Of all our blood relations, an aunt offers the most potential for uncomplicated friendship. The Complete Book of Aunts is an entertaining and touching exploration of aunts in all their guises and varieties, culled from real-life, literary and historical sources. Bewitching illustrations and anecdotes illuminate various aunt types: Bargain Aunts, Mothering Aunts, Damned Bad Aunts, and X-Rated Aunts. With stories and poems about famous or historical aunts, Christiansen and Brophy attempt to uncover what "aunt-ness" is.
Release date:
December 2, 2008
Publisher:
Twelve
Print pages:
257
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First eBook Edition: November 2007
ISBN: 978-0-446-55349-0
Book design and text composition by L&G McRee
Illustrations by Stephanie von Reiswitz
1
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE AUNT
Why are there aunts?” asked a baffled four-year-old boy as I sat in his parents’ dining room talking about this book over lunch. It’s a question I cannot answer. Aunts are not ordained by nature; they do not exist in the animal world. (Elephant herds are matriarchal, and when the males are out of the way, the females band together to look after one another and nurture the calves, even to the point of adopting any orphans. But these ladies are not necessarily blood-related—they are simply public-spirited.)
Anthropologists studying kinship patterns have had little to say about aunts. Not all societies recognize them—or at least, not all languages have bothered to develop a single word to describe a mother’s or father’s sister: Romany has only sachi calli, “female relation.” A separate word for “aunt” is almost nonexistent in the languages of sub-Saharan Africa, while in the extinct tongues of Old High German and Anglo-Saxon, the words nevo and nift, from which our “nephew” and “niece” are derived, appear to have been used to describe uncle and aunt and grandson and granddaughter as well. Other peoples make careful distinctions between maternal and paternal aunts, in the interests of keeping lines, laws, and customs of inheritance clearly defined. In Hindustani, for example, a paternal aunt is phu-phi, a maternal aunt kala; Latin has matertera and amita; and Scandinavian languages double up tante or tant with faster and moster.
In The Development of Family and Marriage in Europe, Professor Jack Goody writes, “A kinship terminology that grouped together the siblings of both parents, placing each in the same category of ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’ (though the holders of these roles were not inter-changeable in all areas of activity) developed first in Vernacular Latin in the late Roman Empire, then spread through the Romance languages, reaching England with the Norman Conquest.” But in English aunt, like cousin, continues to have a more general application as well: An aunt is not just the sister of one of your parents but any older woman with whom you are on friendly terms—an “auntie.” It is in this latter sense that the aunt makes one of her rare appearances in the writings of William Shakespeare, when Puck boasts about his antics:
The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,
Sometimes for three-foot stool mistaketh me:
Then I slip from her bum, down topples she
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.i
Where to begin? The Bible is uninterested in aunts; Homer and the Greek tragedians pretty much ignore them. The first aunt of any historical significance appears in ancient Rome. When Nero was three, his father, Domitius, died. Much to the fury of his atrocious mother, Agrippina, who was exiled in disgrace, the boy was sent to live with his father’s aunt Domitia Lepida. Being far from respectable, she proved a thoroughly bad influence, “choosing a dancer and a barber to be his tutors,” according to Suetonius.
When Claudius became emperor in 41 ce, both Nero and Agrippina were brought back to court. Agrippina loathed Domitia Lepida and instigated a campaign of vilification against her, charging her with witchcraft. “In beauty, age and wealth,” writes Tacitus,
there was little between them. Moreover, both were immoral, disreputable and violent, so they were as keen rivals in vice as in the gifts of fortune. But their sharpest issue was whether aunt or mother should stand first with Nero. Lepida sought to seduce his youthful character by kind words and indulgence. Agrippina, on the other hand, employed severity and menaces—she could give her son the Empire, but not endure him as Emperor. . . .
When Nero became emperor in 54 ce, he murdered Agrippina (thwarted incestuous passion being one putative motive) and then set about getting rid of Domitia Lepida, too, hoping to inherit her fortune since she was childless. “He found her confined to bed with severe constipation,” Suetonius gossips:
The old lady stroked his downy beard affectionately—he was already full-grown—murmuring: “Whenever you celebrate your coming-of-age and present me this, I shall die happy.” Nero turned to his courtiers and said laughingly “in that case, I must shave at once.” Then he ordered the doctors to give her a laxative of fatal strength, seized her property before she was quite dead, and tore up the will so that nothing should escape him.
