*
A Valentine Girl is Blanche Elizabeth Devereaux, whose initials spell the word “BED.” Blanche’s friends call her a tramp, a 50-year-old mattress, a hooker, a friendly port to the navy, and a slut puppy. But Blanche doesn’t mind: “I’m the biggest slut,” she says like an affirmation.
In the first episode of The Golden Girls, Blanche sashays onto the screen wearing a shell-pink dress with sequin shoulder pads. She throws on a mink stole even though it’s June in Miami. The contour of her bronzer is so stark that you can almost see the brushstrokes, as if to say, Yes, I’m wearing make-up! Isn’t it beautiful?
“You look like a prostitute,” Sophia says.
“Sophia! The things you say,” Rose frowns. “She didn’t mean that, Blanche.”
“Of course I mean it,” Sophia spits back. “Look at her, my cab driver would fall in love.”
Estelle Getty once said of Rue McClanahan, who played Blanche: “More people fell in love with her than you can possibly imagine.” Maybe this explains McClanahan’s six marriages (a runner-up to Elizabeth Taylor, who married eight times—twice to Richard Burton). Bea Arthur said of McClanahan, with some discernment: “She’s the total romantic. The total romantic. But then comes the light of day and she thinks, Holy god, what have I done here?”
McClanahan must have related to Blanche, who’s always in love. Or in heat. When Blanche talks about men, her speech spirals like a whirlwind: “All that manliness in one room, in one crowded room, one hot crowded room, everybody’s steamy bodies all pressed up against each other...”
“Blanche! Blanche, Blanche, Blanche,” Dorothy says. “You’re about to set off the smoke detector.”
*
There’s a special place in Hell for the horny. In Dante’s Inferno, it’s the second circle of Hell.
Here, Dante and Virgil stumble upon a hurricane of shrieking, weeping sluts: Cleopatra, Dido, Helen of Troy, and finally, Paolo and Francesca. If Dante had looked closer, he might’ve seen Blanche sail by.
“Love led us to one death,” Francesca explains to Dante. She was unhappily married to Paolo’s brother, Gianciotto, who eventually murders the adulterous couple out of jealousy. Francesca speaks with regret, even though her first kiss with Paolo unfolded in the most romantic way possible: over a book. Francesca laments, “Often those words urged our eyes to meet and colored our cheeks, but it was a single moment that undid us.” While tracing their fingers over the printed kiss between Lancelot and Guinevere, they chose to imitate the art. “We read no more that day,” she says.
Francesca is the woman who loves too much. She loses herself in the affair and gives into her basest desires. Ultimately, she dies for Paolo because she’s a drooly slut puppy, and that’s why her soul is eternally doomed.
Why then, in Romantic renditions, do Paolo and Francesca look so blissful swirling around in Hell together? In William Blake’s engraving The Circle of the Lustful, cast-off lovers rise in one calm, crescent wave. Bodies press up against each other. Above the storm, Paolo and Francesca reach for one another; their arms blend into one.
In Ary Scheffer’s painting The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca Appear to Dante and Virgil, the couple is captured in what appears to be a postcoital scene. Francesca looks like a silent movie star, a long-haired ingénue clinging to her man. A bedsheet falls from her body. Her arms wrap around Paolo, who uses the fabric to shield his eyes from the storm.
I imagine Francesca’s death, her eyes opening and closing against the wind as her vision adjusts to the light of Hell. As she reaches for Paolo’s hand, she asks herself, “Holy god, what have I done here?” to which Blanche, swimming through a sea of nude bodies, might respond: “Holy god, we got into Heaven!”
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