Inspiration – The Passion of Gustav Klimt

The artist Gustav Klimt's work has been enormously popular for over a hundred years. What is it about his work that we find so impressive?
The artist Gustav Klimt’s work has been enormously popular for over a hundred years. What is it about his work that we find so impressive?

I first became aware of Gustav Klimt and his work when I was in 10th grade. I had decided to switch my language classes from French, a language I found frankly boring and far more difficult than necessary, to German. My German teacher at the time was named Frau Christophe; she was a delightful, bright, energetic sort of woman, who had a love for European culture in general, and who went out of her way to educate us as much in the history of the language we were trying to learn as the actual mechanics of grammar and vocabulary.

I took German well into my college years, but this first semester of lessons will always stand out in my mind. I met many people in that class and learned many things that changed me in ways I did not suspect until much later. I also developed a love for Germanic culture and eastern European history in general. Gustav Klimt was part of this interest. Frau Christophe had a large print of Klimt’s The Kiss, which was actually called Lovers when it was first exhibited in Vienna in 1908, hanging by the classroom door, directly in front of my desk.

Gustav's Klimt's most famous piece, The Kiss, exhibited originally in 1908
Gustav’s Klimt’s most famous piece, The Kiss, exhibited originally in 1908

With all my trips to art museums and galleries, I had never seen a painting quite like The Kiss. It drew my eye every time my attention wandered from the lesson at hand and I spent many classes leaning back in my seat between exercises and staring at the portrait, a grimace on my face. I couldn’t understand the picture. Why were they dressed like that? Why was the woman twisted away from the man in such an uncomfortable looking position? The background of gold – was that meant to be the sky? What was the picture trying to say? And why, despite finding the picture indecipherable, did I like it so much?

Gustav Klimt lived in Vienna, Austria for all his life, from 1862 to 1918, when he died at the age of fifty-five. He was a popular and controversial painter during his lifetime, and his work, while undoubtedly well-done and interesting, did not leave any lasting mark on the pages of art history. He never married, though he fathered more than a handful of illegitimate children, and in fact rarely was seen in society, preferring to spend his time with close friends and family. He hated speaking or writing about his work, feeling strongly that the work should speak for itself, and that anyone who wanted to know more about him should look to his work and try to see the man who he was in that. This has left many of his paintings, including The Kiss, very much up to the interpretation of the viewer.

Gustav Klimt's Lady with Hat
Gustav Klimt’s Lady with Hat

As I grew older, I sought out more of Klimt’s work for comparison and study. I have yet to find a piece of Klimt’s which I do not find deeply fascinating, though I think it is fair to say that I have also not found a piece I feel I fully understand. But I have become reconciled to this mystery by, at the minimum, understanding what it is about Klimt’s paintings that I find so beautiful. I think, unlike many painters of his period and indeed, after his lifetime, Klimt’s paintings are filled with his unbridled passion and reverence for his subjects. The paintings take on almost religious iconography and tone, The Kiss most of all. However one interprets the piece, there can be no doubt that the hand that created it felt the deepest sense of awe for this act, for the consummation of love in a kiss. His erotic works, of which there are many, likewise rise above simple titillation to something more by the profound respect and love with which he treats each of his subjects.

It is this unchecked passion which draws many to Klimt’s work. He holds nothing back when he paints, and truly, you can tell much about the soul of the man by really looking at his paintings. More than craft or message, I believe that the presence of passion in any work of creative art elevates it from something that is merely good to a masterpiece. By investing our own love for the topic, or person, or words, into our work, we communicate and inspire love for it in others.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

A Reputation of Deceit: How Moll Flanders Beat the Gossip Game (Part 2 of 2)

Moll Flanders managed to have a good reputation despite her myriad of sexual partners. How?
Moll Flanders managed to have a good reputation despite her myriad of sexual partners. How? (Picture by William Hogarth)

However, it wasn’t always clear to Moll Flanders how to build up a good and useful reputation such as this. When her second husband, a thief, flees the country, Moll finds herself entirely at loose ends for perhaps the first time in her life. She seems to instinctively know that if she stays where, and who, she is, she will soon dwindle down into nothing. She resolves “…to go quite out of my Knowledge, and go by another Name: This I did effectually, for I went into the Mint too, took Lodgings in a very private Place, drest me up in the Habit of a Widow and called myself Mrs. Flanders” (Defoe 64). At first, this move seems to work perfectly. Moll has attained her reputation of virtue by claiming to be a widow, which leaves her both blameless for her lack of “chastity” and open for re-marriage. Yet, the reputation for wealth continues to elude her. Rumors begin to circulate that she is a widow, certainly, but a poor one. Learning that marriage is a market (Defoe 67), she quickly realizes that with such a reputation, no matter how virtuous she pretends to be, she will soon run out of stock and be both destitute and alone.

