William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

Certain dooms are more inescapable still. In the last volume of the trilogy, when Simon Darre, Kristin’s fiance from long ago, jilted by her and accordingly doomed to a loveless marriage with her sister, breaks up a fight and gets a knife-cut for his pains, his friend Vigleik dreams “an ugly dream” that Simon’s dead cousin Simon Reidarssön asks the injured man to come with him; and the next day the wound is infected, and Simon keeps seeing Simon Reidarssön. Then he understands that he is fey. And indeed he dies, although Kristin does her best to heal him. In this episode, doom expresses itself, as in the Eddas and sagas, with the neutral inevitability of a physical law. One thinks upon the ancient tale of Sigurd, who knows that he will slay the dragon, win the gold and the maiden, and after that be rapidly murdered. There is nothing to do but take his fate upon himself. And Simon Darre behaves with a similar clearsightedness, overlain with modern emotional explicitness, arranging the lives of his dependents as best he can, dying calmly, and sincerely speaking his heart. There is no vain and cowardly struggle against the end.

But in the second volume of the trilogy, when Kristin and Erlend have been married for several years, love-doom gets defined through quiet comparison with its changeling, for Erlend now embarks on a disastrous affair with another married woman, Lady Sunniva. At each step of his ensnarement, he persuades himself that he could not have done anything else. Sunniva and her maid are menaced in the street by a band of drunken Icelanders. Erlend approaches, his sword in his belt, and they fall back. Here the reader recalls that he and Kristin became acquainted when he saved her and a companion from being robbed and raped in Oslo. Erlend is a natural rescuer of women, a brave and skilful fighter, and the tragedy of his life, as was the case for Grettir the Strong, is that he was born too late to be a hero of the Saga Age. Sunniva simpers: “Can you believe it, Erlend? — old a woman as I am, maybe I like it not ill that some men think I am yet so fair, ’tis worth while blocking my way—” Undset pens the next sentence in calm irony: “There was but one answer that a courteous man could make to this.” She skips a line, then resumes: ‘He came home to his own house the next morning in the grey of dawn…” Here we have the doom of a man who is not in fact resolute, but impulsive.

In the Eddas, and to a lesser degree in the sagas, doom is written from the beginning, and the only choice people have is how bravely or loyally they meet it. In Undset’s trilogies, the two inevitable dooms of death and original sin have been laid upon us; but we are at times given grace to avert evils from ourselves and others. This grace is another better doom; we cannot will it into being, but we are free to basely reject it. Undset finally says, in words of half-equivalence to those of Odin the High One in “Hávamál”: “The good you have done cannot be undone; though all the hills should crash in ruin, yet would it stand—” As for the evil one has done, Odin and Christ differ as to whether that can be undone. In Undset’s novels, love partakes of any and all of these various dooms and their contingencies. The greatest compliment that I can pay her is that her work thus continues, and in a way completes, the effects of such great forerunners as Laxdaela Saga .

Descriptions of Feminine Beauty in Sappho and Miscellaneous

Greek Lyric Sources

All from Barnstone, whose edition contains the complete poems of Sappho and a smattering of other Greek lyric poets from the Greek period through the Byzantine.

1

Descriptions of feminine beauty and its opposite in Sappho (b. ca. 630 B.C.)

BEAUTY

“Graces of the pink arms” (p. 76)

“Muses of the splendid hair” (p. 76)

“a soft girlfriend’s breast” (p. 76)

“honey-voiced women” (p. 77)

limbs like violets (p. 77)

honey-soft eyes (p. 78)

supple Cretan dancers (p. 80)

“slender-ankled girls” (p. 81)

loud and heavenly singing (p. 81)

Gonglya in her milk-white gown (p. 84)

a Lydian-embroidered gown extending to the toes (p. 85)

“the soft fine linen robes of Amorgos” (p. 85)

a lover (presumed) who exceeds a fine robe’s softness, gold’s hue, a lyre’s sweetness, an egg’s whiteness (p. 86)

a tender girl (p. 87)

a soft girl (p. 88)

blonde Helen (p. 89)

S.’s little daughter, “who is beautiful like a gold flower” (p. 89)

“pink-armed Dawn” (p. 90)

a quiet girl in beautiful garments (p. 91)

UGLINESS

a farm-girl who does not know the proper way to lift her gown over her ankles and who wears “farm-girl finery” (p. 82)

wrinkled flesh and black hair aged to white (p. 90)

2

Descriptions of feminine beauty in Archilochos (late eighth century B.C.)

BEAUTY

“Her breasts and dark hair were perfume…” (p. 36)

3

Descriptions of feminine beauty in Alkman (mid seventh century B.C.)

BEAUTY

goldenrod hair (p. 50)

floral gold chain (p. 51)

4

Description of feminine beauty in Anakreon (b. ca. 572 B.C.)

BEAUTY

blonde hair (of Artemis) (p. 122)

“warm women” (p. 123)

“colorful sandals” (p. 124)

5

Description of feminine beauty in Pindar (d. 438 B.C.)

BEAUTY

“Helen of the lovely hair” (p. 161)

6

Descriptions of feminine beauty in Bachkylides (fl. 476 B.C.)

BEAUTY

“white-armed Iole” (p. 166)

violet-braided Marpessa (p. 167)

white cheek (p. 167)

“violet-wreathed” (p. 168)

“white-armed bride” (p. 168)

7

Description of feminine beauty’s opposite in Asklepiades (fl. ca. 270 B.C.)

UGLINESS

black skin (but A. pleads for her beauty regardless) (p. 161)

8

Descriptions of feminine beauty and its opposite in Meleagros (fl. ca. 270 B.C.)

BEAUTY

perfumed hair (p. 202)

unspecified glow (p. 202)

“erotic mouth” (p. 203)

aquamarine eyes (p. 203)

eyes like fire (p. 203)

9

Descriptions of feminine beauty and its opposite in Philodemos the Epicurean ( ca. 110– ca. 40 B.C.) His lover, Charito, is in her sixties.

BEAUTY

dense hair (p. 211)

high-pointed, conical white breasts (p. 211)

ambrosia-fragrant, smooth flesh (p. 211)

UGLINESS

same woman’s old age (but P. says this is no handicap) (p. 211)

10

Descriptions of feminine beauty’s opposite in Marcus Argentarius (early C.E.).

UGLINESS

scrawniness (but can be overlooked by love) (p. 214)

11

Descriptions of feminine beauty in Rufinus ( ca. 50 B.C. — ca. 50 A.D.).

BEAUTY

silver ankles (p. 215)

milky breasts like golden apples (p. 215)

round hips (from pregnancy) (p. 215)

swelling belly 1(p. 215)

12

Descriptions of feminine beauty in Nikarchos ( ca. first century A.D.).

BEAUTY

plumpness (p. 219)

“beautiful limbs” (p. 219)

13

Description of feminine beauty in Paulus Silentiarius ( fl. ca. 560).

BEAUTY

silver neck (p. 238)

14

Anonymous description of feminine beauty.

BEAUTY

snowy breasts (p. 257)

Proportions of Feminine Beauty in Some Classical and Western European Sources