The illustrationfriday.com challenge word this week is “sour”.
The Fox and The Grapes
One hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. “Just the thing to quench my thirst,” quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: “I am sure they are sour.”
The moral: It is easy to despise what you cannot get.
For your information, Mr. Fox, grapes are readily available at the grocery store. You can try a couple before you make a purchase and they don’t make you jump for them.
The Sugar Frosted Goodness illustration blog has changed its challenges to bi-weekly and the challenge words are posted on Mondays instead of Thursdays. That said, the current challenge is “spots”.
Out, damned spot; out, I say. One, two,—why, then ’tis time to do’t. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier and afeard? What need we fear who knows it when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
These words are spoken by Lady Macbeth in Act V, scene 1 in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking through the castle. She is subconsciously thinking and feeling guilty about being the driving force behind the murder of Duncan. After the murder, Macbeth believed his hand was irreversibly bloodstained, Lady Macbeth told him, “A little water clears us of this deed”. Now, she sees blood on her own hands. She is completely undone by guilt and descends into madness.
“What need we fear who knows it when none can call our power to account?” she asks, asserting that as long as her and her husband’s power is secure, the murders they committed cannot harm them. But her guilt-wracked state and her mounting madness show how hollow her words are. So, too, does the army outside her castle. “Hell is murky,” she says, implying that she already knows that darkness intimately. It is implied, although not directly stated, Lady Macbeth commits suicide.
The challenge this week on Monday Artday is “hair”.
The details of Julia Pastrana’s early life are sketchy. She was discovered in Mexico where she worked as a housemaid. She had hypertrichosis terminalis. She had a beard, was covered in glossy black hair. Her ears and nose were unusually large and her teeth were irregular. Theodor Lent discovered her and purchased her from a woman who might have been her mother. Lent taught her to sing and dance and play music, preparations for Julia’s introduction to the circus sideshow where she would spend the rest of her life. She joined a traveling circus when she was 20. She was regarded as some sort of hybrid or other “freak of nature” that did not fit in the order of things. Some doubted that she was even human, as a flyer from 1854 proclaimed “its jaws, jagged fangs and ears are terrifically hideous… nearly its whole frame is coated with long glossy hair. Its voice is harmonious, for this semi-human being is perfectly docile, and speaks the Spanish language.” A sense of mysticism surrounded people and creatures that deviated from “normal” and even into the mid-19th century, it was worried that even looking at Julia would cause women to miscarry or have monstrous births of their own. Her appearance was often considered to be an obscenity not fit for the public to view.
Lent married Julia during the course of her sideshow career. She became pregnant and gave birth to a son, also covered with hair. Her son died after only 36 hours and Julia died two days later. Julia’s death did not stop Lent. He had the bodies of Julia and the child mummified and took them on an extended tour of Europe, putting them on display at any chance available, for a quick buck. Victorian England loved stories of apes, lurid tales of savage gorillas coming in from Africa and the scientific description of animals. Rather than being some monstrous aberration meant to make people turn their gaze to God, Julia now represented a “missing link,” and the popularity of apes was just too tempting for Lent to let his wife rest in peace. Julia’s mummified remains were easier to approach and many people still turned out to see her body and discuss her anatomy. Ultimately, her body and that of her child wound up in a hospital storage room in Norway where they have disappeared and resurfaced multiple times since the 1860s.