The resourceful Moll formulates a plan, first testing it on a friend she has met in her neighborhood. Her friend has just lost the prospect of a good marriage with a sea-captain. Moll encourages her “that…she should take care to have it well spread among the Women, which she could not fail of an Opportunity to do in a Neighbourhood, so addicted to Family News, as that she liv’d in was; that she had enquired into his Circumstances, and found he was not the Man as to Estate he pretended to be…” (Defoe 69). In this adventure, Moll discovers the key to making and breaking reputations: gossip. It is the gossips of any community that have the power to ruin or elevate based on reputation. After testing this theory to success, she then applies it to herself over and over again. She moves to a new place, spreads the rumor that she is a woman of fortune, and then marries a rich man while being able to claim innocence of any falsehoods, since she never says outright that she has any fortune at all.

Widows had special status in 1700s Britain and the status afford to them would have served someone like Moll very well indeed. (Portrait by Josef Franz Danhauser, The Widows Offering)
Widows had special status in 1700s Britain and the status afford to them would have served someone like Moll very well indeed. (Portrait by Josef Franz Danhauser, The Widows Offering)

This modus operandi of gossip and deceit serves Moll well throughout the novel, keeping her afloat many times when other heroines would have floundered. Nevertheless, all the self-generated gossip in the world can’t save Moll from a fate that every heroine of this era fears most of all: unwedded pregnancy. It is pregnancy that ends the successful scheming of Haywood’s heroine Fantomina. It is difficult, and in many circumstances, impossible, to hide a pregnancy and in most stories it is a certainty that sooner or later someone will find out. Besides, as aforementioned, it only takes the rumor of an impropriety such as this to ruin a woman’s reputation forever. At the point in the story when this fate befalls her, Moll has already had several children within her various marriages. Being familiar with the state of pregnancy, she knows full well how difficult it will be to undergo such a thing by herself; a fact, perhaps, that Fantomina doesn’t fully appreciate and thus fully plan for.

With little money and no husband or family to turn to, Moll’s situation is dire. However, she works the people around her to her advantage and soon finds herself in the care of a Mrs. “B—-”, a midwife with whom she “lays in” (Defoe 163). Unlike Fantomina, pregnancy doesn’t end up hurting Moll’s reputation one bit, simply because she’s a better liar and seems to know more of the world.

Moll Flanders is a character that stands out from her contemporaries in many ways. While her actions are morally reprehensible, she is in control of her life, unlike the other fictional heroines that were placed in her position. Defoe’s tale of the life of Moll Flanders shows that reputation is actually worthless. It raises the question that if reputation can be fabricated so easily and accepted without real virtue behind it, what’s the point in valuing it at all? Perhaps though, Defoe’s depiction of Moll Flanders does contain a moral about reputation that is more clearly illustrated by Moll’s treatment of her children than by the other episodes. The child she has at Midwife “B—-”’s and, in fact, all the other children she bears, she abandons, just as she was abandoned by her mother. She rarely shows any kind of remorse or regret about these desertions, and most of the time the children barely get a line in her narrative. This is one of the most chilling things about Moll Flanders as a character: she is completely cold to those she is supposed to love. Defoe’s story reveals that maintaining a good reputation through deceit, while not impossible, can make one hard and immune to the more tender emotions of not only shame, but love and trust. Surely the price of maintaining one’s reputation through deeds, not deceit, is far cheaper.

Works Cited

Defoe, Daniel, and G. A. Starr. Moll Flanders. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

If you enjoyed this post, you may be interest in these other pieces:

Fairy Tales

On a cool night in midsummer, while the fireflies danced their ancient dances over the river and a pack of deer, emboldened by the protection of the full moon, grazed in the meadow, a baby was born in the thatched hut by the dell.

