Historia de los Anillos de Matrimonio
Historia de los Anillos de Matrimonio
Historia de los Anillos de Matrimonio y Adulaterio
Rings in History Rings have been around for a long time. The ancient Greeks used rings as love tokens, though not as marriage rings.1 The Romans, too, used rings for love rather than marriage; some Roman rings, usually of iron (later of gold), with no gemstone, were associated with betrothal, though still not with marriage, and with no long-term commitment. Later, such a ring was called the annulus pronubus (literally, “the finger-ring for marriage”). The early Christian church authorities were the first to approve the ring as a token of commitment to marriage, now regarded as more than a dissoluble secular contract,2 and by the thirteenth century, rings came to play an important role in marriage.3 The giving of a ring on the occasion of marriage is mentioned in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer.
We have datable archaeological records for other forms of jewelry, which first appear in sites dated around 70,000 years ago, some 30,000 years before cave paintings and mammoth-tusk figurines. They are necklaces: usually shells or animal teeth with holes bored in them.4 Some paleo-anthropologists regard this moment when we started using personal ornamentation—rather than the moment when we first developed language or created painted images—as the moment when we became genuinely human: Homo Adornatus. Since these necklaces were made long before the invention of the mirror, and one can’t keep looking down at one’s own necklace all day without becoming cross-eyed, to get the full effect one had to read the admiration in the expression of other people, very early evidence of a theory of mind (taking the perspective of someone else), of wearing jewelry in order to affect another person.
(p.2) The Meaning of Rings Tiffany’s one-line ad,i proclaiming, “Each Ring Has a Story to Tell,”5 echoes a remark made by Elizabeth Taylor, who, in an interview on the occasion of the publication of her memoir, My Love Affair with Jewelry, in 2002, said, of her many jewels, “Each one tells me a story.” Stories about rings are linked through a common cluster of meanings. In one early German text, perhaps ninth century, Brynhildii sends to her brother, Attila the Hun, a ring twined round with wolf’s hair as a kind of signal, which he does not understand (nor do scholars of the text).6 A ring that sends a signal that no one understands—how postmodern can you get? But though some people in some stories misread a ring’s signal, others do get it, and we can try to get it too.
Some of the meanings of the rings in love stories are suggested by the unbroken circular shape of the ring, which promises a love that is infinite, constant, eternal. “I gave my love a ring that had no end… . How can there be a ring that has no end? … A ring when it’s rolling, it has no end,” says the old “Riddlesong,” and then, in some versions, it adds, “The story that I love you will never end.” Henry Swinburne, a lawyer specializing in matrimonial law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, remarked, “It skilleth not at this day what metal the ring be of, the form of it being round and without end doth import that their love should circulate and flow continually.”7 Other meanings of the ring of love are suggested by its substance, metal, originally iron but later usually gold: the ring that promises love is as pure as gold (or fool’s gold, as the case may be). Thus Swinburne also praised the espousal ring’s “metal hard and durable, signifying the durance and perpetuity of the contract”8 (though gold, as we know, is relatively soft). These features integral to the ring seem to nominate it for its role of vouchsafing integrity and fidelity. Jewelry lasts much longer than a wedding dress, or even a marriage certificate.
The ring differs from most other circular jewelry, necklaces and bracelets, in two significant ways: a ring needs no clasp for you to take it on and off, breaking the circle, and a ring often remains on your hand constantly, in contrast with more cumbersome jewelry that you usually take off at bedtime. (The same is true of bangles, which often share the symbolism of rings and are a commonplace in stories about women, sex, and marriage.)9 (p.3) In a folktale version of the “ring-in-a-fish” storyiii recorded in Kashmir in 1892, the ring is a nose-ring.10 Rings of all sorts certify the unbroken constancy of love in ways that necklaces and bracelets generally do not.
