Mise en ligne le: Film de travestissement Titre original: Mis en ligne le: Elle a eu de la chance. On se repose en jogging et en baskets. Mais… il y a des compensations. Nous y travaillons, nous luttons. Felicity pose sa grosse main sur celle de sa femme et la serre. Le couple ne tiendrait pas. Michelle Rodriguez site Officiel de M. Girlfight , Lost , Resident Evil , Avatar , la liste est longue. Le film repose une question centrale, peut-on accepter de faire jouer des femmes trans par des femmes cisgenre?
Pourquoi ne pas leur laisser? De ces petites confusions naissent les grandes transphobies. Salade chaudes et froides. FR Lorrine 17 Rue de Caulaincourt. Consommation aux environ de 80 F. Cadre charmant et inattendu. Le Queen nous accueille et organise tous les dimanches soir des spectacles de transformistes sortant de chez Michou ou Madame Arthur.
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Consos environ 50 F. FR Scaramouche Le 44 rue Vivienne. Musique techno et Top 50 assez jeune. On se gare facilement rue Vivienne. Vous y serez bien accueillies? BE The Dolls Bruxelles? BE Les Mirabelles Bruxelles? BE Dzi Croquettes Bruxelles?
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FR Guerisold rue Lafayette ? Le plus grand choix de perruques. Elle est souvent douloureuse. Pose de faux ongles. Prix environ 2 F. Je trouve que les femmes ont plus de choix. Si tu veux porter des strings maillots de bain pour homme fait le.
Dirk van der Cruysse
Pour la piscine, je lui ai offert un maillot-boxer noir en lycra. Et nous disons Paul: Les travestis ne sont en rien des trans. Ces deux personnes ne sont pas les deux seuls cas du monde. Nadya est une femme transgenre. Thomas Sigismondi son site Le mercredi 13 janvier Et cet art, disons le enfin: Cliquez sur le lien.
Consulter le rapport annuel de SOS homophobie. Fort de cette intime conviction, Rousseau utilise alors le logiciel de reconnaissance faciale mis au point par la CIA. Ce travesti ne joue t-il pas du bon Jazz? J'aime chargement… Empire Of The Sun: De quoi parlent vos chansons? Est-ce que pour vos ces remixes sont aussi importants que les versions originales? Jane Fonda et Charlie Chaplin! Que vouliez-vous faire avec votre musique? Les artistes sont des professeurs. Actuellement quel est ton top 5 sur ton Ipod? Le groupe de ma soeur — une sorte de Pretenders avec une fille Beatles Tof: At no time was there an indication that the student was expressing any particular message.
Julie Vitale said in a statement released to the media. Lacey and his mother disagree. He says his costume was popular with fellow students until the principal forced him to remove the blue dress and long blonde wig. Par Emilie — 10 Sep — 16 H Par Murielle — 10 Sep — 17 H Par Sylvie — 10 Sep — 22 H Par Camille — 10 Sep — 17 H Par Geronimo — 10 Sep — 19 H Par Cassis — 10 Sep — 20 H Par Lison — 10 Sep — 21 H Par Sophie — 10 Sep — 22 H Par Emmanuelle — 10 Sep — 22 H Par Sylvie — 10 Sep — 23 H Par Skype — 10 Sep — 23 H Par Murielle — 10 Sep — 23 H Par Sylvie — 11 Sep — 0 H Par Maude — 11 Sep — 10 H Par Hip Hop — 11 Sep — 10 H Par Wasisdas — 11 Sep — 11 H Par Cassis — 11 Sep — 12 H Par Geronimo 11 — Sep — 13 H Par Philippe — 11 Sep — 14 H Philippe, transgenre MtF Nota: Par Murielle — 11 Sep — 17 H Par Geronimo — 11 Sep — 23 H Emmanuelle — 12 Sep — 16 H Par Loulou — 12 Sep — 17 H Elles sont moches ces chemises!
Par Hip Hop — 12 Sep — 18 H Par Nature — 14 Sep — 2 H Par Solange — 18 Sep — 16 H Solitude — 18 Sep — 17 H Be authentic, Be yourself. Je suis un gars. Par Simon Poirier Photo de couverture: Cassandra en train de montrer ses fesses pour aguicher le client. Le quartier de la gare Lyon-Perrache la nuit. Sylvie en train de prendre une pause au bar. Un travesti au travail dans le quartier de la gare Lyon-Perrache.
