Benedetta: Naked Lust in Sinful Italy

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17th Century Europe, 17th Century Italy, Benedetta Carlini, Charlotte Rampling, Daphne Patakia, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Monks and Nuns, Paul Verhoeven, Religious Stuff, Virginie Efira

Sorry for my very long absence. Covid completely up-ended my work load in ways that have made doing any writing for pleasure nearly impossible. But this weekend my husband dragged me out of the house to go see a movie, and I felt I simply had to blog about it.

(And my subtitle is a riff on an old Benny Hill skit that reimagines Little Bo Peep as a 70s porn film. For some reason, that skit impressed me way too much as a kid.)

Spoiler Alert: If you plan on seeing this film in the theater, you may want to wait to read this until you have done so, since my review discusses major plot points.

Benedetta (2021, dir. Paul Verhoeven, French with English subtitles) tells the story of a lesbian nun in 17th century Tuscany. She is dedicated to a convent in the small town of Pescia when she is ten. Already at this age she feels a special connection to the Virgin Mary; the night after joining the convent, she kneels in prayer before a statue of the Virgin; the pedestal holding the statue breaks and the statue topples over onto her, pressing its exposed breast close to Benedetta’s face.

A decade later, Benedetta (Virginie Efira) is content with her life as a nun, although she doesn’t get along well with Sister Christina (Louise Chevillotte), who seems to be the biological daughter of the Mother Superior Felicita (Charlotte Rampling in a great performance). But she begins having visions in which Jesus appears to her, often defending her from bandits or snakes. She also begins to discover her sexual attraction to the rather coarse novice nun, Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), when she accidentally sees the novice naked while bathing.

Benedetta’s visions are often accompanied by seizures, and so Felicita decides that Bartolomea should share a cell (or more properly just a curtained-off enclosure) with Benedetta to help her if she has a fit. During one vision, in which Benedetta sees Jesus on the cross and realizes he has a vagina instead of a penis, she receives the stigmata, the wounds of Christ.

Although the convent’s priest believes what Benedetta is experiencing, Felicita is more skeptical, pointing out that genuine stigmata are always accompanied with the wounds of the crown of thorns, which Benedetta does not have. Benedetta leaves the chamber but is soon found collapsed on the floor, bleeding from wounds to her scalp. In an unearthly voice that seems to represent Jesus, she declares that Benedetta is being persecuted. That resolves the question of authenticity for most of the nuns, and word begins to spread through Pescia that she is a saint. The priest pulls some strings and gets Benedetta appointed abbess, relegating Felicita to the status of a mere nun, which she accepts with equanimity.

One of the benefits of being mother superior is that Benedetta and Bartolomea now have a private room, and Bartolomea wastes no time in introducing Benedetta to lesbian sex. Unable to pleasure her deeply enough, Bartolomea carves a statue of the Virgin Mary into a dildo and the two carry on, not realizing that Felicita can spy on them though a hole in the wall.

Although Felicita can accept her demotion, Christina can’t. She tries to denounce Benedetta to the priest in the confessional, falsely claiming that she saw Benedetta cut the stigmata into herself with a piece of broken glass. The priest persuades her to make the accusation in front of the other nuns, but Felicita refuses to support Christina’s version of events and the priest orders Christina to flog herself. The whole incident traumatizes her so much she soon commits suicide by throwing herself off the convent roof.

That persuades Felicita to take action. Even though the Plague has broken out in Tuscany, she travels to Florence and denounces Benedetta to the Papal Nuncio (Lambert Wilson), who arrives and conducts an investigation. He tortures Bartolomea, who eventually reveals everything to him and gives him the dildo as proof. He orders Benedetta to be burned in the town square. But the local populace are not willing to see their saint die, especially since she had promised that Pescia would be spared from the Plague as long as she was alive. Benedetta displays the stigmata and denounces the Nuncio as her persecutor, and the townspeople riot and free her and kill the Nuncio while Felicita, infected with the Plague, throws herself on the flames.

Benedetta (Virginie Efira) displaying her stigmata

Afterwards, Bartolomea confronts Benedetta with a shard of pottery she found when she untied Benedetta from the stake. She accuses Benedetta of being a fraud and faking the stigmata. Benedetta responds that she doesn’t know what she does when she is having visions, and she returns to the convent, with an epilogue text telling us that she lived in solitary confinement for the next 30 years.

I really liked the movie up until the point where the Nuncio got involved, because at that point it degenerated into predictable clichés about tyrannical clergymen torturing and burning people. In particular it dwells at some length on a supposed torture instrument, the Pear of Anguish, which is used on Bartolomea. Supposedly these devices were inserted into an orifice and then cranked open, causing intense pain and damage to bone and tissue. But despite some uncertainty about what ‘pears of anguish’ were used for in the 17th century, they’re not torture devices because the few that aren’t 19th century forgeries aren’t designed to crank open but rather cranked closed; they spring open and don’t generate enough force to do anything more than be vaguely uncomfortable.

A supposed ‘pear of anguish’

But before that, the film offers a nice view of the complexities of convent life: the daily lives of the nuns; some of the work they do; the complex personal politics of the space; and the interplay between faith, skepticism, and politics. The film has a nice running motif of seeing that Verhoeven develops nicely to explore the issue of different kinds of vision.

Benedetta’s visions as they are showed to us are not unlike the visions some medieval nuns reported, and the film consistently refuses to take sides in the question of whether Benedetta’s visions are genuine or whether she suffers from some form of mental illness or epilepsy. Unfortunately, about the time Benedetta becomes mother superior, the film stops showing us her visions, so that element of the film gets somewhat forgotten.

My biggest complaint about the film, which will not be a surprise, is that a film written by two men and directed by one can’t help but indulge the male gaze too much. The nudity slowly becomes more explicit, especially when Bartolomea is stripped naked to be tortured, and in the last conversation between the two nuns both of the women are entirely nude. The two fairly explicit sex scenes feel rather gratuitous. Verhoeven simply can’t resist the lure of the more salacious elements of the story and succumbs to the temptation to treat these ‘lesbians’ with a prurient interest.

Benedetta being taking to the stake

Yeah, But Did It Happen?

A lot of it, yes.

In the early 1980s, historian Judith C. Brown discovered the records of two investigations into the nun Benedetta Carlini in the Florentine archives and was able to reconstruct a substantial amount of information about her. She was born in 1590 to a prosperous silk-worm farmer, Giuliano Carlini. Her birth was a difficult one and Guiliano vowed to dedicate the child to the service of the Virgin Mary if mother and child survived, which they did; ‘Benedetta’ means ‘blessing’. Giuliano, surprisingly, was literate and educated his daughter quite well, emphasizing her spiritual gifts.

As a young girl, she experienced strange things. A black dog mysteriously attacked her and then vanished, and a nightingale seemed to regularly imitate her singing. The family decided that the dog had been the Devil and the nightengale was sent by the Virgin. When she was 9, Giuliano decided that the time had come for Benedetta to enter a convent. She bid farewell to the nightingale and it flew away and was not seen again. She joined the Theatine house in Pescia, a group that were technically not nuns but laywomen living communally and following the Rule of St. Augustine, but Verhoeven can be forgiven for simplifying this detail, and to simplify I’ll just call the inhabitants nuns.

Soon after she joined the Order, Benedetta was praying in front of a statue of the Virgin when it fell over, which scared her but which she interpreted as evidence that the Virgin wished to kiss her. Beyond that, however, she seems to have been a fairly typical if highly obedient nun. Then in 1613, she began to report visions. In her first, she was in a heavenly garden with a beautiful fountain. In other visions, she was attacked by lions and other wild animals, only to be saved by Jesus, who appeared on horseback to defend her. These visions happened when she was praying, and others present reported that she seemed to be in a trance and often gesticulated and spoke incompressible words.

Benedetta and her confessor, Paolo Ricordati, agreed these were real visions, but wrestled with whether they were from God or the Devil. On Ricordati’s advising, she began to pray for struggles, because those would be more likely a gift from God rather than a seducing vision from the Devil. Two years later, her prayers were answered with painful attacks of paralysis. But in 1617, her visions resumed, this time being filled with frightening images of young men pursuing her with weapons; these visions could last for up to 6 to 8 hours. Eventually, she asked for help and it was agreed that a younger nun, Bartolomea Crivelli, was assigned to share her cell and to provide aid when Benedetta requested it.

In 1618, the nuns relocated to a new house, and Benedetta walked the entire route in a trance, seeing angels accompanying her and the Virgin greeting her at the new house. Three months later, she received a trance in which she saw the Crucifixion and received the stigmata, which Bartolomea described as looking like small rosettes.

One of the convents in modern Pescia (not Benedetta’s)

These developments deeply impressed the nuns. They voted to select Benedetta as their new abbess (which didn’t involve demoting their previous abbess). By Lent of 1619, Benedetta was in the habit of preaching sermons to the nuns, a highly irregular thing for an abbess to do. She preached in a trance, encouraging the nuns to scourge themselves as she did so. She spoke not as Benedetta Carlini but as an angel. Ricordati was troubled by this development, but felt that since Benedetta was not preaching per se but rather speaking as a prophetess channelling the words of an angel, it was acceptable.

In March of that year, she had a vision in which Jesus removed her heart. Three days later, he replaced it with his own heart, one that felt much larger. He also ordered her to never eat meat, eggs, or grains and drink only water. He also assigned her a guardian angel, Splenditello, who carried a branch that had flowers on one side to represent the good things she did and thorns on the other to represent her sins; when she erred, Splenditello would strike her with the thorny side, making her feel physical pain.

In May of 1619, Benedetta announced that she was to marry Jesus. (Note that by this time, she was about 30, not about 20 as she is in the film.) After a week of preparations (in which the nuns borrowed numerous items from other religious houses in the area), there was a complex wedding ceremony conducted; this too Father Ricordati was ok with. During the ceremony, Benedetta saw Jesus, the Virgin Mary, numerous saints, and many angels appear, and Jesus put a golden ring on her finger; she narrated all the details to the assembled nuns. Then she preached a sermon speaking as Jesus, declaring that Benedetta was the “empress of all nuns” and that those who did not believe in her would not be saved. The whole ‘marriage with Jesus’ element is something Verhoeven chose to entirely omit from the story, which is a pity because it plays an extremely important role in the actual events.

Benedetta’s behaviors are certainly unusual, but hardly unprecedented. Late Medieval and Early Modern nuns of a more mystical bent frequently had visions; Benedetta’s older contemporary, St Teresa of Avila, is perhaps the most famous example in her period, but Italian nuns such as St Catherine of Siena and St Angela Foligno also had such experiences, and Benedetta and her fellow nuns were highly aware of St Catherine’s example and many of her experiences mirrored Catherine’s, including prolonged fasting, visions, and stigmata. Female mystics frequently spoke of Jesus as the “bridegroom” or “lover” of their soul, and marital imagery was a common way to describe union of the soul with Jesus. And Benedetta was clearly familiar with St Catherine; she was eventually made the house’s patron saint. The two truly unusual elements in the story are the elaborate wedding ceremony, and Jesus and angels speaking directly through Benedetta, but apparently even these elements did not strike Ricordati as automatically problematic, especially since Benedetta had been able to demonstrate some control over the phenomena, thereby conforming to St Paul’s statement that Christians do not receive a spirit of disorder but of order.

St Catherine receiving the stigmata

However, Benedetta’s marriage ceremony coincided with her house’s application to be elevated to a full convent, and that process drew her to the attention of the papal authorities, who had requested that the provost of Pescia, Stefano Cecchi, give them a report. Cecchi was fully aware of the wedding ceremony, and was apparently uncomfortable with it, because he had tried to restrict who could be present at it. Then he forbade anyone to discuss the ceremony, and decided to conduct a formal investigation of the matter.

He examined Benedetta’s stigmata and determined that they produced fresh blood when the dried blood was washed off. He visited her a total of 14 times over the following months, and became more perplexed by her stigmata, because sometimes they seemed to be healing and other times they bled freshly. At one point she exited the examination and then rushed back in with blood pouring down her face and in great pain. Ultimately Cecchi concluded that she was a true visionary. The pope elevated the house to full status as a monastery and Benedetta was confirmed as its abbess. This whole series of events is simplified in the film into a single examination that happens before Benedetta becomes abbess; indeed, it’s really why she becomes abbess.

Two years later, Benedetta died. Ricordati came immediately and commanded Benedetta to live again, and to the nuns’ surprise, she revived and described another vision she had had. Perhaps Ricordati was familiar enough with the symptoms of Carlini’s seizures that he was able to recognize her as being merely unconscious. This incident also happens in the film, but later, during the second formal examination.

The second examination began sometime between August of 1622 and March of 1623. A new papal nuncio, Alfonso Giglioli, became interested in Benedetta for reasons that are unclear. He was far more skeptical of her than Ricordati or Cecchi. During his investigation, Giglioli identified several contradictions in her visions. The ring that she eventually produced as her wedding ring was a shabby one, quite different from what she had described.

The nuns, when questioned, also pointed to some odd behavior. Despite having announced her strict diet, one nun claimed to have seen her furtively eating salami and mortadella. Another said that when she preached and urged the nuns to courage themselves, she never actually struck herself with the scourge she felt but rather seemed to smear it with blood from her hand. Damningly, two nuns claimed they had repeatedly spied on Benedetta through a hole in a door and had witnessed her renewing her wounds with a needle. (There is a hole in the bedroom wall in the film, but Felicita uses it not to spy on Benedetta’s stigmata but on her sexual activities.)

The most startling testimony, however, came from Sister Bartolomea. She said that repeatedly, after she had disrobed, Benedetta would call to her for assistance and when she came over, Benedetta would throw her down on the bed, climb on top of her, and rub their bodies together. When Benedetta did this, she would speak as Splenditello and tell Bartolomea that what they were doing was not a sin because he was doing it, not Benedetta. Benedetta, when question by the investigators, denied having any memory of what she did when Splenditello was controlling her. This is the point where Verhoeven really deviates from the facts. Splenditello never plays any role in the movie at all, and in the film it is Bartolomea and not Benedetta who initiates sex. There was no dildo. The nuncio himself never showed up in Pescia, never tortured Bartolomea, never attempted to burn Benedetta, and was not killed in a riot (he actually died in 1630).

By November of 1623, the investigation had ended and the nuncio had issued a ruling. Benedetta’s stigmata had vanished and she said that she was no longer receiving any visions, although she does not seem to have admitted any imposture. It was concluded that all the apparent miracles were intentionally fabricated by Benedetta. She was removed as abbess. But exactly what the nuncio did beyond that is unclear because she mostly disappears from the records at that point. In 1661, a nun recorded in her diary that Benedetta had died at age 71 of a fever after spending 35 years in prison, by which she likely meant solitary confinement. If that nun was correct, however, that means that Benedetta was not put into solitary confinement in 1623, because that would have been 38 years earlier. Brown speculates that Carlini must have done something in 1626 that merited more harsh treatment than whatever she received in 1623, but we can only speculate about what might have happened. But the townspeople were apparently still quite interested in Carlini, because they sought to get access to her body and the nuns had to bar the monastery doors until she could be buried. Bartolomea died in 1660.

Much of the scholarly debate about Carlini has turned on the question of how to interpret her sexuality. Brown read her as being a lesbian, using the character of Splenditello to express her own lesbian desires, and therefore viewed her through the lens of the history of women’s spirituality and sexuality. But some critics have argued that doing this reads Carlini through a contemporary lens of sexual identities that would have been entirely foreign to Carlini herself; the very concept of ‘lesbians’ did not exist in the 17th century and it’s not even clear that Carlini, Bartolomea, and the investigators recognized Bartolomea’s description as being about sex. For most people of the era, sex required a penis being inserted into some orifice, so in the absence of a penis, they may not have recognized sex as happening. (And it’s worth noting the Verhoeven evidently can’t imagine lesbian sex without a substitute penis.)

Historian Brian Levack has approached Carlini from a very different standpoint. In his work on exorcism in the Early Modern period, he argues that demonic possession provided female ‘victims’ an opportunity to depart from normal social rules about meekness, passivity, and restraint by enacting a wide range of taboo behaviors, including convulsions, blasphemy, vomiting, exhibitionism, and so on. Thus possession was an opportunity for victims to perform a drastically different social role than the one they normally were bound by. (In a previous blog post, I discussed a similar reading of the Salem Witch Trials.) Levack thus views possession as a form of performance, situating Benedetta’s actions not in the history of sexuality but rather in the history of religious theater, and it is worth noting the degree to which Benedetta’s visions and seizures had a literally theatrical element to them; the most obvious example is her wedding ceremony, but also her move from the old house to the new one and a couple of religious processessions she orchestrated.

