borrowed a diamond necklace from her rich friend, Madame Forrestier, to enhance her beauty at a ball.
She lost the necklace, and she and her husband borrowed 36,000 francs to buy an identical replacement, which she returned to the owner without telling her of the substitution. Madame Forrestier did not notice any dif ference. For the next ten years, Mathilde and her husband slaved to repay the money they had borrowed.
(When Jay Reid Gould adapted the story for his one-act play, in 1969, he had Madame Forrestier remark to Mathilde, with hard-headed French, or perhaps American, logic, "Who would lend someone a real necklace?
We keep it safe under lock and key.") Neither of the women could tell the difference between the real thing and the fake: Mathilde mistook the fake for real, and Madame Forrestier the real for the fake. Thus the necklace imitated itself; real diamonds stood in for the fakes that had stood in for the real diamonds. And in parallel to the shift from a real necklace to a fake necklace, the one real thing that Mathilde possessed-her beauty-was destroyed by the jewelry, by the need to work so long and hard to repay the debt.
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235 235 De Maupassant had also written, a year earlier (in 1884), another story about a real necklace that pretended to be a fake ("Les Bijoux," often trans lated as "The Fake Jewels," though "bijoux" here may also carry overtones of the French slang for the female genitals).iii It is the story of a married woman who had an uncanny knack for stretching the meager household budget to procure luxuries, including a great deal of fake jewelry. After her death, her husband was shocked to discover that her supposedly fake jewelry was real.
The shock came from his assumption (the slut assump tion) that if the jewels were real they must have been received "for services rendered," and that his wife therefore must have been false. But he got over the shock, cheerfully sold the jewelry, and lived the rest of his life in luxury, with a second, virtuous wife (who, we may assume, did not wear expensive jewelry). This was a basic theme on which other authors could dance their own original variations.
Henry James, in 1899, darkened the tone in his story "Paste," changing the diamonds to pearls and adding further psychologi cal nuance: Arthur Prime had inherited the estate of his father, who, as a wid owed cleric, a vicar, had married an obscure actress several years older than himself; now both of them were dead. Arthur offered his stepmother's fake jewels, stage jewels, to her niece Charlotte, a governess. Most of the jewels, much lighter than the material they imitated, were "too dreadfully good to be true … flagrant tinsel and glass, they looked strangely vulgar … shameless pinchbeck." And, like everyone else, Charlotte believed that her aunt had had no valuable jewelry to speak of.
But the necklace of pearls, as big as filberts, was surprisingly heavy, and she commented on this to Arthur: "Are you very sure they're not really worth something?" He replied, brusquely, "If they had been worth anything to speak of, she would long ago have sold them." Besides, how could she ever have come by them? Charlotte accepted all the jewels, including the pearls, and thought nothing of them until a woman of the world and an enter tainer, Mrs. Guy, saw the pearls and insisted that they were, in fact, iii.
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236 real; indeed, the lusterless pearls came to life as she handled them. Now persuaded that they were real, Charlotte felt that she ought not to keep them. Guy suggested that she sell them, but Charlotte determined to return them to Arthur.
Furious at what this implied about his stepmother, Arthur insisted, "They're rotten paste," and said he intended to take them to Bond Street to have them appraised. He subsequently wrote to Charlotte that she had insulted her aunt; that the experts had determined that he was right and pronounced them utter paste; and that he had smashed them. But when she next met Mrs.
Guy-"a woman of the world"-in precisely such a transaction. Charlotte suspects that both Arthur and Mrs. But the reader does not know for certain whether Arthur sold the pearls to a Bond Street shop himself (whence Mrs.
Guy bought them) or gave them to her directly. The subtleties of imitation surface in several conversations. Charlotte grants, "Pearls are so easily imitated," but Arthur snaps back, "That's just what-to a person who knows-they're not.
These have no luster, no play." He thinks he's an expert, just as he thinks he is the stepson of an irreproachable woman. To prove that he is right (on both counts), and Charlotte wrong, he goes to another expert-or, rather, says that he does and in any case lies about what that expert reported. The true expert is the mysterious Mrs.
Guy, about whose pedigree James tells us not a word. "Don't you know about pearls?" she says to Charlotte, and when Charlotte asks her if she is sure they are real, she replies, "Sure? For what kind of an idiot, my dear, do you take me?" Mrs.
Guy awakens the pearls, brings them to life out of their long sleep, as if they were enchanted women in a fairy tale, awakened by a touch, by a kiss. Only when they are on Mrs. Guy's neck does Charlotte finally see that "the ambiguous objects" might pass for real pearls.
Unlike diamonds, pearls are made by animals and are therefore fragile, changeable, and subject to life and death. They had been put to sleep by the woman referred to only as
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Prime," the retired actress, who was by definition of a class and respectability far below that of a vicar, and who "had mixed them in her reliquary with false things in order to put curiosity and detection off the scent." That is to say, she hid them in plain sight, where they could masquerade as fakes.
W. Somerset Maugham and China Seas
Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) bridges the nineteenth and twenti eth centuries. Know-All," published in 1925, shares the nineteenth-century slut assumption that underlies the de Maupassant and James stories. And just as George Eliot used the theme of good and bad jewelry to tell a story about Jews (and good and bad women), Maugham uses it to talk about anti-Semitism (and a good-and-bad woman).
The narrator seems to be anti-Semitic; the story begins, "I was pre pared to dislike Max Kelada even before I knew him." Max Kelada is a Semite or Levantine from some vague Middle Eastern land who pretends to be English. The narrator, who is forced to room with him on a trans- Atlantic voyage, regards him as a fake gentleman: "King George has many strange subjects. Kelada was short and of sturdy build, clean-shaven and dark-skinned, with a fleshy hooked nose and very large, lustrous and liquid eyes.
His long black hair was sleek and curly. He spoke with a fluency in which there was nothing English and his gestures were exuberant. I felt pretty sure that a closer inspection of that British passport would have betrayed the fact that Mr.
Kelada was born under a bluer sky than is generally seen in England." Max Kelada is an obnoxious and self-promoting nuisance. One night at dinner with a Mr. Ramsay and his wife- "a very pretty little thing" who has been alone in New York for a year during her husband's absence in Japan-Mr.
When Ramsay remarks, "I didn't buy it myself, of course. I'd be interested to know how much you think it cost," Kelada estimates $30,000. 'You'll be surprised to learn that Mrs.
Ramsay bought that string at a department store the day before we left New York, for eighteen dollars.' " 238
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238 Kelada insists that the pearls are real (wild or natural, and expensive), and Ramsay bets him $100 that they are imitations (either cultured or completely artificial, and cheap). Ramsay's protests, Kelada examines the pearls with a magnifying glass he has in his pocket. Then: "A smile of triumph spread over his smooth and swarthy face.
Suddenly he caught sight of Mrs. It was so white that she looked as though she were about to faint. She was staring at him with wide and terrified eyes.
They held a desperate appeal; it was so clear that I wondered why her husband did not see it. Kelada stopped with his mouth open. You could almost see the effort he was making over himself.
'It's a very good imitation, but of course as soon as I looked through my glass I saw that it wasn't real. I think eighteen dollars is just about as much as the damn thing's worth.' He took out his pocket book and from it a hundred dollar bill. He handed it to Ramsay without a word.
'Perhaps that'll teach you not to be so cocksure another time, my young friend,' said Ramsay as he took the note. I noticed that Max Kelada's hands were trembling. The story spread over the ship as stories do, and he had to put up with a good deal of chaff that eve ning.
It was a fine joke that Mr. Ramsay retired to her state-room with a headache." The next morning, an envelope arrives in Kelada's stateroom, containing nothing but a hundred-dollar bill. The narrator asks him, "Were the pearls real?" and Kelada replies, "If I had a pretty little wife, I shouldn't let her spend a year in New York while I stayed at Kobe." And the story ends: "At that moment I did not entirely dislike Mr.
They all go on believing that the pearls and Mr. Know-All are fakes, and the woman real. A film was made of this story in 1950.7 The basic plot is unchanged, though there is a great deal of additional dialogue involving Mr.
Know- All, who does not seem particularly Jewish (perhaps it was not possible
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239 239 to treat anti-Semitism so lightly after World War II) but, though played by the entirely British Nigel Patrick, is definitely not English (as he claims to be). He is more generically Middle-European, perhaps Hungarian, and hilariously objectionable and self-promoting. The other characters are all exaggeratedly English.
But the main changes serve to spell out, as obvious as a ten-foot neon sign, what is more subtly implied in the written text: that Mrs. Ramsay is in real trouble if her husband finds out that her pearls are real. Max Kelada makes a pass at Mrs.
Ramsay, and offers her a star sap phire. She says, "My husband is a very jealous man; please go away." And we see this jealousy acted out when Mr. Ramsay are alone in their cabin.
He tells her that he feared, while he was away, that she would meet someone she liked better. He: I would have killed him.
She: Oh dear, I'd better watch my step, hadn't I? He: You certainly had." Equally unsubtle is the emphasis on the reality or fakeness of the gor geous, five-strand pearl necklace that she puts on when dressing for din ner. Her husband remarks that they are new, and look very expensive.
He comments, "I don't know how you do it on what I give you." She insists that she picked them up for only eight pounds in a shop in Oxford Street. "Well, nobody would ever know," he assures her. Back in the lounge, there's a long discussion about the difference between natural ("real"), expensive pearls and cultured ("fake" or "imitation"), cheap pearls.
Max says, "An expert can always tell the difference. All I don't know about pearls isn't worth knowing. They'll never make a cultured pearl that an expert like me can't tell with half an eye.
Take my word for it, Mrs. Not only are they real, but they're as fine for their size as any I've ever seen." Ramsay bets him ten pounds that they are fakes. Kelada examines the necklace with his back to the others, but in a mirror he sees Mrs.
After a long moment, he says simply, "I was mistaken. They're imitation." Everyone laughs and Ramsay, yet again hammering home the theme of the slut assumption, remarks, "If they hadn't been, I would have had a serious talk with my wife." Against the general laughter, Kelada just says, "Never mind; we all make mistakes," and pays up.
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240 after the envelope with the ten pound note has been delivered, the room mate/narrator smiles and turns what had been a question in the short story into a statement: "The pearls were real, then." And he calls Max, affectionately, "Mr. Know-all." Kelada simply replies, "Call me Max." Fifteen years before the 1950 film, a more convoluted variation on the Maugham story (unattributed)8 appeared in a subplot of the film China Seas (1935, Tay Garnett),9 which put one more twist on the pearl necklace that flickers between real and fake: As he boards a ship, Romanoff (played by the all-purpose slimy alien Akim Tamiroff) is looking at a man's ring, saying, "Not bad, for a synthetic stone." Soon he encounters Mr.
Timmons, a short, fat, nervous man, and his good-looking wife; she is wearing a pearl necklace. Later, in the ship's lounge, Romanoff says to Mrs. Timmons, "You'd better take care of these pearls in case of piracy." Mrs.
