Love in a Courtly Language

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Love in a Courtly Language

• CNE/ENG 120
• 10/8/04

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Female Characters

• 3 Types
• 1) ones own wife
• 2) another mans wife
• 3) courtesan
• All women were further categorized as innocent,
  average, or sophisticated.
• Love was categorized as enjoyed or frustrated.

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The Tamil Anthologies

• Author various (given before each title)
• Culture South Indian
• Time 2nd-3rd c. AD
• Language Tamil
• Genre love poetry generic feature anonymity
  (no specific people, places, or times mentioned)
• Goal a rasa (representation of an emotion) as
  pure as possible for aesthetic pleasure.

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Further Categories

• Poems may belong to either
• The private world (akam)
• The public world (puram)
• Each poem depicts a moment in a lovers story,
  described by one of the lovers or someone who
  knows them (p.o.v.).

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What Weve Seen Before

• Other cultures love poetry
• Egyptian - young lovers, body parts likened to
  aspects of nature, love as sickness.
• Israelite - age of lovers unknown, body parts
  likened to aspects of nature.
• Greek - focus on natural world in evoking a mood
  focus on love as a violent emotion young girls,
  no wives.

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Tamil Anthologies

• Akam poems use the landscape as a mirror of the
  emotional lives of the characters.
• Traditional Tamil poetics must be decoded. You
  can read the poems without a knowledge of their
  symbols, but you will miss what they meant for
  their original audiences.

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Orampokiyar What Her Girl Friend Said

• Keep in mind what your text told you about the
  symbolism agricultural lowlands freshwater
  fish sexual infidelity.
• The heron deceit he makes fish that swim
  around his feet trust him, then he eats them. In
  the same way, the man has seduced many women. So
  great was the betrayal, the woman doesnt know
  whom to trust.
• The man gets tired of his settled life, keeps
  company with prostitutes.

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Anonymous What Her Girl Friend Said to Him

• Seashore landscape where the woman waits
  anxiously for her husbands return.
• Theme of sexual infidelity sexual excess.
• She is a water lily in a dry bed trampled by
  white herons overfed on a whole shoal of fish.

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Kapilar What She Said

• Symbolism Rainy season patient waiting and
  domesticity
• Tone wry sophistication
• Form Quotations of the mans speech with female
  speakers commentary
• Praise body parts are like things in nature.
• His goal sex

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Kapilar What She Said to Her Girl Friend

• A commentator describes this poem as saying what
  really happened to get the woman to have her
  family arrange her marriage.
• Real time picture of seduction consummation
• How does the woman describe the man as he is
  touching her?
• What is her overall tone?

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Uruttiran What She Said to Her Girl Friend

• The female speaker tells her friend of her secret
  and its revelation
• She forgot to take off her goatherd lovers
  string of jasmine from her hair before she
  returned home.
• These are symbols of patient waiting for
  marriage.
• Again, sex as motivator for marriage.

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Mallanar What the Servants Said to Him

• Our texts only example of a poem about the
  external world.
• Moment when a warrior returns home from war (his
  nostos!).
• Pallor symbol/sign of lovesickness in Old Tamil
  verse.

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Vanmanipputi What She Said to Her Girl Friend

• This is a female poet.
• Theme sex
• Imagery beaches, groves, river banks as setting
  for sex
• Effect of sex my arms grow beautiful in the
  coupling and grow lean as they come away. What
  shall I make of this?

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The 700 Songs of Hala

• Authors various
• Time 2nd or 3rd c. CE
• Culture South-central Indian
• Genre love poetry
• Language Prakit (a literary language, much
  simpler than Sanskrit, represented a country
  dialect vs. the more formal and complex city
  dialect of Sanskrit)
• Theme village life and love as imagined by
  courtly poets

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Generic Background

• The hallmark of the Prakit poems
• the capacity of poetry for suggestion at various
  levels.

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Example

• At night, cheeks blushed
• Speaker the young womans husband
• Why? Young lovers rarely get to spend the whole
  night together when they do, the poems emphasize
  their painful parting at dawn.
• Category of woman newly married wife

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Convention

• New brides are always described as ignorant of
  sex and embarrassed to be alone with their
  husbands however, when the wheel of passion
  begins to turn, she discovers a natural skill at
  sex and transforms almost into another person,
  only to change back again at dawn.
• Theme love enjoyed.

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The Hundred Poems of Amaru

• Author various (both male and female)
• Time 7th c. CE
• Genre love poetry
• Culture Indian
• Themes erotic love the overwhelming nature of
  real sexual passion.
• We see the poetic conventions of female beauty.

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Kama Sutra

• Author Vatsyayana
• Time 3rd c. CE
• Culture Indian
• Language Sanskrit
• Genre Prose handbook (shastra, treatise on
  systematic thought)

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Background

• 3 life goals or human needs were held to make
  legitimate claims on people
• dharma (moral-legal order)
• artha (material-political order)
• kama (the sensory-pleasurable order)

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Classifications of Men and Women

• By
• 1) Body parts/sizes, with judgments regarding
  which are optimal.
• 2) Force of passion, from small to intense.
• 3) Time taken to reach orgasm, from short-timed
  to long-timed.
• Tone scientific, invokes previous authorities
  (Auddalaki, Babhravya, authors on earlier books
  on the science and rules of desire).

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Classifications of Sexual Unions

• 9 kinds in all with regard to the factors of
  dimension, force of passion, and time to orgasm.
• By making combinations of them innumerable kinds
  of intercourse would be produced. Therefore in
  each particular kind of sexual union a man must
  use his reason and employ such means as are
  suitable for the occasion.

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Classification of Passion

• 4 kinds, depending on whether it relates to
  practice, the ego, recollection, or physical
  objects.
• Passion related to habit (repeated act)
• Passion relating to the ego (mental passion)
• Passion relating to recollection (someone looks
  like someone else)
• Passion relating to sensory objects.