Unfortunate (Mostly) Literary Happenings of Past Februaries

Previous Installment in the "Bummer" Series: Bummer New Year

February 1, 1891: Newspaper publisher Ignacio Martínez is assassinated by two men in Laredo, Texas, because they disagree with his newspaper’s criticism of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz.

February 2, 2014: Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played Truman Capote in Capote, dies of an apparently accidental overdose of prescription medicine and heroin.

February 3, 1959: “The Day the Music Died,” when early rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were all killed in a plane crash outside Clear Lake, Iowa. The musicians had performed at Clear Lake’s Surf Ballroom and were on their way to their next show in Minnesota. This accident is remembered in poetic form through the Don McLean song “American Pie,” recorded on May 26, 1971. 

February 7, 1497: On Shrove Tuesday in Florence, followers of the monk Girolamo Savonarola burn art, books, their cosmetics, fancy clothes, playing cards, and other cultural objects they associate with sin in the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities. Sadly, irreplaceable ancient art and manuscripts were lost to this religiously-fueled war on anything that represented luxury. 

Ironically, Savonarola will later be excommunicated and convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. As punishment, he is hanged and his body burned in the same plaza where the Bonfire of the Vanities occurred. It will be forbidden for any Christian to possess copies of Savonarola’s writings. 

February 10, 2005: Playwright Arthur Miller dies of bladder cancer.

February 11, 1963: Poet Sylvia Plath, who struggles with clinical depression, dies by suicide, inhaling gas by placing her head inside an unlit gas stove. She is 30 years old.

February 11, 2012: 48-year-old singer/actress Whitney Houston is found unresponsive in the bathtub of her room at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Paramedics attempted CPR but are unable to revive her. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office attributes her death to atherosclerotic heart disease, cocaine use, and drowning. (Ok, this one's not really "literary." I'll allow it.) 

February 12, 1980: Two days after 34-year-old Patricia Frazier of Texas saw a CBS network TV broadcast of the movie The Exorcist, Frazier kills her 4-year-old daughter Khunji and cuts out her heart. According to Dr. Leon Morris, a psychologist who spoke with Frazier after the crime, Frazier believed Khunji was possessed by demons and trying to harm her (Patricia). A jury of her peers finds Patricia Frazier not guilty by reason of insanity.

February 13, 1945: U.S. and U.K. forces drop incendiary bombs on Dresden, Germany, causing fires with the intention of destroying munitions factories in that city. A second round of bombs are dropped in the early hours of February 14th, calculated to hamper the efforts of rescuers on the scene of the first round of bombings and fires. It’s estimated that between 22,000 and 25,000 Germans are killed, almost all of them civilians.

Author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is there as an American prisoner of war being held by the German army. The experience forms the basis of his science fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

February 14, 1929: In what becomes known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, Al Capone’s gangsters line up seven members of Bugs Moran’s rival gang and machine gun them to death. Police arrive in time to find one survivor, Frank Gusenberg, suffering from 14 bullet wounds. They ask Gusenberg to name his killer, but Gusenberg refuses before he succumbs to his injuries.

February 14, 1989: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issues a pronouncement urging faithful Muslims to assassinate Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s magical realist novel The Satanic Verses depicts a fictional version of the Prophet Mohammad as a character, which the Ayatollah considers blasphemous.

February 15, 1998: 89-year-old war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, struggling with ovarian and liver cancer and failing eyesight, chooses to end her own life by swallowing cyanide.

February 17, 1673: French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who wrote under the pen name Molière, suffers a tuberculosis-induced pulmonary embolism while performing in his own play The Invalid. He finished out the show, but was carried immediately home afterward, where he died.

February 18, 1718: French-born English writer Peter Anthony Motteux dies of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation inside a brothel, although the circumstances of his death were considered suspicious at the time. This may be the oldest recorded case of autoerotic asphyxiation.

February 19, 2013: The body of Canadian student and tourist Elisa Lam is discovered in the water tower atop the Stay on Main hotel in Los Angeles, California. Lam is believed to have entered the tank of her own volition and accidentally drowned, possibly while experiencing the effects of withdrawal from her psychiatric medications.

February 25, 1983: Playwright Tennessee Williams dies of an apparently accidental overdose of the barbiturate medication Seconal.

February 26, 2015: Australian author Jessica Ainscough, age 29, dies of a rare cancer, epithelioid sarcoma. In 2008, her doctors suggested amputating her affected left arm at the shoulder, which would have given her a greater than 50% chance of surviving for ten years or more. Ainscough chose to treat her cancer with alternative therapies rather than having the amputation. She used the alternative treatments for six years, only returning to conventional medical treatments near the end of her life when she developed a tumor that bled continuously for ten months.

