April 3, 2019 Happily The Evil Stepmother By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Franz Juttner, Illustration from Snow White, c.1905 The stepmother swings like a light bulb back and forth, causing the mother who is not there to glow. That is her job. I am a mother, a stepmother, and a step-stepmother because I am my husband’s third wife and he has daughters from his first marriage and a daughter from his second. And I am a mother-mother to our two sons. “This isn’t one of your fairy tales,” my husband once said to me during an argument. He didn’t mean Disney, he meant Grimm. He meant I was stowing myself in the body of a fairy-tale stepmother and setting sail. When all my husband’s daughters are in our house at once, I grow very small. The weight of those girls who are not mine tilts the house and slides me toward the door. The weight of my sons slides me back in. Up and down goes this seesaw. My husband takes no turns. He grows weightless and blurry. On weekends, my seventeen-year-old stepdaughter comes out of her bedroom in the early afternoon in a thick white robe. She moves slowly, like a gathering cloud. My sons worship her. She is soft and kind, and they scramble all over her body like mice. “Play with us,” they beg. She yawns. Shuffles into the bathroom. They wait by the door. Often she is in there for a long, long time. Her name is Eve, like the first woman on earth. I love my stepdaughter, but I don’t love being a stepmother. It’s grim work. If we stood side by side, Eve and I, and looked into the mirror, it wouldn’t be our reflections staring back at us. It would be something wild and cruel. A discarded mother skin. A punishment for loving what doesn’t belong to you. Read More
April 2, 2019 Dice Roll Dice Roll: Madame Mustache By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s new monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original illustration ©Ellis Rosen “You will play, M’sieur?” was how a woman with a black mustache greeted gamblers at the Wild West Saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. The year was 1877; the gold rush was on. Miners flocked to the saloon on the corner of Main and Gold to put the day’s earnings on a game of twenty-one. The elegant dealer with the musical French accent was one of the most notorious women in the West—Eleanor Dumont, whose life pursued two dangerous prospects: the action on the table and the riches underground. “No one knows her history,” wrote a local journalist, and that’s remained true to this day. As with so many figures of the Old West, Dumont’s life is shot through with disputed accounts and fictional flourishes. Only two things were for certain, according to the journalist: she was always alone, and always making money. * The chic Eleanor Dumont first materialized one night behind a roulette wheel at the Bella Union in San Francisco, already a virtuoso with cards. She’d come from New Orleans, a city on the cutting edge of gambling at the time. In addition to countless dens, where the rudiments of the art could be learned, New Orleans boasted luxurious gambling palaces that innovated modern casino mainstays, like free buffets. Read More
March 29, 2019 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Not So Quiet … Stepdaughters of War By Lucy Scholes In her new monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. When it was published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front, by the German World War I veteran Erich Maria Remarque, became an international best seller. The blackly brutal account of life in the trenches touched a nerve with readers who were still reeling from the aftershocks of the Great War. Hoping to cash in on some of Remarque’s success, the following year Albert E. Marriott, an enterprising London-based publisher who was new on the scene, approached the children’s writer and journalist Evadne Price and asked whether she’d be willing to write a spoof response about women at war. He had in mind a title—“All Quaint on the Western Front”—and a pen name for her, Erica Remarks. Price had a talent for pastiche—she was the author of a popular series of girls’ stories that mimicked Richmal Crompton’s hugely successful Just William books—but she had no intention of making light of such a serious subject. Instead, she offered to write a realistic account of a woman’s experience in Flanders. In a bid for verisimilitude, Price relied heavily on the diaries of a woman named Winifred Constance Young, an Englishwoman who had served as an ambulance driver behind the front line. Price, ever the consummate professional, wrote quickly, and the novel was finished in only six weeks. Not So Quiet … Stepdaughters of War (1930) is a shockingly visceral and realistic documentation of the cost of the conflict written as the firsthand account of a woman ambulance driver. It is a world of “wounds and foul smells and smutty stories and smoke and bombs and lice and filth and noise, noise, noise … of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair,” and the book is a shattering denunciation of the jingoism that kept the war machine turning. Although last year marked the centenary of the end of World War I, Europe is teetering on the brink of a new era of incendiary nationalistic fervor. As such, a new generation of readers would do well to turn to Price’s novel. It’s as much a warning for our future as it is a reminder of our past. Read More
