Shee as a vail down to the slender waste
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevel’d, but in wanton ringlets wav’d
As the Vine curles her tendrils . . .
She would also have been forced to writhe her way through Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetic incarnation of Lilith – in ‘Eden Bower’ – as a rippling Godiva of a serpent-woman, the fairest snake in Eden before she became Adam’s first human wife. This was first published in Rossetti’s Poems, 1870:
Not a drop of her blood was human
But she was formed like a soft sweet woman.
The contemporary scholar Galia Ofek divides Victorian depictions of long-haired women into two types: golden-tressed Rapunzels and angels who were sexually innocent and decorous and needed saving; and Medusas, women who had already fallen into sin, were knowing and dangerous and out of control, but who were also in their way victims of representational codification inscribed in their dark hair.
James Frazer devoted many pages to hair in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890). He recorded the widespread belief in the sympathetic magic invested in hair (and nail clippings). Hair was sacred to the spirit of the head and was to be molested at peril. It was a matter of anxiety when it was cut. ‘The chief of the Namosi in Fiji always ate a man by way of precaution when his hair was cut,’ wrote Frazer, who also recorded that among the Toradjas a child whose head was shaved to rid it of vermin was always required to keep a lock on the crown as a refuge for the head’s separate soul. He wrote that men who have taken a vow of vengeance may keep their hair uncut till they have fulfilled their vow. Some ancient German tribes would not allow their young warriors to trim their hair or beards until they had slain an enemy. Hair clippings were often protected. The Huzuls of the Carpathians feared that if mice were allowed to make nests of human hair then the donor would become cretinous or plagued by headaches. In Swabia, cut hair had to be hidden in a place where neither sun nor moon could shine on it. Some African tribes buried hair to stop it from falling into the hands of witches. In the Tyrol, some people burned it lest witches used it to raise tempests. Armenians hide their hair in the cracks of church walls, the pillars of houses or in a hollow tree because all severed portions of themselves will be required for reassembly upon resurrection. The Incas of Peru also believed in keeping cut nails and hair handy for that event; additionally, they were careful to spit in one place. Hair should be combed strictly inside the house, according to some cultures, as cutting and combing were thought to bring on thunder and lightning. In the Scottish Highlands no girl might comb her hair at night if she had a brother at sea. It was a traditional belief of the Irish village that, as Annora claims, the hairs on our heads were all numbered by the Almighty, who would expect us to account for each one on the Day of Judgement. Village women would wind hair into the thatch of their cottages for safe storage until then.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s obsession with hair is too well documented to be explored here. But it is interesting to note that Rossetti’s now iconic ‘stunner’ paintings like Lady Lilith and La Pia de’ Tolomei were not initially seen in public and went straight from the artist’s studio to the home of the buyer. Rossetti was secretive about his work, and rarely exhibited it in public. Both of these paintings were owned by the shipping magnate and art collector Frederick Richards Leyland. Although not exhibited, Lady Lilith was described in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition 1868, alongside Rossetti’s poem. In 1870 the artist’s poem was published again in his Sonnets for Pictures.
Nor would his drawing, La Belle Dame sans Merci (1848), in which the fatal fairy lassoes her knight with her hair, have been seen in public, but I had the Swineys simulate the image with the gondoliers in Venice.
Bram Stoker, a Dublin-born writer, published a story in 1892, ‘The Secret of the Growing Gold’, in which a certain Geoffrey Brent murders his wife Margaret Delandre and hides her body under the floor of his castle, Brent’s Rock. But the hair continues to grow. Hair forces its way through the hearthstones. He tries to burn it but still it grows. Eventually the golden hair, horribly streaked with grey, strangles Brent and his new Italian wife, revealing the secret of the murder, while at the same time avenging it. The uncontrollable anger of the hair, a material, still-living part of a dead body, a spectral but corporeal manifestation: Margaret Delandre’s sullen passion, voluptuousness and recklessness were all expressed in her hair.
Hair has become a highly charged subject in academic and artistic circles, with some writers arguing that hair represents the aggression of the id, or drawing upon the concept of weaving in Freudian theory as metaphor for the dream-work of the subconscious. (Freud also saw weaving as a mask for ‘genital deficiency’.) Others speak of hair as a metaphor for the umbilical cord that joins mother and unborn child, or as the embodiment of boundaries between the inner and outer (hair grows from inside but exists outside too). The cutting or plucking of hair connotes bodily and metaphysical separation. All agree on its power as a sexual totem. The Anglo-French artiste Alice Anderson works with both dolls and doll hair and explores several of the issues raised by this book. Her website includes some films about her work. http://www.alice-anderson.org
Canadian surrealist Mimi Parent used two of her blonde plaits to make a two-pronged whip when she discovered she had been betrayed by her partner. The work, made in 1996, was entitled Maitresse. And the cutting of girlish plaits could also indicate a severance from childhood and innocence.
