The Lady's Prerogative

Happy Leap Day!

Leap day has been on February 29^th since the adoption of the Gregorian

Uh oh, the ladies are up to something...

 calendar in 1582. The concept of a “leap day” was incorporated into the much earlier Julian calendar, however, in which February normally had 23 days and on leap years it had 24.

Apparently, among the superstitions and traditions associated with leap day is that on this day, it was acceptable historically for a woman to propose marriage to a man. As early as 1600, in an anonymously-published play, The Maid’s Metamorphosis, we see the tradition of gender reversal on leap day referred to in the following lines: “Maister be comforted, this is leape year/ Women wear breeches, petticoats are deare.”

Did she really get down on her
knees and beg St. Patrick for a day
"for the ladies"???

Many sites on the web claim that the “tradition” is linked to Irish folklore and stories of St. Brigid begging St. Patrick for a special day for the women to propose, or Queen Margaret enacting a law in 1288 to allow women to propose to men. Both stories have been debunked due to issues of time (for example, St. Brigid would have been 9 when St. Patrick died), but they are both firmly rooted in Irish Catholic tradition. (As is the contemporary film that portrays this tradition, Leap Year.) Other sources cite leap day as being the feast of St. Oswald, a Saxon saint. Part of his feast day tradition was, in Elizabeth times, to allow the ladies to propose to long-time suitors.

In part, this tradition is thought to relate to the fact that leap day had “no standing” in English law or, in other words, that day had “no legal status” and was “leaped over” and ignored by legal bodies—hence “leap year.” If the day had no legal status, then one could presumably overstep the usual social boundaries without the usual repercussions; therefore, women could propose to men rather than having to wait on the gentleman. (If anyone can clarify what it means, legally, that a day can have no legal status, I would be grateful. I found the reference to this in Shakespeare's Festival Worlds, by Frangois Laroque, pg. 107.)

Some traditions state that a man who refuses a woman’s proposal on this day will face bad luck or that he must pay her back in gloves (presumably to hide her ringless hand). Other traditions state that a woman who wishes to propose on this day must wear breeches as she does so. Later, this was changed to a red petticoat that had to be visible when she approached her wary victim.

I have yet to find any real, hard evidence for these supposed traditions, by which I mean texts from the past that mention them, except the reference to The Maid’s Metamorphosis. If anyone has any leads, please let me know—especially if they relate to Leap Day traditions from the long eighteenth century!

 

A husband-hunter spots her quarry in a 1908 postcard.

As a researcher interested in female cross-dressing, this sounds like a particularly juicy story to add to my compendium of examples. As a feminist, though, I have to wonder about the “tradition” of men proposing to women throughout history, which inevitably lead to designating one day every four years in which women could propose to men. (Too much more often than that, and things could get out of hand…)

It is well-known and documented that in the Middle Ages and Elizabethan era, sex before marriage was common and accepted. (For more on the history of sexuality in Europe and premarital sexual practices, check out books by Tim Hitchcock & Karen Harvey.) It seems hard to believe that in all cases, women waited for men to broach the subject. Undoubtedly, there were cases in which couples came together to the decision to marry, and in many cases, the man did not do the proposing at all--proposals were completely handled by the parents. On both sides.

 

She's no catch...but she's caught her man.

Marital traditions that we document the most clearly are often the traditions of the upper-classes and aristocracy, and many traditions that we think of as being around forever are actually quite new. Diamond engagement rings did not become mainstream until a DeBeers ad campaign in the early twentieth century, and white wedding dresses did not become popular until Queen Victoria’s wedding. Nowadays we would never consider wearing our wedding dress after the wedding day, but in The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920), we read that May wears her wedding dress out to various social events during the first year of her marriage.

 

Poor guy....tricked into marriage on Leap Day...

So, until I see some hard evidence about leap year marriage proposals in the form of pre-twentieth-century documents, I’m just a tad skeptical. It’s been an interesting tradition to read about, but for now, I think it might be more urban legend than actual tradition. When we take into account the many cartoons depicting ugly, creepy old women preying on unsuspecting young men, it’s hard not to think of this “tradition” as yet another way to discourage women historically from taking power into their own hands.

Valentine’s Day Special: Restoration & Augustan Impotence Poetry

Many of us, when we are young and impressionable, are taught that poetry is language made beautiful, or, conversely, beauty rendered into words. In the English-speaking world, one of the earliest rhymes we learn is that saccharine Valentine chant:

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Sugar is sweet

And so are you!

For this reason, among many others, I enjoy breaking the poetic stereotype forcefully and with vigor (pardon the pun) by introducing my students to Restoration and Augustan Age impotence poetry. Impotence poetry of this time period, written in the heroic couplet form that dominated the poetry of the time, fuses together what we often think of as “poetic” language with the very “poetic” topics of love and passion and the rather “unpoetic” topic of impotence.

