I went to Amsterdam a few weeks ago and while visiting a museum (Not sure if it was Rembrandt House or Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder) I noticed some hidden fake ladybugs (like some kind of easter egg).
Was that some interation that was part of the experience, but I couldn’t understand? Was that an influencer prank? An artist installation?
I was really curious to know what that was - and I swear I hadn't eaten any brownies or cookies that day, if you know what I mean.
Did you ever just feel so lucky for knowing someone you met online? Like.. I was one click away from not following you. I was one second away from never even knowing of your existence.I would never have been this happy!!!...
I reread Mansfield Park, after more than a decade. The first time I read it, I was a teen, discovering Jane Austen works and watching every adaptation I could put my hands on. Back in the day, Mansfield Park became my least favourite of her novels, while Fanny Price, despite not being my least favourite Austen heroine, couldn’t stand a chance with Lizzie, Emma or even Elinor on my list.
Now, for a series of reasons, I decided to read the novel again and, for my surprise, I liked Fanny a lot. I dare even say she is one of Austen's strongest heroines, succeeding where others failed. Despite being shy (and clearly having low self esteem issues), Fanny do stand up for herself when it's really needed.
That’s more than you can say about Anne Eliot, who was persuaded to refuse Captain Wentworth's first proposal. Fanny is also a good judge of character*, better than Marianne and Lizzie, who let themselves being fooled by Wickham and Willoughby, Catherine Morland, who befriended shallow Isabella (and also accused her father-in-law-to-be of murder), and Emma who managed to misjudge every single character in her story, including herself.
Not saying that Fanny is perfect, tho. She can be a bit of a doormat when it comes to dealing with her Aunt Norris. I dare say Fanny can even be a bit manipulative sometimes. But she surely has her heart on the right place.
I've seen some people compare Fanny with Mary Crawford, stating that Mary would do a much better protagonist. How? Comparing Fanny and Mary is like comparing being kind and being nice. Fanny is kind, and we know it because in her thoughts she really seem to care about the people she loves (and even those she doesn’t love so much). Even when refusing Crawford she worries about his feelings. But Mary, she is not kind, she is nice. Like a chameleon, she changes her demeanor to match her companions. When in Mansfield she is witty and charming, but not improper, specially when compared with Maria and Julia. She even gets closer to Fanny (in acquaintance and demeanor), since she knows that was something Edmund would approve. Back in London, she is changed. With her friends, she is coquettish and frugal, forgetting about Fanny when keeping her friendship is not as useful as it was.
Mary seems confident, but she is a people pleaser. She seeks others love and attention, and expects to gain something from her actions. Fanny doesn’t.
I could say this is an issue of today, of our social media/attention seeking selves, but knowing even Jane Austen's family had very different opions about the novel and Fanny, I dare say nice x kind is a timeless debate. I think Jane knew it, and how easily people could mix the two. Something, I confess, I’m still trying to learn myself.
What do you think about it? Leave a comment, or call me on my DMs.
*Isn’t it brilliant of Jane? Most of her novels, the heroine misjudge other characters, but in Mansfield it is us, readers, who are fooled by appearances.
Being a young adult is so strange. You enter a coffee shop. The 20 year old girl waiting behind you cried all night because she just came to a new city for university and she feels so alone. That 27 year old guy over there works a job he is overqualified for, he lives with his parents and wants to move out but doesn't know what to do about it. That one 24 year old dude already has a car, a house, and a job waiting for him once he graduates thanks to his dad's connections. The 26 year old barista couldn't complete his higher education because he has to work and take care of his family. The 28 year old girl sitting next to you has no friends to go out with so she is texting her mother. That couple (both 25 years old) are married and the girl is pregnant. The 29 year old writing something on her laptop has realized that she chose the wrong major so she is trying to start all over. We are not alone in this, but we are actually so alone. Do you feel me
Mary de Morgan’s ‘The Wise Princess’: A Victorian Fairy Tale of Feminism and Self-Sacrifice
I’m endlessly fascinated by fairy tales, and what they can tell us about the times they were written in: people’s fears, hopes and ideals. So while I was browsing Project Gutenberg for interesting stories, I stumbled upon Mary de Morgan’s 1880 collection of fairy tales, The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde and Other Stories. The title story is wild and wonderful - about a princess who does not wish to marry, so turns her suitors into beads and strings them onto a necklace - and deserves a whole post to itself, but the one I want to talk about is the final story in the collection, ‘The Wise Princess’, which moved me to tears when reading it and has stuck with me ever since. (Illustration from the original publication below by Walter Crane.)
In this story, Princess Fernanda wishes to know everything. After she’s exausted her tutors ‘and learnt every language and every science’, she learns magic from a wizard until ‘she knew the languages of all animals. The fishes came from the deep at her call, and the birds from the trees. She could tell when the winds would rise, and when the sea would be still. She could have turned her enemies to stone, or given untold wealth to her friends. But for all that, when she smiled, her lips were very sad, and her eyes were always full of care.’