February 28, 1916: The Turn of the Screw author Henry James dies of pneumonia.

February 29, 1960: Melvin Purvis II, the FBI agent who shot and killed John Dillinger (and who was played by Christian Bale in Public Enemies), dies by suicide.

Now, after all that bad news, if you want to take a little Public Enemies sidebar and learn about the song "Blue Moon," read here. 

And you can always read my work in progress, Erin O'Riordan's Almanac, on Ko-fi.

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August: Osage County (Not Spoiler-Free)

Remember “Hardcover Bound 2,” the clever literary parody of a Kanye West song with a memorable music video? It contains the lines:

“They ask me what’s next on my reading list-

Ever start a book that you can’t finish?!

Caryl Churchill and Tracy Letts, I

Think I’ll make time for Samuel Beckett

Books can help you overcome lotsa things

You know, I know,

Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

I was vaguely aware of Samuel Beckett as the author of Waiting for Godot, some kind of experimental play in which the two on-stage characters are waiting for an off-stage character who never shows up. As far as I could remember, I hadn’t heard of Caryl Churchill or Tracy Letts. To me, that sounded like the names of two lady playwrights.

It turned out I had actually heard of Tracy Letts, though. (And that he is a boy.) Several years ago, my dad told me and my husband we should watch a movie called Bug, which he said was one of the weirdest things he’d ever seen. So we watched the film, in which Ashley Judd played the main character.

The movie was made in 2006. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was based on a Tracy Letts play. Letts had another play made into a movie in 2014, and Meryl Streep won an Oscar for playing Letts’ main character Violet Weston in August: Osage County. I watched the film version on Saturday, June 11, on Netflix.

August: Osage County is set on Kansas. I’ve never been to Osage County, but it’s the county directly south of the one in which the city of Lawrence sits. I passed through Lawrence on my way to Manhattan for my nephew’s 2012 wedding.

The rural county is the home of poet and playwright Beverly Weston and his wife, Violet, who are both white. Violet has mouth cancer and a strong dependency on pain pills. The pills amplify her tendency to say whatever’s on her mind, no matter how blunt, thoughtless, rude, or obscene it happens to be. Bev hires a Native American woman named Johnna to help him take care of Violet, since Violet’s care is seriously cutting into Bev’s drinking time.

When Bev disappears, Violet’s family converges on the house: daughters Barbara, Ivy, and Karen (only middle daughter Ivy still lives in Kansas), sister Mattie Fay, brother-in-law Charles (played by Chris Cooper, who previously played a Kansan in Capote), nephew Little Charles, granddaughter Jean, Barbara’s estranged husband Bill, and Karen’s fiancé Steve.

Mattie Fay is very harsh and mean to her son, Little Charles, played in the film by Benedict Cumberbatch. I have only recently warmed to his charms. At first I was like, “Ha ha – Benadryl Cookingpot.” That he played the creep in Atonement did not help his case. (Atonement makes a good case for falling in love with James McAvoy or Keira Knightley.) Tumblr wore me down until one day I said, “BBC Sherlock Holmes – actually kind of good-looking. And he does do that sexy impression of Alan Rickman…” (See The Simpsons.)

Let that be a lesson to ya, kids – stay away from Tumblr and British television. They’ll rot your brain.

Little Charles is the family disappointment, and the one thing that makes him happy is his cousin Ivy. They are having an affair that the rest of the family doesn’t know about. In one scene, Ivy goes to kiss Charles but he stops her, reminding her they have a deal not to be affectionate around the family. Then he stares at her in a very dreamy and romantic way, finally saying, “I adore you.” In another scene, they sit at the piano and he sings her a song he’s written for her.

It soon comes out, though, that Bev and Mattie Fay had an affair years ago. Ivy and Little Charles are possibly – probably – half-siblings. Little Charles doesn’t find out, but Ivy does. This does not change Ivy’s plans to run away with him to New York. She reasons that since she’s had a hysterectomy and can’t have any biological children, they aren’t hurting anyone. And it’s hard to argue with her logic. I mean, they were both fine with the fact that their mothers are sisters. They know they’re at least first cousins. It’s not too big a leap.

It’s a pretty grim, gloomy movie overall. If I were a theater major in college, I would compare and contrast Tracy Letts’ bitter matriarch Violet Weston with Tennessee Williams’ overly entangled, bitter matriarch Violet Venable in Suddenly Last Summer.

