Tag Archives: Poetry

July 22, 2018

Beautiful but Deadly

By daseger

In support of the summer-long celebration of the 350th anniversary of the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion in Salem, better known as the House of the Seven Gables, Salem State has offered up a Hawthorne film series in partnership with the Salem Maritime National Historic Site and this week our last film will be shown: Twice-Told Tales (1963). Since we started with The House of the Seven Gables (1940), it will be interesting to see Vincent Price, who played Clifford in that film in a rather straightforward fashion, in what I assume will be his more characteristic over-the-top style. He plays key characters in all three stories of this anthology film, and Dr. Rappaccini himself in the central story, Rappaccini’s Daughter, which just happens to be my favorite Hawthorne short story (it was actually first published in book form in Mosses from an Old Manse rather than Twice Told Tales, but I’m sure this was of no concern to Hollywood). Rappaccini’s Daughter is the favorite Hawthorne tale of many, and it has inspired many visual and literary impressions and adaptations—particularly in the last decade or so. Its allegory makes it endlessly captivating for successive generations, but I think its most recent popularity is due to its rather macabre storyline: the transformation of a young beautiful woman who tends a garden of poisonous plants and in doing so becomes both immune but also a poisonous vessel herself is Gothic in the extreme.

Jesse Willcox Smith, 1900

My particular fascination is the paradox of beauty and toxicity in nature. How can plants as beautiful as monkshood and foxglove be deadly? I have neither in my garden at present, but my very first garden at this house was comprised entirely of plants used in the medieval and early modern eras as plague cures. It did not last long, as most of these plants were really unattractive and I didn’t have quite enough sun for them anyway, so I dug it up and dispersed the more attractive plants in a more conventional flower garden. My favorite survivor of the “plague garden” is rue, a beautiful and ethereal blue-ish gray shrub with yellow flowers that I just sheared off yesterday, with not a care in the world for the potential harm that its leaves could have caused to my skin. How could the “Herb of Grace” cause harm? Obviously it’s not the plant itself but ignorance of its “attributes”; it’s not the medicine but the dose. It’s not nature; it’s man (or woman).

My newly-shorn rue and its illustration in my favorite Renaissance herbal, that of Giovanni Cadamosto (late 15th Century, British Library MS Harley 3736); A much more OBVIOUS poisonous plant in my garden, baneberry or Actaea Rubra: beware of those berries!

Even more paradoxical than a poisonous plant is a poisonous garden, as gardens are supposed to be places of rest, relaxation, wonder and contemplation: sanctuaries where one can find refuge from the busy (and threatening) world outside. Rappaccini’s Daughter is set in Padua, so I believe that Hawthorne was likely influenced by its famous Botanical Garden, established in 1545 and still thriving with over 7000 plant varieties including a collection of poisonous plants, “which are also in the medicinal plants sector because in suitable quantities they can be used to treat illness and diseases”. Also didactic, but a bit more menacing, is the Duchess of Northumbria’s Poison Garden in Alnwick, England, which features more than 100 lethal plants, several of which are in cages, all just part of a much larger botanical attraction and experience. The Duchess wanted to pique the curiosity of children in horticulture, and it probably doesn’t hurt that her estate “starred” as Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films. She also produced a series of books for children titled The Poison Diaries, the first of which has absolutely amazing illustrations by Colin Stimpson of venomous plants “in character”. Scary, but not nearly as scary as the Poison Tree which “stole” into William Blake’s garden, his own creation.

Alnwick’s Poison Garden; a Colin Stimpson illustration from the Poison Diaries; William Blake’s Poison Tree from Songs of Experience, 1794, British Museum.

7 Comments | tags: Art, books, films, gardening, Gardens, illustration, Local Events, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poetry, William Blake | posted in Culture, Nature

January 28, 2018

Curtain Lectures

By daseger

It was Burns Night at Hamilton Hall last night, and my husband and I were charged with giving the Toast to the Lassies and Reply. After a week steeped in the Ploughman Poet, both of us were a bit uncomfortable with the very bawdy Burns in this year of #metoo, so he went with the more inspiring Rights of Woman as the basis of his toast, which meant I had to go for the uplifting too. But I kind of wish he had gone with one of my favorite Burns poems, The Henpecked Husband. I don’t like it for its overall sentiment, of course, but because of just one phrase, curtain lecture, an idiom which I’ve used in class time and time again, because it always provokes a conversation!

