An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Finally got the first chapter to that fitzwells fic done! I’ll put the summary below, hope anyone who reads this enjoys the dust being blown off of this old book!
| SUMMARY |
Flying wasn’t something Charlotte ever expected to do, nor did she understand what it was.
Birds had feathered wings that flapped them up above the clouds. Flies, translucent ovals that beat ferociously so that they could pester any life surrounding them. When she was a child, there had been some Australian immigrant passing through with a dream of knowing the world until he could carve the continents into his palm and make a metaphor of it. The man was a poet. Charlotte remembers.
Poets dream of things beyond what life gave them, they named it ambition. Charlotte believed it was only delusion.
Or
What if Charlotte wells survived her fall in episode 3?
vague harlots thoughts no-one asked for because I’ve mainlined all three seasons (barring the finale) in a very short period of time and I am captivated but also frustrated by its shortcomings:
1. Lucy in S3 has a couple of good moments but… mostly like, why is she still here. She has no real story. Give her something to do (bloodthirsty for revenge against the Spartans maybe?!) or ship her off somewhere. Idk. Not this. Her whole plot point is basically “used for her money” but… yeah, she doesn’t have a lot else going for her in the “assistant at the molly house” line of work. And that could have been a plot point in itself, but it wasn’t, so she’s just inert.
2. Love the idea of the molly house storyline, the actual execution not so much. For one, the main molly boy is a frankly fairly wooden actor. Idk, him and his mother are just so underwritten and my GOD I was so excited for this plot line and it all just went to nothing?! Give me back Rasselas, I loved him even if he was a bit implausibly pure of heart and sufferingly angelic for someone who has a sideline as Quigley’s spy.
(Also, I’m not enough of an expert on 18th C history to make an authoritative judgement, but as I understand it molly houses WERE raided and the series explicitly brings up how dangerous they are. With that in mind… the whole venture seems implausibly high profile and unrealistic. Also there’s like… two molly boys for most of it in a house that used to house like 6-7 harlots at least).
They also depict the molly house activities VERY differently to the main brothels. Where’s the outrageous humour and silliness? Where are the piles of daft metaphors and the down-to-business shagging? We basically only see the client for which Fredo does have feelings, and it’s weird, like they’re treating the whole thing far too delicately compared to the rip-roaring filth of the rest of the series. It came off dull, of all things. Where are the run-ins with the law?!
3. I don’t hate Charlotte’s death, but I do feel it’s left us in such a weird place without a Wells family member anchoring the main brothel (although of course, there has been a lot of turnover there). Losing both Charlotte AND Margaret (who comes back implausibly quickly only to leave again?!) is too much of a blow.
4. My lesbians :( I realise the actors maybe didn’t want to come back, and I suppose Amelia (?) the puritan was going to get married to the cute magistrate last season but… idk. We could have at least had Violet picking herself back up after her lover got married off, and vowing to stick to harlots in future or something? Then we could have seen more of the emotional weight that comes with lesbians (and women generally) not being able to choose their lives for themselves.
Hm sounds fake, my sources have it as: "Miss Emily Lacey. A wretched piece, nasty, disagreeable, snuffy letch without even one good quality. Walks like a parrot and swears like a drunken drab."
I have the inexorable urge to rant about a character I’m obsessed with that much of the fandom hates
Anyway fuck it.
I understand that a lot of people dislike Charles Quigley (for good reason) but I keep getting burned by finding fanfics and posts tagged with the character that only feature him to make fun of him or something
Honestly if you are writing a fanfic in the Harlots ‘verse and don’t want to include him, there is no shame in writing him out. (Or any other character for that matter.)
Have a throwaway line where someone says he went to visit a friend for a month or something.
That could also introduce things like more tension because Lydia might be more stressed / worried about having her precious baby mid 30s boy out of the house. Maybe she’s more prone to lashing out. Maybe she’s distracted and her rivals like Margaret get more bold about taking action against her.
It introduces a lot of interesting things that could work for a number of fanfic plots.
…Okay that’s it for people who don’t want to include him in fanfics, I’m gonna discuss things I think could be explored in fanfic below.
Note that because this show has a lot of interconnected characters I also talk a lot about Lydia, Emily, and Nancy for some reason.
TW: discussions of abusive relationships, incest, sex trafficking, kidnapping, murder (stuff that’s in the show)
I’ve seen someone say before that Charles is one of the few straight male characters on the show who’s important because of his part in fleshing out female characters via relationships.
