The drowned woman
The drowned woman (French: La Femme noyée ) is the sixteenth fable from the third book of the collection of fables by Jean de La Fontaine , which was first published in 1668. Here the fabulist resorts to an anti-feminist joke about the unruliness of women , which has been known since the Middle Ages , but which he uses to expressly distance himself from this attitude. The oldest known analogue is Marie de Frances Fabel D'un Hume qui aveit une Fame tencheresse ( Old French ; From a man who had a moody wife ).
background
In the fourteenth century it was not uncommon for women to be strangled by masked assassins or pushed into them as they walked along the banks of the river - either due to the profligacy of some women or the ruthless tyranny of husbands. This drowning of women led to a popular saying, "It's nothing - only a woman drowns". La Fontaine kept the saying in his fable La Femme noyée , possibly without realizing the allusion to the cruel practice of the 14th century. And this state of affairs depicted domestic life in England from the twelfth century to the first civil war , when the bloodthirstiness of men increased and they moved from murdering women to the practice of slitting each other's throats. A horse or other pet got more recognition than a housewife.
action
The story in La Fontaine's fable La Femme noyée is the same as in Poggio's version, where a man learns of his wife's drowning and searches the river bank for her body. When asked by passers-by why he was looking for her upstream instead of downstream, he replied that he would never find her that way, because while she was alive she was always overly difficult and in a bad mood, and always did the opposite of everyone else, so that she would only swim against the current even after her death. In the case of Geoffrey Whitney (1548 - 1601), the neighbors even advise stopping the search for the woman's body:
"Then leave, quoth they, and let her still be drown'd, for such a wife is better loste then founde?"
"Then go, they advised, and let her drown, such a woman is better lost than to be found?"
La Fontaine, however, sees the female gender in a contrastingly positive light and demands understanding for the woman who has obviously committed suicide.
text
“I'm not someone who says,“ Oh, little thing!
Just a woman who drowns herself! "
I say this is a lot and I am ready
To mourn her because woman gives us joy. -
The foregoing is not superfluous
For my fable, because it reports this
That a woman, tired of life,
One day dropped into the waters.
Her husband wanted at least to save the corpse,
To embed them with church honor.
But from the people who were at the time of the accident
Walked on the bank, no one had noticed
Where her corpse swam to.
But everyone was happy to give advice.
“It is,” said one, “probably in nature
Of things that go with the flow only
Could drift downstream. "Said another:" No!
It seems more correct to me that one looks for it upwards.
How strong the gradient and the force
With which the water manages everything
The spirit of contradiction will determine the woman
To swim against the current. "
The man did not mock at the right time,
I also don't know whether it all seems right
What he meant by the contradiction.
But be the quality to which he attributes women
A mistake or just a bad bias
So the claim doesn't go too far:
Who contradicts, contradicts his whole life!
And not just from cradle to grave,
No, even in death he exercises this gift "
Individual evidence
- ↑ Barbara C. Bowen: One Hundred Renaissance Jokes An Anthology . Summa Publications, Inc., 1988, pp. 7 ( google.de [accessed June 14, 2020]).
- ↑ Isaac Disraeli : Amenities of literature, consisting of sketches and characters of English literature . 2nd Edition. tape 1 . J. & HG Langley, New York 1841, pp. 86–87 ( archive.org [accessed June 26, 2020]).
- ^ Matilda Joslyn Gage : Woman, church and state: a historical account of the status of woman through the Christian ages, with reminiscences of the matriarchate . Ed .: University of California Libraries. New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1893, p. 304 ( archive.org [accessed June 26, 2020]).
- ↑ Post fata: uxor morosa, etiam discors. In: Whitney's Choice of Emblemes 158th Memorial University of Newfoundland , accessed June 14, 2020 .
- ↑ Randolph Paul Runyon, Randolph Runyon: In La Fontaine's Labyrinth: A Thread Through the Fables . Rookwood Press, 2000, ISBN 978-1-886365-16-2 , pp. 45–47 ( google.de [accessed June 14, 2020]).
- ^ Theodor Etzel : Jean de La Fontaine - Fables . 2015, ISBN 978-3-8430-7584-8 ( google.de [accessed June 14, 2020]).
- ^ Theodor Etzel , Guth, Karl-Maria: Jean de La Fontaine - fables . 1st edition. Berlin, ISBN 978-3-8430-7584-8 , pp. 41 .