Introduction
The Loathly Lady and #MeToo
In 2018, in the chyron below an MSNBC newscast, viewers were invited to submit accounts of “how #MeToo has changed the way you work.” I had a story I could have submitted, though I did not. It concerned a libretto I had written years before called The Loathly Lady I was an English professor when the lyrics, unbidden, started popping into my head. It did not occur to me at the time that I was writing an opera libretto, just free associating. I had been teaching “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer— a bit of a stretch for a modernist like me, but a required English course needed an instructor, and I volunteered. I chose this particular Chaucerian tale because I remembered the Wife of Bath from graduate school: gap- toothed and redstockinged and beaten so badly by her fifth husband that she was deaf in one ear.
Dame Alisoun had a great deal to say about love, marriage, and sex in her prologue, but she does not appear in her tale. It is about a knight in the court of King Arthur who has been condemned to death for raping a maiden in the meadow. Queen Guinevere offers him a reprieve. His life will be spared if, in a year and a day, he can return with the answer to this question: What do women most want? The knight sallies forth on this quest, posing the queen’s riddle to every woman he meets. But they all give him different answers, and by the end of the year he is in despair. At the last moment, a Loathly Lady appears, promising the answer in exchange for a
wish. He is only too happy to comply. Back in Camelot, he reports the loathly truth that what women most want is “mastery in marriage.” The ladies of the court agree, and his life is spared. And now the Loathly Lady announces her wish: the knight must marry her—he has no choice.
In their wedding bed that night, the wretched groom bemoans his fate, tied for life to an ugly old hag. Pitying his distress, she offers him a modicum of freedom: he may choose to have her stay as she is— old and ugly, but faithful— or become young and beautiful, and perhaps not so faithful (fig. 1.1). The knight considers for a moment, and a lightbulb goes off. You choose, he tells her, and the Loathly Lady is so happy to have mastery in marriage that she becomes young and beautiful and faithful, and the two live happily ever after.
I was bowled over by this story. It could have been written yesterday, and more to the point, it could have been written just for me, chronically confused as I was by conflicting priorities. The Wife of Bath had been through it all six hundred years before, and she had found an answer. Good for her! . . . though it was not the answer I would have given the knight. Since what he liked most was obviously sex, I thought he should listen to a woman’s view of the matter. Suddenly I was hearing a tango.
What a woman wants Is passion, love, excitement,
To see an everyday Of work and disappointment
Fade before a point of light, A flame, a conflagration
Of burning desire.
To know that she inspires
A madness that will turn
A man away from what is right
Or just or good,
And lead him to require
Her beauty in the night, His lust become his only good.
I do like tangos, but this one clearly belonged to someone a bit more . . . how shall I say? . . . fabulous . . . someone perhaps like Scheherazade. But if this was Scheherazade’s tango, she would be singing it in order to stay
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0.1 John Kindness, The Loathly Lady in the Unicorn Tapestry, 2006; watercolor and photocollage. © John Kindness
alive— the same motive that led her to tell all those stories in The Thousand Nights and One Night. And believing the knight would be pleased by her saying she most wanted passion, she would keep saying that, over and over again. After a while she would sound like an airline attendant delivering the safety announcement for the 1001st time.
The knight, who was on a life- or- death mission to find out what women wanted most, would see through her strategy and press her for her true heart’s desire. And somewhat surprised, she would reveal it:
A moment’s poise,
A rest, a stasis, A perfection.
A time when neither he nor she
Has any need,
A little space when beauty’s real.
Alas, this answer would be lost on the obtuse knight:
A silent noise, an end in the midst?
Good grief! All this from a kiss!
And then, like so many men, the knight would explain to her what she really wants: a repeat performance. And by the 1001st repeat performance, he would observe nastily, most men are already on the lookout for another maiden in the meadow.
