The Elizabeth Complex

			 by Karen Joy Fowler


	. . . love is particularly difficult to study clinically . . .

					Nancy J. Chodorow

		"Fathers love as well. - Mine did, I know,
			-- but still with heavier brains."

					Elizabeth Barrett Browning


     There is no evidence that Elizabeth ever blamed her father for
killing her mother. Of course, she would hardly have remembered
her mother. At three months, Elizabeth had been moved into her
own household with her own servants; her parents became visitors
rather than caretakers. At three years, the whole affair was history -
her mother's head on Tower Green, her father's re-marriage eleven
days later. Because the charge was adultery and, in one case, incest,
her own parentage might easily have come into question. But there
has never been any doubt as to who her father was. "The lion's cub,"
she called herself, her father's daughter, and from him she got her
red hair, her white skin, her dancing, her gaiety, her predilection for
having relatives beheaded, and her sex.
     Her sex was the problem, of course. Her mother's luck at cards
had been bad all summer. But the stars were good, the child rode
low in the belly, and the pope, they had agreed, was powerless. They
were expecting a boy.
     After the birth, the jousts and tournaments had to be cancelled.
The musicians were sent away, except for single pipe, frolicsome,
but thin. Her mother, spent and sick from childbirth, felt the cold
breath of disaster on her neck.
     Her father put the best face on it. Wasn't she healthy? Full weight
and lusty? A prince would surely follow. A poor woman gave the
princess a rosemary bush hung all with gold spangles. "Isn't that
nice?" her mother's ladies said brightly, as if it weren't just a scented
branch with glitter.
     Elizabeth had always loved her father. She watched sometimes
when he held court. She saw the deference he commanded. She saw
how careful he was. He could not allow himself to be undone with
passion or with pity. The law was the law, he told the women who
came before him. A woman's wages belonged to her husband. He
could mortgage her property if he liked, forfeit it to creditors. That
his children were hungry made no difference. The law acknowledged
the defect of her sex. Her father could not do less.
     He would show the women these laws in his books. He would
show Elizabeth. She would make a little mark with her fingernail in
the margin beside them. Some night when he was asleep, some night
when she had more courage than she had ever had before, she would
slip into the library and cut the laws she had marked out of the
books. Then the women would stop weeping and her father would
be able to do as he liked.
     Her father read to her _The_Taming_of_the_Shrew_. He never seemed to
see that she hated Petruchio with a passion a grown woman might
have reserved for an actual man. "You should have been a boy," he
told her, when she brought home the prize in Greek, ahead of all the
boys in her class.
     Her older brother died when she was a small girl. Never again
was she able to bear the sound of a tolling bell. She went with her
father to the graveyard, day after day. He threw himself on the grave,
arms outstretched. At home, he held her in his arms and wept onto
her sleeve, into her soft brown hair. "My daughter," he said. His
arms tightened. "If only you had been a boy."
     She tried to become a boy. She rode horseback, learned Latin.
She remained a girl. She sewed. She led the Presbyterian Girls' Club.
The club baked and stitched to earn the money to put a deserving
young man through seminary. When he graduated, they went as a
group to see him preach his first sermon. They sat in the front. He
stood up in the clothes they had made for him. "I have chosen my
text for today," he said from the pulpit. "I Tim 2:12. ' I suffer not a
woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but be in
silence.'"
     Elizabeth rose. She walked down the long aisle of the church and
out into the street. The sun was so fiery it blinded her for a moment.
She stood at the top of the steps, waiting until she could see them.
The door behind her opened. It opened again and again. The
Presbyterian Girls' Club had all come with her.
     She had, they said, a pride like summer. She rode horseback,
learned Latin and also Greek, which her father had never studied.
One winter day she sat with all her ladies in the park, under an oak,
under a canopy, stitching with her long, beautiful, white fingers. If
the other ladies were cold, if they wished to be inside, they didn't say
so. They sat and sewed together, and one of them sang aloud and the
snowflakes flew about the tent like moths. Perhaps Elizabeth was
herself cold and wouldn't admit it, or perhaps, even thin as she was,
she was not cold and this would be an even greater feat. There was
no way to know which was true.
     Perhaps Elizabeth was merely teasing. Her fingers rose and
dipped quickly over the cloth. From time to time, she joined her
merry voice to the singer's. She had a strong, animal aura, a force.