Like the link of a chain, any form of circular jewelry may fetter the wearer to the giver. A Victorian poem “To Her Ring” exhorts the ring, “Now, as thou bind’st her fingers, bind her heart.”11 Shakespeare’s Posthumus, in Cymbeline,iv wrongly suspicious of Imogen’s fidelity to him, refers to the bracelet that he gives her as “a manacle of love” (1.2.53). The sadomasochistic apotheosis of the ring as fetter appears in Pauline Réage’s (Anne Desclos) Sadeian novel, Story of O (1954), where O’s lover permanently affixes between her legs two rings, engraved with the names of O and of Sir Stephen, sealing off her sexuality like a chastity belt and attached to a chain by which any man can control her like an animal.12
The symbolism of a circle of gold is complicated by the fact that rings are often bi-polar, ambivalent, signifying, like so many symbols, two opposite things at the same time.13 Sometimes a single ring takes on double meanings simply by being alternatively present and absent, first received, then lost, then found again. A ring may have opposite meanings for two different people in a story, or it may set up a masquerade until a second ring unmasks it. And rings tend to clone or breed in the dark, subject to a kind of ongoing fission, like amoebas. When Otto Rank and Anais Nin exchanged rings, he gave her one that he had received from his mentor, Freud, and she gave him one that had been her father’s. But the two rings, patriarchal symbols, soon became three, as she hired a jeweler to duplicate from the ring she gave to Otto Rank a third ring, which she gave to her duplicate lover, Henry Miller.14
The ring of truth is shadowed by the ring of lies. Wedding rings can be used to tell useful lies: married men in search of extra-marital pleasures often take off their wedding rings when they go on the prowl, while Catholic priests who do not want to inspire the attentions of women will often put on wedding rings when they go out in mufti.15 Rings are also lexically associated with truth and falsehood through several English words that are mere homonyms rather than philologically related but nevertheless echo one another in English stories of finger rings. The “ring of truth” in a statement can be traced back to what the Oxford English Dictionary (p.4) (OED) calls “the resonance of a coin or (less commonly) glass vessel by which its genuineness or inherent purity is tested.” Significantly, one of its earliest attestations in this sense is in a statement about a woman: “She was a false coin, which would not stand the test of a ring.”16 On the other hand, according to the OED, a “ringer” (primarily American and Australian slang) is “a person who fraudulently substitutes one thing [usually a dog, horse, or athlete] for another.” But “ringer” (particularly “dead ringer”) also means, more significantly for several recurrent plots in our corpus, “a person or thing that looks very like another; a double.” And Shakespeare seems to have coined the term “ring-carrier” (in All’s Well That Ends Well) v as a pejorative term for a go-between or panderer.
Thus, over and above the meanings suggested by their shape and substance, rings pick up other meanings the way some fabrics pick up scent or dog hair. George Frederick Kunz, writing about rings in 1917, put it well: “While we may regard as superstition any fancy that the material ring possesses any magic quality, that lent to it by association or by memory is none the less real though it is only in the brain or heart of the wearer.”17
The Signet Ring The ring as a signifier of identity is a material token; it doesn’t change when we change, and so it is regarded as a guarantee of identity across time: if Solomon has Solomon’s ring,vi he’s Solomon.
Sometimes the ring is carved in a special way or set with a distinctive stone that makes it unique. Many of the rings in our stories are men’s signet rings or seal rings, carved with the owner’s name or initials or insignia—literally a signifier. The Assyrians used signets or seals to seal letters and documents; the Minoans picked up the custom from the Assyrians. At first these seals were probably free-standing cylinders, but the Greeks converted the cylindrical seals into flat ovals set into rings.18 And the Greeks probably brought signet rings into India with the armies of Alexander, from the third century BCE. Seals, as we will see,vii have a rich range of meanings and a history of symbolism, and rings have another. They combine in signet rings.
(p.5) The first signet rings belonged to kings and were rings of power; “to bestow one’s ring is to bestow a power,” Heinrich Zimmer remarked, “the authority to speak in one’s name.”19 Of course, many of the men in the old stories are lovers as well as kings, and they often use their signet rings to entrap innocent women. A legend tells that King John of England fancied the wife of the baron Eustace de Vesci; he “borrowed” de Vesci’s seal ring on the pretext of having a copy made and sent it to de Vesci’s wife with a request that she meet him immediately. Seeing the ring, she obeyed, but happened to meet her husband on the road; when he saw how they had been tricked, de Vesci “resolved to find a wanton and put her in apparel to personate his lady.”20 (This ruse is a bed-trick, which we will encounter often in these stories: someone substitutes for someone else in bed, fooling the sexual partner.)21
Another king who attempts in vain to seduce his courtier’s wife uses a signet ring to “prove” that he had succeeded, in a story that the Agrawal caste tell about the origin of the goddess Shila Mata who is worshipped in their temple:viii
The Shah of Agroha married his only daughter Shila to Mehta Shah, the minister of the state of Sialkot. When the King of Sialkot heard of her great beauty, he sent Mehta Shah to another state, while he himself went to meet Shila and attempted to “spoil her chastity.” When she resisted his advances, the thwarted king ordered Shila’s maidservant to put his ring in Shila’s bed. When Mehta Shah returned home he discovered the king’s ring in his bed and thought Shila had been unfaithful to him. Immediately he ordered her to return home to her father’s house at Agroha. Some years later, the maidservant confessed to Mehta Shah that it was she who had put the ring in their bed and that Shila had, indeed, been faithful to him. Mehta Shah then rushed to Agroha to retrieve his wife and ask her forgiveness; but on the way to Agroha he collapsed and died. When Shila (p.6) learned of her husband’s death she joined him on his funeral pyre. A temple was built on the site of their cremation, which came to be known as the Shila Mata Shakti Mandir.22
The spiteful king uses his ring, in revenge, to frame the good woman who spurned him. He rightly assumes that her husband will assume that the king either lost his ring in her bed or gave it to her, but in either case slept with her.23
Queens, too, sometimes have signet rings. According to a much told, and much denied, legend, Queen Elizabeth I, when she loved Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex (1565–1601), gave him a ring and told him that if ever he was in trouble, he should send it to her and she would help him; or (in other versions) that no matter what charges might be brought against him, she would pardon him.ix Things went badly between them, and he was imprisoned for treason and condemned to death. He sent her the ring, but Lady Nottingham, who was to deliver it to the queen, was prevented from doing so.24 (The reasons are differently narrated in different versions.) Years later, Lady Nottingham, on her deathbed, sent for the queen, gave her the ring, and told her what had happened. The queen, full of remorse, died soon after. So the legend goes. The diary of John Manningham (covering the years 1602–3), the only contemporary who alludes to a ring in connection with Essex’s relations with Elizabeth, states only that “the queen wore till her death a ring given her by Essex.”25
Signet rings are the stamp of recognition. In the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 38),x Judah’s “seal” by which Tamar identifies him is a signet, presumably a signet ring,26 which, together with the cord and staff, according to Robert Alter, “as the legal surrogate of the bearer would have been a kind of ancient Near Eastern equivalent of all a person’s major credit cards.”27 To lose them (as Judah does) would amount to what we call identity theft.
