Letter From America: It's In The Bag!
...It has to be acknowledged that the handbag is a world that men do not understand, and that is why they do not go there. As Mavis Gallant wrote: "Sensible men understand all this. They know your bag is out of bounds. Tell a man he can find a pen in your handbag, and he won't go rifling through it!"... The ebullient Ronnie Bray writes about territory that is foreign to all males - the interior of a woman's handbag.
I was watching a TV court show. The plaintiff and defendants were blackening each other’s character like a couple of spoiled children. At one point, the plaintiff accused her ex-boyfriend of going through her handbag looking for proof of her infidelity. The defendant’s reaction was immediate and explosive.
"I would NEVER go through a woman’s handbag," he insisted passionately. "I never went into my mother’s handbag, I NEVER went into my sister’s handbag, I would never go into ANYBODY’s handbag!" I believed him. He said it just as I would have said it if I had been charged with handbag rifling.
Not going into someone’s handbag is a principle instilled into baby boys with their first mouthfuls of solid food. Even when Gay asks me to get something out of her handbag, I feel I am walking through a forbidden place, and feel the burning gaze of the singularities set to watch over a woman’s most precious chattel.
Whether the handbag cost a measly pound from a charity or shop, is a second-hand Chanel "Teapot" bag, a snip at fifty dollars, or costs an unthinkable thousand pounds, as does Gucci’s "It" bag that sports a gold python and serpent heads, it remains as inviolable as the Inner Vault of the Bank of England. It is not the value, but the abiding principle.
A young woman identified only as IKB speaks her grief at having lost her cheap but beloved bag:
"I left the lost-property room with a feeling that the matter was far from resolved. If you have been on the East Kilbride to Glasgow train in the past week and have seen an old, but faithful looking black Nike bag with purple highlights on the straps, then get in touch. Please. Don't make me go on TV and do one of those tearful pleas on the six-o'clock news. I don't think my family could take it."
Handbags have attracted disgust, fascination, fear, suspicion, and even adulation. The imperious Lady Bracknall was scathing in her denunciation of poor Jack Worthing's obscure origins when informed that he was found as an infant in a handbag in London's Victoria Railway Station. Her disgust rises to a full head as she repeats the offending words, expanding each to multi-syllabic proportions, unfurled over a full octave:
"F – o – u – n – d? In a H – a – n – d – b – a – g!" she disgorges. "I can't have my daughter marrying a mere parcel!"
French artist, Mme Lecroc, paints pictures of handbags and their contents. After the painting is completed, she offers her insights into your insides by reference to what you hoard inside your bag. In an interview with American Vogue, she said, "It's incredible what you can say about people after just two or three hours with their bags. It's the same kind of insight you get when you sit with somebody at dinner." She might be on to something.
Handbags are used as weapons to deliver opinions with deadly force. My father was ‘handbagged’ by my grandmother when he turned up at her house to do the decent thing and marry my mother. Afterwards, he could not see a handbag without flinching.
International Dominatrix Maggie Thatcher was famous for her omnipresent handbag. The Handbag became the symbol of Thatcher's manner of government. She ‘handbagged’ her European colleagues into giving the United Kingdom a budget rebate, and ‘handbagged’ her way into the good graces of President Ronald Reagan.
Baroness Thatcher donated a black leather handbag to raise money for Breast Cancer Care. An ardent Scottish admirer bought the handbag, which originally cost around three hundred pounds, for one hundred thousand pounds at auction. Beaming, he said it "Represented her significance and worth."
However, handbags have not always provided amusement. Nowhere is this made clearer than in the case of William Ewart Gladstone, who had a stiff-leather bag with two hinged compartments named after him.
Philip Sugden, in his, "The Complete History of Jack the Ripper" writes of, "[N]oisome courts and alleys, Hansom cabs and gaslights, swirling fog, prostitutes decked out in the tawdriest of finery, the shrill cry of newsboys - and silent, cruel death personified in the cape-shrouded figure of a faceless prowler of the night, armed with a long knife and carrying a black Gladstone bag."
The fact that a shadowy figure had been seen near the scenes of these murders carrying a Gladstone Bag was enough for some to suspect that the ‘Ripper’ was none other than Gladstone. Perhaps they suggested that to divert attention from the Prince of Wales, another popular suspect.
Handbags are one of the oldest items, historically speaking, found among women’s possessions. They are easy and cheap to make, unless you need them diamond-studded, and little change has been necessary to this low-tech accessory over the centuries. However, that changed as Handbags went high-tech!
Rosanna Kilfedder, has fashioned the first solar powered handbag with an illuminated lining, signalling the end of women fumbling frustratedly in the dark for their keys, lipsticks, or other essential but evasive articles. The battery is energised by a solar cell on the outside of the bag, and charges mobiles, Blackberrys, and other devices, that are fast becoming as essential to the ‘Complete Woman’ as the handbag itself.
Anthropologists have discovered that white handbags gather automatically in the middles of dance floors, attracting scores of jiggling young ladies for as long as the music plays. When it stops, it loses its power over the gyrators and the girls sit down and refresh themselves. Men do not appear to be influenced by the handbags.
It has to be acknowledged that the handbag is a world that men do not understand, and that is why they do not go there. As Mavis Gallant wrote: "Sensible men understand all this. They know your bag is out of bounds. Tell a man he can find a pen in your handbag, and he won't go rifling through it!"
Mavis is right, and so was the defendant. No man in his right mind would do it, and no woman in hers would put up with a man that did. A lady’s handbag may be the last bastion of personal identity in a world where privacy is continually being eroded. There remains few places that we can call our own, our very own, where the uninvited do not stray, and where the invited are just as loth to wander, and the lady’s handbag is, quite rightly, the enduring symbol of that diminishing category.
Copyright © 2005 Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
"It's never too late to be who you might have been"
-- George Eliot (1819-1880)
