Indignity–Progressive Righteousness And The Story Of A Defiant, Moral Woman

Bella Cartwright was brought up properly.  Her parents, descendants of both New England Puritans and Virginia cavaliers, had been members of New Brighton society for generations, and were proud to uphold a tradition of moral rectitude, noblesse oblige, and social conservatism.  There could be no question of right and wrong when the Bible, historical conventions, and good common sense were quite clear.  One had an obligation to one’s family, community, society, and nation to be righteous and right-living.



It was with dismay and disappointment that the Cartwrights lived in the latter half of the 20th century, and with shock and grievance that they entered the 21st.  The precepts of Cato the Elder, the moral injunctions of the New Testament, and the social history of Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment had seemingly been buried under the  avalanche of self-discovery, individualism, and self-valuation.  Where had the commonweal gone? Where had the uniting and unifying principles of a common moral code, submission to the principles of the commonweal, and the communalism stressed by Jefferson in his ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ gone?



Bella had more than the usual parental authority to overcome as she matured into adulthood.  Hers were not overbearing, berating parents – the good old days and all that – but set such an example of principle and moral righteousness that is was difficult to rebel.  She could not dismiss her parents values as old fashioned or démodé even though her colleagues and friends were happily tearing down the old bastions of privilege.  There was something to universal morality and common social justice that had been proven over and over. 

No civilization had survived without a foundation of moral and ethical principle.  Those which had tried to impose temporal and idealistic measures to create better societies – i.e. the Soviet Union – had failed miserably.  The most autocratic and elitist societies– the monarchies of the Renaissance – at least within their own privileged dominions fostered and promoted essential Christian values.



So what to do with a society that overvalued the individual – that distorted Jefferson’s and Hamilton’s vision of the rights of individuals and lionized them at the expense of the communities within which they lived?

Bella Cartwright was awash in progressive idealism before she even distinguished between Left and Right or compared and contrasted legitimate conservative moral preservationism with secular relativism.  Yet, thanks to her upbringing, could never bring herself to subscribe to the popular sub-zeitgeist.  It was one thing to challenge the status quo per se as a matter of social and philosophical inquiry; another to reject established principles as part of a revisionist assault which rejected all history.

Sex was Bella’s anodyne, balm, and escape from the ethical conundrums which demanded attention.  She was quite happy to retreat to a cabin in the Catoctin Mountains, defy convention, good taste, and right choices; and for a brief, managed interlude she said goodbye to the world, her parents, and the ill-founded progressive revolution.

Bella, however, was never a social anarchist.  She cared little for any movement, cause, or social action.   She was against all of them, and felt that progressivism was insulting and demeaning to individual personality and character.  Compared to the limitations of social, moral conservatism – proper behavior, dress, attitude, and comportment – progressivism was far more repressive.  Bella was indignant that self-appointed reformers had arrogated to themselves the authority to manipulate others.  The human being and soul were not to be tampered with.

Bella’s moral and social conservatism came naturally.  How could one ignore, she concluded from a very early age, those fundamental precepts common to every civilization.  Honor, courage, compassion, respect, strength, and discipline had been hallmarks of Ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, China, and Japan.  Not only were they universal principles, but they were the defining values of ruling elites from French kings to Japanese shoguns.  However far European and Asian regimes may have strayed from these core values, they had remained in place, intact, and regimental throughout the millennia.  One disregarded them at one’s peril.



Her principled stance was not without social consequences.  It was not easy to be an intellectual conservative in an America which equated conservatism with antediluvian mentality, innate retrograde immoral elitism, and a perimeter-minded rejection of multi-culturalism.

As much as Bella might try to warn of the dangers of cultural anarchy and how pluralism was never an intrinsic good but a social trend to be considered and managed within the context of Jeffersonian communitarianism, she was criticized, dismissed, marginalized, and rejected by her peers. 

At a time when the statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton were being removed because of partisan,and provincial concerns, she found it difficult to champion the irrevocable past and the inviolable sanctity of the individual.

Tolstoy in his second afterward to War and Peace said it best.  Napoleon may have been an influential historical figure; but his prominence had more to do with the random events that preceded and created him than any unique, innate, special character or personality.  Great men can and do step on the international stage; but they are incidental to the sweep of random human history.  Don’t take anyone too seriously.



At best Bella was considered a misanthrope, an ill-informed pessimist, and a wet blanket on the enthusiastic idealism of her generation.  At worst she was a pernicious negativist. Her calls for historical perspective and intellectual temperance were no more than covers for her radical Right Wing agenda, or so said her critics.

By the time she was a young adult, Bella gave up – not on the validity or importance of her principles, but on the airing of them.  If she was to be met by continuous slander and opprobrium, there was no point in persisting.  She rested on her classical laurels, and what laurels they were! – the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, and Cato the Elder; the moral psalms of Hebrew prophets and the moral teachings of Jesus Christ in the Gospels and Epistles of St. Paul, and the moral literature of Dostoevsky, Conrad, Tolstoy, Miller, and Williams.

Although always diffident, with no interest in political engagement or debate, Bella was indignant.  Personal convictions aside, how could anyone so cavalierly ignore and reject history and criticize those who value it as socially insensitive?

Bella was always criticized by her progressive friends as irresponsible and amoral. How could anyone sit on the sidelines when such a dramatic reconfiguration of American society was in progress?

She offered no defense because none was required.  Anyone who ignored the predictable ebbs and flows of history, the ineluctability of human nature, and the permanent genetic sequencing of homo sapiens, should be able view with complete equanimity and distance the course of human events.
So, content, but not smug, Bella retired weekend after weekend to her refuge in the Catoctin Mountains with lover after complaisant lover, overjoyed at being alive and unhitched to man, nature, or ideas.

