bring back homeric epithets. call people brave-hearted, swift-footed, laughter loving and loud thundering. view the world with its rosy fingered and saffron robed dawns, its wine dark seas. make your own, walk across kiln fired earth and moss soft as sea sponges. be dew-eyed and soft-cheeked and silver-souled, deft-fingered and bright-tongued. gaze up at the many-storied stars and feel the warmth of the ancient sun, father of gods and men, as it beats down on the shimmering world, soft spun like caterpillar silk
"What do they say?" asked Gandalf and Thorin together, a bit vexed perhaps that even Elrond should have [discovered the moon letters on the map] first, though really there had not been a chance before, and there would not have been another until goodness knows when.
"Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks," read Elrond, "and the setting sun with the last light of Durin's Day will shine upon the key-hole."
"Durin, Durin!" said Thorin. "He was the father of the fathers of the eldest race of Dwarves, the Longbeards, and my first ancestor: I am his heir."
"Then what is Durin's Day?" asked Elrond.
-The Hobbit
here's my new headcanon, Elrond Peredhel who's been alive thousands of years and sits around all day in a giant library knows full well what Durin's Day is but he just saw both Thorin and Gandalf throw a tantrum that he found the moon-letters and Elrond Peredhel who's been alive thousands of years and has twin sons sighs to himself and says 'okay I need to make them feel important and thorin is obviously passionate about Durin, I'd better pretend not to know what Durin's Day is'
“Last night I photographed a Barn Owl hovering above prey at a local farm where I have been baiting them for some time, I did attempt this last winter but failed due to the lens misting, still a work in progress” ~ Roy Rimmer
it's so important to have your favourite couple of poems memorized. like, if you don't have a poem memorized that you can recite to yourself standing on a windy bluff overlooking the crashing sea, what even is the point
This guy knows what he’s talking about. He’s one of the lead writers for Leverage and if you ever watch the series on DVD, do yourself a favor and listen to him talk about how the scripts got written. Some of the advice he has is stuff I use all the time:
1. Don’t introduce an important plot person or thing after the first half of the story.
2. Always tie up loose ends.
3. Introduce important things in the middle of unimportant things.
4. If you have to infodump, find an emotion to tie it to and it will seem less like infodump and more like a motive rant.
Seriously this guy knows how to write.
"Women arent attracted to men who cry" WROOOOOOOOOOONG WROOOOOOOOOONG INCORREEEEECCTTTTTTTT WROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG 🛑🛑🛑✋️✋️✋️✋️✋️✋️✋️🛑✋️🛑✋️🛑🛑🛑✋️✋️✋️✋️✋️✋️✋️ BZZZZZT BZZZZZT WRONGGGGG NOT TRUE
Been doing another Jane Austen reread and apparently this time around I've got on my Chronic Illness goggles because I can't get it out of my brain that Fanny Price probably suffers from a mild case of rickets.
But, Kat, what the fuck are rickets? (infodump incoming)
So if you've never heard of rickets, congratulations on living in the 21st century. There's never been a healthier time to be alive 👍
So basically, rickets is more a set of symptoms than it is an actual disease, and those symptoms are caused when a growing body doesn't get enough vitamin D or calcium. That can be caused by either an underlying disease that messes with your body's ability to absorb vitamins and minerals, or by poor diet and lack of enough natural light.
In a culture where food isn't enriched with extra vitamins and minerals and adulteration of bread with things like alum is common, the Price family isn't going to have the most nutritious diet, and on top of that, poor Fanny as the eldest daughter would have been stuck inside all day every day helping out her mother. It's entirely possible that her sunday walk to church was the only time she got any direct sunlight.
And now that I've gotten all that out of the way, what are the actual symptoms of rickets? The main ones are stunted growth, bone and muscle pain, and weakness.
Fanny is noted in the first chapter to be very small for her age, and her fatigue and issues with things like short walks are noted repeatedly. Of course a lot of things can cause symptoms like that and that poor girl has Chronic Illness(tm) written all over her, but I really do think rickets makes sense for one reason.
She gets better when she can spend a lot of time outside and worse when she's confined to the house. More than a few days without riding or otherwise being outside are shown to lead to worsening fatigue and weakness.
Why? Because time in the sun causes the body to produce more vitamin D than would be the case otherwise.
