THE YOUNG IDEA

Southland Times, Issue 20897, 5 October 1929, Page 13

THE YOUNG IDEA

WHY BLAME MESSALINA?

(By

Susan Lee.)

Really it seems that being a woman is full of responsibilities and there are pitfalls at every turn so that if you don’t meet one you go into another and Catastrophe stalks about like a hungry lion seeking whom he may devour, some of which is in the bible. It actually is. I mean what chance does a poor girl have as long as there are men in the world to lift her above her station and shower her with Rolls-Rpyces and jools and fancy boxes of candy—oh yes I see what I see at the pictures and I think what a hard world it is for girls especially if they’re good-looking and hanker after those finer makes of cars. But I must say that I always thought that as long as we women stuck together and defended one another from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as Shakespeare said, or if he didn’t I don’t know who did—anyway, we’d find union was strength and we’d be able to snap our fingers at the rest of the world and jolly well continue to allow ourselves to be the judges of our own right and wrong. That is what I thought, which just shows how foolish it is to have any convictions about anything because the, more you have the bigger will be your rubbish-heap where you deposit the pieces. When a woman stands up and denounces another woman, things have come to a very pretty pass, and that’s just what they have come to, because only the other day I read an article in a northern paper by a woman with a French name which first made me blush for her, then for my sex, and finally made me wonder what was the use of blushing, and whether I, being a woman, were capable of blushing, anyway. The article, running to about one and a half columns of shrieking condemnation, had

three headings—the first, “Love,” the second “What is it?” and the third, “Messalinas of the Modern World”; and this is the way it began: “Love . . . Burning words, kisses under which a woman almost swoons, long, bruising kisses. Plighted troths, vows of undying loyalty, eternal devotion, sighs, eyes moist with longing,

the ecstasy and rapture of a passion. “Wonderful —and dangerous! And capable of a thousand and one strange interpretations. The modern generation finds the elasticity of definition useful. To-day almost anything masquerades under the name of love.

“A wife runs off with a false-hearted scoundrel. This, she says, is Love. She is being true to love. A man falls in love with his pretty secretary, treats his wife in such a way that she commits suicide—the secret story of that will never be known —and marries the young girl. Love again. He exalts himself. He loves this girl. Everything must give way to his passion. It is, he argues, not a sin; it is the great, the Divine, thing to do —to yield to Love, sacrifice everything, and incidentally everyone, to this sinister, yet glowing rapture.” Naturally I read on. Man seemed to be getting the worst of it, and that always appeals to me. But the defeat was shortlived, and he rose again, triumphant, over the cower.ing figure of woman. For I learnt here, for the first time, that woman was the downfall of the mighty Roman empire, and although the thought of such power couldn’t help but send gorgeous shudders down my spine, I felt wl:»it a pity it was that such a nice, intellectual place like Rome should have gone to the barbarians merely because “the martial character of the men decayed” becatise they “could not be bothered to obey the moral code in a society where the women were ‘easy.’ ” As a matter of fact this didn’t surprise me in the least, because I’d always suspected those Roman matrons were flighty and headstrong. But I did think that so many years had wiped those times away, that we women would have learned from experience that even from the point of view of policy, faithfulness, like honesty, always pays in the end. Then followed the dreadful story of Messalina, which made me wonder why somebody didn’t get Mr Hilaire Belloc to make a cautionary tale out of it, as Messalina, who devoted so much time to her heart that she left her back uncovered and had it pierced by a sword. Anyway, here’s how one woman talks about another woman:

“Mesalina was a typical woman of that last phase. Messalina married the Emperor Claudius at 15 and thenceforward settled down to worship at the pagan shrine of Eros, god of love. She had a thousand lovers before her career was ended with a sword thrust in the garden of the palace. There are many Messalinas in the society of to-day. “But between the Messalinas of yesterday and those of to-day there is an odd difference. The dissolute women of the past seldom attempted to justify their loose morals. The world knew them for what they were. They set a pace, but they did not poison minds by sentimentalising their degeneracy. Nor did men and women of the bygone times tolerantly excuse them on the ground that they loved greatly.” Now that sounds jolly rotten to me, §o I just decided I’d try and discover the true facts about the wife of the Emperor Claudius. So it turns out that Messalina was his third wife, and his first wife had tried to take his life, which did seem to justify his divorcing her; and he divorced his second wife, too, although I couldn’t discover on what grounds. Anyway, his third attempt at matrimony involved the “vicious and shameless” Messalina, who, according to Tacitus (who sounds pretty much of a woman-hater himself, and consequently a biassed historian) after a varied and erotic career as Mrs Claudius, went through the ceremony of marriage with one of her many lovers, for which her lawful husband allowed her to be seized and put to death. Now that certainly does make her case look very black, as if it would need a lot of explaining to explain it away. But Suetonius gives it a different complexion altogether, which makes it look as if the poor woman has been the victim of a grave injustice all these years. Because he says that Claudius not only desired, but assisted in the marriage owing to the fact that he had been warned by a soothsayer that the husband of Messalina was about to fall into misfortune, so he was trying to shift his responsibilities on to the shoulders of another man. I mean to say I know of nothing more despicable than a man who tries to hide behind a woman’s petticoats, even if it was his money which purchased them. And what makes me think there is something in this latter version is that Claudius, not content to let well alone, married a fourth time, the lady in this case being already the mother of Nero—a resourceful woman who evidently found no difficulty in getting rid of her spouse by giving him poison. i

Now, what I want to know is, why did the first Mrs Claudius try to do away with her husband, and why did the fourth Mrs Claudius accomplish the same end? Surely if he were a model husband, as Roman husbands went, such singleness and urgency of purpose would not have predominated in both, to say nothing of the second who was divorced, and Messalina who had the will not only to choose another husband but the courage to go through the marriage ceremony with him. Indeed, that seems

to me jolly like dying for an ideal, and the more I think of it the more I am convinced that hers ‘is the case of another idealist who - has been misunderstood. Perhaps some day I’ll find time to go into the matter more fully and clear up the mysteries at present obscuring it. Meanwhile, I can’t yet make up my mind whether I like being called a “Messalina of Modern Times” or not. But it does look as if, where there was room for misunderstanding once, there is still room, and unlike Miss- Henriette Fragonard 1 am inclined to believe in the individual “right to love,” which is quite a different thing from “desire glorified as love.” Perhaps this is a case of one sipping the grape—and it was sour I