March 28, 2019 Devil in the Details A Bathroom of One’s Own By Larissa Pham Larissa Pham’s monthly column, Devil in the Details, takes a tight lens on single elements of a work, tracing them throughout art history. In this installment, she focuses on women in bathrooms. Edgar Degas, La Toilette, c. 1884–86 The door of my childhood bedroom didn’t have a lock on it, so I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. Every human wants privacy, but no one more than a teenage girl. Though I ostensibly shared the bathroom with my little brother, I claimed it as my domain. I spent hours reading on the tiled floor, my body bracketed between the sink and the door. In my memory, it’s a slightly steamy, always warm, watery place—but I never spent that much time in the bath. If I wasn’t reading or sulking after a fight with my parents, I was performing those charmless beauty rituals teenage girls are so fond of—shoving my A-cup breasts together trying to make cleavage magically appear in the mirror; waxing my legs with a kit I’d surreptitiously tipped into the family shopping cart; dyeing the tips of my hair hot pink. Manic Panic spotted half my towels; menstrual blood stained the rest. In the bathroom—my bathroom—I lounged, I cried, I sat on the edge of the empty tub, my two thumbs laboriously T9-texting my friends. Last summer, my roommate brought home a framed print of a woman standing at her toilette. She found it for five dollars at a yard sale in the Hamptons and purchased it for the Dutch blue frame, but I liked the elegance of the print—a replica of a Mary Cassatt drypoint and aquatint, Woman Bathing, from 1891. In the composition, a woman bends over a basin, one hand submerged in water, the other at her brow. She is nude from the waist up; her dress is rendered in appealing, nearly abstract stripes, and the shape of her skirt blocked out in solid, pastel colors—sage green, snow white, sunrise pink. On the floor is a flowered water pitcher, and the ground is similarly patterned with ferns and flowers in warm gray and thinned-out royal blue. The image is modest—we see only her smooth back, the faint shape of her breasts—and the mood is one of quiet intimacy, a peek into one woman’s private world. Though Cassatt’s subject stands opposite a mirror, her face is hidden from us. Her expression is caught in the private, unreadable space between her body and the mirror. I love this most—that her image is doubled and therefore doubly hidden from us. The rectangle between her face and her reflection becomes a chamber of endless possibility: What thoughts run through her mind? The flowered ground rises up to meet her. Read More
March 27, 2019 Objects of Despair Objects of Despair: Mars By Meghan O’Gieblyn Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column Objects of Despair examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them. Mars is an impossible planet: waterless, desolate, barren. Its atmosphere is drenched in UV radiation and contains only trace amounts of oxygen. Temperatures in the winter are comparable to Antarctica’s, and in the summer there are dust storms that stir up the toxic soil and blot out the sun for weeks at a time. Any reasonable person knows that humans will never consent to live there. This is why Mars is the ultimate utopia: a planet where no real future is imaginable is a planet where any future is imaginable. The writer Wladislaw Lach-Szyrma, who coined the noun Martian, wrote his utopian novel Aleriel (1883) to remind readers here on earth that “there may be brighter worlds than this, and a happier existence than we can have here.” Mars is red, the color of roses and revolution. The Bolsheviks imagined socialist uprisings succeeding there even as their own were being repressed. (The “red star” of communist iconography was inspired by a 1907 Russian science fiction novel of that title, set on Mars.) On earth, movements fail, rights are revoked and denied, injustices of all kinds prevail. But on Mars, it’s possible to envision—as two nineteenth-century Iowan feminists did—a world in which gender roles are reversed. In Unveiling a Parallel (1893), by Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant, female Martians vote, control the levers of power, and unabashedly solicit the company of male prostitutes, while males are relegated to the errands of the domestic sphere. In a world with forty percent gravity, a planet unburdened by the weight of history, such things can happen. Read More
March 21, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Your Absence Has Gone through Me By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. ©ELLIS ROSEN Dear Poets, I am a poet myself; I write about the strength and love my family provides for me, and about my identity as a daughter. A few months ago, I found out that my father has a second family and has been hiding years worth of lies. Since confronting him, he has become offensive, threatening, and hurtful. He refuses to acknowledge what’s happened and insults me instead. Even more than feeling betrayed and rejected, I feel like my sense of self and of reality is crumbling. I keep second-guessing my father and our family’s life together. I would love to read a poem that provides some comfort or affirmation as everything familiar falls apart. With Love, Former Child Dear Former Child, We are accustomed to thinking of the future as unknown. The past, on the other hand, often feels like a stable coordinate from which any number of futures might be charted. Your father’s betrayals have complicated that clean narrative line from where you’ve been to where you’re going—a line that often constitutes a central pillar of identity. But you are a poet. You have practiced something other than narrative. I want to offer you a poem I turn to when the coordinates of my life feel unmoored, not because it directs me to feel more grounded, but because it nourishes the possibility of being exactly where I am, wherever that is: Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript”: And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other Read More