Finally, it is worth at least pondering the gender roles Benedetta maintained. Although she was a nun and underwent a spiritual marriage to become a literal bride of Christ, she occasionally adopted the persona of two male figures, Jesus and Splenditello. When she was Jesus, Benedetta was both bride and groom in one body, and when she had sex with Bartolomea, she played a male role both by initiating sex through seduction/deception and by being on top of Bartolomea. Is it possible that we should view Benedetta not as a lesbian but as an example of what we today would call a trans man or gender-fluid person? Unfortunately, that’s a question we can’t answer because the investigators didn’t ask Benedetta about how she understood her gender. She never engaged in any form of cross-dressing or breast-binding (that we know of), but she did engage in attempts to control her body through fasting and, apparently, through self-mutilation, both practices which some trans individuals today struggle with. Her seizures, the physical pain her body experienced, and her dramatic death and revival might also point to a sense of alienation from her body. And to borrow a point from Levack’s approach, her behavior while having visions and being possessed allowed her to temporarily put off her highly-restricted feminine identity and engage in male-coded behavior such as drawing attention to herself, preaching, taking a leadership role, and initiating sex. Thus it is not unreasonable to consider whether Benedetta was seeking to express a sense that she was male even if her body was not.

Benedetta does a nice job of calling attention to a fascinating and very obscure woman. The film does a very good job of exploring convent life and exploring some of Benedetta’s experiences. But by making Bartolomea the sexual aggressor and excluding the details about Splenditello, I think Verhoeven misrepresents Benedetta in a fairly key way, and the whole third act departs from the most fascinating elements of her story in favor of a clichéd false ending that seriously diminishes my appreciation for the film.

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Queen of the Desert: Getting It All Right and All Wrong

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20th century Middle East, Damian Lewis, Gertrude Bell, Interesting Women, Iraq, James Franco, Lawrence of Arabia, Middle East, Nicole Kidman, Queen of the Desert, Robert Pattinson, Werner Herzog

You might be forgiven for not realizing that Werner Herzog released a movie in which Nicole Kidman plays Gertrude Bell a couple of years ago. Queen of the Desert (2015, dir. Werner Herzog) got panned by the critics when it was given a showing and as a result it got shelved until 2017, when Letters from Baghdad, a documentary about Bell was released. Even then, it was released to only two American theaters and had no PR campaign to support it. Needless to say, it sank like a stone.

But you might also be forgiven for not knowing who Gertrude Bell was. She only played a major role in shaping 20^thcentury international events in the Middle East.

Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Bell was born in 1868 to a British industrialist and minor noble. She studied modern history at Oxford, being one of the first women to graduate with a first class honors degree. In her mid-20s, she began to travel the world, visiting her uncle in Tehran, where she acquired an abiding love of the Middle East. She had a talent for languages, ultimately becoming fluent in Persian, Arabic, French, and German and able to hold a conversation in Turkish and Italian. This linguistic skill proved enormously useful as she traveled through Ottoman Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Arabia. She became interested in archaeology and did work in Mesopotamia and southern Asia Minor, where she met T.E. Lawrence, the famous ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.

Gertrude Bell

When the Great War broke out in 1914, the British, who controlled Egypt, realized that they had very little real intelligence on much of the Middle East. So they summoned both her and Lawrence to Cairo and eventually appointed her as a Liaison Officer to the Arab Bureau in Cairo, making her the first female intelligence officer in the British military. (She was called “Major Miss Bell”.) She used her extensive knowledge of the geography and peoples of the region to draw maps and offer guidance on how to navigate the political conflicts particularly of Mesopotamia.

Bell possessed extensive knowledge of the various tribal groups, arguably superior to even Lawrence. The British didn’t have the forces to conduct a full-scale invasion of the Ottoman Empire, so instead they focused on persuading native peoples in the region to revolt against the Turks. In that project, Bell and Lawrence made a major contribution to the war effort, eventually helping to foment the Arab Revolt.

After the British occupied Baghdad, she was sent there and appointed as Oriental Secretary. As a result, when the Ottoman Empire was broken up in 1919, she emerged as one of the most important figures in the discussion of how to redraw the map of the Middle East. Her report “Self Determination in Mesopotamia” argued that Iraq should be established as an independent state and is considered a masterpiece of the genre. The British Commissioner for Mesopotamia disagreed, pushing for an Arab government under British control, but in 1921, Winston Churchill, the new Colonial Secretary, agreed with Bell. As a result, Bell’s views on the region were to a considerable extent decisive for the establishment of Iraq and Jordan as independent states.

Bell and Lawrence understood that the British had over-promised. British officials had basically told everyone, including the Arabs and the Zionists, that they could have independent territory. That was bound to make some people unhappy at some point. Lawrence mostly gave up in disgust, but Bell was determined to find a way to satisfy at least some of the people she had dealt with.

The Hashemites and the Al-Sauds

One thing Bell’s adventures in Arabia had taught her was that there were two dominant clans in the region, the Hashemites and the Al-Sauds. The Hashemites were the clan of the Prophet Muhammad. Hussein ibn Ali, one of the leaders of the Hashemites, was a sharif, a direct descendant of the Prophet, and the Emir of Mecca, the holiest city for Muslims. He represented a very traditional form of Islam, open, tolerant, and not very dogmatic.

In contrast, Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman ibn Faisal ibn Turki ibn Muhammad al-Saud came from a family that had ruled Arabia by right of conquest off and on for two centuries. The Al-Sauds (or just Saudis, as they are called in the West) had built an alliance with the followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d.1792), a Puritanical Muslim imam who had developed a movement aimed at purging Islam of what Abd al-Wahhab saw as unIslamic innovations that had crept into the faith in the generations after the Prophet. Despite their traditionalist rhetoric, the Wahhabis represented a radical new branch of Islam—strict, dogmatic, and intolerant of anything that did not fit into their vision of what Islam ought to be. In their minds, Wahhabism represented the only genuine form of Islam and anyone who did not accept it could be conquered and forced to obey Wahhabi principles. For example, when the Wahhabis first got control of Mecca in the early 19th century, they destroyed the tombs of all of the Prophet’s wives and other members of his family because they felt that honoring anyone other than Allah was immoral; only an enormous outcry kept them from destroying the Prophet’s tomb. (A few years ago, archaeologists found what they believed was the grave of the Prophet’s mother Amina. The Saudi government promptly destroyed it.)

To simplify a complex set of issues, the alliance was based on the principle that the Al-Sauds would impose Wahhabist practices on Arabia in return for the Wahhabis aggressively supporting the Al-Sauds. Both the Wahhabis and the Al-Sauds wanted to control Mecca and Medina because it strengthened their claim to represent true Islam, while Hussein wanted to control the Hejaz (roughly, western Arabia, where Mecca and Medina are located). Bell is probably the first Westerner to realize that al-Saud and Hussein were on a collision course, and she favored Hussein. The British promised Hussein a wider Arab state (roughly everything between Egypt and Persia with a few small exceptions), but then turned around and agreed to give Syria and Lebanon to France and agreed in theory to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Hussein helped lead the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. But after the war, he was angry at the British for not giving him everything he felt he had been promised, so he simply declared himself the king of the Hejaz and king of all Arabs to boot. When al-Saud attacked the Hejaz in 1924, the British provided no help to Hussein, and he was quickly driven out and effectively lost his kingdom. Al-Saud established the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, an officially Wahhabist state whose current ruler, Salman ibn Abdulaziz, is his son. The Saudis have been promoting their intolerant strand of Islam ever since, using their oil dollars to spread Wahhabi Islam across the planet.

The British were in a much better position to dictate what was going to happen further north, in Mesopotamia. They had already agreed to give what would become Syria and Lebanon to the French, but the territories between there and Persia were more or less theirs to organize. Bell was determined to put the sons of Hussein, Faisal and Abdullah, on their own thrones. Ultimately, with her aid, Faisal wound up ruling Iraq and Abdullah became the king of Transjordan (now generally just called Jordan). Thanks to Bell, both of these countries became independent Arab states rather that puppet-states of the British.

But in one respect, Bell badly mis-stepped in the arrangements she fought for. The region of Iraq is essentially three highly distinct zones. The northernmost zone is dominated by the Kurds, a Sunni Muslim ethnic group whose population is spread across modern Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran, with the strongest concentration being in northern Iraq. The middle zone is dominated by Sunni Arabs, who share a religious sect with the Kurds but who are ethnically distinct from them (the Arabs are a Semitic people, while the Kurds see themselves as Medes, a branch of the Persian peoples). The southern zone is dominated by Shiite Arabs, ethnically the same people as the Sunni Arabs but belonging to a rival sect of Islam. In other words, Iraq is like a slice of Neapolitan ice cream where the three flavors dislike and distrust each other and would all rather be in their own sundaes. Oh, and the hot fudge on top of that sundae is oil.

The British didn’t want to have to deal with three separate states producing the oil they wanted, so they wanted all three states to be one country. Bell considered the Kurds to be too turbulent and unreliable to govern an independent state, so including Kurdistan in Iraq made some sense to her. Perhaps even more fatefully, most of Bell’s contacts in the Arab world were Sunnis like the Hashemites. Although she had spent some time in Shiite Persia, she never really made any close contacts with Shiite leaders in southern Iraq. As a result, she saw the Middle East very much through the Sunni lens and she trusted the Sunni Arabs far more than the Shiite Arabs. The British authorities seem have had little comprehension of the difference between the two sects and Bell doesn’t seem to have done very much to correct their ignorance (or failed in her efforts, perhaps). In her view, it made sense for the Sunni Arab middle zone of Iraq to control the Shiite Arab south and she accepted the idea that they would also control the Sunni Kurdish north. So the Iraq that she helped create gave most of the political power to the Sunni Arabs, who were numerically the smallest of three groups.

The Mesopotamia Commission, with Bell second row, second from the left

Although many people consider Bell a shrewd diplomat, she badly misjudged the situation on this issue. Lawrence seems to have seen things more clearly. He once said “That Irak [sic] state is a fine monument; even if it only lasts a few more years, as I often fear and sometimes hope. It seems such a very doubtful benefit—government—to give a people who have long done without.” Leaving aside the rather condescending view of Arab self-governance, Lawrence seems to have sensed that Bell’s Iraq was something of a Frankenstein monster that would probably not last very long.

And the predictable gradually happened. The Hashemite monarchy of Iraq was overthrown in 1958 (after having been briefly deposed and reinstated by British intervention in 1941) by the Ba’athist party. The Ba’athists eventually gave rise to Saddam Hussein, a brutal thug who courted his Sunni Arab base by aggressively persecuting and subordinating both the Kurds and the Shiites. Hussein, of course, was overthrown by the American invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush, and the country has been struggling to hold itself together ever since, because the US wants it to stay one country while the Kurds want to separate and the Shiite Arabs long to punish the Sunni Arabs for what the Ba’athists did to them. As a result the Sunni Arabs don’t trust the majority Shiites, and that’s turned into fertile recruiting grounds for Wahhabist groups like Al-Qaeda and Daesh (commonly known as ISIS or the so-called Islamic State).

It would be unfair to lay all of that at Bell’s door, but political violence between these three groups was certainly a predictable consequence of forcing them into the same state together. Bell was a remarkable woman, but she wasn’t able to truly escape the colonial mindset and recognize that these three people needed to make their own choices and not simply have the British impose a choice on them. The British government was heavily dependent on her understanding of the region when it was making that decision, and she allowed her personal relationships with Sunni leaders to blind her to the dynamics of the situation she was helping to create.

So while we can celebrate her as a bold woman who accomplished a lot in an era when women were often kept from accomplishing much at all, and while we can acknowledge that she powerfully shaped the Middle East as it exists today, we also have to admit that she made a disastrous set of choices that are partly responsible for the violence and instability of the region to this day.

 

Queen of the Desert

Now that you have some idea who Gertrude Bell was, let’s get on to Herzog’s film, which he wrote as well as directed. The first thing I have to say is that it’s one of the most accurate films I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the most accurate biopic I’ve reviewed. Virtually every incident and major development in the film is grounded in fact, so far as I can see, or a reasonable extrapolation of fact. The film fiddles a few chronological issues, but not in ways that drastically change things. For example, she’s shown already being the Oriental Secretary in Cairo around 1915, when in fact she didn’t get that office until after she arrived in Baghdad in 1917. She is shown meeting Lawrence (Robert Pattinson) at Petra rather than Carchemish, presumably because Petra is a more impressive site to film at than Carchemish. Small points like that I can generally overlook because they don’t seriously affect how we understand the events of Bell’s life.

Kidman as Bell with Pattinson as Lawrence

In a really nice touch, the film quotes her letters, diary, and poetry repeatedly, and even goes so far as to have Sir Mark Sykes say about her, “Confound the silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!”, which is actually a quote from a letter he wrote. So it’s clear that Herzog took real pains to be accurate. My hat’s off to Herzog in that respect.

And yet I just can’t help but think that he got everything wrong.

Kidman’s Bell is very much a Herzogian protagonist in the sense that she’s an individual pursuing her own goals despite what the world thinks of her and despite the obstacles she encounters, none of which are honestly that big. With the exception of her father’s refusal to allow her to marry Henry Cadogan (James Franco), a minor British diplomat who commits suicide as a result, every problem she encounters she effectively surmounts by the end of the next scene, leaving very little dramatic tension in the film. (As a side note, Kidman’s performance is quite good, although it’s a bit jarring to see a woman in her 50s playing a woman in her 20s for the first third of the film, the same way it is jarring to see Harrison Ford playing action roles in his mid 60s. As a result, I never once forgot I was watching an actress at work. But with a performer of Kidman’s skill, that’s not always a bad thing.)

Kidman as a 25-year old Bell with James Franco as the doomed Cadogan

Herzog builds the film around two failed and unconsummated love affairs, with Cadogan, whom she can’t marry because he’s badly in debt, and with Charles Doughty-Wylie (Damien Lewis), whom she can’t marry because he’s trapped in an unhappy marriage with a woman who is threatening to commit suicide if he leaves her. To escape his bind, he enlists when the War comes and probably intentionally gets himself killed at Gallipoli (which might be a bit of a distortion, but it’s speculation by the character who tells Bell of his death). To find solace from Cadogan’s death, she turns to exploring Syria, and to find solace from Doughty-Wylie’s death, she seems to focus on getting thrones for the Hashemite princes. So the film essentially uses her failed relationships as an explanation for why she becomes an explorer, which seems both to oversimplify and distort Bell’s wanderlust. She was an explorer because she wanted to explore and learn, not because she was a sad spinster.

And at the same time, although the film accurately captures major moments in her travels, it utterly fails to convey a sense of who this woman was, why she traveled, and what people made of her. On two separate occasions, she is captured, first by Druze tribesmen in Lebanon and then by Arab tribesmen in Arabia. But in the very next scene, the tribal chieftain is so charmed by her that he lets her go, and at no point is it clear what they find so charming about her. It’s not a failure in Kidman’s performance. It’s just that Herzog can’t convey either what Bell found so compelling about Arab society or what Arab leaders found so interesting about her. Her ability to learn about Arab culture and build relationships with Arab leaders is never explored in anything but the most superficial way, merely taken as a given, the same way that her remarkable gift for languages is condensed to a single scene in which Cadogan gives her a lesson in reading Farsi and a later comment that her Arabic pronunciation is very good. So the movie just sort of hand-waves what ought to have been a core part of her story.

Most frustratingly for me, the film focuses on the superficial story of her wanderings and almost entirely leaves out the complex political issues that Bell became so deeply involved while she was stationed in Cairo and Baghdad. She meanders around the Middle East, has men fall in love with her (or fall in like with her, in Lawrence’s case), charms Arab leaders, and get sad when Cadogan and Doughty-Wylie die. The end. There are two scenes of British leaders debating what to do with the Middle East, but the deliberations can be mostly summarized as “we’ll let the French have Syria and Lebanon, and good riddance”. The actual issues aren’t explained at all, and it’s never very clear why Bell’s contribution matters, because she’s not even in those scenes. Then right at the end, she tells Faisal and Abdullah (both of whom are seen for the first time in this scene without any real exploration of who they are) that they will both be rulers. She gets on a camel and rides off into the desert as they watch and marvel at this prediction, and we get an epilogue text. It kind of feels like a movie about Teddy Roosevelt where they forget to mention that he became president. Bell deserves a movie like Fitzcarraldo, not Queen of the Desert.

Oops, wrong Queen of the Desert

You might be forgiven for leaving this movie with absolutely no idea that she basically drew the map for the region the United States has been entangled with since the 1990s, because if you don’t come into the movie knowing it, the movie will never tell you. Herzog got all the facts right but told the wrong story and told it surprisingly poorly.

If you want to support this blog, please think about donating to my PayPal account. Those who make a generous donation can request that I review a particular film or tv show and if I think it’s suitable for the blog, I’ll write at least one review of it.

 

Want to Know More?

Queen of the Desert is available through Amazon. Honestly, though, unless you are a fan of Nicole Kidman, you can probably skip this and watch the PBS documentary Letters from Baghdad instead.

If you want to read up on Bell, you might try Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations. Or read her own words in A Woman in Arabia: The Writings of Gertrude Bell. It’s the basis for the PBS documentary.