I don't know if I liked August: Osage County, but it was certainly interesting.

Oh How Pinteresting (OHP): Vintage/Black and White

Happy Wednesday! Let's link up with Michelle at TheVintageApple.com for Oh, How Pinteresting.



Pinterest has a large collection of pictures of Marilyn Monroe reading; she read often. I made a this post with just some of those images.



I'm glad Tennessee Williams won a Pulitzer for Streetcar and not Suddenly Last Summer. I'm still somewhat traumatized by the latter. Did you know Brando was native to Omaha, Nebraska?

Yesterday was Jack Kerouac's birthday. Kerouac desperately wanted Marlon Brando to play the lead in a movie version of On the Road, but it never happened. You can read Kerouac's letter here.



This is a gorgeous screencap from From Here to Eternity: Montgomery Clift (another native Nebraskan, btw) as Prewitt, doing what Prew does best, and Donna Reed as Lorene, the ultimate ride-or-die chick, down for whatever. Donna Reed has the best costumes in this movie - especially the party dress she's wearing when Prew first sees her at the club. Gorgeous.



The English actress Lily Elsie.



Live fast, die young, bad girls do it well.



Okay, this one's not vintage. It's just a lovely image from Alex O'Hurley's Sexy Man Monday posts.

The Tennessee Williams Play That Freaks Me Out

I haven't been reading for pleasure lately, stopping in the middles of The Amber Spyglass and The Thin Red Line to study up on the U.S. Constitution, presidents, Supreme Court justices, bodies of water, Canadian provinces et al. for my upcoming Jeopardy! try-out. I've also been dusting and reorganizing my bookshelves, and when I came across Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara? The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World's Best-Loved Books by Jenny Bond and Chris Sheedy, I couldn't resist flipping it open.



From Here to Eternity is on page 131. I'm pretty sure I read this section before, but I didn't mean as much to  me before I finished FHTE. I learned (or re-learned) that James Jones is like Robert E. Lee Prewitt in the following ways: Jones' father was an alcoholic, which was part of the reason Jones left the family home as a teen, and he was also a boxer in a unit renowned for its Golden Gloves participants. I also learned that the book FHTE beat out when it won the National Book Award was The Catcher in the Rye.

Catcher in the Rye is a favorite subject of the conspiracy theory bloggers, by the way. See this post at MK Culture, for example, or this post at Pseudo-Occult Media implicating the cartoon Family Guy (a cartoon I personally dislike, for the record). The Wikipedia entry on the book mentions that it's been linked to John Hinckley Jr.'s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, Mark David Chapman's shooting of John Lennon and Robert John Bardo's shooting of Rebecca Shaeffer.

Anyway, another book I came across was Famous American Plays of the 1940s, edited  by Henry Hewes, which was one of my school books from my freshman year of high school. The first play is Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, and it includes the cast of the first production (November 18, 1942). It included Tallulah Bankhead as Sabina (P.S. that was my maternal grandpa's mom's name) and Montgomery Clift (then aged 22) as young Henry.

I've been borrowing Montgomery Clift films from Netflix, and after reading Tennessee Williams' rather catty quote about Marilyn Monroe via D.R. Haney's Salon.com article on Marilyn's death anniversary, I somehow came to the conclusion that I should watch the Williams adaptation Suddenly Last Summer, which features Montgomery Clift. I was imagining it would be a family drama along the lines of Streetcar,  with Elizabeth Taylor doing a turn as a Blanche Dubois-esque Southern Belle, probably with some tragic result. I had no idea it would be so creepy and disturb me so much.

The screenplay, by the way, was written by the recently deceased Gore Vidal.

(Vidal is on the right, next to Tom Wolfe.)

At the beginning of the movie, Montgomery Clift's character, psychiatrist Dr. Cukrowitz (from the Polish word for sugar, cukro), is performing a lobotomy at a former school made into a mental health hospital; the building is literally falling apart. He's from Chicago, but recently moved his practice to this state-run hospital in New Orleans. Later that same day, he meets a potential benefactor in Mrs. Violet Venable (Katherine Hepburn). 

Mrs. Venable, who arrives to greet Dr. Cukrowitz via an elevator that makes her look like a goddess descending in an ancient Greek drama, is deeply in grief over the death of her son Sebastian. Sebastian (explicitly named for the saint who was martyred after being shot with arrows) supposedly died of a heart attack in Spain the previous summer, and his death was witnessed by his cousin, Catherine Holly (Taylor). Catherine suffered a mental break because of her cousin's death and is now confined to a Catholic mental health hospital.



