#madam griswold's

[xoxomyah]

𝒶𝓂𝑒𝓇𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓃 𝒸𝑜𝓇𝓈𝑒𝓉𝓈 𝒸𝒾𝓇𝒸𝒶 𝟙𝟠𝟞𝟘𝓈 ♡₊˚ 🦢・₊✧

[yourtrashcollector]

Joyce ha scritto tre romanzi, - disse Tom. - Balzac novanta. Che differenza fa adesso noi?

-Kafka ha scritto il suo primo racconto in una notte.

Stendhal ha scritto La certosa di Parma in quarantanove giorni.

Melville ha scritto Moby Dick in sedici mesi. Flaubert è rimasto cinque anni su Madame Bovary. Musil ha lavorato diciotto anni all'Uomo senza qualità, ed è morto prima di riuscire a finirlo. Ci importa qualche cosa di tutto questo, ora?

La domanda sembrava non chiedere risposta. Milton era cieco. Cervantes aveva un solo braccio. Christopher Marlowe fu ucciso a coltellate in una rissa da bettola prima di compiere trent'anni. Sembra che il coltello gli abbia trapassato un occhio. Cosa dovremmo pensarne, noialtri?

-Non lo so, Tom. Dimmelo tu. -Niente. Un bel cavolo di niente. - Penso di essere d'accordo con te.

- Thomas Wentworth Higginson «corresse- le poesie di Emily Dickinson. Un trombone ignorante che definiva Foglie d'erba un libro immorale osò toccare l'opera della divina Emily. E il povero Poe, che mori pazzo e alcolizzato in un buco di Baltimora, ebbe la sventura di scegliere come curatore postumo della sua opera Rufus Griswold. Senza sapere che Griswold lo disprezzava, che quella sottospecie di amico e paladino avrebbe passato anni a tentare di distruggere la sua reputazione. Povero Poe.

- Eddie non era fortunato. Non lo era da vivo, e non lo è stato neanche dopo morto. Lo seppellirono nel 1849 in un cimitero di Baltimora, ma ci vollero ventisei anni prima che mettessero una lapide sopra la sua tomba. Un suo parente ne aveva ordinata una subito dopo la sua morte, ma fini in uno di quei macabri casini per cui ti chiedi chi ha le redini del mondo. A proposito di follia umana, Nathan. Il laboratorio del marmista, tu pensa, si trovava sotto un tratto di ferrovia sopraelevato. Proprio mentre stavano finendo di tagliare il marmo, un treno deragliò, si abbatté nel cortile del marmista e distrusse la lapide; e dato che il parente non era abbastanza ricco per ordinarne un'altra, Poe giacque il quarto di secolo successivo in una tomba senza nome. -Come conosci tutte queste cose, Tom? Sono note.

-A me no.

-Perché non hai fatto il dottorato. All'età in cui tu eri in giro a salvare la democrazia nel mondo, io me ne stavo seduto in una biblioteca a farcirmi il cervello nozioni superflue. Ma alla fine... chi pagò la lapide? - Un gruppo di insegnanti locali costitui un comitato per raccogliere i fondi. Che tu lo creda o no, ci misero sei anni. Quando ebbero finito il monumento, i resti di Poe furono esumati, trasportati su un carro attraverso la città e tumulati in un cimitero di Baltimora. La mattina dell'inaugurazione si tenne una speciale cerimonia in un posto chiamato Western Female High School. Un nome strepitoso, vero? La Scuola Superiore Femminile dell'Ovest. Invitarono tutti i maggiori pocti americani, ma sia Whittier sia Longfellow sia Oliver Wendell Holmes trovarono scuse per non intervenire. Solo Walt Whitman si sobbarcò il viaggio. E dato che la sua opera da sola vale più di quelle di tutti gli altri messi insieme, lo considero un atto di sublime giustizia poetica. L'interessante è che quel mattino era presente anche Stéphane Mallarmé. Non in carne e ossa... ma il suo famoso sonetto Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe fu composto per l'occasione, e anche se non riusci a finirlo in tempo per la cerimonia, fu presente in spirito. Mi piace molto, Nathan... Whitman e Mallarmé, padri gemelli della poesia moderna, in piedi alla Western Female High School per rendere omaggio insieme al loro avo comune, il disonorato e infamato Edgar Allan Poe, il primo vero scrittore che l'America abbia dato al mondo.