Signet rings therefore play an important role in many myths of masquerade and recognition, a major genre that often intersects with our themes of love and betrayal.28 The ring of recognition must be unique to a single person in order to establish the identity of the wearer. Stith Thompson, the Linnaeus of folklore, included in his wide survey of folktale motifs (a cross between the periodic table and the Dewey Decimal (p.7) System) an entire Tale Type (TT 560), “The Magic Ring,” but also noted several widely distributed motifs involving (non-magic) rings of recognition (such as “H 94: Recognition by ring”). Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is about a man whose disfiguring sins are magically transferred to a painting, while he remains always the same; when he dies, he suddenly takes on the hideous form of the transfigured painting, which returns to its pristine form. The story concludes: “It was not till they had examined the ring that they recognized who it was.” In real life, too, a metal ring is often all that is left to identify a dead person when the body has decayed or been destroyed.
Rings also sometimes convey erotic powers. Signet rings worn by men in sixteenth-century Italy were often set with stones that were engraved with erotic images of naked women and were said to give them the power to command women. The image of a nude woman with her hair down to her breast, “facing a man who showed signs of love,” gave the wearer the power to make any woman he touched with it do whatever he wished.29 Were these stones to fall in the hands of a woman, however, they would have no power whatsoever.30
In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Case of Lady Sannox” (1893), Lord Sannox tricks his wife’s lover (a surgeon) into cutting off her lower lip in order to punish, and prevent, her adulteries; he claims that the lip must be cut off in order to save her from death from a cut she has received from a poisoned dagger, but when the surgeon has done his work, Lord Sannox confesses: “The wound, by the way, was from nothing more dangerous than my signet ring.” He has used his signet ring to brand her as his property, just as sadistically as the lover of O used his ring as a chastity belt.
A song made famous by Elvis Presley expresses unabashedly the possessive aspect of the ring:
She wears my ring to show the world that she belongs to me She wears my ring to show the world she’s mine eternally With loving care I placed it on her finger To show my love for all the world to see … That’s why I sing, because she wears my ring.31 In our day (well, in my day, at least), the sexual marking power of signet rings lived on in the custom by which a young man in high school or college would give his class ring or fraternity ring to his girlfriend, who (p.8) generally wore it on a chain around her neck. These rings changed hands (or necks) quite often. In the film Dear Heart (Delbert Mann, 1964), the character played by Glenn Ford shows a friend his fraternity ring. “Fun and games,” he says, and then, “Look what happens when you turn it around; it becomes a wedding ring.” The tension between “fun and games” and weddings is what much of this book is about.
The Ring on Her Finger The signet ring is an extension of the hand, with its handwriting and, later, fingerprints.32 Rings sometimes become part of your finger; you wear a ring for many years and never take it off and then you discover that, as you grow older and your joints swell, the ring grows tighter, until you actually can’t take it off. Sometimes it leaves a mark on your hand, thus becoming a scar.
The finger and the ring are closely associated as signs of natural and cultural identity, respectively; as Posthumus says in Cymbeline, “My ring I hold dear as my finger, ’tis part of it” (1.4.134).xi And in The Merchant of Venice,xii Portia says to Gratiano, speaking of the ring his wife had given him, “Your wife’s first gift; / A thing stuck on with oaths upon your finger / And so riveted with faith upon your flesh” (5.1.168). Bassanio then says, speaking of losing the ring that Portia had given him, “Why, I were best to cut my left hand off / And swear I lost the ring defending it” (5.1.177–178). Rings worn on the body are therefore legally almost as inalienablexiii as a limb—or a pound of flesh, for that matter.
