Refusing the muse-ing
Artist, activist and Bob Dylan's muse who resisted the role of handmaiden. Actually, what we get from that is that Suze Rotolo also resisted the role of muse itself: she left him for months while she went to study art in Italy (go sistah go sistah!), where she
read Françoise Gilot's Life With Picasso, in whose pages she encountered "revelations, lessons, warnings". She became envious of men who could sit alone in a cafe, writing or drawing. "If a girl did that it would mean she was alone," she told me three years ago. "It would take a lot of courage to do it, and when you did it, you took a chance."
As a result, 'Her art work has been shown in New York galleries, and in 2004 she joined Billionaires for Bush, a satirical street-theatre troupe': which is heartening. We also note that, while the obituarist concedes that she was 'more than a passive muse', he (it would be, wouldn't it) doesn't actually go so far as to suggest she was actually Dylan's mentor, rather than merely his 'cultural guide' to the Greenwich village scene, leftwing politics, art, poetry and theatre, does he?
This intersects with thoughts I've had about beauty/attractiveness/youthfulness in response to posts hither and yon and the chapter I read yesterday in Adrian Bingham's Family Newspapers about the development of the newspaper pin-up and the idea that looking at a scantily clad pretty young woman makes everybody happy. (And while this would be outwith Bingham's remit, which is the British popular daily papers, we do note that women's magazines have traditionally had a woman on the front, usually young, or youngish, and pretty, but maybe that's aspirational...)
And that whole idea that pretty young women are there like vases of nicely arranged flowers to make people (= men, mostly) feel good. Being too much of an individual would be a problem.
Which sort of goes in two directions: one would be in the direction of this post by matociquala about Jane Russell and the way that women in particular perhaps are culturally dismissed by a caricature of memory:
[H]ow we forget famous artists' very real talents, presence, skill--their art--and collapse them into a simplified version of what they are. I grew up on pop culture, and the Monroe and Russell in my head aren't, you know, the Monroe and Russell who graced the screen. They're Jessica-Rabbit-like pastiches, parodies of themselves.
The version of "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" in my head isn't Monroe at all, but a thousand second-generation copies.
But look at that: these women were funny, sarcastic. They had great chemistry on screen together. Russell had fabulous comic timing. She was a person, and an actor, and (yes) a great beauty.
And see this really creepy thing about Hedy Lamarr that I posted about some while ago. That the beauty somehow overwhelms everything else that these women had to offer.
The other one would be in a direction of thinking about the benefits of being plain, or at least, thinking oneself plain, and therefore, not having to enter that arena of being judged on looks, and even worse perhaps, to have those seen as one's prime source of value and one that is moreover a vanishing asset consumed by time.
There's a brief passage in one of the novels in Doris Lessing's Martha Quest sequence in which it is just mentioned in passing that, is it Jasmine? - who is notably pretty, comes in for a lot of casual kissing and hugging and touching which she accepts with grace as the expected thing because of her looks, even among the comrades, of whom she is a highly committed one. Which I possibly find more icksome now than when I first read it.
I rather like the bit in Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs in which Vinnie Minor is said to have not lost amazing good looks she had never had, but to have the kind of looks that have survived rather better into middle age than those of greater beauties (or something of the kind).
I'm not sure where this is going: there have been various thoughts going on but I'm not sure they entirely cohere into anything sensible.
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