Paul Auster, Follie di Brooklyn

[aliteraryprincess]

Special Edition: The Beauty and the Beast by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve

Warning: Contains spoilers

Welcome back to Fairy Tale Friday!  Today’s post is a special edition.  Instead of looking at a retelling, we’ll be looking at the original tale.  This also means the format is going to be a bit different.  There will only be two sections instead of three: My Thoughts and Other Reading Recommendations.  So let’s dive into Villeneuve’s full version of The Beauty and the Beast!

My Thoughts:

This is my first time reading the full version of this fairy tale.  People are generally more familiar with the one adapted for children by Madame Jeanne Leprince de Beaumont.  Even the version attributed to Villeneuve in Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book is more a mix of the original and Beaumont’s version.  Villeneuve’s story is actually novella length and consists of nine chapters.  Six of those chapters contain the story that we all know and love.  The remaining three provide backstory and plot points left out of the abridged versions.

Villeneuve opens with the set up we’ve all come to know: a rich merchant loses his fortune and has to move his family to a house in the country.  The only thing different from some of the versions we’re more familiar with is the number of children the merchant has.  In this original incarnation, he has six daughters and six sons.  Beaumont pared down the number to three of each, and most retellings I’ve read cut the sons completely.  It ultimately doesn’t make much of a difference to the story, but it’s interesting to note.  The role Beauty’s sisters play is also a bit different from what we might expect based on other versions.  While they are jealous and bitter toward her, they don’t really do anything about it.  However, Beaumont’s sisters actively plot against Beauty after she returns to visit them.  They plan to detain her longer than her allotted time in hopes that the Beast will be angry and kill her.  This is the version I grew up with, so I’m surprised that it’s a complete invention of Beaumont’s rather than something from the original.  

Beauty’s time with the Beast is mostly the same, though it is much more detailed.  She spends a great deal of time discussing the various rooms Beauty goes to and what she finds there.  There is a room of birds, a troop of monkeys who end up waiting on Beauty, a room with windows that open to reveal various plays, and, of course, the library.  To be honest, I found that these descriptions started to drag after a while, and I can see why Beaumont and Lang chose to remove them from their adaptations.  They make for some nice illustrations in my edition, but I wanted the story to move along a bit.  However, there is one detail that I wish was included in more versions and retellings.  The Beast’s palace is filled with statues of people, and it turns out these are actually the members of his court.  They’ve been turned into statues until the spell is broken.  Is that not the creepiest thing ever?  Why is no one using this?  Someone put this in a retelling and get it to me asap! 

I was a little disappointed in the actual love story between Beauty and the Beast.  Since it’s so much longer than the later versions of the story, I thought the romance might be a little more developed.  However, that’s not the case.  Beauty falls in love with him through her dreams, where he appears in his handsome, human form, referred to as the Unknown.  She isn’t aware that the Unknown and the Beast are the same person.  Her interactions with him as the Beast are extremely limited; their conversations consist of her telling him what she did with her day and him asking her to marry him.  She finds their evenings together tedious and refers to him as stupid.  I find it hard to believe that she becomes so fond of him that she finally agrees to marry him.  Then, once he is human again, we find out that it’s not actually him in her dreams at all.  It is just an image of him conjured by the fairy.  So basically she falls in love with him based on interactions that aren’t actually with him.  I know I shouldn’t have expected much since it is a fairy tale.  But considering how much time is spent on descriptions of the palace, the clothes, and all the wonderful things Beauty encounters, it would have been nice to have the relationship between the two developed more.     

As I mentioned, the final few chapters are devoted to providing the backstories of both the Beast and Beauty.  I really appreciated the inclusion of the Beast’s story since most versions don’t have it.  Beaumont mentions a wicked fairy cursed him, but she doesn’t go into any details.  In Villeneuve’s version, the Beast’s father dies when he is young and his mother goes to war to protect their kingdom, leaving him in the care of a fairy.  As he gets older, the fairy decides she wants to marry him.  When both he and his mother refuse, she transforms him into the Beast.  The curse is broken not by a girl falling in love with him, as it is in most retellings, but by a girl willingly going to live with him even though she believes he will kill her and eventually agreeing to marry him.  Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy Beauty’s back story nearly as much as the Beast’s.  It turns out she is not the merchant’s daughter at all; she’s the daughter of a king and another fairy, and everyone thought she was dead.  Honestly, I started to skim at this point.  There’s a whole part about Beauty’s mother involving fairy politics, and I just didn’t care.  It felt like an unnecessary addition to make Beauty and the Beast equals in social status.  I prefer for her to be just the daughter of a merchant, and on top of that I found it dull.                  

