A Flood of Lava

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon.  She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trails, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her  mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.  A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott and around and below , wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows .

---Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

So Awfully Happy

"Did you have to give up all your jewels when you were divorced?"

"Divorced---?" Susy threw her head back against the pillows and laughed.  "Why, what are you thinking of?  Don't you remember that I wasn't even married the last time you saw me?"

"Yes; I do.  But that was two years ago." The little girl wound her arms about Susy's neck and leaned against her caressingly.  "Are you going to be soon, then?  I'll promise not to tell if you don't want me to."

"Going to be divorced? Of course not! What in the world made you think so?"

"Because you look so awfully happy," said Clarissa Vanderlyn simply.

---Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922)

Wharton's novel about the possibility of love in a culture of divorce.  Here, a child who has been abandoned (for all practical purposes) by her mother, mistakes newlywed bliss for the exuberant freedom of the soon-to-be divorcee. 

Hair Part II: Pieces of Me

Today's quote for this multi-part series on Hair  is taken from Helen Sheumaker's fascinating study, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America. This study traces the rise and fall of hairwork (hair jewelry, wreaths, portrait miniatures including locks of hair) as an object of sentiment and devotion as the once hand-made fanciwork became increasingly commercialized:

     In the eighteenth century, the sentimental associations of hair were obliquely displayed; by the nineteenth century, hairwork and the sentimentality it conveyed was worn for others to observe. This practice revealed a paradox about sentimentality. While display of one's sentimentality was essential to being regarded as sentimental, that same exhibition could easily be construed as ostentatious, vulgar, and insincere. Fashion was constantly in flux, it was superficial, and it was self-aggrandizing. It opposed the sincerity that women in particular were supposed to possess. Fashion was expressed with goods, and therefore was opposed to the domestic sphere. Thus, those constant fluctuations in styles threatened to undermine the premise of sentimentality itself.
     Even as hairwork revealed the dissonance between genuine emotion and frivolous fashionableness, it attempted a remedy.  Hair's undeniable relationship to an individual asserted a sincerity of character that transcended the hypocrisy that fahionableness implied.  The mid-nineteenth century was the height of the popularity of hairwork perhaps because as fashion was criticized as being particularly hypocritical, hairwork's genuiness was being asserted.  On the one hand, hair jewelry was very much a commodity, buttressed as it was by marketing and salesmanship; on the other hand, it was exactly that which could not be completely commodified.  Hair jewelry provided a way to forestall the apparent effects of fashion in the market and in the social world" (20-21).

--Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, (2007)

Boundaries Part VI: Inconceivable

In this final selection for "Boundaries" I offer you the gift of a poem by Donald Hall from his collection, Without, which documents his wife Jane Kenyon's bout with leukemia and eventual death in 1995 at the age of forty-eight. Today's quote is the third section of "Song for Lucy." It features an object--a tourmaline ring--that underscores the boundary between life and death, the material embodiment of their desperate hope.

     Alone together a moment
on the twenty-second anniversary
     of their wedding,
he clasped her as she stood
     at the sink, pressing
into her backside, rubbing his cheek
     against the stubble
of her skull. He gave her a ring
     of pink tourmaline
with nine small diamonds around it.
     She put it on her finger
and immediately named it Please Don't Die.
     They kissed and Jane
whispered, "Timor mortis conturbat me."

--Donald Hall, Without, (1998)