They're artificial; they're not worth any thing." Timmons: "Twelve and a half bucks. Quite a bargain, I'd say." Romanoff: "Where did you get them, Mr. Timmons?" Timmons: "Why she picked them up …" Mrs.
Timmons interrupts: "I bought them myself, in Tokyo." Romanoff: "Well, you know, it's not always easy to tell the real from …" He sees her eyes, pleading and terri fied, and continues: "I'm sure you didn't pay too much for them." Timmons: "Bet your sweet life she didn't. That little woman gets her money's worth every time, eh, Poopsie?" Later, alone with her, Romanoff asks, quietly, "Where did you really get those pearls?" She says, "You won't tell Wilbur, will you?" and he replies, "Twelve and a half bucks to Wilbur," winks and clicks his tongue.
Still later, implic itly threatening to reveal the truth about the pearls to her husband, he forces her to kiss him (with a fade-out suggesting, under the Hayes Code, that she will sleep with him). When Chinese pirates board the ship, she hides the pearls down the front of her dress. Seeing this, her husband becomes suspicious again: "Sweetheart, those pearls, they're not worth anything…" She: "I don't want to lose them." He: "There's something funny about those pearls; I'm going to have them appraised when we get to Singapore." She: "Oh, Wilbur, don't be insane." But the pirates, too, think they must be real, and grab them.
As both Romanoff and Timmons watch intently, the head pirate bites them to test them. He spits them out and throws them down, whereupon Timmons
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241 241 says, cheerfully, "I'm sorry, Poopsie. Looks like that guy did the appraising!" and she looks daggers at Romanoff. We are left to surmise that Romanoff was telling the truth at the beginning when he said they were fakes, and that the pirate was right to spit them out.
We may also assume that, like that earlier lover, Romanoff slept with her.
(All of this frames the main story, in which Jean Harlow plays a prostitute who seems to be no good but in the end turns out to be true and real.) Maugham's genuineness is also at stake in the Max Kelada story: Is he really an anti-Semite himself, or just writing about one? Does he approve of the narrator? Does the narrator cease to be an anti-Semite at the end?
And is the whole story of Kelada, like that of the clever wife,iv a narrative of resistance, the ethnic underdog fighting back, siding with the woman (also an underdog) against the Christian man, her husband? Is Max Kelada sympathetic to Mrs. Ramsay because the terror that he sees in her eyes is something that he knows about as a Jew?
Maugham later (1943) wrote "A String of Beads,"10 a satire on his own Max Kelada story. At a dinner party, a governess was asked to stand in for a fashionable woman who had canceled at the last minute. Another guest at the dinner, an expert on jewels, insisted that the string of pearls the governess was wearing was genuine, worth fifty thousand pounds.
She strenuously protested that she had paid only fifteen shillings for them. Eventually the truth emerged: the governess had taken her own, fake pearls to be mended and the jeweler had given her back, by mis take, someone else's real pearls. The mistake was detected, the necklaces exchanged, and the governess received a reward, which she used to set herself up as a demi-mondaine in Paris (presumably now able to get her own real jewelry from rich lovers).
As the governess had substituted for a "real" member of high society, so real pearls had substituted for her fake ones.
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242 The story is told to Maugham by a person who claims to have been pres ent at the party and who remarks, "We all laughed. We've all heard of wives palming off on their husbands as false a string of pearls that was real and expensive. That story is as old as the hills.' " And Maugham, retelling the vignette, continues: " 'Thank you,' I said, thinking of a little narrative of my own." Maugham is making fun of his own earlier story in conscious self-parody.
His remark here, in 1943, that "that story is as old as the hills," is one that he returns to in introducing the film of "Mr. He says, "I believe it's a story of my own invention, but I wouldn't like to go into the witness box in a court of law and take my oath on it. I think I might venture to make use of a phrase of Dr Johnson's and say that if a story is good it is unlikely to be new, and if it's new it's unlikely to be good.
I've come too late to a world too old." One couldn't ask for a bet ter definition of narrative intertextuality; the world of stories is always much older than the narrator.
Twentieth-Century Films
But some of the studios put new twists into the old necklaces.
Random Harvest
Two necklaces embody the remembering and forgetting of true love in the film of Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942)12 in ways that are strikingly parallel to the double necklaces in Mansfield Park and Daniel Deronda. Like so many clever wives,vi the heroine of Random Harvest pretends to be someone else and in that guise receives jewelry from her husband, who v.
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243 243 does not recognize her. But this bed-trick is not consummated for many years, and there is no child. Here's the plot: A shell-shocked World War I veteran (Ronald Colman) has lost his memory of everything before the war, including his name.
He takes the name of Smith. He falls in love, on Armistice Day, with a music hall star named Margaret Hanson (Greer Garson). He calls her by her stage name of Paula; she calls him Smithy.
They marry and live in the country, but one day he goes to Liverpool and there is hit by a car; he remembers that he is Charles Rainier, a wealthy man, and he goes home to his estate. He forgets Paula and all else that happened since the Armistice and the accident. She has resumed her name of Margaret Hanson, but he does not recognize her; she is part of the forgotten period of his life.
Eventually they marry, but the marriage remains unconsummated, as he is still tied to the memory of some woman he knows he loved but cannot precisely remember-Paula. After many years, he finally recognizes that Margaret is Paula. Smithy had given Paula an inexpensive necklace of beads that were, he said, the color of her eyes (blue).
Later, Charles gave Margaret a diamond necklace with a magnificent emerald that had belonged to the Empress Marie Louise. That night he came into her bedroom to find her weeping over the old necklace of blue beads, which she had chanced to find when she went to put away her new diamond and emerald necklace. He asked if the beads had been a gift, and she told him, "He said they were the color of my eyes.
They are, aren't they?" And when he asked her if she was sorry she had married him, she laughed and said of course not, for how else would she ever have gotten to wear an emerald that belonged to an empress? Smithy/Charles gives her one necklace in each life, something he apparently likes to do, one of several character traits that survive his loss of memory. Each necklace has colored stones, blue for Smithy, green for Charles, the same necklace but not the same necklace, just as he is the same man but not the same man.
She hopes that the clue of the blue neck lace will trigger his memory, but he is merely jealous of the other man who gave it to her. She says, "They're just cheap little beads." Looking at his emerald necklace, he responds, "But they have a value for you that this has not." The cheap beads are real because they were given in love; she never 244
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244 wears them, only holds them, for she does not get to keep the love that they represent. The precious emerald necklace is fake, hollow, because it is given as a reward for services not rendered, a kind of apology necklacevii to compensate her for his inability to allow himself to love her, his rejec tion of her. (When he proposes to her he says, "You need have no fear that I would make any emotional demands on you.
I have only sincere friend ship to offer, I won't ask any more from you." This is a British euphemism for the sword in the bed.)viii But the emerald necklace is the one she wears, the one that connects her with the hollow remnant of her love. Though she seems to pick up the blue beads by accident as she puts away the emerald, Freud has taught us that there are no accidents: she picks up the blue beads now because the emerald reminded her of them.
The jewelry never does revive Charles's memory; it simply torments the memory of Margaret, the clever wife. The sense that there ought to be a telltale ring in Random Harvest persists to this day, as a 2003 posting on the Internet demonstrates. It says, in its entirety: "Did I miss something or did Ronald Coleman [sic]/Smithy not have a wedding ring when he went to Liverpool and was hit by the car?" Vertigo (and Gaslight) In George Cukor's version of Gaslight (1944), a film somewhat reminis cent of Henry James's story, "Paste," an actress makes real jewels act the part of fake jewels.
A king who was the actress's lover had given her four fabulous, priceless jewels, once part of a crown. She sewed them onto her costume along with a lot of fake jewels and wore them on stage, hidden in plain sight. No one in the audience knew what they were, except the man who had given them to her, watching her from the royal box.
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245 245 found the brooch, she realized that she was sane after all. That was a key clue of recognition-a recognition of hate, not love-provided by jewelry. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)15 borrows several of these themes (making the woman, rather than the man, the murderous doubler) while also replicating some of the structure of Random Harvest.
(Hitchcock, too, stole from the best, including himself, and was often stolen from.) A man called Scottie meets a woman twice, first under one name ("Madeleine," a blond) and then under another (Judy, a brunette). Only near the very end of the film do we learn that the real Madeleine's husband had hired Judy to impersonate her: Madeleine's husband, Gavin, hired Scottie (James Stewart) to tail his wife. Scottie followed "Madeleine" (Kim Novak) to a museum and observed her staring, for hours on end, at a portrait16 of a woman wearing a fabulous necklace.
Source: Vertigo (1958) © Universal Studios 246
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246 Some time later, Scottie met Judy (Kim Novak), who was the spitting image of "Madeleine," though her hair was a different color and worn in a different style. Judy adamantly denied that she was "Madeleine." Scottie persuaded her to change her look (back) to look exactly like "Madeleine" (again) and one day they became lovers. That evening, dressing to go out, Judy asked Scottie to fasten her necklace.
Looking over her shoulder as she looked at herself in the mirror, he recognized the necklace that Carlotta (in the painting) had worn. He realized that Judy was in fact "Madeleine"; or, more precisely, that "Madeleine" had been Judy in disguise. Judy is made over to become "Madeleine," who presumably looks like the Madeleine who is to be murdered, a woman we never see.
We (and Scottie) are told that Madeleine wears the necklace in imitation of her ancestor, Carlotta, whom we do see in the portrait, with the necklace. Scottie's ex-fiancée Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), the "good girl," who is a painter, copies the painting as a joke, replacing Carlotta's face with her own. The mythical necklace therefore travels down through four generations (and more): from Carlotta (seen wear ing it in the portrait), to the murdered Madeleine (alleged to wear the necklace), to "Madeleine" (never seen with it), to Midge (wearing it in her portrait), to Judy (seen wearing it).
Eventually the necklace sup plies the key proof of identity, making real Scottie's false memory of "Madeleine." When Scottie tells Judy how he had finally realized the imperson ation, he concludes, "The necklace, … that was a slip. I remembered the necklace." Scottie reasons that Gavin must have given it to her in partial payment for her part in the masquerade, and as a lover's memento. The necklace is the sharply focused thing, when everything else is as blurry and out of focus as Doris Day's close-ups, shot through gauze and Vaseline.
The necklace awakens Scottie because it is the clas sical mythological clue, the piece of jewelry that unmagics the amne siac or bewitched lover, and surely if ever a man was bewitched, it's Scottie. Why else does she make the "slip" of wearing the necklace? Perhaps because, as Scottie tells her, she is careless and senti mental, qualities that she allows to override her hard-headed knowledge that it is insane to keep a souvenir of a murder.
(Just as it is insane to keep a souvenir
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247 247 of a rape, though a lot of guys do that, too.)ix But also because, especially now that they have become lovers (again), she's tired of the masquerade and tired of waiting for him to figure it out. She wants to blow up the masquerade so that he'll love her as she really is. And so she gives him a great big clue.