Pastoral scenes were popular in artworks

of the time period as well, 

such as this one, Arcadia by Frans Francken II.

Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment” draws on the language and imagery of the pastoral (a common move in impotence poetry, alluding to its Ovidian origins), presenting us with the shepherd Lisander and his lover Cloris who meet in “a Thicket, made for love.” After overcoming Cloris’s fears of losing her virginity and therefore her honor and virtue, the lovers “extend themselves upon the moss” in preparation for the final “sacrifice” on the altar of love. However, we soon learn that poor Lisander, after seeing Cloris’s lovely bosom “rising” and “bare” is now “o’er ravished” and “unable to perform the sacrifice.” In the end, Cloris runs off, her virtue still intact while Lisander remains behind, blaming the innocent Cloris and her charms, “whose soft bewitching influence/ had damned him to the Hell of Impotence.”

By contrast, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who wrote many sexually-explicit poems about his penchant for “swiving,” has only himself to blame in “The Imperfect Enjoyment.” Written in the first person, a little more crass and vulgar than Behn’s refined, poetic language, “The Imperfect Enjoyment” details the bedroom amours of the narrator and his Corinna (another pastoral name). Still, despite being a little more explicit about the sexual act, the language of Rochester’s poem delights with its romance-novel euphemisms: “My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,/ hangs hovering o’er her balmy brinks of bliss.”

Yet, when the unfortunate lover comes too soon, he finds himself unable to perform a second time. Soon the narrator is “the most forlorn, lost man alive….I sigh, Alas! and kiss but cannot swive.” Rather than blame his lovely partner, Rochester blames himself, or, rather, his “prick”: “Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame/ False to my passion, fatal to my fame.” In the end, Rochester damns his own penis to “chancres” and “stranguary” while “a thousand abler pricks agree/ to do the wronged Corinna right for thee.” In Rochester’s poem, it is love, not lust, that renders him impotent: his penis being “so true to lewdness, so untrue to love.”

As a pair, these two poems illustrate two different approaches to the impotence poem: Rochester’s serves as a comic indictment of the libertine lifestyle while Behn’s, as beautifully-written as it is, illustrates the unjust fate of women who, like Cloris, can be both prey to sexual assault as well as damnable prudes who “bewitch” men into losing their virility and manhood. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s poetic response to Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” illustrates another approach to the impotence poem: the impotence poem as poetic revenge. In Swift’s poem, he portrays in disgusting detail the inside of Celia’s dressing room. With meticulous attention to the abject and the disgusting, Swift’s Strephon “took a strict survey/ of all the litter as it lay.” Included in the survey are “various combs for various uses/ filled up with…/…A paste of composition rare/ Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead, and hair” as well as “puppy water”, a basin full of “the scrapings of her teeth and gums”, towels “begummed, bemmattered, and beslimed/ with dirt and sweat and earwax grimed”—not to mention her chamber pot! Montagu read Swift’s poem and apparently thought it a perfect illustration of a small-minded and vain little man (of course, she hated Swift for his politics too).

A lady at her toilette.

As a response to the poem, Montagu published her poem, “The Reasons that Induced Dr. Swift to Write a Poem Called the Lady’s Dressing Room.” In her version, Strephon is obviously Swift, and Celia is no better and no worse than a prostitute whom Swift tries to gain admittance to with “gallantry and wit” but who, in the end, must pay his four pounds for Betty’s charms. (In Montagu’s version, the poetic Celia is an everyday Betty.) Once inside Betty’s room, “the reverend lover with surprise/ peeps in her bubbies and her eyes/ and kisses both and tries—and tries.” Montagu’s Swift/Strephon is nothing but a “Fumbler”, as Betty calls him, whose “sixty odd” years have taken a toll on his sexual abilities. She refuses to return his money, even after he exclaims that the fault is not in him, but rather in the state of her chamber: “Your damned close stool so near my nose/ Your dirty smock and stinking toes” would make even a Hercules lose his mojo, he claims. Montagu further jests at Swift’s expense, writing that the “disappointed dean” of the poem proclaims he will write a poem that describes Betty’s mess in such detail, “the very Irish shall not come.” Betty’s delightful reply, which finishes out the poem, is “I’m glad you’ll write/ You’ll furnish paper when I shite.”

Restoration and eighteenth-century writers were fascinated with exploring sexual politics in their poetry, and the growing number of female writers at this time meant that women could bring their own views on sex and desire into the conversation. While poetry that concerns itself with love, relationships, longing, and lost love often dominates what we think of as poetry, the sub-genre of impotence poetry can be, in some ways, more revealing about social attitudes towards the body, failure, and the human condition even as it changes our idea of what poetry can be and what it should be. Lastly, for those of us working on the history of sexuality, impotence poetry puts the body and notions of embodiment front and center in ways that are fascinating and humorous.

