My Great Grandmother in Female Fiction

Well, I must thank Patricia Clapp (now two years defunct), and I do, for having written an eminently entertaining and largely factual biography, which I have just finished reading, of my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandmother Constanta Hopkins Snow. It was to be expected that, as a work of explicitly Juvenile Fiction--written about, by and for, immature members of the Sex--it should have a great deal more "romance" and "kissing" in it than a masculine taste (even that of an indulgent great-grandson) can well tolerate; but it is otherwise, in its verisimilitude, in its conveying of the character and flavor of daily life in the first years of Plimoth Plantation--and in its surprisingly accurate and well-described (even a trifle dull) account of the economic and political facts of life of Colonial America--nearly faultless. And, after all, there was, that we know, a great lot of romance and kissing going on among these attractive, intelligent, healthy, capable, and adventurous young people who were so busy building, inhabiting, and populating an entirely New World.

Mee and Noam Chomsky and Thomas Jefferson

I have decided--for the purpose of keeping the various matters of "this day's" blog, on the subjects of the accurate phonetic representation of Stress in the American English Language, and of its Grammatical or Semiotic Significance, together--simply to return to it and add to it, as whim, increasing mastery of diacritics, and expository purpose dictate and permit.

What the three of us dissimilar geniuses--Jefferson, Chomsky, and Mee--have in common, is that we have all three of us, at various times, determined to devise a phonetic transcription of the stress/unstress pattern (if pattern it be) of American English--and we have, all three of us, come severally to the conclusion that there are no fewer than five stress/unstresses which must be accounted for in a faithful sonic representation of our language. You gotta think that if three such utterly disparate virtuosi have arrived so independently at a basic fiveness, then five basic stress and unstresses in English must there be--not unlike, for mysterious never less, though sometimes more, than five of petals, digits, Personality Traits, and voice parts (or melodic lines) in perfectly balanced polyphony.

But, of course, I actually worked at my stress-phonetic of English longer than either of my illustrious colleagues--even kept a journal for decades in the script that I devised for it--and I, not unnaturally, discovered Peculiarities, and what the French call Idiotismes, of English in faithfully phonetic transcription which aren't (and which are, but which, for various reasons, are automatically overlooked) immediately evident in the quasi-hieroglyphic written English bequeathed us by historical accident.

The first of these Peculiarities in spoken and phonetic English is its perfectly clear and marked distinction, between Function Words (non-emphasized conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, articles, verbal auxiliaries), which receive what may be called normal unstress, and All Other Words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs), which receive what may be called normal stress (including, as we shall see later, normal emphatic stress and normal/demoted stress). It is, I think, not insignificant that this feature of standard spoken English--so ordinary and familiar that even most teachers of English forget to mention it--has no parallel in any other language in Earth, not even in Brazilian Portuguese, where the abbreviation of inessential grammatical elements in rapid speech is common.

A secondary, related, peculiarity of English is a level of what may be called normal emphatic stress, and its corollaries of normal stress, and of normal-but-demoted stress (used most commonly, as we shall see, to denote things which have already been mentioned).

My Great-Grandmother's Hat

Curiously, there is but one relic of my Great-Grandmother Constanta Hopkins Snow, come down to us after her death in 1677 (a year after the death of her husband, Great-Grandsire Nicholas Snow)--her hat, a picture whereof I have found on the Net, and here enclose. It's somewhat the worse for wear after three and a half centuries, but being of stout American beaver, felted in England, it retains most of its original "steeple" shape and floppy brim, only slightly dog-eared.

Such hats were worn by both men and women throughout the first half of the 17th century, as may be seen in the St. Gaudens statue of 'The (male) Puritan,' and in the wedding portrait of himself and his bride by Peter Paul Rubens, wherein the bride wears a much smarter and more be-trimmed version of my grandmother's hat. Note, however, that the rakish floppiness of the brims of Grandmother Snow's and Mrs. Rubens' hats are both quite similar, and--each in its own way, in its own day--fetching. A reminder that the Constanta Hopkins of 1627 was widely acknowledged to be a very beautiful (and extremely capable) young woman. I wonder if Great-Grandsire Nicholas was anywhere near as good-looking as his bride?

Reading 'Sex at Dawn' in tandem with 'Pantagruel'

• The neat thing about being an aristocrat--I refer, of course, to my 'Mayflower Madam' status--is that you know what your whole family has been doing for the last five or six hundred years. It's strange, on the other hand, once you get used to it, to realize that most people's view of themselves and their progenitors fades into the mist at barely a hundred years or so--Well, like mine did, for all my deep reading and lifelong fascination with history, and even my memories of past lives, until I (just recently) discovered my Mayflower Descendance....(Descendance is a word I've borrowed from French maybe illicitly, but I just can't see my way to doing without it--Descent, for example, doesn't begin to cover the various things I mean by it).

But still, while a familial consciousness of half a millennium is inconceivable to the many, many many-headed, it's nothing compared to the vastness of the vista that has been evoked within me by reading Christopher Ryan's and (his wife) Cacilda Jethá's Sex at Dawn, the Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, or, as it might have been called, The Intellectual and Moral History of Mankind between the Invention of Language/Reason and the Invention of Agriculture (34,000 to approximately 10,000 B.C.E.). 'Cause it's not just about sex. I've read it a couple of times within the past five days, and paid particular attention to the sources and footnotes during the second perusal.

And then just yesterday and this afternoon I've been reading (really reading) Pantagruel for the first time--I know enough Latin and Old French that, by paying full attention to the footnotes, I'm getting it...though I am rarely, if ever, amused by it. And yet, oddly, nay bizarrely--Well, whatever--I was reading very closely, very attentively, very seriously the catalog of the Librairie de sainct Victor on the bus coming home this afternoon, and suddenly bark, bark, bark! at 'Les Lunettes de Romipètes' I was seized with strange guffawing. I can't explain it even now--but the rhyming of Lunettes and farting at Rome strikes me as hilarious. Or it did, anyway.

But what I'm getting to is this curiously congenial concept of partible paternity--how perfectly natural it seems, at first, and even at second blush. And my lovely mind, somehow, without having to stretch for it, pulled up the images of the wombs of Pasiphaë and Leda--teeming with the progeny of various fathers, and said "Yes! That's how we were meant to create new life!" Whoa. And in there somewhere--I can feel it--is the evolutionary explanation of the homosexualities. And that's why all the images of men (only one of whom, Sir Francis Bacon, is certainly gay) for this blog entry. What's lucky though, because I'm really not very adept at ordering the positioning of the pictures with which I try to illustrate the subject matter of my blogs, is that that's an excellent picture of Michel de Montaigne at the top--a mean, and rather snotty, heterosexual if ever there were one. I feel I know him too well, and resemble him too much, ever, without considerable reservations, to like him. But notice that he's holding forth, with particular suggestiveness, an image hanging by a gold chain around his neck. I'm going to go out on a limb here--because I know nothing of the history of this portrait of le Sieur de Montaigne--and declare that that image is a likeness of Étienne de la Boétie, Montaigne's one true love, and onliest, bestest friend--though both men were straight and almost certainly never had sex together. The point being that it wouldn't have mattered if they had.