Fashion As Art–The Ensemble Of Color, Line, Culture, And History

Amanda Barkley was a slave to fashion, or at least so said her mother who, a very practical and parsimonious woman, could not see the point in ten pairs of shoes and as many socks, halters, camisoles, and jumpers.  She had grown up in France where even the wives of merchants and store clerks always looked good in their well-tailored clothes, chosen with taste, kept for years and accessorized, hemmed, and trimmed to keep up with the latest trends.  If they were not exactly in vogue, they kept up the universal French standards of couture, patrimony, and culture.



A Frenchwoman didn’t need more than one or two outfits which she wore on special occasions; but even in her more common workaday dress she was always well turned out, attractive, and very respectable.

So Amanda’s mother came by her criticism honestly.  Her daughter’s love of fashion went far beyond modest good taste.  It wasn’t so much the clothes themselves but the number of them that offended her sensibilities. 

Yet Amanda persisted in her interest in fashion. She grilled her mother about women’s shoes – what’s the purpose of high heels? Why don’t men wear them? Where do flats and slippers fit in? – and Mrs. Barkley , as attentive to ‘teaching moments’ as any parent, but worn down by her daughter’s bullheaded drive, decided to answer as fully and correctly as she could but hoped that such dry, disinterested and matter-of-fact responses might through her daughter off the path. 

Amanda so loved to look great and had such a unique sense of style that she indeed spent more time considering what to wear than most girls.  Deciding on an ensemble, arranging and balancing elements with an eye to color, line, and statement took time and effort.  She was a trend-setter for every age group, the arbiter of fashion from fifth grade on. 

For some reason she became fascinated with clerical fashion.  She thought the Pope in his finest regalia was the coolest thing on earth, and was surprised that this high fashion had remained so long cloistered in the Vatican.



If she were a man, she thought, she would dress like the Pope.  “Look at all that gold embroidery”, she exclaimed to her mother, “and his little red slippers.”  It turns out that Benedict had an eye for style and design, and loved the traditional red shoes of the great Popes of history which, unfortunately, had fallen out of fashion. He restored the use of the red papal shoes, which were provided by his personal cobbler, Adriano Stefanelli from Novara.  To add a flourish and personal touch to the shoes, in 2008 Benedict restored the use of the white damask silk Paschal mozzetta  which was previously worn with white silk slippers.

No one except Benedict and the gay priests in his holy entourage paid any attention to the red shoes or the white silk mozzetta, and Amanda Barkley was one of the very few outside the Vatican to give the Pope kudos for fashion; and the older she got and the more sophisticated she became, the more she appreciated the very cool fashion sense of the Catholic Church.

The entire Vatican was tops in Amanda’s book.  She loved the profuse elegance of the robes of the cardinals of the Inquisition, and imagined Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, the Grand Inquisitor watching Spaniards being dismembered on the rack in his flowing red robes.


She appreciated the more modest and temperate dress of modern day cardinals and archbishops whose elegant simplicity exuded power and authority without vengeance or Biblical injunction.



“Notice the continuing red motif”, she wrote in her Harvard PhD dissertation, “its quiet assertiveness, and reserved authority.  Note the clerical collar, absent in the paintings of The Grand Inquisitor, as a muted sign of Church authority and a Papal willingness to conjoin his bishops with parish priests. Black takes center stage, although set off by the discipline of the red cummerbund, and the elegant red Edwardian sleeve buttons exude the aristocracy of the Church.”

After studying fashion history, trying her own hand at classic design, and then seduced by the anachronistic, flamboyant, and dramatic dress of the Vatican, she discovered San Francisco fashion - a mix of black, gay, Latino, and lesbian styles unique to the city. Her particular talent was an instinctive sense of what would look good from one street culture matched with another and an ability to confect creations that were never entirely derivative; attractive but never tricked out; slightly ironic but never predictably so; and above all graceful.

The eclectic, thrift shop style was just underway when she arrived on the West Coast.  Designers had begun to add pieces of an ensemble in unusual ways.  Pieces that never had ever gone together were now matched.  The old palette of complementary colors was discarded as were patterns.  Now plaids and stripes, checks and frills; hems and embroidery; broad swatches and minute detail all went together.  Retro, archived, ironic, and passé clothes, jewelry, and accessories were all in.  Sexy and folk went together.  High heels and funk; rural cracker and Broadway.



This new style was ground-breaking because it relied so much on irony, history, and cross-cultural trends.  Amanda, however, not only had no difficulty negotiating this new world of eclectic fashion; but she developed her own unique ‘art of accretion’.  It was one thing to design from with only line, color, fabric, and balance  another to cobble together fashion statements; but another altogether to understand the nature of fashion itself.

Braque and Duchamp disassembled what they saw, then reassembled to reflect the past but within a new, personal, but singularly cultural dimension.  Amanda never intended to deconstruct the fashion of Dior, Balmain, and St. Laurent; nor to reject traditionalism out of hand, but to incorporate their good taste and incomparable sense of color, line, and dimension.


Amanda never considered herself an artist – she had been too traditionally educated to think of art in terms other than Sargent, Whistler, and Homer or the interpretive work of Kiefer and Bacon.  Yet what is art if not an expression of personal vision, zeitgeist, culture, and history?

Her mother reluctantly admitted that perhaps she had misjudged and misunderstood her young daughter.  Mrs. Barkley, in addition to her French parsimony, had had a strong dose of classicism at the Sorbonne, and was responsible for this narrow view of art. 

To her credit Amanda took her mother’s classicism seriously but politely put the rest aside.  Her maturity as a a fashion artist attested to the strength of her creative vision, her social and historical insights, and her ability not only to see beyond cultural boundaries and limitations but to borrow, amend, match, and complement them.