Spectacle dans un night-club. Mais rassurez-vous, le temps du traitement psychiatrique, des psychiatres comme: Dans les rapports de production. On peut entendre Norrie May-Welby expliquer sa situation dans une interview datant de Les bustiers aussi sont tes grands potes! Par contre, elles iront bien en haut! Garder un bas assez uni en gardant les motifs pour le haut, et fuir les rayures horizontales qui amplifient les volumes. Les tuniques et hauts longs eux aussi seront tes potes: Ceinturer ta taille pour mettre tes hanches fines et tes jambes en avant.
Mettre ta poitrine en avant avec des cache-coeur, qui auront aussi pour effet de marquer doucement ta taille comme pour la morphologie en H. En parlant de jupe: En haut , tu peux… Mettre en valeur ta poitrine! Choisir des chemisiers, des tops longs, des tuniques: James Bond travesti dans une pub.
Jacques est votre ami.
Ne changez pas de comportement envers une personne transgenre. Traitez-la comme vous traiteriez toute autre personne. Si vous vous trompez de pronom, ne vous excusez pas trop, corrigez-vous et continuez ce que vous disiez. Des sites web comme My True Gender, PlanetOut ou MySpace ont des groupes ou des forums pour personnes transgenres, vous pouvez leur parler pour en savoir plus. On ne peut pas choisir de se sentir homme ou femme ou non-binaire ou agenre. Auparavant, elle se consacrait uniquement aux adultes.
Le personnel est adorable, complice avec les travs. Club essentiellement homo mais les trans et travs y sont bien accueillis. Plus petit que le Scorpio, Consommation aux environ de 80 F. Il y a aussi des spectacles [de] transformistes. Musique Top 50 et Techno. Consos au environ de 60Fr. On y danse il y a plusieurs spectacle de streep. Soins du visage etc. Prix environ F la paire. Pour illustrer le propos, nous vous proposons en premier lieu: Le peintre Francis Bacon en travesti sur une vieille photo. Empire Of The Sun: Regardez Cliquez sur le lien ci-dessous http: With few actual historical references but with a great deal of confidence, we can say that it is very likely that Saint-Mars, the prison governor to whom the marquis de Louvois wrote a letter about the valet who would soon be coming as a prisoner, would be familiar with cards and would have played his fair share of games, both as a soldier, which he was before he was governor of Pignerol, and as a prison superintendant in charge of a bored staff and a handful of miscreants in an isolated prison in the Alps.
He would have seen the face, the weapon, and the name of Hogier the Dane practically every day of his life. In French, the Knave or Jack, the third-ranking picture card in a suit of cards, is called the Valet. A homophonic heterograph is a pun that makes a link between two words that sound the same but are written differently, in this case, Dauger and Hogier.
Before even getting that far with this particular pun though, you have to know another connection that is not a sound-alike set of words but which is a set of interchangeable words: One of the valets in a deck of cards is customarily Hogier. There are historical precedents for the use of this word as an insult. One reads in Dr. We have then, in the pun, three passages: Dauger is Hogier; Hogier is a Valet in a deck of cards; to be a valet of someone is humiliating.
Both Saint-Mars and Louvois lived in sections of society where card playing was popular, so both men knew that Hogier le Danois was a Valet and both would enjoy having that connection turned into a laugh by Dauger being verbally dressed as valet. Writers, poets, bon vivants , and an occasional deep thinker came together at the homes of hostesses at regular moments in the week to talk, but more than that, to talk cleverly using historical, mythological, and literary allusions to describe current society matters, preferably current amorous endeavors by members of the society in the house or outside of the house.
To belong to salon society, one was expected occasionally to launch a bon mot for the group. Saint-Mars knew nothing of the salons other than that they existed, but Louvois had social connections that required him to be a player in these word games:. In a highly conversational and aristocratic milieu their object was to distinguish themselves where possible by originality of thought or expression. It was given to only a few, such as Voiture, to achieve originality of thought, and the others, wisely, concentrated on the art of rendering their ideas more striking by the piquancy of their vocabulary or by the ingenious construction of their phrases Maland So let us not give credit to Louvois for originality; these plays on words were all the rage in his social circle; he was merely following fashion by inserting clever, hidden messages into communications with friends.