The circle of the jewelry is echoed in the spinning vortexes of the famous opening credits, in the circles of "Madeleine" 's hair-do, and in the circular tree rings of the crosscut redwoods they see together. It's echoed in the spinning circles of the room when they kiss. And it is there in the circular plot, where in the sec ond half Scottie circles back to do again all the things he did in the first half.
In The Living and the Dead, the novel on which Vertigo is based, we learn more about the necklace, which is made of amber, capturing the ancient past (as in "flies in amber"). Madeleine is a prostitute who is tricking the man for the money and meets him twice as two different women, both named Madeleine. He is fascinated by what the first Madeleine tells him about her necklace: "When her mother died, she naturally inherited a lot of family things, including some jewelry and ornaments that had come down from her great-grandmother, among them an amber necklace.
He took it to the window and held it up in the pale glaucous light which filtered through the frosted glass. The amber beads glowed faintly golden. There was no room for doubt." It was the necklace of the first Madeleine's great-grandmother.18 Still, the second Madeleine denied that she was the first Madeleine, and he was almost persuaded.
But then: "All the same, there's that necklace… . Why don't you wear it?" "Because I don't like it. I've told you so already." "Or was it because you were afraid I might recognize it?" "No." ix.
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248 He rejects her lie about where she got the necklace: "That was pos sible, of course … no, it wasn't. Such a coincidence was inconceiv able."19 He rejects the argument from coincidence-and the duplicitous woman. Like Scottie, he finally uses the necklace to break out of the enchantment.
The Earrings of Madame de … The problem faced by the female protagonist of Max Ophüls's The Earrings of Madame de … (1953)20 is the reverse of that of the married women por trayed by de Maupassant and James and Maugham: she must account for a gift of diamonds not from a lover but from her husband, a gift that she discards in her indifference to him and rediscovers in her passion for her lover. She does not lie to her husband about jewelry she has received from her lover; she lies to her lover about jewelry given her by her husband.
The chain reaction of lies she generates demonstrates that while to lie to a husband is normal, to lie to a lover (about lies you told to your husband) is unforgivable treachery. The prelude to the film tells us that nothing would have marred the happy, uneventful life of the Countess Louise de … had it not been for the jewelry. And it does seem so: To raise cash for her extravagances, the Countess Louise (Danielle Darrieux) sells a valuable pair of heart-shaped diamond earrings back to the jeweler from whom her husband, the Count, General André de … (Charles Boyer), had bought them.
When she arrives there, she tells the customs officer that they are "a gift from a man who loved me." Later the mistress sells them (the fourth transaction) and Baron Fabrizio
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249 249 Donati, the Italian ambassador to France (Vittorio de Sico), buys them (the fifth transaction). Baron Donati, returning from Constantinople to Paris, meets the Countess Louise briefly at another customs shed, another bor der. Through a series of encounters, they fall in love.
They meet only in public, but the general suspects them. Louise travels to Italy by herself. Donati brings the earrings to her there and presents them, saying, "They could have been made for you," as indeed they were.
He asks her what she had told her hus band that made it possible for her to wear the earrings in public; she concocts a series of desperate lies that she claims to have told (she had gotten the earrings from a rich aunt who detests her husband; she had gotten them from her mother). Now she is telling her lover lies about the lies she told her husband. But Donati, who knows the truth, tells her that he will never see her again.
He takes the earrings to the jeweler (transaction #6), who presumably pays him for them; and the general buys them back from the jeweler (#7, the third time the general has bought them). The general gives the earrings back to Louise, but when he sees how much she loves them, he immediately takes them back and makes her give them to a poor relative, her niece, who has just had a baby. The niece says, "I hope you too will have such a happy event soon"; but Louise is barren.
The niece then sells the earrings back to the same jeweler (transaction #8),23 and the jeweler offers them to the general (#9a), noting that this would be the fourth time the general has bought them ("It's our usual business"). But this time the general refuses, saying, "Don't bother me with those stupid jew els." Now Louise sees them in the jeweler's window and buys them back again (#9b), selling all of her other jewelry to pay for them.
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250 When the general looks in her room and says, "I don't see your diamond cross or your emeralds," she shows him the ear rings and says, "I sold them for these." Now he apologizes to her for his own indiscretions, but challenges Donati to a duel. She takes the jewels to the church and offers them to the Virgin, pray ing that Donati will not die, insisting, truthfully, that they never slept together; it was all just in their minds.
Donati is killed in the duel and Louise dies of a broken heart. The jewels remain in the church, with a note indicating that they are the gift of Madame de … Louise tries to justify having the earrings (more precisely, wearing them) by pretending to find them again, and she might have gotten away with it, had the frightened jeweler not told all to the general at the beginning. When she buys them back for the last time, she promises the jeweler, "I won't wear them; and in fact I'll have to hide them." She keeps her word, but her husband finds out the truth not by seeing the earrings but by not seeing all her other jewelry; the earrings have become a negative force, a subtraction.
When Donati gives her the diamond earrings, he asks her, as the jew eler had asked, but with a twist, "How will you wear them?" And when she brushes this off, as she had the jeweler's question, he adds, "How is it that your husband allows you to accept such a gift?" This question reveals the same slut assumption that underlies the nineteenth-century stories: expensive jewelry betrays a woman's infidelity. (It works on the general, too. Seeing his wife wearing the earrings, he rightly concludes that Donati has given them to her because they are lovers.) But then, why did Donati give them to her?
Did he expect her to wear them only when she was alone, the way people who steal famous works of art can only con template them behind locked doors?x To answer Donati, Louise concocts her first lie to him, lying about the lie she will actually tell the general: "I'll tell him a distant aunt left them to me; that's our little lie." But no; it's just her little lie, not theirs. Donati rejects her, not because she lied to her husband but because she lied to him, Donati, about the lie she was going to tell her husband.
That is when he says he x. This was Jean Plaidy's interpretation of Jeanne de la Motte's suggestion about Marie Antoinette and the diamond necklace: "Sometimes she puts it on in private." See chapter 8, p.
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251 251 can no longer believe in her. He leaves her before she finally confesses the truth, that the earrings were a wedding present from her husband. It is only when the general learns that Louise had lied to Donati, too, that he realizes she is in love with him.
Louise's attitude to the earrings is the barometer of her changing capacity for true love. After all, the diamonds are hearts-"hearts made of diamonds," coeurs en diamants. At the start, she hesitates to sell them, recalling that her husband had given them to her at their wedding, as a symbol of his love, but then she realizes that she loves all her other jew elry more, a sad comment on the marriage.
She comes to value the ear rings only when they are the gift of a man other than her husband. She croons to them, "Poor earrings, you had to go all the way to Constantinople before you could come back to me." After Donati leaves her, and she buys the earrings back, they become a fetish to her; she has them in the place of the lover she has lost. When the general discovers what she has given up to have them (all the things she would not part with at the start of the film) and sees how happy she is to have them, how she caresses them and kisses them as if they were her lover, he realizes how deeply she is in love with Donati.
He says to her, in anger, "You're trying to turn the regret of lost love [chagrin] into mementos [souvenirs]." The earrings tell him the truth. By this time the language of the earrings has been thoroughly glossed and is patent to all parties to the transactions. The general, who hated to see her so happy because of another man, hates even more to see her so unhappy on account of the same man, and he determines to kill Donati.
When Donati bought the earrings, he loved no one. And he uses the earrings to get to meet Louise: when he first catches sight of her in the cus toms shed, and wants to remain there to talk with her, he asks the customs man to lie, to pretend to be querying him about the earrings, though as a diplomat he is exempt from customs inspections.
She, of course, lies constantly to everyone, about the earrings and about love.
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252 The ultimate transaction of Louise's earrings is religious. In the begin ning of the film, her prayer book falls to the floor when she's looking for something to sell, and she remarks casually, "I've never needed it much." She breezes into the church and gives only four centimes for a candle, as she prays that the jeweler will agree to buy the earrings. But in the end, she really does pray, and promises her earrings to the Virgin Mary in the vain hope of saving Donati's life in the duel.
This time her prayers are not answered: her lover dies, but the Virgin keeps the earrings. Thus the earrings circle back to Louise, even as they have cir cled back, again and again, to the jeweler. Like Polycrates with his ring,xi the jeweler can't get rid of them.
But when the hat-check girl's lover, a Marine (Gene Kelly), sees the bracelet, he assumes she has been unfaithful, yanks it from her wrist, and leaves. Later, the drunken Marine gives it to a streetwalker (Tamara Toumanova). She walks past a hotel, where the original husband spots the brace let on her wrist, buys it, and returns home, joyously greeted by his wife.
Significantly, Kelly gave to the only character that he himself danced (the Marine)26 the explicit pantomime of the emotional significance of the gift xi.
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253 253 of the bracelet implicit in all of the encounters: the Marine assumes that his girl has gotten it by sleeping with someone else. The New Yorker, in 2011, ran a delightful short piece entitled "Girls' Best Friend,"27 that I, at least, see as an homage à Max Ophüls. It began with an anecdote identified as "company legend, … related over the phone by a Van Cleef executive," and said to have taken place in Paris, sometime in the 1950s: A woman walked into Van Cleef and Arpels and coveted an expen sive diamond necklace, worth perhaps four hundred thousand francs.
She told the jeweler that she would return with her hus band: "Tell him the price is half that. I promise I'll pay in full." The next day, she came in with her husband, pretended to fall in love with the necklace for the first time, and got him to buy it for two hundred thousand francs. Later, she returned the necklace and, still later, came in with her lover.
Same routine, and the lover paid the remaining two hundred thousand francs. A now elderly Van Cleef staff member, hearing this anecdote, remarked, "I've heard stories like that… . You know, that was pure gossip." But the New Yorker wisely commented, "Reality can sometimes merge with fan tasy when it comes to jewels." Paris in the 1950s is just when and where The Earrings of Madame de … was playing to rave reviews.
I wonder if the clever lady who brought her husband and lover into Van Cleef and Arpels28-or the person who started the "gossip," not to mention the Van Cleef staff member who had "heard stories"-had seen the film. Unlike the Countess Louise, however, the New Yorker lady has cleverly worked things so that she can wear her diamond necklace both with her husband and with her lover, and each of them thinks both that the diamonds are real (which they are) and that the woman is faithful to him alone (which she is not).
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254 stories that symbolize true love, and/or marriage. The protagonists of these stories are primarily concerned about the chastity of the women, and therefore not so much about the genuineness of their jewelry as its provenance. But the questionable authenticity of pieces of circular jewelry ambiguates their ability to authenticate the identity of the women who wear them.
Jewelry, like a woman, is always suspected of being false. The clever wives,xii after all, succeeded in their tasks by becoming fake courtesans (or fake rope dancers, or even fake kings) and, in effect, fake wives. Both women and their jewelry may be replaced by imitations, doubles or forger ies; the women masquerade as other women and are unmasked; the genu ine jewels are replaced by identical fakes.
The jewelry in Random Harvest and Vertigo and The Earrings of Madame de … is real, but the women are not. The traditional assumption is that the fake is inferior to the real. Lorelei Lee, a "professional lady" in Anita Loos's novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925),xiii remarks of "paste" diamond jewelry.