The ring was often regarded as a part not merely of the finger but of the heart. A tradition attributed variously to the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, and still current in northeast Scotland in the nineteenth century,33 made the fourth finger on the left hand the ring finger and held that it was directly connected to the heart by a vein called the vein of love, vena amoris. Macrobius, in the fifth century CE, remarked, “Because of this nerve, the newly betrothed places the ring on this finger of his spouse, as though it were a representation of the heart.”34 The sixteenth-century Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius said that this finger was called Medicus; (p.9) the old physicians would stir up their medicaments and potions with it, “because no venom could stick upon the very outmost part of it but will offend a man and communicate itself to the heart.”35
The ring finger often played a macabre role in folklore and literature. The Welsh Mabinogion (1300–1425) tells a chilling story about the amputation and mutilation of a woman’s finger that bore a ring. As the story is rather long, I will summarize the main points that concern us here:
Elphin boasted to the king of his wife’s chastity; the king imprisoned Elphin and sent his own son, Prince Rhun, to test the continence of Elphin’s wife. She had, however, been warned by Elphin’s bard, the magician Taliesin. She dressed one of the scullery maids in her own clothing and adorned the maid’s fingers with her own best rings, including the signet ring that Elphin had sent to her as a token a short time before. Rhun drugged the maid so that she didn’t even feel him cutting off her little finger, on which was the signet ring. He had his way with her, and afterward he took the finger—with the ring on it—to the king as proof that he had violated Elphin’s wife’s chastity and cut off her finger as he left. The king summoned Elphin and showed him the ring and the finger as evidence that the one who had cut it off also lay with his wife. To this Elphin replied: “Indeed, there is no way I can deny my ring, for a number of people know it. But, indeed, I do deny vehemently that the finger encircled by my ring was ever on my wife’s hand.” The finger was much larger than his wife’s, he pointed out, the nails had not been pared for a month (and his wife pared them every day), and there was rye dough on it, which his wife never kneaded. Taliesin freed his master from prison, verified the chastity of his mistress, and silenced the bards so that none of them dared say a single word.36
The text does not tell us how Taliesin “verified the chastity” of Elphin’s wife, but perhaps he merely testified to the bed-trick he had staged (very much like the one used by King John on de Vesci’s wife). Nor does it explain (for it cannot) how a woman’s amputated finger proves that her chastity was violated. (Inverted, displaced, transferred castration? Upwardly displaced defloration?) Here, the evidence of the ring is separated from that of the finger, in this case a sign not so much of personal identity, which the signet ring theoretically establishes, but of class: the owner of that finger is a working girl, not a lady. The king seems to believe the ring, though it (p.10) is false—not in the sense that tin may masquerade as silver but because the ring appears to be a proof when in fact it is not, and the finger is. The king at first accepts the “proof” conventionally provided by the old myth of the ring of recognition because he wants to dishonor Elphin. And Elphin acknowledges the logical reasoning behind that proof: a number of people know the ring. But the hard evidence provided by the finger finally breaks through the convention of the story,xiv a convention that the storyteller also constantly undercuts with a series of cynical asides (“the story says that” and “if the tale can be believed,” etc.).
An amputated finger with a ring (again with a bed-trick) also appears in The Changeling, a seventeenth-century play by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.37 And in a story collected in the nineteenth century from a village in the Auvergne, a telltale ring on the mutilated paw of a wolf reveals the true identity of what had appeared to be a human woman.38 In other stories a witch masquerading as a cat is revealed by the same mutilation of the hand/paw.39
The Sexual Ring Jewelry is often imagined as part of the body. Think of all those metaphors that liken a woman’s body parts to jewels: pearly teeth, ruby lips, eyes shining like diamonds, golden hair. Philip Roth, in Sabbath’s Theater, rhapsodizes on the clitoris and concludes: “Why do they need jewelry, when they have that? What’s a ruby next to that?” On statues of goddesses (I know the South Indian bronzes best, but it is true much more broadly), the bracelets and anklets seem part of their skin, more a part of them than any garment could be; this is especially true of statues of nude goddesses, even of naked women, who often wear nothing but jewelry. One of the earliest images of this sort that I know comes from the ruins of Mohenjo-daro in the Indus River Valley (now in Pakistan), from a great civilization that thrived c. 2000 BCE. It is a tiny (10 cm.) bronze image of an impudent, defiant dancing girl, totally naked save for a chunky necklace and an assortment of bangles.