The knight was a cynical guy. I enjoyed watching him tangle with Scheherazade, knowing that his comeuppance was only a twelvemonth away. But what would other women tell him? I riffled through the great female icons of English literature. Obviously Titania, queen of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, would most want a child (the “changeling child” her husband Oberon so resented). Wrong, the knight would snap back: as soon as a woman gets a child, she loses her knight. Jane Austen’s Emma would say she most wanted a wise, honorable husband, a Mr. Knightley. Wrong again, the knight would declare: a man as virtuous as all that could only be a figment of a woman’s imagination.
There was an element of truth in what the knight said, and I realized I was not altogether sure what I thought of him. I decided to divvy up my conflicting views among the queen and her two ladies-in-waiting.
Qu: He certainly has bearing, rather regal bearing, Now that I look at him.
Lady 1: How can you bear to look at him?
Lady 2: He’s rather thrilling if you look at him.
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Lady 2 is what today we would call “sex positive,” whereas Lady 1 was a medieval Andrea Dworkin:
He is a man—a thug, same thing. He’ll die tomorrow and he Won’t have learned a thing. Men cannot learn. All they can do Is take, and use, and spoil, and leave.
It was a relief to subcontract my confusion to these obliging women. And of course, by this point I had realized I was writing an opera libretto. I had seen only a few operas then, though I had grown up with Gilbert & Sullivan and Rodgers & Hammerstein. But two operas I had seen, Puccini’s Turandot and Verdi’s La Traviata , had left deep impressions on me.
As with “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” the libretto of Turandot, by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, turns on a rape and the renegotiation of a contract. In the distant past, an ancestor of Princess Turandot’s was raped and murdered, and as a result, the princess is terrified of men and marriage. Her father, the emperor, has decreed that her many suitors must solve three riddles to win her hand or die in the attempt, and so far a series of executions has kept Turandot happily single. But now a noble stranger (Prince Cal à f) arrives in the capital, falls in love with Turandot, and solves the riddles. Turandot refuses to marry him nonetheless, indignantly asking whether he means to take her by force. Instead, the stranger negotiates a new contract: Turandot has until dawn to discover his name. If she succeeds, she can have him executed, but if not, she must marry him.
That night no one sleeps in the city as the imperial guards search out the stranger’s name. A serving woman called Liù knows but refuses to tell, even when Turandot has her tortured. Turandot asks her why she is willing to suffer for this man, and Liù describes her love for him and then kills herself to keep his secret safe. Cal à f reproaches Turandot for her cruelty to Liù but presses his suit with a kiss. It takes all of Turandot’s willpower to go on resisting, but she does.
Come the dawn, Turandot has not discovered his name. Instead of enforcing the contract, however, Cal à f voluntarily reveals his name, giving her the choice to have him executed, if that is her wish. But by now it is not. Turandot accompanies Cal à f to the palace, and before her father she declares rapturously that this man’s true name is “Love.” The couple
La Traviata provided me a different insight. In the second act of Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto, the courtesan Violetta for the first time meets Giorgio, the bourgeois father of her lover Alfredo. Violetta has been happily ensconced with Alfredo in the country, their love having rescued her from her previous, frivolous life in Paris. In the production I saw, Violetta and Giorgio faced the audience and sang over each other. Violetta tells Giorgio how much his son’s love means to her, and Giorgio tells her she must give it up to protect the future happiness of Alfredo’s sister from the dishonor such a marriage would bring the family. The scene is heartrending. We hear the clashing viewpoints simultaneously and inhabit them both at the same time. Opera is surely unique among the arts in creating such split- screen empathy. Traviata led me to give my deadlocked characters equal time, as it were, and it also made me more tolerant of my own confusions.
But unlike Traviata , The Loathly Lady was meant to have a happy ending, and so it was a gift from the gods of comedy that Sigmund Freud and the knight had been tormented by exactly the same question. I had Merlin conjure Freud up from the future to show the knight what he was up against, and Freud’s own words became my lyrics: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ ”1 The cocksure knight ignores this red light from the future and sets out to meet Titania and his other female informants.
All I needed now was a frame to hold the piece together. In a prologue, I had an elf queen step out of a magic tapestry to taste the joys of human love. She assumes the form of a maiden in the meadow, where she encounters not love but rape at the hands of the knight. As he departs, she lays a curse on him: he must understand the meaning of his crime or die. She then morphs into the queen at Camelot and sets the knight’s quest.