The Favourite: Random Thoughts

Tags

17th Century England, 17th Century Europe, Early Modern England, Early Modern Europe, Emma Stone, Interesting Women, Olivia Colman, Queen Anne, Rachel Weisz, Sarah Churchill, The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos

I am very sorry for the long delay in posting. This semester has been hellishly busy with seemingly endless rounds of exam grading and other work that have left no time or energy to do more enjoyable things like blogging. But I finally have a spare moment, so I figured I should finish up my thoughts about The Favourite (2018, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos). Sadly, I’ve forgotten a number of the things I wanted to say about it, so this post is going to be rather bullet-pointy.

 

• At the start of the film, Anne (Olivia Colman) is thinking about building a palace for Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and her husband. This is quite problematic. The film must be set after 1711, because Anne’s husband Prince George is dead (the film never touches on the fact that she must be grieving for him). But work started on Blenheim Palace in 1705 and by 1711 it was already quite advanced, although when Anne and Sarah had their final break in 1712 the building was still unfinished and Parliamentary funding for it got shut off until after Anne’s death.
• The same scene presents Anne as thinking that the battle of Blenheim meant that the war with the French was basically over. Sarah has to correct her, and the scene serves to establish that Anne is basically incapable of running the government and that Sarah is functionally Anne’s prime minister. This is simply untrue. Anne was not an intellectually-gifted woman, but she took her duties as sovereign very seriously and was actively involved in the day-to-day affairs of state. Her stubborn insistence on particular courses of action occasionally frustrated her ministers and advisors because they had no way to over-rule her when she put her foot down.
• Similarly, Sarah was not the driving force behind Anne’s government. The film suggests that she basically lived in Anne’s palace and ran the government consistently for a decade. Sarah certainly spent a good deal of time in Anne’s household, but she also spent an enormous amount of time at the Churchill family estates because, among other things, she produced seven children with her husband, all but two of whom survived into their late teen years or beyond. That means that a good deal of Sarah’s time was spent at home tending her family like any good early 18^thcentury woman was expected to do. She was also an astute manager of the family estates, which would also have occupied a good deal of her time and attention. And she was also occupied with the construction of Blenheim Palace. One of the reasons we know so much about these two women’s relationship is that they wrote each other letters constantly precisely because they weren’t always together. Anne certainly listened to Sarah’s ideas, but she often disagreed with them.
• One scene shows Sarah basically writing Anne’s parliamentary speech for her. This is certainly untrue. Royal speeches were written by the queen’s ministers. Drafts might go back and forth between the queen and her officials with revisions, insertions, and so on, but Sarah Churchill would have had only a minimal role in that process.
• The phrase “prime minister” gets used several times in the film, which two factions competing for the office. That office wouldn’t exist for about a decade at the time of the film. It evolved during the reign of George I (1715-1727), in part because George was also the ruler of Hanover and therefore did not reside full-time in England, thus making it necessary for him to have an official who exercised a greater degree of governmental oversight that had been traditional in previous reigns. The first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, held three offices that had traditionally been separate—First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Leader of the House of the Commons. This collection of offices made him the most powerful man in government. So the film is being anachronistic here, but only by about a decade or so.
• The last act turns on Abigail’s (Emma Stone) scheming. She drugs Sarah’s tea, so that when Sarah goes riding, she passes out, injures herself, and awakens in a brothel with a horrible scar on her cheek that she spends the rest of the film covering up with a lace veil. That is entirely invented. There is absolutely no basis for it at all.
• While Sarah Churchill was convinced that her fall from grace was caused by Abigail Hill displacing her as Anne’s favorite, there is little evidence that Anne considered Abigail anything more than a servant she liked. There is no evidence that Abigail had any meaningful influence with Anne over political matters or anything else substantive. Sarah’s fall was much more deeply rooted in Sarah’s own overbearing personality, which Anne slowly tired of as time went by, especially given Sarah’s tendency to bully Anne about political decisions that she disagreed with. When Prince George died, Sarah refused to wear mourning clothes, implying that Anne’s dramatic gestures of grief were faked, and Sarah ordered George’s portrait taken out of the queen’s bedroom, which Anne found profoundly cruel. The final precipitant for the break was an incident in which Sarah and Anne were riding to church in a carriage and got into a disagreement. As they reached the church, Sarah told Anne to be quiet lest the crowds hear them quarreling. Anne found Sarah’s shushing of her to be insulting and presumptuous.
• The whole “rabbits as substitute children” thing is made up.

I like The Favourite, but the longer I sit with it, the more I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something misogynistic about it. None of the women in it come across well: Anne is petulant, weak, and stubborn. Sarah is arrogant and presumptuous, although she insists she just loves the queen. Abigail is a liar and schemer who at the end of the film literally tortures a rabbit just because she can. The film punishes all three women with its conclusion: Anne has swapped lovers but she knows Abigail doesn’t really love her. Abigail has gotten power, but the price is sexually servicing a queen who despises and torments her. Sarah has fallen from grace, lost her best friend, been forced to go into exile because of an unjust legal charge, and lost her beauty.

Although in theory these women are struggling about political power, none of the political issues matter to the viewer at all, so it’s really just a three-sided cat-fight in which the weapons are sex, lies, and drugs, all traditionally weapons attributed to women. So while nominally feminist in its approach, the film falls back on traditional ideas about women as schemers, poisoners, and seducers. It’s great that Lanthimos made a film with three female leads, all of whom are richly complex characters. I just wish he could have made a film that actually liked its characters.

 

Want to Know More?

The Favourite is available on Amazon now.

Although it’s close to 40 years old now, Edward Gregg’s Queen Anne is still probably the essential historical take on her.

The Favourite: Was Queen Anne a Lesbian?

Tags

18th Century England, 18th Century Europe, Abigail Masham, Early Modern Europe, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Kings and Queens, Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill, The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos

 A key plot point of The Favourite (2018, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) is that Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is in a secret lesbian relationship with Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz). When Abigail (Emma Stone) discovers this, she sets out to replace Sarah in Anne’s bed as well as her confidences. When Sarah discovers that she’s been replaced, she blackmails Anne by threating to publish Anne’s letters which would reveal their intimacies. The film is pretty explicit, presenting sex scenes and showing Abigail naked in Anne’s bed. So how true is this? Was Anne a lesbian?

 

“Spoiler” Alert: Since the film is still in the theaters, you may wish to see the film before you read this review, since I do discuss key details of the film. However, if you know anything about Anne and Sarah Churchill, there’s not really anything to spoil. There are no unexpected plot twists, so you can probably just keep reading.

First, as I’ve mentioned before, analyzing the sexuality of historical figures can be difficult. The modern language of homosexual/bisexual/heterosexual didn’t exist until the later 19^thcentury, and the concept of ‘sexual orientation’ didn’t exist either. The word ‘lesbian’ wouldn’t acquire its modern usage until that time. (Prior to then, it just meant someone from the island of Lesbos.) However, for the purpose of this post, I’m going to refer to female same-sex desires and sexuality activity as “lesbianism”, simply because it’s the term we tend to use nowadays. Note that the term as I am using it here doesn’t refer purely to women who felt desire exclusively for other women. All the women we’re going to discuss here were married and had multiple children, and so may have been bisexual as much as lesbian in modern terms.

In the 17^thand 18^thcenturies it was understood that some people did have sex with members of their own sex, but this was seen more as an immoral activity than an innate difference in their sexuality. In this period, male homosexuality was generally scorned. Female homosexuality was less acknowledged, in part because in the absence of a penis, it was less clear that what two women did in bed together was actually sex. (Indeed, there is evidence that some 19^thcentury lesbians may not have recognized their own intimate relationships as sexual even when they seem to us to be having sex. If one thinks of sex purely as involving penetration with a penis, a kiss between two women is not sex, regardless of where that kiss might be planted.)

That said, the 17^th century had a good deal of room for what we would see as homosexuality and bisexuality among both aristocratic men and women. Anne’s grandfather James I was known to have had many male favorites (although there is no clear evidence he had sex with any of them), and her brother-in-law William III was rumored to have developed a taste for men after his wife’s death (although again, there’s no solid proof he ever did anything). There was a strong culture of female ‘Romantic Friendship’ in the Stuart period, in which women were encouraged and expected to express their feelings for female friends in terms comparable to those expected between a heterosexual couple. The culture of Romantic Friendship particularly flourished in the period after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660.

Some scholars, especially LGBT scholars, have explored the extent to which Romantic Friendship may have expressed or served as cover for actual lesbian relationships. There was court gossip about ladies-in-waiting having affairs with each other. While this was immoral by the standards of the day, it wasn’t illegal (whereas male homosexuality was), and because it posed no threat to a man’s control of his wife’s reproduction, it was mostly permitted.

If this interests you, you might check out Heather Rose Jones’s Lesbian Historic Motif podcast. Jones is a historical fiction author who has done a good deal of writing exploring the lesbian text and subtext of late Stuart literature and devotes a whole episode of her podcast to the question of Anne’s sexuality, where she digs into the context more deeply than I do here. (She takes a much more favorable view of Sarah Churchill than I do, tending to accept Sarah’s characterization of Abigail Hill as a schemer and viewing Anne as vulnerable to the manipulations of others.)

 

Anne’s Marriage

The starting point for any discussion of Anne’s sexuality has to be her marriage, because it provides our only solid evidence for Anne’s sexual activity. Anne married her cousin Prince George of Denmark in 1683, when she was 18 years old. The marriage was arranged a few years earlier for diplomatic reasons, so Anne had no real choice as to her husband.

Queen Anne

The marriage lasted down until George’s death from respiratory problems in 1708. By most measures, it was a happy marriage. Anne and George got along quite well, and spent the majority of their marriage living together, which was definitely not a requirement of marriages at the time. George was not a particularly ambitious man and seems to have been quite clear that he was the junior partner in the marriage, especially after Anne became queen. During her reign, he only ever attempted to strongly influence her once, when he sought to persuade her that she had to accept the removal of one of her trusted ministers. To judge by the frequency with which Anne got pregnant (three times in one year at one point), they appear to have had a very healthy sex life, and Anne was deeply distressed when George died. Soon after his death, Sarah ordered his portrait removed from Anne’s bedroom, on the theory that seeing the portrait would increase Anne’s distress, but Anne was very upset by the action and found Sarah to be cruel.

The one way in which the couple were not happy was in the area of child-bearing. In this arena, the couple suffered profound tragedy. For a woman in her position, having a child was a vital consideration, and on top of that Anne seems to have had very intense maternal instincts. But her health was poor most of her life (indeed, she was essentially an invalid her entire reign), and bringing a healthy child to term was extremely difficult for her.

She got pregnant very soon after her marriage and between then and 1700, she had at least 17 pregnancies. (I say “at least” because she also had either two or three false pregnancies. There is some uncertainty about the outcome of the first of those potential false pregnancies.) Of those 17 definite pregnancies, 7 ended in miscarriages, 5 ended in stillbirths, and 5 ended in live births. Of the five live births, two lived for less than two hours. Her daughter Mary was born in June of 1685 and her daughter Anna Sophia was born in May of 1686. Both died in February of 1687 from smallpox.

Only William, born in 1689, made it out of infancy. But he was always a sickly child. He suffered from convulsions and hydrocephalus (“water on the brain”) and experienced developmental problems; he didn’t walk until he was three and wasn’t really speaking until he was five. But in 1700 he fell ill on his eleventh birthday with what was variously diagnosed as smallpox or scarlet fever and died six days later. Anne had suffered a stillbirth earlier the same year, and so she and George hoped that she might still produce a child, but that stillbirth was her last known pregnancy.

Prince George of Denmark

Anne’s tragedy, then, was that despite being able to get pregnant quite easily and being desirous to have children, her own medical conditions apparently made it very difficult for her bring a healthy child to term. The loss of so many children was unusual, even by the standards of her day in which high rates of child mortality were common. Her mother Anne Hyde had 8 children, three of whom lived less than a year and three more of whom died before the age of five. Her older sister Mary suffered between one and four miscarriages and never had a sustained pregnancy. So the Stuarts were familiar with this sort of domestic tragedy, but not on the same scale.

If all we had to go on was the available facts of her marriage, no one would suspect that Anne was anything other than a heterosexual woman with a healthy libido and a close relationship with her husband for 25 years. So where do these suspicions of lesbianism come from?

 

Sarah Churchill

Anne seems to have had a strong need for a female presence in her life. Between age 4 and age 6 ½, she lost her grandmother, her aunt, and her mother, and this may have contributed to a desire for an intimate relationship with a woman. She seems to have been close to her older sister Mary, but when Anne was 12, Mary left to get married to William of Orange and the two did not see each other much until Mary returned as queen in 1685, eight years later. Anne loathed her Catholic step-mother Mary of Modena and in 1688 actively spread rumors that her step-mother was faking a pregnancy. So Anne’s need for a female relationship could not be met within her family circle.

It’s also clear that there was some concern that Anne felt deep attachment to the women around her. When she was a girl, Anne’s father James became worried that Mary Cornwallis, one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting, exercised too much influence over her and dismissed her. Her uncle Charles II is once reported to have said that “no man ever loved his mistress as [my] niece Anne did Mrs Cornwallis.”

Anne’s relationship with Sarah Churchill provided her with a female authority figure she could be close to. They met in 1671, when Anne was six and Sarah was eleven. Anne was a shy, quiet girl who grew into a shy, quiet woman, while Sarah was a witty, vivacious, confident girl who grew into an increasingly over-confident and arrogant woman. Anne may have been attracted to Sarah’s outgoing nature as the opposite of her own.

Sarah Churchill. Note the key on her hip–that’s the symbol for her office as Mistress of the Privy Purse

For most of the remainder of Anne’s life, the two regularly exchanged letters that reflect an intense degree of feeling. One of Anne’s letters, from 1683, says “lett me beg you not to call me your highness but be as free with me as one friend ought to be with another & you can never give me any greater proofe of your frieindship then in telling me your mind freely in all things.” (quoted in Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 81; all spelling is original) Sometime in the next 6-7 years, the two of them agreed to pet names for each other: Anne was Mrs Morley and Sarah was Mrs Freeman. This is not as strange as it sounds. Anne did something similar with another young female friend, and it was not uncommon in this era for people to use ‘cant’ names in correspondence as a way to be discreet. In Abigail’s surviving correspondence, Anne is her “aunte Pye”.

Anne’s surviving letters are full of expressions of how deeply she loves Sarah. Phrases like “dear Mrs Freeman” and “your poor unfortunate faithful Morly” recur over and over in Anne’s writing. When Sarah and her husband talked of returning to their estates not long after Anne’s coronation, Anne wrote, ‘The thoughts that both my dear Mrs Freeman & Mr Freeman seems to have of retyering [retyring] gives me no small uneasiness…if ever you should forsake me, I would have nother more to do with the world, but make another abdication…I never will forsake your dear self, Mr. Freeman…but allways be your constant faithfull servant…” (quoted in Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 171).

Although contemporaries commented on how close they were and how much they loved each other, they weren’t so close that Sarah didn’t spent a great deal of time away from court. In her letters, Anne frequently complains of Sarah’s absence and asks her to come back to court. The Favouritedepicts Sarah as almost entirely living at Anne’s (unspecified) palace, but this is definitely untrue.

But there are two things missing from the picture provided by the correspondence. One is Sarah’s half of the correspondence. Anne, following Sarah’s request, burned most of Sarah’s letters after reading them. So we can’t easily gauge whether Sarah’s letters included such fervent statements of devotion or whether the relationship was more about Anne adoring Sarah because Anne needed someone to devote herself to. It seems clear that Sarah must have returned Anne’s devotion to some extent; Anne was neither blind nor stupid. But whether Sarah reciprocated Anne’s emotional outpourings the way a romantic partner might is just not clear.

George and Anne

The other thing that’s missing is anything overtly sexual in these letters. Anne clearly loved Sarah deeply, but there’s no indication in the letters that she loved Sarah carnally. She desired Sarah’s presence and attention, but there’s no evidence that she desired Sarah’s body.

Starting in the 1980s, LGBT scholars and amateur historians became interested in “queering the past”. Queering, simply stated, involves looking at an historical person and asking if there is any evidence that person was homosexual. Queering attempts to reclaim a lost LGBT past by reading historical evidence the way LGBT people have often learned to read each other’s small clues of body language, clothing, grooming, and speech. It’s sort of an exercise in ‘historical gaydar’. Because LGBT people generally have to learn to read each other’s subtext to find each other, the idea is that LGBT scholars can spot evidence of same-sex desires in the writings and activities of historical figures.

So while at first glance Anne’s letters seem completely non-sexual, some people have detected veiled sexual desire in words like “passion” and “inclination”. Personally, while I’m very sympathetic to the project of reclaiming the LGBT past, in Anne’s case, I don’t see it, and most other scholars don’t see it either. Anne doesn’t make much reference to Sarah’s appearance or body, she doesn’t mention any desire to touch or hold Sarah, she doesn’t resort to sexually-suggestive metaphors. She just says she loves Sarah, misses her, is devoted to her. This seems to be the language of friendship, not sexual desire.

