Vaults and wandiches
Sep. 7th, 2010 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fulseldenHeh. Actually not an Avatar post.
But ... not actually as exciting as it sounds, sorry.
Nooo, this is where I take the twelfth-century Marie de France’s immensely light, spry, subtle poem Laüstic and use it to perpetrate an angsty fic about Victorian vibrators and repression.
So you should probably just go and read Laüstic: here is a verse translation (pdf, sorry). And in fact the rest of the Lais of Marie de France, if you haven’t already. I suspect people nowadays are more likely to read Sei Shōnagon than Marie, but you should do both if you like the sound of a sophisticated, ironic, distinctly female (there’s not even all that much evidence that Marie was actually a woman, but she certainly sounds like one) voice from the Middle Ages. Plus, Marie de France is of course a barbarian compared to any Heian court lady and so she writes about people’s noses getting bitten off as well as about fairy knights and their ladies. The best of both worlds!
And if you want to know as much about Victorian vibrators as I now do (not much, lol, research, what is that?), there is for instance this piece or this interview.
But anyway, Laüstic is a narrative of entrapment and enclosure to a ridiculous degree, in that it starts [um, SPOILERS] with the speaker pinning down the word ‘laüstic’ itself in no fewer than three different languages (it means ‘nightingale’; ‘laüstic’ is Breton) and ends up with the gift-wrapped nightingale in its shiny new reliquary in the quote below.
The story has a married lady, ‘wise, courtly, and elegant’, won over by the knight-next-door. When she gets out of bed to stand by the window and yearn for him, she tells her husband she is listening for a nightingale. No fool, he gets every single one of his servants to think up ‘some trap, net or snare’ until they catch the bird. Then he snaps its neck in front of his wife and throws the body at her, ‘so that the front of her tunic was besplattered with blood, just on her breast.’
So. AFFAIR OVER. The lady ‘wrapped the little bird in a piece of samite, embroidered in gold and covered in designs’ (as others have said, hello Philomel, telling your story through embroidery, embodying the violation of love as a nightingale), and sends it to her lover. Since ‘he was not uncourtly or tardy’, he gets the meaning - goodbye; don't you dare ever forget me - of this message in a bottle from the inside of her marriage, creates an ornate casket for the nightingale, and carries it ‘with him at all times’. After all, what are courtly knights for? Pining, that's what.
So, even in translation, that’s a whole onion’s worth of layers closing in round the unfortunate wise and witty lady, for all that she manages to smuggle out some concrete remnant of her love.
Aaand then I read about antique vibrators and remembered the tendency of Victorians to enclose absolutely everything they could in, like, padded receptacles. Yeah. IDK.
The passage at the end is from Marie de France’s translation of St Patrick’s Purgatory, a visionary journey through Purgatory written in the latter half of the twelfth century; the protagonist is just entering purgatory itself.
Check out these two lines from the original:
Tel lumiere a iluec trovee
cum est d’yver en l’avespree.
[The light he saw there / Was like winter light at dusk]
Oh yeah. And I don’t even really read modern French, let alone this stuff.
Fandom/Series/Work I’m doing bad things to: Laüstic, I guess.
Rating: T.
Content notes: Victorian repression, skeeviness; fantasy dehumanisation of women. Badly researched antique vibrators.
ONE CONTINUOUS WALL
He had a small vessel prepared, not of iron or steel, but of pure gold with fine stones, very precious and valuable. On it he carefully placed a lid and put the nightingale in it. Then he had the casket sealed and carried it with him at all times.
Marie de France, 'Laüstic', in The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby (London: Penguin, 1986), pp.94-96 (p. 96).
Dr Cantharides, Dr Cantharides.
That’s what Dr Minsheu calls him. Dr Minsheu is his professional rival. He has shiny, rusty seams to his frock coat and shiny, rusty hair, and he is a very popular family physician. His family comes from Basingstoke. On Sunday afternoons he can be seen walking the red gravel paths of the park, his cane held under one arm, his trousers waxy and pressed. He was going to marry the Caversham widow, but she turned out to be no better than she should be and went off with a non-commissioned officer to live in Bath.
