I love it when a poem teaches me something I didn’t know about the endless strangeness of our human past. I had never heard of chicken skin gloves before reading Evangeline Riddiford Graham’s wonderful poem about them. All the rage in Europe from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, the gloves were intended to soften and whiten the hands of aristocratic ladies, and were made not out of actual chicken skin (phew—that does sound rather gross) but leather from unborn calves (also gross). They were produced in Limerick and were so thin and delicate a pair could fit in a walnut shell and lasted only for a day.
Why do these gloves make me think of the embroidered handkerchief Othello’s mother gave him for his eventual bride, which had the magical power to preserve a husband’s love unless she lost it, in which case she’d be hateful to him? There’s something here about the connections between rich women and the women who make for them the lovely, fragile, quasi-magical things that preserve their beauty and desirability. There’s power in these precious items, but also danger, whether for Desdemona or for the Irish seamstress losing her eyesight over tiny stitches.
“Scouring Pad” takes the same theme into our own time. Here a babysitter is beset not just by the children in her charge but by the mother, who imposes endless extra housework on her with no clue about what a burden it is and no suggestion of extra pay.
. . . The mother wonders
if I have time to wash
the floor. There has been
a divorce. I look
in every cupboard
but there is no broom.
This mother/employer has troubles of her own of course. And what woman does not? If only we could find that broom!
