The Heroine with 1001 Faces
Page 19
Scribbling girls, with their passion for using words to further their causes, are close cousins of girl detectives such as Nancy Drew, also driven by curiosity and positioned as an agent of social justice. Oddly, there is something of a midlife crisis in the universe of woman detectives in the first half of the twentieth century, for it is dominated either by girls investigating or by spinsters sleuthing (among them, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Miss Climpson and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple) who take on all the allegorical qualities of Nemesis. Before looking more closely at the writers and detectives at the youthful end of the age spectrum, it is worth contemplating women’s relationship to knowledge over the centuries, along with some biblical and mythical women who want to know too much.
The history of the English word “curiosity” is full of surprises, with unexpected shifts in meaning over the centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary prefaces its definitions of “curious” by noting that the term has been used over time “with many shades of meaning.” Given how curiosity has attached itself to a certain type of female heroine, it makes good sense to explore those meanings, the one, now obsolete, signifying “bestowing care or pains, careful, studious, attentive”; the other, as used today, defined as “desirous of seeing or knowing; eager to learn; inquisitive,” and often used with a slightly negative connotation.
Curiosity seems to invite judgment. “I loathe that low vice—curiosity,” Lord Byron wrote in Canto 23 of Don Juan (1819), surely a tongue-in-cheek aside from a poet renowned for love affairs that led to one paramour calling him “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”6 More than a century later, the French sociologist Michel Foucault found himself dreaming of an “Age of Curiosity” and reminded us that curiosity evokes “concern” and “the care one takes for what exists and could exist.”7 A look at the etymology of the term goes far toward understanding how curiosity came to be seen as a trait both valuable and constructive as well as problematic and sinister, with moral and religious judgments constantly being pronounced, for and against.
We can begin by looking at a fable collected by the Roman author Hyginus (born 64 BCE) that tells of a Roman goddess named Cura (“Care” or “Concern”), who molded the first human from clay or earth (humus). A narrative competing with Christian accounts, in which woman is a minor character in a creation story with a male God, the story of Cura was taken up by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. What fascinated Heidegger was the way in which Cura represented care for something in the sense of concern or “absorption in the world” and also “devotion.”8 Cura has slipped into oblivion today, just as “curiosity” in the sense of “care,” “worry,” or “concern” is now obsolete. But that obsolete meaning captures something paradoxical, reminding us that the affirmative and restorative value of care can quickly shade into domineering fussiness and anxious (and anxiety-producing) attention. Is it any wonder that the allegorical embodiment of “cura” is a woman?
Today we use the term “curiosity” to mean “the desire to know or learn,” but that appetite, as the Oxford English Dictionary reveals, can be judged in multiple ways—as “blamable,” “neutral,” or “good,” with the “good” instinct defined as “the desire or inclination to know or learn about anything.” We have a deeply conflicted attitude toward curiosity, seeing it as both annoying addiction and generous attentiveness. Curiosity is a conduit to knowledge, but like all forms of desire, it can lead to excesses and risks pivoting into a Faustian thirst for knowledge that can never be quenched. In sum, care for others and the desire for knowledge are folded into “curiosity,” but both can be carried to excess in the form of cravings that push the boundaries of what is appropriate or permissible. And the negative valence given to “curiosity” in both senses of the term implies that there is an authority making decisions about what is illicit or forbidden and what is a legitimate object of care and inquiry.9
Our cultural stories about curiosity and knowledge bifurcate as well, giving us an emphatically gendered account of what it means to have an inquiring mind. When Aristotle declared that “all men by nature desire to know,” he was paving the way for the belief that desire can lead to good things, foremost among them scientific knowledge.10 But there are things off limits to human intelligence, and the twelfth-century French abbot Bernard de Clairvaux was among the first to set limits to curiosity in its social form: “There are people who want to know solely for the sake of knowing, and that is scandalous curiosity”—scandalous in the sense of outrageous but also associated with the creation of scandals, with nosy inquisitiveness and meddlesome prying.11
Pandora Opens a Jar and Eve Eats Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge
Women’s problematic and persistent desire for knowledge instantly becomes evident in the stories of Pandora and Eve, two women whose intellectual curiosity leads them to engage in forms of transgressive behavior that introduce evil and misery into the world. In those cautionary tales, curiosity is framed in derogatory terms, signaling a need to rein in curiosity when it manifests itself in women.