My Rating: 4 stars

Other Reading Recommendations:

This section is a little different today too.  Instead of retellings, I’m providing a list of some different variations of the fairy tale.  As usual, starred titles are ones I have read myself.

Other Variations of “Beauty and the Beast”:

“Beauty and the Beast” by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont*

“Beauty and the Beast” edited by Andrew Lang*

“East of the Sun, West of the Moon” by Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe*

“Beauty and the Horse” from Denmark*

“The Bear Prince” from Switzerland*

“The Clinking Clanking Lowesleaf” from Germany*

About the Fairy Tale:   

Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales About Animal Brides and Grooms from Around the World by Maria Tatar*

Beauty and the Beast Tales from Around the World by Heidi Anne Heiner

The Meanings of “Beauty & the Beast”: A Handbook by Jerry Griswold

Have a recommendation for me to read or a suggestion to make Fairy Tale Friday better?  Feel free to send me an ask!

[femnet]

On June 27, 2018, United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced that he was going to retire from the Supreme Court. For those who do not know how the Supreme Court works, the justices are elected to a life long term provided they exhibit “good behavior.” Their terms end by retirement or death. Only one justice has ever been impeached by Congress.

The top pick to fill Justice Kennedy’s seat is Brett Kavanaugh, a member of the Republican party who once served in George W. Bush’s White House. His ruling history shows a bias towards government over individuals claiming rights violations. Consequently, women and Democrats across the country started talking about one of the most polarizing Supreme Court cases of all time: Roe v. Wade. Issued in 1973, the decision in Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the entirety of the United States. There were still regulations that weren’t resolved or ruled upon until 1992 (Planned Parenthood v. Casey), but abortion was no longer illegal.

The renewed debate brings a new interest in Roe v. Wade, including a new group of people who either have never heard of the case, or don’t know the history behind it. We’re stuck listening to the same ignorant rhetoric for another news cycle.

So, let’s talk about abortion.

Abortion hadn’t always been illegal. For a period of time, it was advertised in magazines and on the radio. Up until the 19th century, abortion was a common occurrence in the newly created United States. Abortion was permissible until a woman felt a fetus move, or “quicken.”  In Leslie Reagan’s book When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the Unites States 1867-1973, she notes, “the popular ethic regarding abortion and common law were grounded in the female experience of their own bodies.” No one believed that life began at conception, not even the Catholic church.

In fact, it wasn’t the Church that lead the push to ban abortions. It was doctors, seeking to drive out traditional healers (“quacks”). Many home medical guides had recipes for “bringing on the menses” with herbs found in a common garden, or even the woods. Commercial preparations became so common by the mid eighteenth century, the phrase “taking the trade” became a popular euphemism. However, many of these drugs were unregulated and fatal.

The first statues regulating abortion were passed in the 1820’s and 1830’s. These laws were essentially poison-control laws. The sale of commercial abortifacients was banned, but abortions were not. This, like so many other anti-abortion laws to follow, did not deter women from getting abortions. The commercialization of abortion continued, and by the 1840’s, business was booming. Perhaps one of the most famous abortionists, Madame Restell, openly provided abortion services in offices in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. She had traveling salespeople who touted her “Female Monthly Pills.”

The American Medical Association lead the fight against abortions, attempting to push midwives and homeopaths out as regularly called upon physicians. Moreover, anti-abortion sentiment was also connected to nativism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-feminism. Citing the number of non-Catholic, non-white immigrants, physician and anti-abortion leader Horatio R. Storer is quoted as asking if the West would “be filled by our own children of by those of aliens?” The birth rate among white native-born Protestants had declined, as the typical abortion patient of the time was a middle or upper-class white married woman.

Licensed physicians, including prominent members of the AMA, kept providing abortions. Their issues lay with the homeopathic remedies, not with the practice itself. And despite their own organization calling for it’s end, it remained legal. It’s estimated that some two million abortions were performed in the late nineteenth century, making the per capita rate of abortions seven to eight times higher than today. This was in the era before hospitals, where doctors practiced out of their own offices and on their own terms. Many women sought out doctors who would listen to their needs and work with them. Thus, providing abortions (while sometimes motivated by compassion) was self-serving, as women would continue to see that physician for all other medical issues.