She asks the wizard how to be happy, but he does not know. She asks her maid, a lark and a dog the same question, but still does not receive a satisfactory answer. (Interestingly, she meets a woman with a baby who says that she is happy, but right at that moment she is anxious because her fisherman husband is late coming home; Princess Fernanda responds, ‘Then you could not teach me.’ I wonder if this is the author’s way of saying that true happiness cannot be dependent on another person, or specifically, that a woman’s happiness cannot be reliant upon a man.)
Then she comes across the body of a young man killed in war, laid out in a church with a smile on his lips. Death, appearing as a white angel, tells her that he taught the soldier how to be happy while the man was doing his duty. Fernanda leaves the church and goes to the beach, where she sees a boy drowning and rushes to save him. She brings him to safety, ‘but the waves were so strong that she could scarcely keep above them. As she tried to seize the rocks, she saw Death coming over the water towards her, and she turned to meet him gladly. “Now,” said he, clasping her in his arms, “I will teach you all you want to know;” and he drew her under the water, and she died.’ When her body is found, cold and beautiful, she too has a smile on her lips.
Mary de Morgan was a feminist and a suffragette - author Kate Forsyth has written a fascinating article about her, titled Suffragette Mary de Morgan: England’s First Feminist Fairy Tale Writer?. This comes through clearly in both this story and others, here with a headstrong princess who wishes - and is allowed - to dedicate herself to studying. This subject was very timely: in 1869, a group of women known as The Edinburgh Seven became the first matriculated undergraduate female students at any British university, having all studied medicine, but they weren’t allowed to graduate or practice as doctors. Their story caught the attention of the press and advocates for women’s education and, four years before the publication of The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde, the Medical Act 1876 was passed, allowing women to graduate as licensed doctors.
The message of self-sacrifice, too, is strongly Victorian. Stemming from Christian theology, the Victorian view of self-sacrifice as a good and noble act can be seen in the romanticisation of the soldier’s death, as it can be in Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in Postman’s Park, London, where beautiful tiles - designed by and made by Mary de Morgan’s brother, William de Morgan - commemorate the lives, or rather deaths, of everyday people who died saving others. (If you’ve seen the movie Closer, you’ll know that Natalie Portman’s character takes her name, Alice Ayres, from a plaque here.)
The Victorian ideal of woman as ‘the angel in the house’ - a phrase from a poem by Coventry Patmore in which he describes his perfect wife - was subverted by the suffragettes themselves, who used religious imagery and words such as ‘crusade’ and ‘martyr’ to describe their cause. They often depicted themselves as Joan of Arc figures and portrayed Emily Wilding Davison, who was trampled to death by King George V’s horse in 1913, as an angel on the front cover of their journal.
Although this ideal clearly lasted beyond Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, we can also see the tide beginning to turn against it. Just as the idea that dying in war is a beautiful act was bitterly rebuked by Wilfrid Owen in his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, written during World War I, a resistance can be found in novels such as May Sinclair’s The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1922), which shows the devastating consequences of the protagonist’s Victorian upbringing, with its emphasis on selflessness, or E.M. Delafield’s Consequences (1919), where life in a convent causes only more suffering. The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice was never finished, after its creator George Frederic Watts died in 1904 and his widow lost interest in it.
Although I have conflicted feelings about message in ‘The Wise Princess’, it still moves me. Perhaps it’s because we still haven’t found the answer to ‘how to be happy’, or solved the struggle between caring for others and caring for ourselves.
What do you think about this story? I’d love to know if you have any more examples of fairy tales that reflect their times, examples of Victorian self-sacrifice, or works that rebelled against this ideal - please get in touch!
The Wise Princess has become my Roman Empire for years now. One of the reasons (there are many) is because it reminds me of a song I used to listen as a child about someone asking around for "Lady Happiness" and getting the answer from an angel.
Happy Birthday, @skyland2703!!! I wish you happiness, love, money and a huge bday cake! Keep being kind, sensitive, a bit of a dreamer, and so, so smart! You are a gift to this world!
From your big soul sibling from another country :)
Why is the Doctor making Donna a cup of coffee so significant?
Well, he is trying to impress her, to get her to travel with him again – like he tried to do by using the TARDIS to make it snow at Christmas the first time he asked her to travel with him.
But he got that attempt wrong. Donna doesn't like Christmas, and the Doctor having the power to make it snow "scared her to death."
A cup of coffee, just how she likes it, is (on the surface of it) a smaller gesture to show that he remembered the little details about her. A cup of coffee is what brought them together all those years ago.
But it's what Donna told the Doctor about what Lance making her that cup of coffee meant to her that the Doctor really listened to and remembered.
