The fact that it's hard to modernize Lydia Bennet's disaster in Pride & Prejudice because she can always just go home is such a good thing and we should appreciate it and protect it with our lives
ADULT me reading this, with years more understanding and learnedness:
lmao.
something that i will say i think is interesting about bruce and stripey is the callback between this poor kitten’s senseless drowning and bruce’s prior despairs over babies drowning on the lusitania. i don’t have much else to offer here, but i do still think it’s… interesting lol.
that said, also something about bruce and stripey is inexplicably much more unstomachable to me, regardless of the purity of the motive of a propitiatory sacrifice, than other areas of animal cruelty in maud’s books. 🧐 mr harrison hanging his dog twice is a close second, though. just for instance, when anne and the patty’s place posse attempt to euthanise rusty, not only do they ultimately fail, but there is an appropriate amount of anne’s heart misgiving her, despite even phil being the one to suggest it and actually do it, and calling it her one, iirc, ‘useful accomplishment’. this episode is lightyears more humane, however, in that chloroform does the work itself, and doesn’t require a 10 year old to hold a struggling cat underneath the lip of a body of water, scratching and clawing desperately i’m sure (no mention of bruce stalking off determinedly with a burlap sack [when this was done in this era, as i understand it, it was a practise of inserting the poor animal into a sack with a large rock and thennn basically yeeting it into the water], so it’s likely this was the case). 🥹 i honestly suspect this is what grinds my gears so much – that bruce could do such a thing manually, without a change of heart. idk man. sickening.
because otherwise, as a theme, i totally get it. in 1917, the presbyterian church (maud’s church ofc) officially endorsed the war, and spread far the emblem of sacrifice, like abraham with isaac, like Christ himself, and this motif was regularly invoked to apotheosise fallen soldiers and give a holy meaning to perishing on the noble battlefield. soooo when i look at this and weigh it against the connection to stripey, i personally see maud planting some teeny seeds of questioning this particular churched-up philosophy of war. good for her.gif or something but… i still really wish it never happened. 🥲 liiiike it clocks to include something of this nature, i just wish it had been done very very differently.
Ok so @bewareofitalics has been cooking up a fantastic idea for a Rilla of Ingleside E-book. As part of that, I’m trying to make some cover art for it and I need you to help me decide. I have 2 mock-ups for a potential cover. I need you all to vote on which you would rather have.
"Hasn't June been a delightful month?" she asked, looking dreamily afar at the little quiet silvery clouds hanging so peacefully over Rainbow Valley. "We've had such lovely times–and such lovely weather. It has just been perfect every way."
I am discovering, in my effort to dip in the season 3 trailer and theories for the Gilded Age, that I appear to be the singular person who would LOVE a Russell divorce arc
Crimson peonies, not poppies, thank goodness, because I suppose that would be much too heavy-handed! Something that makes me laugh, right out the gate, is Susan wearing a new black silk blouse, “quite as elaborate as anything Mrs. Marshall Elloitt ever wore,” and therefore “had all the comfortable consciousness of a well-dressed woman” as she opened the ‘Glen Notes’ column in the Daily Enterprise... ergo, you may recover some self-respect by at least looking quite upright and proper, when succumbing to something as reprehensible as shameless gossip?
Jack Frost, the poem that is, fits rather spectacularly with the overall vibe of Montgomery (who is meticulous enough to have chosen Jack Frost for a reason), and especially the Ingleside kids. There’s a bit of ominous undertone, for all its imaginative factors, and it’s very Victorian in that way, and YUH, idk where I was going with this other than to say that it’s super relatable that some of the Ingleside kids named their cats after contemporary pop culture like Jack Frost and Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde. It’s like if your fave big bother re-named your newly diagnosed bipolar kitten “Hulk Smash.”
Faith Meredith being “the most handsomest creature” Miss Cornelia ever saw effectively dethrones Leslie Moore on this area, and that must be a considerable feat, though loyal (biased) Susan seems to refute this, and goes toe-to-toe and suggests Rilla is the prettiest girl in the Glen.
SPEAKING of Susan, there’s that line that Susan detests any reference to her age lmao, “not from vanity but from a haunting dread that people might come to think her too old to work”... and this is where I find I stand, because... how old is Susan, exactly? Probably she should be retired! Probably she should! I get that she’s down with being useful and wanting to work, but holy cow, she’s... a spritely 80? At least? When we first met her, twenty-two years prior in House of Dreams, she is already described as “elderly.”
Anne saying, “when I look at those two tall sons of mine,” on the heels of realising that Walter and Jem are grown up is very cute to me, because this implies that she still thinks of brown boy Shirley as her still non-grown baby son.
Miss Cornelia and Susan’s discussion of Mary Vance, from “parents that were not what you could call aristocratic,” awoo... there are so many areas of classism in these novels, but one (me, I’m one) wonders how Anne (another former “nameless nobody”) really feels during these kinds of peripheral conversations, owing to the idea that there are innumerable ties between Anne and Mary, down to sharing history with the Hopetown Asylum.
Miss Cornelia btw:
“But there, it would not do to let Gilbert hear me hinting such heresy.” 💀 This is soooooy on brand for Gilbert, son of practicality, and reminds me of that slip-in in the Blythes Are Quoted, when he’s invited to spend the night in a ‘haunted’ location, that’s been plaguing its owners with creeping steps and sounds, only to have good ole Dr. Blythe be the only fellow to almost-catch the very corporeal prankster (hiding between blankets in an old trunk in the garret, iirc) that’s been causing the mysterious disturbances. If I’m understanding the chronology of TBAQ, this event would have occurred before the opening of Rilla here. No doubt he is prone to skepticism! He’s like, okay bet, prove it 😎.
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