His play on words juggles Dauger, Hogier, and the miscreant, imaginary valet. It is a beautiful pun. Unfortunately for Louvois, it is this stunning joke which may prove to be the critical weakness in the sturdy barriers the regime built to hide Eustache Dauger that scholars need to make progress in solving the mystery of the man that Louvois was charged with keeping anonymous and hidden.
But there is more historical content in this joke. The married marquis de Louvois, in , the year previous to his 19 July letter, had been attempting to have an affair with a young, beautiful, rich, married girl named Marie Sidonie de Lenoncourt, marquise de Courcelles — His efforts to experience double adultery had not been successful, however. Dueling was illegal, and both duelists were arrested in the first week of July and taken to the Conciergerie to serve sentences Pougin In January , six months later, Marie Sidonie appeared to be pregnant.
She was taken into custody and gave birth on 5 July to a child that soon died. Cavoye had gotten what Louvois had not, Louvois found an excuse to put him in prison, and did so. It would not be unusual in those circumstances for Louvois to have been pleased with his consolation prizes, the incarceration of his rival and the downfall of the girl who had spurned him. These events had been taking place a few months before and even one week before 19 July , when Louvois wrote the letter to Saint-Mars in which he called the prisoner Eustache Dauger a valet. We are grateful to previous researchers for highlighting the different spellings of Dauger.
First of all, a pun like this one is impossible to understand when one does not have the requisite knowledge of the compared items. We are not accustomed to a family name being interchangeably spelled with a buffet of choices. Our playing cards are no longer labeled with the names of knights, kings, queens, and famous royal mistresses who lived in myth, ancient history, or distant history.
The design of playing cards is not where scholars would expect to find hard historical data. Seasoned Mask researchers, locked on to facts about prison cell construction and the swollen list of Mask might-have-beens, have not placed enough emphasis on interdisciplinary studies. They have not asked art historians to join their search. Art historians have the plaintexts for these codes. Researchers using any language but French have been at a disadvantage. In old English, German, Spanish, and Italian playing cards that follow the tradition of using names of famous people on the picture cards, the historical figures might not be French kings, queens, and heroes, so Hogier the Dane would possibly not appear on cards in non-French card decks, again limiting the number of people who might have understood the joke.
If Louvois had known how important this prisoner was to Louis XIV, he would never have dared to joke about him in a written document using a reference to his own failed lechery. He was a young man, just taking on the weight of his position after being tutored by his father, Michel Le Tellier, his predecessor, for many years. By this bravado, we have been given information about a very mysterious prisoner for whom the official, royal directive was that we should know absolutely nothing.
The larger picture becomes clear. Louvois was making a joke about someone he knew and hated, not about Eustache Dauger, a man it appears he did not know. And in the beginning there was no reason for Louvois or anyone else to spend two minutes wondering who Eustache Dauger was.
There were secret arrests of boring evildoers all the time. Louvois, at this starting line, did not foresee the long race he would run with this particular prisoner, nor the gravity of the case that would gradually be revealed to him. He had been ordered to take care of this fiddling matter by his master, and, as always, he scrambled to obey. Louis XIV therefore gave this name to Louvois when he asked his minister to instruct the governor of Pignerol to prepare a cell. He would have given the new prisoner a false name. The joke was born out of a naturally occurring conflation of names, which was the pattern of salon jokes.
The subject material had to be a real artifact picked out of the actions or names of others and then appended to another action or event that showed the opinion of the author. Making up the root of the joke would have been cheating.
He used the name the king gave him. Fourth, we see that Louis XIV had a secret that he wished to hide from everyone else, including his closest advisors. The solution to the valet problem intensifies that point, which has been made by many writers. It begins to appear that Louis XIV did not tell any of the operatives who captured and incarcerated Eustache Dauger anything at all about the man they arrested and supervised. If Louvois was not told who the prisoner was, or at least was not told enough to keep him from being surly and personal in an official communication, then not one of his subordinates knew.