In 1880, laws were passed in every state banning abortions in all but “therapeutic reasons,” which left medical practitioners and the legal system to determine who did or did not have one. As you’d expect, wealthier women with access to doctors had abortions, and poor women bled. Rachel Benson Gold of the Guttmacher Institute says that the stark indication of illegal abortions was the death toll. “In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death in almost 2,700 women – nearly one-fifth of maternal deaths recorded that year.” She notes that, “in New York City in the early 1960s, 1 in 4 childbirth related deaths among white women were due to abortion; in comparison, abortion accounted for 1 in 2 childbirth-related deaths among nonwhite and Puerto Rican women.”

Women of wealth started to leave the country for abortions as other countries legalized the practice. The California based Society for Humane Abortion helped women go as far as Japan to have abortions. In Chicago, a society called “Jane” was founded in the late 1960s, which had a hotline where women could ask for “Jane” to be referred to an illegal abortion. Eventually, members learned how to and performed abortions themselves. These women performed an estimated 11, 000 abortions by 1973.

And then we come to Roe v. Wade.

The facts of the case are this: Roe, a Texas resident, sought to terminate her pregnancy by abortion. Texas law prohibited abortions except to save the pregnant woman’s life. After granting certiorari (an order by which a higher court reviews a decision of a lower court) the Supreme Court heard arguments twice. The main question the Court had to decide on was, “does the Constitution embrace a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy by abortion?”

By a 7-2 vote in favor, from an all-male Court, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a woman’s right to an abortion fell within the right to privacy (recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut) protected by the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868, defines national citizenship and forbids the states to restrict the basic rights of citizens or other persons). The decision gave women total autonomy over the pregnancy during the first trimester and defined different levels of state interest for the second and third trimesters. As a result of the ruling, abortion laws were affected in 46 states.

So where does that leave us today?

Well, if you’ve been listening to the talks surrounding abortion lately, you’ve heard of something called a “trigger law.” A “trigger law” is a nickname for a law that is unenforceable but may become enforceable if a key change in circumstances occurs. Essentially, if Roe v. Wade is overturned by a “Pro-Life” leaning court, these laws banning abortion become the law. At least 4 states have trigger laws in place, while many others (of those 46 where abortion laws had to change) have existing laws that could be voted back into effect.

Anti-abortion sentiment isn’t just institutional, as you’d expect. While there’s plenty of government officials (and back during the first anti-abortion push, doctors) who are staunchly “Pro-Life”, there’s a very vocal and incensed contingent of voters who are anti-abortion. (While they call themselves “Pro-Life”, for the duration of this piece, they’ll be referred to as simply “anti-abortionists”, as there’s simply no evidence to the matter that they care about any lives aside from fetuses.) This group of people has often turned violent and there’s an entire history of domestic terrorism against abortion doctors.

The most notable anti-abortion group is an elusive one called the “Army of God”. They are an underground domestic terrorism group that’s incredibly hard for the FBI and other government agencies to track. In fact, in their manual, it says that the purpose is that the “soldiers” do not communicate with one another. It’s believed the group was created in the early 80’s (after Roe v. Wade), after a “privately printed, closely guarded” how-to manual began circulating within anti-abortion circles. The AOG advocates violence towards abortion providers and clinics. AOG followers have kidnapped, assaulted, and murdered doctors, sent letters containing fake anthrax to clinics, bombed clinics, and sent death threats to not only clinics, but Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun (one of the Justices who voted in favor of abortion rights.)

One of the most recent incidents of anti-abortion violence occurred at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, Colorado in November of 2015. A man, who had previously acted against other clinics and referred to himself as a “warrior for the babies” left three people dead and several others injured. More recently than this, there have been numerous prosecuted vandalizations on women’s clinics and Planned Parenthoods across the country. In some parts of the country, people line up outside these clinics daily to harass and threaten violence against the people working in or going inside.

If you’ve never gone to a Planned Parenthood, I’ll give you some insight. There are no signs indicating that the clinic exists in the building. The only sign is on main floor entrance, and on the clinic door. The clinic doors are all glass and because I asked, the glass is bulletproof. The receptionists sit back from the entrance behind thick glass they can close, also bulletproof. You have to be buzzed into any of the clinic areas. They asked me if it was okay for them to call me and say they were calling from Planned Parenthood, and if it was okay if I received mail from them. In some areas, people can volunteer to walk women into Planned Parenthoods. Some clinics have no windows at all. Others have constant security on site, as there’s constant protests and the possibility of violence.

