Chapter 4 Preface: Invisible Life (4)

③It means "mausoleum" in Spanish - translation notes. There were also vengeful mothers, such as Tomyris, queen of the sixth-century kingdom of Scythia, whose son was murdered by the famous Persian tyrant Shiro.For this reason, when Tomyris defeated Ciro, she had his neck cut off and his head stuffed into a vat of blood to satisfy her thirst for revenge.And La Gaetana, a Colombian tribal chieftain during the conquest; her son was burned alive in her presence for opposing the conquistador Anasco's claim to partition the Indians.So La Gaetana mobilized all the Indians against Anasco, defeated him and slowly tortured him to death.

○Foreword The Invisible Life also had female rulers who were dazzled by passion, such as the "crazy girl" Juana, who wandered all over Spain for three years with the body of her husband "Beautiful Man" Philip ②.Or Artemisia II, queen of Halicarnassus (fourth century BC), when her beloved Mausolus died, she ordered the construction of a tomb in his honor, which became part of the ancient world One of the Seven Wonders, we still use the term Mausolus to this day.A predecessor of this sad widow, Artemisia I, queen of Halicarnassus a century earlier, was not so gentle in her affections: she fell in love with Dardano, and when Someone gouged out his eyes and then killed himself.

And creepy women.Like Irene the Great, eighth-century Byzantine empress, she organized the Seventh Council of Nicaea to suppress iconoclasts.After her husband's death, Irina took the place of her ten-year-old son Constantine as regent.Ten years later the son had to resort to a military uprising to oust his mother from the throne.But soon after he committed the weakness of filial piety - he called his mother back to himself (he was only twenty-two years old).Irina came back, of course she did: first she accused her son of bigamy, then deposed him, then imprisoned him, and finally ordered him to be blinded.She proclaimed herself empress at the time, but was deposed five years later and died in exile.The strangest thing is that her body was brought back to Constantinople a few years later with the honor of the relics, and she was canonized by the Orthodox Church: so the mother who ordered her son's eyes to be gouged out today told a large group of believers It is Saint Irina.

All these stories of tough and brutal queens show that women can be evil too, which is a relief in a way because it reaffirms women in their total and total humanity: women are as much as anyone , able to do all good and evil things.Who is the worst of all women?It is difficult to compete, but there is a classic villain with the same symbolism as the evil of Marquis de Sade, and she is Elisabeth Bathory, a bloody countess (1560-1614), a Hungarian widow. He thought that he could maintain his youth by bathing in the blood of a young girl.It is said that she mutilated more than 600 young peasant girls for this purpose, beheading and bleeding them.When her crimes were discovered, Countess Bathory was built alive within the walls of her castle.

In short, there have been all kinds of women.There were prominent women entrepreneurs like Marie Brizard in the eighteenth century and Nicole Clico, another figurehead widow in the nineteenth century; there were eminent women scientists like Maria Agnes Si Pinotini, an Italian mathematician who published in 1748 the best treatise on differential calculus ever done; She directed an expedition to Paraguay in the sixteenth century.Women were willing to do odd jobs, and there was even a female executioner in eighteenth-century France: her gender was not discovered until she had been in the profession for several years, and she was imprisoned for ten months.

①Donald Trump (1946-): An American real estate operator who purchased a large number of hotels, casinos and other real estate in New York——annotation. ②Nelson Rockefeller (1908-1979): 41st Vice President of the United States (1974-1977), Governor of New York State (1959-1973), leader of the moderate Republican Party——annotation. Behind the prosaicness of our collective forgetfulness lurks a gorgeous scene of queer women.Some women are revered, others notorious. What they have in common is a betrayal, an escape, and a win: betraying the expectations that society placed on them, escaping their limited female lot, and winning individual freedom.It should be considered that in most cases, being a woman for thousands of years meant not having the right to education, not even the most basic freedom of movement (such as walking alone on the street or traveling alone). "The fact that women may have to overcome enormous hurdles to achieve adequately doesn't put them on a par with Donald Trump or Nelson Rockefeller," Linda L., author of Tellingwomenlives Wagner-Martin wisely said.But within that common background, each life is as rich and different as all life.At a deep level, men and women share the same basic humanity.