At first Saint-Mars was curious. His pride in the fables he was telling people about Dauger attests to that. But instinctively we feel that this braggadocio came from his own lack of knowledge. He could still have been a valet without Louvois knowing it. Previously, it was probable enough that he was a valet that all authors on the subject have examined this description at length and many of the most erudite have formed their theories based on the valet. Now we see that Eustache Dauger was as likely a valet as he was a shoemaker or a bureaucrat.
We now have no hint as to what his former occupation was and we never really did. If there is a broad lesson for historical studies in this matter, it is that an interdisciplinary approach to a tough problem is likely to lead to success. It has also required a generous amount of skepticism about previous strategies and assumptions. They have been aware of M. But many who have read his July 19, letter to Saint Mars have credited him with honesty and candor in it.
With that credit in place, the problem was not solved. Jean Markale comes to a conclusion that deeds were done in this matter that is unpleasant to look at:. Que de temps perdu! He says to his readers that he could not do everything that has to be done to solve the mystery; he can only provide some leads that will serve others who follow him.
The argument that has always defended the royal Bourbon family from connection with Eustache Dauger has been that the marquis de Louvois said he was a valet. We could not argue a blood connection with the Bourbons when we were told by the war minister that the prisoner was a valet.
A valet is a servant, and not even the contemptuous Louvois would call a royal prince a valet; that would be much against the code of respect for royals and nobles. If Louvois wrote in an official document that Dauger was a valet, then he was most certainly not a Bourbon family member.
But now we see that Louvois was not describing the prisoner; he was just using an accidental collision of identical names to make fun of a rival. If the king was not open with his most trusted confidants, then this matter must have been illegal. Resolving the valet issue faces us with the possibility that an extremely cruel act was committed by Louis XIV for his personal convenience and possibly for reasons of state. Ms , folio 37 v e. Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King. The Man Behind the Mask: Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris.
Editions de Minuit, Le Marquis de Cavoye — Culture and Society in Seventeenth-Century France. Riaux et une notice sur Mme de Motteville par M. Le secret du Masque de Fer: Editions de Provence, Histoire de Louvois et de son administration politique et militaire. Valade, an IX The Candidacy of Claude Imbert. The Man in the Iron Mask: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Jeu de cartes au portrait de Paris. Presses universitaires de France, The other prisoner that the king ordered to go with Saint-Mars, Matthioli, being ruled out, was Dauger.
French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: University of Delaware Press, La Rochefoucauld par quatre chemins. Les Maximes et leurs ambivalences. The first part of the volume establishes the cultural, literary, economic, and social context in which early modern French women wrote. Wood and Laura B. Ann Rosiland Jones discusses Pernette du Guillet and her use of Neoplatonic conventions, establishing textual links between Du Guillet and her literary contemporaries. Part III proposes specific pedagogical and critical strategies for study of early modern women writers.
Larsen explores female writing communities revealed in the works of Catherine des Roches, from literary salons to networks that spanned centuries and crossed national boundaries. Gary Ferguson argues for the inclusion of the poetry of the Catholic nun Anne de Marquets in a course on women writers. Deborah Lesko Baker addresses the sometimes problematic issue of having students read texts in Middle French.
In one essay Colette H. Karen Simroth James and Mary B. McKinley open the door to the past a bit wider for students by suggesting ways they can access centuries-old texts, both via online resources — digital facsimiles are more and more available — and directly in special collections that house rare books. This volume will be a precious resource for teachers and for scholars. The selection of writers, subjects, and approaches is both broad and deep, and will prove invaluable for those who wish to include women writers in survey courses or courses focusing on a particular theme or genre, and for those constructing a course specifically centered on early modern women writers.
Dans The Wisdom of Animals: Printable PDF of Romanowski, 93— Another is a practical circumstance, that our term is only one quarter long 10 weeks , which means that nothing like a complete overview of the century can be proposed. I decided that the concept of modernity would provide such a focus.
Second, links can be made with our own period and the movements of contemporary thought variously named futurism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-modernism, and post-colonialism. Any period can think of itself in this way. Ce mot Moderne vient de Modernus, dont plusieurs se sont servis. This, I feel, is different from what the sixteenth-century writers did.