If all we had to go on was Anne’s letters, there is no reason to think that this relationship was anything other than the sort of typical emotionally intimate relationship 17^thand 18^thcentury women were encouraged to have with each other. So where do these suspicions of lesbianism come from?

 

Enter Abigail

Abigail Hill entered Anne’s service probably in 1697 or so, when Anne determined that one of her “women of the bedchamber” was becoming too old to perform her duties. The women of the bedchamber performed tasks such as helping the queen bathe and dress (but not menial tasks such as scrubbing floors or doing laundry). By 1705, Abigail had some degree of influence with the queen, who agreed to grant her brother a military commission.

In 1706, George’s groom Samuel Masham came back to court after an absence and evidently began romancing Abigail. A year later, the queen arranged to assign Masham command of a regiment that was normally stationed in Ireland while allowing him to remain at court. This was probably done because Samuel and Abigail were courting, since sometime between April and June of that year, the two of them married at Kensington Palace at a moment when Anne was residing there. Anne seems to have given Abigail a rather handsome dowry of £2,000.

This portrait may or may not represent Abigail Masham

All of this was kept secret from Sarah, who only found out later that year when she noticed the queen’s withdrawal of the money from the account books (which Sarah, as Mistress of the Privy Purse, was responsible for). The queen realized that Sarah would take this poorly, and indeed she did, leaping immediately to the unwarranted conclusion that Abigail was now Anne’s favorite. Sarah retained that conviction for the rest of her life, even though it appears to have been untrue. Anne appears to always regarded Abigail as a servant, albeit one she was fond of. For example, Abigail seems to have had very little real influence with Anne in the realm politics; her cousin Edward Harley, who was one of Anne’s most relied- upon ministers, once remarked that while Abigail might be able to pull someone down in Anne’s sight, she did not have enough influence to build someone up. Her main contribution to the politics of her age was to act as a messenger and information conduit between Anne and Harley.

Anne and Sarah’s friendship had already been strained for several years at this point, but Sarah’s paranoia about Abigail caused things to rapidly deteriorate. She stopped residing at Kensington Palace, much to Anne’s dismay. But a year later, when she discovered that Abigail had been permitted to move into some of her rooms in the palace, she furiously paid a visit to court. She brought with her two poems that were currently circulating in London. One was an attack on Abigail’s influence with Harley. The other was about Abigail’s relationship with Anne. Here are four of the 35 verses (set to the tune of “Fair Rosamund,” a ballad about Henry II’s mistress):

 

When as Queen Anne of great Renown

Great Britain’s scepter sway’d,

Beside the Church, she dearly lov’d

A Dirty Chamber-Maid

 

O! Abigail that was her name,

She stich’d and starch’d full well,

But how she pierc’d this Royal Heart

No Mortal Man can tell.

 

However, for sweet Service done

And Causes of great Weight,

Her Royal Mistress made her, Oh!

A Minister of State.

 

Her Secretary she was not

Because she could not write

But had the Conduct and the Care

Of some dark Deeds at Night.

(quoted in Gregg, Queen Anne, p.275)

 

As if that weren’t enough of a hint, Sarah sent a letter to the Anne telling her about the existence of the poem and explaining the point of the song.

“…I remember you said att the same time of all things in this world, you valued most your reputation, which I confess surpris’d me very much, that your Majesty should so soon mention that word after having discover’d so great a passion for such a woman, for sure there can bee noe great reputation in a thing so strange & unaccountable, to say noe more of it, nor can I think the having noe inclenation for any but of one’s own sex is enough to maintain such a character as I wish may still be yours.” (quoted in Gregg,Queen Anne, p.275-6)

While neither the poem nor the letter explicitly says it, the implication is obvious–there are rumors that Anne is having sex with Abigail. This is the first solid evidence that anyone thought Anne was sexually interested in women.

Another anonymous pamphlet of the period depicts Abigail Masham having a fictional conversation with Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s one-time mistress and now wife. In it, Abigail admits that she was suspected of having too-great an attachment to women, which caused her to find a husband to cover her sexual activities. The pamphlet doesn’t say she was having sex with the queen however. It leaves the identity of her lovers up to the reader’s imagination.

The fact that there was a poem and a pamphlet circulating in London gossiping about Anne’s and Abigail’s sexuality suggests at first glance that there must have been serious talk about that relationship. But there is more going on than it looks on the surface. Although it’s not proven, it’s usually thought that these poems and the pamphlet were written by Arthur Maynwaring, a hardcore Whig member of Parliament. He was also an author who specialized in scurrilous political writings that attacked the Crown and defended Whigs like Sarah’s husband. He was very close to Sarah and considered himself her secretary.

Arthur Maynwaring

This raises the very real possibility that Maynwaring wrote this material at Sarah’s behest. Attacking one’s political opponents in anonymous writing was a common tactic in the late 17^thcentury. Sarah was at one point the target of a thinly-veiled roman a clef that depicts her as the center of a circle of lesbians at court. It’s also noteworthy that these works are not attacks on Anne; they’re directed at Abigail, which increases the likelihood that they are Sarah’s effort to undermine Abigail, not efforts to ruin Anne’s reputation.

This poem and this pamphlet are the entirety of the documentary evidence that Anne had sex with women, and they seem to originate from a woman who was bitterly angry at Anne for what she perceived as Anne’s mistreatment of her. If she herself did not ask Maynwaring to write these works, he certainly was drawing on what she had to say about Anne and Abigail. So these sources are not independent evidence that people in early 18^thcentury London thought the queen was a lesbian. They’re really just evidence that someone, probably Sarah, was accusing Abigail of being a lesbian as a way to get Anne to dismiss her from the royal household.

Sarah continued making these claims to Anne until the final collapse of their friendship. But she went a step further. She pointed out to Anne that she could publish the queen’s letters to her if she wished, essentially resorting to blackmail, although she never actually did publish them. Anne clearly took these threats seriously. In the long run, Anne chose to pay her off. Unfortunately we don’t have the last of Sarah’s account books from her time as Mistress of the Privy Purse, but Edward Gregg speculates that Anne permitted Sarah to write off £20,000 that Sarah had borrowed from the Privy Purse to help fund the construction of Blenheim Palace, on top of giving her a £12,000 grant in 1708. That’s an enormous sum of money for the period. Basically, Sarah made out like a bandit from the end of her relationship with the queen.

To my mind, this fact—that the queen paid Sarah so much money to not publish her letters—is the only serious evidence that Anne may have been a lesbian. Why would Anne have paid Sarah off to such a degree if there wasn’t anything inappropriate in those letters?

There seem to be only three possibilities here. First, and least likely, perhaps those letters contained something inappropriate but non-sexual. It’s hard to imagine what that might be, and the fact that Sarah chose to make lesbianism the center of her threat also works against that, so we can probably discard that possibility.

A coin of Anne’s reign

Second, Anne may have made more open references to sexual activity with women in those letters. If that’s the case, it would have had to have been sex with Sarah, not Abigail, because the letters in question mostly pre-date Sarah’s suspicion that Abigail was displacing her. So Sarah was threatening to reveal that she and Anne had been lovers by publishing letters that offered explicit or nearly-explicit references to them having sex. But if that’s true, it was a very risky gambit for Sarah, because actually following through on that threat would have revealed her as a lesbian, and it would have ruined her reputation as well as Anne’s. She was essentially holding a hand grenade and daring Anne to pull the pin, knowing it would blow both of them up. Given Sarah’s later obsession with controlling her reputation through her memoirs, it’s hard to imagine that she would ever have actually taken that step. If this is the right scenario, the incriminating letters must have been destroyed, because they’ve never come to light among the letters Sarah possessed.

Third, there was nothing more incriminating in those letters than Anne’s intense statements of devotion, but Sarah was playing on Anne’s shyness and need for privacy to make Anne feel threatened. Anne was an intensely private woman who only opened up to a few trusted friends. She was deeply loyal to the members of her household; Beata Danvers literally served Anne all the way through her life and reign and Anne only replaced Ellen Bust when it became clear that Ellen was close to death. Sarah’s break with Anne wasn’t just the end of a friendship; it must have felt like a profound betrayal of Anne’s trust, especially as it culminated in blackmail. Perhaps Sarah was able to make Anne think that those letters said something worse than they really did, that Anne had crossed some line into lesbian sentiment.

To me, the third scenario seems most likely. I’m simply not convinced that we have enough evidence to conclude that Anne ever had sex with another woman. It seems more plausible to me that these claims stemmed entirely from Sarah Churchill’s anger over the breakdown of her friendship and her sense, at least partly untrue, that her cousin Abigail had displaced her. There’s just no independent evidence that Anne engaged in sex with women and it’s too easy to see how Sarah might have fabricated the rumors for her own purposes. Even Jones seems to feel the evidence is inconclusive.

It’s also hard to write off Anne’s 17 pregnancies as merely pursuing her duty to produce an heir, especially given that those pregnancies were clearly damaging her health. If she had found sex with George unpleasant, she could easily have put off sex with the excuse that she was not recovered enough from her previous prenancies or that she was too frail. If Anne was involved in women, I think we have to say that she was bisexual rather than homosexual.

However, none of this goes to prove that Anne did not have lesbian desires. It’s clear that her relationships with her female friends were intense (although her love for Prince George seems to have been pretty intense as well and no one ever considers that as evidence that she was heterosexual). Those relationships were intense enough that people around her were aware of her strong affections for women, and this was a trait she demonstrated throughout her life. I don’t think her letters reveal definite evidence of same-sex attraction, but I don’t think we can say they don’t support at least the possibility of it. And the second possibility, that Anne’s letters contained something explicit, cannot be entirely discounted.

I’ll give Jones the last word on the issue:

“…When one digs through the coded language, even if one takes an extremely conservative position that the sexual allegations were all politically motivated, it’s undeniable that Anne’s deepest and most lasting relationships were all with women like Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham, and that those relationships existed in a cultural context where other women with such bonds definitely were engaging in sexual relationships. So, lesbian or not? The distinction seems scarcely worth making.”

 

Want to Know More?

The Favourite is still playing in theaters and so isn’t available on Amazon yet.

Although it’s close to 40 years old now, Edward Gregg’s Queen Anne is still probably the essential historical take on her.

If you’re interested in the issue of homoesexuality in late 17th century England, take a look at Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbians in Early Modern England and Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England as well as Jones’ Lesbian Historical Motif podcast.

The Favourite: First Thoughts

Tags

18th Century England, Abigail Hill, Early Modern England, Early Modern Europe, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Kings and Queens, Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill, The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos

 Last week I got to see The Favourite (2018, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos), a movie about the cinematically-neglected Queen Anne of England (r.1702-1714). It’s a lovely film that focuses on Anne’s relationship with two women, Sarah Churchill and Abigail Hill, and there’s a good deal to say about it, so I’m going to give it two or three posts.

“Spoiler” Alert: Since the film is still in the theaters, you may wish to see the film before you read this review, since I do discuss key details of the film. However, if you know anything about Anne and Sarah Churchill, there’s not really much to spoil. There are no unexpected plot twists, so you can probably just keep reading.

At the start of the film in 1708, Anne (Olivia Colman) is well into her reign as queen, and Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) is her closest friend. Churchill is also the Keeper of the Privy Purse, meaning that she oversees the accounts of the royal household, and Groom of the Stole, meaning that she supervises the queen’s apartments. Anne is in poor health, using a wheelchair to get around, and she is fussy, sullen, lacking in self-confidence, and occasionally explosively demanding, which the film suggests is the consequence having lost 17 children (she keeps rabbits in her bedroom as substitute children). Sarah is self-assured to the point of arrogance, razor-smart, and adapt at managing the queen’s moods. She is Anne’s chief political advisor as well as her closest friend, and her decades of familiarity with Anne have trained her to be startling blunt with the queen. At one point she says “I will always tell you the truth. That’s what love is.” She is also Anne’s secret lover.

Olivia Colman as Anne

Early on in the film, Sarah’s cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) arrives at court. She is the daughter of a minor aristocrat who has fallen on hard times, and so she has been sent to court in the hopes that her kinship with Anne will secure her position in the royal household. Sarah appoints her to the kitchen, but Abigail is either plucky or scheming (Stone does a good job of making it unclear which is the case at the start) and manages to attract Anne’s attention by giving her an herbal remedy that improves her gout. She recognizes Anne’s profound maternal sadness and allows her to express it in a way that Sarah will not. As Abigail rises in the queen’s favor, Sarah becomes jealous, worrying about her place in Anne’s affections, and the result is that Abigail and Sarah become locked in a struggle to see which will be Anne’s bed companion and confidante. In the end, Abigail drugs Sarah’s tea just before Sarah rides angrily from court; the result is that Sarah falls unconscious during her ride and eventually awakens, injured and stuck in a brothel. This gives Abigail the opening she needs to complete her ascendancy. By the time Sarah returns to court, she has been replaced and is forced to leave court. So basically, it’s All About Eve if Margo Channing and Eve Harrington were both trying to sleep with the same woman.

The Favourite is a fun movie. It has a surprising sense of humor for a period drama; it entirely avoids the danger that many costume dramas fall into of being so serious that they become airless. All three of the leads do an excellent job bringing their characters to life as believable people. The film’s depiction of the relationship between these three women is well-handled (although the drugged tea is a bit over the top).

What makes this so much more than just a cinematic cat-fight is that Anne and Sarah are genuinely at the center of their political world; Sarah is married to the duke of Marlborough (Mark Gatiss), the queen’s key general in the war with France and a leading member of the Whig party. As Sarah focuses her attention on the war, the leading Tory, Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult) works to use Abigail as a spy against Sarah. So this isn’t just a film about three women in a complicated relationship. It’s also a film about three women engaging in political maneuvering around each other.

(And if you want a very deep look at the costumes, Frock Flicks has an extensive look at the what the costume designer had to say.)

 

Anne’s Reign

Anne is one of the more obscure English monarchs, at least in the public consciousness. She is the last of the Stuart dynasty, the Scottish dynasty that inherited the throne after the death of Elizabeth I (who to judge from the number of movies about her, must have been the most important British ruler ever). Her father, James II, made the mistake of being the first openly Catholic ruler since Mary I at a time when the English population was pretty hostile to Catholics. In 1688, after three years on the throne, Parliamentary leaders invited the leader of the Netherlands, William of Orange, to come help them out. The result was the Glorious Revolution, a bloodless coup in which James fled the country, Parliament decided that he had actually abdicated, and James’ Protestant daughter Mary was put on the throne jointly with her husband, the afore-mentioned William. William and Mary (you’ve heard of their college, right?) had no children, so it was clear when they stepped up to the throne that Anne was their likely heir.

Rachel Weisz as Sarah Churchill (wearing men’s clothing for some reason)

This period saw the emergence of the first two political parties in English history, the Whigs and the Tories. To simplify some pretty complicated stuff, the Tories were the party of royal authority and High Church Anglicanism. They favored the power of the monarch over the power of Parliament, but they were also the champions of Anglican supremacy, meaning that they felt that no one except committed Anglicans should be allowed to hold public office. (So it was kind of problem for them when James II was trying to use royal authority to except Catholics from the laws barring Catholics from public office.) They were also insistent that the line of succession had to strictly follow the rules of inheritance, which they saw as expressing the will of God. That’s why they were willing to tolerate a Catholic monarch in the first place.

The Whigs, in contrast, favored Parliamentary authority and wanted to limit the monarch’s ability to function independently of Parliament. They were also willing to allow non-Anglican Protestants into office, but generally distrusted Catholics. The Whigs felt that Parliament should have the power to dictate the line of succession, skipping heirs who were Catholic, for example.

Sarah Churchill

Both factions worked together during the Glorious Revolution because both sides saw James as a threat (the Tories thought he was a threat to Anglicanism, while the Whigs thought he was a threat to Parliament. Again, I’m simplifying a complex story.) So they agreed to depose James while pretending he had actually abdicated by fleeing the country. They revised the relationship between monarch and Parliament to make the monarch dependent on Parliament in a variety of ways, thus essentially securing the dominance of Parliament and helping lay the foundations for modern democracy. The Tories weren’t fond of William because he wasn’t Anglican, whereas they quite liked his sister-in-law Anne because she was an absolute committed Anglican. They rallied around her as the focus of opposition to William (setting a trend that was to last for a century, in which the party out of power couched their opposition in terms of support for the heir).

When William died in 1702, Anne succeeded with no challenge whatsoever (her sister had already been dead since 1694). She immediately found herself caught between the Tories and Whigs, both of whom essentially argued that they had to have complete control of the major offices of state and that the other side couldn’t be trusted. The Tories argued that the Whigs didn’t support the monarchy, and the Whigs argued that the Tories were secretly plotting to put James’ Catholic son on the throne. Anne saw her role as sitting above the two factions (the very idea of political parties was barely a quarter-century old, so it makes sense that she didn’t see either side as completely legitimate) and tried to steer a path between them.