Mrs. Venable, who is widowed, shows the doctor around Sebastian's jungle-like garden, where she feeds her Venus fly-trap. The garden contains a statue of the angel of death, which resembles the alleged "angel skeleton" on The Simpsons. 

Violet was unusually devoted to her son, even going to so far as to say the mother-son pair was regarded as a couple. Sebastian and Violet's relationship was overly entangled, if not outright incestuous.  

Mrs. Venable's deeply offended by the "babblings" of Catherine in her "madness," which impugns Sebastian's "moral character." Violet wants Catherine to have a lobotomy, supposedly for her own good. When we first meet Catherine, she has intentionally burned a nun's hand with a cigarette, and stands accused of molesting a 60-year-old male gardener and then claiming the man attempted to rape her. Is Catherine really mentally ill, or is she a sane woman who suffered a terrible trauma and is now chafing under the restraints of an overly restrictive hospital where she does not belong? 

At that first meeting between Catherine and Dr. Cukrowicz, she kisses him. He does nothing to discourage her, dismissing this inappropriate interaction as "a friendly kiss." They're going to have major transference issues. 

However, the much larger danger to Catherine is that Violet's money, power and influence will induce the state hospital (to which Catherine is moved; the nuns have a hard time controlling her) to perform a lobotomy on Catherine. Tennessee Williams had a sister on whom a lobotomy was performed, and he appears to have been deeply traumatized by his parents' decision to allow this. 

Dr. Cukrowicz is reluctant to perform the surgery, at least until he can get from Catherine the true story of how Sebastian died in Spain. When Catherine does finally tell the story at the film's climax, it is very disturbing. We can assume from Catherine's narrative that Sebastian has used her to attract attention, then propositioned the men who swarmed around her. Before Violet got "too old," this was Violet's function for Sebastian as well. There's a suggestion - although nothing this explicit could have been stated in a 1950s film - that Sebastian may have taken advantage of underage boys, who are so poor he can coerce them with money.

For whatever reason, the mob of boys and young men turns against Sebastian, chase him through the streets and kill him in a manner most gruesome - they tear him apart, and some of them eat bits of his flesh. Since his previous play was titled Orpheus Descending, it's not too far-fetched to imagine that Williams may have been thinking of classical Greek and Roman mythology, with its fiercely violent followers of Dionysus and Bacchus - a theme also used by Charlaine Harris. Barbara Walker's Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets will be happy to tell you that St. Sebastian is a mythological figure linked to the Gaulish version of the Annually Dying God, who is sacrificed each year. The website CatholicOnline says of St. Sebastian, "He is also commonly referred to as a homosexual icon, which remains an on-going controversial tie between  the gay community and the Roman Catholic Church." 

This is a much grislier fate than befalls the typical Tennessee Williams character; The New York Public Library Literature Companion says of the one-act play on which the film is based, "Even for Williams, the play is unusually bleak." Critics have suggested that according to the moral code of the 1950s, gay men were "monsters" who, like Frankenstein's monster, were to be dealt with by chasing them down with pitchforks and torches. If Mrs. Venable, in some aspects, represented Williams' mother, he may have identified with the refined, shy, sensitive poet Sebastian, and he may have felt he was being cruelly punished by society for being gay. Even if Williams identified with Sebastian, though, the film paints the character in a negative light. 

Katherine Hepburn's character, Mrs. Venable, is truly a villain, willing to destroy her young niece in defense of her dead son's reputation and to avoid facing the truth. 

Sebastian is disturbing. Mrs. Venable is disturbing. The relationship between Dr. Cukrowitz and Catherine - following the tried-and-true Hollywood trope that the hero must always get the girl at the end of the picture - is also disturbing. Dear Gore Vidal in gay heaven, this is such an inappropriate story onto which to tack a love story.  Yes, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift were BFFs, but turning Catherine - who told the doctor about an experience of being sexually assaulted before she told him about her traumatic experience of witnessing Sebastian's death, and had also recently attempted suicide - into a romantic heroine is just bizarre.  She's far too vulnerable to be able to have an equal relationship (other than a professional relationship, that is) with her doctor, and he has totally forgotten his Hippocratic oath.