During the second half of the sixteenth century and in the early part of the seventeenth century, however, the cultural energies and the political situation had degenerated into the violence of the religious wars, economic and social instability. This approach is based on analyses of the culture by several historians and thinkers who have described a decisive shift in this period. I put their books on reserve at the library, I photocopy a few significant pages, and I ask students to read them in tandem with the literary works. A recent work by Sara E.
Nature is completely other and separate from the human, and the construction of the human is completely under our control and free will. However, Latour shows that these were ideals that necessitated other practices of mediation, mixtures, interferences between these two presumably opposed domains: Indeed, I might reverse the dynamic here: For him, it is crucial to have a single, central authority located in the self in order to understand and organize the world, to separate the bodily from the immaterial, and to achieve the rationalization, the quantification of the universe, and, most important, human mastery over nature.
This produces what John D. The reforms of poetry by Malherbe and Boileau are well known and need no restatement here and are similar to statements by Vaugelas and other grammarians; I distribute short excerpts from all these writers. In the period, there was a lively battle between the partisans of drawing and line and those of color, as a battle between those who favor theoretical reason and those who favor materiality of color that escapes rational discourse. There are other cultural domains where similar forces of ordering are at work: One interesting specific domain where one can see these efforts at refinement and control is the disciplining of the body.
As Georges Vigarello states:. Some disadvantages of this approach can be mentioned at this point. There are several advantages to this approach, in my opinion. First, the seventeenth century is viewed in the context of the preceding period—of course, every culture and literature ought to be viewed in context, but the self-consciousness of this particular culture and its unique attempts at self-definition are highlighted as being a special moment in European culture that has long-reaching consequences.
This can be viewed as a crisis: I would suggest that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and Romanticism, transformative movements though they were, did not shake the foundations of thought and culture established by the second half of the seventeenth century. The weight of these ideologies is felt in two domains of contemporary French culture. One, inside France itself, can be linked to the seventeenth century ideals.
The self-conscious oppositional mind-set is expressed forcefully by Edouard Glissant: By rejecting this imposed culture, might not these writers, it seems logical to ask, connect with some of the practices rejected by the seventeenth century culture? An intriguing aspect of this is indicated by the same writer who concludes his work with the proposition: The other strategy is to contextualize the century in two directions: La Formation de la Langue classique — Reading the Oppositional in Narrative. U of Chicago P, The Church and the Age of Reason, — Les mots et les choses: The Style of the State in French Theater, — The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age.
The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France. U of Pennsylvania P, Essays Presented to J. U of Georgia P, The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Printable PDF of Cohen, 77— Several commentators have speculated that some of the characters and certain elements of the plot are drawn from contemporary religious and political history and that Racine uses the play to express his personal views on people and events.
The importance of historiography is stressed in the Hebrew and the Greek versions of the book of Esther , both of which Racine uses as sources. The king requires the events of his reign to be chronicled so that they may be used as an instrument of governance. It is he, after all, who transmits to his niece the raw material that she will shape into her persuasive speech to be delivered to her husband.
In order to be able to identify his enemies, which he believes will make him more able to predict any possible conspiracy, he orders that the chronicle be read to him. He then utters lines that underscore the usefulness of historiography as a repository of crucial information and a remedy against inevitable royal distractions:. He was not engaged in recording details of court life so that the king might read or hear them in order to detect the identity of his friends and foes and thereby prevent any potential betrayal.
In Esther, Racine creates a heroine who saves her people by being the type of historian that the playwright never had the opportunity to be. Si pour sauver son peuple il ne vous gardait pas? What is important here is that she does not ask God either what she should say or how she should frame her arguments. Instead, she reserves those prerogatives to herself:. These words are derived from the Greek version but are not found in the Hebrew text, from which this prayer, and indeed all mention of God, are absent:. Mon Seigneur, notre Roi, Toi, tu es le Seul! She is using history to provide the king with a model of royal greatness that he might emulate.