In particular, Anne was, as mentioned, a High Church Anglican and was more naturally inclined toward the Tory political philosophy. But her best friend Sarah Churchill and Sarah’s husband John, the duke of Marlborough, were both solid Whigs. This created a situation where Anne was constantly pressured by Sarah to favor the Whigs. To make things more complicated, England was involved in a war with France for virtually the entire duration of her reign, and Marlborough was her indispensable general. Anne could not afford to politically alienate Marlborough.

 

The Sources

Our best source of insight into Anne as a person are her correspondence with Sarah, her best friend for most of her life. The two women wrote each other constantly and discussed not only their personal feelings but also all the political issues of the moment. However, for some reason, Sarah was very insistent that the people she wrote letters to should burn those letters after reading them, so for the most part we only have Anne’s side of the correspondence. Often that gives us a sense of what Sarah had written, but it’s still a rather one-sided view of their relationship (although in a few cases, we do have Sarah’s side of the correspondence).

Emma Stone as Abigail Hill

Another extremely important source of information is Sarah’s memoirs. She published her first version of them in 1730, 16 years after Anne’s death, and a second version, essentially a heavily-revised second draft, in 1742. Because she was so central to the politics of the era, her take on the personalities and events of Anne’s reign has proven extremely influential, but her account is heavily colored by the gradual falling out that she and Anne had as Anne’s reign progressed. Sarah was a smart, lively, charming woman, but she also had a rather inflated sense of her own ability to assess the facts, a fierce temper, and, in the words of one historian, “an almost pathological inability to admit the validity of anyone else’s point of view.” Having fallen out with Anne, Sarah depicted Anne as a dull-witted, foolish woman completely at the mercy of those around her. That view of Anne shaped the way people viewed the queen for more than 2 centuries. When Sarah’s famous descendant Winston Churchill decided to write a massive four-volume history of John Churchill’s life, he relied quite heavily on Sarah’s memoirs. (Incidentally, Sarah is also an ancestor of Lady Diana Spencer, the famous and ill-fated Princess Diana.)

However, when professional historian Edward Gregg sat down to write a biography of Anne in the late 1970s, he came to a very different conclusion. He found Anne to be a shy, quiet woman, but one who quickly matured into a confident politician once she became queen. Rather than being manipulated by those in her court, she skillfully navigated their conflicting demands in pursuit of policies that rose above faction, although she was not always successful in achieving those goals. In Gregg’s view, her chief weakness was not being easily manipulated but quite the opposite; she was a profoundly stubborn woman who had trouble recognizing the need to make concessions.

Within a few years of becoming queen, Anne had developed a very different take on the political issues of the day than Sarah’s, and Sarah’s harsh judgment of her derives to a large extent from her inability to accept that Anne could have formed her own opinions that disagreed with Sarah’s. Anne also tired of Sarah’s presumptuous bullying of her and constant demanding that she appoint Sarah’s preferred candidates to various offices, so that her eventual estrangement from the duchess of Marlborough was largely Sarah’s own fault. Given the remarkable favoritism Anne showed toward the Marlboroughs early in the reign, Sarah generally comes off in Gregg’s version of events as grasping and overly entitled.

Gregg’s view of Anne has drastically altered scholars’ take on her and her reign. As Gregg points out, it was in Anne’s reign that England laid the foundations for the outsized role England was to have in 18^thand 19^thcentury international events. It was during Anne’s reign that England and Scotland were brought together into the United Kingdom, a far from foregone conclusion, given that after Anne’s death, Scotland could easily have wound up with Anne’s Catholic half-brother on the throne while the English wound up with her distant Protestant cousin George I. And Gregg sees Anne as playing an important role in those developments.

Why does this matter? The first draft of The Favourite was written by Deborah Davis, who has a bachelor’s degree in history (I think—she says she “studied history at university” and is described as an historian, but I can’t find anything more specific about her education). She found the story of Anne’s complicated relationship with Sarah interesting and did a good deal of research into the women as she wrote it. In interviews, she mentions three sources that she relied on: the surviving correspondence, Sarah’s memoirs, and Churchill’s biography of John Churchill. So the film’s take on who Anne and Sarah were as people and how they related is to a very considerable extent Sarah’s take on who they were. That means that the film’s version of things is rooted in a now old-fashioned take on Anne’s reign.

In the film, Sarah is certainly imperious toward Anne, but is driven much more by her love of Anne than by her inability to tolerate disagreements. Anne is emotionally erratic and in need of someone who will be more sympathetic to her than Sarah is willing to be, and Abigail is to some extent a schemer who steps into that hole and works to alienate Sarah from Anne. In reality, Sarah required no outside help to alienate Anne.

In my next post, I’ll dig into the film’s treatment of the historical facts.

 

Want to Know More?

The Favourite is still playing in theaters and so isn’t available on Amazon yet.

Although it’s close to 40 years old now, Edward Gregg’s Queen Anne is still probably the essential historical take on her.

If you’re curious about Winston Churchill’s take on the era, Marlborough: His Life and Times is available on Kindle quite cheaply. Churchill was a gifted writer and a rare example of a politician who truly appreciated history, but he wasn’t exactly a great historian.

Agora: Hypatia and the Heliocentric Theory

Tags

Agora, Alejandro Amenábar, Alexandria, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, Hypatia of Alexandria, Interesting Women, Middle East, Movies I Love, Oscar Isaac, Rachel Weisz, Roman Empire

Agora (2009, dir. Alejandro Amenábar) is a surprisingly fresh film about ancient Rome. Unlike most films about ancient Rome, which tend to focus on the period from roughly 100 BC to 68 AD, Agora is set in the late 4^th/early 5^th century AD, as the Roman Empire was entering the decline from which its western half would never recover. Instead of focusing on sword-and-sandal heroics, it tells the twin stories of the religious upheavals in Alexandria, Egypt (one of the largest cities of the ancient world) and of the intellectual pursuits of the female philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria (Rachel Weisz). One of my readers, Jerise, has kindly made a donation to my Paypal account and asked me to review it. I was planning on getting to this film eventually, so thank you Jerise for giving me a reason to get to it sooner rather than later!

Agora tells a complex story, so this review is going to focus specifically on its depiction of Hypatia. We’ll look at the political and religious upheavals in Alexandria in the next post.

Hypatia

Of the historical Hypatia we know only bits and pieces. She was probably born between 350 and 360 AD, and thus was in her 30s or 40s in 391 when the film opens (making Weisz just about the right age to play her). Her father was Theon of Alexandria, a mathematician of some note who was probably responsible for her unusually high degree of education in an era when women were rarely educated at all. She became a Neoplatonic philosopher and taught male students at Alexandria, numbering both pagans and Christians as her pupils. That in itself indicates that she was held in remarkable regard. One of her pupils, Synesius, went on to become the bishop of Ptolemais in Libya, while another, Orestes, became the praefectus Augustalis, essentially the governor of Egypt, although the film simply calls him Prefect.

According to the Greek historian Damascius (d. after 538 AD), one of Hypatia’s students professed his love for her. Damascius gives two different versions of her response. The more polite version (which he discounts) is that she told him that music was the antidote for love. The less polite version is that she handed him a bloody menstrual rag and said “this is what you really love, my young man, but you do not love beauty for its own sake.” Her point in the latter story is that he is merely infatuated with her body, but her body has an ugly side to it.

Of her scholarly works, comparatively little is known, because none of her writings have survived. She is known to have been a mathematician like her father. She was clearly interested in astronomy, because she edited and corrected the most important ancient work on the subject, the Almagest of the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. The Almagest still survives, so we do have something with Hypatia’s fingerprints on it, as it were. She was also interesting in the geometry of cones. She has incorrectly been attributed as the inventor of the astrolabe and the hydrometer (a device for determining the density of liquids). Beyond that, all we know is that she subscribed to the Neoplatonic school of philosophy and that she was a pagan, a fact that was to become extremely important to her eventual fate. As a Neoplatonist, she probably believed in a single god who had much in common with the Christian Creator.

Since we have no historical images of Hypatia, here’s Rachel Weisz instead

Unfortunately for Hypatia, late Roman Alexandria was an extremely tumultuous place religiously, with intense political and religious disputes between the pagans, multiple sects of Christians, and Jews. The city was subject to frequent religious riots and acts of violence. The patriarch of the city, Cyril of Alexandria, was locked in a struggle with Orestes, and because Hypatia was a good friend of Orestes, Cyril’s supporters became convinced that she was preventing a reconciliation between the two men.

In 415, a group of Cyril’s supporters attacked Hypatia. According to Socrates of Constantinople (an historian who died some time after 439 AD), a religious official named Peter led a crowd who waylaid her as she returned home on day in a chariot, dragged her to one of the major churches, stripped her naked and stoned her to death with tiles. They dismembered her corpse and had it burned. The 7^th century historian John of Nikiu (who seems to have been quite hostile to Hypatia) says that Peter’s crowd seized her, stripped her naked, and dragged her through the streets until she died, and then burned her body. A later and more lurid account claims that the rioting crowd flayed her with sea-shells, a detail that modern scholars entirely discount. Regardless of exactly what happened, it’s clear that a mob of Christians led by Peter murdered her and burned her body. Thus died the most highly-educated woman of the ancient world (at least that we know anything about).

Hypatia in Agora

Amenábar’s film manages to include virtually everything we know about Hypatia, although it fleshes out the details considerably with its own invention. But one of the things I love about this film that, with the exception of two fictitious slaves (Davus and Aspasius), virtually every named character in the film was a real historical person. That in itself suggests that Amenábar (who wrote the script) was serious about trying to be historically accurate.

The film opens in 391 with Hypatia teaching Orestes (Oscar Isaac) and Synesius (Rupert Evans). Since Orestes is a pagan, this correctly captures the fact that she taught both pagans and Christians. Orestes is in love with her, makes a public declaration of his love by playing a tune he has composed on the aulos in a theater, and then giving her the aulos. The next day, she responds by giving him her menstrual rag, which he throws down in disgust, not really getting the point she was making. Historically, Orestes is not the student who professed his love to her, but this modest adjustment to fact allows the film to set up the idea that Orestes will be in love with her his whole life, even after he becomes the Prefect.

Oscar Isaac as Orestes

In the film, Hypatia teaches at the Serapeum, an important temple dedicated to the late Egyptian god Serapis. Her father Theon is described as the ‘director’ of this institution, which contains an enormous library, all that’s left of the Great Library of Alexandria. Although the film does distinguish between the Great Library and the Serapeum library, it doesn’t really go out of its way to do so, giving viewers a sense that Hypatia taught at the Great Library.

The Great Library of Alexandria was founded at the end of the 3^rd century BC by Ptolemy Soter, the first member of the last pharaonic dynasty of Egypt, the Ptolemids. At its height, it had over 500,000 books housed in it, far and away the greatest library of the ancient world. It was large enough that the collection wasn’t all housed in one building. The Serapeum was one of the ‘daughter’ libraries.

One of the little puzzles of ancient history is what happened to the Great Library. Although various people have been accused of destroying it, it probably was destroyed gradually by a series of crises, including Julius Caesar’s siege in 48 BC, Emperor Aurelian’s siege in 269 AD, Emperor Diocletian’s harsh actions in 298 AD, Bishop Theophilius’ destruction of the Serapeum in 391 AD, and the Arab conquest of the city in 641.

The film’s version of the Serapeum. The library is the round building in back

Theon may possibly have been associated with the Serapeum, perhaps being educated there, but there is no evidence either that he was the director of the institution or that Hypatia taught there. As a leading philosopher of Alexandria, it’s not a huge stretch to make her one of the Serapeum’s faculty, but that’s an invention of the film.

Hypatia’s Astronomy

Another thing I love about this film is that one of its two plots is Hypatia’s drive to figure out an astronomical puzzle. The film opens and closes with the shot of the whole Earth, making it clear that this film is to some extent about astronomy. Early in the film, Hypatia lays out the classical Greek understanding of the universe. The Earth must be the center of the universe because while objects in the heavens move in perfect circular orbits, on Earth objects move in a linear direction downward, toward the center of the universe. If the Earth were not the center of the universe, objects would fly off the planet seeking the center of the universe. In the absence of any concept of gravity, the idea that physical things have an inherent attraction to the center of the universe makes a pretty good explanation.

Hypatia’s slave Davus (Max Minghella) is in love with her. Having listened to her lectures, he builds an orrery, a model of the universe according to the astronomer Ptolemy’s system. It shows the Sun and the planets moving in circular orbits around the Earth, but each planet (including the Sun) also rotates around the moving point on their own circular orbits, known as an epicycle. This was Ptolemy’s attempt to explain some of the irregularities in the observed motion of the planets, irregularities actually caused by the fact that we are observing the motion of the planets from a platform that is itself moving. Orestes ridicules this system as needlessly complex. Why, he demands, wouldn’t stationary planets be more perfect than moving ones?

Hypatia looks at Davus’ orrery

That question sets Hypatia off on an intellectual journey that will last throughout the film and through the rest of her life. Every so often the film gives us a scene in which Hypatia and others try to reason out what’s actually going on with the planets.

In my opinion, the film does an excellent job of explaining the logic of ancient astronomy as well as how Hypatia slowly solves the problems inherent to it. In a later scene, she and her students discuss the Heliocentric theory, first proposed by Aristarchus of Samos centuries before. As one of her fellow scholars points out, the Heliocentric theory makes no sense. If the Earth was moving, why wouldn’t there be a constant wind against us as the planet moved? Why wouldn’t objects we dropped fall a distance behind where we were when we dropped them (since the planet would have moved on)? These are entirely reasonable objections to the Heliocentric theory based on what knowledge the Greeks had access to. So while most films tend to depict pre-modern people as scientifically backward and foolish, Agora treats its characters as intelligent, capable of observation and reason, and coming to reasonable conclusions based on what they know.

Later on, Hypatia conducts an experiment in which Aspasius, her slave and research assistant, drops a bag of sand from the mast of a ship as it sails. Instead of falling a distance behind the mast, the bag lands near the mast. So, she reasons, the objection that objects would fall away from us as the Earth moves must be invalid. She begins to think that maybe the Heliocentric theory might be right.

Still later, Hypatia debates the problem of the Earth moving around the Sun with Orestes. She suddenly realizes that the problem is that everyone has been blinded by the perfection of the circle. Maybe the Earth’s movement isn’t circular. But what sort of shape could explain things?

Then she realizes that one of the shapes contained within a cone, the ellipsis, might do the trick. In a scene that is one of the climaxes of the film, she works out the puzzle of the Heliocentric theory as Aspasius watches. It’s a truly beautiful scene that celebrates the joy of intellectual discovery. Have a look.

However, to be clear, there is absolutely no evidence that Hypatia actually did find a way to prove the Heliocentric theory. The film acknowledges in a epilogue text that Johannes Kepler is credited with the discovery. It doesn’t say that everything it’s shown us is hypothetical, which is unfortunate. When the film first came out, I was teaching Early Western Civilization, and I decided to allow my students a little bit of extra credit by going to see the film and then writing a 2 page paper about it. I told them beforehand that there is no evidence that Hypatia proved the Heliocentric theory, but every single student who decided to take the extra credit came away from the film convinced that she had.

That’s why historical accuracy in film matters. Despite the active admonition of a college instructor that the film was going to show them something entirely hypothetical and probably untrue, all of my students found the dramatic visual presentation of the material more persuasive. Film is an incredibly powerful teaching tool, and film makes owe it to their audiences to be more careful about what they teach their audiences. Remember that there is no such thing as ‘just a movie’.

Despite this major flaw in the film, I find myself forgiving Agora on this point. While the film overstates what we know about Hypatia intellectually, Amenábar is careful to base his film’s speculation on two things that we actually do know about Hypatia: she was interested in astronomy, and she was interested in conic sections. Had she combined those two interests with a certain degree of experimentation, it’s not impossible that she could have worked out a proof for the Heliocentric theory 1200 years early. And in the film, she makes her discovery and is then killed by the Christian mob before she has a chance to tell anyone, so her discovery dies with her. In a nice touch, as she’s dying, she looks up and sees an ellipsis in the dome of the room.

It’s also incredibly rare for a film to depict a woman as an intellectual, a scholar, and a discoverer of truth. Typically, our cinema celebrates the intellectual work of men while glossing over the critical contributions of women. So I find myself liking this film the way I like Hidden Figures, for highlighting a woman for her smarts, not her beauty.

But…

There is one really egregious anachronism in the film that bugged me the whole way through. Although it’s set in Alexandria in the late 4^th and early 5^th century AD, the Roman soldiers are shown dressed in gear from about the 2^nd century AD, with rectangular shields, metal breast-plates, pilums, and helmets with a neck-flap, instead of the mail tunics and round shields they should have had. That would be like making a movie set in the modern day and dressing and equipping all the American soldiers as minute men.