Dr Minsheu specialises in small children with whooping cough and ladies with gout and bridge parties. He lives in a house with complicated white-painted gables and green glass over the front door, set back from the road in Surrey Mews. He is supposed to have a complete set of The Pearl and other works of that nature kept locked in a compartment at the back of his liquor cabinet, although the old Lieutenant, the source of this information, cannot be entirely trusted.
Dr Cantharides specialises in the complaints of women. He has acquired a reputation of sorts, whatever Minsheu may say. They come to his surgery near the Wesleyan church. Often they go to the church beforehand; he sees them there sometimes when he goes to sit by the wheezing cast iron stoves in winter-time. The church is very tall, although not particularly large, and the two stoves crouch like small black castles on either side of the chancel, the elaborate cut-work at their tops like battlements or perhaps gables, a blessed circle of heat pulsing around them.
Dr Cantharides has a shelf full of carefully placed rosewood boxes with brass hinges, their insides padded with green velvet and thick pasteboard instructional cards tucked inside their lids. The devices have names like Macaura’s Blood Circulator and Green’s Patent Muscular Relaxation Device. They have smooth ebony handles and carefully oiled winding mechanisms, different attachments moulded in thick nubbly rubber, wide vulcanised pads or parts like thimbles made for giants. There are separate compartments for each one.
It is these that the women come for. That they spread their thick white thighs for, raising up their serge skirts, rucking up their summer muslin to show thin, freckled legs, unsnapping heavy clasps behind the willow-sprigged screen, oh doctor I am so glad you could fit me in. Please, let me know what you would recommend. There is always a sheet, of course, and the usual chips through the layers of paint on the pipes above the examination couch, shaped some of them like flowers, or perhaps like foxes.
He is a perfectly competent family doctor. He has a gaping, sag-sided Gladstone bag done in walrus hide, grey and hideously pebbly, cracking in the creases from the familiar press of forceps and speculum, the little rack of patent remedies tightly stoppered, the wide white box of digestive pills.
But the women come into the church and its iron castles and into his examination room and its flowers and foxes (the pain when the enamel is levered up with a nail, a secret at the end of a finger) and behind the green leaves of the screen and into the green velvet of his boxes, snapping down the lids behind them, fitting their white legs into the shapes left for them, moulded, snug, because of his reputation, he knows. Dr Cantharides. He thinks, walking past the red houses under the railway, holding one hand in the other, that Dr Minsheu is a pleasant fool. He will never be closed in green velvet.
---
The light he saw there
Was like winter light at dusk.
The palace had all around it
One continuous wall,
Constructed of columns, arches,
Vaults and wandiches.
It resembled a cloister,
Suited for men of religion.
Marie de France, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, trans. Michael J. Curley (Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Tests & Studies, 1997), 685-92.
Ibid, n. 9: Wandiches is a hapax legomenon [ie a one-off] whose meaning is unknown. The word may derive from a scribal error. The OED lists the term ‘wandyd kirke,’ used in 1593 to refer to a church from which the body of Saint Cuthbert was translated. ‘Wandyd’ or ‘wanded’ meant “made of wicker work,” or “wattled” (of a building). Cf. ‘wand,’ as “a young shoot of willow cut to be used in basket-making, wattled buildings, or the like,” and the example provided in the OED (c. 1450): “A litil chapel of wandes þai made.”
But ... not actually as exciting as it sounds, sorry.
Nooo, this is where I take the twelfth-century Marie de France’s immensely light, spry, subtle poem Laüstic and use it to perpetrate an angsty fic about Victorian vibrators and repression.
So you should probably just go and read Laüstic: here is a verse translation (pdf, sorry). And in fact the rest of the Lais of Marie de France, if you haven’t already. I suspect people nowadays are more likely to read Sei Shōnagon than Marie, but you should do both if you like the sound of a sophisticated, ironic, distinctly female (there’s not even all that much evidence that Marie was actually a woman, but she certainly sounds like one) voice from the Middle Ages. Plus, Marie de France is of course a barbarian compared to any Heian court lady and so she writes about people’s noses getting bitten off as well as about fairy knights and their ladies. The best of both worlds!