In particular, I have always had a great interest in the biographies, autobiographies, letter collections, and diaries of literary figures, both male and female.From that ancient passion was born the series contained in this book: fifteen sketches of women, published in due course in the Sunday Supplement of the National.Almost all articles appear here in extended versions, freed from the narrow space constraints. Of course this is not a scholarly work, nor is it in the most traditional sense of a newspaper article, and thus has no intention of covering territory, be it geographical, temporal or professional: that is to say, I have chosen these biographies of women neither for Nor is making them representative of the situation of women at different times in history to properly assign the cultures and countries to which they belong, much less because these women are the most famous.To tell the truth, it was not so much that I chose these heroines as that they chose me: I will tell of the women who at one point or another spoke to me.There is something special about his biography or diary that shakes me, makes me reflect, experience, feel.Therefore, what I am trying to present is not so much a horizontal and orderly vision unique to journalism and academia, but a vertical and disordered line of sight, a line of sight unique to that very special vision, sometimes ( One night before we went to bed, one evening while we were driving home) we thought with this vision we glimpsed for a moment the self-essence of life, the inner core of chaos.

Why only write about women?That's because of that aforementioned feeling of penetrating calm waters to fish out a whole bunch of amazing deep-sea animals from under the water.In addition, reading women's biographies and diaries, you will find unquestioned social views, as if real life, everyday life, life of flesh-and-blood men and women, would have traveled along different paths than official life, The latter are collected in almanacs with all their prejudices.Let us take, for example, the subject of love between an old woman and a young man; this relationship, so to speak, was long regarded as an outrageous affair, and has until now largely appeared to be an exceptional exception. , yet a great deal of these astonishing facts can be found by looking into the lives of the women of the past.

To cite just a few examples, we remember that Agatha Christie remarried to Max Mallowin, an archaeologist fifteen years her junior, and they lived together for forty-five years until her death.When George Eliot was sixty-one years old, he married John Cross, who was 20 years younger than her. George Sand had a 15-year-old sculptor Alexandre Manceau who was 14 years younger than himself. The great love story of 2000 years ended only after Manceau's death (sixty-one-year-old George Sand had a short but intense erotic passion with the forty-year-old painter Charles Machar a few years later).Mrs Ottoland Morell, protector of the "Bloomsbury Group", fell in love with a twenty-year-old gardener she called "Tiger", enjoying the life of her life in her fifties The best and strongest love.Simone de Beauvoir was in a seven-year relationship with a much younger journalist, Claude Lanzmann (he was not her only younger lover).The very famous Marie Curie, a two-time Nobel laureate, also had an unusual love affair with the married scientist Langevin, who was six years her junior: these added to the scandal.

Even the very decent Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had a mistress twelve years her junior, Miller, and that was the great secret experience of her life: they were so So peaceful that Miller wrote Eleanor a letter every day for 34 years. ①Paul Langevin (1872-1946): French physicist, elected as a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1934, and joined the French Communist Party in 1944——Annotation. What I want to express is that women, as half of human beings, have lived a secret life for thousands of years (like those young lovers who love each other secretly, or like the secret language "Nvshu") and A largely forgotten life, but one that is always richer than the patterns society has set for them, one that transcends prejudices and stereotypes.All in all, I longed for a brief glimpse through the book into those shadows.Because there is a history that is not in history, only by listening to the whispers of women can we dig out the history beyond that history.

Bibliography ○Barbara Ehrenreich, Dete Inglesh: Witches, Midwives and Nurses, Lazar Press; For Their Own Happiness, Daulus Press Pocket Edition . ○Sylvia Thibbe: Women Without Shadows, Twenty-First Century Press; Dictionary of Famous Women, Pocket Edition, Esparza Press. ○ Bonnie Anderson, Judith Zinzer: Women's History (Volumes II and III), Critical Press. ○Robert Graves: The White Goddess, Arianza Press. ○ Linda Wagner-Martin: Telling the Lives of Women, Rutgers University Press (NJ, USA). ○ Claire Barker (editor): The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature, Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd (London). ○Mary Morris (editor): "Girl's Travel", Distinguished Posts Press (New York). ○ Phyllis Roth (editor): Women's Lives, WW Norton & Company (London and New York).