Want to Know More?

Agora is available through Amazon.

There hasn’t been a lot written about Hypatia by scholars, since the hard facts about her are so few. But Edward J. Watts’ Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher might be worth your time.

Also, novelist Faith Justice has written a number of blog posts about Agora, so you might find what she has to say worthwhile.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women: Secret Identities for Everyone

Tags

20th Century America, Angela Robinson, Bella Heathcote, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Luke Evans, Olive Byrne, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, Rebecca Hall, Superheroes, William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman

When I first heard about Professor Marston and the Wonder Women ( 2017, dir. Angela Robinson), I was really excited. The film is a biopic of William Moulton Marston, the Harvard-trained psychologist who was the creator of Wonder Woman. Marston lived a rather unconventional life and I was interested to see how Robinson, who also wrote the film, would treat Marston.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning to see this movie, you might want to put off reading this until you’ve done so, because I discuss the plot of the film in detail.

The film tells the story of Marston (Luke Evans) and his ferociously intelligent but academically-thwarted wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall). They are trying to develop a prototype lie-detector at Radcliffe when they meet Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), the niece of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, who takes one of Marston’s classes. The Marstons are feminists and believers in free love (the early 20th century term for sex outside of marriage), and they are both attracted to Olive. Elizabeth figures out a way to make the lie-detector work, and after several rounds of lie-detector Truth or Dare, the three admit they are all attracted to each other and start a polyamorous relationship long before that was a thing,

Evans as Marston

 

Unfortunately, word of their unconventional (not to mention unethical) relationship leaks out and the Marstons are dismissed from Radcliffe right around the time that Olive announces she’s pregnant. Elizabeth takes work as a secretary and William starts trying to make a living as an author. Along the way he encounters a bondage fetishist and the threesome discovers that they’re all kinky; Elizabeth is dominant while Olive is submissive. (Magic lassos, anyone?)

All of this sparks an idea in William. He will write a new comic book involving a female superhero who defeats her opponents through love. As a psychologist, William developed what he called DISC Theory, which focuses on two dimensions of people’s emotional behavior: whether they perceive their environment as friendly or hostile and whether they perceive themselves as having control or lack of control over the environment. Control in an antagonistic environment produces Dominance, control in a friendly environment produces Inducement, lack of control in an antagonistic environment produces Submission, and lack of control in a friendly environment produces Compliance. His character, Suprema the Wonder Woman, was conceived as a demonstration of these principles, as well as an expression of his sense that women are inherently superior to men because they are not automatically aggressive.

Despite Elizabeth’s skepticism, William sells the character (sans her original name) to a comic book publisher and makes a good deal of money writing the character. Olive and Elizabeth both have children. But one day during a kinky romp in their house, a friendly neighbor walks in, discovers the threesome in flagrante delicto, and their world collapses around them. Elizabeth demands that Olive and her children leave to start a new life. William is investigated by a morality crusader; her ‘interrogation’ of him forms the film’s frame tale. William develops cancer, and is eventually able to persuade Olive to return by getting Elizabeth to drop her Dominance and enact Compliance with Olive. The film ends shortly before William’s death, with an epilogue text that explains that Olive and Elizabeth continued to live and raise children together for the next several decades until Olive’s death.

The film is very well-done, if not at all subtle about its themes. Olive and Elizabeth are together William’s perfect woman and both contribute components to Wonder Woman’s character. The film liberally peppers panels from early Wonder Woman comics into scenes of the trio’s life, illustrating how their sexual interests were freely expressed in the comic. When the three of them first make love, they do so in a theater prop room, which allows Olive to be dressed as the goddess Diana, Elizabeth wears a cheetah-print coat, and William is dressed in a WWII pilot’s outfit; anyone who knows Wonder Woman will immediately spot the references to Wonder Woman’s secret identity, her arch-nemesis the Cheetah, and her love interest Steve Trevor. William’s lectures on DISC Theory act as chapter headings for the film.

The three title characters

 

It’s interesting that in a biopic about William Marston, he’s not really the main character, which is not a bad thing, since as an actor, Evans is very pretty to look at but not really a very dynamic presence. The main focus is on Elizabeth and Olive’s complicated relationship, and Hall shines as Elizabeth. Every time she’s on-screen, she absolutely commands attention, which both fits the historical Elizabeth’s ferocious self-confidence and helps explain why William adores her so deeply. Heathcote’s Olive is a gentle woman but one willing to pursue her desires and stand up for herself against Elizabeth’s harshness. And the film handles their polyamorous relationship in a very sensitive way, never treating it as freakish while still acknowledging the difficulties it creates for them.

 

Unfortunately…

A lot of the film is made up.

Yes, the film is “based on a true story.” But that doesn’t mean it’s based very closely on it.

The film opens with William and Elizabeth already at Radcliffe, and in doing so glosses over a good deal of interesting stuff in William’s earlier life, including the fact that he wrote at least four screenplays that got turned into silent movies (including one directed by DW Griffiths). He claimed to have supported himself as an undergraduate at Harvard that way. He also spent a year in Hollywood working for a film studio. William’s natural gift for attracting media attention was quite useful there, but ultimately he returned to New England. The man lived a very interesting, if not entirely successful life, but much of it gets cut out in the interests of focusing on the relationships at the heart of the film.

William didn’t invent the Lie Detector. He invented a precursor to it that focused on systolic blood pressure. He repeatedly used it for experiments, some of which were basically publicity stunts, and both Elizabeth and Olive helped him conduct these experiments, but there’s no evidence that the trio ever used the device on each other to uncover their secret feelings. The actual Lie Detector, more properly called a Polygraph (because it measures several body functions, including systolic blood pressure) was invented by John Augustus Larson, whose protégé Leonarde Keeler improved on it and then patented it. William’s work was certainly important to the development of the device, and William frequently claimed to have invented it, but that’s a considerable exaggeration. It was Keeler who made all the money on it.

Marston doing a publicity stunt with three women at a movie theater

 

The film greatly simplifies William’s employment history. He never actually taught at Radcliffe, but did teach at several other universities, including founding the Psychology Department at American University. He was not fired because of his unconventional relationships; rather departments just stopped renewing his teaching contracts. It’s possible that word of his relationships played a role in this, because at least one letter in his file at Harvard hints at improprieties, but that’s as much as we can say about why his academic career faltered. He also had a law practice (since he and Elizabeth both went to law school) and tried to insert himself into various famous criminal investigations (such as the Lindbergh case) as an expert on lie detection. One of the cases he was involved in, the Frye case, resulted in an important appeals court decision about when scientific experts can be introduced as witnesses, a decision that still gets cited today. He worked for the FBI briefly. He also ran at least four separate businesses, all of which failed, and one of which got him charged with mail fraud, although he was found innocent (that trial is probably why American University dismissed him). All in all, William was something of a publicity hound and a bit of a grifter, which doesn’t come through in the film at all.

Also, he can’t be Professor William if he’s not working at a university. Professor is a job title, and he didn’t have it, except perhaps for a year at American University.

 

His Relationships

The biggest problem in the film stems from its misrepresentation of the relationship between himself, Elizabeth and Olive. The film suggests that the Marstons had an essentially conventional relationship until meeting Olive in the mid 1920s. In fact, by that point, the Marstons already had at least an open relationship, because while William was working for the Army during WWI, he met Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, a divorcée several years his senior. By 1919, she had moved in with the Marstons. For the rest of William’s life, Huntley moved in and out of wherever the Marstons were living; she had a permanent room in the house they raised their children in. The exact nature of the relationship is unclear. Although Margaret Sanger, who knew the Marstons’ circle quite well from the 1920s on, said that the relationship was non-sexual, Huntley herself described it as a “threesome”. She and William were certainly lovers, but there’s no clear evidence that she and Elizabeth were intimate, depending on how you understand “threesome”. The film complete omits Huntley, but it’s clear that the Marston trio was really more of a periodic quartet.

The Marston clan: Elizabeth is far left, Olive far right, the three boys are their sons, the girl on his right is his daughter, and the woman on his left is Margaret Huntley

 

Nor were Huntley’s sexual interests purely vanilla. When she met William, she was already a devotee of “love-binding”, what modern kinksters call bondage. The film claims that William stumbled across a group of bondage fetishists in New York some time after Olive had moved into his household, when in reality he was probably already familiar with bondage before he met her, thanks to Huntley.

Nor was Huntley the only sexual adventurer in William’s circle. His paternal aunt, Carolyn Marston Keatley, was a believer in an early form of New Age spirituality, maintaining that the world was entering an age of free love. She maintained a regular weekly gathering at her Boston apartment where about 10 people, including the Marstons, Huntley, and eventually Olive, would gather regularly. These meetings seem to have been devoted to exploring female sexual power; the women routinely went naked, and a set of meeting minutes from this group strongly suggests that group sex and bondage were a regular part of the activites. These meetings seem to have laid the foundation for the philosophy that Marston and his women used to govern their complex relationship. Instead of being a later development of their relationship, as the film depicts, bondage seems to have been one of its early components.

However, understanding what William, Elizabeth, and Olive (and Huntley, when she was around) did sexually is complicated, because there is conflicting evidence. The aforementioned evidence about Huntley and about Keatley’s meetings strongly suggests that kinky sex was a basic element of their dynamic, but the Marstons’ children have insisted in interviews conducted by historian Jill Lepore and others that they never saw any hint of bondage in their household and that neither Elizabeth nor Olive would have tolerated such things.

Even more problematic is the film’s central conceit that Elizabeth and Olive were lovers, because William and Elizabeth’s grand-daughter, Christie Marston, insists that this was not the case. Christie says that she knew her grandmother quite well and had many frank conversations with her. Christie insists that the two women lived together as “sisters” rather than lovers. She points out that Angela Robinson made no effort to contact any of the Marston family and therefore Robinson’s treatment of the relationship is entirely fictitious. We know that the two women maintained separate bedrooms, and on one occasion when they visited Sanger, she arranged from them to use a room with two beds (she was very emphatic that they not use her bedroom, which might point to a willful blindness on her part). There is no explicit evidence that the two women were ever lovers (and as we’ll see, their children had no clear idea that Olive was intimate with their father, even though one of the children caught the two of them having sex).

Elizabeth and Olive leaning into their first kiss

 

Despite that, there’s certainly reason to speculate that Elizabeth and Olive might have been lovers. William had a remarkably contemporary view of sexuality, maintaining that homosexuality was entirely natural and that sexual desire was not inherently connected to a person’s gender (which he considered more social than biological). He found lesbian sex arousing and claimed to have watched women having sex; it’s not a far leap to guess who those women might have been. The notes of the Keatley meeting group talk about a ‘Love Leader’, a “Mistress” and their “Love Girl” coming together to form a “Love Unit.” That certainly sounds like Elizabeth had some sort of sexual relationship with Olive. “The ladies” (as the family still calls them) continued to live together for decades after William’s death, and long after their children had moved out.

And while their children and grandchildren certainly knew the trio well, there’s reason to think that their testimony is not entirely reliable. As Lepore has documented, the Marston trio were remarkably dedicated to hiding the nature of their relationship, even from their children. Olive invented a husband who fathered two sons on her and then died. She never told her sons Donn and Byrne that William was their father; as adults, the sons finally pried the truth out of Elizabeth, who only told them on the condition that they never ask their mother about the matter again. Olive was, in fact, so dead-set against anyone learning the truth that she threatened to commit suicide if her sons pressed her on the subject of their father. William adopted both of Olive’s sons to help protect the family secret, and Olive was variously passed off as either a domestic servant or a widowed sister, to prevent neighbors from gossiping. But the fact that Donn and Byrne felt there was something their mother wasn’t telling them suggests that they had suspicions that they had been lied to.

Later in life, as Elizabeth was sorting through William’s papers, she aggressively culled the documents, and then very carefully decided which of the four children would get which papers. Lepore, who was able to see three of the four sets of papers, was startled to realize that Holloway had given each of the children a sharply different family narrative, as if she was trying to keep each of them from finding out the truth even from each other. Although William drew much of his inspiration for Wonder Woman from “the ladies”  and although Olive functioned as William’s typist and secretary, Holloway insisted that Huntley was much better informed about Wonder Woman’s origins than Olive was. So it seems that neither Elizabeth nor Olive wanted anyone to know the details of their unconventional relationship, and it seems entirely in keeping with that to think that Elizabeth might have lied to Christie in an effort to protect Olive’s privacy. So she may well have been sexually involved with Olive and simply chose not to reveal the fact. Given that the children had no clear awareness that William was Olive’s lover and Donn and Byrne’s father, it seems to me plausible that the trio might have successfully hidden a relationship between Elizabeth and Olive as well.

However, against that interpretation, we must set the fact that some of William’s co-workers at All American Comics (which was later sold to DC Comics) seem to have been fully aware that he effectively had two wives. In fact, William seems to have been quite the ladies’ man his entire adult life, and numerous people were aware of it. William’s mother was fully aware of what was going as, as were Margaret Sanger and Olive’s mother Ethel (and quite possibly two of Olive’s uncles, who performed as drag queens on the vaudeville circuit). So the family secret wasn’t so important that William didn’t tell anyone at all.

 

If I had to guess, I’d say that Elizabeth and Olive did have sex at least occasionally, since the meetings of Keatley’s group seem to have involved that sort of thing. But it’s a far cry from that to the film’s version of the relationship, in which Elizabeth kisses Olive before William does and the three regularly share a bed at night. William seems to have maintained separate sex lives with each of them, and given that there’s no concrete evidence that the two women saw themselves as lovers, it’s best to not read too much into things. However, as I’ve already laid out, the evidence is somewhat contradictory. Robinson’s speculation that Elizabeth and Olive were lovers is certainly possible, but it’s speculation, not provable fact.

In the film, Elizabeth only finally acquiesces to William’s relationship with Olive when Olive has a baby. She goes to work as a secretary because someone in the family has to be earning some money. In reality, Elizabeth was very career-oriented and had struggled to figure out how to make that work with being a mother, something else she wanted. Olive was the solution to her dilemma; Elizabeth would be a career woman, and Olive would be the stay-at-home caretaker for the children. Far from being a secretary, she was an editor at the Encyclopedia Brittanica and McCall’s, and eventually began the assistant to the chief executive at Metropolitan Life Insurance.

The movie claims that after about 5-6 years, the trio’s secret was revealed when a neighbor wandered into their house and caught them in a bondage scene together. The trio came under so much social pressure that Elizabeth forced Olive and her two sons to move out, and William was only able to reunite them at the end of his life by using the fact of his cancer to goad them into a reconciliation. That never happened at all. The trio’s secret was never found out by their neighbors (or if it was, it was tolerated). Olive never moved out of the Marstons’ household, and given that William and Elizabeth had legally adopted both her sons, she probably couldn’t have taken her sons with her if she had.

Elizabeth (left) and Olive late in life

 

Another problem with the end of the film is that it distorts what happened medically. About a year before he died, William contracted polio, and gradually lost his ability to walk, spending his last months bedridden. During that period, he developed cancer, but the family chose not to tell him about the diagnosis (secrecy ran deep in the Marston household, it seems), so that he died never knowing what he was suffering from.

 

Wonder Woman

The film also gets a chunk of the comic book side of the story wrong as well. In the film, William comes up with the idea for Suprema the Wonder Woman, despite Elizabeth poo-pooing the concept of a female superhero, and pitches it to MC Gaines (Oliver Platt), the head of All American Comics. In reality, William had already been working with All American for some time before he pitched his concept. Gaines realized that having a well-known psychologist who could say that comics were healthy reading for children was a good thing, so he paid Marston a monthly fee to act as a consultant. William was always good at making headlines, so they were a natural fit for each other.

When William invented Wonder Woman, Elizabeth was not against it. In actuality, she was the one who told him that the character had to be a woman. William was trying to express his ideas about submission to loving authority, and Elizabeth pointed out that because he was trying to create a totally different kind of superhero, it ought to be a woman. William was already essentially a female supremacist, so it made sense.

The film suggests that Wonder Woman was a combination of Elizabeth and Olive, and that may well be true. Elizabeth was an extremely strong and assertive woman, and Olive was much more docile in many ways, which would fit Wonder Woman’s aggressive nature and her docility when she is bound by a man. But William seems to have modeled Wonder Woman physically much more on Olive than on Elizabeth. In the film, Elizabeth is tall and athletic and dark-haired, while Olive is shorter and more soft-looking and blonde. In reality both women were dark-haired, and Olive was taller than Elizabeth.

The scene in which Olive puts on a burlesque costume and accidentally inspires Wonder Woman’s costume is false. William created the costume in co-operation with the artist Henry George Peter, who partly modeled her on pin-ups he drew. But Olive did contribute one element of the costume; William had given her a pair of bracelets that she wore every day and those were the direct inspiration for the Amazonian bracelets that deflect bullets.

