I had been reading over on Pratie Place about the wonderful 17th-century Mexican nun Sor (Sister) Juana Inés de la Cruz, her life, and a lovely poem about, well, about the general stupidity of men.

Then, this evening, deciding, probably unwisely in light of the day I’d had, that I could manage to make it through a play without falling asleep, after a browse around the half-price ticket place in Leicester Square I concluded that the only show that appealed was a Royal Shakespeare Company Spanish season play House of Desires. (By the way if you are visiting don’t be fooled; the proper ticket place is a standalone building in the middle of the square; don’t go to any of the joints located in various rows of shops around it or you’ll pay for the mistake.)

I had no idea what it was, but you seldom go wrong with the RSC, so I trotted down to the theatre and picked up a £10 seat there. (This is often cheaper than even the legitimate ticket booth.)

Then, what do you know, I was reading the programme over my neighbour’s shoulder*, and I realised this was a play by the said Sister.

It is on one level a madcap farce – a variation on the English drawing room scamper with mistaken identities and hidden people overhearing conversations all over the place – and frequently genuinely funny, if sometimes a bit obvious, but it is also a scathing comment on the Sister’s society, and particularly the honour culture that weighed so heavily on women.

This becomes particularly evident at the end of the second act, in which the men are concerned not with the fate of their supposedly beloved daughters and sisters, but only with their own honour, and they can’t get them married off under “shotgun wedding” conditions fast enough.

Not that the women are saints by any means. The Sister appears to have identified with Do̱a Leonor, a beautiful learned, if horribly vain girl Рthe staging has the nun watching the initial action before stripping off to reveal her identity. (Although I doubt that can have been so clear in the original script.)

This play is beautifully directed by Nancy Meckler, doing her first shows for the RSC – more here. The staging of scenes in which the lights go out – actually up – and the actors grope around on stage while the audience can see every move could be silly, but works brilliantly.

The acting is evenly good but I’d have to agree with Michael Portillo that Simon Trinder, in a long-winded transvestite gag, does steal the show, producing gales of laughter with the mere flick of an eyebrow.

In some ways perhaps this helps to bury the politics of the play – but then the politics of 17th-century Hispanic societies probably don’t mean an awful lot to most of the audience, and judging by overheard comments on the way out they’d all had a good evening, entertained by a 17th-century nun, albeit a pretty cynical one.

*Call me a cheapskate, but I never buy programmes – they are ridiculously expensive, but more importantly my flat is already overflowing with books and papers and I can’t face adding any more.

I finally got around to reading the second half of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, which takes first a ethnographic turn, skipping across Asia, Africa and South America, before going sociological about the last century in the West. (See posts one and two for the earlier historical approach.)

In a way it was disappointing because I’d been expecting a clearer methodological and theoretical approach in this part of the book and it never came. Overall this book is a collection of anecdotes about smell from all parts of the world, with the thesis that smell is as much a cultural as a biological construct, but it never gets beyond its parts to make a real whole. If it was an undergraduate essay you’d say the sources were under-digested.

Nonetheless, they are good anecdotes.

* Quechua, the language spoken by the Incas and still used in the Andes, had at least eight words for the act of smelling, including ones for “to smell a good odour”, “to smell a bad odour”, “for a group to smell something together”, “to let oneself be smelled,” “to come across a food odour”, a word that also meant “to inspire”. (That word is camaycuni, BTW.) Smell was obviously important to the culture. (p. 112)

* For the Dogon of Mali, onion is the loveliest fragrance. Young men and women fry the plant in butter and rub the result all over their bodies as a perfume. (p. 124)

* European languages still contain a value-judgement of women by scent. The Spanish puta and the French putain, both meaning whore, are derived from the Latin for putrid. (p. 162)

* Halitosis was an old almost obsolete medical term when recovered by some bright advertising spark in the 1920s. Its succession in advertising Listerine mouthwash – company profits from $100,000 in 1920 to $4 million in 1927, led to the development of many other diseases, including “homotosis”, the lack of attractive home furnishings, and “accelerator toe”. (No it doesn’t explain what that was, and Google couldn’t help.) (p. 183-4)

History Carnival No 4
It is up now at Blogenspiel, written by “Another Damned Medievalist”. (She doesn’t explain that term, but it sounds like it has a history of its own.)