Scientists and philosophers living in Early Modern Europe (spanning the three centuries from 1500 to 1800) had sought to demonstrate that curiosity was morally neutral—in large part, in the spirit of Aristotle, to legitimize scientific inquiry. But scientific inquiry remained at that time a distinctly male domain. The more powerfully curiosity was endorsed and rehabilitated in the name of science, the more forcefully a form of “bad curiosity” asserted itself, one that was gendered female and associated with rumormongering, disorder, and transgression. Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, a highly influential emblem book published in Italy in 1593, represented curiosity as a wild-haired, winged woman, her features distorted into an enraged expression. “I am no angel,” she appears to be saying, despite those wings.
Before turning to Eve, it is worth a look at Pandora, the woman who was fashioned on the orders of Zeus to punish humans for Prometheus’s theft of fire. It is she who brought evil into the world by opening, not a box (as the Dutch humanist Erasmus erroneously called it), but a jar filled with “countless plagues.” The Greek poet Hesiod, writing around 700 BCE, gave us the two standard accounts of Pandora’s origins and her powers. In Works and Days, we learn that she is fashioned by Hephaestus, with contributions from other gods and goddesses, including Aphrodite and Athena, who each endow Pandora with gifts, much like the good fairies in our familiar story of Sleeping Beauty. Hermes gives Pandora her name (a richly nuanced term that can mean “all-gifted” or “all-giving”), and he also furnishes her with “a shameful mind and deceitful nature,” along with the power of speech, bestowing on her a gift for telling “lies” and using “crooked words and wily ways.” Hesiod’s Theogony describes Pandora as a “beautiful evil,” a creature of “sheer guile, not to be withstood by men.”
Zeus orders Hermes to take Pandora to Epimetheus, the brother of plucky Prometheus. Naïve Epimetheus fails to heed his brother’s warning about gifts from Zeus, and revenge for the theft of fire is exacted: “He took the gift and afterwards, when the evil thing was already his, he understood. Previously men lived on earth free from ills and hard toil and sickness. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar and scattered all these and caused sorrow and mischief to man.”12 Only one item remains in the jar—hope.13
Combining the seductive allure of surface beauty with the intellectual traits of deception and treachery, Pandora, the first mortal woman, stands as a perverse model of woman as femme fatale. Her looks and adornment are nothing but a trap. Like Prometheus, she is wily, but her duplicity takes a bad turn with a tragic outcome, becoming a perversion of intelligence and craft. The many otherwise magnificent gifts of the gods are corrupted and distorted, used for evil ends when bestowed on her.
Every age seems to reinvent Pandora, re-creating her in ways that capture cultural anxieties about women and power, evil and seduction. But up through the nineteenth century, her desire for knowledge was generally rebranded as sexual curiosity and she came to be linked with Eve a
nd seduction. In countless paintings, she is depicted without the glittering silver clothing given to her by Athena. Instead she is nude, a jar or box at her side, resembling Venus herself more than anyone else. Occasionally she gets back some of her clothes, though the attire is usually still revealing by the standards of the time.
John William Waterhouse, Pandora, 1896
The nineteenth-century French painter Jules Lefebvre gives us a nude Pandora, perched on a cliff, in side view, to be sure, but with little left to the imagination, since her red hair and gauzy scarf cover virtually nothing. More boldly, John Batten, in his 1913 Creation of Pandora, gives us a full frontal view of Pandora on a pedestal, fresh from the forge of Hephaestus. John William Waterhouse’s painting Pandora (1896) catches the beautiful deceiver in the act of opening the box, her eyes trained on the contents, her shoulders bare in a revealingly diaphanous dress. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1879 Pandora offers a more chaste representation, exposing only shoulders and arms. The preponderance of European paintings show Pandora either as a seductive, naked figure or as an equally beautiful clothed woman, on the brink of succumbing to temptation. She is positioned as both captivating temptress and guilty troublemaker.
