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Memory and Nostalgia; The Handbag, Past and Present
Time and space travel have nothing on a handbag's power to whisk as woman back to another time and place. Unclasping the bag is like taking the cap off a whistling kettle:genies of memory escape.
Whether antique, vintage, heirloom, or merely 'last year's," handbags have the power to conjure a specific person, time gone by, or past event. The metaphors abound:they are time capsules, reliquaries, hope chests, or archives that hold memories within their charmeuse seams of gilt frames.
Most strikingly, handbags can powerfully summon the essence of the person who once carried it. The first time I witnessed this phenomenon I was visiting a woman who held her deceased mother's clutch-style Sunday purse in her lap. It still contained her mother's tissues, bus schedule, religious medal, and a spool of thread whose color the mother had intended to march. Just as an elderly mother might have been, the purse itself was a bit frumpy and old-fashioned. It had a classical female shape, snap closure, and sturdy fabric body. All the content were intact, frozen in time just as the mother had left them thirty years ago. When the daughter opened the handbag and displayed each of these talismans to me, I, too, became aware of the absent mother. Her essence had been released just as the scent of perfume pours from a falcon, suddenly decanted.
For some women, objects trigger intense associations-the sudden sight of a grandmother's nitroglycerin pills, or the scent of her Chanel Number 5 still embedded in the weave of her Belgian lace handkerchief. For other women, her attitude toward her handbag is a revealing prism through which she can view her relationship with her own mother.
So strongly associated are handbags with people or memories that many a woman has difficulty parting with them, even if the bags are so dumpy or damaged that she knows she'll never use them again. She cannot bring herself to call the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Somehow, those bags are Mother, and to throw them out is unthinkable!
For some women, pocketbooks summon memories of their younger selves. Old handbags may evoke nostalgia. They come equipped with powerful stimuli: olfactory, visual, tactile. One whiff of April Violets or Wint-o-green Lifesavers or even the mustiness of the attic or cedar chest can send a woman on a swift magic carpet ride back in time.
Sometimes handbags function as small, private, ambulatory museums, Stuff collects and accretes at the bottom, forming layer upon archaeological layer: ticket stubs from a performance, of Cosi Fan Tutte at the opera, a Marisse exhibit at the MOMA, a concert starring Kurt Cobain, strange, square-shaped foreign coins, or useless paper money engraved with the visages of dictators or kings.
Writes Ellen Levine, the editor-in-chief of Good Housekeeping magazine:" My bag is like a personal treasure chest-I never know what I am going to find. Loose change, earrings I thought I lost, Tiffany pens missing for years."
Excerpts from "Handbags" by Barbara G.S.Hagerty
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