And if you want to know as much about Victorian vibrators as I now do (not much, lol, research, what is that?), there is for instance this piece or this interview.
But anyway, Laüstic is a narrative of entrapment and enclosure to a ridiculous degree, in that it starts [um, SPOILERS] with the speaker pinning down the word ‘laüstic’ itself in no fewer than three different languages (it means ‘nightingale’; ‘laüstic’ is Breton) and ends up with the gift-wrapped nightingale in its shiny new reliquary in the quote below.
The story has a married lady, ‘wise, courtly, and elegant’, won over by the knight-next-door. When she gets out of bed to stand by the window and yearn for him, she tells her husband she is listening for a nightingale. No fool, he gets every single one of his servants to think up ‘some trap, net or snare’ until they catch the bird. Then he snaps its neck in front of his wife and throws the body at her, ‘so that the front of her tunic was besplattered with blood, just on her breast.’
So. AFFAIR OVER. The lady ‘wrapped the little bird in a piece of samite, embroidered in gold and covered in designs’ (as others have said, hello Philomel, telling your story through embroidery, embodying the violation of love as a nightingale), and sends it to her lover. Since ‘he was not uncourtly or tardy’, he gets the meaning - goodbye; don't you dare ever forget me - of this message in a bottle from the inside of her marriage, creates an ornate casket for the nightingale, and carries it ‘with him at all times’. After all, what are courtly knights for? Pining, that's what.
So, even in translation, that’s a whole onion’s worth of layers closing in round the unfortunate wise and witty lady, for all that she manages to smuggle out some concrete remnant of her love.
Aaand then I read about antique vibrators and remembered the tendency of Victorians to enclose absolutely everything they could in, like, padded receptacles. Yeah. IDK.
The passage at the end is from Marie de France’s translation of St Patrick’s Purgatory, a visionary journey through Purgatory written in the latter half of the twelfth century; the protagonist is just entering purgatory itself.
Check out these two lines from the original:
Tel lumiere a iluec trovee
cum est d’yver en l’avespree.
[The light he saw there / Was like winter light at dusk]
Oh yeah. And I don’t even really read modern French, let alone this stuff.
Rating: T.
Content notes: Victorian repression, skeeviness; fantasy dehumanisation of women. Badly researched antique vibrators.
ONE CONTINUOUS WALL
He had a small vessel prepared, not of iron or steel, but of pure gold with fine stones, very precious and valuable. On it he carefully placed a lid and put the nightingale in it. Then he had the casket sealed and carried it with him at all times.
Marie de France, 'Laüstic', in The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby (London: Penguin, 1986), pp.94-96 (p. 96).
Dr Cantharides, Dr Cantharides.
That’s what Dr Minsheu calls him. Dr Minsheu is his professional rival. He has shiny, rusty seams to his frock coat and shiny, rusty hair, and he is a very popular family physician. His family comes from Basingstoke. On Sunday afternoons he can be seen walking the red gravel paths of the park, his cane held under one arm, his trousers waxy and pressed. He was going to marry the Caversham widow, but she turned out to be no better than she should be and went off with a non-commissioned officer to live in Bath.
Dr Minsheu specialises in small children with whooping cough and ladies with gout and bridge parties. He lives in a house with complicated white-painted gables and green glass over the front door, set back from the road in Surrey Mews. He is supposed to have a complete set of The Pearl and other works of that nature kept locked in a compartment at the back of his liquor cabinet, although the old Lieutenant, the source of this information, cannot be entirely trusted.
Dr Cantharides specialises in the complaints of women. He has acquired a reputation of sorts, whatever Minsheu may say. They come to his surgery near the Wesleyan church. Often they go to the church beforehand; he sees them there sometimes when he goes to sit by the wheezing cast iron stoves in winter-time. The church is very tall, although not particularly large, and the two stoves crouch like small black castles on either side of the chancel, the elaborate cut-work at their tops like battlements or perhaps gables, a blessed circle of heat pulsing around them.
