Elizabeth Fillmore, apparently. The above dress is cccccrrrraaaaazy in an eccentrically beautiful kind of way, but even if I had the necessary funds ($19,580, apparently - which is, what, the best part of £12,000?) I don't think I could bring myself to wear a dress worn by such an ill-starred mythological figure.
Let's remind ourselves of her story, shall we? (I'm sticking mostly with Euripides here, I think) Medea is minding her own business on Colchis when along comes the handsome Jason - who doesn't so much sweep her off her feet, as convince her to help him nick the rather valuable and certainly unique golden fleece by murdering and dismembering her own brother. Nice. Then, they get back home to Corinth, and after knocking her up a couple of times Jason announces he's leaving her for a princess (the daughter of the king, not just a spoilt blonde); as if that weren't bad enough, he pretty much tells her it's all her own fault for being different and that, not to worry, she can be an ex-wife with 'benefits', if she wants. In retaliation, Medea is emotionally torn, but decides to punish him by killing the two children she has borne him in cold blood (but off-stage). She doesn't even leave their little lifeless bodies behind for the now-bereft Jason to bury with the proper rites.
Even the myth seems to blame Jason, because Medea doesn't get her comeupance but is carried off on the sun-god's chariot. Ovid has a rather nice line in Medea's point of view, too, in his Heroides (note too that Jason has not one but two letters from scorned special lady friends in the Heroides, the cad!).
So all in all, not the best name for a wedding dress.
I think we all agree that Jason was a buccaneer (what the OED calls a 'piratical rover' after one 'who dries and smokes flesh on a boucan after the manner of the Indians'). He was certainly not a chap who would use the term 'special lady friend' with any sincerity, if at all.
ReplyDeleteFor another use of Classical celebettes in the wedding-discourse, see the blurb at http://www.humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/comments/skulpcha/ and a further image at http://www.flickr.com/photos/robep/3744829859/. These sculptures belong to a series by Anthony Gormley, each named after a Greek poetess (Nossis, Erinna, Corinna, Anyte, but no Sappho...), or 'Cornelia', or 'Paete, non dolet'. The one with barbed wire for a head is 'particularly' unsettling.
Uncle P.