"I was temping. I mean, it was all a bit posh, really. I'd spent the last two years at a double glazing firm. Well, I thought, I'm never going to fit in here. And then he made me a cup of coffee. I mean, that just doesn't happen. Nobody gets the secretaries a coffee.
"And Lance, he's the Head of HR, he didn't need to bother with me. But he was nice, he was funny. And it turns out he thought everyone else was really snotty too. So, that's how it started, me and him. One cup of coffee, and that was it."
Donna fell in love with Lance because he made her a cup of coffee. So used to being unnoticed and uncared for, something as simple as an 'important' man taking the time to make her a cup of coffee meant everything to Donna.
She thought it was a sign that he was kind, that he was nice. She thought it was a sign he noticed and cared for her.
And the Doctor sees how it devastates her to learn the real reason why he was making her coffee was to drug her for his own ends. Despite their differences, he's gentle when he breaks it to her. And it connects her to him in a shared grief.
So when the Doctor makes her a cup of coffee after she regains her memories, he's not just telling her that he remembers the little details about her like how she likes her coffee, but the big things too.
He's showing that he sees her, that he cares about her thoughts and feelings, that he wants to care for her after all these years when he couldn't. That he knows how important this is to her.
But that's not all.
In the alternative timeline, Donna never meets Lance. And yet, when she is upset, and afraid, she asks Rose Tyler for a cup of coffee. Steam rises from her mug as they stand around the console inside the dying TARDIS, and have the most honest conversation they've had yet about the Doctor and their feelings towards him.
In the proper timeline, the person we see Donna drinking coffee with is Wilf. In moments of joy and moments of upset they bond over coffee. Before she finds the Doctor again, Donna brings Wilf a thermos to escape Sylvia's criticisms.
Wilf is the only person in Donna's life who she can be herself around, who has unconditionally cared for her, and who she takes joy in caring for back.
Even in the alternative timeline, Wilf has held onto not only the telescope but the exact same thermos Donna brings him coffee in when he's up on the hill.
For the Doctor to remember how she takes her coffee, we know they must have had moments together like this off-screen too.
So when the Doctor makes her a cup of coffee, just how she likes it, he is communicating he remembers not just the small details of her but that he remembers all these things that she associates with making someone a cup of coffee – kindness, acceptance, being noticed, caring for someone and being cared for, home, and family.
It's possible, for the Doctor, there's an apology in that cup of coffee too.
But wait, there's still more.
Did Donna spill the cup of coffee on the console on purpose?
The slight of hand was rather obvious. And it came at a time when Donna was trying to convince him not to leave her, to come back home to her, if only just for a visit.
He'd not said no, but she'd easily seen through him the first time he lied about coming inside to have dinner with her family that first Christmas, and likely saw through him again – the avoidance of eye contact, fiddling with the TARDIS, the wane "yeah, maybe."
She also rather clearly wanted to go on another trip with him (she never wanted to stop in the first place), and was only saying no because of her obligations to her family. It's possible she was buying time by spilling the cup of coffee – just one more than one last trip, without it being her "fault."
She had, after all, just dropped a cup of coffee on a computer and lost a job she'd probably hated, knowing Donna. And before things had gone really wrong, she'd definitely been enjoying herself.
It's also possible she's still quite angry with the Doctor, but unable to fully verbalise this yet.
He connects the cup of coffee to remembering every detail of her. She has not been able to remember any detail of her life with him. The last time they were standing around the console together, he took her memories against her will. He says it killed him; but she – or that version of herself, the one she actually liked – was arguably the one who was killed.
And she might be remembering Lance, another man she truly loved and trusted, and how a cup of coffee seemed like a kindness but was in fact a lie, a violation.
The Doctor quite possibly also suspects something like this is what might have happened, given his level of anger at her.
Despite the fact that this Doctor is more able to admit his feelings, we don't see what happened between them when he took her memories ever properly resolved in words.
Instead, there are a series of proxy arguments that stand in for it – Donna's anger that she gave away all her money because of him, that he sees taking the slow path, living a life day after day as such agony when he made her do it, his anger at her faith that he will know how to defeat the Toy Maker.
And their most emotional proxy argument of all – who is at fault for stranding them at the edge of the universe? Is it Donna, who spilt the cup of coffee, or the Doctor, who she couldn't stop from wandering off?
Thematically, however, there is some resolution. The Doctor lets Donna decide to regain her memories, even if it means she'll die. The Doctor knows Donna enough to save her from being left to die alone, even if it is at the very last moment. The Doctor admits he used to think he knew everything, but now he knows he doesn't.
Donna gets to tell him it's not all about him saving her, gets him to stop, finally gets him to come home with her.
And in their last scene, it's the Doctor who is having the cup of coffee.
DW is back with the specials, and for the first time that wasn’t the Doctor who travelled back to the past, it was me. Suddenly I was younger, watching the Doctor and Donna being brilliant together. That’s the greatest gift a fan could ever receive. Welcome back!