I'm not the only one disturbed by this fascinating, well-acted but problematic and strange melodrama. For further reading:

http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2000/3paller.htm

http://www.helium.com/items/1132913-movie-reviews-suddenly-last-summer

http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/12894119/devouring-creation-cannibalism-sodomy-scene-analysis-suddenly-last-summer

http://filmgeist.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/suddenly-i-write-about-suddenly-last-summer-by-joseph-l-mankiewicz-1959/

http://www.cinemaqueer.com/review%20pages%202/suddenlylastsummer.html

The Loki in Lughnasa

A few weeks ago, when Tom Hiddleston's erotic reading of Tennessee Williams' The Seven Descents of Myrtle came up in a prostitution-related post, I mentioned Hiddleston-portrayed Marvel Comics character Loki. The Norse god Loki, I said, sometimes has female characteristics, and is the mother of several offspring.

I got curious about the details of this story, so I turned to my trusty Hamilton's Mythology. It mentioned Loki's part in the death of the beloved god Balder, but says nothing of his children. I then turned to Myths and Folklore by Henry I. Christ, which is the textbook from which I studied mythology as a high school freshman and sophomore, ages ago. It, too, was of limited usefulness. It said, "Although handsome, he was fickle and unreliable. His three offspring were the wolf Fenris, the Midgard serpent, and Hela, or Death." 


Hela is often depicted as half alive and half dead. Hela is the death-goddess, an equivalent of Persephone and Kali. Her Celtic equivalent was Scotia, or Scatha, and Scotland was named after her. Also referred to as Skald in Norse mythology, she had to be appeased with the yearly blood sacrifice of a hero. 

I said Loki is the mother of this weird little brood, but Encyclopedia Mythica says Loki is the father and that their mother is the giantess Angrboda, Loki's mistress. Loki was the mother of the eight-legged colt Sleipnir; he took the form of a mare to distract the stallion Svadilfari, which belonged to a giant who opposed the gods. In doing so, Loki saved Freya from having to marry the giant. 


Then I went to Barbara G. Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. Walker writes, "Like many of the oldest gods, Loki was bisexual [in the sense that he was sometimes a male and sometimes a female]. He even succeeded in becoming a mother, though only after he swallowed a woman's heart to acquire the power of birth-giving...Loki's offspring was the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, spirit of death, a symbol of the gallows tree on which Odin rode." 

Walker notes that Loki was sometimes identified as "Logi," or "flame." She associates Loki-as-Logi with Lug (or Lugh), the Celtic god of fire, who was celebrated at Lughnasa/Lughnasadh (Lug's games) on August 1st. Hey, that's tomorrow!


Lug, it seems, is an Irish version of the annually dying and returning god. He's the son of Dagda (the great Irish father-god, equivalent to Odin), but also a reincarnation of Dagda. His mother/lover throughout the incarnation cycle is Tailltiu, the earth-goddess. At her eponymous Irish city, Taillten, the annual fair resulted in temporary marriages that lasted a year and a day. Lughnasa is reminiscent of Beltane - a cross-quarter holiday (the halfway point between a solstice and an equinox) at which a stage of the harvest is celebrated with symbolic acts of human fertility - i.e. sex, and not necessarily with one's usual partner. 

However you celebrate Lughnasa - bread and blueberries are traditional symbols of this stage of the Northern Hemisphere's harvest season - have a great one!

Hooker Please ~ Prostitutes in Literature

On account of reading and writing so much about prostitution lately, I threatened HERE to write this blog post, and now I did. I don't judge people for non-monogamy or for having jobs in sex work, but just for the record, I categorically oppose human trafficking, forced prostitution of any kind and the sexual exploitation of minors.

The two former prostitutes I've known in my life were both recovering drug users, and their sex work was directly related to their addictions. This doesn't apply to any of the five characters you'll read about below - obviously, for artistic purposes, there's a bit of a disconnect between reality and fiction.

I warn you, a spoiler is coming up for Mockingjay, so don't continue unless you've finished the entire Hunger Games trilogy.

Prostitutes in Literature I've Read Recently

1. A Hu-Li, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin. A Hu-Li is a supernatural kitsune, a fox shape-shifter. Owing to her supernatural ability to influence human minds, she never actually has to physically touch her clients. Until she starts falling in love, A Hu-Li is, paradoxically, a virgin prostitute, at least in the sense that she’s never had intercourse in her unnaturally long life.