The elf queen’s magic tapestry is the world of literature and art where the knight’s interviews take place. The tapestry contains not only Titania, Scheherazade, and Emma, but another trio of famous females. In a climactic scene, Eliza Doolittle and Virginia Woolf are caryatids holding up the doorway of the Lady of Shalott’s tower. A curse keeps Shalott innocent of the world by forbidding her from even looking out the window. When
[ 8 ] I LIKE, THEREFORE WE ARE embrace, and the emperor blesses their union. As I was writing The Loathly Lady, I wondered how many operas depicted the trauma of rape palliated by an offer of “mastery in marriage.”
the knight shouts his question up to her, Shalott calls down that she most wants a room with a view. Eliza of course wants a room somewhere, and Virginia wants a room of one’s own. The incorrigible knight concludes that what women really want is real estate.
In short, in every scene within the tapestry, the knight symbolically reenacts his rape outside it. But the Loathly Lady is impossible to victimize, for she is the elf queen in yet another disguise, waiting in a tapestry forest to reveal what women most want. It takes the knight a while, but when he finally learns her lesson, she becomes young, beautiful, and faithful: the maiden he had desired and the maiden she had yearned to be.
“Finis,” I wrote, slipping the libretto into a drawer. There it lay for some years, until by a series of accidents it ended up on a stage at the University of Pennsylvania, performed before an audience of seven hundred people. The score by composer Paul Richards used ars nova idioms from Chaucer’s day for the medieval scenes and traveled through musical history for the interviews with the women in the tapestry. (Scheherazade’s tango was an anachronistic favor just for me.) Artist John Kindness drew a multitude of still images for the projections (figs. 1.2, 1.3), and Joshua Mosley and Erinn Hagerty animated them. Maestro Gary Thor Wedow conducted soprano Julianne Baird, baritone Thomas Meglioranza, members of Anonymous 4, Parthenia Viol Consort, Piffaro Renaissance Band, and a host of other early music virtuosi. As long as I live, I will never forget the elation I felt that evening.
The next morning, a female undergraduate whom I did not know posted a video of herself on Facebook. Speaking in languidly disapproving tones, she asked where Professor Steiner got off, giving a rapist his heart’s desire.
On a dime, my elation turned to fury. This was Chaucer’s plot, not mine, and he was . . . CHAUCER. Besides, The Loathly Lady was a work of art, not a moral tract. And wasn’t it better to teach the knight how to be a better man than to kill him?
But other people, it turned out, were equally bothered by the happy ending, and The Loathly Lady was not performed again until 2017, when the Hartford Opera Theater staged a couple of scenes in a showcase of new works. #MeToo was in the air, and on the train home from Hartford, reading in the paper about an outed rapist, I decided to rewrite the ending of my opera.
As before, the tapestry bed- curtains close discreetly around the knight and his newly beauteous, faithful wife. But now Virginia Woolf and Eliza
jections,
Doolittle step out of the tapestry curtains. Eliza, confused by what has happened, asks Virginia the same question that undergraduate had posed: Why should a rapist get his heart’s desire? Virginia answers:
In fairy tales, Eliza Doo’, A selfish brute
Becomes a gentleman on cue.
In fairy tales, a girl abused Can bounce right back
And teach an abuser to be true.
“Fairy tales are a broighter room, loik?” Eliza responds, and at this point we hear “a room somewhere,” “a room with a view,” and “a room of one’s own” merging into the finale.
This sadder but wiser Loathly Lady shows “how #MeToo changed the way I do my work.” It also explains why I have written this book, which goes over much the same ground: female desire, rape, beauty, art. The many conflicts, contradictions, and reversals in these pages may strike you as a touch operatic at times, but they are truer to the flow and churn of aesthetic paradox than an exposition controlled strictly by logic. Rather than a Cartesian cogito, you could call my mo an amo: I like, therefore we are. As women, our taste, pleasure, and desire are our profoundest means to know ourselves and to refine the human condition.