In the Yogavasishtha, a Sanskrit text from Kashmir in the eleventh-century CE, a woman named Chudala uses her magic powers to transform herself into a man by day and back into a woman by night; as she changes into a woman, at sunset, she exclaims, “I feel as if I am falling, trembling, melting. I am so ashamed as I see myself becoming a woman. Alas, my (p.11) chest is sprouting breasts, and jewelry is growing right out of my body.”40 Jewelry in this culture was an essential part of a woman’s physical reality. Indeed, it was part of a man’s body, too; the ancient Indian warrior Karna was born with golden earrings and golden armor that were part of his skin; when he grew up, he was tricked into cutting them off, a bloody and excruciating, but not fatal, operation.41 There is only one form of ornamentation even more closely bonded to the body than jewelry, and that is tattooing. The women of the village of Kanker, in Chhattisgarh, central India, always say that tattooing “is the ornamentation that no one can take from you, the only ornaments that go with you in death.”42
These visceral connections between jewelry and the body are particularly true of rings. Nowadays some people get rings tattooed on their fingers instead of buying metal rings. The naturally close association between rings and fingers (and the heart) underlies stories in which a ring conjures up a person in his or her physical entirety. When, in the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana, the princess Sita,xv separated from her husband Rama, sees his ring, she feels “as happy as if she had been reunited with her husband,”43 and a commentator remarks that “this beloved ring would inevitably remind her of his hand, the memory of which would in turn conjure up for her his arm, which in turn would evoke his whole body. Thus,” he continues, “she fantasizes seeing her husband before her and makes as if to embrace him.”44
The ring as the body of an absent lover appears in several Christian texts. Red marks in the shape of rings (called “espousal rings”) were said to have appeared miraculously around the fingers of a number of women in the Middle Ages, symbols of their marriage to Christ.45 A nun named Sister Benedetta Carlini (c. 1623) cited such an “espousal ring” as proof that Christ had married her; on the fourth finger of her right hand was “a circle, the width of an ordinary, inexpensive gold ring … and on the top side there were five points … of an almost dark red color.”46 But others claimed that she had imagined it, or that her lover was the devil or a kind of incubus who masqueraded as Christ. Benedetta complicated matters by testifying that a demonic masquerader of this sort did in fact appear to her—not instead of Jesus, but in addition to him, two months after the display of the first ring, at which time another ring appeared on her right hand, not nearly as beautiful and brilliant as the (p.12) first.47 Benedetta’s own testimony about the masquerader is vivid and revealing:
“Another time there came one young man with a ring to tell her that he wanted her to be his bride and she answered him that she wanted to be the bride of Jesus. He wanted to put the ring on her finger by force, telling her companion to hold her hand… . She never wanted that young man to touch her hand to put the ring on it.”48
Benedetta was so sure that this was not the true bridegroom that she resisted and was symbolically raped by him with the ring. Finally, however, doubt was cast upon the evidence of the first ring: some of the nuns noticed that Benedetta’s adjoining fingers were sometimes stained with the same shade of yellow as the ring, and that the ring appeared sometimes very bright and at other times faded. Finally, Benedetta’s companion, Bartolomea, found a small brass box containing diluted saffron: “She surmised that Benedetta used the saffron to paint the ring and that she used her own blood for making the red stones.”49 So the ring was an artificial scar, transformed, unsuccessfully, into a supernatural sign.
The ring from Christ takes an even more vivid form in the story of Catherine of Siena (who died c. 1380). She had, according to the hagiographies, visions of a ring made of silver or of gold, ruby-encrusted and diamond-studded, but she herself said, in several letters, that “we do not marry Christ with gold or silver but with the ring of Christ’s foreskin, given in the Circumcision and accompanied by pain and the shedding of blood… . She even said that the ring of flesh with which Christ marries us in the Circumcision is a sign that he is the spouse of our humanity.”50 The reference to male genitalia sexualizes the ring, while the reference to a divine, spiritual marriage rather than a human, carnal union desexualizes it. The scar that a wedding ring makes on a finger is the next thing up from circumcision, as a form of sexual marking.
Indeed, a ring was more broadly regarded as a symbol of the male sexual body. Words for the male genitalia often refer to jewelry, as in the expression “the family jewels.” The Tibetan word for the male genitals is “jewel” (nor bu), and the word schmuck means “jewel” in German and “genitals” in Yiddish (and, then, also in Yiddish, comes to designate a man who is a contemptible jerk, a creep—in a word, a prick). Ovid’s Amores (p.13) includes a poem on “A Ring,” specifically a signet ring, which plays the part of the male sexual organ.
But far more common than the association with male genitalia is the representation of women’s genitalia as a ring. The wearing of a ring has obvious sexual meanings, perhaps on the analogy between putting your finger through a ring and putting one sexual organ into another. Since Shakespeare’s time, “ring” has been a slang term for the female genitalia,52 just as “jewel” (bijou) is in French. In the very last line of The Merchant of Venice,xvi Gratiano, punning on the finger ring that has played an essential part in the plot, promises: “Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing / So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring” (5.1.306–307). About which David Bevington delicately comments, “As Gratiano bawdily points out (p.14) in the play’s last line, the ring is both a spiritual and a sexual symbol of marriage.”53
Throughout the Slavonic oral tradition, the vagina is represented as a golden ring.54 In one story, a husband (named Staver Godinovich) fails to recognize his wife, who is masquerading as a male warrior, until the warrior “lifts his garment up to the very belly button and then the young Staver Godinovich recognised the golden ring.”55 In a Russian tale recorded by A. N. Afanasiev, a magic ring on a young man’s finger, like a kind of proto-Viagra, made his penis grow longer, the lower down on his finger he put the ring. When a thief who was riding in a carriage slipped the ring down to the middle of his finger, he got an erection that “knocked the coachman off his box, passed over the horses and extended five miles in front of the carriage.”56