I can see that. I think the nature of the show means that he as a man - a passive one at that - wouldn’t get a lot of screen time.
The point about him being important relationship wise is really interesting. Tbh, the early-mid season 1 interactions between Emily and Lydia remind me of the trope of a dad running to chase away his daughter’s boyfriend with a shotgun.
There’s that gender flipped part where women aren’t usually given as much sexual agency in tv/film etc, but also I like that it’s not played off as a kinda quirky “overprotective” parent thing, but the show recognizes how toxic this dynamic is.
You can argue in the gun toting dad example it’s sometimes bc the daughter is underage, but still, there’s often that undercurrent of a parent being threatened by their child getting a romantic partner and “replacing” them.
This is a big part of the Lydia and Charles relationship imo. I would characterize it as a nuanced depiction of an emotionally abusive relationship with elements of covert / emotional incest.
Emotionally abusive because she tends to manipulate him - isolate him from others, like potential partners.
When she feels he “replaced” her by choosing Emily - she immediately replaces him with Charlotte, a surrogate daughter.
Note: covert incest is not actual, literal incest. I do Not think their relationship has an actual sexual / romantic component to it. (but idk if you think that would be interesting to explore in a fanfic, go right ahead.)
I’m referring to unhealthy parent/child relationships where the child is expected to take on a role similar to the parent’s spouse. Such as where the parent expects the child to comfort them emotionally (even from a young age), or to prioritize their relationship over other forms of relationships, like friendships or dating other people.
I can definitely see that, especially with Lydia’s line to Rasselas in season 2 after he talks about losing his partner to an unknown disease. He says something like “I lost my precious boy”.
And she says, “so did I”.
This is due to Lydia being self centered as fuck, sure, but remember how she reacted to Charles nearly dying of an OD because of Emily? She was nowhere near this mopey about it.
(Ofc she had to make sure he was safe but once he was in stable condition she immediately struck.)
In that case at least she could react with violence and use Emily to boost her own standing.
In the case of Charles moving out to live with her, she’s kinda screwed, her old methods of dealing with a situation by attacking others to her own benefit don’t work.
It’s not really actionable. She can’t just go after Emily at the moment.
Lydia is finally stuck having to deal with the idea that her son - who she’s made part of her identity, especially if it means she can say she’s a Good Mother so she’s winning at Patriarchy - maybe chose someone else over her. Or doesn’t want to be close to her anymore.
—
Okay yeah I have talked about the relationships a lot but I could also talk about Charles himself.
Again, he’s a very passive character in a show about very active - or even aggressive - women.
I think his scenes in the show serve an important role of providing some levity or respite from the more intense drama (ie kidnapping, psychological torment, etc). It kinda breaks things up so you can fully digest how awful the other scenes are.
Not to say that he’s a totally innocent guy.
He’s still a shitty person, very self centered and privileged and willing to take advantage of others for his own desires.
I feel like sometimes I’m tipping the scales in his favor too much, as Charles is a morally grey character who likes to think he’s a good guy, but… it’s much easier for him to continue being awful or allow others to suffer for his benefit.
I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff at play with him, the ways Lydia’s parenting makes him see her as a role model and also a negative role model.
He starts off wanting to follow in her footsteps, to impress her. When Lydia starts intimidating Margaret for Emily coming to her, he backs up Lydia by remarking that Emily’s pretty bangable.
(Which is… kinda a stupid thing to add, but it still has an effect on Margaret, which is what they want.)
But once Charles starts to get into what it really means for Lydia to be a bawd - and him by extension - he doesn’t want to continue in the same way.
It’s not just, maybe he can keep Lydia from lashing out at the girls, or maybe if she does he can help them out by sneaking them food.
Once Emily nearly kills him via OD to escape, he doesn’t feel like going after her. Maybe he has a realization from that near death experience. Maybe he’s just too passive to want revenge. Maybe he knows that if he tried to get revenge Lydia would just take it to an eye for an eye levels of intense.
Maybe you could argue that he’s got some kind of guilt around what he did to Emily.
He seemed to almost have a moment of self awareness when (iirc) he told her he’d want to move out some place without Lydia, where she wouldn’t have to have sex with anyone… except him. Oops.
