2008
Parroting and the Periodical: Women’s
Speech, Haywood’s Parrot, and its Antecedents
Door: Manushag N. Powell
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature,
Volume 27, Number 1, Spring
2008, pp. 63-91 (Article)
Published by The University of Tulsa |
Het amoureuze leven van Ver-Vert
In a variation on this theme, in the
adaptation of one of Pétis de la Croix’s Persian Tales that
appears in Spectator 578, the unfortunate Fadlallah is
turned into his wife’s pet nightingale and must watch helplessly
from his cage every night as his rival makes love to her. 30
In Jean Baptiste Louis Gresset’s popular French poem, "Ver-Vert: or,
the Nunnery Parrot" (1734,
translated into English in 1759),
Ver-Vert (sometimes "Green-Green" in the English), an Indian parrot
sent from his home to a convent in Nevers "for his good" is
described as the rooster among his hens. 31 The parrot is
"debonair, / Light, spruce, inconstant, gay, and free" (p. 10, ll.
114-15), all the nuns adore him wildly, as the "Sole licens’d male
to be belov’d" (p. 10,
l. 133) among them, and he has complete
freedom to roam the nunnery, receiving lots of tasty treats and
caresses, and pecking the nuns "in wanton play" (p. 11, l. 145). "No
human Parrot of the court / Was fondled half so much as he" (p. 13,
ll. 180-81); he even spends every night in the chamber of a
different nun. 32 Another example of sex and parrots appears
in the frame story of Alexander Dow’s
Tales, Translated from the Persian of Inatulla of Delhi
(1768). Prince Jehandar’s best friend,
Jewan Sadit, is mauled by a tiger and dies, only to be reincarnated
as a parrot, who, encountering his prince, "began, as it
fluttered with joy, to nibble at the roses of his lips," and, upon
heading home with Jehandar, engages victoriously in a battle
with the Prince’s mistress for
control over his affections.
33
NOTEN
30
Suitably, in the version of this story that appears in the
Tuti-nama (the Tale of
the Raja, on Night 46), the young man eventually possesses the body
of a parrot, and is thus able to communicate the situation to his
wife and avert the tragic
ending of the wife’s violation and suicide in
Fadlallah’s tale. In her
Adventures
of Eovaai, Princess of
Ijaveo, ed. Earla Wilputte (1736; rpt., Peterborough, ON:
Broadview Press, 1999), Haywood inverts this story in the tale of
Atamadoul, who is punished for desiring the evil Ochihatou (Haywood’s
satirical Walpole character) by being changed into a monkey and
chained to his bed, where she is forced to watch him grant to other
women the favors she can no longer enjoy, while at the same time
fending off an amorous baboon.
31
Jean Baptiste Louis Gresset, "Ver-Vert: or, the Nunnery Parrot: An
Heroic Poem in Four Cantos"
(London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), p. 10, l. 111. Subsequent
references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
32
The text seems to be playing with the long-standing association
between convents and
pornographic fantasy.
33 Alexander Dow, Tales, Translated
from the Persian of Inatulla of Delhi, 2 vols. (London: T.
Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1768), I, 16. The prince erotically
reciprocates the parrot’s feelings: he "stroaked his glossy feathers
and kissed his crimson bill; while the grateful bird nestled in his
bosom, exhibiting every sign of delight" (I, 21). |
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