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dropped down on stage in Pantoland.
"I have come back to earth and I feel randy!"
She/he didn't have to say a word. The decor picked up on her unutterance
and all the pasteboard everywhere shuddered.
The Dame and the Principal Boy come together by chance in the Chinese
laundry. Aladdin has brought in his washing. They exchange some banter about
smalls and drawers, eyeing one another up. They know that this time, for the
first time since censorship began, the script will change.
"I feel randy," said Widow Twankey.
What is a fertility festival without a ritual copulation?
But it isn't as simple as that. For now, oh! now the hobby-horse is
quite forgot. The Phallic Mother and the Big-Breasted Boy must take second
place in the contemporary cast-list to some cricketer who does not even know
enough to make an obscene gesture with his bat, since, in the late twentieth
century, the planet is over-populated and four breasts in harmony is what we
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need more of, rather than babies, so Widow Twankey ought to go and have it off
with Mother Hubbard and stop bothering Aladdin, really she/he ought.
Do people still believe in Pantoland?
If you believe in Pantoland, put your palms together and give a big hand
to. . .
If you really believe in Pantoland, put your -- pardon me, vicar --
A fertility festival without a ritual copulation is. . . nothing but a
pantomime.
Widow Twankey has come back to earth to restore the pantomime to its
original condition.
But, before scarlet drawers and satin knicks could hit the floor, a hook
dropped out of the flies and struck Widow Twankey between the shoulders. The
hook lodged securely in her red satin bustier; shouting and screaming, with a
great display of scrawny shin, she was hauled back up where she had come from,
in spite of her raucous protests, and deposited back amongst the dead stars,
leaving the Principal Boy at a loss for what to do except to briskly imitate
George Formby and start to sing "Oh, Mr Wu, I'm telling you. . ."
As Umberto Eco once said, "An everlasting carnival does not work." You
can't keep it up, you know; nobody ever could. The essence of the carnival,
the festival, the Feast of Fools, is transience. It is here today and gone
tomorrow, a release of tension not a reconstitution of order, a refreshment. .
. after which everything can go on again exactly as if nothing had happened.
Things don't change because a girl puts on trousers or a chap slips on a
frock, you know. Masters were masters again the day after Saturnalia ended;
after the holiday from gender, it was back to the old grind. . .
Besides, all that was years ago, of course. That was before television.
Ashputtle
or The Mother's Ghost
THREE VERSIONS OF ONE STORY
I THE MUTILATED GIRLS
But although you could easily take the story away from Ashputtle and
centre it on the mutilated sisters -- indeed, it would be easy to think of it
as a story about cutting bits off women, so that they will fit in, some sort
of circumcision-like ritual chop, nevertheless, the story always begins not
with Ashputtle or her stepsisters but with Ashputtle's mother, as though it is
really always the story of her mother even if, at the beginning of the story,
the mother herself is just about to exit the narrative because she is at
death's door: "A rich man's wife fell sick, and, feeling that her end was
near, she called her only daughter to her bedside."
Note the absence of the husband/father. Although the woman is defined by
her relation to him ("a rich man's wife") the daughter is unambiguously hers,
as if hers alone, and the entire drama concerns only women, takes place almost
exclusively among women, is a fight between two groups of women -- in the
right-hand corner, Ashputtle and her mother; in the left-hand corner, the
stepmother and her daughters, of whom the father is unacknowledged but all the
same is predicated by both textual and biological necessity.
In the drama between two female families in opposition to one another
because of their rivalry over men (husband/father, husband/son), the men seem
no more than passive victims of their fancy, yet their significance is
absolute because it is ("a rich man", "a king's son") economic.
Ashputtle's father, the old man, is the first object of their desire and
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their dissension; the stepmother snatches him from the dead mother before her
corpse is cold, as soon as her grip loosens. Then there is the young man, the
potential bridegroom, the hypothetical son-in-law, for whose possession the
mothers fight, using their daughters as instruments of war or as surrogates in
the business of mating.
If the men, and the bank balances for which they stand, are the passive
victims of the two grown women, then the girls, all three, are animated solely
by the wills of their mothers, Even if Ashputtle's mother dies at the
beginning of the story, her status as one of the dead only makes her position
more authoritative. The mother's ghost dominates the narrative and is, in a
real sense, the motive centre, the event that makes all the other events
happen.
On her death bed, the mother assures the daughter: "I shall always look
after you and always be with you." The story tells you how she does it.
At this point, when her mother makes her promise, Ashputtle is nameless.
She is her mother's daughter. That is all we know. It is the stepmother who
names her Ashputtle, as a joke, and, in doing so, wipes out her real name,
whatever that is, banishes her from the family, exiles her from the shared
table to the lonely hearth among the cinders, removes her contingent but
honourable status as daughter and gives her, instead, the contingent but
disreputable status of servant.
Her mother told Ashputtle she would always look after her, but then she
died and the father married again and gave Ashputtle an imitation mother with
daughters of her own whom she loves with the same fierce passion as
Ashputtle's mother did and still, posthumously, does, as we shall find out.
With the second marriage comes the vexed question: who shall be the
daughters of the house? Mine! declares the stepmother and sets the freshly
named, non-daughter Ashputtle to sweep and scrub and sleep on the hearth while [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]