Birth of the Chess Queen: A History
A History of the Breast
A History Of The Wife
For Yalom the Dutch Republic of the 17th century played a special role in the history of breasts. Dutch 17th century art portrayed a new attitude toward breasts in the domestic realm of the home. Bourgeois women were featured affectionately nursing their babes - a message not only visible in art but also endorsed in word by moralists. The domestic breasts of Dutch women were not torn between their sacred obligations of nursing their children and the erotic desires of their husbands. A husband's hand on the breast of his wife - a common genre - not only insinuated possession but also reflected a feeling of intimacy, friendship, tenderness, and respect which Yalom argues "suggests that the breast to be shared also contains a heart".
In the late 18th century breasts became politically stigmatized. With the onset of the French Revolution, the aristocratic custom of wet-nursing and sending children out to the countryside was replaced by bourgeois norms of maternal breastfeeding. A mother suckling her infant came to represent a morally good mother who would raise her children into virtuous French citizens. In Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People a bare-breasted Liberty is shown leading the people to victory. During political crises Marianne's unconcealed bosom would be used time and time again. In the First World War French posters portrayed Marianne standing next to a canon with her hair swaying in the wind and "upright breasts defying the German army". America also used her Statue of Liberty to drum up support for the war cause. Unlike France's Marianne, America's Puritan Liberty flaunted no bare breasts, but the accentuation of her clothed but well-endowed buxomness left little for the imagination.
For the Second World War, posters of women personifying the nation were replaced by real women in various work situations. Especially in the Second World War breasts took on a larger form. According to Yalom during troublesome times in history the biological differences between men and women tend to become more emphasized. Big-breasted girls featured as pin-ups and even on the noses of airplanes reminded the boys fighting oversees of what war destroys: "love, intimacy, nurturance". However, the mode initiated by Hollywood "bombshells" did not end after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The post-war American motion picture industry carried the torch with big-breasted actresses like Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida, and Jayne Mansfield on to the big screen. Film-makers and advertisers, especially, realized that if breasts could sell the war then they might promote more besides. The bosom became a commercial attribute. A well-endowed pretty girl in a commercial or advertisement can virtually sell anything: fruit, cars, coffee, and probably manure to farmers if needed.
This mania only enhanced the cult of the breast culture in America which spread over the rest of the West like wild fire. But in America the culture of the breast became more polarized and hypocritical. While women like Pamela Anderson make no secret of their silicon augmentations and teasingly flaunt their wares, breastfeeding mothers in some states can be arrested for indecent exposure if they nurse their children in public places such as restaurants or parks. The contemporary breast is in a state of confusion. There are too many realities of the breast in our culture. From the outside, the eye of the beholder of the breast has come to represent many things to many people. As Yalom concludes "Babies see food. Men see sex. Doctors see disease. Businessmen see dollar signs. Religious authorities transform breasts into spiritual symbols, whereas politicians appropriate them for nationalistic ends".
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Yalom definitely has a point: the game that washed up on the beaches of the Costa del Sol had no chessmen, it had chess lumps, because the Koran forbade the depiction of living creatures like men, women and horses; also, it had no queen. The king's sidekick was a man -- the vizier -- and was the weakest piece on the board, permitted to move only one measly square per turn, on the diagonal. (Indeed, games that feature the vizier and abstract pieces live on, mostly in the Middle East and India.) The game we know today in the West had begun to take shape by the end of the 10th century, when the chess queen surfaced in manuscripts in a Swiss monastery; in the 11th century, ivory chess queens turned up in Italy; and in Spain, a queen with a face finally appeared in the 12th century. Dwarfed by her ivory throne, she looks, Yalom writes, as if she were ''sitting in a bumper car.'' The queen needed those bumpers over the next 300 years, as she transformed herself into the crowned powerhouse that we and Garry Kasparov recognize today, who swoops across the board, forward and backward, diagonally and sideways, knocking down any knight, pawn, bishop or rival queen in her path. However did she do it?
Yalom's entertaining (and credible) contention is that the booting of the vizier and the coronation of the queen are linked to the rising status of women in medieval Europe: ''The miraculous Virgin, the chess queen and the beloved lady grew up together and reinforced one another,'' she explains, referring to the cult of the Virgin Mary and the tradition of courtly love. Also crucial, Yalom believes, was the example of medieval warrior queens, who made a chessboard without a queen seem as incomplete as a Ferrari without an engine.
In Spain there was Toda of Navarre, in the 10th century, who went to battle to install her grandson on the throne of Léon; and Urraca of Galicia, who divorced her husband, King Alfonso I of Aragón and Navarre, waged war on him (she won), retook Portugal and then a lover; and (skipping a few generations of Amazons) Queen Isabella of Castile, who united the country, financed Christopher Columbus's foreign travel, exiled Spain's Jews, expelled the Moors and in her spare time ran the Spanish Inquisition. Elsewhere in Europe, there was Adelaide of Burgundy (later a Holy Roman empress), Matilda of Tuscany (she led her troops into battle on horseback) and Catherine the Great. Roping in two others, Eleanor of Aquitaine in France, whose court was a beacon to courtly love, and the pious Marianist, Blanche of Castile, Yalom declares, ''Their illustrious reigns coincided with the spread of chess in France and England, and enhanced the prestige of the queen on the board.''
The Vanity of Breast-Feeding
Audio;
Interview with Jennifer Shahade
Marilyn Yalom: "A History of the Wife"
Birth of the Chess Queen
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