In this case, the fake jewel that pretends to be real is a sign that the man is a fake, his love a fake. This simple equation was affirmed in a story that made the supplemen tary point, namely, that a real jewel that pretends to be fake is a sign that a man's love is true. Elizabeth Taylorxiv told this story about her husband, Mike Todd.
A pair of inexpensive, paste "diamond" earrings in the win dow of a boutique in Paris caught her eye and she bought them. We will return to Liz Taylor's diamonds in chapter 10, pp.
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255 255 "A couple of months later we were back in New York, and I went to put on those earrings… . I opened the box, and the earrings looked all polished up, and I put them on. But there was something differ ent about how they fit.
(In modern variants, a woman can also authenticate herself by proving that she bought the jewelry herself.)xv In Alfred Hitchcock's 1955 film To Catch a Thief, Grace Kelly assumes that Cary Grant, a notorious cat burglar, wants to steal the fabulous diamond necklace she is wearing. "You know as well as I do that this necklace is an imitation," he says. To which she replies, "I'm not." The paradoxical judgment that the fake may be more valuable than the real has become quite trendy in twentieth- and twenty-first-century postmodernism.
And jewelry, fake or real, is often a key to this inversion. Anthony Hope's novel The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) was often adapted for stage and screen. In John Cromwell's film version with Ronald Colman (1937), the drunken king gives his ring (presumably with the royal seal) to the better man who will stand in for him as his double.
But the double gives his own ring to Flavia, the woman they both love, and Flavia, who at first believes that this is the king's ring and that the double is the true king, continues to wear the ring when she discovers that he is not the true king, but realizes that he is her true love (and that, therefore, the fake ring is the true ring, for her). The fake was often superior, certainly more useful, than the real. Formulas for making imitation gemstones had been part of alchemy from ancient times, but they came into their own in the eighteenth cen tury, when Christopher Pinchbeck compounded a brass alloy (still called "pinchbeck" in his honor) that could pass for gold, so that ordinary people could wear "golden" jewelry; his son Edward Pinchbeck perfected a way of xv.
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256 making paste stones that looked like diamonds. Rich people, too, openly made use of these fakes, "for convenience and in the interest of preserv ing one's authentic jewels … without on the one hand risk of loss or, on the other, revealing that one had been obliged to relinquish one's material wealth."31
Lorelei Lee, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, commented on the use of fake
Wealthy women in New York City used to wear copies of their diamonds, like the women in Lorelei Lee's Paris, in fear of being mugged; but after a while, when this practice became well known, many of them once again wore their real diamonds, trusting that would-be muggers would take them for fakes. One woman who owned a lot of valuable diamond jewelry had copies made of all her major pieces. When she went to a gala affair, where rich people might be expected to be present, she wore the copies.
That's right: it was faux faux fur." Apparently several retailers were federally pros ecuted for marketing real fur (rabbit, raccoon, and, possibly, dyed mink) as fake fur. As the Times commented, "On the face of it, the real-for-fake switch might not seem to make business sense." But in fact, because many people have ethical objections to the killing of animals for fur (or
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257 257 social misgivings about being caught wearing it anywhere but at the opera), they prefer faux fur, and so the sellers mislabel the furs in order to reach a wider market. "The lines between real and fake have gotten really blurry," said Dan Mathews, a senior vice president with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. And the Times concludes, scratching its head, "Mislabeling real fur-inexpensive rabbit as luxurious mink, say- is an old game.
But mislabeling real fur as fake fur is relatively new."35 Mislabeling real jewelry as fake jewelry, on the other hand, is as old as the hills.
10. Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
The diamond engagement ring is the epitome of "bling," a word that the Oxford English Dictionary glosses as "(a piece of) ostentatious jewellery. Hence: wealth; conspicuous consumption." "Conspicuous consumption" is a term that Thorstein Veblen coined in 1899 (in The Theory of the Leisure Class) to describe people who buy expensive items to display their wealth and income rather than to cover their real needs.
Ring compare 67
The Symbolic Baggage of Baguettes
The diamond engagement ring is the epitome of "bling," a word that the Oxford English Dictionary glosses as "(a piece of) ostentatious jewellery. Hence: wealth; conspicuous consumption." "Conspicuous consumption" is a term that Thorstein Veblen coined in 1899 (in The Theory of the Leisure Class) to describe people who buy expensive items to display their wealth and income rather than to cover their real needs. A "bling ring," as in the title of Sofia Coppola's 2013 film, is both a band of jewel thieves and an ostentatiously expensive jeweled ring.
Both definitions of the bling ring are evoked by De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., which has, since the nineteenth century, dominated and controlled the diamond industry- both mining and trading, operating mines of all kinds (open-pit, under ground, large-scale alluvial, coastal and deep sea) all over the world. For in the twentieth century De Beers invented a new mythology of the engage ment ring, the success of which allowed them to elevate the price of dia monds to a dizzying height that amounts to highway robbery.
Ring hub 68
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
Tom Zoellner reports that he asked the villagers who worked in the diamond mines in Africa "if they knew how their diamonds would even tually be used when they left Africa. They answered no, they had no idea. 'In America,' I said, 'it is traditional for a man to give a woman a diamond when he asks her to marry him,' and this set off a round of laughter.
They had never heard of such a thing. It was ridiculous to think of. I was asked … if I was joking."2 The essential diamond engagement ring is a new myth.
They are, as Zoellner puts it, "nothing more than an empty cage for our dreams."6 An article in the Economist in 1997, entitled, "The Diamond Business: Glass with Attitude," noted that De Beers, from their headquarters on Charterhouse Street in London, were selling not just gems, "but symbols, myths, magic. As worldwide dealer in enchanting illusions, Disney has
Ring cycle 69
nothing on De Beers.”7 Moreover, the Economist declared:
"Vanity, greed, envy, desire, even love: the diamond barons could scarcely appeal to more common human instincts… . The diamond myth lives in a world a bit outside of logic, outside of ordinary eco nomics: a world where there are still a few talismanic substances whose magic rubs off on the bearer. Thus do the sorcerers of Charterhouse Street concoct glamour from carbon, and fool us all."8 260
Ring flow 70
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260 De Beers added to the inherited mythology of the ring of love the simple codicil that it had to have a diamond. But that rider trailed a long narrative train, for diamonds have a mythology of their own, beyond their place in the more general mythology of jewelry. Philip Roth beautifully captured this mythology in the words of a Jewish merchant who sold diamond wed ding and engagement rings: "It's a big deal for working people to buy a diamond, … no mat ter how small.
The wife can wear it for the beauty and she can wear it for the status. And when she does, this guy is not just a plumber-he's a man with a wife with a diamond. His wife owns something that is imperishable.
Because beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable. A piece of the earth that is imperishable, and a mere mortal is wearing it on her hand!"9 Everyone knows that diamonds are hard, therefore indestructible and permanent, and colorless, therefore honest ("transparent") and pure. Let's consider first hardness, then purity.
Ring ladder 71
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
The lyricist Leo Robin contrasted the changeless qualities of diamonds with the inevitable changes that would overcome the women who wore them: Men grow cold / As girls grow old, / And we all lose our charms in the end. / But square cut or pear shape, / These rocks don't lose their shape /… Time rolls on, / And youth is gone, / And you can't straighten up when you bend. / But stiff back / Or stiff knees, / You stand straight at Tiffany's.
And indeed, diamonds, though hard, are not indestructible; they are very brittle, more brittle than jade, easy to crack with a moderate tap of a hammer.18 Diamonds burn, too, if the flame is hot enough. Diamonds are not permanent after all. Besides, even the big ones are pretty small, compared with, say, a Porsche or even a pearl necklace.
You can as easily lose a diamond ring as any other ringi (and it is more likely to be stolen). So much for hardness, indestructibility, and permanence. Perhaps we can do better with purity.
The symbolism is fairly transpar ent, like the diamond itself. The function of a diamond "is to display the matrimonial promise, which must be clear and unambiguous."19 George i.
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And they are easily faked, more easily than rubies or pearls, con stantly imitated by "paste";iii hence, again, the need for experts.
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
Orientalism continued to color novels, films, and legends about big diamonds that carried fiendish curses. The Koh-i-Noor was a 186-carat diamond (later cut to a mere 108 carats) the shape and size of a small hen's egg. It had belonged to a series of Indian rulers, including the Mughal Emperor Babur, before the British stole it in 1850 and made it quite liter ally the jewel in the crown of Queen Victoria.
The "moonstone" in Wilkie Collins's 1868 novel of that name is a large diamond said to have been taken from the forehead of the Hindu god Shiva in the temple of Somnath, "Lord of the Moon," on the western shore of Gujarat, India, and tracked to England by servants of the god Vishnu (not Shiva, but never mind; in the dark of British Orientalism, all Hindu gods look alike); several people in the novel died, under the requisite "mysterious circumstances," before the gem was returned to India. And so the Orientalist mythology of cursed diamonds continued iv.
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
Leo Robin had worked on the script in 1939, and again in 1942.
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
267 267 For the girls Robin had in mind weren't interested in the sort of thing that "lasts forever" (such as an idealized marriage: the song also contains the line, "That's when those louses / Go back to their spouses"). He sub stituted for "lasts forever" a phrase that became one of the most famous lines in the history of show business (more famous, even, than Mary Gerety's "forever" line), the title of the song Robin himself regarded as "the National Anthem for the Women of America"47 and that is surely one of the great American jewelry myths: diamonds are a girl's best friend.
Is Forever.” The Economist article (“The Diamond Business: Glass with
Recall the distinc tion between the married woman authenticated by her one man, one ring, and the courtesan authenticated by her many lovers, many jewels.vii And vii.
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268 remember what happened to the respectable married women who crossed the line by accepting real jewelry from more than one man.viii The Ayer/ De Beers ads promised to protect married women from that danger, from that promiscuous mythology. By changing "Diamonds are" to "A diamond is," moving from bad girls to a good girl, they moved from show business to big business. The women that the ads were aimed at didn't want to be courtesans; they wanted true love.
Ayer/De Beers nailed the "I love you forever" mythology to a single diamond: purity and permanence, purity instead of promiscuity, permanence instead of a series of conquests. A single big diamond (weigh the love in carats) from a prince charming who is yours alone, rather than a miscellaneous pile of smaller, lesser, colored gem stones from a stable of guys whose names you can't remember. But eventually Ayer/De Beers also cashed in on the "girl's best friend" line, as well as on its show business allure.
Well, at the tryouts of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in Philadelphia, the "diamonds" number had stopped the show for long minutes of wild applause. Word of the show's success, and perhaps of the prominence of diamonds in it, had reached New York by opening night and may well have inspired Van Cleef and Arpels to lend Ms. Channing what Lorelei Lee would have called "expensive jew-els" (to rhyme with "du-els").
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
Capote described Holly Golightly, the heroine of his novel, as an "American geisha." He Figure 10.2 Marilyn Monroe wearing diamonds in a publicity still.
