They Wore Their Mothers’ Bones Like Scarlet Letters, 2009, intaglio etching, after The Three Fates (Die Parzen) by Theodor Baierl, 7.75 x 5.5 inches, edition of 3 (first state). By Heather Lee Birdsong.
As a white woman and student of (predominantly European) art history, I am naturally interested in how white women have been depicted throughout that history and how these depictions continue to manifest in contemporary culture. In this work, I’ve turned the gazes of the women inward, toward each other rather than the viewer: they self-consciously and collectively carry the weight of a macabre history. What does it mean to carry this history, and how is it best borne? Is Clotho, the cutter of the thread of life, resigned to it, or preparing to cut herself loose? I give different answers on different days.
This print references two works by white male creators: the anachronistic painter Theodor Baierl (who created his Fates painting, with the central figure’s strikingly confrontational glare, in the immediate years following the end of World War I) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (originally published in 1850; like many American children, I first read it in high school).
This work was recently featured in a solo exhibition, and the edition sold out. A second state exists, all of which are in private collections too. A third state with aquatint is forthcoming, but I have no idea when completion of the plate and printing may be possible. If you would like updates about this work, please contact me via my website, here.
[image description] In this line etching, three women, mostly nude, use a single, long ribbon to tie human bones to their bodies in corresponding places. Two are standing, staring into each other’s faces. The third woman, seated on a rock behind and to the left of the other women, holds the ribbon taut between her mouth and wrist, poised to cut it with a pair a scissors.
The author’s biography doesn’t always tell you anything terribly significant about a literary work, but when I think about the fact that Sir Thomas Malory, the compiler of the most well known English-language literary interpretation of the Arthurian myth cycle, was a double-dealing knight who fought on both sides of the War of the Roses, was repeatedly charged with horse thievery, escaped from prison or skipped bail at least five times, and evidently made himself so obnoxious to those in power that he was specifically excluded by name from a general pardon of prisoners on two separate occasions – an accomplishment in which he is, to the best of my knowledge, unequalled – well, that tends to suggest a certain interpretive lens, is what I mean to say.
I had to look up lots and lots of things in Moby Dick. I was pretty skeptical of all the “whale facts” in that book after an early chapter where he lists the various types of whales and includes about forty that sound totally made up (“quog whale”, “grampus whale,” “sulphur-bottom whale”, “junk whale”, “thrasher whale”, “pudding-headed whale”, “scragg whale” etc), and also included dolphins.
How-some-ever, everything else I looked up turned out to be totally true, to the point where I decided Melville MUST have gone on a whaling ship as part of his research. So I looked up his biography!
My dude Herman was born in aristocratic wealth until his father blew it all and they became impoverished, and he did indeed go off to sea on a whaling ship. Then he deserted in Polynesia and lived with the natives for a year before signing up on another whaling ship, where he promptly joined the crew in a mutiny and got thrown in jail for it. He escaped and lived as a beachcomber and “island rover” while personally battling God/having an intense spiritual crisis. Then he went home to New England, became a celebrated author and dinner party guest on the strength of thinly fictionalized retellings of his adventures, and fell shatteringly in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
So uh yeah sometimes an author’s biography canreally illuminate the work.
What I love most about Sir Malory is that he is so un-chivalric that some interpreters have spent a great deal of time trying to convince the world that this must be the wrong Thomas Malory!*
*See William Matthews The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Enquiry into the Identity of Sir Thomas Malory or Richard R. Griffith’s essay ‘The Authorship Question Reconsidered: A Case for Sir Thomas Malory of Papworth St Agnes, Cambridgeshire’
I’m not sure what my favourite part of that whole discourse is: the tortured efforts to explain away the Winchester manuscript literally saying “yeah, the author wrote this in prison” as metaphorical or something, or the fact that there’s a reasonable case to be made that the most popular alternative candidate for the Le Morte’s authorship was also into brigandage of some description.
Wait, wait, wait.
“fell shatteringly in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne”?
How are we not talking about this?
Weare talking about it, this is just how conversations with bi people are
Stephen King is just continuing the fine New England tradition of horror which can trace itself back to such greats as HP Lovecraft and Nathaniel Hawthorne of being unable to picture the world outside New England as anything other than a screaming void of horror.
To be fair from what I’ve heard from Florida my aunts’ work in healthcare (one as an administrator and the other as a doctor) and my cousins time in school there, they’re not wrong.
(Also, note that even though Howard Philips Lovecraft is a well-known writer and any statues of him would be even more entertaining than the statue of Edgar Allan Poe being attacked by a raven just off the Boston Common, Boston does not have a tradition of putting up statues of people whose main contribution to history was their racism.)
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