The Maiden in the Lonely Tower

Or should it be the Lonely Maiden in the Tower? The old stories are still good today: I'm reminded of the retreat of rich Americans into enormous white 2-story box houses that all look the same – with walls, cameras, and a view where they can look down on the neighbors that they don’t talk to. The lonely maiden in the tower. Could be a man. Maybe with a gun.

 One of those giant white boxes is going up next to our house: 6 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms. Who needs 6 bedrooms?

Historically, retreat to a lonely tower is a popular metaphor in art and literature. One of its two main variations is where the women are captives of others, usually men: some of the Grail legends and Roman de la Rose, the Brothers Grimm tales like Rapunzel (ok, that was by a woman) and Maid Maleen (up top), the Ottoman harems. They feature strange castles and palaces and walled rose gardens. Or the heroines are asleep, under a spell: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White. Sometimes this was because the men didn’t want their women impregnated by other men or because the women were a threat - Joan of Arc and Eleanor of Aquitaine – or the women were in exile because they were out of favor at court – the French salon writers, Ninon de Lenclos and Madame d’Aulnoy. Hiding away in the tower.

The story goes back to classical times – in Greek mythology Danaë is hidden in a dungeon, but she ends up impregnated by Zeus anyway (in a dubious shower of golden rain). Hero (and Leander) ends tragically but it spawned hundreds of paintings, plays, poems and music scores throughout every artistic period.

The other variation in this popular genre is female loneliness, often by choice. Sure, Hölderlin retreated to his tower in Tübingen, and there’s the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, but mostly it's women and the most iconic of the genre is Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. These are women who for whatever reason feel lost and abandoned and who end up feeling they cannot leave the tower. Many religious women took this path – the medieval virgin martyr legends - and there have been artists who chose to be hermits, Emily Dickinson for example. Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath may have had people around them, but loneliness can be psychological as much as physical and it can be deadly.

A tower also could be an island: the women of Homer’s Odyssey, which speaks to generations of women who entered nunneries, or started elaborate secret gardens as an escape – Gertrude Jekyll (who never married) and Vita Sackville-West (who did but who was lesbian – Sissinghurst). Other women chose to simply disappear - I'm thinking of Agatha Christie in 1926. 

Finally, the tower retreat metaphor resembles the return to Eden theme, especially as we age: Leonardo at Amboise, Casanova at Dux. Old people hiding out in the library or in the garden, waiting to die.