What Do Women Want?

In the Wife of Bath's Tale, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a knight who has committed rape is given a quest to save his life. He must find the answer to "What do women really want?" He spends a year and a day trying to find out. Eventually an old crone who forces him to marry her (but is actually a beautiful fairy in disguise) tells him that he can have her as an ugly old woman but faithful or beautiful and unfaithful. When he refuses to chose, but allows her to chose, he gets both, learning that what women really want is to make decisions of their own.

I thought of that story Sunday as I sat amid a huge audience of women in their 20s attending He's Just Not That Into You. The film pretends to teach women what men really are saying when they such things as "I'll call you." But what the film actually does is perpetuate those very stereotypes that women have come to accept:

• The not-so hot guys are the ones you should rely on.
• The really cute guys--who are married or in a committed relationship--are often liars and cheats. The blonde hunk, played by Bradley Cooper with a winning smile and persona, cheats on his wife, confesses to her his infidelity and then continues that infidelity while saying he wants to work it out with his wife. AND he lies about not having quit smoking, a sin the film--and wife--sees as equal to the infidelity. At the end, though, he gets his comeupance by being alone, just like the girl he cheated with and his ex-wife. [The film undercuts this high moral viewpoint toward telling the truth by having a multi-married woman say how much better she is than any of her three husbands--she was never caught.]
  
• Cooper's best friend, Ben Afflick, is in a seven year committed relationship with Jennifer Aniston but refuses to marry her. He's sensitive, caring, does the dishes, but just doesn't want to do the vows. After she finally realizes that a committed relationship is better than no relationship, he gives her ring and gets on his knees to beg her to marry him. A collective sigh went up from all the romantic souls in the audience. After all, just as Sex in the City showed, what women really want is to have a man sweep them off their feet and marry them.

No where in the film is there any woman who can stand on her own without a partner. It is only as part of a couple that women are supposed to find fulfillment. Only the girl who cheated with the husband and the wronged ex-wife are alone at the end--and being alone appears a curse, not a blessing.

What do women really want? It appears Hollywood thinks it is to let men make their decisions and determine the roles to play in their lives.

The Big Chill

In the early 1990s, a poster stating “Fear No Art” appeared. That image has stayed in my consciousness since then. I wonder often at the fear some people exhibit toward the visual art or the written word. Surprisingly for me, both educated and uneducated people seem to acknowledge the power of art to transform us, seemingly beyond our control.

In reading about Sarah Palin today, I felt a chill down my spine as I read this passage from Time:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them.
"The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

I’ve previously talked about the chilling effect that religion had on the time of Chaucer. Sarah Durant’s book, The Birth of Venus, deals with the climate created by Catholic Dominican reformer Girolamo Savonarola.

In 1481 or 1482, Savonarola was sent to Florence to preach. Immediately he began opposing the Renaissance attraction for pagan works and the perceived immoral life of the Florentine society and Lorenzo de Medici’s court. Becoming obsessed with the Book of Revelation, he spent from 1489 on trying to save souls from the Apocalypse he felt was immediate. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Many persons brought articles of luxury, playing-cards, ornaments, pictures of beautiful women, the writings of pagan and immoral poets, etc., to the monastery of San Marco [where Savonarola was prior]; these articles were then publicly burned. A brotherhood founded by Savonarola for young people encouraged a pious, Christian life among its members. Sundays some of this brotherhood went about from house to house and along the streets to take away dice and cards from the citizens, to exhort luxuriously dressed married and single women to lay aside frivolous ornament. Thus there arose an actual police for regulating morality, which also carried on its work by the objectionable methods of spying and denunciation.

During the 1497 carnival, Savonarola organized fifteen story-high pyres in Piazza della Signoria, onto which his followers threw “carnival masks, rich feminine ornaments, mirrors, cosmetics, cards and dice, perfume, books of poetry and on magic, musical instruments, and worldly paintings where female bodies were displayed unclothed.” Botticelli, a very sensitive soul, was so impressed (or so scared) by Savonarola that he threw many of his paintings on the bonfires. Among the works burned were Boccaccio’s Decameron and the works of Ovid. The spectacle became known as the Bonfires of the Vanities.

Savonarola’s criticisms of the Church in Rome eventually led to his excommunication in 1497, and his subsequent execution by hanging in May 1498, after which his body was burned.

