O the goodly years that might have been — now desolate and bare!
After recently revisiting the retro/manky charms of "Old Maid" and its catalogue of ineligible bachelors, I did a quick search to see how the Old Maid herself, that icon of socially-unacceptable spinsterism, had fared down the years. The resulting image haul (pictured below) is meaty enough to keep Gender Studies scholars occupied for several lifetimes. Behold a random sample.
1) Clad in black, austere, severe, surrounded by cats. Here is the Old Maid archetype. The terrifying spectre of moth-balled, odd-ball female singledom that haunts the dreams of women everywhere (or so patriarchal bastard card-mongers would have you believe). She stares vacantly into space. Impossibly empty space. Joyless and despair-filled space. Silent space punctuated only by the dull "plop" of cat shit hitting the floor.
2) Chirpy, unreasonably optimistic, and demented gargoyle. Tragically out of step with contemporary fads and fashions. Caked in cheap make-up in a late and desperate bid to hook a man. A pantomime dame, a drag queen, a disaster. A lesson to ladies everywhere. Dear God, don't leave it too late.
3) Clad in the mode of a terrifying maiden aunt, her meanings seem, at first glance, easy to unpick and unpack. But there's that roguish smile. And there's that…um…circus. Is she proud of that "Admit One" ticket she so brazenly displays? Is this an "Old Maid" content with her singular lot? Can society cope with such a creature?
4) Rich. Eccentric. Crazy cat lady. Rattling tipsily around a decaying mansion. Simple.
5) Mary Poppins with an inhuman taste for man-flesh. Crazed rictus grin revealing teeth sharpened into vampiric points. Not just sexually and socially dead, but undead. Yet still somehow predatorial. Flee, menfolk. Flee! She wants to chomp yer balls clean off.
6) Young girl thinks – "Whatever happens in my life, I must not become her".
7) Parrot shrieking the name of a lost love (drowned at sea). Animal menagerie stinking up the house with the odour of faecal matter and social maladjustment. Heart arrowed not by Cupid but by his malevolent bastard cousin. A motif that recurs in our next offering…
…which has the added non-bonus of spectacles (Ugh! Intellectual!), a bedraggled and suicidal feline, and knitting – the non-sexiest thing one can do with one's hands. You can't knit passion. You can't knit a child!
9) A greater sin than unwanted, unwonted and grossly inappropriate sexual aggression is…ice-cold, buttoned-down, purse-lipped frigidity. Who does she think she is?
10) Witch and her familiar. Drinker of infant blood. Pure evil.
February 17, 2011
7 responses to O the goodly years that might have been — now desolate and bare!
Wow! Oh, good job. I LOVE number 8 and its commentary. You can’t knit a child!
The last one is alarming in its greenness alright. And your little dog too!
Number 8 gazez wistfully to the side too. Thinking of opportunities lost. Condemned now to solitude. And knitting. Cat abut to OD on catnip and escape the misery.
Yup, 10 is pure Miss Gulch/WWotW. Rich, alone and burning a deadly hatred for all living things.
The first one appears to be pouring milk on her cats’ heads. I aspire to be number 4, she just looks so happy. Better dump that husband first though…
Why all the cat motifs? I have 2 already – how many is veering towards danger zone?
well, after that display I know a few Old Maids who might be VERY put out. Beware the Ides of Marge!
I think anything more than two, definitely.
I suppose Old Maids had to be villified, ridiculed, witchified, or they threatened the status quo too much.
I think number four is clearly independently wealthy, and lushed up on Moet.
Dogs need to be taken for walks, thus indicating a willingness to engage with society. With cats you can just pull the curtains, lock the doors, and sit in your mouldering shit-filled ruin of a house going slowly mad(der). Also, cats = witch’s familiar = evil = shorthand for all that is terrifying about womankind. Burn them all!
Some people might find that video amusing. I do not. I see it as a grim warning of the dangers these OMs represent. ASBO-like measures have been introduced to combat the scourge of youthful exuberance, but what measures have we in place to curb all this unchecked Old Maidness?
God blessed them with the ability to bear children. God allowed them to attach themselves to menfolk and thus make themselves whole. And they repay this by accumulating cats and accumulating notions of independence. Such behaviour amounts to an open love letter to Satan (their Lord and master).
A startling and commendable bit of research and commentary. If I hadn’t pledged to try and keep a lid on my giddiness as a New Year’s resolution I would be tempted to claim that this collection of grotesques represents as depressing an indictment of the culture that produced it as any number of galleries of Nazi art.
Fascinating oddities though, all the same, ranging from the manically gormless to the splendidly malignant. Number one, as you say, is very much the ur-Old Maid – there is an awful sadness in the image – some sinister metaphysical traction has caused her to buckle, (the harnesses of hysteria and melancholia no doubt), as she slouches in the parlour like a dissolute “Whistler’s mother”.
On the night her mama died she heard a tearing at the back door and there he was and ever shall be, her dearest Mr. Scratch, (mama’s finest furnishings in time whittled to straw by the constant whetting of his claws). Although he cannot speak his sinuous parading somehow amounts to an imperious insinuation, so she huddles in a chambermaid’s uniform and ensures his bowl is forever brimming with milk, (hardly finding the time herself to scrape some lard against the heel of a musty loaf – still there are always the restorative glasses of sherry).
But then he begins to bring acquaintances home with him and her capability as a hostess is strained to the point of debilitation. As demanding as the bewhiskered members of a gentleman’s club, they sashay into the parlour, (tails pert and versatile, whipping the air with a dandy’s relish for the swish of his cane), and braid themselves about the bowl. Mr. Scratch curls anti-clockwise in soft abrasion about her calf and the brush of his fur ripples along her so that her spine jolts like a bolt shot free of a lock and her body sways ajar. An imagined door swings open onto a summer in her girlhood, when cousin Peter loosed a cool rope of water from a garden hose to lash about her legs like a crystal lasso.
Milk spatters from the lurching jug in her hand and startles Scratch who retaliates, nipping at her ankle, drawing a brief spray of blood which stipples the surface of the milk in the bowl. Tails in a frenzy of twitches cut obscure shapes like runes. Scratch winds tighter around her, anti-clockwise again and again, six times six times six. The milk now marbled with red streaks is incised in a ritual of tongues, as if some monument was being chiselled with the marks of a covenant or an epitaph.
Apologies to all cat-lovers. I never could abide by New Year’s resolutions.