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270 wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holly in the 1961 Blake Edwards film, in which Holly's habit of taking money from the men she slept with was tact fully glossed over, but Monroe refused, allegedly because she didn't want the call-girl image (though Holly was no naughtier, surely, than Lorelei Lee). The film, starring Audrey Hepburn as Holly, pokes fun at the engage ment ring scenario when Holly and her boyfriend (George Peppard) try, in vain, to get Tiffany's to engrave a Cracker-Jack ring.
The bad-girl association (together with the telltale use of the plural of "diamonds") snuck back in, in the title of Diamonds Are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971), the sixth and last film with Sean Connery as James Bond. In the 1956 Ian Fleming book on which the film is based, Bond muses that the eyes of a corpse "spoke to him and said, 'Mister. Nothing is for ever except what you did to me,' " and later Bond says, "They [the eyes of the corpse] had been wrong.
But the mythology of diamonds generally assimilated them to the women whose best friends they were, rather than to their lovers.
The Divorce Ring and the Apology Ring
Actually, George Frederick Kunz had anticipated this possibility in 1917: "It seems that in view of the great number of divorces now granted we might well introduce the custom of giving 'divorce rings,' [which] might be differentiated from the old-fashioned wedding- ring by substituting the inscription ABC from DEF for ABC and DEF. A novel idea in divorce-rings is reported from Chicago, where a fashionable divorcee had her wedding-ring made smaller so that she could wear it on the little finger of her left hand as a divorce- ring… .
Perhaps in some cases this wearing of the wedding-ring, even in a modified form, after a divorce, might be intended to indi cate that the old love had not wholly vanished, and that some day those who had been put asunder could be rejoined, as occasionally happens now-a-days."69 x.
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272 But this "repurposing," of course, was not what De Beers had in mind; no, a new ring-this one, too, with a diamond, of course-was required to mark the divorce. Almost a century after Kunz's musings on the divorce ring, a journalist asked, "Will 'divorce rings' catch on?" and conjured up a rather different scenario from Kunz's: "Imagine: a man bent on one knee, gazing up into the eyes of a teary-eyed woman. He takes out a velvet jewelry box, opens it, and she gasps.
Ayer/De Beers actually started planning such a ring in 1966-67, according to an N. Ayer Annual report to De Beers in that year: "There are many reasons why men decide to give their wives dia mond jewelry. When a man is truly motivated by warm sentiment, he likes to feel reassured and encouraged.
Kobe Bryant bought his wife Vanessa a fabulous ring after he was booked on suspicion of raping another woman. As one report commented, "If diamonds are a girl's best friend, perhaps Vanessa Bryant will find solace in hers as she works through her divorce from hus band Kobe Bryant. The mom of two filed for divorce in Los Angeles on Friday-though the fate of her $4 million diamond sparkler, a xi.
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
When Philip Roth fin ished his novel Deception, in 1990, his then wife, the actress Claire Bloom, found in the manuscript a chapter describing in bleakly unflattering terms the protagonist's wife Claire, an actress. "She was still shaking with rage when he came home, much earlier than usual, bringing an extravagant gift, a gold ring in the shape of a snake with an emerald head bought from Bulgari on Fifth Avenue." (Was the snake a symbol of the loss of their Eden?
One journalist asked, "Is this some gimmick by the jewelry industry to get you to spend more? Is it some ploy by feminists to brand men with engagement rings, too?" A "gimmick by the jewelry industry" seems to me precisely what this is. But in defense of the second option, Kunz foresaw, in 1917, the feminist possibilities of the mangagement ring: "Perhaps the objection of the extreme advocates of 'woman's rights' might be satisfied 274
The Anti-Myth: Diabolical Diamonds
For every myth there's an anti-myth,79 and the dark sides of diamonds keep surfacing, despite all the attempts by the diamond cartel to cover them up. We have already seen examples of the anti-myth of evil diamonds in Daniel Deronda and in the nineteenth-century French and English stories about diamond necklaces,xii as well as in the mythology of large Oriental diamonds carrying diabolical Oriental curses, but especially in the mythol ogy of greedy, seductive women. The anti-diamond myth was frequently evoked by texts with religious agendas, for Christianity has always been distrustful of jewelry (except, naturally, as worn by the princes of the Church).xiii The Puritans under the Commonwealth in England tried to abolish wedding rings because of their association with bishops, but people insisted on having them.80
Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, Part I (1806) tempts Gretchen with a
box of jewels, and in Jacques Offenbach's 1881 opera, The Tales of Hoffmann (with a libretto based on stories by E. Hoffmann), the devil incarnate uses a huge diamond to entice Giulietta to help him steal Hoffmann's soul. He sings an aria about a scintillating diamond that catches a woman as a hunter catches a lark: Sparkle, diamond, fascinate, draw her, The lark or the woman, to this conquering bait… .
One leaves her life there, The other loses her soul.81 xii. Recall the Pope's ring in chapter 2, p.
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
275 275 Giulietta says she was seduced by the diamond; she steals Hoffman's reflection for the devil, and dies. Offenbach had died before he had com pleted the opera, and among the many versions of the libretto that others later composed, one interpolates a bit of Orientalist dialogue before this aria. When the devil shows her the diamond, he says, "It was one of the eyes of the god Brahma.
Drennan gave his wife a ring, sans diamond, accompanied by this poem with a strongly negative view of diamonds: Emblem of happiness! Not bought nor sold; Accept this modest ring of virgin gold. Love, in this small, but perfect, circle trace; And duty, in its soft but strict embrace.
The Mughal emperor Babur, when he owned the Koh-i-Noor, is said to have remarked that it was worth the value of two and a half days' food85 for all the people in the world. And indeed, many people have starved, and died in other ways, too, for diamonds. Zoellner, who called his book about 276
diamonds The Heartless Stone: A Journey through the World of Diamonds,
And "All," as Lord Randolph Churchill said when he visited the South African diamond mines in the 1890s, "for the vanity of woman"88-and of man, though Churchill some how left that out. But this book is not about the human suffering that surrounds the pro duction of diamonds; important as it is, it is not the only thing worth say ing about diamonds. We cannot do justice to these human tragedies in this book, which merely concerns the mythology of women and their jewelry.
But we can acknowledge the hideous truth of the situation before going on to consider the way that the mythology of those diamonds caused far less serious hardships among engaged couples in Europe and America. Elizabeth Taylor devised an ingenious rationalization for keeping the 33-carat Krupp diamond, which was tainted with moral evil over and above the moral evil of African mining, having been owned by Vera Krupp, of the famous German munitions family that was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews.
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
I'd only entertained an objective, hanker-free appreciation of the jewels in Tiffany's win dows, so it made sense that before our wedding we went to the dia mond district to buy two diamondless bands… . I gardened, cooked and never missed having to place my non-existent gems in a soap dish before plunging my hands into bread dough or compost… . Later, this seemed too cheap and easy and what, I wondered, might that signify?
But not all of the blame for the "shaming" can be laid at the feet of Ayer/De Beers. We noted that the taste for diamonds began in the late nineteenth century, but even before that the custom of plain gold wedding rings had become a hardship for some. As Charles Edwards wrote in 1855: "The use of the ring has become so common in England that poor people will not believe the marriage to be good without one; and xiv.
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278 the notion also is that it must be of gold. At Worcester (England) on one occasion, the parties were so poor that they used a brass ring. The bride's friends indignantly protested that the ring ought to have been of gold; and the acting officer was threatened with indictment for permitting the use of such base metal.
In another case of humble marriage, the bridegroom announced that a ring was not necessary. The woman entreated to have one. The super intendent of the poor took part with the woman and represented how the absence of it would expose her to insult; and he, kindly, hesitated to proceed with the marriage until a ring was produced.
The man yielded at last and obtained one. The woman's gratitude brought tears into her eyes."96 Even without Ayer/De Beers, public pressure often made poor people spend more than they could or should on wedding rings. But some people found ways to resist the myth.
Saint Augustine asked priests to perform weddings without rings for those who could not afford them.97 James Remington McCarthy noted that according to custom in Ireland, a marriage was not legal without the use of a gold ring, as great an imposition on most Irish farmers as a diamond was for most
New Yorkers. But,
In eighteenth-century European society, jewels were "regularly borrowed or hired. Nor was there any ignominy connected to this-on the contrary." Hugh Walpole in 1742 told how the Princess of Saxe Gotha attended a xv.
Take Back Your Ring: The Legal View
Another factor that worked in De Beers's favor was a shift in legal atti tudes regarding the property that a woman could take away from a broken engagement, attitudes that swayed back and forth in the strong winds of the bi-polar mythology of women's sexual natures. The predatory women whose best friends were diamonds were from about 1920 known as "gold diggers," a term that the OED glosses, in the singular, as "a girl who attaches herself to a man merely for gain; slang (orig.
Loos's Lorelei even traffics in fake diamonds: when a man gives her a 280
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Adelaide, a sexy show-girl, sings: "Take back your mink, / Take back your pearls. / What made you think/ That I was one of those girls?" (Or, in the immortal accent of Vivian Blaine, as Adelaide:) "Take back your mink, / Take back your poils. / What made you think / That I was one of them goils?" Adelaide is arguing that she is not a gold digger.
To prove it, as the song continues she pantomimes a superficial strip-only to take off, presum ably to return, the jewelry and gifts that she fears her boyfriend intended as down payment for services to be rendered. She is insisting that she is the other sort of girl, the sort who gets married and gets the other kind of jewelry. In her signature number, "Adelaide's Lament," she complains, "Just from waiting around for that plain little band of gold / A person can develop a cold," and she pities the single woman who suffers "from a lack of community property." So the poils are no longer the spoils; that "plain little band of gold," and the legal right to the community property that goes with it, are what she's after now.
The gold digger's game had changed, and we can chart its change in American history. The sort of woman we call a gold digger was known as a type in England and Europe for centuries before this term was coined. We recognize her in Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda (1876)xvi and in Lizzie
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
281 281 much legal ink flowed in the twentieth century in an attempt to dis tinguish between the different ways in which the gold digger "attaches herself" to her man (before, during, after, or without marriage) and to decide under what circumstances she did and did not have to return the poils. In an earlier, more innocent age, in the nineteenth century, both fictional and legal texts had concerned themselves with "nice" women, of the one-diamond ilk, whom they regarded as fragile, needing to be protected from men who promised unique devotion but really were only After One Thing.
And so there were "heart-balm" laws, allowing women to claim damages (presumably with "heartless stones" serving as balm for a wounded heart) if men seduced them with a promise of marriage and then reneged on the promise after the sexual fact. (Men could also sue under these laws, but seldom did; the double standard worked here in women's favor.) Since jewelry has sentimental value over and above its cash equivalent, vindictive divorcing couples (and contentious siblings) often attach great sentiment to the jewelry they bicker about, clearly equat ing jewelry with (lost) love.