In the present day, rickets is a fully treatable condition, usually only requiring vitamins to reverse all the symptoms (sometimes surgery to correct bone deformities, but many of those will resolve themselves over time). But Fanny doesn't live in the present day and she doesn't have a doctor making sure she gets her 2,000 IU of D3 every day. So while moving to Mansfield (and getting a relatively healthy diet for a change) would absolutely have helped her symptoms, but she was probably always struggling with a chronic low-grade case of rickets that got better or worse depending on how much time she was able to spend in the sun. (Both the diet and sunlight things would also explain why going back to Portsmouth made her ill again.)
Maybe Mr Crawford wasn't entirely full of shit when he noticed she had a growth spurt at some point after her cousin's marriage. Maybe that was her body beginning to self-correct after years of better nutrition and more frequent exposure to the sun.
Which probably means that when the duty of babysitting Lady Bertram was shifted to her sister and Fanny moved to the parsonage, she probably did experience a full recovery, or something very close to it.
So many people reading my post about Fanny Price having rickets and i love to see people talking about the idea. One of the people who reposted it (@gcballet) got to talking in the tags about disability which is obviously a major theme in Mansfield Park (which makes sense given the number of chronically ill relatives Jane Austen herself had) but also mentioned Fanny's parentification in that book.
Which then got me thinking about parentification more broadly in Austen's works. And to be clear, I know some people think "Parentification" is a buzzword for "children being expected to help out" or "children being expected to be mature" or anything like that. It most certainly isn't, especially when used in a professional context, and it's not what I mean. Parentification is extremely unhealthy to a young person, and it can really screw with their sense of self, among other aspects of mental health it can do a number on.
Children forced to take care of their sick or mentally ill parents. Very young children being forced to take care of younger siblings before they have the knowledge and skills to do so. That is parentification and it shows up a LOT in Austen if you go looking. It was definitely a phenomena Austen was aware of and paints negatively, and whether she condemned it or not, I think she found it wrong just based on how she paints it.
Starting with Mansfield Park. Before moving to Mansfield, Fanny was helping her mother with the care of the house and all her siblings, despite being a small child herself (I've even seen speculation that part of the reason Mrs Norris might have suggested that they take in Fanny instead of any of the others is because it would be depriving Mrs Norris's hated sister of her most helpful/able child and and forcing her to take on all that extra responsibility herself). Then, when she gets to Mansfield, the physical labor may be less, but she's still a full-time babysitter to Lady Bertram: fetching and carrying and running errands and messages; arranging her sewing work so it will be easier to do; and just generally keeping her entertained, happy, and calm.
The way others see her is so strongly tied up in those duties that even her favorite (and most loving) brother William is convinced that her return to Portsmouth will magically make life in the Price household quieter and more orderly and comfortable than it has been since her departure a decade ago. Lady Bertram's desire to have Fanny back after Tommy's injury isn't about Fanny or Tom, but about her ladyship's personal comfort and peace of mind.
Fanny's not the only character to get that treatment to a greater or lesser degree, either. Susan Price becomes Fanny 2.0 both at Portsmouth and then later at Mansfield. She probably considers Mansfield a lucky escape, but she's still a child babysitting a grown woman (I am deliberately not getting into whether Lady Bertram was in any way disabled because an adult who needs a caregiver needs an ADULT one).
In Mansfield, it's not just the girls being parentified, either. I'm going to leave aside William Price being sent at 12 to undertake the life of a sailor (a very dangerous and uncomfortable life that left his father disabled and bitter). Children in hard, dangerous jobs is a different discussion to parentification. At that time, I doubt anyone saw that as anything other than an apprenticeship he was lucky to have landed, and there was no taking care of adults involved for him. If anything, he was (HOPEFULLY!) being taken care of and educated by the other adults on ship. At the very least, he doesn't seem to have been required to support his parents and siblings to any great degree (he probably does give some money to his parents, but he feels no guilty about using some of his money to buy Fanny what was probably a rather expensive amber cross.
But Edmund, despite living a much safer, easier life than Willian, does seem to have been stuck with more of a paternal role. When Sir Thomas leaves for Antigua, not only is it Edmund who is relied on to keep his siblings in check (including his elder brother who by the standards of the time should have been the de facto head of house and who got zero pushback for being an irresponsible wastrel instead), but he is the one his mother relies on to, among other things, deal with the servants (which may even mean he's directing his fathers stewards and by extension all the incoming and outgoing cash and possibly even some of his father's tenants as well). As silly as it seems for him to try to stop the others from having their play, he is the one who was left in charge. And, with everything else he would have had on his plate, he probably wished his aunt or mother would have put their foot down and saved him the hassle.
All this is part of the reason I've always said that one of the major themes of Mansfield Park is neglect. The younger generation are either left to run wild or forced to be the adults in the room. There is no in-between.