The framework is histographical, looking at what history is and should be — including a student who finds that her Women’s History course is almost too relevant — but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also point you to some great stories. These include ritual transvestism and an unmissable account of a 17th-century nun, a pillar of learning and knowledge. Don’t miss it! (This humble booklover makes a small contribution.)

A nice cup of tea
A central part of English* life, particularly for women, through much of the 20th century seems to have been the J.Lyons & Co teashop – the Starbucks of their time. There’s a lovely little online history here. There are lots of pictures, price lists and lots of other potentially useful info.
*There’s no mention of Wales or Scotland so not sure if they got that far.

It makes me think of the spectacular looking Hat and Feathers Restaurant on Old Street in London, which I often cycle past, which is sadly boarded up and apparently derelict.

French-American distrust
There’s nothing new, it seems, about the French and the Americans getting stuck into each other, according to this review of, among others, the translation of the French professor Philippe Roger’s The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism. An extract from the review:

Before the founding of the United States, for example, one reaction to the Romantic idealization of the New World came in a series of scientific studies of the continent’s plant and animal life. In 1768, the naturalist Cornelius De Pauw called America a “vast and sterile desert” whose climate nurtured “astonishingly idiotic” men. The natural historian Buffon claimed that its animals were stunted miniatures of their Old World counterparts. These assertions were so widely believed in France that Thomas Jefferson devoted considerable energy to their refutation.

The London Library
I was raving earlier about how wonderful the London Library is, but for the full story, check out this article by the president for some great anecdotes, including the one about the founder, Thomas Carlyle, collecting up volumes on the French Revolution for Dickens when he was writing A Tale of Two Cities. (From the Telegraph, free registration required)

A world fallen apart
Anyone who whines about asylum-seekers should be directed to this blog post, an Afghan woman’s account of her decision to flee her country.

A tag: [history]

So is our sense of smell socially determined?

Thais is a woman Martial obviously didn’t fancy.

“Thais smells worse than a grasping fuller’s long-used crack*, and that too just smashed in the middle of the street; than a he-goat fresh from his amours; than the breath of a lion; than a hide dragged from a dog beyond Tiber; than a chicken when it rots in an abortive egg; than a two-eared jar poisoned by putrid fish sauce.” (p. 30)

*a pot filled with urine

While I have never smelt a lion’s breath, I’m prepared to believe it mightn’t be great, and from this description, and many others in Aroma, it seems clear that the ancients found many of the same smells offensive as do we.

And they were particularly concerned about bad breath, presumably for the same reason certain sex acts were poorly regarded – see earlier post. Aristotle was particularly puzzled: “Why is it that the mouths of those who have eaten nothing, but are fasting, have a [strong] odour?” p. 31)

As for “good” smells, it seems the ancients thought you could never get enough. Theatres (traditionally with saffron) and ampitheatres were scented, incense and perfumes were used at, and sometimes in, dinner parties. Pliny again: “some people actually put scent in their drinks and it is worth the bitter flavour for their body to enjoy the lavish scent both inside and outside”. (p. 23)

Broadly, that seems to continue into the 18th century, when, it is suggested, rising personal cleanliness was accompanied by declining perfume use. There’s an obvious end of the need for a cover-up there, but perfumes themselves came increasingly to be seen as unhealthy, excessive, particularly by the middle classes. The poor were associated with filthy stench, the aristocrats with flippant perfume excess, themselves with clean “olfactory neutrality”. (p. 83)

Fashions in scent also changed. During the Renaissances strong scents of animal origin, including musk, civet and ambergris, were popular, but by the late 18th century these were consider too strong, too beastly. (Although the Empress Josephine bucked the trend by adoring musk.) (p. 71-73)

There was also a sudden gender division. Previously, the same scents had been worn by men and women – George IV of England first smelt his personal favourite worn by a princess at a ball, then adopted it as his own. But over the century sweet, floral smells came to be gendered as female; woodsy, outdoor scents such as pine and cedar as male. (p. 84)

So it seems while there is some innate division of good/bad smells, beyond that most of our views are culturally determined.

And I can personally attest that some time in the 20th century the use of scent by women definitely reached down into the working classes. I live in a block of council flats occupied primarily by elderly women – sometimes the perfume in the lift is suffocating, even after the user has left the building.

(See post below for reference.)

A tag: [history]

… for intermittent service at present. Blogger after a week of instability seems to have gone totally haywire and I’m having great difficulty posting.