The association of the ring with female genitals underlies a naughty French satire on the motif of the ring “fished up” from vast waters.xvii It was published c. 1462, in The One Hundred New Tales (Les cent nouvelles nouvelles) collected by Antoine de la Sale:
"A miller had a beautiful but rather stupid wife, whom a clever knight tricked into allowing him to bed her on several occasions. The miller decided to take revenge on the knight. When the knight was away from home for a month at least, the miller called on the knight’s wife. Knowing that she was in her bath, he brought a fine pike to her and insisted on presenting it to her himself. She thanked him and sent it to the kitchen to have it prepared it for supper. Meanwhile the miller saw a large, beautiful diamond ring sitting on the edge of the tub, where the lady had placed it before bathing. The miller stole it and left. Only later did the lady discover that she had lost the ring, and she was deeply upset, for the knight, her husband, had given it to her on their wedding day. Finally she summoned the miller, who assured her that he knew nothing about the diamond but then suggested that, since she had left her diamond at the edge of the bathtub, it must have slipped from her finger, fallen into the water, and worked its way into her body. He asked her to lie on her bed, examined her, and claimed that he could see the ring and would extract it. “Begin, then, handsome miller,” she replied. Then, (p.15) “The miller even made use of the same type of tool as the knight had used, in order to fish for the diamond.” It took several attempts, and she begged him to keep fishing until he found it. Finally, “the miller fished so diligently that he returned madam’s diamond.” When she told the knight what had happened, he realized that the miller had repaid him heartily. When they met again, the knight greeted the miller with, “May God keep you, fisher after diamonds!”57"
The fish is brought to the house and is sent down to dinner, where anyone who knew the old story of the ring-in-the-fish might expect to see someone open the pike and find the ring. Not so; the tale moves in another direction, brilliantly satirizing the idea that a woman might lose her wedding ring in the deep waters of her own insatiable (and naive) sexuality and find it only in the course of an adultery. It may also be a blasphemous take on the disciple Peter, whom Jesus said he would make a “fisher of men.” Here the fisher after diamonds is a fisher of women.
Hans Carvel’s Ring The symbolic equation of ring and vagina is grotesquely clear in a story first collected and published in 1470 by Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459, also known as Poggio Fiorentino, “Poggio of Florence”) in his book of jokes, in Latin, Facetiae:
"Franciscus Philelphus, jealous of his wife (zelotypus uxoris), was worried that she might go to bed with some other man, and so he watched her day and night. One night, in a dream (for we often dream about what has concerned us when awake), he saw a certain demon, who promised him a way to be certain of his wife… . “Take this ring and keep it carefully upon your finger; for as long as your finger is in the ring, your wife will never sleep with another man without your knowledge of it.” Philelphus, awakened by joy, realized that he had his finger in his wife’s vagina. That ring indeed allows a jealous husband to be sure that his wife will not be unchaste without his knowledge."
It is worth noting that Poggio leaves a loophole for the husband to let his wife sleep with another man with his permission; it protects him only from her adultery without his knowledge.
(p.16) De la Sale, who also told this tale, remarks that the jealous husband let his wife sleep undisturbed, “perhaps because he had so many fancies and whims in his head that nature was restrained.”59 François Rabelais, to whom the story is usually attributed, may have drawn upon the de la Sale version when he retold the story in Gargantua and Pantagruel (c. 1533), though the tale was freely circulating by then. But Rabelais changed the husband’s name to Hans Carvel and made him the jeweler of the King of Melinda (in East Africa).60
Rabelais says that Hans Carvel, here evidently a Muslim, in his old age married the bailiff Concordat’s daughter, a young, attractive, ardent girl, much too friendly to friends and neighbors. Suspecting that his wife might be unfaithful to him, Carvel, jealous as a tiger, gave her a chain enriched with pure Oriental sapphires. Still, he was worried, and Satan appeared and gave him the ring: “Grammercy, My Lord Devil,” said Hans Carvel. “I renounce Mahomet if ever it come off my finger.” When he awoke to find his wife protesting, he “thought only that someone was trying to steal his ring.”61
It’s strange that Rabelais, of all people, followed de la Sale in using a coy locution for the place where the husband found his finger (trouva qu’il avoit le doigt on comment a nom? de sa femme).62 One English translator renders it quite literally as “his wife’s what-do-you-call it.”63 Poggio, protected by the shield of Latin, had been much more straightforward: sensit se digitum habere in uxoris cunno. But the story itself then became yet another coy locution; in nineteenth-century England, “Hans Carvel’s ring” (or just “Carvel’s ring”) came to be a slang term for a vagina.
The story continued to be retold by others, including Jean de la Fontaine (1621–95)64 and Matthew Prior (1664–1721). Prior’s version has some charming doggerel in it. He too turns the demon into Satan, who appears in the form of a barrister.
Sigmund Freud and D. E. Oppenheim retold this story in their collection of folktales, using Poggio’s version rather than Rabelais’s: a demon, rather than “the devil,” visits the man (who is not named).66 Oddly, though, Freud omits Poggio’s very Freudian observation that “we often dream about what has concerned us when awake.”67 The power of the ring is projected (as Freud taught us to see); within the dream, the man puts the ring not on his wife’s finger, as we might expect if it were to function as a fetter, but on his own, in a transposed replication of the sexual act. (Magic powers are often projected in this way: in ancient India, placing a magic ointment on your own eyes made you invisible to others.)68 Outside the dream, however, his wife—or the part of her that concerns him—is the ring, which therefore belongs on his finger, not hers.
