The Rings of Wives and Courtesans

The patterns that link jewelry and the sexuality of women have intricate historical
and sociological implications, but a ruthless structuralist can group the narratives of
circular jewelry into two contrasting paradigms. Though they are ancient types, I will
name them after the two film icons who seared my soul when I was a teenager in
the 1950s: Doris Day (1924 ) and Marilyn Monroe (1926 62). The Doris Day/
professional virgin scenario of legitimation (Get the wedding ring before you go to
bed with him) is challenged by the Marilyn Monroe / gold-digger scenario of
illegitimation (Get lots of rings [or bracelets, or necklaces] before [and after] you
go to bed with him). These two paradigms have different historical trajectories, one
from the regulation of marriage by religion and the other from the survival
strategies of women outside the confines of religion. The tension between them is
the driving force behind the narratives. But both of them are grounded in what I
would call the slut assumption: when a woman has a piece of jewelry, she must
have gotten it by sleeping with some man. Many of these tales (particularly but not
only those about clever wives) are about inheritance, and others (particularly but
not only the nineteenth- century stories) are about heirlooms. But most of them
involve payment for services rendered. Fay Weldon, in The Bulgari Connection, put it
well: She was a working girl, he was a wealthy man, and he loved her and must
prove it. Thats why she expected him to buy her expensive jewelry. Ultimately,
this paradigm reduces women to whores.

The mythology of women and their jewelry often raises issues of authenticity. The
(wedding) ring, on the one hand, the Doris Day ring, makes the wife a good woman;
its official, marital, given to her by the unique man she is supposed to love, her
legal man, her husband, in return for sleeping only with him. And she damn well
better keep it; if she loses it, she might lose her authenticity. Some married women,
according to the nineteenth- century historian Charles Edwards, were so rigidly
superstitious or firm that they would never ever take off their wedding ring,
extending the expression till death do us part even to the ring. This also applies
to men in some of our stories: if the husband loses his ring (or, more particularly,
gives it to a woman he thinks is not his wife Tamar, Helena), he loses his
authenticity and validates hers.

By contrast with the married woman, another sort of woman gets other forms of
circular jewelry, necklaces or bracelets (or anklets), or other kinds of rings the
Marilyn Monroe jewelry from men (plural), lovers or serial husbands, in payment
for sleeping with them, which makes her lose her chaste authenticity. I would call
these women courtesans, in the European sense of a woman of notorious beauty,
often a famous actress or dancer, sometimes called a demi-mondaine; she is the
mistress of a wealthy lover (or a series of lovers, or husbands, but only one at a
time) who gives her valuable gifts, principally jewelry. (The word courtesan in
American English has overtones of crass prostitution that I wish to exclude; think
Madame du Barry or Mata Hari, rather than Belle Watling or Polly Adler). The great
courtesans Dumass Camille (Marguerite Gautier), Verdis Violetta, Elizabeth
Taylor, Mae West have an authenticity different from that of the monogamous
women, because their fabulous jewelry proves that they have many rich/ famous
lovers/ husbands and thereby authenticates their beauty and their charm.

The much publicized number and value of the jewels worn by such women is the
equivalent of the collection of garters that a certain sort of man used to show off, or
the notches that he cut on his bedpost. A vividly mythologized instance of the
female form of this tradition appears in Mary de Morgans 1880 fairy tale, The
Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde: the beautiful, evil princess refused to marry for
fear that her husband would make her give up the magic that kept her beautiful; so
she turned each of her suitors into a bright, beautiful bead strung on the gold circlet
that she always wore around her neck. She did this twelve times until, finally, the
thirteenth suitor tricked her and made her the thirteenth bead, thereby releasing
the other twelve suitors from the necklace. Significantly, the necklace had no clasp,
and just fit over her head; in effect, it was a ring.

In the 1958 film musical, Gigi, based on a 1944 novella by Colette, a young girl who
is being tutored in the art of a courtesan, and in particular in the ways to get jewelry
from lovers, sings, with great disapproval:

A necklace is love
A ring is love
A rock from some obnoxious little king is love.