Dr Cantharides has a shelf full of carefully placed rosewood boxes with brass hinges, their insides padded with green velvet and thick pasteboard instructional cards tucked inside their lids. The devices have names like Macaura’s Blood Circulator and Green’s Patent Muscular Relaxation Device. They have smooth ebony handles and carefully oiled winding mechanisms, different attachments moulded in thick nubbly rubber, wide vulcanised pads or parts like thimbles made for giants. There are separate compartments for each one.
It is these that the women come for. That they spread their thick white thighs for, raising up their serge skirts, rucking up their summer muslin to show thin, freckled legs, unsnapping heavy clasps behind the willow-sprigged screen, oh doctor I am so glad you could fit me in. Please, let me know what you would recommend. There is always a sheet, of course, and the usual chips through the layers of paint on the pipes above the examination couch, shaped some of them like flowers, or perhaps like foxes.
He is a perfectly competent family doctor. He has a gaping, sag-sided Gladstone bag done in walrus hide, grey and hideously pebbly, cracking in the creases from the familiar press of forceps and speculum, the little rack of patent remedies tightly stoppered, the wide white box of digestive pills.
But the women come into the church and its iron castles and into his examination room and its flowers and foxes (the pain when the enamel is levered up with a nail, a secret at the end of a finger) and behind the green leaves of the screen and into the green velvet of his boxes, snapping down the lids behind them, fitting their white legs into the shapes left for them, moulded, snug, because of his reputation, he knows. Dr Cantharides. He thinks, walking past the red houses under the railway, holding one hand in the other, that Dr Minsheu is a pleasant fool. He will never be closed in green velvet.
---
The light he saw there
Was like winter light at dusk.
The palace had all around it
One continuous wall,
Constructed of columns, arches,
Vaults and wandiches.
It resembled a cloister,
Suited for men of religion.
Marie de France, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, trans. Michael J. Curley (Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Tests & Studies, 1997), 685-92.
Ibid, n. 9: Wandiches is a hapax legomenon [ie a one-off] whose meaning is unknown. The word may derive from a scribal error. The OED lists the term ‘wandyd kirke,’ used in 1593 to refer to a church from which the body of Saint Cuthbert was translated. ‘Wandyd’ or ‘wanded’ meant “made of wicker work,” or “wattled” (of a building). Cf. ‘wand,’ as “a young shoot of willow cut to be used in basket-making, wattled buildings, or the like,” and the example provided in the OED (c. 1450): “A litil chapel of wandes þai made.”
no subject
Date: 2010-09-12 11:39 pm (UTC)Your prose style is so interesting. I love these lines:
And crikey, what a fascinating set of historical scraps to stitch together. Intersections of sexuality and ownership. I like it.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-13 12:43 am (UTC)And thank you! I definitely enjoyed the stitching process! Marie de France is such good times in general that I was wary, but I feel she'd mostly just be hilaritized by this (I mean, crossing culture shock off the list), so I don't feel too guilty. She does (iirc) put one of her ladies in some kind of laced-up skin-tight bondage-wear type contraption, after all.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-30 04:01 am (UTC)Okay, I am subscribing/granting access to you right now. There are more of my favorite things in this story than there reasonably ought to be in any story ever. Laüstic? Historical vibrators? Saint Patrick's Purgatory?????? Seriously, who are you and how have we not met yet?
no subject
Date: 2010-09-30 05:31 am (UTC)And omg your profile with that Troilus quote which always makes my upper lip, uh, unstiffen slightly, sob. Though tragically I am mostly on Dreamwidth to talk about a flying cartoon bison (um, that would be Avatar the Last Airbender, for the possibly uninitiated...), so I can't promise regular fangirling of Marie et al!
no subject
Date: 2010-09-30 05:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-30 05:42 am (UTC)