The Vagina Monologues The French tradition of Rabelais also developed in other directions, not merely equating the vagina itself with a ring but giving another ring the power to reveal the truth of that first ring, the woman’s jewel. The story in this form plays upon an equation between a woman’s mouth and her lower mouth, a widespread motif that Freud called “upward displacement.”69 A thirteenth-century text by Garin, Le Chevalier qui faisait parler les C—et C—ls,70 was retold in 1747 in a brief tale attributed to Count Anne Claude de Caylus. In this story a fairy gives a young knight, Amador, the power to make women’s sexual organs speak.71 In 1875, Denis Diderot published a novel based on the Caylus story: Les bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels).72 Diderot set his story in the world of Orientalism that was in place even in the time of Rabelais and was rife in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. In the pseudo-genre of the Arabian Nights, Les bijoux indiscrets revels in a miscellaneous mélange of sultans in mosques who worship the Hindu god Brahma and deal with duplicitous Brahmins (since all Orientals, Hindu and Muslim, apparently look alike in the dark).
Diderot also added a ring to Caylus’s story. Now, talking rings were nothing new. The satirist Lucian, in the second century CE, quotes a man who was said to have “a ring set with an engraved signet bearing the head of the Pythian Apollo and to have boasted that the ring literally ‘spoke’ to him.” Lucian says this was a lie, and he cites the story just to show what stupid fables some people believed.73 In Diderot’s allegory, a genie named Cucufa discovers at the bottom of his pocket a tiny silver ring, which he gives to Prince Mangogul with this user’s guide: women (p.19) speak, but not through their mouths; put this ring on your finger, turn the stone toward some woman, and it makes her “jewel” talk; on another finger, the little finger, it makes you invisible; and you can also say, “I will be there,” and it transports you wherever you like.74 (This is quite a ring, more multi-tasking even than Benchley’sxviii or Wagner’s:xix the ring of invisibility, of truth, and of sexuality, with seven-league boots thrown in for good measure.)75 Diderot tells us that women’s “jewels” always speak, but too softly to be heard; the ring just amplifies the volume.76 As soon as the jewels talk, someone devises a muzzle to make them stop talking, but they have their uses: a woman who lied about rape because she was jealous of her lover’s new girlfriend is found out when her jewel tells the truth; the man is set free, and she is condemned to wear a chastity belt (another ring) forever.77
The ring works on other mammals, too; Prince Mangogul turns the ring on his mare, to make it speak like a woman,78 thus combining the magic rings that allow the wearer to understand the speech of animals (King Solomon had the most famous of these)xx and those that understand vagina monologues.79 Since vaginas were often given the slang name of animals (chatte in French, pussy/beaver/coney in English, etc.), it is easy enough to see the animal-language-rings as the source of the vagina-language-rings. Chantal Thomas points out that the vaginas in Diderot’s story do not, in fact, express women’s thoughts or experiences: “The jewels, far from saying what they like, what gives them pleasure, how they have orgasms, are essentially bookkeepers. They tally the register of visitors and their orgasms.”80 Yet, Thomas admits, “To the extent that this ring is presumed, according to the Freudian analytic scheme, to give voice to the forbidden … Diderot … reveals himself here with surprising candor, perhaps unwittingly, just as the jewels do.”81
Michel Foucault used the Diderot story to introduce his History of Sexuality:
“The aim of this series of studies? To transcribe into history the fable of Les bijoux indiscrets. Among its many emblems, our society wears that of the talking sex. The sex which one catches unawares (p.20) and questions, and which, restrained and loquacious at the same time, endlessly replies. One day a certain mechanism, which was so elfin-like that it could make itself invisible, captured this sex and, in a game that combined pleasure with compulsion, and consequently with inquisition, made it tell the truth about itself and others as well. For many years, we have all been living in the realm of Prince Mangogul: under the spell of an immense curiosity about sex, bent on questioning it, with an insatiable desire to hear it speak and be spoken about, quick to invent all sorts of magical rings that might force it to abandon its discretion… . Our problem is to know what marvelous ring confers a similar power on us, and on which master’s finger it has been placed… . It is this magical ring, this jewel which is so indiscreet when it comes to making others speak, but so ineloquent concerning one’s own mechanism, that we need to render loquacious in its turn.”82
And that is one of the purposes of this book of mine, too.
