UglyMyfanwy, The Reader
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call me myf
...
"First came Isaiah with his crinkled little fingers
Then came Charlotte and that wretched girl, Dawn
Ugly Myfanwy died on delivery
Mercifully taking her mother along
Alright, alright, alright..."
"The Rake's Song" - The Decemberists
...yeah. I named myself after a line in a Decemberists song, and a rather dark one at that. A song about a rake, a rascal, who realizes that married life just isn't for him - and so, when his wife dies in childbirth and he is left with three children he doesn't want, he... "divests" his burden, to put it delicately. It's a good song, probably my favorite on that particular album. It's a good story about a terrible person. I enjoy good stories about terrible people.
But I enjoy exploring the unexplored more.
Myfanwy dies at the same time as her mother, so why does she have a name? And why "Myfanwy," when the other three children have more common names? She's an infant, so why, when describing her, is "ugly" the first word that comes to the Rake's mind?
Myfanwy is a Welsh name. According to the ever-so-useful behindthename.com, it translates into English as "my woman." A unique name, at least for its setting, with a blank and generic meaning. I doubt the name was picked out by the mother before she went into labor, considering how strange a name it seems when listed with Charlotte (English/French/Etc European), Dawn (English), and Isaiah (Jewish/Biblical/English). The Rake gave it to her, for reasons unknown: to stake a claim of ownership on the baby, despite its death, in some subconscious machismo need to point and say "that's mine"? Or maybe a subconscious need to put a name to the thing that finally ended his (self-induced, btw) misery?
But whatever the reason for the name, it's the "ugly" that matters most, because whether he knows it or not, the Rake isn't describing the stillborn infant there. There's something else. Something deeper. Something within him that declares this whole business of childbirth and child-rearing as repugnant, something he rejects entirely with an angrier sort of hatred than the flippancy with which he relates his tale. Myfanwy is, in the Rake's mind, the thing that put a stop to his wife's "spilling out babies," is not a godsend. He's not grateful for her. He hates her dead and would've hated her living. She was, by nature, innocent. It's the Rake that's ugly, not his stillborn daughter.
That's the kind of story that fascinates me. That's the kind of character I love to read about but would never want to meet. The fact that such people exist alongside thousands, millions of other different "such"es of people; the tangled wires inside each person's mind; the sparks and fires that start when two minds meet. That's why I write and that's why I'm here, and I kind of thought that this mini-exploration might be a decent depiction of how I think.
I promise I'm not always this pretentious. It's just kind of a thing I do. Write and wring out a subject until I can't wring it anymore. I'm definitely not always this pretentious, I'll promise you that. I can't promise that I'm not going to be long-winded... but I'll do my best to hold some of the more superfluous thoughts in.
Signed,
UglyMyfanwy