After expressing her regret, Taylor concluded, philosophi cally, "At least I got to keep the ring."107 282
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282 But by then the courts had moved in a different direction. After the turn of the century, as women fought to get the vote and became more aggres sively visible in public, calls for equal treatment of the sexes led many state legislatures and high courts to revisit the laws that favored the woman in a broken engagement. This shift in the wind led, in 1935, to a number of laws that limited the damages to which a woman was entitled when an engagement failed to lead to a marriage.
The new legislation was quite notorious at the time. Jilted brides, who had once been awarded tidy sums, now encountered courts reluctant to enforce breach of promise laws. Now, "the once-common and oft-successful female plaintiffs disappeared from the case reports, replaced by theretofore virtually unknown, and suddenly successful, male plaintiffs."108 Equality does have its price.
Another factor behind the change in legislation was a new belief in the non-commodifiability of love and marriage, an argument that trying to Figure 10.3 Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Budapest in 1973. She is wearing the 69-carat "Taylor-Burton" diamond. Source: Photo by © Norman Parkinson Ltd./courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive/Corbis/ Corbis via Getty Images.
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
But as we have seen, gold diggers and fortune hunters had been around for quite a while. The new anti-gold-digger (or, as it was often called, anti- heart-balm) legislation was therefore a response not to the rise of these predatory women but to a shift in attitudes to them, a shift in the mythol ogy of women. In contrast to nineteenth-century heart-balm legislation, designed to protect vulnerable women from "naturally dominating male xvii.
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"The triumph of diamonds has to be understood in terms of their symbolic functions," says Proctor,115 and Tushnet agrees: "The justifications for the ring (and the rules of etiquette governing its return) focus on the symbolism involved… . If the woman's loss of virginity is to be compensated, she should always keep the ring. The fault rule itself represented a new relationship between love and property in which the jilted lover could retain or reclaim the material symbol of the lost love.
As Kerber puts it: "In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, valuable jewels came to carry an additional value when given as an engagement
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There is now a website called exboyfriendjewelry.com that advises women to
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287 287 "BUY, SELL, TRADE AND BLOG ABOUT THE BREAKUP! Consignment shops are even worse… . So, what's a girl like you to do?
You have all that jewelry sitting around that you loved so hard to get (that sounded dirty, but you know what we mean) and will never wear again… . Welcome to EXBOYFRIENDJEWELRY.COM-a site where you can buy/sell/ trade and blog about all of those little painful reminders in your jewelry box that make you wonder 'what did I ever see in him?' You set your own price. You get it off your chest and out of your sight.
She chatted with Leo while he fixed it: "He said did I know the diamond in the ring was a perfect stone. I said Mark had told me that. He said it wasn't the kind of diamond I'd ever have trouble selling if I ever wanted to-he had told Mark he'd be glad to buy it back for what Mark had paid for it.
I said I was glad to hear that. He asked me how I liked the necklace. Leo looked up, and the loupe dropped from his eye.
'I must be thinking of another customer,' he said. 'No you're not,' I said… . The diamond caught the afternoon sun and made a rain bow on the wall of the store." She realized that her husband had bought the necklace for the mistress she had suspected him of having.
She told the jeweler, "I love the ring, 288
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288 but it really doesn't go with my life… . and if you've got a ring you can't wear on the subway, what's the point of having it?" He gave her a check for $15,000. "I realized I had just been given the means to walk out of my marriage." So, once again, jewelry as incriminating evidence (in this case, a necklace) reveals the man's betrayal, while jewelry as portable propertyxx (in this case, a ring) comes to the rescue of the betrayed woman.
The Rebellion of Twenty-First-Century Women
Almost a century ago, women began to revolt against wedding rings and engagement rings, as Kunz reported in 1917: "In England, it is said that a movement has been initiated to abolish the use of the wedding-ring, possibly in some sense as a war mea sure, to constitute a slight check on the use of gold for ornamental purposes. It is, however, conjectured that its real source is rather to be sought in the general movement for the complete independence of women, the wedding-ring being looked upon by some extremists as an antiquated badge of slavery.
They rebel in various ways: not only by (a) selling their diamond rings but by (b) buying their own dia mond jewelry, or (c) buying themselves something other than diamonds, or (d) buying costume jewelry instead of the Real Thing, or (e) forswearing jewelry altogether, or, for many women, (f) never giving a damn for jewelry in the first place. Only option (b) still plays into De Beers's hands, but it, too, can serve feminist ends.
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
Sex with only one man for I don't know how long." She bids furiously on the ring but is outbid by someone who buys the ring, via phone, for $55,000. Later, Smith (wearing nothing but bulging underpants and coming on to her) gives her the ring, and she realizes that he was the one on the phone at the auction. She tries to explain to him that she wanted to buy it for herself, but he insists on giving it to her.
She hedges: "Well, just to be clear, this is a ring with diamonds… . It's not a diamond ring, right?" "Yeah." "Well, in that case, I love it." And they go to bed together. But some time later, talking to a woman friend about the way that she always thinks of Smith's needs before her own, she looks at her ring and says, "Even this ring.
I wanted to buy this for myself. To be able to do that. Then, he buys it for me… .
Now, every time I look down at it, I see him. Not me." Eventually, when she leaves him, she looks at the gardenia ring on her finger and starts to take it off, but then she tells him, sadly, affectionately, "No. Every time I look down at it, I want to think of you." Several conflicting ideas about jewelry are packed into this tiny, frag mented vignette, beginning with one incident taken from the life of an actual public figure.
"Blair Elkin" is a near-anagram for the name of the film actress Ellen Barkin, who in 2006 had auctioned off at Christie's the jewelry that her husband, Ronald Perelman, had given her. The New York Times called it "a symbolic and literal purging of the union" and quoted Ms. Barkin as saying, "These are just not memories I want to wear out every day." "Take Back Your Pearls" (a line from Adelaide's song, "Take 290
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290 Back Your Mink") was the Times' caption for one of the photographs in the story,134 but of course Barkin did not tell her ex-husband to take them back; she sold them. So, in the Sex and the City story, Blair Elkin is selling the jewelry that she presumably received in love and now is disposing of in hate. Samantha wants her ring to have no connection with love at all; she wants it to sym bolize herself as an individual, not a partner; yet she says she has earned it not only through her individual effort (she will be spending her "hard- earned money") but also through her fidelity to a single partner.
She is therefore playing a double game. Her boyfriend ruins her dream of inde pendence by sweet-talking, and sex-talking, her into accepting the ring from him. All she can do to reaffirm her independence is insist that it is not a "diamond ring," an engagement ring, and that she is therefore still at least technically a single woman.
In the end, she leaves him to become single altogether, though now that she is free of him she values the ring in a new way, as a memory of him that takes his place. Presumably the many viewers who buy reproductions of Samantha's two-finger cocktail ring available from several online merchants are women buying them for themselves-but perhaps not. As the movement for women to buy their own jewelry gained momen tum, De Beers tried to sleep with the enemy by advertising, in 2012, a ring, generally featuring stones of less than 2 carats, that women were encour aged to buy for themselves.
Your right hand thinks knights are for fairy tales. Your left hand says, 'I love you.' Your right hand says, 'I love me, too.' Women of the world, raise your right hand. View more at adiamondis forever.com."138 Cunningly expressing the same sort of ambivalence that Samantha confessed to, De Beers assures women that they can have their
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
"She couldn't tell the difference," he insists. Many women are finding their way out of the tyranny of diamonds. As Proctor optimistically remarks, "Diamond rings were popular in an era of sexual inequality… .
But many women are raising their left hands without diamonds on them. As Sarah Maza put it, "Diamonds are 292
The Ties That Bind
Women who buy their own jewelry are swimming upstream against the still operative assumption that your jewelry proves that some man, your husband or your lover, owns you. To buy your own jewelry is therefore to say, "Nobody owns me." But does it also say, "Nobody loves me"? That fear seems to be addressed in another sort of jewelry that would make any card-carrying feminist weep: "love bangles" marketed by Cartier and other firms, bracelets that come with a key for the man to lock onto the woman's wrist and then wear on a chain or key ring, with a screw that he screws shut using a screwdriver that he wears on a chain.
Shades of "The Story of O"!xxi These are, alas, very popular, and selling well, setting the feminist movement back about five centuries. Another discouraging modern trend is one in which not husbands but fathers use rings as symbolic chastity belts to shackle the sexuality of their women. Some Christian fathers now give their daughters silver purity rings (recall the "purity" of diamonds; this is apparently a less expensive kind of purity), also called chastity rings, promise rings, or abstinence rings.
A Mississippi jeweler made a ring for his thirteen-year-old daughter with two sapphires representing his watchful eyes, guarding her virginity until the day she marries.147 The custom has both incestuous overtones (as in the Cinderella stories in which fathers give their daughters wedding rings)xxii and religious resonances (as in the nuns' rings that marry them
to Christ).xxiii
The practice originated in the United States in the 1990s among Christian-affiliated sexual abstinence groups, where wearing a silver purity ring is typically accompanied by a religious vow to practice abstinence xxi.
Are Diamonds a Woman’s Best Friend?
11. Two Conclusions, on Money and Myth
What is the conceptual thread on which we can string these gems of sto ries? There are several, of course, and I laid out half a dozen of them in the Introduction.i But I wish to focus here on one so obvious that I haven't really talked about it directly, and that is the eternal triangle of jewelry, sex, and money.
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I Money: The Lap of Luxury
What is the conceptual thread on which we can string these gems of sto ries? There are several, of course, and I laid out half a dozen of them in the Introduction.i But I wish to focus here on one so obvious that I haven't really talked about it directly, and that is the eternal triangle of jewelry, sex, and money. Most of the stories we have seen are about the interaction between jewelry and, on the one hand, sex and gender (or, if you prefer, sex and women) and, on the other hand, money and power.
These sto ries remind us why the word "luxury" meant "lust/lasciviousness" before it came to mean "opulence/extravagance," and why Luxury, "usefully compress[ing] together opulence and libido,"1 is the patron goddess of jewelry, giving a double meaning to the phrase "the lap of luxury." There's a lot of talk about love in these tales, but they are really all about lucre, about payment for services rendered. They are not True Love Stories. The clever wivesii are not primarily after love; they are trying to secure their sons' inheritances.
And though it's not at all clear what different cultures mean by "love," they seem generally to agree on the meanings of sex and money. Men-male jewelers, male buyers-exchange jewelry in much the same way that, as Claude Lévi-Strauss taught us to see, men exchange women to cement alliances between men.2 Fathers give their daughters i.
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Two Conclusions: Money and Myth
We have seen how the mythology created by the De Beers corporation in Amsterdam bam boozled several generations of Americans into buying diamond engage ment rings they could not afford.iii The jeweler is the obvious pivot of all the transactions in Max Ophüls's 1953 film, The Earrings of Madame de,iv but jewelers are there, behind the scenes, in every story involving jewelry. The exaggerated number of transactions in that film merely makes bla tant, and tragicomic, what is always present, usually hidden, in all of these tales: jewelry is money, and constantly changes hands, circulating just like money, or sex.
