My best friend took a course on Sondheim musicals. They were analyzing You Must Meet My Wife, and the professor said the line about Anne saving Fredrik's cigar butts was a sexual reference, that she kept them and...well, yeah.
Possible, but I have always seen it as just another example that Frederick gives that his is not really a grown-up marriage. Everything he says suggests only Anne's hero worship of Frederick - to treasure anything that has touched his lips (pretty sexy, I guess). Also, Desiree counters with, "You're joking" so I don't think the line is particularly strong, even if it is intended to be sexual.
He misses the entire point of the show and its sophistication.
Desiree stops short of anything that crude.
The point is that it doesn't HAVE to be sexual for her to call it "bizarre" and stopping herself short after the "but--"...it's bizarre if all she does is put them in a box because they were his.
If you take it to the level of Anne having a sexual fetish with his cigar butts, you rob the show of everything that is wonderful and smart and sophisticated and nuanced about Sondheim.
This man should not be allowed to teach that class. As punishment, he should be forced to listen to Hermione Gingold sing "Liaisons" over and over and over and over until he understands what the lyrics mean.
Actually, collecting cigar butts is consistent with psychoanalytic cliches of a young woman yearning for sexual awakening in that period. That doesn't mean the impulse is conscious on her part or Fredrik's, nor that she actually uses the cigars as dildos. (I agree the latter is entirely inconsistent with the tone of the play.)
How Desiree HEARS the story is another matter. But she knows Fredrik wouldn't discuss masturbation with her, so either she, too, understands the habit in psychoanalytic terms or shrugs it off as the eccentricity of a silly girl.
Sondheim does devote a surprising number of lines to that detail and is enough of a gamesman to enjoy the inside joke. He certainly knew that cigars were so frequently seen as phallic symbols at the turn of that century that Freud supposedly had to say, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
Which may be true in this case. On the other hand, what a clever way to suggest that Anne is also sexually driven, at least subconsciously; she simply isn't attracted to her husband. Clever as a symbol of Anne's unconscious; simply vulgar if meant literally. Not a chance of the latter.
I highly doubt Desiree is aware of the Freudian implications. You know, rattle, woolly penguin - she doesn't think of Anne as sexually developed or hungry at all. She thinks it's bizarre, I guess, that Anne would think of her husband in such reverent tones. And, it's worth mentioning, that at the point in question Fredrik has not yet admitted that Anne's still a virgin.
Good point, Glinda. I certainly agree that Desiree needn't think in psychoanalytic terms to find Anne's habit "bizarre". But speaking of psychoanalytic cliches, the collection of cigar butts might suggest unconscious frustration whether or not Anne is a virgin.
Assuming a woman of the world like Desiree has familiarity with such theory (a big if, since Freud's INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS only sold a few hundred copies in 1900), she might recognize the collection of cigar butts as a "symptom" even before she knew "of what".
But this line of thought is useful only if the actress playing Desiree finds it useful subtext.
On the whole, I think it's more the lyricist's in-joke than any character's conscious sexual reference.
Anne's curiosity about sex manifesting itself in her collecting Frederik's cigar butts (which isn't all that out-there, given the other strange things adolescents do to express love) is totally removed from their exchange, which essentially boils down to:
"She saves my cigar butts." "That's weird."
The actress can build on her line but there's no pressing impetus for Desiree to receive it sexually.
If you talk about Bigfoot long enough, it starts to seem plausible and before you know it you're on some godforsaken reality show on a misnamed network.
To be fair, A Little Night Music is based off an Ingmar Bergman comedy, and comedy or not Bergman was infatuated with the halls of psychology. I can't remember if the butts are in the film (I think they are) but is it such a leap? Couldn't it be considered that Sondheim would slip a joke like that into a show that's (almost) all about sex?
I, who have been around the block, am honestly not sure what your professor was talking about.
But whatever it might be (unless I'm missing the point entirely), I doubt Anne Egerman would do it. The very point of the song is that Anne isn't at all sexual.
Sometimes, Clinton and Lewinsky aside, a cigar is just a cigar. Now I could easily buy that Fredrik's belief that Anne loves his cigar is Freudian.
Did your professor mean that Anne's saving the butt is that she is preserving Fredrik's less than complete, partial, expended manhood which has seen better days and relegating Fredrik to asexuality. That I can buy.
I quote that line above, justoldbill. It may be an urban legend, but if Freud actually said it, it was precisely because a cigar-as-phallus was such a common trope of the period.
I certainly don't believe Sondheim means to say that Anne is masturbating with used cigars (as was implied, apparently, by the OP's professor).
But I also don't believe Sondheim devotes that many lines to Anne collecting cigar butts without a reason. It makes perfect sense as a Freudian "perversion", an unconscious habit of Anne's in place of actual contact with a penis. Fredrik wouldn't see the habit as such and Desiree might or might not: either way she knows it isn't appropriate behavior for a virgin bride.
One needn't find any of the characters crude to appreciate the in-joke by the lyricist.
"Which may be true in this case. On the other hand, what a clever way to suggest that Anne is also sexually driven, at least subconsciously; she simply isn't attracted to her husband. Clever as a symbol of Anne's unconscious; simply vulgar if meant literally. Not a chance of the latter."
I think this is spot on. My impression is that Anne is in the process of her own sexual awakening. I think the sexual implications are there; however, the cigar butts are an unconscious manifestation (to echo others' words) of this awakening.
"But whatever it might be (unless I'm missing the point entirely), I doubt Anne Egerman would do it. The very point of the song is that Anne isn't at all sexual."
Perhaps this is Frederik's take, but during the course of the work, isn't Anne's sexuality expressed towards Henrik (perhaps a mate more sexually suitable and appropriate for Anne, and thereby stimulating her [pun intended] in a way Frederik might not)?
Yeah y'all are over-thinking here. Frederick is bragging about his wife to his ex-lover. I don't think she saves his cigar butts any more than she's the incandescent....what? Of his life. We've seen that Frederick & Ann's life is anything but blissful- she's completely detached from him and he's frustrated as hell. The whole song is a lie.
Actually, I don't think the whole song is a lie at all.
It's not inconceivable that she actually calls him "Old Dry As Dust" and actually ruffles his ties, among other things mentions.
He starts off by implying that something's amiss when he calls her his "happiest mistake" and the "ache" of his life. The point of the song is not a lie that gets compounded (as "In Buddy's Eyes" is), but that Henrik DOES think she sparkles and twinkles and bubbles and glows--the only problem (which he is hugely embarrassed to admit) is that she won't have sex with him.
So the psychological build of the song is toward the admission of "unfortunately still a virgin," but even after that, he goes on defending her.
All the things he mentions before that have the ring of truth, unlike the outright lies Sally mentions throughout "Buddy's Eyes."
Do you really think Ann loves him? worships him? That Fredrick lives in "So completely demented contented a fashion"? I do think the truth peeps out- as it usually does when one lies compulsively: She is "Unlike a wife" and she does call him "Old dry-as-dust." But she no more keeps his cigars than she ruffles his ties.
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joined:7/17/07
Posted: 8/26/12 at 02:28pm