Like many Greek myths, the story of Pandora was uprooted from adult literary culture and transplanted into the playground of stories for children. At first Pandora’s evil nature was magnified—but once she shed a few years, she became a “naughty” girl, guilty of being seduced by a combination of beauty and mystery. The box (and, after Erasmus, it is always a box) is generally a glittery, jewel-encrusted, luminous container, and although its size varies, it becomes more like a toy chest than a jewelry box as its proprietor sheds years. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths keeps her a woman, but one who is “beautiful and silly,” cursed with “insatiable curiosity.”14 Edith Hamilton is much harder on Pandora, calling her a “beautiful disaster.” From her, we learn, comes “the race of women, who are an evil to men, with a nature to do evil.” Pandora was a “dangerous thing,” Hamilton writes, laying it on even more thickly. After all, Pandora, “like all women,” has a “lively curiosity.” “She had to know what was in the box,” Hamilton adds in a way that lets us feel her own personal sense of exasperation with the mythical being.15
It was Nathaniel Hawthorne who started the trend of turning Pandora into a girl. Just a few miles from where Herman Melville was shaping out “the gigantic conception of his ‘White Whale,’” Hawthorne decided, shortly after the birth of a daughter, to rewrite Greek myths. A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, published in 1851, retells the stories of Perseus and the Medusa, King Midas and his golden touch, Pandora, Hercules and the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, Baucis and Philemon, and the Chimæra. Hoping to purge the tales of their “classic coldness” and “old heathen wickedness,” Hawthorne planned to add morals wherever it was “practicable.”16
Under the title “The Paradise of Children,” Hawthorne retold the story of Pandora, turning her and Epimetheus into two orphaned children living in a cottage. Pandora falls under the spell of a beautiful box in the cottage and talks endlessly about it. One day, her curiosity grows so great that she is determined to open the box. “Ah, naughty Pandora!” the narrator scolds. Then, as she is about to open the box, he amplifies his disapproval with “Oh, very naughty and very foolish Pandora!” But Hawthorne does not leave Epimetheus blameless: “We must not forget to shake our heads at Epimetheus likewise,” for he failed to prevent Pandora from lifting the lid of the box and was equally eager to discover the contents of the box.17
Walter Crane, illustration for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, 1893
In 1893 the British illustrator Walter Crane added images to Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book for the publishing house of Houghton, Mifflin in the United States. His teenage Pandora and Epimetheus are stylized figures, looking more Greek than American or British. For the 1922 edition of Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book, Arthur Rackham, famous for his illustrations of fairy tales by the Grimms and by Hans Christian Andersen, added images that turned Pandora and Epimetheus into naked, pixie-like preadolescents living in a lush natural paradise. The target for a lesson about curiosity has now become the child, both in the story and in the illustrations for it.
The nineteenth century, which witnessed the rise of print culture and higher literacy rates, provided unprecedented access to information and knowledge, not just for men, but for women and children as well. Is it any surprise that curiosity came to be demonized in that century and the next, with Pandora as Exhibit A? The incarnation of curiosity in its most damning and damaging form, Pandora provided an alibi not just for reining in women’s unruly need to investigate arenas of action traditionally cordoned off from them but also for scolding young boys and girls, but first and foremost girls.18
Arthur Rackham, illustrations for A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, 1922
Pandora’s desire for knowledge was first rebranded as sexual curiosity. Then her story became a cautionary tale for children, warning them to beware of violating prohibitions. Today the message we take from the story is largely about the survival of hope and our need for resilience in the face of cataclysmic or catastrophic events. Pandora’s biblical cousin, Eve of Genesis, has never fully escaped the role of culprit in the Fall of Mankind and expulsion from Paradise. Merging with Pandora in the title of a painting by the French artist Jean Cousin the Elder, she reclines nude in a bower, one arm resting on a skull, the other on some kind of urn. Eva Prima Pandora: Are there not striking similarities between the first woman fashioned by Hephaestus and the sinner of Judeo-Christian beliefs? Perhaps it is in fact Pandora on the canvas?
