Anniversary

Housecleaning has always been a rite, a worship, for me.  A thanksgiving, stewardship of what I have been given, what I always hope to earn, to deserve.

Here is a post about the people who were the vehicle by which I was given everything I have, everything I am.  About an artifact I hope my nieces will love someday, too.



Today is the fiftieth anniversary of my parents' marriage, and though dad's not on this plane to share it with us, mom and I had a brief celebration of sorts, doing a crossword together on the phone this morning.  We used to do them as a family, spanning the kitchen and family room, calling out clues and answers out loud; crosswords were a shared thing for us.  Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the first "word cross" puzzle, too.

I seem to like anniversary markers, though through most of my life I'd probably have said that sort of thing didn't really have meaning in itself.  But as I've grown a little older, time - and its observance (and marking) - means more to me, or perhaps I just recognize what it's always meant to me.  Mr. X being so far away probably throws this tendency into higher relief, but that's okay.

Today is also the eleventh anniversary of our first date.  I can still recall so vividly getting dressed for that date, our walking together to the restaurant - the very silly place we went - and his engaging telling of The Greatest Bike Wreck Ever Told, a story about X as a kid having what could have been a nasty wipeout and rising from it triumphantly unscathed.  To this day, that memory just makes me grin at what an adorable kid he still can be from time to time.  Not  a lot of people other than his kids get to see that side of X.  It's a nice side.

Mama gave me the wedding album when she remarried, and its images feel so close, for me - even though they all predate me by years.  Padded ivory vinyl and little brass fleur-de-lys.  "Wedding memories" in gold leaf.  Stiff, brass-cornered pages, black and white eight-by-tens, parchment leaves in between every image, every page.  Five little brass feet on the back cover of the book.  A somewhat tattered box.

The photo of my parents' hands on their guestbook, mama's pretty little fingers slim and unbent by arthritis, the ring slender and unadorned - no sapphires flanking the bright diamond , commemorating two children yet unborn and un-imagined.  The picture of my mom and grandma, the pastel hat grandma wore, which I have now, hanging in my dining room.  The picture of mom with my aunts, her sisters, putting on her garter, her appealingly turned ankle, her beautiful little sculpted heel - the wedding crystal and the Fostoria parfaits behind her on my grandparents' mantel, in front of the mirror mama bought for them, which now lives in my own bedroom.  What that mirror has seen.  I remember it, hanging always over grandma's living room, angled downward so we could always see so much, hanging so high.

One of the most striking images in the album is the one of granddaddy walking her into the church.  They're all black and white, and the wedding was in the evening in December.  A puff of wind took up mama's veil and the composition is full of movement, excitement, joy.  Granddaddy looks stoical, but mama is so young, so fresh, so pretty.  The veil rises up toward a deepening winter twilight, framing the dimmer image of my aunt in the background.  Mama, in white, is luminous, a shock of brightness.

My older cousins, little girls, white pinafores, white socks, and black patent maryjanes.  Adorable chubby knees.  Aunts and uncles.  My young grandparents, all of them, together.  These are the only photos I have of all of them together, and I so love these pictures.  I cry a little bit, that mom gave this to me.  This time capsule, this treasure.

This observation of time.  Of a date, so important.

If my mom was beautiful, my daddy was so handsome.  He was a furry fellow, and so dapper.  His hands were warm and manly.  His hair was amusingly thick, here - and yet, as he grew older, as his crowning glory grew thinner, he never looked any different to any of us.  He was a good looking man, they were a beautiful couple.  I had no idea of that, for so long, but once I realized it I have never been able to look back at pictures of them without seeing that anew.

Lace tablecloth, lace long sleeves, gleaming satin, a little linoleum-floored church hall.  Aunt V. putting her hands over dad's eyes as he slipped the garter off of mama's pretty leg, laughter, the sweet comedy of propriety meeting promise, and a couple I know were deeply attracted to each other.  Dad found mom utterly beautiful until the day he died; she always dressed and made herself up for him - until the day he died.