All because some Planned Parenthoods provide abortions and the organization receives federal money.

Legally speaking, no federal money can go towards providing abortions. This was set up in the Hyde Amendment. Most federal money given to PP goes towards preventative care, sexual education, pregnancy prevention and birth control, sexually transmitted infection screening and treatment, and breast exams. Because those are services that the organization provides. But most anti-abortionists don’t want to listen when you explain the other services women’s and sexual health clinics provide. However, every time there’s a new abortion debate in this country, clinics like Planned Parenthood are threatened because abortions are 3% of what they provide.

Ultimately, the anti-abortion debate has shifted to being anti-women. What started as a push by physicians over healthcare concerns has turned into a debate that’s thinly veiled misogyny. They’ll claim their reasons are religious, and the ever present “Pro-Life” line has become tired. Many of the same people who claim to be Pro-Life are also the people who turned a blind eye to children being locked in cages at our borders, torn away from their parents. Even on a domestic scale, these “Pro-Life” politicians want to take away social programs that help single/poverty-stricken mothers take care of their children. They’re only “Pro-Life” until birth, then you’re forgotten.

Hope springs eternal though, and even as anti-abortion voices become louder and find their way into positions of vast power, the pro-choice voices are growing louder still. A personal favorite story is of Wendy Davis, a Texas senator, who in 2013 brought her pink running shoes to a state house session to filibuster for 13 hours to prevent a vote on a bill that would severely restrict access to abortion in Texas. People across the country are donating to abortion funds and calling their senators daily. Prominent leaders in the Democratic party are speaking out against the nomination of Kavanaugh, and the importance of Roe v. Wade.

In the end, if Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortions will continue across the country. Women will find a way, as they have for decades, to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Banning abortion doesn’t stop the practice, it just makes it more dangerous. People are already driving hundreds of miles to have abortions, saving up for weeks until they can afford them. By making safe abortions illegal, we’ll see numbers like we saw before, of abortion related deaths. Poor and working-class women will, once again, bleed.

So, what can you do?

Call your senators. If you don’t want to call, use RESIST BOT.

Donate to Planned Parenthood and other abortion/women’s health clinics in your area.

And most important, vote in the 2018 midterms. The midterms are going to be one of the most important elections of our lifetime.

[spudart]

Webcomic: Use silly made-up palindromes in your messages for Palindrome Week by spudart https://flic.kr/p/2he2ub3 When you see everyone using clever #palindromes for #PalindromeWeek, impress them with your stupid palindromes. // My thoughts on the humor in this comic // This is a rather silly webcomic about palindromes. Not as clever as I’d like my webcomics to be. But the script resulted in a work Slack conversation where I was being goofy. Perhaps the context of a work Slack chat makes this a bit more funny. But I figured why not toss this into a webcomic? There’s something about how palindromes seem to carefully composed. They are perfect constructions of balance. Writers of palindrome sentences surely must take lots of sweat and tears to produce a single sentence—tossing out all the other sentences that don’t have perfect balance. And then this webcomic has palindromes created by flipping the word backwards, and sticking it in front of the original word. Completely lazy. Completely the opposite of how a palindrome would be painstakingly constructed. So I find some humor in that. // Ending reaction phrase // At the end, Etym says “Too hot to hoot!”—which is a palindrome. Originally, I had “cleverrrrrr”—which doesn’t really make any sense, other than a silly commentary. I thought perhaps a palindrome reaction might be humorous to mark Etym’s reaction. A google search for palindromes list resulted in this handy page by Ralph Griswold on arizona.edu. “Too hot to hoot” is kinda funny. Weird phrase. But a fun interjection. Other sentences I considered: • Sit on a potato pan, Otis. • Did Hannah say as Hannah did? • Mad? Am I, madam? • Niagara, O roar again! • I moan, Naomi. • Live not on evil. I kinda stayed away from the sentences that have a name. I have yet to name the Worm, and I don’t really want to start naming him something random like Otis.

[the-met-art]

Corset by Madam Griswold's via Costume Institute

Medium: cotton, metal, bone

Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of E. A. Meister, 1950 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/158008