Jean Cousin the Elder, Eva Prima Pandora, c. 1550
The temptress Eve became the main biblical source of seduction (with the snake as mere enabler rather than agent) and her desire for knowledge was sexualized, turned into something carnal rather than intellectual.19 As Stephen Greenblatt tells us in his magisterial The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Eve, the mother of all humans, shoulders the blame for our loss of innocence and for the accompanying curse of mortality, bringing death into the world. She is the sinner, embodying the spirit of transgressive desires. Recall, however, that the serpent tempts Eve with nothing but knowledge: “Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Eve has done little more than accept the invitation to become a sentient human being endowed with moral awareness and wisdom, and yet she is likened to the serpent, indeed in some cases she is the real serpent.20
Pandora and Eve both pale in comparison with one biblical creature who reminds us of the powerful anxieties invested in female sexuality. Few can outdo the Whore of Babylon, an allegorical figure who wears on her forehead a banner announcing her wickedness to the world: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. Representing Extreme Debauchery, she has committed fornication with the “kings of the earth” and sits upon the waters in the wilderness. With seven heads and ten horns, she is “arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.”21
Female carnality was writ large in allegories of excess that became the foundational myths and stories of many cultures. The desire for knowledge becomes dangerous, with what philosophers call epistemophilia (the love of knowledge) quickly shading into unrestrained sexual cravings. Philandering men are legion in myth as in fiction, but they are rarely described as figures of ill repute—instead they are legendary libertines, mischievous rogues, conniving cads, insolent scoundrels, and endearing rascals. They are seldom denounced as cravenly seductive and duplicitous—those attributes are reserved for mythical and biblical women like Pandora and Eve.
That curiosity stems from care and concern is a fact rarely acknowledged in the moral calculus of our foundational cultural stories about women. The fairy tale about Bluebeard and his wife is exceptional in its framing of
curiosity as a lifesaving strategy. Much as the heroine’s drive to explore and investigate may be reviled and attacked, it also saves her neck. “Bluebeard, or the Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience,” the title of an 1808 version of the story, reminds us of how easy it was to misread the tale, turning a story about the value of knowledge into a parable about the perils of an inquisitive mind.
Charles Perrault was the first to write down the story of Bluebeard in his collection Tales from Times Past, with Morals (subtitled Tales of Mother Goose), published in 1697 under the name of his teenage son, Pierre Darmancourt. Twice removed from authorship, via the attribution of the tales first to old wives and then to a boy who was presumably a listener to the tales, Perrault no doubt feared that these trifles would tarnish his literary reputation. After all, he was a distinguished member of the Académie Française and secretary to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance minister to King Louis XIV, the French monarch notorious for the number of his mistresses and illegitimate children. One of those mistresses died in childbirth at the age of nineteen, and it is not implausible that Bluebeard, with his storied wealth, carriages of gold, and parade of wives, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Sun King. The tales in Perrault’s collection became his most significant legacy, for the stories from French popular tradition made their way into court circles, where they became a source of delight and pleasure for sophisticated audiences before they retreated to the nursery.
Perrault’s “Bluebeard” begins by highlighting the attractions of wealth and beauty: “There once lived a man who had fine houses, both in the city and in the country, dinner services of gold and silver, chairs covered with tapestries, and coaches covered with gold.” But the man himself is “ugly and frightful,” and his vast wealth cannot compensate for his appearance and the fact that he has a past (“He had already married several women, and no one knew what had become of them”). Still, one young woman is so dazzled by his ostentatious display of wealth that she agrees to marriage.22