Her spirits were always lively. John Knox denounced her in church
for her fiddling and flinging. She and her sister both, he said, were
incurably addicted to joyosity.
     Her half-brother had never been lusty. When he died, some years
after her father, long after his own mother, hail the color of fire fell
in the city, thunder rolled low and continuous through the air. This
was a terrible time. It was her time.
     Her father opposed her marriage. It was not marriage itself, he
opposed; no, he had hoped for that. It was the man. A dangerous
radical. An abolitionist. A man who would never earn money. A man
who could then take her money. Hadn't she sat in his court and seen
this often enough with her very own eyes?
     For a while she was persuaded. When she was strong enough, she
rebelled. She insisted that the word obey be stricken from the
ceremony. Nor would she change her name. "There is a great deal in
a name," she wrote her girlfriend. "It often signifies much and may
involve a great principle. This custom is founded on the principle
that white men are lords of all. I cannot acknowledge this principle
as just; therefore I cannot bear the name of another." She meant her
first name by this. She meant Elizabeth.
     Her family's power and position went back to the days when
Charles I sat on the English throne. Her father was astonishingly
wealthy, spectacularly thrifty. He wasted no money on electricity,
bathrooms, or telephones. He made small, short-lived exceptions for
his youngest daughter. She bought a dress; she took a trip abroad.
She was dreadfully spoiled, they said later.
     But spinsters are generally thought to be entitled to
compensatory trips abroad and she had reached the age where
marriage was unlikely. Once men had come to court her in the
cramped parlor. They faltered under the grim gaze of her father.
There is no clear evidence that she ever blamed him for this,
although there is, of course, the unclear evidence.
     She did not get on with her step-mother. "I do not call her
mother," she said. She, herself, was exactly the kind of woman her
father esteemed -- quiet, reserved, respectful. Lustless and listless.
She got from him her wide beautiful eyes, her sky-colored eyes, her
chestnut hair.
     When Elizabeth was one year old, her father displayed her, quite
naked, to the French ambassadors. They liked what they saw.
Negotiations began to betroth her to the Duke of Angouleme,
negotiations that foundered later for financial reasons.
     She was planning to address the legislature. Her father read it in
the paper. He called her into the library and sat with her before the
fire. The blue and orange flames wrapped around the logs,
whispering into smoke. "I beg you not to do this," he said. "I beg
you not to disgrace me in my old age. I'll give you the house in
Seneca Falls."
     She had been asking for the house for years. "No," Elizabeth
said.
     "Then I'll disinherit you entirely."
     "If you must."
     "Let me hear this speech."
     As he listened his eyes filled with tears. "Surely, you have had a
comfortable and happy life," he cried out. "Everything you could
have wanted has been supplied. How can someone so tenderly
brought up feel such things? Where did you learn such bitterness?"
     "I learnt it here," she told him. "Here, when I was child, listening
to the women who brought you their injustices." Her own eyes, fixed
on his unhappy face, spilled over. "Myself, I am happy," she told
him. "I have everything. You've always loved me. I know this."
     He waited a long time in silence. "You've made your points
clear," he said finally. "But I think I can find you even more cruel
laws than those you've quoted." Together they reworked the speech.
On towards morning, they kissed each other and retired to their
bedrooms. She delivered her words to the legislature. "You are your
father's daughter," the senators told her afterwards, gracious if
unconvinced. "Today, your father would be proud."
     "Your work is a continual humiliation to me," he said. "To me,
who's had the respect of my colleagues and my country all my life.
You have seven children. Take care of them." The next time she
spoke publicly he made good on his threats and removed her from
his will.
     "Thank god for a girl," her mother said when Elizabeth was
born. She fell into an exhausted sleep. When she awoke she looked
more closely. The baby's arms and shoulders were thinly dusted with
dark hair. She held her eyes tightly shut, and when her mother forced
them open, she could find no irises. The doctor was not alarmed.
The hair was hypertrichosis, he said. It would disappear. Her eyes
were fine. Her father said that she was beautiful.
     It took Elizabeth ten days to open her eyes on her own. At the
moment she did, it was her mother who was gazing straight into
them. They were already violet.
     When she was three years old they attended the silver jubilee for
George V. She wore a Parisian dress of organdie. Her father tried to
point out the royal ladies. "Look at the King's horse!" Elizabeth said
