“No, ma’am, she didn’t want one. Her heart was broken.”
“She missed her chance. An army hospital is the best place in the world to look for a husband. Wounded soldiers get a pension.”
In college I was an accidental conformist because my tastes just happened to coincide with the wisdom of the hour, which centered around the fifties’ husband-hunt.
To avoid wasting energy that could better be spent pursuing their “MrS.” degrees, coeds of the Eisenhower years took only those courses in which “all you have to do is read.” We were cheered on by the Blooms and Hirsches of the era, who urged female students to acquire a “broad general education” so we could help our husbands get ahead. The idea, like most American ideas, was never thought through, but it had something to do with inviting your husband’s boss to dinner and sending him away thinking you were one classy dame.
It’s a good thing I never married. My husband’s boss would have gone away thinking I was insane because my broad general education included courses like The English Rural Novel, which got me into the habit of saying “Eee, by goom, thart’s summat.” Nor could I resist Flowering Of courses, especially if they were French, which they usually are.
Tragedy 303. The flowering of 17th-century French neoclassical drama. An intensive study of the verse plays of Jean Racine, with special emphasis on Phèdre. Friday, 8—11 P.M. Old Storage Building sub-basement. Miss Dalrymple.
That class schedule is an exquisite indication of how Americans really feel about culture. Anyone interested in the finer things in life is presumed to be free on Friday nights from eight to eleven and deserves to be consigned, like Miss Dalrymple, to a root cellar.
Seventeenth-century French drama is called neoclassical because it followed the rules of ancient Greek drama. These are often called “Aristotle’s classical unities,” but in truth Aristotle can only be blamed for one of them: the unity of action, meaning that you can have only one story line with no subplots and no mingling of tragedy and comedy in the hang-loose Shakespearean manner.
Hanging loose was a non-non in sevententh-century France. Louis XIV’s rigid etiquette was so complicated that a Versailles courtier had to knock on a marquis’s door with his index finger and a duke’s with his pinkie. This sort of thing was bound to spread to the Crown-supported stage, and it did. To make their task harder, the neoclassical dramatists added two more unities: place, meaning that the whole play could have only one set; and time, meaning that the events of the story, no matter how titanic and far-reaching, must be compressed into a period not to exceed twenty-four hours—or as we say in America, “Have a good day.”
They also expanded Aristotle’s dictum on theatrical decorum. He merely said that murder and other violence must not happen onstage, but the neoclassicists, fearful of offending against Versailles-decreed politesse, decided that it was bad taste to let anything happen onstage. Instead of showing the action they tell it; the story unfolds in long declamatory speeches hurled at those neoclassical yentas in togas known as “confidants,” who serve a threefold purpose: pumping the principals to find out what they’re going to do, listening while they tell what they did, and rushing onstage to announce that something has happened.
To impose still more good taste on themselves, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in Alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other. An Alexandrine must have twelve beats and four stresses and it must rhyme with the next line. If it doesn’t, the Académie Française will shoot out your kneecaps.
Based on the Hippolytus of Euripides, Racine’s Phèdre (Phaedra) is about an older woman who develops a passion for her stepson. Set in the mythical ancient Greek city of Troezen, the cast is as follows:
Theseus—King of Athens
Phèdre—his second wife
Hippolytus—son of Theseus
Aricia—a foreign princess
Oenone—confidante of Phedre
Theramenes—confidant of Hippolytus
Ismene—confidante of Aricia
Panope—confidante-at-large
Phèdre opens with Hippolytus confiding to his confidant, Theramenes. He says that he has decided to conduct a search for his father, Theseus, who in classic Greek fashion has forgotten to come home from a journey. He adds that he is glad to have an excuse to get away from Troezen at this time because his stepmother, Phedre, has been inexplicably hostile to him of late, and also because … well, something has happened.