The bouquet, midair, the small group of smiling women - I don't know who caught it.  The photo captures the penultimate moment, the instant of promise the superstition carries, of potential and possibility ... whoever catches it, marries next ...

Mama in her pretty traveling suit and hat, little black shoes on her tiny feet now, her and dad's heads bowed as the rice flies around them, coming down the evening steps.  Out beside the car, the last streaks of light in the clouds above their heads - an image easily as striking, as gorgeous, as mom's entrance with my grandfather.  Her open, nervous, exciting smile.  Mom's smile always so wide.  Mom's smile always a defining feature of her - mom's laugh is so much a part of her self.  Like her, I know people identify me by my laugh.  Mom's youth, mom's face in love.

And the final picture.

Daddy, in the driver's seat, arm around mama, her smile rising above an almost ridiculously large pouf of corsage, the checks of her suit the only pattern in eight by ten inches of black and white and silver.

Daddy's smile.  His eyes all on her.  His peaked eyebrows, his cute nose.

His everlasting, abiding love.  My dad ... was beautiful.



Happy anniversary, mom and dad.

Character Decisions

When I first became inspired to think about what is now my WIP, it was during the course of research on The Ax and the Vase, as that research exposed me to Clovis' sister, Audofleda, and her daughter, Amalasuntha.  The WIP itself is still in research mode, so it is not merely possible but likely that its shape will change a lot, but I have always found when I talk about it that Amalasuntha tends to be my focus (in some ways, I still leave open the possibility that the novel will focus on Audofleda, Amalasuntha, and Matasuentha, the third generation of this matrilineage), but Ama is definitely prominent, and has been the subject of the few actual scenes I've written.

Image:  Egyptsearch.com

Image:  Wikimedia

The research spanning both works included not only reading, but images, and there are several available images of Amalasuentha available online.  When I first encountered them, the peculiarity of her eyes was perhaps the most striking feature.  I thought at the time that this was not reflective of a stylistic convention, and wondered whether she might have had what we now call Graves' disease (the condition which gave Marty Feldman his distinctive appearance).  This actually appealed to me, as it was a dead-cert against turning Ama into any sort of a Mary Sue, and gave her a built in obstacle to work against.

More recently, of course, I've seen other prominent period work with similarly prominent eyes, and begun to question my assumptions about contemporary art.  Here we have an image which appears definitely to be a different person, and is attributed as most likely being Theodora, the notorious empress, wife of Justinian I, who had some fascinating issues with Amalasuntha:

Image:  Livius.org

The face and features are far too long to be a portrayal of the same woman shown in the first bust above; there's nothing in common between then but the noticeably wide eyes.  (For a truly fascinating partial reconstruction of the human face this stone image could have represented, take a look here.)  More importantly, there's nothing in the source material to point to such a notable condition in Ama's health.

The time it takes to work on a piece of historical fiction (at least the time *I* seem to take) provides time for ideas to change, and this can help a work and even change the nature of a character.  This can be disillusioning, sometimes - when the expectations you go in with are contradicted or reversed.  It can also be exhilarating, if in writing you embrace chance, change, and following the leads.

For my writing readership:  has any of you ever experienced a reversal in your work - whether due to your research, due to the story itself, or for some other reason?  I'm fascinated by the turns writing takes; tell me about your own unexpected "plot twists" ...

Historical FICTION Some More

There's a fascinating thread at the Absolute Write fora right now, considering the question of how icky "historical mindsets" were.  There's a focus at this point on the specifics of women's position(s- because, kids, there have been more than one sets of context women had to live within!) in society, and I thought I'd share my bit.


***



I have to say, speaking as a feminist, I don't see how pretending-away the more difficult aspects of life for women (or ANYone) during a difficult period in history does me any favors today.  I find anachronistic female characters jarring and irritating precisely because ignoring the problems of any society (whether gender-based or otherwise) too apologistic and flip.

