The Ring of Truth: And Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry

by Wendy Doniger

Why are sex and jewelry, particularly rings, so often connected? Why do rings continually appear in stories about marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss and recovery, identity and masquerade? What is the mythology that makes finger rings symbols of true (or, as the case may be, untrue) love?

The cross-cultural distribution of the mythology of sexual rings is impressive--from ancient India and Greece through the Arab world to Shakespeare, Marie Antoinette, Wagner, nineteenth-century novels, Hollywood, and the De Beers advertising campaign that gave us the expression, "A Diamond is Forever." Each chapter of The Ring of Truth , like a charm on a charm bracelet, considers a different constellation of stories about rings lost and found in fish; forgetful husbands and clever wives; treacherous royal necklaces; fake jewelry and real women; modern women's revolt against the hegemony of jewelry; and the clash between common sense and conventional narratives about rings. Herein lie signet rings, betrothal rings, and magic rings of invisibility or memory. The stories are linked by a common set of meanings, such as love symbolized by the circular and unbroken shape of the infinite, constant, eternal--a meaning that the stories often prove tragically false.

While most of the rings in the stories originally belonged to men, or were given to women by men, Wendy Doniger shows that it is the women who are important in these stories, as they are the ones who put the jewelry to work in the plots.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Literature, Mythology, Jewellery

424 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2017

Reviews

[Anjana Basu · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Ring of Truth
And Other Myths of Sex and Jewellery
Wendy Doniger
Speaking Tiger
Rs 899/

In my end is my beginning wrote Mary Queen of Scots. The same could be said of this book – like a ring it comes full circle. Wendy Doniger has applied the weight of her scholarship to the folklore of jewellery, mainly the ring because that is the most symbolic of gewgaws. Rings keep appearing in stories about marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss and recovery, identity and masquerade. The ring encircles marriage vows and in ancient times embossed with a seal, it stood for identity. A man could be identified by his ring and, when handed to a woman, the jewel seemed to prove that the two of them were acquainted.
Doniger has delved extensively through a host of cross cultural references covering Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit and medieval tales. In her introduction she makes it clear that she is not talking about rings of power like the one Tolkien describes but about rings which have another kind of power. She also throws in anecdotes of her mother and grandmother. There is a host of stories about fish swallowing rings which are then miraculously brought to light in various kitchens, which includes Kalidas’ version of the Shakuntala story.
There are detailed footnotes which direct you not just to chapters but to the relevant pages which is useful since by the time the reader has flipped through the numerous stories, some of the previous ones may have been forgotten. Comparisons of the different versions of the Siegfried-Brunhilde story which varies from Scandinavia to Germany are so minute that it does require patience to take in the differences and to wonder at the perversities of rulers and wives.
Doniger’s prime principle is that the ring stands for the female sexual organ and hence is written about with a lot of double speak. It also influences male potency because the size of the ring supposedly reflects a man’s power. From ancient myths of rings which also encompass bracelets, the research moves on to necklaces. Jewellery according to Doniger stands for sexuality and any jewel which encircles brings with it the subtext of bondage – the Story of O in fact features in her ring bearer’s tales.
From medieval myth to advertising spin doctoring – namely the De Beers slogan ‘A diamond is forever’ – Doniger covers the entire sparkling circle. Diamonds, for example also represent sexuality – a single ring for the wife and a host of jewels for the courtesan. Jewels in fact have tales to tell about the chastity of their owners which is why the later part of the book contains outlines of so many films from Max Ophuls to Hitchcock and goes into great depth over the affair of the remarkably ugly diamond necklace that was responsible for Marie Antoinette’s final downfall. Elizabeth Taylor and her jewels also come into it and Doniger wonders what makes women preserve certain stones and part with others. In Taylor’s case she sold the diamond that Burton gave her after their second attempt at marriage fell apart but hung onto the much larger Krupp diamond that belonged to the infamous German arms dealers. In a sense, diamonds serve as consolation when men are gone because ‘they luster on’ – in other words their lust is unending because diamonds are indestructible.
Whether one would call this conventional scholarship is doubtful but Doniger manages to put together an interesting collection of theories and anecdotes on a subject dear to most women’s hearts. Jewels, after all, are a woman’s best friend – or at any rate, good collateral for a divorce.

[Sridhar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Sanskrit scholar, Wendy Doniger yet again comes out with a classic. The book just doesn't limit within the diameter of the ring but goes all around in layers and layers, peeling overtime, a deeper meaning and connection- from far land stories of Polycrates to Shakuntala- and each effort makes a poignant observation.

The trinity of ring, myth and sex (mistresses), with rich historical anecdotes from varied cultures, makes it unputdownable.