Aphra Behn on Justice

Aphra Behn

This semester I’m teaching an upper-level English course on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. We started with two works by Aphra Behn: the play The Widow Ranter (1689) and the short fiction The Fair Jilt (1688). The first tells the story of a disparate band of Englishmen and women in the Jamestown colony in Virginia at the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, a historical event that Behn modifies for the purposes of drama. The second is a work of “amatory fiction” that recounts the scandalous amours of an evil, plotting young woman named Miranda, who, when she can’t get what she wants, resorts to extremes (lies, deception, murder—the usual). In both works, however, as in many of her others (the play The Rover, for example, or her novella Oroonoko), the notion of justice and its inverse, injustice, play a prominent role.

           In The Widow Ranter, justice has been suspended for the colonists, as in the wake of a power vacuum, the colonial council makes all the decisions. The council is made up of a motley crew of immigrants to the new world, many of whom have extremely dubious credentials. As Friendly tells his newly-arrived pal Hazard, “for want of a governor we are ruled by a council, some of which have been perhaps transported criminals, who having acquired great estates are now become Your Honour, and Right Worshipful, and possess all places of authority” (Act I, Scene I). The members of the council are indeed scoundrels, as represented by Behn in the play. With names like Timorous, Whimsey, Whiff, and Boozer, it is evident that the council members are not to be trusted. In fact, they are all great cowards, and their cowardice becomes part of the comic relief, even as it suggests one of the play’s most overt critiques of power and governance.

Real life Nathaniel Bacon.

            In Act III, Scene I, we enter the courtroom, and Hazard is accused of drawing without provocation against two members of the council. The entire courtroom scene is a farce of justice, as the play portrays the justices indulging in punch in the courtroom and presiding at the hearing while drunk. Further, when all is revealed, we learn that Hazard was defending himself against Dullman and Boozer who struck him first. The questions of what is allowable “under the law” surfaces in this scene, where it is comic, but inflected with serious consequences. The problem of what is legal and what is just is painted in broader strokes in the case of Bacon and his rebellion. The inhabitants of the colony bemoan that what Bacon, the brave and valiant Bacon, did by inciting his own war against the Indians without leave from the council, was perhaps just, but it was not legal.

            In The Fair Jilt, the miscarriages of justice are, if possible, even more complex. Miranda manipulates the justice system in order to get the object of her affection convicted of rape. Father Francisco refuses her overtures of love, and she, obsessive young maiden that she is, contrives to make it look as though he has raped her. He is convicted and put indefinitely into prison. While he molders in jail, Miranda meets Prince Tarquin, seduces him, marries him, and begins spending extravagantly. She spends her own dowry as well as that of her unmarried, much younger sister Alcidiana. When Alcidiana prepares to marry and demands her dowry, Miranda seduces a young page, Van Brune, and convinces him to kill Alcidiana for her. The attempt ends with Van Brune’s confession, his conviction and death, and Miranda’s disgrace. Miranda doesn’t learn, however, and resorts to even greater extremes: she convinces her husband, Tarquin, to commit the murder of her poisoned-but-not-killed sister. He shoots and misses; he is caught; he and Miranda are both imprisoned. Miranda is banished, and Tarquin is sentenced to death by beheading; the beheading is botched, however, and he is saved by the crowds, recovers, and reunites with his banished wife. At the end, we learn that the two of them live a long and happy life and that Miranda is repentant.

            My students were rather unsatisfied, to say the least, with Miranda’s happy ending. They wanted her to receive a proper punishment for the way she had lied, manipulated, deceived, and caused the imprisonment and/or death of innocent people. Is the ending of The Fair Jilt an injustice to all those Miranda harmed with her obsessive selfishness? Does it illustrate the dangers of not educating women and allowing them to become obsessed with their own youth and beauty and their powers of seduction? Or is this a searing indictment of male blindness? In Behn’s works, nothing is simple or easy, even if we are momentarily tempted to consider The Fair Jilt nothing more than a silly telenovela.

            Behn lived in a tumultuous time, and her own life story, what we know of it, seems to suggest that she witnessed many injustices. Her works are full of melodrama and comedy, yet their complex relationship to issues of justice, the law, money, power, and relationships force us to re-examine the darker side of these stories. The law, she reminds us, is made by men, and men are fallible, petty, blind, jealous, selfish, and power-hungry. They project these same negative qualities onto women—yet they embody these qualities themselves and with much more far-reaching and dangerous results.