Jewelry worn by a woman is a way for a man to broadcast to another man his ownership both of wealth and of the woman. The neck lace that the general and Donati give to Louise in The Earrings of Madame de is part of a transaction between the two men that ends in a duel. Courtesans are generally even more aware of the value of jewelry than wives are.
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As the texts in this book testify, for many centuries in many parts of the world, jewelry has been the only property that most women have been allowed to own. Jewelry gives a woman a degree of financial and politi cal independence. "She has nothing but the jewels she stands up in," a catty woman says of a penniless English widow in the film Up at the Villa (Philip Haas, 2000), based on the book by W.
Jewelry was for women what James C. Scott has taught us to call a weapon of the weak:8 often women's jewelry was all they could use to defend themselves against men who denied them the ownership of land and permanent property. Jewelry has all the advantages of what Wemmick, in Dickens's Great Expectations (1861), called "portable property," and advised Pip to "get hold of." It has often been all that a woman could take with her if she was divorced or if she divorced her husband; it is the key to her freedom.
Jewelry is both portable and fungible. Until recently, if a woman wanted to leave her husband, few legal or economic sanctions were available to her. But she was usually allowed to keep the jewelry that she had brought into the marriage (as part of her dowry), and sometimes also the jewelry that she had been given by her husband, and this bought her some degree of independence.
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Two Conclusions: Money and Myth
Dowries in India were sometimes more of a curse than a blessing. Even today, Indian women are murdered for their dowries. In nineteenth-cen tury India, particularly in Bengal, where widows were allowed to inherit their husbands' property, such widows were sometimes encouraged (or forced) to become satis by burning themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres.
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298 about, sleeping in tents, and there are no safe deposit boxes.
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Reason, and Rationality
Why do these mythic structures have such a stranglehold on the human imagi nation? More particularly, why do people keep telling stories that fly so blatantly in the face of logic and reason, even when logical concerns are explicitly raised in the course of the stories themselves? We will look for answers to these questions both inside and outside the narrative frame.
We saw, in the story of Marie Antoinette's diamond necklace, how a moment of history came out of myth in the eighteenth century and went back into it.vi And we saw how in the twentieth century an advertising campaign about women and their diamonds created myths of the same genre as those that recur throughout the fictional sources.vii Robert Pippin has commented insightfully on the persistence of the cen tral motifs: "Romantic/sexual love is an archetypal domain of deep, fundamen tal uncertainty. The vulnerability is greater than any other human domain, the need for proof correspondingly the highest and the frailest.
The "proofs" are as much a tangle as the oral pledges.
The Recognition of Myth and the Myth of Recognition
What is experienced by the characters inside a recognition story is also experienced by the reader or hearer, outside the frame of the story. As the story unfolds, we see through the disguise of the new superficial details-now the princess has become a chambermaid, the palace a cattle ranch-to realize that it is, in fact, our old friend the disguised heroine or the forgetful husband. When the vic tim of the masquerade finally recognizes the masquerader ("Oh, it's my wife!"), the reader or listener of the story recognizes the plot ("Oh, it's a recognition story!").
Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaroxi mocks the cliché of the recogni
tion scene when (in Act III) the valet Figaro remarks, in the presence of the woman (Marcellina) who is about to force him to marry her, that he viii.
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300 has been searching for his lost parents for years, that rich shawls and jew els (!) found on him as an infant identify him as noble, and that his par ents had taken the precaution of marking a unique scar (a spatula) on his right arm. At this everyone realizes that Marcellina is Figaro's mother (and has narrowly averted incest).xii "His mother!" one character after another cries out. Mozart's librettist, da Ponti, stretches it out to six repetitions at one point-"Sua madre?" "Sua madre!" "Sua madre?" and so on.
The stories about Marie Antoinette in chapter 8 are about a different sort of recognition-the mis-recognition of the queen in the masquerade in the Bower of Venus. In chapter 9, jewelry supplies the evidence for the recognition of the woman in the film Vertigo; it is also a more subtle clue to the recognition of a woman's character, her iden tity in a broader sense, in many nineteenth-century stories. And men and women in chapter 10 parade their diamonds, in the spirit of conspicuous consumption, in order to be recognized not as individuals but as people of a certain type and status: "I am a man who can afford expensive dia monds"; "I am a woman whose husband loves her enough to buy her expensive diamonds." If we classify the corpus of recognition narratives as a family (in the phylogenetic sense), the narrative of recognition by means of a ring is a genus, and recognition of your own disguised wife or husband by means of a ring is a species.
On each of these levels, there seems to be a limit to xii.
Repetition and Originality
The variants of a myth recorded in different texts build a potentially infi nite number of stories by rearranging a finite number of mythic themes. Lévi-Strauss compared the process of recycling these inherited mythic themes to bricolage, the work of the French handyman (the bricoleur), the rag-and-bones man who makes new things out of broken pieces of the old, using one leg of a broken chair to replace a missing leg on another chair. The myth-maker's toolbox consists of fragments of old stories that can be recycled in new stories.
Each culture chooses the scraps that it wants to keep; audiences as well as storytellers know them. Some, such as the ring narrative, have proved more recyclable than others. For some critics, such repetitions are a literary flaw.
But the sense of being cheated is not, I think, what is experienced by the reader of or listener to a recognition story, outside the frame of the xiii.
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Unlike literary critics and cultural snobs (who, Cave admits, are the main people who accuse recognition narratives of fraudulence),28 the com mon or garden variety reader or listener does not feel defrauded by a plot that he recognizes. Unlike our reaction to most repeated anecdotes or the narration of other people's dreams, we do not think, "O lord, not again," when we encounter a familiar mythic text. The voice of myth is meant to be predictable.
The audience has an expectation of what the story should say, and the storyteller imitates that paradigm, fulfills that expectation. The audience takes pleasure in predicting what will happen and satisfaction in seeing it happen, rather than in being surprised or shocked. And it is pre cisely the known quantity of the clichéd plot (plus its intrinsic appeal: cli chés endure because they represent truths) that makes it ultimately not empty but filling, the comfort food of narratives.
In a world without copyrighting, plagiarism has no legal repercussions-and indeed no meaning. Retellings of old stories are "covers," as contempo rary musicians call their own renditions of other musicians' songs. Great myths serve storytellers as the Pieta or the Madonna and Child served medieval European sculptors and painters, as a classic shared theme that challenges the artist to use it as a foil for individual originality-for tellers of myths can, in fact, be highly original, as long as they also take pains to touch all the bases that their audiences expect.
They learn from other storytellers, not necessarily in a formal teacher-student relationship, but just by following them around (in an oral tradition) or reading them (in a literary tradition). They claim to tell the very same stories, as they heard them and learned them and as they themselves have always already told them, but they change them with every retelling, just as Claude Monet painted haystacks, and the Houses of Parliament, over and over again, but never the same. Artistry rather than context explains the way the cliché xv.
Two Conclusions: Money and Myth
Many such myths also connect us to all the other people who have said those words, heard those words, throughout the history of our families and wider communities. (To return to the musical analogy, as we hear Louis Armstrong sing "Mack the Knife," we sense Lotte Lenya singing, in German, behind him.) And every time we hear the words adds, like the layers of a pearl, to our deeper feel ings about that text. Myths snowball as they roll through a culture.
The film Big Fishxvi begins by presenting the hardheaded view of repeti tion. When the father insists that "everyone loves" his story of the fish and the ring, the son says, "No, dad, they don't. And I don't love that story, not any more, not after a thousand times.
I know every punch line, I can tell them as well as you can." But finally the son recants entirely, and the film ends with him saying: "Have you ever heard a joke so many times you've forgotten why it's funny. But you hear it again and suddenly it's new; you remember why you loved it in the first place. A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories.
They live on after him and in that way he becomes immortal." It's the repetition that produces the immortality.
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304 identity of the masquerader, sometimes seems to leak into the minds of some of the characters, who have a sense of the realistic truth even when they are apparently under the power of the mythic illusion. The myth per sists because of the collusion of storytellers and audiences in its preserva tion. Neither the audience nor the storyteller has complete control of the story; it is an act of mutual creation.
Sometimes they are even self-conscious about it, as when, in Terence's The Mother-in-Law,xvii someone remarks, "I hope this won't be a comedy, where everyone learns everything in the end." So too, near the end of The Winter's Tale,xviii speaking of Hermione, who is presumed dead, Paulina says, "That she is living, / Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale: but it appears she lives" (5.3.115-227). The joys of repetition are especially characteristic of movies, a main source of our contemporary mythology.xix So it is that every Christmas season we listen, again and again, to A Christmas Carol, and watch, each year, the different film actors playing Scrooge (Reginald Owen, 1938; Alastair Sim, 1951; George C.
Two Conclusions: Money and Myth
305 305 1991 play into a film in 1994, he changed the title to avoid confusion. As he wrote: "The title of the stage play is The Madness of George III and of the film, The Madness of King George. This was a marketing decision: the American backers somewhat shamefacedly explained that the audi ence might think, seeing The Madness of George III, that they had missed out on The Madness of George and The Madness of George II.
A survey had apparently shown that there were many movie-goers who came away from Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V wishing they had seen its four predecessors.
Man (or The Second Mrs Tanqueray) I’m not sure.”33
And so it is with stories about rings of recognition; we like to listen to "Clever Wife II," and III, and IV. Sometimes, however, it is the divergence from the expected plot that delights the audience, especially if they can see it coming. (This is true more of written variants-in which we, as scholars and students, may identify and appreciate such clever twists-than of oral presentations, though it works well in the theater and cinema.) As Warner has noted: "Much pleasure for the reader arises when, like the protagonist or other character, the story takes an unexpected turn and springs a different denouement.
The Ring to the Rescue
When men within the stories use rings to salve their consciences, or to wrig gle out of tight spots,xx storytellers are using rings to save the story. Storytellers often find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place, between an inherited, traditional story that they are holding onto like a monkey with a banana in his fist, and a new cage of ethics that traps the monkey's paw (cum banana) within it. At such a moment, a ready-to-hand narrative theme may be invoked as a key to unlock the cage.
When a storyteller has painted herself into a corner, she reaches for something to fix the story she has inherited, to adapt it to her own purposes. Sinking into the moral quagmire produced when one moral standard collides with another that follows but does not quite supplant it, such as the tension between the siren song of adultery and the monogamous wax poured into the married couple's ears, the storyteller reaches for a life-saving narrative. And a narrative device like the smoking ring or ring ex machina is always readily available to do the job.
Byatt has a woman who writes stories for children ask a museum curator to suggest an object around which a story can be made, "something that's always been missing-with a story attached to it, naturally--and that can be made to have magic properties, an amulet, a mirror that shows that past and the future, that kind of thing… . There are so many tales about rings."36
Sexing Texts
Most of these stories appear in texts that were written by men. Yet women are storytellers too, as we have seen even among the earlier tales and still more in modern folk renditions (such as the tale of the Korpalu xx.
