Wiles of
a Southern Belle
By Carol
Strickland, author of The Eagle and the
Swan
In elementary school I docilely
attended a weekly dance event called “Genes and Janes.” I swear to God I wore a
stiff-ribbed hoop skirt contraption under my red, bell-shaped skirt trimmed
with black rick rack—an unthinkable outfit for savvy primary school students today.
Why our mothers considered it mandatory for 9-or-10-year-olds to learn square
dancing will forever remain a mystery to me, but there was no shortage of boys
enrolled, wearing those peculiar string ties and starched, white shirts. We
twirled around, dutifully following instructions to “Bow to your partner” and
“do-si-do”—now a lost art among children, I suspect.
By
junior high, we “popular” kids formed our own dance club. I blush to recall
what we named it: The Happy Hipsters. Needless to say, no more square dancing,
which was clearly for squares. Our chosen name brazenly declared we ‘tweens
were hip. It was the Beatnik era, the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Coolness had
penetrated even the mossy, I-like-Ike suburbs of New Orleans.
Irony
was unknown to us. We were all too happy to pose as hipsters, even though we
had no hips to speak of and our main concept of hipness was the surly James
Dean in Rebel without a Cause.
Consistent with our outré status, now
there was no de rigueur dress code. We
girls all wore pastel party dresses with wide sashes, organza puffed sleeves,
and our Pappagallo flats. Boys still wore stiff shirts, their hair slicked down
with Brylcreem.
Hipness—or lack thereof—aside, it
was considered obligatory for properly brought up Southern children to be
skilled in ballroom dancing: the waltz, box step, and cha-cha. I confess we mounted
a minor rebellion and demanded the bumptious jitterbug (toe-heel, toe-heel,
back-forward), which we so admired on The
Dick Clark Show. After all, Elvis Presley had blazed on the scene and there
was a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on. But even with rock ‘n roll, it was still an
era when dance partners held each other stiffly and joined hands to oscillate
and spin. Pre-Twist, in other words.
I was in the awkward stage of
cat-eye-glasses (i.e., pre-contact lenses), but at least my dreadful grade-school
perm had grown out. Gawky and flat-chested, I had nevertheless imbibed with
mother’s milk a Southern Belle’s Code of Feminine Conduct. Not that any modern
mother breast-fed her babies. We were all hygienically bottle-fed by black
nurses.
Television,
advertising, movies, and accepted formulae decreed that for a girl to be
successful in attracting the opposite sex—our primary concern—you had to be (1)
pretty, (2) flirty, (3) not ostentatiously smart, and (4) able to convey an
impression of hypnotic fascination with whatever a targeted boy wished to
expound on. I absorbed the lesson that “good” girls should be seen more than
heard. The key to social prominence was to make eye contact (preferably with
fluttering lashes and an adoring look of all-consuming interest) while
prompting a boy to hold forth. I perfected the ability to ask questions rather
than volunteer answers, which actually served me well in my later life as a
journalist. A smiling look of utter enchantment hid my inner, blank boredom.
In high school, this trajectory led
me to become a cheerleader, lustily egging on the boys’ teams to athletic
triumphs, and a spot on the Homecoming Court, clutching a bouquet of roses and
smiling benignly at the crowd like a mindless beauty queen. I emulated my idol,
Jackie Kennedy, wearing a pillbox hat with a little veil and a scratchy wool
suit in a tasteful, neutral color.
In this pre-Women’s Lib era, none of
our mothers worked outside the home. And even in the moms’ domestic sphere, African-American
maids did the grunt work of cooking, cleaning, laundry, and sizeable amounts of
childcare. Our mothers were free to play bridge, gossip, possibly tipple, go to
Garden Club, and serve on committees espousing good works. In today’s parlance,
our role models hardly “leaned in” to grab a place at the power table. They
were relegated to a decorative slot as chauffeurs and birthday-party
organizers.
This preamble is by way of
explaining why I undertook to tell the story of Empress Theodora of 6th-century
Constantinople. My heroine and I couldn’t be more different. I came from an
affluent background and was swaddled, coddled, and nearly smothered by parental
attention and concern. Theodora, the circus bear-keeper’s daughter, was born
into the trashy underclass and became a prostitute at a tender age. While I was
dorkily square-dancing, she was developing an infamous reputation as an exotic
dancer (OK, a stripper). Maybe it was my feeling of being stifled—judged by
external appearance and behavior rather than interior qualities—that drew me to
this brassy, outspoken firecracker. Plus my sympathy for her as an abused child
who overcame so many handicaps.
Despite her wretched childhood—or
maybe because of it—there was something in the way she moved: from the gutter
to the top. Theodora made her own way when it seemed as if there was no way for
a lowlife like her. She became the most powerful woman of the civilized world,
arguably the first female co-ruler of an Empire.
So here’s a salute to Theodora. She
was hardly a role model for a proper Southern lady, but she showed how
effective both beauty and brains can be when working in harmony.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Strickland is an art and architecture critic, prize-winning screenwriter, and journalist who’s contributed to The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and Art in America magazine. A Ph.D. in literature and former writing professor, she’s author of The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in the History of Art from Prehistoric to Post-Modern (which has sold more than 400,000 copies in multiple editions and translations), The Annotated Arch: A Crash Course in the History of Architecture, The Illustrated Timeline of Art History, The Illustrated Timeline of Western Literature, and monographs on individual artists.
While writing on masterpieces of Byzantine art (glorious mosaics in Ravenna, Italy featuring Theodora and Justinian and the monumental Hagia Sophia basilica in Istanbul built by Justinian), Strickland became fascinated by the woman who began life as a swan dancer and her husband, an ex-swineherd.
Knowing how maligned they were by the official historian of their era Procopius, who wrote a slanderous “Secret History” vilifying them, Strickland decided to let the audacious Theodora tell her story. She emerges not just as the bear-keeper’s daughter and a former prostitute who ensnared the man who became emperor, but as a courageous crusader against the abuse of women, children, and free-thinkers.
AUTHOR LINKS
For 1,500 years she has been cruelly maligned by history. Labelled as corrupt, immoral and sexually depraved by the sixth-century historian Procopius in his notorious Secret History, the Byzantine Empress Theodora was condemned to be judged a degenerate harlot by posterity. Until now. Due to a conviction that its contents would only be understood by generations of the distant future, a manuscript that has remained unopened for a millennium and a half is about to set the record straight. It will unravel the deepest secrets of a captivating and charismatic courtesan, her unlikely romance with an Emperor, and her rise to power and influence that would outshine even Cleopatra. This historical novel traces the love affairs, travails, machinations, scandals and triumphs of a cast of real characters who inhabit an Empire at its glorious and fragile peak. It’s the tale of a dazzling civilization in its Golden Age; one which, despite plague, earthquakes and marauding Huns, would lay the foundation for modern Europe as we know it.
PURCHASE