And in the 1956 operetta Candide, the much- seduced Cunegonde seems at first to
be haunted by the same sort of shame over her ill-gotten jewelry that troubles Gigi.
In one verse of a song, lyrics by Richard Wilbur, she sings:

Pearls and ruby rings,

Ah, how can worldly things
Take the place of honor lost?
Can they compensate
For my fallen state,
Purchased, as they were, at such an awful cost!
Bracelets, lavalieres,
Can they dry my tears?
Can they blind my eyes from shame?
Can the brightest brooch
shield me from reproach?
Can the purest diamond purify my name?

But she quickly makes her peace with her jewels in another verse:

And yet, of course, these trinkets are endearing!

Im oh so glad my sapphire is a star.
I rather like a 20-carat earring!
If Im not pure, at least my jewels are.
And that is the courtesans creed.

So there is a tension between the two forms of authenticity that jewelry offers the
married woman (validating her chastity) and the courtesan (validating the devotion
and wealth of her conquests). Trouble arises only when the wife, from paradigm A,
strays into the territory of the courtesan, in paradigm B, and obtains jewelry that
she cannot account for. But even then, sometimes the jewels a married woman gets
from her lover validate her in a different way, because her lover really loves her,
and her husband may merely own her. And the jewelry that a masquerading clever
wife gets from the man she sleeps with proves that she is actually virtuous, not
promiscuous, since it proves that her lover is her husband.

In many tales of this corpus, beauty is a legitimating or, more often, illegitimating
criterion. Translators know the old sexist saying, often attributed to George Bernard
Shaw: translations are like women: if they are beautiful, they cant be faithful, and if
theyre faithful, they cant be beautiful. The circularity of jewelry, beauty, and
jealousy is reduced to its logical absurdity in Isak Dinesens 1934 short story, The
Roads Round Pisa (a story all about circularity), when a man who prides himself on
his knowledge of jewelry buys for his wife, an insanely jealous woman, a pair of
particularly fine eardrops, to set off the beauty of his young wife, who wore them
so well. Then:

He had been so pleased to have got them that he had fastened them in her
ears himself, and held up the mirror for her to see them. She watched him,
and was aware that his eyes were on the diamonds and not on her face. She
quickly took them off and handed them to him. I am afraid, she said, with
dry eyes more tragic than if they had been filled with tears, that I have not
your taste for pretty things. From that day she had given up wearing jewels.

As the author comments in despair, She is indeed jealous of her own jewels.

In Anthony Trollopes novel The Eustace Diamonds (1871), the protagonist Lizzie
Greystock refuses to relinquish the diamond necklace that her late husband, the
aged Sir Florian Eustace, had given her; and when she sets out to snare another rich
husband, she wears the diamonds to highlight her beauty. In the Guy de
Maupassant story, The Necklace (1885), Mathilde borrows a diamond necklace to
make herself beautiful in hope of entrancing a rich man who will marry her and give
her diamond necklaces. Jewelry and beauty play a game of doubles here: if women
are beautiful, men give them jewelry, which they want in part because jewelry
makes them more beautiful, so that they can attract more men, to give them more
jewelry or, perhaps, a wedding ring, which magically transforms the Marilyn
Monroe type into the Doris Day type. Popular music, as usual, cuts to the chase, this
time in lines of a lyric from the musical Kismet, entitled Baubles, Bangles, and
Beads:
 [S] omeday he may
Buy me a ring, ring-a-ling-a,
Ive heard thats where it leads,
Wearing baubles, bangles and beads.

Women use jewelry to get men to buy them jewelry. Its a circle, like the circle of a
ring.

Reprinted from THE RING OF TRUTH: And Other Myths of

Sex and Jewelry by Wendy Doniger with permission from
Oxford University Press. Copyright 2017 by Wendy
Doniger.