Upon hearing Esther reveal her Jewish identity just before her climactic speech, her husband is incredulous that such a good and wise woman could be a part of such a loathsome ethnic group:. This process, Hydaspe tells us, has a calming affect: It is he who, while being slightly troubled by her fear, does not succumb to the contagion of her fright. Instead, he tries to calm her: The queen is characterized as intelligent, assertive, and calculating. Finally, she places a special responsibility on God by arguing that he should not permit the annihilation of the only people who acknowledge him as the one true divinity: Justice would demand not only that the king punish Aman for being a mendacious advisor but also that he reward the captive Jews for being faithful subjects.
Mythos and Renewal in Modern Theater. U of Alabama P, The Art of Jean Racine. Sacred Representation in Esther. Sylvie Romanowski and Monique Bilezikian. The most persuasive refutation of that theory is made by Jean Pommier in Aspects de Racine. The writer of the Hebrew text bases the credibility of his narrative on its presence in the authoritative royal Persian chronicles, thus fulfilling his narrator's fonction d'attestation: Mais la nuance est nouvelle: Printable PDF of Morris, 63— The painting does depict, as expected, the obligatory nude figures of Adam and Eve.
Our eyes, guided by our knowledge of the biblical tale and its many pictorial depictions, and influenced by an ingrained mental habit that has resulted, survey the scene. He is neither wrapped around the trunk of the Tree nor slithering along it nor hanging from a branch nor poking its head out from some thick foliage nearby nor simply on the ground in plain sight. The absence of the Serpent alone arouses puzzlement that deepens for those of us aware of the particular appeal that the snake had for Poussin as a vehicle of symbolic significance. A snake appears in a number of his most famous landscapes.
A snake, the python, wrapped around the base of a tree, also appears in the painting Apollo and Daphne Fig. In that painting we see a snake, the longest and thickest of any before painted by Poussin, splayed out upon a large dark rock in the left foreground of the painting and still another, much smaller, attached to the trunk of a tree just off the center of the scene on the right.
Where we expect a snake, we see none. Where we do not expect a snake, we see two. It is as if the sly Serpent, split into two in some manner, and then slithered away from Eden in the spring where he belonged, to a stormy wintry scene of horror, accompanied by a smaller companion, where he does not. The fact that the paintings come from the same series compounds our puzzlement.
I consider in this paper Spring alone. He also means to convey something to us by non-representation. He appears in the Tree of Life, offering a deceptively appealing illusion of overcoming death while Eve is about to grasp knowledge and the reality of human mortality. My view is that Poussin in Spring provides a radical and illuminating revision of the biblical tale of Adam and Eve from a Stoic perspective on life. I reject a number of possible explanations that may come to mind and then offer one of my own.
In Part II I offer supporting argument for my second claim. The Serpent has yet a role to perform. All is, as yet, complete innocence. He has no further role to play. Eve then tempts Adam and he, too, eats of the Tree of Knowledge, but the Serpent is not there to witness this final act of the Fall.
The claim, then, is that the painting captures that moment in time after Eve has eaten and now approaches Adam, inviting or beckoning him so that he might join her. It is a tale of two temptations each one of which attains its goal. Several obstacles stand in the way of accepting this interpretation.
Spring does not portray such a scenario.
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Secondly, the position and gaze of God in the clouds above seems perplexing in light of the tragedy unfolding below. We would expect a focus, not on what is in the distance ahead of him, but rather on what is below him and, given the biblical tale, what he will soon with great displeasure address. True there are intimations of the Fall and mortality in Spring. Yet what Poussin intends to depict is the world before the Fall, a world in which Eve is pointing at the Tree but has yet to reach for its fruit. The Creation of the world is finished, and God is seen high in the sky blessing his work.
The Golden Age is coming to an end. And, as with Milton, the Serpent is a character in the tale whose role has already been performed, and he need not be depicted. This view, while not open to the criticism that there is no evidence of Eve having eaten, is vulnerable to the criticism of an incongruity between the events taking place in the Garden and the depiction of God. Disappointment of an expectation is likely to draw more attention than its satisfaction.
I suggest that the Serpent, as usually understood, has no role to play in tempting Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge whatsoever. Poussin likely believed that a fantasy of a serpent with feet, mouthing words, in what language we can have no idea, a being apart from humans, one capable of subtle thought, distracts from what is the morally serious point. We know that, as we develop, we shall acquire knowledge of good and evil.
