Showing posts with label julius caesar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label julius caesar. Show all posts

17 Mar 2019

Uterine Philosophy: Notes on the Woman of Isis

Victoria Vives as a Priestess of Isis
 Photo by Robert Domondon (2017) 


I.

As readers of Lawrence, we are intimately familiar with Ursula Brangwen and Constance Chatterley. Indeed, we know the latter not only from top to bottom, but inside and out in pornographic detail.

Arguably, however, the most intriguing woman in the Lawrentian universe is the unnamed and rarely discussed priestess of Isis, who performs such a crucial role in Part II of The Escaped Cock (1929). And so I thought it important to say something of her here ...


II.

The woman of Isis is twenty-seven years of age. Educated and intelligent, she's also very beautiful, with wondering blue eyes, dusky-blonde hair, and white-gold breasts. But she remains a virgin, however, for the "bud of her womb had never stirred" [145].

This is despite the fact that she grew up in a world of powerful and fascinating men. The only child of a Roman commander who served with Mark Anthony, the latter had "sat with her many a half-hour, in the splendour of his great limbs and glowing manhood". His attempts to seduce her were in vain, however, for whilst she had felt "the lovely glow of his male beauty and amorousness bathe all her limbs and her body [...] the very flower of her womb was cool, was almost cold, like a bud in shadow of frost" [144].

The woman of Isis had also known Julius Caesar, but, again, had "shrunk from his eagle-like rapacity" and much preferred older men who were happy just to talk with her and had no expectation that she would "open like a flower to the sun of their maleness" [144].

Remote, dreamy, and sexually unresponsive, the woman of Isis awaits a special type of man; one who has died and risen and is full of that other kind of beauty; "the sheer stillness of the deeper life"; a man who could touch her "on the yearning quick of her womb" [147].

Thus, retiring with her widowed mother to Sidon - an ancient city on the Mediterrranean coast of Lebanon - the woman of Isis built a pink and white temple dedicated to the goddess at her own expense. Here she has served as a priestess for seven years, dressed in a saffron-yellow mantle worn over a white linen tunic, with a pair of gilded sandals upon her ivory-white feet.

Her mother, meanwhile, took care of the day-to-day business of the small estate on which the temple and a villa, set amongst the olive trees, was built. She also oversaw the slaves, which is just as well, as the woman of Isis professes no interest in their activities, finding them invariably repellent as a class: "They were so imbedded in the lesser life, and their appetites and their small consciousness were a little disgusting" [148] to her. 

On one occasion, she watches with noble indifference as one of her young male slaves beats and rapes a half-naked slave girl. Nevertheless, despite her coldness, her cruelty and contempt for inferiors, she can give an excellent (erotic) massage, as the man who died discovers to his great joy:

"Having chafed all his lower body with oil, his belly, his buttocks, even the slain penis and the sad stones, having worked with her slow intensity of a priestess [...] suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side, and her arms round him [...] and she pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth, like the folds of a river." [159]


II.

In an early manuscript version of Part II of The Escaped Cock, Lawrence provides a few more details about the woman of Isis, some of which contradict the final published version, though not in any significant manner (for example, her age is given here as twenty-six, not twenty-seven). 

What is emphasised above all, is the extent of her learning: she was tutored as a child and young woman by a Greek philosopher, and whilst she often spoke Syrian or Latin, she always thought in Greek:

"Her Greek had taught her logic and history, and also poetry, and since she was small, she had liked to speak with men" about these things. But she found these men too worldly for her tastes and they "cared little for the gods" [216]. Thus she did not wish to be touched by any of them (much to her father's irritation). Indeed, the girl who would become the woman of Isis was not keen on any physical contact:

"True, her slave women bathed and annointed her. But their touch was dumb and voiceless, like the touch of linen, or the touch of polished wood. It came no further than the skin. But the touch of men would go much deeper, and would soil her subtlest privacy." [217]

She is defiantly chaste and even at twenty-six has the "same delicate virgin belly" [217] as the goddess whom she serves. And she knows herself - not in a philosophical sense, so much as in a gynaecological manner; she's womb-conscious in the same way that male protagonists in Lawrence's fiction are often said to be phallically conscious:

