"The Countess"

Tonight having returned from the play "The Countess" by Gregory Murphy, my mind resounds with some of the powerful themes implied by the dialogue of this true life tale. In it, John Ruskin, the brilliant intellectual (art critic, poet and writer), is the husband who will not consummate his marriage to the beautiful Effie Gray because he finds that she does not live up to his expectations of what a woman's person should be when compared to what he sees in art. Effie Gray is the woman who is ironically loved by all of society because of her spirit and physical beauty but believes she is deformed and diseased because her husband constantly tells her she is not how a woman should be. And John Millias is the man (a visual genius himself) who falls hopelessly in love with her for the woman she is despite the fact that her husband is his mentor. You can't make up stuff like this.

All together I was impressed at how the play delievered so much more than just the mere facts of the lives of these celebrious individuals. I found it fasinating to think how even in the strict mores and milieu of victorian society, here was a man (Ruskin) who had so feasted on the idealized beauty portrayed in art, that he could no longer be excited in the form of the real woman he had married. Or as Millias says in the play of Ruskin, he is "forever theorizing about lovely things and yet looks at the practical woman before him with contempt." It reminded me very much of the insightful article in New York magazine called "The Porn Myth" by Naomi Wolf. As I continued to watch the play, I realized of course that this was not just a problem of this man wanting the perfectly beautiful wife or even all men desiring the idealized beauty but that this was the trouble all mankind encounters when carrying something of the created realm and placing it into that of the divine. Perhaps that is why Ruskin remarks that "all bachelors marry goddesses, but husbands live only with women." Perhaps he forgot that he was also not the god that his wife married and that she too had now to live with the mere man.

One of the more humorous lines of the play was another line from Millias to Ruskin as they touch upon Ruskin preference or excitement for younger women or girls and Millias asks him how he could be "looking to acorn for shade when the comfort of oak is before him." Obviously this was not the 'I love lucy" funny, it just reminded me of a high school friend mentioning to me over Christmas break that he could never see himself marrying a younger woman because he had observed one too many of his colleagues having to go to music concerts filled with the olsen twin dopplegangers to appease their younger wives. I had laughed but I remember feeling a little disconcerted when I suddenly recalled that two of my most favorite movies last year weren't even targeted toward the teen crowd but the pre-teeny boppers who still dream about making eye contact with their crushes not sleeping with them. I know sometimes I have wished in my heart for simplier times when beauty wasn't about comparison to idealized photoshop creations on magazines or having yourself displayed immodestly to attract attention, so if nothing else, this play was a great reminder to me of the nature of sin during any time period to corrupt the good thing that God created and also the amazing truth that even if no man on earth sees, God sees past the external and into the heart of what true beauty is.

"Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God's sight" 1 Peter 3:4