We know, too, that at a certain point in time that we shall die. The tale, if taken literally, presents a history of how these facts about human life have come about. He exploits for his purposes the tale, but through his form of telling a story, through pictorial images, he leaves out an expected pictorial representation of the serpent, modifies in this manner the accepted story, and conveys an important moral truth. The biblical Serpent is not only a phantom but also, importantly, one too seductively available as an object upon which to place responsibility.
Each is fully responsible, and, given that Eve has not yet eaten, the powerful motives of love and compassion Adam might possess, as on the Miltonian view, to join her in eating, are not in play. There is no room for Eve to blame the Serpent or for Adam to blame Eve. If true, Poussin has already modified the biblical tale in an obviously important respect. He is telling a different story but keeping two of its main characters. I shall now argue that his version of the tale of Adam and Eve is even more radical.
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They are to be regarded, not as fallen creatures, not as the earliest human malefactors, the cause of so much human suffering. Rather, they are creatures about to experience a rebirth, appropriately occurring during spring, transformed into creatures capable of a more elevated form of life. There is, I believe, a temptation many viewers will feel when looking at Spring. What will immediately come to mind is a biblical tale with which they are bound to have some familiarity.
They expect to see the Serpent, and this expectation would be reinforced if they have familiarity with other pictorial representations of the tale. All have a snake and all have that snake on or close by the Tree of Knowledge. Let us, then, shift our focus of attention to this tree. In Genesis 2 we learn that God has placed within the garden numerous trees, two of which are named, one the Tree of Knowledge, the other the Tree of Life. It is reasonable to assume that the Tree of Knowledge is the tree toward which Eve is pointing and from which she and Adam shall soon eat. They do, after all, gain knowledge of good and evil, and nothing is presented that suggests that they have eaten of the Tree of Life, which, arguably, if they had, would have made them invulnerable to death.
So the Tree of Life is the tree, for the most part painted in dark colors, shaded from the sun, atop of which is a dark rock formation, the tree with hanging fruit that appears in the left foreground of the painting. What meaning might it carry? If we focus our attention upon this tree, we are confronted with a stunning sight, the sole aspect of the painting that conveys a sense of dread that, if we stay with it, can make our skin crawl, not dissimilar to our response to the large snake in the left foreground of Winter.
We spot him in the dark, narrow, contorted and twisted trunks and limbs forming all that we can see of the lower portion of the tree. It seems as fitting a description as any to apply to those shapes. It provides a marked contrast to the erect trunks of the bedazzling Tree of Knowledge with its flowers scattered amidst its hanging fruit. If we were indeed meant to view the Serpent as situated there, Poussin would be alone among a long list of distinguished painters to have chosen him to be so situated. That we should find the Serpent in this tree seems, however, peculiarly fitting, even while we must acknowledge its dramatic divergence from the biblical tale.
What is to be made of all this? What is to be made of the Tree of Life, holding out its promise of everlasting life, depicted in a dark setting, with shapes giving rise to a feeling of unease, while the Tree of Knowledge, the eating from which brings death, is sprinkled with bright flowers? Among all living things, animals flee the prospect of imminent death.
This thought arouses in many a fear of death, and this fear gives rise, in turn, to thoughts of how it might be avoided. This behavior is contrary to reason. It is also contrary to reason to believe, and behave as if it were true, that such a life without end was clearly an indisputable good to be chosen if offered to one.
Reason rejects a choice of some purported good when the prospect of attaining it brings before our minds an idea that we cannot get our minds around, an idea whose intelligibility we cannot grasp. Reason instructs us that death appears an evil to be avoided at any cost, but it is in fact a blessing provided by nature.
No reasonable person would choose this false, tempting, good. A lengthier life, provided certain conditions, such as good health, obtain, yes. Seeking an everlasting life, with all its unknowns, no. The bright light of a morning sun, evoking the light that knowledge, shines upon her. There is no Serpent, as we know in this version of the tale, to either tempt her to eat of the Tree of Knowledge or to assure her that she shall not die if she does.