The confidant is all ears, so Hippolytus indulges in that Racinian neurotic compulsion known as “rompre le silence”—what spies do under torture. He confides that his former immunity to female charms has collapsed and he has fallen in love with Aricia, “that sole survivor of an impious race”—i.e., she’s the daughter of the rival political family that tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Theseus and wrest his kingdom from him.
This is a silence that should not have been romped because Aricia is under house arrest. A firm believer in heredity, Theseus decided that her bloodlines were so politically dangerous to him that she must never be allowed to reproduce. Before leaving on his journey, he forbade her to marry, ordered her held hostage in his palace so she couldn’t meet any men, and had signs reading “Défense de Foutre Aricia” posted in the Troezen metro. The only man he trusts her with is his son, Hippolytus, because it’s a well-known fact that il est chaste.
Now that Hippolytus has kicked off, the logorrhea shifts into high gear. Enter Oenone, Phedre’s confidante, with word that something has happened: her mistress is dying of “une maladie secrète.”
Hippolytus and Theramenes exit and Phèdre enters with word that something has happened: her strength has failed, her hair (cheveux) has grown heavy, her eyes (yeux) have gone bad, her knees have buckled, and she has lost her mind.
Oenone perks up, certain that these titanic afflictions are emotionally based, the result of a world-class secret that Phedre has kept to herself instead of confiding to her confidante, who would be only too happy to spread it all over Troezen. Referring contemptuously to secret-keeping as “le silence inhumain,” she starts pumping.
Oenone: Aimez-vous?
Phedre: De l’amour j’ai toutes les fureurs.
Oenone: Pour qui?
Phèdre: J’aime … .
Oenone: Qui?
Phèdre romps the silence and names Hippolytus, then pours out the whole story of her guilty passion in fifty exquisitely rhymed Alexandrines, explaining that she has only pretended to hate her stepson in order to conceal her lust for him.
Suddenly they are interrupted by Panope, a beginning confidante apprenticed to Oenone, who rushes onstage to announce that something has happened: Theseus died on his way home from his journey.
Now that Phèdre is a widow, her guilty passion is no longer guilty. Egged on by Oenone, she decides to tell Hippolytus that she loves him.
But Hippolytus’s tongue has also been loosened by the news of his father’s death. In the next act we find him declaring his love to Aricia. He wants her, he says, bad blood and all, and she might as well stay and hear him out because “J’ai commencé de rompre le silence.” When these people start, they can’t stop.
Fortunately for Aricia, he is interrupted by his confidant, who tells him that Phèdre wishes to see him. Aricia and Theramenes exit and Phèdre confronts the virginal hunk. But when she declares her passion, the prissy Hippolytus recoils in horror. The scorned Phèdre flees.
As soon as she’s gone, Theramenes runs back in to find out what happened, but Hippolytus refuses to tell him, saying “cet horrible secret” must remain forever buried. It’s the worst thing you can say to a confidant, but the boy is thick.
The next act opens with the scorned Phèdre in a tirade, calling Hippolytus “Misérable! Détestable! Sauvage! Odieux!” because the next line ends in “mes yeux”.
At this point, Oenone rushes onstage with word that something has happened: Theseus isn’t dead after all; that new confidante Pano
pe got it all wrong. He’s alive and well and will be home any minute.
Phèdre panics. The puritanical Hippolytus will surely tell his father that she put the make on him. What can she do to protect herself against her husband’s certain fury?
Oenone comes up with a damage-control plan, telling Phèdre that she must get to Theseus first and accuse Hippolytus of rape before he gets a chance to accuse her of attempted adultery. Phèdre, already wracked by guilt, reduces the charge to sexual molestation and Oenone bustles off to tell Theseus all about it.
It’s a bad time to approach Theseus because Theramenes has just told him that Hippolytus wants to marry Aricia. When Oenone tells him that the prince tried to rape his stepmother, Theseus bellows “Perfide! Monstre! Fils criminel! Profane adultère! Lâche incestueux!” so it will all rhyme with “les yeux.”