The unlikelihood of this wondrous event was commented on widely by the fairy folk who made their home in the dell. It was the first human birth to occur so close to their own realm in over a thousand years, and the community was abuzz with talk for several days.

It was not the fact that a baby was born which they found so astonishing. After all, babies are born all the time, to practically everything, everywhere. No, it was the fact that out of the millions of people who could have resulted from the union of the man and the woman in the hut, on the millions of days and nights that the baby could have been born, in what was only one of surely millions of places, this exact baby was born on this exact night in this exact place.

To call such an event improbable was a gross understatement. A miracle, the fairy folk agreed, something like magic, was a much more appropriate term for it. They wondered that the man and woman in the hut, while happy with their new bairn, did not seem to be in awe of it as they should. But then again, the fairy folk considered, humans had very strange points of view about these types of things.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Inspiration – Making Connections with 1776

The musical 1776 was a surprise hit for Broadway. Why did a historical drama musical become so popular?
The musical 1776 was a surprise hit for Broadway. Why did a historical drama musical become so popular?

Seeing as how it’s Presidents’ Day tomorrow, it feels only fitting to talk about a show which captures the very beginnings of the United States of America, 1776. 1776 opened on Broadway in spring of 1969 and was well received by critics and the public. A film adaptation was later produced, released in 1972, starring William Daniels, Howard Da Silva, and Ken Howard  as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson respectively. I have watched this show almost every year for over ten years, generally around the 4th of July, as part of a family tradition. It was among one of the first musicals I was ever exposed to – which might seem odd, but makes more sense when you consider that my father has an avid and passionate interest in American History.

1776 tells the story of the creation of the Declaration of Independence and, as a result, the creation of the United States of America as we know it today. The main protagonist is John Adams, originally played on Broadway and in the film adaptation by William Daniels. John Adams was a congressman from Massachusetts, who would later go on to become the 2nd President of the United States in 1797. A staunch proponent of independence, he is not very well-liked in congress due to his argumentative and bombastic nature. But, with the help of his colleague Benjamin Franklin and the soft-spoken, but literarily inclined Thomas Jefferson, they accomplish something which had never before occurred in the history of the civilized world; a colony broke off from its mother country and declared complete political independence.

John Trumbull's famous portrait of the signing of the Declaration of Independence hardly seems fodder for a new musical. But beyond this moment in history were some of America's most vibrant personalities.
John Trumbull’s famous portrait of the signing of the Declaration of Independence hardly seems fodder for a new musical. But beyond this moment in history were some of America’s most vibrant personalities.

1776 could have easily been a straight play instead of a musical. After all, it is a historical drama, with many interesting and complicated political and social underpinnings to be discussed. Historical dramas aren’t often transposed into musicals, with good reason; many of the events would seem ridiculous set to song and dance, and in some instances it would be downright disrespectful to do so (a musical about Hitler wouldn’t go over very well…or would it?). But the fact that 1776 is a musical is, I feel, very important.

The musical numbers, dances, score – they all are tools, consciously used by the creators, to connect with the audience. It’s very easy to feel removed from history – it was all such a long time ago, after all. Even history that has personal significance can be hard to reconnect with. But by using a medium that is accessible to all, like music, and using it to help convey character’s motives, hopes, dreams, problems, and indeed the main conflicts facing the entire world of the story, the story itself becomes relatable and understandable. No, we weren’t there when John Adams was trying to get congress to seriously discuss the issue of independence, but we can all understand the frustration he feels at his inability to get anyone to listen to him, a frustration he gives voice to in song.

There are stories in each of us, stories that we may or may not know how to tell. I think it’s important to consider using mediums of communication that may be unique or atypical for the type of story we want others to understand. Are you trying to write an autobiography? Why not try writing it as a comic book? Trying to paint a picture of your favorite place in nature? Consider taking a collection of photographs and creating a collage instead. Give your audience, and yourself, opportunities to understand your material in new ways. It’s better to try something different and fail than to not try at all.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

A Reputation of Deceit: How Moll Flanders Beat the Gossip Game (Part 1 of 2)

