Fornicopia
 

The title Fornicopia merges two concepts from the Revolutionary period: fornication and cornucopia.  The latter symbolized the promise of abundance in a new world governed by the enlightened man, but fornication was thought to be of the exclusive domain of the female, particularly if she dared to pollute the public realm with her sexuality.  During its revolution, anonymous pamphleteers infested France with pornographic plays and stories detailing Maria Antoinette's licentious appetites, her liaisons and bestiality, and the guttural conversations that accompanied her perverse sexual acts.  All complete fabrications, (including the attribution to her of those famous incendiary words: Let them eat cake), no one doubted Marie Antoinette's guilt, because, after all, the republic was in chaos, and woman was to blame.  Her execution was a symbolic purging of the body politic of its most formidable threat, feminization.  Translations of these texts have been fragmentized into nearly meaningless phrases almost disappearing beneath the lace of the skirt, and swirling red targets have softened into a rose-color pattern.  The snake scales of the bodice and center skirt have crystallized into a rich surface of pastel colors, her favorite.

 

As a foreign princess Marie Antoinette was literally stripped of her Austrian identity at the French border.  She had the misfortune to marry a weak king who was unable to "seed" his bride for seven years and who could not escape the machinations rooted in earlier courts.  As queen her gravest sin was incessant self-absorption forgetting that her only value to her king and subjects was to provide an heir to the throne.

                                              

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