The next scene finds Hippolytus and Aricia making plans to run away together. Worried that someone will find out, she asks him, “Can you keep silent in this mortal danger?” This has to be the silliest question in all literature. Can any of these people keep their mouths shut? No, my leetle cabbage, as soon as your back is turned he will run and tell his confidant every word you said.
Hippolytus exits and Theseus enters to tell Aricia what Oenone told him that Phèdre told her about what Hippolytus did, but she refuses to listen. Nor will she let him pump her about what Ismene heard from Theramenes. She says she intends to flee his presence that very minute because she cannot endure any more gossip, or as Racine puts it: “Pour n’etre pas forcés à rompre le silence.”
Once again Panope rushes onstage with word that something has happened: Oenone has drowned herself. It was, she says, a mad (furieux) act that will hide her forever from our eyes (yeux). Never mind our ears, they don’t rhyme.
While everyone is talking about what happened to Oenone, Theramenes rushes onstage with word that something else has happened: Hippolytus has been killed in a chariot wreck. The bad news is that it was a terrible sight (affreux, yeux). The good news is that the mortally wounded prince lived long enough to confide in his confidant one last time. He used his last breath to tell Theramenes to tell Theseus that nothing happened between him and Phèdre, and to beg his father not to let anything happen to Aricia. (Nothing will as long as she stays on that stage).
While everyone is talking about what happened to Hippolytus, Phèdre staggers in and announces that something has happened to her: she has taken poison, but before she dies she wants to tell everyone what really happened. “Il faut rompre un injuste silence,” she begins, and proceeds to clear her stepson’s name.
“C’est moi qui sur ce fils chaste et respectueux
Osai jeter un oeil profane, incestueux.”
Only one eye this time, she doesn’t have much wind left. After she dies, Theseus vows to honor his son’s last request, declaring that he will adopt Aricia as his daughter and treat her as a member of the family.
He has to—fille rhymes with famille.
I graduated from college qualified to do nothing except crossword puzzles in ink. Though a scholarship student, I received an aristocrat’s education, designed for people like the ante bellum Ashley Wilkes who have the money and leisure to enjoy it for its own sake. But polished proletarians have to make a living. That’s hard to do when employers keep saying you’re “overqualified”—or worse, hire you anyway. Nothing is more frustrating than sitting in an office amid typewriters and mimeographers when you know what deus ex machina means.
My classmates who went for their MrS. had it worse. Because America regards culture as woman’s work, generalist movements in education always contain the seeds of antifeminism. The all-you-have-to-do-is-read brigade formed the backbone of the feminine mystique and bought the aprons inscribed with “For This I Spent Four Years In College?” But they should not have felt as uselessly decorative as they did because they performed a service for America that is sorely missed today.
I refer to what used to be called the “Scarsdale conference,” named for advertising men who took work home and laid certain professional problems in the laps of their housebound wives.
American men have always preferred pragmatic curricula, but at least when women went to college to catch husbands they caught a few other things as well. Stuffed full of all those Appreciation Of and Flowering Of courses, coeds of the fifties absorbed, often in spite of themselves, a vast array of cultural miscellany, so that when their copywriter husbands asked their advice, they were able to keep the poor dumb slobs from making the kind of knuckle-headed mistakes so prevalent today.
No husband of the fifties would have named a car “Cressida” because his wife, when she got through laughing, would have recited Shakespeare’s “O Cressid! O false Cressid! False, false, false! Let all untruths stand by thy stainèd name and they’ll seem glorious!” Nor would he have named a motorcycle “Virago” as the Yamaha company did. His wife would have said yes, it does have something to do with virile, but it means a quarrelsome, unfeminine woman, a scold; or a strong, manlike woman, an Amazon—in neither case the kind of image young studs wish to project.