After this unforgettable scene, the records go very quiet on the matter of aunts for seventeen hundred years. Whether nephews and nieces were genuinely indifferent to them we cannot know, but certainly there is little evidence of any intense emotional relationships. Uncles fare no better. For some reason, this seems to change in mid-eighteenth-century England, when aunts become the objects of affection and gratitude. We hear about Catherine Perkins, who helped her nephew William Hutton become a bookseller, and the historian Edward Gibbon’s devotion to his aunt Kitty (see page 45), while novels by Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney paint vivid pictures of their heroines’ aunts, who play more than passing roles in the story. In her fascinating book Novel Relations, Ruth Perry attempts to relate the rise of the aunt to a deep social change that took families away from a consanguine to a conjugal model, in which loyalty toward your parents and “extended” family became less important than loyalty toward your spouse and children—a phenomenon underpinned by the drive toward capitalistic independence and small businesses, with more people marrying younger and reproducing sooner.
Why should this make aunts more important? Because, Perry suggests, they were implicated in the question—urgently asked by young women especially—of the extent to which parents should be obeyed in the quest to marry, and in the search for other adult figures who might support rebellion. This is certainly an obsessive interest of novels of the period, which repeatedly explore the theme of a girl fighting to marry the man she loves against the will of her tyrannical or uncomprehending parents—an issue made more urgent by England’s Marriage Act of 1753, which made it illegal for anyone under twenty-one to marry without parental consent. Whom could a girl turn to for sympathetic, disinterested adult advice? Not a similarly inexperienced girlfriend but a wise old aunt with no ax to grind. Elizabeth Bennett’s reliance on her companionable aunt Gardiner in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is only one example.
But this is only a theory, and a rather porous, tendentious one at that. Maybe it’s better just to accept that suddenly, it was time for aunthood to get its due. In the course of the next century or so, the familiar stereotypes emerge. The poet William Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy is an early instance of the childless spinster aunt who grows up devoted to her big brother and then duplicates that love toward his offspring, in whose nurturing she plays a crucial role. Dorothy’s particular care was the firstborn, John, born with a “noble forehead” that gave promise of a fine intellect. Alas, as Dorothy was forced to admit after attempting to homeschool him, he turned out dim and obtuse. This made no difference to her love for him. She sewed him new suits and shirts when he went off to boarding school and prayed that “God grant he may preserve his ingenuous dispositions.” Finally, he got into Cambridge, where he struggled to keep up. Appointed to a curacy in the wilds of Leicestershire, he begged his aunt to come and help him settle in. So she set off, canceling an exciting holiday in Rome without a murmur of complaint.
“Nephews and nieces, whilst young and innocent, are as good almost as sons and daughters to a fervid and loving heart that has carried them in her arms from the hour they were born,” writes Thomas de Quincey in his memoirs, presumably thinking of his friend Dorothy’s poignant devotion to the hopeless John. “But after a nephew has grown into a huge bulk of a man, six foot high, and as stout as a bullock . . . there is nothing in such a subject to rouse the flagging pulses of the heart and to sustain a fervid spirit.” Yet Dorothy was a loyal soul, and aunts can sustain their love on very little return: To be needed was sufficient joy.
The Victorian era was perhaps the aunt’s finest hour, and the chapters that follow will detail several of their triumphs. Aunts (and this includes great-aunts) in the nineteenth century could be heroic figures, women who had avoided the surrender of marriage and sought spheres of activity beyond the roles of wife and mother. But chiefly they were objects of indulgent affection, in a culture that sentimentalized the relics and recollections of childhood. E. M. Forster, for instance, wrote Marianne Thornton, a touching memoir in tribute to his great-aunt, a woman selflessly devoted to the cause of education, who had died when he was barely seven. She had pampered and adored her little nephew, who at the time found her billing and cooing cloying and irritating. “I was in the power of a failing old woman, who wanted to be kind but she was old and each visit she was older. How old was she? ‘Born in the reign of George the Fourth’ my mother thought. ‘More likely Edward the Fourth’ cried I.” When she died, she left Forster eight thousand pounds—a sum that he described as “the financial salvation of my life . . . she and no one else made my career as a writer possible.” The biography, his final book, was a pious attempt to repay a debt of love and gratitude.
Aunts also become ripe for some good-natured ribbing. From the mid–nineteenth century date such innocent expletives as my aunt! or my sainted aunt! (The expression of incredulity my aunt Fanny! comes much later, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.) Aunt Sally was a fairground game, still popular in Oxfordshire pub gardens today, in which the dummy of a woman’s head with a pipe sticking out of its mouth is assailed by sticks or balls aimed at dislodging the pipe—from which presumably springs the figurative use of Aunt Sally to describe a person or phenomenon that is a sitting duck for criticism or mockery. An Aunt Emma, in the quintessential Victorian recreation of croquet, is a player who obstreperously avoids risk and aims solely to impede the progress of others.
Late in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, aunts seem to have become even more emphatically comic figures—some of them merely amiably dotty, such as Aunt Etty in Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece (see page 132); some of them figures of ludicrous self-importance and rigid propriety, such as Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell (page 131) or P. G. Wodehouse’s Aunt Agatha (page 126). The prim maide. . .
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