Read Online Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 12 by Gavin J. Grant - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Gavin J. Grant
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knows the enemy. Every woman who sleeps with a man sleeps with the general.
The Woman. It's not true.
The Chorus. You know it's true. You've volunteered for the enemy's bed. (18-19)
Shortly after I began rereading this novel, a friend forwarded me an email announcing the Lysistrata Project. On March 10, 2003, actors in hundreds of cities around the world would, according to the email, perform public readings of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, after which their audiences would discuss the play's relevance to the (then) threatening war against Iraq. The email openly fantasized the wives of all the leaders in both governments withholding sex in order to promote a diplomatic solution, but the underlying assumption of such a fantasy, viz., that the leaders’ wives, being women, would likely oppose war in the first place, struck me as unwarranted, notwithstanding the thirteen-point gender gap (as reported in early March) in attitudes towards the war. Moreover, the March 10 readings—which took place in more than a thousand locations—constituted yet another moment of determined, global protest against the war that did not claim to be gender-based. Indeed, Katha Pollit quotes Sharron Bower, one of the New York actors who dreamed up the idea in the first place, as saying, “Nobody can resist an ancient Greek dick joke.” As Pollit put it, “What a pleasure it was to have fun, vitality, humor and sex on our side, not to mention the literary canon, the glory that was Greece and the majority of the world's population, and leave the other side stuck with Confederate flags, Bible study and bigoted prom queens like Ann Coulter."
"Fun, vitality, humor and sex” might be a fair representation of the play, but most classical scholars must have been a bit surprised to find it being used to make an anti-war gesture resting on the apparent assumption that women are naturally opposed to war. While scholars note that Aristophanes, a conservative landowner, opposed the Pelopennesian war, they also suggest that he wrote Lysistrata to “exorcise” (as Eva Cantarella puts it) the tragedy of the decline of Athens’ polis, and so depicted Athenian men, “reduced to pure animality,” as forgetting fatherland and honor when they give in to the sexual extortion of women (70). The play, that is, shows them ending the war, but for the wrong—or rather, through lack of—reason, as if to say, this is how low we've fallen: that we are so beyond reason, which would require us ending the war, that only an appeal to our base animal instincts can stop the war.
The premise of Metzger's The Woman Who . . . effectively seeks to invert the premise of the Lysistrata story. Aristophanes depicts Lysistrata and her followers as appealing to the willingness of weak and irrational men to do whatever it takes to get laid. Metzger, on the other hand, suggests that at least some warlike and violent men may be taught to perceive the world in a more responsible, mature manner precisely through their bodies (which Aristophanes, like most ancient Greeks, figured in opposition to reason). Barbara Meyerhoff, introducing the novel, characterizes the struggle Metzger depicts thus:
[T]he enemy is The General, one who destroys indifferently, without awareness or choice. The Woman sets herself against his deadness. She conquers fundamental anatomical truth, that a man and a woman uniting briefly make the two into one. This primordial form of connection is a vanquishment by taming—her body the cauldron that transforms him from the Other into one who is momentarily a part of her, a partner. In a dramatic but quiet moment, the alchemical work is done: he covers her feet against the cold with a rough blanket. The General has developed enough imagination and therefore empathy to feel what she feels. So this is why women have always slept with warriors, even those who have killed their loved ones. . . . They sleep with the enemy to make him their own, to assert their commitment
The Woman. It's not true.
The Chorus. You know it's true. You've volunteered for the enemy's bed. (18-19)
Shortly after I began rereading this novel, a friend forwarded me an email announcing the Lysistrata Project. On March 10, 2003, actors in hundreds of cities around the world would, according to the email, perform public readings of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, after which their audiences would discuss the play's relevance to the (then) threatening war against Iraq. The email openly fantasized the wives of all the leaders in both governments withholding sex in order to promote a diplomatic solution, but the underlying assumption of such a fantasy, viz., that the leaders’ wives, being women, would likely oppose war in the first place, struck me as unwarranted, notwithstanding the thirteen-point gender gap (as reported in early March) in attitudes towards the war. Moreover, the March 10 readings—which took place in more than a thousand locations—constituted yet another moment of determined, global protest against the war that did not claim to be gender-based. Indeed, Katha Pollit quotes Sharron Bower, one of the New York actors who dreamed up the idea in the first place, as saying, “Nobody can resist an ancient Greek dick joke.” As Pollit put it, “What a pleasure it was to have fun, vitality, humor and sex on our side, not to mention the literary canon, the glory that was Greece and the majority of the world's population, and leave the other side stuck with Confederate flags, Bible study and bigoted prom queens like Ann Coulter."
"Fun, vitality, humor and sex” might be a fair representation of the play, but most classical scholars must have been a bit surprised to find it being used to make an anti-war gesture resting on the apparent assumption that women are naturally opposed to war. While scholars note that Aristophanes, a conservative landowner, opposed the Pelopennesian war, they also suggest that he wrote Lysistrata to “exorcise” (as Eva Cantarella puts it) the tragedy of the decline of Athens’ polis, and so depicted Athenian men, “reduced to pure animality,” as forgetting fatherland and honor when they give in to the sexual extortion of women (70). The play, that is, shows them ending the war, but for the wrong—or rather, through lack of—reason, as if to say, this is how low we've fallen: that we are so beyond reason, which would require us ending the war, that only an appeal to our base animal instincts can stop the war.
The premise of Metzger's The Woman Who . . . effectively seeks to invert the premise of the Lysistrata story. Aristophanes depicts Lysistrata and her followers as appealing to the willingness of weak and irrational men to do whatever it takes to get laid. Metzger, on the other hand, suggests that at least some warlike and violent men may be taught to perceive the world in a more responsible, mature manner precisely through their bodies (which Aristophanes, like most ancient Greeks, figured in opposition to reason). Barbara Meyerhoff, introducing the novel, characterizes the struggle Metzger depicts thus:
[T]he enemy is The General, one who destroys indifferently, without awareness or choice. The Woman sets herself against his deadness. She conquers fundamental anatomical truth, that a man and a woman uniting briefly make the two into one. This primordial form of connection is a vanquishment by taming—her body the cauldron that transforms him from the Other into one who is momentarily a part of her, a partner. In a dramatic but quiet moment, the alchemical work is done: he covers her feet against the cold with a rough blanket. The General has developed enough imagination and therefore empathy to feel what she feels. So this is why women have always slept with warriors, even those who have killed their loved ones. . . . They sleep with the enemy to make him their own, to assert their commitment
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