"She never confused an outside thrill or a suffusion of surface excitement with the other, the soft expanding joy of the womb [...] She was a woman of the old world, skilled in her own sensations. [...]
      The woman, skilled in Isis and the lore of Isis, knew her womb in lotus-bud, knew it deep, deep under the waters, knew its mystery, its curved, down-bent head, its uncoloured virgin petals, its thick, strong, softly-massive heart of golden adhesive fecundity. Dark-green like a water-snake, submerged like a root, obscure and even fearsome, the deep lotus-bud of the shadowy womb." [219]

I don't quite know what to make of a passage like this - and it seems that Lawrence doesn't expect most (if any) of his readers to understand it either: "This is Isis lore, which Isis women forever will understand, and only they." [220]


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Escaped Cock', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Part II, pp, 141-63. See also Appendix I (c) Part II: early manuscript version, pp. 216-30. 

Readers interested in an earlier post inspired by the woman of Isis should click here


25 Feb 2017

Carry on Plautus: The Romans in Films and on TV

Frankie Howerd and other members of the cast trying hard 
not to titter on the set of Up Pompeii (BBC TV 1969-70)


According to Barthes, the method favoured by Hollywood to signify Ancient Roman masculinity is the insistent use of a particular hairstyle. In MGM's 1953 adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for example, all the male characters are wearing fringes: 

"Some have them curly, some straggly, some tufted, some oily, all have them well combed, and the bald are not admitted, although there are plenty to be found in Roman history. Those who have little hair have not been let off for all that, and the hairdresser - the kingpin of the film - has still managed to produce one last lock which duly reaches the top of the forehead, one of those Roman foreheads, whose smallness has at all times indicated a specific mixture of self-righteousness, virtue and conquest."   

The fringe and forelock method, says Barthes, is a sign system operating in the open that not only affords the actor instant historical plausibility, but also provides the audience with overwhelming evidence that they're watching a realistic on screen portrayal of Ancient Rome. Even the non-Romanness of Anglo-American faces doesn't overly distract or amuse; everyone is reassured by this simple technique.

But, one might ask, what of the Roman women; how is their femininity signified within popular culture (and the pornographic imagination)?

Unfortunately, Barthes doesn't provide us with an answer, although he does note how, in the same film, Portia and Calpurnia are both awoken during the dead of night and their "conspicuously uncombed hair" not only expresses their nocturnal surprise, but their inner turmoil and vulnerability (he calls this a sub-sign in the category of capillary meanings).

Given his interest in the language of fashion, I suspect that, had Barthes chosen to analyse this subject, he'd almost certainly have done so in terms of clothes and make-up and related his remarks once more to the cinema. But for someone of my generation and background, growing up in late-sixties/early-seventies Britain, the key point of reference and source of all knowledge about the world (be it true or false, laudible or reprehensible), is television.

Thus it is that my idea of the typical Roman matron was formed by Elizabeth Larner as Ammonia in Up Pompeii. And my stereotypical fantasy of saucy Roman sexpots is similarly shaped by the nubile young actresses in skimpy outfits performing alongside Frankie Howerd, including Georgina Moon as Erotica.  

However, whilst Up Pompeii can be discussed from many critical perspectives, I'm not sure it's possible to read it semiotically. For its signs lack any ambiguity and are neither extreme nor intermediate in the Barthesian sense of these terms.

In other words, Up Pompeii aims neither at realism nor artifice; nor even the duplicity peculiar to bourgeois art (i.e. the hybrid form of naturalness). Viewers are not asked to believe in what they're watching, but neither are they obliged to suspend disbelief; they're simply invited to enjoy the show in all its Carry On style campness and vulgarity. 

Barthes would probably have found it boring; not even a degraded spectacle. But I've a suspicion that the Roman playwright Plautus, whose Greek-style comedies relying upon crude puns and stock characters such as the scheming slave and lecherous old man inspired the writers and producers of Up Pompeii, would have laughed at the antics of Lurcio and company ...

  
See: Roland Barthes, 'The Romans in Films', Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (Hill and Wang, 1978), pp. 26-8.