I think the relationship with Emily - because she’s a lot more pro active than he is, and she’s willing to talk back to him despite the power he has over her - forces him to realize his role in things.
And the development with the whole kidnapping people and giving them over to sadistic cultists to murder thing gets him firmly off Lydia’s side.
(Well, that and the line where iirc Nancy says something like “you can’t be on everyone’s side”.)
I think also there’s a lot that could be said about Nancy’s role in nudging him in the direction of a redemption arc in season. Maybe more like pushing him, idk.
Nancy is one of the only people who’s really patient enough to help Emily, even when she lashes out because she feels vulnerable.
She’s one of the first people who really treats Charles as an adult now that I think of it. Like even when Emily rocks the boat, she still plays into his childish side to keep his favor.
I think it’s largely because he’s the exact kind of guy Nancy is used to seeing - a rich dude who wants a dominant woman to take care of him and guide him - and the added history with his mother helps.
You could also argue that while Lydia fits patriarchal ideas of the ideal mother - being nurturing (unless you piss her off), delicate, feminine, lacking her own romance / sex life in lieu of caring for her child (usually) - Nancy is more like the reverse of all these traits, but she actually cares for and guides the people she takes under her wing.
When Emily lashes out at people she thinks are condescending to her, Lydia just doubles down on punishing her, but Nancy gives her the benefit of the doubt and offers her aid.
Was this post a Trojan horse for Nancy birch?? Maybe??
I think that the contrast is also interesting, with Nancy lacking all the conventionally feminine things that make Lydia appear to be a good person on the surface, but actually nurturing and wanting people to grow and providing good coping mechanisms and a shoulder to cry on. Often at the expense of herself.
(So basically Lydia is cloth mother and Nancy is wire mother? Yeah)
I realize I went way off the mark here but I think there’s a lot of potential in exploring the relationship between Charles and Nancy too.
Like he’s more used to seeing women who try to fit into social roles men place on them (whore, virgin, mother, crone etc archetypes) so seeing a goth butch lesbian who tells him to get his shit together… kinda breaks his brain.
It’s a really interesting dynamic I wish we saw more of.
—
There’s a lot more I could say, and maybe will say at a later date, but I’m getting kinda tired of writing this post. I tried to focus on the stuff that was touched on in canon + my own interpretation of it. Or different ones you could run with.
If you got this far… thank you for reading! I give you a sugar pig (whatever that is) for your efforts
I might elaborate more later on this but I also want to point out the fact that Lydia uses her relationship with Charles to act out an ideal female role in patriarchy, and Charles uses his relationship with Emily to act out an ideal male role
they both tend to act in ways that are seen as unfitting for their sex (ie Lydia’s ruthlessness and Charles’s passiveness and fear of confrontation)
I’m analyzing this using the framework of “emotional enmeshment” and other therapy words and get the sense that Lydia doesn’t just love Charles for him, but what he represents for her. they have these strict roles of being mother and son without much room for growth over the years, given how much she treats him like a child
(but also back then rich folks would send their kids to foster families to raise them for a while and I would say his line “how could she hit her own son” implies that she had someone else raise him since fucking everyone in the Georgian era used corporal punishment on kids but I digress)
(I personally headcanon that she would’ve sent him to a foster family and then boarding school, then taught him how to run things once he was like 15.
but treating him like a young kid is more convenient for her desire to keep him under her control)
(also yeah I get that parenting was way different back then so I focus more on what’s in the show canon, which was written by modern people, when I use a modern lens to analyze it)
she gets to play out the role of a sweet loving mother with a darling baby boy - as long as she doesn’t lose her temper and start berating him. and as long as he doesn’t show an interest in a relationship with anyone other than her…
on the flip side Charles is pretty content being a spoiled mama’s boy who gets everything he wants, but in his relationship with Emily he wants to feel like he’s a big tough provider for her and everything
and sure even when he sticks up for Emily for real (such as by telling off Osborn), he still lies and exaggerates and tries to use it to make himself look better. (iirc he said something like “I vanquished him” to make himself look cooler rather than just saying like “oh he’s never coming back”.) (IMO that’s to cover up his fear of confrontation)
I think it’s a cycle of abuse thing where neither of them really had a chance at non toxic relationships growing up, but I like that parallel where the more shallow aspect of their relationship (enmeshment & acting out an idealized version of a role together) is reflected in Charles’s chosen / non family relationships
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