Ida’s gesture of cleaning the floor with her hair has reference to Janine Antoni’s Loving Care, in which the artist dipped her hair in buckets of black dye and used it as a brush to paint or wash the floor of a London gallery in 1992. But most modern hair art by women refers to cutting it in order to sever connections with feminine stereotypes, or to signify grief upon loss of a lover.
Other artists who have worked with hair include Hannah Wilkes, who used hair that fell out during chemotherapy, and Mona Hatoum, who has deployed hair extracted from hairbrushes, and Esmé Clutterbuck, whose delicate drawings of hair give it a life of its own. Hair art by women was the subject of Braided Together, an exhibition in Cambridge and London in 2012, featuring the work of Samantha Sweeting, Elina Brotherus, Marcelle Hanselaar, Tabitha Moses, Karen Bergeon, Marion Michell, Mary Dunkin and others. Some of the images from this exhibition made their way indirectly into scenes in this book. Mika Rottenberg has produced a film called Cheese that was loosely inspired by the Sutherland Sisters. Kate Kretz embroiders with human hair. M.K. Guth creates installations of long hair. Their work, and that of many artists who deploy hair, can be seen on the excellent http://hairisforpulling.blogspot.it/. An exhibition opened at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris in 2012 entitled Cheveux chéris, frivolitées et trophées – containing 250 works of photography, painting, sculpture and ethnographic objects. Hélène Fulgence, the director of the exhibition, wrote: ‘Everything that is to do with hair is important because it is related to the head, and the head, in all civilisations, is sacred.’
Acknowledgements
First of all, thanks as ever to Bill Helfand, who opened my eyes to the possibilities offered by hair as a subject in medical history and literature.
For information about Kildare, Wicklow fairy beliefs, the Famine and many other details, I am indebted to Chris Lawlor, who not only provided a wealth of information in his excellent and comprehensive book An Irish Village: Dunlavin, County Wicklow but who also went out of his way to help, generously offering insights from his own encyclopaedic knowledge and also finding me copies of rare materials. Thanks also to Nessa Dunlea and Catherine Mackay at the Kilcullen Heritage Centre, and, for help with local newspapers in County Kildare and Ireland, Mario Corrigan, Executive Librarian at Kildare Collections and Research Services. As usual, many thanks to the Wellcome Library staff, particularly Ross MacFarlane and Phoebe Harkins.
To my agent Victoria Hobbs and my editor Hele
n Garnons-Williams, so much gratitude for their infinite patience and care; also to Kristina Blagojevitch for her help; Mary Tomlinson for her painstaking editing work, especially after I telescoped the timeline. For invaluable writing advice and support, grazie infinite to Mary Hoffman, Lucy Coats, Louise Berridge, Tamara Macfarlane, Jill Foulston, Sarah Salway, Ros Asquith and the Clink Street Writers Group. For advice on Pre-Raphaelite hair, many thanks to Dr Lucetta Johnson and for all medical advice, my father Dr Vladimir Lovric.
To Principessa Bianca di Savoia Aosta, Giberto Arrivabene Valenti Gonzaga and Sabine Daniel, mille grazie for precious private access to the Palazzo Papadopoli at San Polo.
For countless journeys round Venice in an old green boat, and for showing me the ways of true kindness – mille baci to Bruno and Susie Palmarin.
And an abbraccio forte forte each to Jenny, Tony, Cathy, Greg, Hin-Yan, Kate, Sarah, Carole, Emma, Kaitlin, Laurie, Claire, Jack, Ornella, Elena, Ross, Irene, Jane, Rebecca, Claire, Melissa, Harriet, Thomas, Nick, Adèle, Marie-Louise, Dianne, Penny, Annabel, Paola, Carol, Fiona, Pat, Alan, Sybille, Paulina, Steve, Erik and Aidan.
They know why.
A Note on the Author
Michelle Lovric is the author of four novels – Carnevale, The Floating Book, The Remedy (longlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction) and The Book of Human Skin (a TV Book Club pick in 2011) as well as four children’s books. Her book Love Letters: An Anthology of Passion was a New York Times bestseller. She lives in London and Venice.
www.michellelovric.com
By the Same Author
The Book of Human Skin
Carnevale
The Floating Book
The Remedy
Copyright © 2014 by Michelle Lovric
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lovric, Michelle.
The true and splendid history of the Harristown sisters : a novel / Michelle Lovric.
pages cm
"First published in Great Britain in 2014"—Title page verso.
ISBN 978-1-62040-014-2 (hardback)
eISBN 978-1-62040-015-9
1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Dancers—Fiction. 3. Sibling rivalry—Fiction. 4. Ireland—History—19th century—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.O8765T78 2014
813'.54—dc23
2014004935
First U.S. Edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury USA
This electronic edition published in August 2014
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The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 46