In 1933, it wasn’t the Church promoting the burning of books and ideas, it was German students. Nazi Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels began an attempt to regulate the arts to bring them into line with Nazi goals. Organizations were purged of Jews and others considered politically or artistically suspect. On 6 April 1933, the German Student Association’s Main Office for Press and Propaganda called for a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit,” eventually culminating on 10 May, in many university towns, in the burning of over 25,000 volumes considered “Un-German.” Students marched in torchlight parades, bands played, songs were sung, “fire oaths” were taken and the left was silenced one way or another. Some of the banned authors included Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Kerr, and Americans Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller.

Moying Li in Snow Falling in Spring describes the rampaging Chinese Red Guard of the Cultural Revolution in 1968 who break into her home and force her father to destroy his collection of “Western” books.

Book banning and burning follows much the same philosophy as that of the ancient Egyptians—if it’s not there to see, it didn’t exist. Pharaohs often had inscriptions from previous rulers recarved and their names inserted. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, in 221 BCE, took the same tact when he ordered the burning of classic works and histories, fearing that they might undermine his authority.

A sobering poster from World War II from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shows a book with the headline: “Books cannot be killed by fire.” And under the image of the book and burnings is the slogan, “Books are weapons in the war of ideas.”

To learn more about chilling of our minds, start here to learn the history of book burning through the ages.

And if you need any more frightening image of repression of art, check out the following images of the Hitler book burnings. Are these the past or our future?

The Great Chill: or Geoffrey Chaucer's Dead and Gone

Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400. Or maybe it was 1402. According to authors Terry Jones (Monty Python), Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, and Juliette Dor in Who Murdered Chaucer: A Medieval Mystery, the only certain thing we can be certain of about Chaucer's death is that he disappears from history somewhere between 1400 and 1402. How he died, where he died, or any additional details are lost to history. The authors believe he was murdered.

Chaucer lived in a perilous time to be on the king's pay. King Richard II's throne was usurped by the next King Henry IV, the man responsible for Richard's death. The authors describe the different between the two reigns as something similar to us going from the free and easy 1970s directly into the religious and intellectual conservativism of the 2000s.

Orchestrating the chilling political climate change was Thomas Arundel, the former archbishop of Canterbury, who returned with Henry IV from exile and proceeded to scourge the kind of religious questioning and humanism that had been acceptable behavior in the earlier reign. Thomas Arundel made a formidable adversary toward someone like Geoffrey Chaucer who was in the midst of writing what we know of as The Canterbury Tales, a work which satirizes the Church and its clergy and celebrates "country morals."

Previously reformers like John Wyclif had been proposing changes in the Roman Catholic Church doctrines and practices. Wyclif, for example, had suggested the need for an English translation of the Bible that the common people could read. And that was exactly the problem. Arundel didn't want the common people involving themselves in such things as church doctrine--in fact he was quite content to have his clergy equally ignorant.

Arundel hit upon a strategy to pull the dissenters into line: the charge of heresy and the threat of being burned alive. (This was approximately 10 years before the birth of Joan of Arc.) England had not until then used this Continental approach.

Arundel needed a litmus test to prove their support. That issue was transubstantiation--that's the moment the priest holds up the bread and wine and they become the body and blood of Christ. Before Arundel the people could question whether the moment described is more symbolic than literal. Arundel made it literal. And anyone who couldn't agree was at risk of a fiery send-off.

The book quotes the experience of one knight:

... On the breaking of the bread the knight looked again , and saw with his own eyes, in the hands of the celebrant friar, true flesh, raw and bleeding, divided into three parts.

Interestingly, Arundel begins his reign of benevolent terror just as Chaucer stops writing the Canterbury tales.

I was struck as I read the book by the chilling of the arts and intellectual thought--similar to what we see happening about 100 years later with Savonarola in the Florence of Michelangelo and Botticelli, preaching destruction of all books and art and creating the bonfires of the vanities.

I could not help but make parallels between Jones' book and Al Gore's chilling assessment of global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. Here we go again, I thought. Religious conservatism is trying to put a strangle-hold on scientific research, the arts, the social climate--and the pro-Bush/anti-global warming camp seems intent on stressing, "Don't confuse me with facts." The leaders have followed Arundel and rather than using transubstantiation they have taken up the fire brands of gay marriage and global warming. Archbishop Arundel can only be smiling.

Who killed Chaucer? I think you've already figured out their answer.

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I have a new paper doll based on two views of Chaucer. Check here.