~~~~~
But parentification shows up in other Austen books, too. Although i won't go on about them in quite as much length, I do just want to point out some obviously examples of it that occur to me off the top of my head. And I also want to point out that none of these make the parents in question bad people. I quite like some of the parents mentioned.
Sense and Sensibility: No hate for Mrs Dashwood because child parentification is not always the result of evil or neglectful children, but because Mrs Dashwood seems to think she lives in a romantic novel, 19 Elinor does most of the intellectual heavy lifting for the family, including reminding her mother that they live on a budget now, and trying to keep Marianne from setting her life on fire. When Marianne and Willoughby are making spectacles of themselves in front of the whole neighborhood and Mrs Dashwood finds it very sweet and harmless, it's Elinor who needs to remind her the risk to Marianne's reputation, trying to protect her sister in a way their mother should be. When Marianne wants to chase Willoughby to London, Elinor warns her mother against it. Her mother ignores her and things go to shit almost immediately. And it's Elinor there in London to pick up the pieces for her sister.
Pride and Prejudice: I won't be going in detail into my opinion on Mr Bennet (it is not high), but the one thing we can all agree, I hope, is that he didn't do much to take care of his kids. When his wife didn't bother to educate the kids, he didn't try to force her, and he didn't hire a governess or tutor. He actively encouraged his kids (and everyone else) not to respect his wife, and the result is that none of the kids listened to a thing Mrs Bennet said unless it was something they wanted to hear. This left the only two children he actually likes (Jane and Lizzie) to try to keep their younger sisters in check (Jane by example and advise, Lizzie by cajoling, and by trying to make her sisters and parents see reason). They do their best, bless them, but it is seldom enough. When Lydia wants to go to Brighton, Lizzie begs her father not to allow it. She knows Lydia will make a fool out of herself AT BEST and tells her father so. And Mr Bennet, contender for Father of the Year, flat out responds with "look, she's going to make an ass of herself at SOME point, at least this way she's doing it on someone else's dime where I don't have to watch" ... Cue Lydia running away with a serial seducer who fully intends to leave her ruined and alone and facing a life of prostitution. And when Lizzie tries to comfort her father over it later, his response was "yeah, you were right. i should have restrained her. but don't worry, i'll get over it" 🤦 Whatever you think about Mr and Mrs Bennet, Lizzie and Jane were the parents in that family.
Emma: So, in Emma's case, it's not a sibling she's taking care of, it's her own father. He's a sweet, loving old man without a mean or pushy bone in his body. And he is needy like a fretful toddler. I won't even get into whether there's actually anything wrong with his health or not because that's not really the point. The point is that for much of Emma's life, she's lived with a father who needs constant reassuring and cheering up, and the fact that she doesn't MIND consciously doesn't change the fact that that responsibility of hers has gotten so far into her head that she can never imagine leaving him, not even to marry. Her own sister thinks she'll never marry while their father is alive. By the end of the story, there's a compromise. Emma is allowed to get married, but the condition is that she stays at home and continues to be her father's fulltime caregiver while her husband moves in with them.
Persuasion: Much more subtle than the others (especially given her older age), and I know some people will argue that Anne Elliot isn't parentified. To that, I can only point out that after her mother dies, she spends literal years trying to remind her father to behave well and not overspend, all while trying to cope with her own heartbreak and the complicated business of growing up into her own person. When the family gets too far in debt, she once again leads the efforts to economize, even if she's ignored at every turn. When her adult sister, with a husband and servants gets sick, it's Anne who is expected to drop everything and look after her. She is always forced to be the voice of reason (a voice which is seldom heeded) and is always expected to look after everyone else, even an injured child whose parents are Right There. She has all the responsibilities of motherhood and none of the respect, (to borrow and heavily modify a line from another of Austen's novels).
Northanger Abbey & Lady Susan: None. Wait! None at all? In the two books featuring overtly evil parents? omfg 🤯
the impact that “dying is easy, young man, living is harder” has had. single-handedly undermined one of the last remaining bastions of Christian culture by making a traditional redemption arc ending in sacrifice seem alien and unattractive
One of my senior boys, writing an essay on crime and punishment, paraphrased the opening line of Emma to describe Raskolnikov. (See below.) This is what teacher dreams are made of. To me.
“Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, handsome, clever, and very very poor, with a tumultuous loft and an emo disposition, seemed to unite some of the saddest blessings in existence, and had lived 23 years in the world with many a thing to distress and vex him.”