Do note the author subtle german humour at the conclusion of every significant chapter. She does have a funny bone!

[Sajith Kumar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many legends and stories from all parts of the civilized world are in fact recognition stories in which a long-lost husband, wife or offspring is reunited with his or her relatives when they come across a piece of jewelry, most typically a ring, in the custody of the unknown person. Kalidasa’s Shakuntala is the most well-known tale in India in which the royal lover forgot about his sweetheart in a hermitage and refused to recognize her when she presented herself at his court with unmistakable signs of pregnancy. Unfortunately, the girl had also lost the ring gifted by the king. By a strange coincidence of events, the ring which was lost in a river was swallowed by a fish which ends up in the royal kitchen. The king quickly remembered the ring’s past and is reunited with his wife and son. This book narrates similar stories from other cultures as well, such as ancient Greece, medieval Europe and Arabia. The pattern of such stories strikingly resembles each other across cultures. The stories given here are about circular jewelry, particularly rings even though bracelets and necklaces also make in their appearance quite regularly. The shape mimes the circle of eternity in the face of ephemeral human lives. We also find that sex and jewelry are often connected. Stories of rings frequently get into marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss and recovery and identity and masquerade. Wendy Doniger is a controversial professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. Her book ‘The Hindus – An Alternative History’ is banned in India because of the contemptible way in which it handled the sacred lore of Hinduism. You can, however, find it reviewed here.

Readers are treated with a fine variety of legendary stories from various parts of the world. A curious exemption is China from where nothing is heard though this may be attributed to the author’s poor research on the Far East. Apart from the genre of innocent wives who are reunited with their husbands upon presenting the ring which was gifted by him earlier in the story, there is another category called clever wives whose stratagems outsmart the restrictions set by a heartless husband who declines to consummate the marriage and set restrictions upon the wife which could be mitigated only by the son borne to her of him who leaves her. Such clever wives escape their detention, goes in disguise to follow the husband and trap him in the guise of a dancing girl or courtesan. The union eventually results in the birth of a male child thus setting into play one of the conditions of mitigation. The first seven chapters deal with stories of rings throughout history. The next two chapters veer towards necklaces in particular cultures and particular historical periods. The final two chapters return to rings and to the invention of the mythology of diamond engagement rings and a concluding consideration on the cash value of rings and the clash between reason and convention throughout the world. It may come as a surprise to many that the practice of presenting a diamond ring to the would-be bride at the time of betrothal was the result of a change in social mores brought about by persistent advertising campaign initiated by the De Beers company which produced diamonds around the end of World War II.

The author’s exposure to Indian mythology helps to construct parallels between it and European concepts which are very similar. A great deal of Orientalist study has gone into this subject so as to puff up the current comparative literature to such levels of advancement. The ancient myth of the submarine mare is a case in point. According to this legend, a mare triggers the final fire and the final flood. Hindu mythology tells of a fire that threatened to destroy the universe until it was placed in the mouth of a mare that roams at the bottom of the ocean. The flames that shoot out of her mouth are simultaneously bridled by and bridling the waters of the ocean. This delicate balance and the hair-trigger suspension will finally be disturbed at the moment of doomsday. Doniger mentions Scandinavian and Norse myths comparable to this Indian tale. Richard Wagener’s nineteenth century operas featuring the adventure of Siegfried and Brunnhilde also display cross-cultural affinity.

The book includes different variants of the Shakuntala story and we wonder at the freedom taken by Kalidasa as poetic license in embellishing and transforming a minor story in the Mahabharata into a world classic. Doniger quotes the comments of other scholars on these and unfortunately, she has chosen only Left-Islamists like Romila Thapar and Akhtar Hussain Raipuri who handles the subject matter under the lens of their religio-political prejudices. Raipuri had translated Kalidasa’s works into Urdu. He finds fault with Kalidasa and argues that he was a man identified with ‘Brahminical high culture’ and changed the original story. It is only in India that we find the opinions of Islamists posing as liberals getting a treatment at par with established wisdom. Hussain Raipuri is, in spirit, almost on the same page as those Muslim scholars in the Mughal court who were tasked with translation of Hindu texts to Persian. Even though they did the job well, they bitterly complained about ‘the unsavoury task of handling a religious text of the unbelievers’. Mulla Shiri, who translated the Mahabharata, termed the epic as containing ‘rambling, extravagant stories that are like the dreams of a feverish, hallucinating man’. Centuries have gone by, but this genre of bigoted scholars remains the same. For further details on the translation of Hindu texts in the Mughal era, please read my review of Audrey Truschke’s ‘Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court’ here. Doniger has learned Sanskrit well and her treatment of the nuances in literary texts point to the fact that she has mastered the language. However, this mastery is not translated into respect to the ancient texts. Her irreverent, mocking style sets her up as an insensitive braggart. Once she remarks that ‘Had Dushyanta, Yven, Tristan and Siegfried lived to our time, they might have attributed their memory lapses to another sort of a drug and cited a study reported in an article in Nature Genetics (p.135). In another instance, the author describes the legends linked to Durga Puja in Bengal and claims that Parvati berates Shiva for his ‘refusal to beget a son, his addiction to marijuana, his poverty, his infidelity and his refusal to get a job’ (p.150). Such is her disgusting style.

