Putting the Words into Women’s Mouths

Ruth Padel on the female role in opera

In the 1640s, every musical household in Italy had a copy of ‘Ariadne’s Lament’, high-spot of Monteverdi’s Arianna and his most famous song. The lament expressed the opera’s theme: abandonment. Monteverdi called it Arianna’s ‘most fundamental part’. There have been many Ariadnes since. Cambert, Marcello, Porpora, Handel, Strauss: only Dido can challenge the number of times Ariadne magnetises ‘abandoned’ to her name. At the moment of the lament, Ariadne’s abandonment is fourfold. Two past abandonments: she abandoned her home and herself, for and to Theseus. Two in the present: abandoned by him, she again abandons herself, this time to her feelings in song. Her self-abandoned expression of abandonment is a hieroglyph of all four abandonings.

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Vol. 19 No. 2 · 23 January 1997 » Ruth Padel » Putting the Words into Women’s Mouths (print version)
pages 12-17 | 10172 words

Letters

From Peter Marin

The point that is lost in Ruth Padel’s essay on ‘The Female Role in Opera’ (LRB, 23 January) has to do with two elements that often play a role in male musical and literary laments: exile and death. While women, as Padel points out, are left behind by their mobile lovers and mates, it is men who are pushed out, or away, or made somehow unable to return – think of Oedipus or Lear – to a lost homeland, order or world. This relation to things and source of suffering may well recapitulate the early experience of birth and then childhood: of expulsion and separation from the mother, a fate equivalent for the male to abandonment. Oedipus, after all, laments, as does Lear – and in male, not female, terms. They lament the loss of homeland, family, power, their good name. They, too, have in a sense been ‘jilted’, just as the many female figures Padel mentions have been. While this is not obviously sexual, one could argue that the sense of expulsion, of the eternality of a condition close to damnation, recapitulating as it does the earliest male experiences, also recapitulates sexual experience; the male, who pursues, enters and is then inevitably expelled, losing (or at least giving up) the paradise or home in flesh he has momentarily found. It may be possible to see or understand all male lamentation about exile or loss as a lamentation about the loss of a relation to women, and as expressive of a sense of eternal solitude that parallels, but is not expressed through, female laments. The second possibility – that death rules the lamentations of men – may be even more significant. Death after all is the single power which proves stronger than masculine dominion over women and the world.

Peter Marin
Santa Barbara, California