I'd agree with everyone who has pointed out that history isn't some sort of homogenized place where everyone held exactly the same viewpoints to exactly the same degree, in every station and every place across the board.  Women are enough a part of the population that even the most misogynistic systems were forced to accommodate at least some aspect of their participation in the world.  It's often been speculated, too, that in so-called "lower classes" there was less room for systematized chauvinism, as women had to contribute in order for all the work to be properly done.  I think there are limits to this theory, too, but it *has* given enough room for some authors to have created some excellent historicals based on this "wiggle room".

My own approach to female characters has varied somewhat.  Very early Frankish society was still in some flux, and my main female character happens to be a queen known almost entirely for her influence with her husband - but I depict a relationship between them fraught with its *own* difficulties, some of which do present in the context of a historical woman's actual position.  One woman is banished from society (the worst punishment possible) for sexual indiscretion, and another, as the victim of rape, witnesses her tormenter seriously punished (by the laws of [I]wergeld[/I], a woman in childbearing years was high in the heirarchy of human life value).  The second novel will deal with a woman of even higher noble station, in a much more ritualized society, who infracts against her system pretty spectacularly (she marries a slave at one point) and witnesses the consequences to others, of her actions.  This woman happens to be educated (letters of hers survive) and powerful, but in many ways has a much harder go of things as a woman precisely because of her attainment of power.  The price she'll pay is definitely owing to her gender, too.

In order to explore these things, to get down into their implications, for me as an author to ignore them would leave me writing a fairy tale, not a real story.  I can't and won't do that, and have a very hard time understanding why it would interest anybody to cleave away these things from a work of fiction.  Whatever their reasoning may be, they're asking for compromised storytelling - and fiction is compromised in enough ways just subjectively, I can't fathom good reasons to compromise it knowingly.  I don't understand the attraction to history, if one wants bits of it redacted or edited away.


***

Salic Lawdy

The recent hard-hitting news regarding the laws of succesion in Britain offer me the excuse to expound a little on one of the more substantial choices made by Clovis I.

Clovis was the guy who laid down the law a millenium and a half ago.  The codes resulting were a formal recording of traditions both ancient and diverse:  Clovis ruled a domain comprised both of his own people, the Franks, and Gallo Romans - those people in Gaul who were a part of the imperial legacy, then beginning to wane (Clovis' first battle, in The Ax and the Vase, is fought in alliance with Odovakar, who deposed the last Roman emperor), but boasting still a significant local population in what became France.

There was a vogue in any case, at that time, for codification.  The Visigoths had done it, Alaric II having laid down a breviary, and certainly Roman influence had its power.  For Clovis, too, the stipulation of legal terms served to this advantage:  to unite in common policy a disparate set of peoples.  Under Salic Law, the Franks and Gallo Romans were treated as one - both using the ancient northern traditions of his people as a template, and by innovating within those practices.


Salic Law has become a synonym, over time, for male primogeniture, and has been cited for centuries both with fervency and with loathing as the cause to withhold estate from women.  The Plantagenets were born after The Anarchy, a long and bloody war which arose for the sole reason that a woman was given to inherit.  Henry VIII's incomprehension of even the idea of a female HEIR rewrote Clovis' own Catholic legacy in western history.  There's rather a long and delicious post about the irony in that, come to think  of it.

But to my point.  Clovis's code, or the central tenet as contenporary history now sees the phrase as centering upon, is about to be rewritten in Britain.

Maybe.

Of course, it will take the many commonwealths and pieces (again ironic) of a definitely-waned empire to ratify this.  But female primogeniture may at last be legitimized.  Assuming natal legitimacy itself, of course.


***


I think about the generations and centuries since St. Clotilde swayed a husband ... and I think about the life I live, one and a half thousand years later, and sometimes I see similarities.  Yet the power I own (greater by far than any woman who EVER could have sat on England's throne, or indeed ever has) is unimaginably distant from hers.