The Henpecked Husband

Curs’d be the man, the poorest wretch in life, The crouching vassal to a tyrant wife! Who has no will but by her high permission, What has not sixpence but in her possession; Who must to he, his dear friend’s secrets tell, Who dreads a curtain lecture worse than hell. Were such the wife had fallen to my part, I’d break her spirit or I’d break her heart; I’d charm her with the magic of a switch. I’d kiss her maids, and kick the perverse bitch.

Burns certainly didn’t coin this phrase; it had been around for quite a while. In my courses, I use the frontispieces from Thomas Heywood’s Curtaine Lecture (1637) and Richard Brathwaite’s Art Asleep, Husband? (1640) but I think the expression predates these works as well. It seems very Shakespearian to me, but the heavily-curtained seventeenth-century bed provides the perfect “frame” for wifely “advice”.

If you pop these images up before a class of 19-year-olds you are immediately rewarded with their focused engagement in the history of women, marriage, gender relationships, satirical discourse, and material culture (inevitably their attention strays to the “alarm clock” on the table in the Heywood illustration). Lots of comments, lots of questions, all of which can be contextualized and connected to other timely trends. Obviously the notion had a wide appeal—or recognition–in the seventeenth century and after, which is why it survived up until Burns’ time. In an earlier post, I showed the Richard Newton caricature that dates from around the time of The Henpecked Husband, and it is one of many variations on the theme published in this era, give or take a few decades. As the era of curtained-beds closed, the curtain lecture continued, and was revived quite dramatically by the publication of Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures by Douglas Jerrold in Punch in 1845. These 37 illustrated lectures were published in book form that same year, and reissued frequently thereafter, inspiring a wave of variant visual expressions in all sorts of mediums: stereoviews, postcards, even a board game. Now it is a general rule of mine that once animals (or birds) take the place of people a concept has jumped the shark (with a few exceptions), and it’s hard to conceive the curtain lecture could have lasted through the twentieth century in any case, but nevertheless it survives as an effective teaching tool.

Caudle2

A Curtain Lecture pub. by J. Lewis Marks, 1824, British Museum; illustrations by John Leech for the first edition of Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, 1845; Mrs. Caudle Card (with real hair!), Victoria & Albert Museum; 1907 stereoview from the Library of Congress; postcards, c. 1900-1910.

9 Comments | tags: Drama, ephemera, Literature, Local Events, Photography, Poetry, Robert Burns, Satire, Teaching | posted in History, Paper

July 16, 2017

A Week to Remember

By daseger

It’s a rare week in Salem that the Witch Trials are the focus of commemoration rather than commerce, and this week is just such a time: the combination of the 325th anniversary of 1692 and the completion of the new memorial marking the execution site at Proctor’s Ledge is creating a perfect storm of remembrance. Maybe I’m a bit more focused on it than the average person because I’m also teaching a graduate institute on early modern witch-hunting all week and moderating a panel on Proctor’s Ledge on Thursday, but I think many people in Salem and its environs will be thinking about the victims of 1692 this particular week. I find the timing very poignant: we had our 325th anniversary symposium on June 10, the date of the execution of the first victim, Bridget Bishop, but on July 19 the Trials intensified with the execution of five women: Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, and Sarah Wildes. Even though more executions were to follow in August and September, July 19 was also a turning point in the village consciousness: if such a venerable and pious woman as Rebecca Nurse could fall prey to accusations of witchcraft, then surely anyone could. Mayor Kimberley Driscoll of Salem will dedicate the Proctor’s Ledge memorial on Wednesday the 19th at noon, the Danvers Alarm List Company, the stewards of the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers, are hosting a commemorative event that evening, and Governor Charlie Baker has proclaimed the 19th Rebecca Nurse Day.

I went by the new memorial this morning, a glorious Sunday, as I wanted to spend some contemplative time there—it’s a small neighborhood site so I’m sure Wednesday will be a bit more busy. I’m so grateful to both the city and the neighborhood for making this memorial happen, as well as to the Proctor’s Ledge team of historians and geologists and interpreters who were not going to be satisfied with a generic “Gallows Hill” (earlier “Witch Hill”) execution site. Gallows Hill remains a neighborhood, however, and I sure there are those who live there who fear that their community will be overwhelmed by the witch-trial tourism that overruns the city in the fall and has transformed the downtown tricentennial Witch Trial Memorial into some less than sacred space. I hope that doesn’t happen too. I find the two memorials to be very complementary; if fact, when I was looking at the new one this morning I kept thinking about downtown, especially with reference to a poem about the latter by Nicole Cooley, from her 2004 volume of poetry inspired by the victims–and resonance–of 1692, The Afflicted Girls.