A good point of the author’s effort in writing this book is the consolidation of narratives similar in action and morals neatly laid out across cultures and millennia. A really creative attempt is to link the tales to the present-day world where myths are still widely prevalent but which are spawned and spread by commercial organisations for facilitating increased sales of their product – such as diamonds by De Beers. The significance of the genuineness of jewelry also seems to have made a diametrical shift. Whereas in old tales it was the genuineness of the ornaments that ensured that everything went well, in the modern stories the recurring theme is that faithful women cannot afford to possess expensive, real gems like genuine diamonds or pearls. We read of some stories in which a supposedly loyal wife silently implores an appraiser to pronounce a pearl necklace in her possession as fake when in fact it was gifted to her by another man. Morals change over time and so does morality – that’s what the author stresses. The book also provides an accidental glimpse of the loot of India in the colonial period, and the author is an unwitting party to it. Doniger proudly claims that she wears a bracelet of ancient Indian gold coins from the fifth century Gupta period. John Marshall, who excavated them, stole this treasure and gifted it to his mistress in the 1930s. She eventually married another man but kept the coins for herself. It was later bequeathed to the author. The book is not difficult to read but feminism ooze out of every pore in the narrative. Without implying any kind of disrespect to the author and solely copying an old Sanskrit idiom, let me conclude that the literary content of this book is like a garland in the hands of a monkey!

The book is recommended.

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Ring of Truth is a fascinating look into the conjunction of sex, jewelry, and power in the stories people have told each other since ancient times. Across eleven chapters, Doniger dives into the forms that narratives about sex and jewelry (most often rings) take, covering astonishingly stable myths such as the-ring-found-in-a-fish, rings of forgetfulness, the-ring-and-the-clever-wife, and other such transcultural tropes. The breadth of the texts Doniger covers is pretty remarkable: we traverse ancient, biblical, Indian, Arab, European, and, finally, U.S. American corpora (China and the rest of East Asia are mostly missing), all to realize that myths surrounding jewelry attempt to compensate for the unequal power relations between the sexes, one of the very few things that has been really stable throughout recorded history. So, men sleep with, impregnate, and then leave women, and women try not to be left or at least to guarantee that their sons inherit. Rings, and jewelry at large, in human myths symbolize and, sometimes, equalize that power dynamic. Often, they reflect the priorities of the ruling elite of the time; less offen, they undermine ruling-class goals. These things are both satisfying and terrible to learn.

In my opinion, while interesting and well written, Doniger's book suffers from a lack of theoretical framing, probably because Oxford doesn't quite know if this an academic or a trade book. The final chapter actually provides a lot of the theoretical grounding, and my sense is that the coda started out as the introduction but was relegated to the back to the book so as not to scare off the casual reader. As it is, the book feels too diffuse, its texts randomly selected, and its chapters too haphazardly grouped without the initial, anthropological overview.

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Qual è il ruolo dell'anello nei miti classici?
Dai Greci, ai Romani, al Medioevo, passando per le tradizioni indiane fino alle rielaborazioni degli antichi miti con Shakespeare e gli autori dell'800/'900 da Ibsen a Wagner, l'anello ha assunto diverse connotazioni, spesso utilizzato anche come alibi per i comportamenti umani deplorevoli.
In alcune circostanze la sua circolarità lo rende simbolo d'amore eterno, in altre strumento identificativo di rango o di identità, in altre ancora diviene strumento di oblio ovvero di memoria dell'uomo che indossandolo/togliendolo "dimentica/ricorda" la donna amata.
In alcuni racconti popolari si lega alla donna astuta che, seppur rifiutata, ma desiderosa di avere un figlio, lo ottiene con l'inganno.
La Doniger riflette, altresì, sulla condizione della donna, sulle credenze patriarcali e discriminatorie e sulle condotte umane.
Non avrei mai pensato che la quasi totalità della letteratura internazionale riconducesse i rapporti umani al loro legame con un anello e pertanto è stata una lettura interessante.
Unica pecca, la lunghezza e la ridondanza del medesimo tema.
Interessante!

[Mills College Library]

398.28 D683 2017