Olive in the Wonder Woman costume

 

The film’s frame tale involves William being forced to meet with a committee run by Josette Frank (Connie Britton), who is disturbed by the sexual themes in the comic. Gaines says that he cannot protect William from Frank, so that if William can’t convince Frank that the comic is wholesome, Wonder Woman will be taken away from him. The truth is quite different. Frank actually worked on a committee that reviewed children’s literature. Gaines hoped for their stamp of approval, but Frank was troubled by the copious amounts of bondage, and never accepted William’s theories about willing submission to loving authority, which he fully admitted were part of what the comic was about. Eventually Frank resigned from the editorial advisory panel reviewing All American comics.

But Frank never had any real leverage that could have forced Gaines to take away the character from William. Gaines was making too much money off of William’s character to ever threaten his star author that way; by the end of his life, Wonder Woman was regularly appearing in three different comic books and an internationally-syndicated newspaper strip. William worked on these up until just shortly before his death, although his assistant Joye Hummel was increasingly scripting the comics from his notes. So the entire frame tale of the movie is made-up. Gaines did come under some pressure over Wonder Woman while William was writing her, but the real attack on comic books and Wonder Woman was just beginning to take shape as William was dying.

It’s not hard to see why Frank found material like this problematic

 

William would certainly have been very disappointed to see that the next writer to control the character was Robert Kanigher. Where William was a full-blown feminist convinced of women’s moral superiority to men, Kanigher was an outright misogynist who despised the character he was being asked to write, and reduced her to a love-starved simpering editor of a woman’s romance magazine, desperate for Steve Trevor to marry her. It was not until the publication of the first issue of Ms Magazine in 1972, which put Wonder Woman on its cover, that Wonder Woman really began to return to her feminist roots.

Despite being largely invented, I still like Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. It’s a well-done story that brings a fascinating and rather neglected trio of historical figures to the awareness of the viewers. It’s a moving portrait of a polyamorous family at a time well before that was a thing. And it doesn’t hold back from the original feminism that made Wonder Woman such an inspiration to many of the women of Second Wave feminism.

My next post will finish up looking at The Last Kingdom.

Want to Know More?

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is still playing in theaters, so it’s not available elsewhere yet.

If you want to know more about William Moulton Marston, his women, and his famous creation, I cannot recommend Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman highly enough. She painstakingly pieces together the secret life the Marstons worked so hard to keep hidden, and she does an excellent job setting Wonder Woman in the context of 1920s feminism, showing how the issues of birth control, suffrage, women’s right to work, and so on are played out in the pages of Sensation Comics. It’s honestly one of the best pieces of historical scholarship I’ve read in a long time. If you have any interest in Wonder Woman, this is a must-read.

I, Claudius: Livia!

Tags

Agrippa Postumus, BBC, I, Claudius, Interesting Women, Livia, Roman Empire, Sian Phillips

The most memorable performance in I, Claudius is Sian Phillips’ Livia. Her personality drives the action in the first half of the series, and Phillips gives a truly unforgettable, incandescent performance as the ruthless schemer who systematically manipulates everyone around her except Claudius (Derek Jacobi), whom she wrongly considers too stupid to pay attention to until late in her life. The performance netted her a much-deserved BAFTA award. So let’s take a look at her and see how fact meets fiction.

Livia in the Series

When we first meet Livia, it’s at a banquet celebrating the seventh anniversary of Augustus’ triumph over Antony and Cleopatra. She’s watching everyone in the room, catching every detail of what the people do, and she demonstrates her ability to manipulate Augustus (Brian Blessed). She’s iron-willed, arrogant and condescending, clever, and in many ways the power behind Augustus’ throne. And she is absolutely determined that her older son Tiberius (George Baker) is going to succeed Augustus as ruler of Rome. For the first four episodes, nearly everything she does is about eliminating all the possible alternative candidates, of whom there are several. Her problem is that Augustus dislikes the prickly Tiberius and would much rather have anyone else as his successor. So she has her work cut out for her. Over the course of the first seven episodes, Livia

• Poisons Marcellus, Augustus’ young nephew and initial favorite so that Agrippa will return to Rome, since she’s convinced that Augustus needs Agrippa
• Poisons Agrippa between episodes 1 and 2 because Agrippa required a marriage to Julia, Augustus’ daughter, as the price of returning to Rome, and Livia wants Tiberius to marry Julia
• Ignores Augustus’ explicit wishes and arranges for his deification on the eastern side of the Empire
• Apparently poisons her own son Drusus (Ian Ogilvy) because it looks like he might try to rebel against Augustus to restore the Republic
• Poisons Julia’s son Gaius off-screen because he’s Augustus’ obvious successor now
• Persuades Plautius (Darien Angadi) to spy on Julia and compile a list of Julia’s lovers
• Persuades Lucius to reveal his mother’s adulteries to Augustus so that he won’t appear complicit in the affairs, thus getting Julia exiled in hopes that Augustus will change his mind and recall Tiberius from exile
• Arranges for Plautius to kill Lucius in a boating ‘accident’ because he’s now Augustus’ successor
• Persuades her grand-daughter Livilla (Patricia Quinn) to falsely accuse Augustus’ last surviving grandson Postumus (John Castle) of attempted rape so that Augustus will have to recall Tiberius and make him his successor
• Tricks the chief Vestal Virgin into breaking her oath and allowing Livia to look at Augustus’ will and then substituting a fake will when she discovers that the will names Postumus as Augustus’ successor
• Poisons Augustus by painting poison on the figs he’s growing because he won’t eat anything anyone else has touched
• Sends Sejanus (Patrick Stewart) to murder Postumus so he can’t succeed Augustus
• Sends assassins to murder Fabius Maximus because he knows about Augustus’ intentions for Postumus succeeding him
• Sends her agents to spirit away Martina, the woman who poisoned Germanicus (David Robb), so that Piso (Stratford Johns) can’t use her testimony against Tiberius during his murder trial, compares notes about poisoning with Martina, and suggests that she could easily have poisoned Martina if she wanted to
• Intervenes in Piso’s trial to protect his wife Plancina (Irene Hamilton), which Tiberius refuses to do
• Persuades Plancina to persuade Piso to commit suicide so that Livia can destroy the letter than implicates her in Germanicus’ poisoning
• Persuades Claudius to promise to deify her by telling him whom she murdered, and admits to Claudius that she didn’t orchestrate the deaths of Drusus and Germanicus only because they died without her intervention
• And finally dies an old woman, with Claudius the only person who knows about her long list of crimes

Whew! That’s a rap sheet that even Shakespeare’s worst villains can’t match. So is any of it true?

Philiips as Livia

 

The Real Livia

Probably not.

As Augustus’ wife, Livia played an important role in his rule. Publicly, she was offered as the embodiment of traditional Roman feminine virtue, a great beauty, and a matron devoted to her family. She made many of her family’s clothes herself, a traditional marker of moral virtue for Roman women. To some extent, this traditionalist depiction was a strategy of Augustus to provide cover for the radical political changes he was introducing at Rome, but Augustus may also have been a man of conservative social tastes. His choice to exile Julia for the rest of her life (and deny her the right to drink wine) after her adultery was revealed was reportedly gut-wrenching to him because he loved her dearly, so he was clearly horrified at Julia’s immoral behavior. According to Cassius Dio, Livia attributed her influence over Augustus to her unswerving faithfulness to him and overlooking his various flings.

As she aged, she became a model for the depiction of the goddesses Piety and Concord and as such helped shape the Roman view of its future empresses, who were expected to faithful and devoted wives and mothers. At public events, she was allowed to sit with the Vestal Virgins, the most honored women in Rome. And of course after her death, Claudius had her deified, the first Roman woman to achieve that honor.

Livia

She was clearly interested in promoting her two sons politically. Both Tiberius and Drusus became important and trusted generals. Drusus married Augustus’ niece Antonia Minor and Augustus forced Tiberius to divorce his beloved wife Vipsania in order to marry Julia. This was clearly an unpleasant experience for both the unfortunate Tiberius and Julia; they got along poorly, which probably contributed to Julia’s decision to start sleeping with other men, and the loss of Vipsania seems to have permanently scarred Tiberius emotionally. But whether Livia played any role in orchestrating these two marriages is unknown.

The ancient sources all agree that Livia had a good deal of influence with Augustus. She is known to have helped him with the administration of the Empire, often replying to correspondence in his name. This gave her the opportunity to make important decisions on matters of second-tier importance. It’s unlikely that she presumed to handle the most important matters. Given that Augustus trusted her to handle a lot of routine and less important matters, it’s likely that the two discussed issues of governance and she probably acted as an important advisor to him.

Tacitus claims that “she had the aged Augustus firmly under control” and asserts that she was the driving force behind his decision to exile Postumus. The reason Augustus did this is unknown; the story of Livilla accusing him of rape at Livia’s behest is made up. But note that Tacitus says this was when Augustus was quite old; if the charge is true, it was a consequence of decades of ruling and not a basic characteristic of their marriage or Livia’s personality. Suetonius, in a striking turn of phrase, claims that Gaius Caligula described Livia as “Ulysses in petticoats” (Ulixem stolatum). Since in Greek mythology Ulysses (or rather Odysseus, the Greek form of his name) is marked out by his cunning more than his martial skills, the quip is a charge of being manipulative. But elsewhere he says that Augustus refused her request to grant citizenship to a Gaul.

Livia as Ops, Goddess of Wealth

The sources definitely accuse her of some of the murders she commits in I, Claudius. Tacitus claims that she murdered both Gaius and Lucius. He claims, quoting an unnamed source, that Marcia, the wife of Fabius Maximus, revealed to Livia that Maximus had accompanied Augustus to his reconciliation meeting with Postumus, and then subsequently said at his funeral that she had been the cause of Maximus’ death. But he admits this is a rumor. He says that Tiberius claimed that Augustus had left instructions for Postumus’ death, and then based on no evidence whatsoever asserts that it is more probable that Tiberius and Livia arranged it out of fear of Postumus, a rather odd claim given that Tiberius was emperor and Postumus was a disgraced prisoner. He notes that “some suspected” that Livia might have caused Augustus’ final illness out of fear that he would restore Postumus. Tacitus clearly dislikes Livia, describing her as a curse to the empire and curse to her family.

Tacitus also accuses Tiberius and Livia of conniving with Gnaeus Piso and his wife Plancina to arrange the death of Germanicus. The reported motive is that Germanicus was a threat to the possible succession of Tiberius’ son Drusus (called Castor in the series) and that Livia hated his wife Agrippina and wanted to ruin her because she had more children and was more famous that Livia. When Piso and Plancina returned to Rome, the Senate demanded a trial for the death of Germanicus. Tacitus claims that Plancina was saved, despite her guilt, because Livia begged Tiberius to rescue her friend. The claim that Livia orchestrated Plancina getting clemency has been confirmed by the discovery about 20 years ago of a senatorial decree that explicitly says as much.

Suetonius repeats the claim that Livia might have ordered the death of Postumus, saying that the tribune who did the deed had received a letter from Augustus ordering it, but that Livia could have written it. He says that as emperor Tiberius became vexed that Livia was claiming to rule jointly with him and went out of his way to avoid meeting privately with her. Their final breach happened when, during an argument, she produced some letters that Augustus had written to her complaining about Tiberius; since Suetonius had access to the imperial archives he might have seen such letters, although he doesn’t quote them as he does with other correspondence between the couple. But that’s the only crime he accuses her of, and given that Suetonius was normally eager to repeat dirt on the Julio-Claudians, it’s striking that he does not say anything about Tacitus’ other accusations.

Agrippa Postumus

The idea that Livia was systematically murdering her way through Augustus’ possible successors rests primarily on Cassius Dio. He says that she was accused of poisoning Marcellus, but then says that a lot of other people died of disease the same year, so that people were uncertain whether the charge was true. He says that Gaius died of an infected wound and Lucius of illness and people suspected Livia because this happened about the time that Augustus recalled Tiberius from exile. He claims that she manipulated Augustus into being merciful toward an attempted assassination plot as part of a Machiavellian scheme of her own. (Indeed, the conversation he invents about this is possibly the longest speeches an ancient author attributed to any woman. It runs for seven paragraphs.) He expands on Tacitus’ claim that she poisoned Augustus by inventing the absurd story that she smeared poison on some figs in Augustus’ garden and then offered them to him, eating clean ones to prove that they were safe. He repeats the claim that she might have arranged Postumus’ death. He says that people gossiped that Livia had secured Tiberius’ succession, much to Tiberius’ consternation, and that she claimed this as well, and that eventually she wished to take precedence over Tiberius. Tiberius grew tired of this, forced her to step out of public life, and then grew so tired of her trying to manage his household that he retreated to Capri to get away from her.

So between the three of them we find the following accusations (in chronological order):

• The poisoning of Marcellus
• The poisonings of Lucius and Gaius
• The poisoning of Augustus
• The murder of Postumus
• Perhaps the murder of Fabius Maximus
• The poisoning of Germanicus

That means that the other crimes, including the murder of Agrippa, the exposing of Julia’s adultery, the framing of Postumus, the theft of Augustus’ will, the suicide of Piso, and the kidnapping/rescue of Martina are entirely invented.

With the exception of the killings of Postumus and Fabius Maximus, Livia is accused of poisoning her victims (the sources disagree about how Lucius died). The problem with this is two-fold. First, the ancient world had only a hazy notion of medical issues. People easily died unexpectedly of undiagnosed maladies such as heart disease and sudden crises such as stroke, of fevers and other illnesses that simply couldn’t be treated, and from food poisoning, given the poor state of preservative techniques. Any of these could produce a sudden unexplained death. Injuries could easily turn infected and gangrene could set it. Because the ancient world could not easily explain such things medically, it was incredibly common for people to suspect poisoning and curses, because that made an unexpected event easily understandable in human terms. A second problem here is that the ancient world widely viewed poison as a woman’s weapon. Because women were physically too weak to use weapons successful (or so ancient culture assumed), they preferred to resort to poison to eliminate their enemies.

As a result, I am always very skeptical of historic accusations that a woman has poisoned men, because they can easily be expressions of misogyny and a lack of medical knowledge. Gaius’ death from a wound that became infected is so easily understood that attributing it to Livia is perverse. Similarly, Augustus was in his late 70s when he died; the idea that Livia would have gone to ridiculous lengths to poison the man who was the source of her political clout is absurd. Marcellus died in a year when many others died of disease as well. Germanicus and Lucius both died a long way from Rome, and murdering them would have required Livia to pull a lot of strings and risk her position if exposed. In all cases, Ockham’s Razor means that we ought to consider these deaths as result of natural causes rather than Machiavellian plotting.

A cameo of Livia

Our sources also acknowledge this. They repeatedly comment that these charges are rumors, that some people thought she might have poisoned Marcellus, Gaius and Lucius, that Livia could have forged a letter from Augustus ordering the death of Postumus. They offer no firm evidence for any of these claims. The only hard evidence we have for any of this is that Livia intervened to rescue Plancina from a poisoning conviction. That doesn’t prove that Livia had conspired with Plancina to poison Germanicus or even that Plancina had actually poisoned him, merely that she helped Plancina get off. An equally probable reading of the evidence is that Livia sincerely believed Plancina was wrongfully-accused and acted to help an innocent friend.

Notice also that the motives attributed to her are the typically misogynistic ones of advancing a son’s interest and, in the case of Germanicus, feminine resentment that another woman was more successful than she (a pretty absurd charge for a woman of Livia’s towering stature). The idea that a woman would kill another woman’s husband simply because they had more children than she did is the sort of misogynistic nonsense that ancient authors were prone to.

Livia makes a marvelous villain, perhaps one of the greatest evil women in all of 20^th century film and television, thanks to Sian Phillips remarkable performance. I’ve always suspected that Tony Soprano’s viciously manipulative mother was named Livia as a nod to Phillip’s performance. But while she’s a remarkable character, the historical Livia was probably quite different.

 

Want to Know More?

I, Claudius is available on Amazon, as is the combined I, Claudius pair of novels by Graves. They’re both highly recommended.

If you’d like to know more about Livia, try Anthony Barrett’s biography, Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome. 

Hidden Figures: Laudable Liberties

Tags

20th Century America, Civil Rights Movement, Dorothy Vaughan, Hidden Figures, Interesting Women, Janelle Monáe, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, NASA, Octavia Spencer, Racial Issues, Taraji P Henson, The 1960s

I know that I promised my next post would be with the historical consultant for The Eagle. But I just saw Hidden Figures (2016, dir. Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly) and I really wanted to get my thoughts about it down in blog form. So I promise I’ll get to the interview in my next post.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this movie, you may want to put off reading this, since I talk about major plot points.

Hidden Figures tells the fascinating story of three African-American women who worked at NASA in the 1960s. All three were originally hired to work as ‘computers’, women who did the low-status work of laborious mathematical calculating and double-checking the work of higher status male scientists in the era before the birth of electronic computers. Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) is a mathematician whose calculations proved invaluable to the launch of the Atlas rocket that made John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth. Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is the head of the ‘Western’ Computing group, a group of African-American female computers kept separate from the ‘Eastern’ Computing group, who were white women; realizing that her job will eventually be made obsolete by the arrival of an IBM computer, Vaughan teaches herself Fortran and becomes an expert in computers. Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) pursues her ambition of being an engineer for NASA.

