oh lots….. he’s essentially a blackwood woman without being a woman. “blackwood woman” is a title reserved for the wives of the men who inherit the blackwood estate; a woman moves in (with her most valuable possessions) and then the house swallows her up and a new blackwood woman eventually moves in to take her place. the system obviously gets taken apart when merricat kills thomas, who was going to inherit the estate (thereby forcing her and constance out of the house), along with the rest of her family. but who unwittingly survives the murders? julian. and julian is very much defined by his status as survivor throughout the story—it contributes to merricat’s insistence on treating him kindly (i spoke a bit about this here)—but it also contributes to his emasculation. julian was never much of a “man”, at least in the book’s terms, he wasn’t well-off, he was living off his brother, and was comparatively meek even before his arsenic-induced dementia. he is both symbolically and physically powerless. merricat tolerates him because she doesn’t perceive him in the way that she perceives her father, or the main target of the poisoning, thomas, and julian’s survival confirms her perception of him (in her mind he survived because he merited survival). when julian finally dies in chapter eight at the hands of the villagers, again indicative of his place among the blackwood women, and the stress caused by the fire, merricat wraps constance in his old shawl and constance even starts speaking like him in her daze. when she and constance return to the ruins of their house, they find everything burnt and blackened, except the kitchen, the cellar, their mother’s drawing room, and julian’s bedroom—i.e., the feminine domains are left untouched by the fire. constance also decides to wear julian’s suits and sleep in his old bed, and finds a place for his box of papers: the cellar, beside the rows upon rows of the blackwood women’s jams and preserves. merricat resolves to bury something of his; none of their other family members is buried on the estate, but burial is important in many ways in the story and merricat wants to honour julian, and in that way he becomes part of the blackwood women and their property weighting the house. constance planting a yellow flower for him is also decidedly not a masculine representation of julian, but an accurate one all the same
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