More terrifyingly - the autonomy I claim is scarcely a hair's-breadth from the chattel-leine.  From the queen subject to a husband by divine right - and from every one of his thousands upon thousands of feminine subjects, unable to inherit, bereft of personal agency.  From the factory working mother, or daughter, chained up within the Industrial Revolution.  From my grandmother in her own factory.  From the secretary of sixty years ago.  From my mother, who with her coworkers colluded never to let one of their number be alone with the boss in the bank vault.  From even myself - a secretary because, even when I was coming out, there was still a degree to which typing was the way to make money.

My fingers fly now - and I am recognized - and I love what I do.  I no longer apologize for my occupation.

But I know that the impulse is there precisely because its obsolete echo is "this is what a woman can do."  Just because I can write a novel now:  doesn't mean I didn't get this skill as a backup to that interest in theater my parents were nervous about.  I didn't want to be a teacher.  I became a clerical worker.

There are millions of women my age who did "better" - but that is because what I do was anathema.  Terrifying.  I am that same hair's-breadth distant from being a nurse, a housewife, a mother, a whore.  I wonder whether others who entered fields as traditional as secretarying is harbor the same awareness of the conflict of "tradition" in this context.  There ARE still women who become teachers not out of vocation, but because that is the acceptable way for a woman to make enough money for her family to live - because it looks good at church - because mama and daddy said - because they feared to reach for "more" ...

... who feel guilty for not getting a "better" job, because, after all, they are so darn bright.

Who couldn't THINK of anything else to do even in the milieu of college.  Distracted by theater nerds, English classes, and the repulsiveness of business and marketing degrees.  Intimidated by science.  Unable to find the right entry point in history.


I am so much closer to the thousands of years, hundreds of generations of women who make up the history of the world - and whom Salic Law (and those ancient traditions so like it, replicated the world over) prevented inheriting.  Prevented power - by money.  I'm part of the nineteenth-century dust, the primeval red clay, the centuries-old winds of my old-fashioned hometown - my old-fashioned family - my anachronistic (in both directions) self.


***


And yet.

I have come into ownership.  I am laden with gratitude - and larded with blessings.  Power my mom even marvels at a bit.

The memory of the first time my granny ever visited my house - walking around the lot with her, going around the front yard - when she asked me, "How many husbands do you mean to marry, to keep a house like this?" - and did NOT mean, how will I get myself supported:  but how much of a harem of men would I have, in my beautiful estate.  I remember her glee, and her beautiful nervousness.

Granma had the most luminescent nervousness.  And nothing quite cowed her like accomplishment.  You could see the wonder in her, sometimes - at the extensive family she and my granddaddy amassed, generation on generation.  I remember sitting with her at her 90th.  "Look what you did grandma."  Her amazing smile.  When she was most excited, she was a little bit afraid.  "How many husbands will you have?"

Not a one, Granny.  But not for lack of loving.

I'm soclose to powerlessness.  I'm still just a secretary.  I'm an underachiever at heart.

But ... in action ... I am something so much greater.  Somewhere along the line, that hair's breadth came into existence.  I may not be far from the long history of women in subjection.  But I am not a part of it.  The hair's breadth isn't a wide barrier.

But it lies between me, my mom, my granny.  It lies between me and Clotilde.  Between me and every English queen - regnant, or not.

My grandmother used to exclaim, "Oh my lands!" and it meant something different.

But I have my own land.  I have paid it off, alone, and own a significant swath of a beautiful, enviable lot, a good patch of a cheering, lovely home.  Oh MY lands.

And women will inherit from me.  Only women - my nieces, when they are grown - a fantasy of perfect joy, imagining the women THEY will be.

And they are salish dwellers, themselves.  Like Saint Clotilde.  We all make a circle.

And now  we can own what we all encompass.  It's only a hair's breadth.

It is enough.  In my case - in the end - a bounty.