All three women encounter racist obstacles at NASA. Johnson struggles with the fact that the only bathroom African-American women can use is located literally half a mile away on the Langley campus where she works, forcing her to take extended breaks simply to use the bathroom and thereby drawing the ire of the division head Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). Vaughan is long overdue for a promotion; she has been acting as the supervisor of the Western Computing group, but hasn’t been given the title or the pay of a supervisor, and the woman she reports to, Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) doesn’t seem to care. Jackson needs to take night classes in order to apply for the engineering position, but the only school that offers such classes is segregated, and she has to persuade a judge to allow her to attend the classes.

Monáe, Henson, and Spencer

Ultimately, all three overcome their obstacles. Johnson repeatedly demonstrates her invaluableness to Harrison, who increasingly bends the rules to allow her to participate in the work of getting Glenn safely into space and back. Vaughan masters the newly-installed IBM computer before anyone else, and then teaches the other members of the Western Computing group how to work with it, thus saving all of their jobs and giving them a future on the cutting edge of computer science. This convinces Mitchell to arrange Vaughn’s over-due promotion. Jackson persuades the judge to let her attend the night school classes she needs and by the end of the film is on her way to becoming an engineer.

The story is well-told all around. The script is funny and does a good job of making the mathematical problems of early space flight intelligible to a general audience. The performances are all solid, especially Henson’s. And the costume designer does a very subtle job of highlighting the exclusion of African-American women from NASA; the white men tend to vanish into a sea of identical white dress shirts and dark ties, while the black women stand out in demur but colorful skirts and blouses, highlighting the absence of ‘colored’ people whenever they’re not around.

Katherine Johnson

The story it tells is an important one. These three women all played important roles at NASA and made major contributions to American space exploration for several decades. Their story deserves to be told, and it’s exciting to see the movie do so amazingly well at the box office. All too often, American history is presented as the accomplishments of white men, and Hidden Figures does a good job of reminding us that women of color have made great contributions to the country as well. It’s particularly nice to see a biopic about African-Americans who aren’t entertainers or athletes. These women are important not because they’re pretty or can sing, but because they’re smart. And the film confronts the problems of segregation head-on, particularly in Johnson and Jackson’s storylines. Americans need a reminder of just how ugly and unjust segregation and Jim Crow were.

The problem with the film is that in the pursuit of its goal of highlighting the struggles these three women had with segregation and racism, it significantly misrepresents what was going on at NASA in the 60s.

NACA and NASA

The organization we think of NASA began life in 1915 as NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. It existed until 1958, when it was shut down and replaced with NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NACA began hiring African-Americans to work as computers already in 1941, but like many branches of the American government in the period, NACA was segregated. It had a system of bathrooms, cafeterias, and other facilities for whites, and less well-maintained parallels for blacks.

Henson as Johnson solving a problem involving the space capsule

However, when NASA was formed in 1958, it wasn’t segregated. For example, NASA abandoned the system of segregated bathrooms, even though many of its properties were carried over from NACA. The story about Johnson having to run back and forth between buildings to use the bathrooms is actually a story that Jackson told about NACA in the 1950s. In the film, Johnson has to make several bathroom trips, once in the rain, trying to do her calculating work on the toilet so as not to fall too far behind in her work. Finally, when she breaks down and complains to Harrison, Harrison angrily goes out and uses a crowbar to tear down the sign labelling a particular bathroom as being for colored women. It’s a great scene that produces cheers in the audience, but it’s simply untrue.

Similarly, Vaughan was denied the supervisory position she deserved for some time, but that was during the 1950s. By the time the film opens in 1961, Vaughan had already been a supervisor for 3 years. Jackson was offered a position in an engineering team and then had to find a way to get into those classes, whereas the film suggests that she is kept from applying for the position because Mitchell is somewhat racist and unwilling to bend on the rules. So far as I can determine, the film consistently projects the segregation of 1950s NACA half a decade forward onto 1960s NASA.

NASA in the 1960s was actually a tool for desegregation. Already when he was the Senate Majority leader, Lyndon Johnson saw NASA as a way to advance African Americans by hiring and promoting them into better-paying and more respectable positions. It’s no coincidence that NASA desegregated in 1958; Johnson was the head of the subcommittee that oversaw the passage of the government act that created the agency.

Morgan Watson, NASA’s first black engineer

Katherine Johnson herself denied experiencing the treatment the film shows her receiving. “I didn’t feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research…You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job…and play bridge at lunch. I didn’t feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn’t feel it.” Likewise, Jackson only recalled one instance in which she felt disrespected, and the man involved subsequently apologized when he realized that he was in the wrong.

So by painting early 1960s NASA as a strongly segregated environment, the film is somewhat unfairly tarring NASA for NACA’s failings, and denying NASA’s modest role in helping advance the interests of African-Americans. The real racism that the women experienced in this period seems to have been from the communities around Langley. Vaughn had difficulties finding a place to stay. In the 1960s, many of the black male engineers encountered threats and violence from the white locals, and one white NASA employee was so badly injured and threatened that he left NASA entirely. Had it chosen to, the film could have made its point more honestly by contrasting the comparatively accepting environment of NASA with the much more racist environment beyond its gates.

 

Racism or Sexism?

The more I think about the film and read about the background, the more I find myself thinking that the real problem Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson experienced wasn’t so much racism (although they clearly did encounter some of that) but sexism. Consistently, there is a pattern of the men doing the important, high-status work (such as figuring out the physics of space flight and designing the capsules) while the women (both black and white) are relegated to the low-status work of computing, even though the film makes clear that doing so is a waste of their talents, especially Johnson’s. Apart from Johnson, the only other woman in the Space Task group, Ruth, appears to be a secretary, and there are no women at all in the engineering group that Jackson is involved in.

Dorothy Vaughan

Johnson repeatedly insists that she needs to be involved in the key meetings where decisions are made, because excluding her means that she has to wait to get the data she needs, which often renders her work obsolete by the time she’s finished it. She persuades Harrison to bend the rules for her to sit in on briefings with the Air Force, and eventually he invites her into Mission Control when Glenn’s flight happens (a decision that the film claims probably saved Glenn’s life). The issue here is not that she’s African-American, but that she’s a woman and the men around her are uncomfortable with her presence.

While the film suggests that the white computers earned more than the black computers, the truth is that the two groups were paid the same, but that their pay was 40% less than the equivalent male pay, even during the NACA period.

So I think that the real problem with the film, at least for me, is that it was trying too hard to make its point about segregation, a point it could only make by misrepresenting the degree of segregation at NASA. Instead, the real story in the material seems to be the way that NASA was excluding women of talent from important roles. Their obstacles were clearly intersectional, involving both their race and their gender, but the film discourages us from thinking too much about gender by highlighting a simultaneous divide of gender and race; the scientists and engineers are all white men and the computers almost entirely black women (the exception being Vivian, who leads the white female computers, but who is never shown making any intellectual contributions to the project and who mostly acts as an administrative obstacle to Vaughn). The result is that whenever gender emerges as an issue, race is almost always there at the same time. There is one scene when Johnson’s future husband (an African-American) makes a sexist remark, but that’s almost the only moment when gender is highlighted as an issue. So the film tends to subsume gender issues under race issues in a way that makes it hard for the audience to see the gender component of the problem.

None of this makes Hidden Figures a bad movie, merely a movie that privileges its message over the facts. It tells an important story that people need to know. I just wish it had been a bit more honest with the facts.

(I feel a need to point out that I’m not a specialist in either American history or NASA history. I’m basing my comments on information I’ve been able to dig up online, and it’s possible that I’ve missed evidence that NASA was a more segregated environment than I realize. I’m certainly not suggesting that NASA was magically free of racism in the 1960s. It clearly wasn’t. I’m sure that these women encountered many obstacles due to their race, but they weren’t the specific obstacles the film offers.)

 

Correction: An earlier version of this post described John Glenn as the first American in space. I should have written that he was the first American to orbit the Earth, since Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom both flew high enough to be in what is defined as space prior to Glenn’s flight, but neither of them achieved orbit. I regret the mistake. Thanks to T Rosenzveig for catching it!

Special Note: If you got to this post because some racist shitstain posted a link here in a rant about how the women depicted in this film made everything up, let me clarify the post. These women were not liars. Most of the racism they ran into in the film actually happened. It just didn’t happen in the 1960s under NASA; it happened a decade earlier under NACA. It was the film-makers, not the women, who misrepresented what happened when, in order to make a more dramatic movie. The problems they ran into in the 60s had more to do with ideas about gender than ideas about race. I absolutely 100% support the goal of abolishing racism, and I think it’s wonderful that this movie looks at the vital contributions a trio of little-known black women made to one of America’s greatest technological triumphs, because I think every white person in this country should understand that black scientists have made major contributions to America. So if you got here hoping to read some racist bullshit takedown of this movie, fuck off. You’re not welcome here.

 

Want to Know More?

Hidden Figures is still in the theaters, so it’s not available on Amazon. However, if you want to do some reading about these women, their story is told in Hidden Figures, by Mary Lee Shetterly. Another book about them is Sue Bradford Edwards’ Hidden Human Computers. Richard Paul and Steven Moss’s We Could Not Fail discusses the history of African-Americans in the space program.

Finally, you could look at Steven Moss’s unpublished master’s thesis, NASA and Racial Equality in the South, 1961-1968, which is available online.

The Girl King: How to Dress a Lesbian Queen

Tags

17th Century Sweden, Christina of Sweden, Early Modern Europe, Ebba Sparre, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Kings and Queens, Malin Buska, Sarah Gadon, Sweden, The Girl King

One of the standard clichés of royal biopics is the conflict between the monarch’s duties as sovereign and their desires as a private human being. Usually, the monarch yearns for their true love but then has to give that person up for the good of the kingdom. So we get this nice drama in which royal success is founded on royal misery. But occasionally we run into a monarch who goes off-script and chucks royal duty out the window.

Queen Christina of Sweden is one of the most unusual monarchs in history. Her father, Gustavus Adolphus, had made Sweden one of the great powers of Europe through his military leadership during the 30 Years War, but in 1632 he died on the battlefield when she was six, leaving her his heir. She was well-educated and proved to be a remarkably bright girl; by the time she was an adult, she had studied Greek, Latin, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Italian, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as philosophy and theology. She took a keen interest in the emerging sciences of the Scientific Revolution, as well as art and history. She corresponded with various artists and scholars. She invited the legal scholar Hugo Grotius to become her librarian but he died before taking up the job. More importantly, she corresponded with the great French philosopher Rene Descartes and invited him to organize a scientific academy, although when they met they did not hit it off and he only saw her few times.

Her biggest challenge, however, is that like Elizabeth I of England, there was enormous pressure on her to marry, and she had a deep distaste for the idea. She disliked feminine things and became known for her unkempt hair. All her life she comported herself in decidedly unfeminine ways; she was a tomboy as a child, insisted on riding astride rather than side-saddle, and enjoyed fencing and bear hunting. She favored men’s shoes. Later in life, she took to wearing a justacorps (the fore-runner of the man’s frock-coat), a cravat, and a man’s wig. At the end of her life, however, she had returned to wearing women’s clothing, including gowns with a scandalously low neckline.

Scholars have struggled to understand Christina’s sense of her own identity. In addition to her mannish habits, her style of dress, and her rejection of marriage, there is some evidence that she was attracted to women. She wrote passionate letters to Ebba Sparre, her lady-in-waiting, but that was a common style of letter-writing at the time; she also once introduced Sparre to the English ambassador as her ‘bed-companion’. But she seems to have disliked most of her other ladies-in-waiting, considering them overly feminine. However, in her late 20s, she socialized so freely with men, including Cardinal Azzolino, that there was much gossip about it, and she wrote passionate letters to him as well. In 1541, one of her subjects accused her of being a ‘jezebel’, which got him executed.

There is no actual evidence that she ever had sex. So historians have variously classified her as heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, asexual, and even intersex. (When she was born, she was so hairy that she was mistaken for a boy for several days.) It’s even been suggested that her refusal to follow social conventions might be evidence for Asperger’s Syndrome.

But Christina is most famous for her decision to abdicate her throne in 1654 when she was 28 years old and to abandon the Lutheranism she was raised in for Catholicism. Her interest in science seems to have led her to question Lutheranism, and long conversations with the Portuguese ambassador, a Jesuit, drew her to Catholicism.

Countess Ebba Sparre

Her decision to abdicate appears to have been the result of a complex set of issues. The constant pressure for her to marry and produce an heir was unpleasant for her. She slowly became more unpopular because of her decision to ennoble more than 300 families, all of whom had to be gifted with property to help them live a suitable lifestyle, and that property had to come from the Crown. Despite being a very hard-working monarch, she was accused of living a life of sport and indulgence. In 1651, she seems to have had a nervous breakdown from the stress of her office. And as queen she had to be a Lutheran. All of this fed into her decision early in 1654 to announce her abdication. She had already named her cousin Karl Gustav as her heir in 1649, so the transition was a relatively easy one.

She was granted a pension as well as revenue from a number of estates. She settled in Rome, although she undertook a number of visits to France, Naples, and Milan, as well as two visits to Sweden after the death of Karl Gustav. She contemplated trying to regain the throne, but was rebuffed because of her religion. She died in Rome in 1689 at the age of 62 and was buried in the grottos beneath St. Peter’s Basilica.

The Girl King

The Girl King (2015, dir. Mika Kaurismäki) follows Christina from her coronation to her abdication and does a reasonably good job of trying to condense the complexities of her story into a 90-minute film. Malin Buska’s Kristina is a strong-willing and highly intelligent woman whose free spirit is slowly choked by the demands of her situation. The film emphasizes her unconventional clothing, showing her frequently dressed in pants and men’s vests, although the historical Christina seems to have only adopted men’s clothing on a regular basis after her abdication. She fences, hunts, and regularly wears a sword.

Malin as Kristina addressing her subjects for the first time

The film is also interested in her intellectual interests. She acquires Grotius’ library after his death, plans to build a 500,000-volume library, and demonstrates her linguistic knowledge several times. The film claims that she became close friends with Descartes and that he helped lay the groundwork for her rejection of Lutheranism. As already noted, Christina and Descartes were not friends, and she didn’t agree with many of his teachings. But the film uses her friendship with Descartes as a short-hand for all the intellectual pursuits that undermined the faith of her childhood.

Any film about Christina has to decide what her sexuality was, and in this film she’s a lesbian. The moment she meets Ebba Sparre (Sarah Gadon), she is smitten by the woman, and as the film goes on she falls more in love with her. She declares Ebba her ‘bed-warmer’ and flirts with her increasingly. When Chancellor Oxenstierna (Michael Nyqvist) gives her several dresses as a way of trying to get her to marry his son Johan (Lucas Bryant), Kristina gives them to Ebba as an excuse to have her undress. Eventually, Ebba reciprocates her love, but just as they consummate their passion, Johan stumbles onto them. Jealous of Ebba, he kidnaps her and pressures her into marrying her long-time fiancé. The film suggests that Ebba’s choice to marry was such a deep betrayal of Kristina that it set in motion the queen’s choice to abdicate. This is going far beyond what the historical evidence will support, but it presents a coherent narrative out of the rather confused and indeterminate evidence of Christina’s complex motives.

Gadon as Ebba

The film certainly oversimplifies. Although it acknowledges a decade passing by, it still manages to compress the events of Christina’s reign into what seems like 18 months; no one in the film ages perceptibly.

And despite its deviations from fact, the film does an impressive job with a lot of little details. For example, the dress that Kristina gives Ebba is identical to one in an actual portrait of Ebba Sparre (compare the two images of Sparre above). Kristina seduces Ebba by showing her the Codex Gigas, the so-called ‘Devil’s Book’, supposedly written by a medieval monk in one night, with the aid of the Devil. The film references Descartes’ interest in the pineal gland and correctly shows foreign ambassadors encouraging Christina’s interest in philosophy as a way to seduce her from Lutheranism (although in this film, it’s the French ambassador, not the Portuguese one). So although the film gets a lot of things wrong, it makes an effort to include a lot of small details that are true.

The film also does a nice job with Christina’s sexuality. Its portrait of a young lesbian fumbling her way toward her first love at a time when lesbianism was taboo is sensitive, not sensational. It presents her desires as natural but still acknowledges that her society cannot accept them, while avoiding exploitation of the subject matter. So if you only see one movie about a lesbian, cross-dressing queen, make it this one.

Want to Know More?

The Girl King is available on Amazon.

There don’t seem to be any scholarly works on Christina that are both scholarly and accessible to the general reader. Veronica Buckley’s Christina Queen of Sweden is probably your best bet. Buckley isn’t a scholar, but she’s been praised for a very readable style.