Today the liberated daughters of these cultural heroines are marching forth with MBA degrees, proudly competing on an equal footing with MBA-ed males. What they actually are is equally ignorant. If we have already been treated to cars named Cressida and motorcycles named Virago, what else will slip by these dress-for-success nincompoops? If they try to use the enriching information they are going to get from Bloom & Hirsch sound bites, the Land of Hopefully and Glory can look forward to:
“Pyrrhic Victory”—the after-shave for sexual athletes
“Horst Wessel” lunchmeat
“Effluvia” deodorant
“Stonehenge”—the robber-proof door lock
“Annabel Lee” beach togs
“Caveat Emporium” variety stores
“Medea”—the baby carrier for the having-it-all mother
“Lupine” toothpaste for the smile they won’t forget
“Shylock”—the body wave for troublesome hair
“Ultima Thule” laxative suppositories
The worst enemy culture ever had is a woman named Bea.
Bea is a fixture in American life and the nemesis of the poor-but-bright kid. Her stamping grounds are the working class, the lower-middle class, and what Southerners prefer to call the shabby-genteel class. Wherever you find six plaster ducks flying across the wall in graduated sizes, there too will you find Bea.
Bea can be your aunt, your mother’s cousin, or the neighbor down the hall who becomes a family friend. Usually she’s childless, not because she’s a spinster but because “she was married for a little while.” In plaster duckland this means that her husband of two months went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Since then Bea has operated Bea’s Beauty Parlor, where she gets even with men by saying “Honey, I know exactly what you mean” a dozen times a day.
The poor-but-bright kid loved the plaster ducks when she was little, especially the baby one that brought up the rear. She loved Bea, too. Bea is the kind of adult that children love because she loves children. She plays “Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me-Tight” very gently, lets you help her clean out her pocketbook, and smells sugary from Woolworth’s perfume.
The poor-but-bright kid has no trouble with Bea in elementary school. Bea thinks it’s fine to get good grades then, because at that age, scholarly triumphs are linked to unthreatening conventional virtues like obedience, politeness, and in the case of females, docility. Elementary school is also the place where neatness counts, and to Bea’s way of thinking, the poor-but-bright kid’s perfect notebooks and her own perfect comb-outs are one and the same. It’s all a matter of doing your lessons.
The Bea hive starts to stir in high school when curricula fork off into “academic” and “commercial.” The poor-but-bright kid gets placed in academic and receives her first Bea sting.
“Say something in French.”
Bea has
teased you before, but this time the old warmth is missing. Two shiny pinpoints of hostility are visible in her eyes; you sense that you have done something wrong but you don’t know what it is.
When college time comes, Bea gives every appearance of enthusiasm and encouragement.
“Don’t be like me,” she says. “Make something of yourself.”
The poor-but-bright kid wins a scholarship and goes to college. Now that lessons have turned into study, Bea makes a point of asking “What are you studying?”
“Anthropology.”
“Ann who?”
“Anthropology,” the poor-but-bright kid repeats, blushing.
“Lord, I couldn’t even pronounce it much less study it.”
Bea gets in some of her best stings when the poor-but-bright kid is called on to define something involving confusing concepts and big words that she’s afraid to use for fear of seeming to show off, like the Romantic Movement in literature.
“No, it’s not romance as in love story, it’s … it’s … .”
What? A rebellion against the strictures of classicism? Yes, but you can’t say that because it will only get you in deeper. The elevation of emotion over reason? True, but Bea will just say there’s nothing like a good cry. A movement launched by Jean Jacques Rousseau? Fine, but it will trigger a “Who dat?” straight out of Amos ‘n’ Andy.
What, then, can you say? While you grope for the answer you know so well, Bea’s eyes glitter with vengeful pleasure.
“I went to the college of hard knocks myself.”
A highlight of the Bea inquisition is the dinnertime discussion of epistemology. I defy any poor-but-bright kid to refrain from mentioning epistemology at the table. You know perfectly well what Bea is going to do with it; handing her a word like that is like handing a child a loaded gun, but by now you can’t help it. You are in the grip of compulsion. Bea has filled you with so much free-floating education guilt that you’re like those people who walk into the police station and confess to murders they didn’t commit.
Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye Page 2