Butterfly Effect - ressourcesfeministes

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1 empurpled. “Great News! We have made it into the language”, writes astrophysicist,
Meryl Waugh: from the 3rd (latest) edition of The Australian Concise
Oxford Dictionary (1997): "empurple v.tr/ 1. to make purple or red 2. to make
angry.”
2 purple shift. Red shift and blue shift describe the respective move away from or
towards the observer. In measuring the speed and direction of the motion of stars
wavelengths are distorted: a shift to the longer red wavelength indicates
movement away from the observer; a shift to the shorter blue indicates
movement towards the observer. Purple shift describes the movement of an
emotion into a different dimension. Neither towards nor away, the shift
represents an emotional leap of faith into another realm, away from patriarchy,
and certainly out of this world. What Suniti Namjoshi calls an “unfamiliar
realm”.
3 the whole world turns purple. “Morgan [E.M. Forster] says he’s worked it out and
spends 3 hours on food, 6 on sleep, 4 on work, 2 on love. Lytton [Strachey] says
10 on love. I say the whole day on love. I say it’s seeing things through a purple
shade. But you've never been in love they say.” Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-
West, 18 February, 1927. In Louise De Salvo and Mitchell A Leaska (Eds.). 1985.
The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. p. 204. The history of the
association of purple with homosexuality is a long one and attested to by Judy
Grahn’s first chapter in her history of gay and lesbian metaphor, Another Mother
Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1984). A poem by Anonymous entitled, “A
Woman’s Song: To Her Indifferent Lover” written in Latin in the eleventh
century includes these lines: “Ver purpuratum exiit / ornatos suos unduit: / aspegit
terram floribus, / ligna silvarum frondibus.” Gillian Spragg has translated this poem
and the verse reads: “Spring, like a queen in purple comes, / puts on her gems: /
with leaves and boughs / they sing their joy for hours.” Although poems
celebrating nature are common throughout the history of poetry, and purple is
not unusual in contexts such as this, it remains interesting that it is a lesbianauthored
poem which here picks up on these images. H.D. in her imagist poetry
of the twentieth century was to pick up on many of these elements in her work
which resonates with allusion to Classical Greek culture. In particular, her poem,
“Hyacinth” alludes to the ability of this flower to withstand the cold, to be a
precursor to spring, even while the icy winds prevail. See H.D. 1983. Collected
Poems: 1912-1944, pp. 201-206. Further, the poem by Anonymous is reminiscent of
some of Sappho’s work. The complete original and translation can be found on
the Babel Building Site, an interactive poetry site at
4 wolves. The Wolf Girls at Vassar were a group of girls at Vassar women’s college
who cavorted at night dressed in wolf skins. They were perhaps acting out Djuna
Barnes’ depiction of lesbian sexuality in Nightwood (1936). Cristina Biaggi writes
of her last year in 1959: “Gail [Ellen Dunlap] got these two wolf skins from her
father, so we decided to wear them – tied over the shoulder, like Hercules –
everyone else was wearing Bermuda shorts – and we went out and howled. We
howled in the morning and we howled at night.” Two years later the story had
escalated, and Lucy Cross, writing of 1961, remarks: “some friends told me about
the Wolf Girl – somebody who put on a wolf skin and went howling around the
Circle in the full moon. That’s for me, I thought. There’s room for me.” See Anne
Mackay (Ed.). 1993. Wolf Girls at Vassar, p. 17. Vassar has also been recorded in a
poem by Rita Mae Brown entitled “A Song for Winds and My Vassar Women”.
Rita Mae Brown. 1974. The Hand that Cradles the Rock, p. 50.