instead. The first movie she was ever taken to see was The Little
Princess with Shirley Temple.
     Her father had carried her in his arms. He dressed all in joyous
yellow. He held her up for the courtiers to see. When he finally had a
son, he rather lost interest. He wrote his will to clarify the order of
succession. At this point, he felt no need to legitimize his daughters,
although he did recognize their place in line for the throne. He left
Elizabeth an annual income of three thousand pounds. And if she
ever married without sanction, the will stated, she was to be
removed from the line of succession, "as though the said Lady
Elizabeth were then dead."
     She never married. Like Penelope, she maintained power by
promising to marry first this and then that man; she turned her
miserable sex to her advantage. She made an infamous number of
these promises. No other woman in history has begun so many
engagements and died a maid. "The Queen did fish for men's souls
and had so sweet a bait that no-one could escape from her network,"
they said at court. She had a strong animal aura.
     A muskiness. When she got married for the first time her father
gave her away. She was only seventeen years old, and famously
beautiful, the last brunette in a world of blondes. Her father was a
guest at her third wedding. "This time I hope her dreams come
true," he told the reporters. "I wish her the happiness she so
deserves." He was a guest at her fifth wedding, as well.
     Her parents had separated briefly when she was fourteen years
old. Her mother, to whom she had always been closer, had an affair
with someone on the set; her father took her brother and went home
to his parents. Elizabeth may have said that his moving out was no
special loss. She has been quoted as having said this.
     She never married. She married seven different men. She married
once and had seven children. She never married. The rack was in
constant use during the latter half of her reign. Unexplained illnesses
plagued her. It was the hottest day of the year, a dizzying heat. She
went into the barn for Swansea pears. Inexplicably the loft was
cooler than the house. She said she stayed there half an hour in the
slatted light, the half coolness. Her father napped inside the house.
     "I perceive you think of our father's death with a calm mind," her
half brother, the new king, noted.
     "It was a pleasant family to be in?" the Irish maid was asked. Her
name was Bridget, but she was called Maggie by the girls, because
they had once had another Irish maid they were fond of and she'd
had that name.
     "I don't know how the family was. I got along all right."
     "You never saw anything out of the way?"
     "No, sir."
     "You never saw any conflict in the family?"
     "No, sir."
     "Never saw the least -- any quarreling or anything of that kind?"
     "No, sir."
     The half hour between her father settling down for his nap and
the discovery of murder may well be the most closely examined half
hour in criminal history. The record is quite specific as to the times.
When Bridget left the house, she looked at the clock. As she ran, she
heard the city hall bell toll. Only eight minutes are unaccounted for.
     After the acquittal she changed her name to Lizbeth. "There is
one thing that hurts me very much," she told the papers. "They say I
don't show any grief. They say I don't cry. They should see me when
I am alone."
     Her father died a brutal, furious, famous death. Her father died
quietly of a stroke before her sixth wedding. After her father died,
she discovered he had reinserted her into his will. She had never
doubted that he loved her. She inherited his great fortune, along with
her sister. She found a sort of gaiety she'd never had before.
     She became a devotee of the stage, often inviting whole casts
home for parties, food, and dancing. Her sister was horrified; despite
the acquittal they had become a local grotesquerie. The only seemly
response was silence, her sister told Lizbeth, who responded to this
damp admonition with another party.
     The sound of a pipe and tabor floated through the palace. Lord
Sempill went looking for the source of the music. He found the
queen dancing with Lady Warwick. When she had become queen,
she had taken a motto. _Semper_Eadem_, it was. _Always_the_Same_. This
motto had first belonged to her mother.
     She noticed Lord Semphill watching her through the drapes.
"Your father loved to dance," he said awkwardly, for he had always
been told this. He was embarrassed to be caught spying on her.
     "Won't you come and dance with us?" she asked. She was
laughing at him. Why not laugh? She had survived everything and
everyone. She held out her arms. Lord Semphill was suddenly,
deeply moved to see the queen, at her age!, bending and leaping into
the air like the flame on a candle, twirling this way and then that, like
the tongue in a lively bell.

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Copyright © 1996 by Karen Joy Fowler
First published in Crank! 6, April 1996

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