2. Lorene (Alma Schmidt), From Here to Eternity by James Jones (currently reading). Lorene is Alma Schmidt’s “house name” at the Honolulu brothel The New Congress Hotel. She’s a native of Oregon who told her mother she was going to Hawaii for a few years to work as a secretary. Alma has a legitimate reason for wanting to earn her own money: she doesn’t want to have to depend on a man. The first night Robert E. Lee Prewitt meets her, he’s in love. She won’t marry him because, in order to preserve her reputation to the extent that no one would ever believe she’d been a prostitute, she intends to marry a high-status husband.

3. Finnick Odair, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. Mockingjay is a war novel, and many outrages happen therein, but few upset me as much as Finnick’s fate as a 17-year-old Hunger Games victor. In Catching Fire, Finnick’s flirtatious nature made him seem like he was overly confident, cocky and proud. In Mockingjay, we learn his sexualized way of relating to other people is the result of exploitation from the Capitol – he was literally pimped out to wealthy male and female clients. Unlike Alma, Finnick gets to marry his true love, Annie, who is pregnant when Finnick is killed in battle.

Sidebar: What do Katniss Everdeen and Robert E. Lee Prewitt have in common? They look somewhat similar - tall and slim, with an olive complexion. They both come from a coal mining area, and both had coal miner fathers. Prew drinks like Haymitch, though.

4. Sophie-Anne Leclerq, Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris. 1,100-year-old French teen Sophie-Anne Leclerq is a recurring character in Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries series, until her true death. Definitely Dead is the book in which the heroine Sookie Stackhouse hears Sophie-Anne’s tale. As a mortal human, Sophie-Anne was the sole survivor of a wave of plague that destroyed her village. When she met up with other human beings again, they exploited her and put her to work as a prostitute. Her callous treatment by other humans is some of the reason why the vampire queen of Louisiana is so cold and calculating, a terrifying and powerful woman.

5. Myrtle,The Seven Descents of Myrtle(also known as Kingdom of Earth) by Tennessee Williams. I didn't actually read this one; via Kala's (TheDorkMistress') Tumblr, I heard this recording of the short story/dramatic monologue being read by Tom Hiddleston. Tom Hiddleston is one of the stars of Tumblr, beloved by fangirls everywhere for his portrayal of the comic book villain/Norse god Loki in the movies Thor and The Avengers. Hiddleston narrates the story as "Chicken," the character who steals his half-brother Lot's new wife, Myrtle.

(This is an odd image of Loki, but it resonates with the "seven descents" in the title - Dance of the Seven Veils, get it? But then again, in Norse mythology, Loki is sometimes female. He/she gives birth - the wolf-monster Fenrir, who may or may not appear as a character in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, is one of the offspring of which Loki is the mother.*)

Myrtle and Chicken have a long, philosophical talk in which she describes being sexually harassed and then raped by her boss as a young teen. Despite the violence of her experience, she learned that she liked the sexual act itself* and became a prostitute as well as a showgirl before marrying Lot. Lot, afflicted with tuberculosis,is a pathetic figure; Myrtle married him largely out of pity. Lot calls Myrtle’s name all night while she’s up in the attic making love to Chicken, and in the morning the two come down to find Lot dead.

Prostitutes in Literature I Haven't Read

For this, I've enlisted the aid of the trusty New York Public Library Literature Companion. I feel as if there should be some character who comes immediately to mind when I think of literary prostitutes, and I’m having a brain cramp and just not thinking of him or her. Help me out here, blogosphere – who else belongs on this list?

-- Moll Flanders, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. Being a prostitute is counted among Moll Flanders’ misfortunes. Later in her life, she becomes rich, repents, and dies an honest woman. Stupid Flanders. 

-- Lulu, Pandora’s Box by Frank Wedekind. Lulu is the classic literary femme fatale – she literally causes the deaths of those around her. Like Moll Flanders, she grew up on the streets. In her declining years, Lulu is reduced to prostitution, and her final client is Jack the Ripper. Louise Brooks played Lulu in a 1929 silent film.

-- Maureen Wendall,Them by Joyce Carol Oates. Maureen is the daughter of Howard and Loretta Wendall, a working-class couple. Howard, a police officer, is once busted for taking money from prostitutes. After his death, Loretta relies too heavily on her young daughter to take care of her, and Maureen works as a prostitute to build an escape fund. Her stepfather finds out and beats her, resulting in a nervous breakdown. Maureen’s older half-brother, Jules, sexually abuses and pimps out a woman. So, typical Joyce Carol Oates: heavy, depressing dysfunction all around.

I do not volunteer to read any of these things. 'Specially not J.C.O. I'm still traumatized by "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been."

*Corrected here: http://erinoriordan.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-loki-in-lughnasa.html