The Rings of Wives and Courtesans The patterns that link jewelry and the sexuality of women have intricate historical and sociological implications, but a ruthless structuralist can group the narratives of circular jewelry into two contrasting paradigms. Though they are ancient types, I will name them after the two film icons who seared my soul when I was a teenager in the 1950s: Doris Day (1924–) and Marilyn Monroe (1926–62). The Doris Day/professional virgin scenario of legitimation (“Get the wedding ring before you go to bed with him”) is challenged by the Marilyn Monroe / gold-digger scenario of illegitimation (“Get lots of rings [or bracelets, or necklaces] before [and after] you go to bed with him”). These two paradigms have different historical trajectories, one from the regulation of marriage by religion and the other from the survival strategies of women outside the confines of religion. The tension between them is the driving force behind the narratives. But both of them are grounded in what I would call the slut assumption: when a woman has a piece of jewelry, she must have gotten it by sleeping with some man. Many of these tales (particularly but not only those about clever wives)xxi (p.21) are about inheritance, and others (particularly but not only the nineteenth-century stories)xxii are about heirlooms. But most of them involve payment for services rendered.xxiii Fay Weldon, in The Bulgari Connection, put it well: “She was a working girl, he was a wealthy man, and he loved her and must prove it. That’s why she expected him to buy her expensive jewelry.” Ultimately, this paradigm reduces women to whores.83
The mythology of women and their jewelry often raises issues of authenticity. The (wedding) ring, on the one hand, the Doris Day ring, makes the wife a good woman; it’s official, marital, given to her by the unique man she is supposed to love, her legal man, her husband, in return for sleeping only with him. And she damn well better keep it; if she loses it, she might lose her authenticity. Some married women, according to the nineteenth-century historian Charles Edwards, were “so rigidly superstitious or firm” that they would never ever take off their wedding ring, “extending the expression ‘till death do us part’ even to the ring.”84 This also applies to men in some of our stories: if the husband loses his ring (or, more particularly, gives it to a woman he thinks is not his wife—Tamar, Helena),xxiv he loses his authenticity and validates hers.
By contrast with the married woman, another sort of woman gets other forms of circular jewelry, necklaces or bracelets (or anklets), or other kinds of rings—the Marilyn Monroe jewelry—from men (plural), lovers or serial husbands, in payment for sleeping with them, which makes her lose her chaste authenticity. I would call these women courtesans, in the European sense of a woman of notorious beauty, often a famous actress or dancer, sometimes called a demi-mondaine; she is the mistress of a wealthy lover (or a series of lovers, or husbands, but only one at a time) who gives her valuable gifts, principally jewelry. (The word “courtesan” in American English has overtones of crass prostitution that I wish to exclude; think Madame du Barry or Mata Hari, rather than Belle Watling or Polly Adler). The great courtesans—Dumas’s Camille (Marguerite Gautier), Verdi’s Violetta, Elizabeth Taylor, Mae West—have an authenticity different from that of the monogamous women, because their fabulous jewelry proves that they have many rich/famous lovers/husbands and thereby authenticates their beauty and their charm.
(p.22) The much publicized number and value of the jewels worn by such women is the equivalent of the collection of garters that a certain sort of man used to show off, or the notches that he cut on his bedpost. A vividly mythologized instance of the female form of this tradition appears in Mary de Morgan’s 1880 fairy tale, “The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde”: the beautiful, evil princess refused to marry for fear that her husband would make her give up the magic that kept her beautiful; so she turned each of her suitors into a bright, beautiful bead strung on the gold circlet that she always wore around her neck. She did this twelve times until, finally, the thirteenth suitor tricked her and made her the thirteenth bead, thereby releasing the other twelve suitors from the necklace.85 Significantly, the necklace had no clasp, and “just fit over her head”; in effect, it was a ring.
So there is a tension between the two forms of authenticity that jewelry offers the married woman (validating her chastity) and the courtesan (validating the devotion and wealth of her conquests). Trouble arises only when the wife, from paradigm A, strays into the territory of the courtesan, in paradigm B, and obtains jewelry that she cannot account for.xxv But even then, sometimes the jewels a married woman gets from her lover validate her in a different way, because her lover really loves her, and her husband may merely own her. And the jewelry that a masquerading “clever wife”xxvi gets from the man she sleeps with proves that she is actually virtuous, not promiscuous, since it proves that her lover is her husband.
In many tales of this corpus, beauty is a legitimating or, more often, illegitimating criterion. Translators know the old sexist saying, often attributed to George Bernard Shaw: translations are like women: if they are beautiful, they can’t be faithful, and if they’re faithful, they can’t be beautiful. The circularity of jewelry, beauty, and jealousy is reduced to its logical absurdity in Isak Dinesen’s 1934 short story, “The Roads Round Pisa” (a story all about circularity), when a man who prides himself on his knowledge of jewelry buys for his wife, an insanely jealous woman, a pair of particularly fine eardrops, “to set off the beauty of his young wife, who wore them so well.” Then:
“He had been so pleased to have got them that he had fastened them in her ears himself, and held up the mirror for her to see them. She watched him, and was aware that his eyes were on the diamonds and not on her face. She quickly took them off and handed them to him. ‘I am afraid,’ she said, with dry eyes more tragic than if (p.24) they had been filled with tears, ‘that I have not your taste for pretty things.’ From that day she had given up wearing jewels.”
As the author comments in despair, “She is indeed jealous of her own jewels.”88