Long ago, Jeanette Hardage started an article that she never completed, full of musings about hair. As someone who inherited her thick hair, I can understand why she might have gotten a bit obsessed from time to time with hair that can be hard to love, but that would be sorely missed if it were gone. Here are her partially developed thoughts for your enjoyment.
Jeanette began, as she often does, with a biblical reference (see Matthew 10:30 and Luke 12:7):
The Bible says the very hairs of our heads are numbered. Well, there aren’t as many hairs to count as there used to be. Why? I guess I’ve inherited my father’s thinning mane and receding hairline. For a woman who boasted “fat” hair all her young days, this development is disconcerting!
Starting down this mind’s journey led Jeanette to start cataloguing various references to hair in literature. Here’s a partial list of the ones she jotted down, mostly reflecting a certain light heartedness as she worked:
- Emily Dickinson, This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies, “This quiet Dust was […] frocks and curls.”
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV Scene 1, “Methinks I am marvelous hairy about the face.”
- Robert Browning, A Toccata of Galuppi’s, XV, “Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the gold[…]?”
- Scottish ballad Waly Waly, “Or wherefore should I kame [comb] my hair?”
- T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “Shall I part my hair behind?”
- Francis Thompson, The Way of a Maid, “She only talks about her hair.”
- John Milton, Il Penseroso, “Thee bright-haired Vesta”
- William Butler Yeats, For Anne Gregory, “And not your yellow hair.”
- Hilaire Belloc, The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, “And never brush their hair.”
- Anne Hunter, My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair
- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, [multiple references]
- Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, Chapter 5, “And her hair was so charmingly curled.”
- Robert Herrick, The Mad Maid’s Song, “Good morrow to mine own torn hair”
- Song of Solomon, Chapter 4, “Your hair is like a flock of goats”
Jeanette then proceeded to reminisce about her youthful hair and all the things she and her mother did to tame it:
When I was 6 or 8 or 10, Mother curled my hair on rags—a long and tedious process that resulted in tight, long curls. With a heavy head of hair it looked ludicrous.
French braids—two of them—were actually her hairstyle of choice for me. This was long and tedious too, but she preferred it because she wouldn’t comb my hair for two days after. My eyeballs hurt from the pulling from aft, to get those braids tight and smooth.
As I grew older, we tried various other forms of torture: pincurls; aluminum curlers; the desired, then detested, permanent wave—precursor of today’s “perm.”
Here Jeanette stops to record more literary references, but this time there are no frivolous ones. Her mood has headed to a more somber place, leaning perhaps toward self-censure with a reminder not to get lost in vanity.
- David Hume, Essay XXII: Of Tragedy, in which beauty is an impression of the mind
- Alexander Pope, Epistle II: To a Lady on the Characters of Women, “Woman’s at best a contradiction still.”
- Thomas Carlyle, An Essay on Robert Burns, “the golden calf of self-love”
- George Lyttelton, Advice to a Lady, “Your heart’s supreme ambition? To be fair”