Two Conclusions: Money and Myth
Because they reflect the rationality of their time and place, in which such behavior was considered normal (or macho, or virile, or honorable, or what you will).xxiv And because, as we have seen, the old myths live on, often patched up a bit, even when new ethical norms make them an embarrassment. And because there is something in the stories that reas sures men about things that are important to them, such as the paternity of their children.xxv Such stories often encode repressive social agendas; the tales of clever wives enforce the view that it is the job of women to remain faithful to their husbands no matter how badly, how unreasonably, they are treated, and they let men off the hook by pretending to redress the balance of power, as if to say, "I'm not a bully; she can defend herself by her wiles."38On the other hand, we may ask why women tell stories that depict them as promiscuous tricksters.
Perhaps because they are also depicted as cleverer than the men, and (usually) only apparently promiscu ous. It might also be argued that it is in the interest of women to see men depicted as cads and in the interest of men to see women depicted as pro miscuous tricksters. Viewed that way, it's a win-win situation.
The connection between jewelry, women, and deception is an enduring one. Our stories accuse jewelry and women of faking it in various ways; fake jewelry is mirrored in the deceptions, the lies, the women pretending to be other women. But considerations of the changing social contexts of xxi.
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308 these stories shift our focus back to the outer level of the narrative frame, where the narrator uses the ring to obscure the fact that the men were fak ing it when they said that they had not slept with the women or that they had forgotten that they had slept with the women. The cross-cultural cor pus of stories about fake jewelry reveals how male narrators fake it (with the audience's collusion): how they cast moral aspersions on one of the few sources of women's independence, their jewelry; how they maintain the illusion that if you can get someone's ring you can prove that he slept with you, or that he did not really abandon you but was merely helplessly bewitched into temporarily forgetting you; or that if you can prove that a woman has real jewelry that her husband did not give her, you can prove that she was unfaithful to him.
The gender myths mesh nicely: the slut assumptionxxvi (if the woman has the ring, she slept with some guy) bal ances the paternity fearxxvii (if she has your ring, you must be the father of her kid). Here is where the cross-cultural distribution of this theme is so impres sive. It shows us how often narrators have tricked their audiences into believing what they so deeply want to believe: that a little thing like a ring can bring justice to the asymmetrical power relations that have controlled female sexuality for most of human history.
It shows us how widespread is the desire to project the responsibility for sexual rejection or betrayal onto an external force like a gold ring.
Two Conclusions: Money and Myth
Let's consider the role first of reason and then of rationality in myths of rings of recognition.
The Ring Runs Rings around Reason
Myths as a whole are unreasonable not merely from the standpoint of Enlightenment types standing outside the culture but even for the people who make the myths, people who are perfectly capable of noticing that human beings cannot fly and who can also see the logi cal flaws in the use of a ring as proof text. Such stories demand that the reader or listener suspend the sense not only of what is physically possible but of what is logical, overlooking easily available explanations for certain events in favor of the extremely unlikely explanation that the traditional story offers.
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So, too, in early versions of the Siegfried myth, Siegfried merely changes into Gunther's clothes to impersonate him; in later ver sions, he uses first a magic cloak and then a magic helmet. Reason gave way to mythology, as it generally does in the development of stories in which a magic ring is inserted into later retellings of the tale. Adam Gopnik has spoken well of the special pleading that we allow nar ratives about rings (even though he is talking about the other sort of rings, Tolkienian rings of power):xxix "Certain kinds of truths are convincing only in a narrative.
Conventional recognition nar ratives are not at all like World War II spy flicks, in which agents carefully learn accents, make sure to wear the right shoelaces, and so forth, know ing that if they make a tiny slip, the Gestapo will catch them. The myths are playing a different game. The signet ring is the only kind of ring that is a certain sign of iden tity, with the bearer's name or emblem on it.
That such arguments from reason were always available to storytellers and audiences is easily dem onstrated by a number of stories we have seen in which someone does question how, after all, a ring can prove that someone did or did not com mit an act of sexual infidelity.
Reason often pipes up to argue against the "proof"; reason says, "Look for the ring where you lost it"; reason says, "Lots of people have rings like that," or "You stole the ring," or "That's not xxix.
Two Conclusions: Money and Myth
311 311 my ring"-in other words, "The ring lies." Habrotonon, for instance,xxx resists the evidence of the ring on grounds that "a million things" might have made a man lose a ring in ways other than the occasion of a rape. 'Ayshaxxxi pretends to have an identical twin sister in order to provide a reasonable explanation for the success of her masquerade. In Jay Reid Gould's version of the de Maupassant story of the necklace, someone sen sibly remarks, "Who would lend someone a real necklace?
We keep it safe under lock and key."xxxii The unreasonable "proof" of circular jewelry is sometimes either forgotten at the end of the story, leaving atavistic traces in the text (as in the Marriage of Figaro),xxxiii or, though kept in the plot, is pushed aside to make way for more logical proofs of identity, as in The Lady of the Jeweled Necklace.xxxiv In one of the short French fragments of the tale of Tristan and Isolde,xxxv when Tristan objects that Isolde did not recognize him until she saw the telltale ring of green jasper, she replies "We are surrounded by treachery… . Neither the mention of your past life, nor the sound of your voice, not even this very ring, proved anything to me, for all these might have been the evil tricks of a sorcerer.
When, at the end of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale,xxxvi the lost child is found, a gentleman remarks, "The Oracle is fulfilled, the king's daughter is found, such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour, that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it" (5.2.23-26).
The Ring of Truth
312 answer to the question, "Has the King found his heir?" another gentleman speaks: "Most true, if ever truth were pregnant by circumstance: that which you hear you'll swear you see, there is such unity in the proofs. The mantle of Queen Hermione's, her jewel about the neck of it, the letters of Antigonus found with it, which they know to be his character; the majesty of the creature in resemblance of the mother, the affection of nobleness which nature shows above her breeding, and many other evidences proclaim her, with all certainty, to be the king's daughter." (5.2.31-40) The "unity in the proofs," not just "her jewel about the neck of it," is the voice of reason.
Despite the fantasy of the romance, the whole pile of proofs is needed, to supplement the proof offered by the jewel-though it all goes to show that the jewel was, in fact, telling the truth, and the old tale was true. The same combination of arguments pops up just a few lines later, when Antigonus (the one who exited "pursued by a bear") is identi fied by his ring, though the man who tells this remarks, "Like an old tale still, which will have matter to rehearse, though credit be asleep and not an ear open" (5.2.62).
Reason challenges the ring-proof in a tale told by an Irish woman and retold by the poet William Butler Yeats. It seems that a girl whom the fair ies had taken years ago is eventually returned to her parents. Her father thinks she is long dead and he does not recognize her.
She says, "Stop, dear father, till you look at this ring on my finger. Look at your name and mine engraved on it." "It certainly is my daughter's ring; but I do not know how you came by it. I fear in no honest way." She calls her mother and says, "You have all forgotten me; but look at this mole on my neck.
In a fantastical story in the Mahabharata (which does not involve a ring), this sort of non- recognition is justified by a boon that the god Dharma grants to his son, King Yudhishthira.48 Yudhishthira tells Dharma that he and his brothers have been forced to go into exile in disguise and will lose their kingdom
Two Conclusions: Money and Myth
313 313 if they are recognized. He asks the god to promise that they will not be recognized, and the god agrees. This boon justifies the shallowness of the disguises that the king and his brothers subsequently adopt, parodies of their well-known characters.
Magical though it is, the god's promise does interject a reasonable, if not realistic, explanation of how they got away with such obvious and playful masquerades. The Hindu god's explicit boon is implicit in every recognition plot in every culture: no matter how poor your masquerade is, no one will recog nize you. Similarly, the ring as evidence would never stand up in court, but it either jogs the forgetful husband's memory, if he really has forgot ten, or jogs his conscience, if he is lying, so that he confesses.
The clever wife is like a sharp courtroom lawyer, tap-dancing with material that she knows would not actually be admitted as evidence. Is it possible that all of the clever wife folktales are satires on the dumb idea that you could prove paternity with a ring? And is Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Wellxxxvii a satire on it too?
Is The evidence of Judah a satire on Genesis 38?xxxviii I wonder. One reasonable argument that challenges the "proof" of the ring is the argument from coincidence: maybe two unrelated people just happen to have the same ring (or the same name, or the same face). But the idea of coincidence itself flies in the face of reason, and can be challenged.
And that chain-mail is what preserves these illogical stories even in cultures where the more logical likelihood has been acknowledged.
Myths revel in the violation of reason. Lewis Carroll’s White Queen,
perhaps quoting Tertullian ("Credo quia impossibile [I believe it because it is impossible]"), chides Alice when she says she can't believe impossible things, and advises her to practice: "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impos sible things before breakfast." In the heat of the myth, cold reason has no more chance than a snowball in hell.
Rationing Rationality
Reason in myths is often sacrificed on the altar of rationality. Against the forces of reason, the power of the myth depends upon the human habit of making individual logic yield to the rationality of the group, often embod ied in convention or "tradition" (as Tevye celebrates it in Fiddler on the Roof). What Joe Campbell used to call "the power of myth" in an individual (as in, "find your own bliss") is not really your own myth at all but some one else's myth putting you in their power, overlaid upon and obscuring your own individual desires and your own intellectual power to poke holes in the official party line.
The rationality of the myth-the need for the descendants of Judah to be fruitful and multiply-overcomes the reason of the myth (which knows that the ring cannot prove that Judah is the father of Tamar's child). So too, men in several of our stories give a woman a ring that they obtained in the course of raping another woman.xli Why were they, we xl.
The Triumph of Myth over Reason
The myth persists because of its intrinsic value for the individual, over and above its value for the rationale of the culture. Freud's concept of denial shows us some of the factors that often trump reason: people see xlii.
The Ring of Truth
316 not only what fits with the view of the world that supports their lives but also what they want to see, for their personal emotional needs. The belief that love will last forever, and that your special ring is proof of this, is spec tacularly counterfactual but not counterintuitive. It is entirely intuitive, it is what we want to believe, it is what our deepest intuitions grab hold of instead of reason, and it is what the mythology feeds on.
And so the myth carries the day; the ring rings true.
Main Points
1. Rings are signifying objects that bind truth claims to metal circles. 2. Marriage rings sit beside adultery rings in the same symbolic field. 3. Ocean recovery plots restore recognition after loss. 4. Shakuntala makes the ring a memory technology between lovers and courts. 5. War and siege tokens move rings into political proof. 6. Diamonds drag myth into money and gendered desire. 7. Two conclusions separate money talk from myth talk without letting either escape. 8. Family jewels preface personalizes the scholarly hunt. 9. Cross-cultural ring plots show shared silk with local weaves. 10. Truth and lies share the same hardware of tokens.
Frameworks
| Name | What it says | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Signifying ring | Object carries truth claim | A token appears in a plot |
| Memory technology | Ring restores forgotten bond | Recognition scenes |
| Money/myth split | Value stories vs sacred stories | Diamond chapters |
About this book
The Ring of Truth: And Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry by Wendy Doniger, 2017. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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