In the 17th and 18th century, a woman's good reputation was everything. So how could she go about keeping it spotless? (Painting Group Portrait of a Family by a Lake and a Classical Pavilion by Charles Philips)
In the 17th and 18th century, a woman’s good reputation was everything. So how could she go about keeping it spotless? (Painting Group Portrait of a Family by a Lake and a Classical Pavilion by Charles Philips)

Literary works of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries tend to depend, in one way or another, on reputation. In works such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Eliza Haywood‘s Fantomina, the issue of good and bad reputation informs the main conflict of the story. It is important to note, however, that the reputation at stake in many of these works is that of the female protagonist; not the male. Reputation is rarely mentioned when it comes to the men of these stories, except to tell us whether they have a good or bad one. Those men with bad reputations, like Macheath from The Beggar’s Opera, are rarely looked down upon for them. The women who receive bad reputations on the other hand, usually for some kind of sexual or romantic misconduct, are treated as if their life essentially over. One black mark and they are sent away from society forever, like the tragic Fantomina, or they are forced into a life of prostitution and destitution. These women’s reputations are at the mercy of the public. Even the rumor of misconduct is enough to cause trouble, as Belinda fears in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.

Women of ruined reputations often ended up as prostitutes in brothels such as these. (Painting Brothel by William Hogarth)
Women of ruined reputations often ended up as prostitutes in brothels such as these. (Painting Brothel by William Hogarth)

However, there is one heroine from this time period that does not allow herself to be entrapped by others opinions of her. She is a woman who learns to work the civilized machinery of reputation to her own advantage. Moll Flanders, the protagonist from Daniel Defoe’s classic novel of the same name, does not sit idly by, but molds the gossip and chatter of society to her advantage, gaining a good reputation again and again even though she has been “Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia”, and has given birth to countless bastards (Defoe, IV). What makes Moll so different from her fictional female contemporaries? How could she become the mistress of her reputation when they could not? The answer is a simple one: Moll is a consummate liar. Deceit, Defoe illustrates, is the key to a good reputation.

The original title page for Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders
The original title page for Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders

The issue of reputation is first brought up in Defoe’s tale of debauchery when Moll’s “virtue” has been taken by the eldest son of the high-born family she has been living with since youth. It is here that Moll first lays out the difference, in her eyes, between ‘reputation’ and moral ‘character’. When looking back on this time of her life, Moll comments wistfully that she “…had not only the Reputation of living in a very good Family, and a Family Noted and Respected every where, for Vertue and Sobriety, and for every valuable Thing; but I had the character too of a very sober, modest, and virtuous young Woman…” (Defoe 19). The world in which Moll lives in, the world of mid-seventeen hundreds Britain, legitimates this perception of ‘reputation’ time and time again; whether or not you actually have ‘virtue’ and ‘sobriety’ is relatively unimportant, as long as one is perceived to possess such traits.

Richardson's Pamela embodies many of the female virtues women of the time period were expected to posses.
The polar opposite of Moll, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela embodies many of the female virtues women of the time period were expected to posses.

It is to Moll’s credit that during this first indiscretion she seems little concerned for her reputation, more concerned with her “love” for the older brother than what anyone else in the house might think of her. It is the elder brother himself that stresses these issues of reputation, reminding her time and time again that if the affair is made public, even to their immediate family, there will be no way to  “…save [them] both from Ruin…” (Defoe 41). Moll is taught by this man of great public reputation, but poor private morals, that reputation is one of the most important things to those who hope to move about in ‘society’.

Moll learns this lesson well and put it to good use. Being without any real family and having her first husband die and his family turn their back on her, Moll finds herself out on her own for basically the rest of her life, with only what she manages to save from her various adventures to live upon. For Moll, a good reputation is the key that will open the door to her greatest desires. For her, reputation allows her to find company, mostly in the form of husbands, and to find financial security, mostly in the form of rich husbands. For to be alone and to be destitute are the two things Moll fears most. She gives voice to these fears many times in her writings, counting her stock at the end of every misadventure, bemoaning the fact that she does not have any friends upon which to rely as the rest of the world does. A reputation of virtue allows her to move through the world of the upper-class, while a reputation for wealth allows her to marry gentry over and over again.

Works Cited

Defoe, Daniel, and G. A. Starr. Moll Flanders. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

If you enjoyed this post, you may be interest in these other pieces:

%d bloggers like this: