American planes fly near the sailing ship "Joseph Conrad" launched in 1880. Photo from 1942. She was then used as a training ship in the United States, and is currently a museum ship at the Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.
'Let me look to your pistols,' said Jack, as the trees came closer to the road. 'You have no notion of hammering your flints.'
'They are very well,' said Stephen, unwilling to open his holsters (a teratoma in one, a bottled Arabian dormouse in the other). 'Do you apprehend any danger?'
'This is an ugly stretch of road, with all these disbanded soldiers turned loose. They made an attempt upon the mail not far from Aker's Cross. Come, let me have your pistols. I thought as much: what is this?'
'A teratoma,' said Stephen sulkily.
'What is a teratoma?' asked Jack, holding the object in his hand. 'A kind of grenado?'
'It is an inward wen, a tumour we find them, occasionally, in the abdominal cavity. Sometimes they contain long black hair, sometimes a set of teeth: this has both hair and teeth. It belonged to a Mr Elkins of the City, an eminent cheese-monger. I prize it much.'
'By God,' cried Jack, thrusting it back into the holster and wiping his hand vehemently upon the horse, 'I do wish you would leave people's bellies alone. So you have no pistols at all, I collect?'
'If you wish to be so absolute, no, I have not.'
'You will never make old bones, brother,' said Jack.
more stories where falling in love is a horrifying fate worse than death rather than a source of comfort and hope. more stories where love is understood as a terminal affliction.
more stories where someone falls in love and understands that this means they will be changed and made more vulnerable by it, compelled to do irrational things in the name of it, and be willing to die for it, and starts lashing out and stress vomiting about it
his swagless mental breakdowns this, his homoerotic patterns of grief that. what about HER grief-stricken moments of extremely poor decisionmaking? what about HER incredibly alarming isolation and trauma-driven life choices?!?!?!
there's been some really fantastic posts lately in the aubreyad tag about stephen maturin and his political place in the world, how he for all love speaks and thinks as progressively as he does but does nothing to really challenge the way his profession and position benefit him (and british imperialism as a whole). i've been really fascinated by these writings and i wanted to add my own narrative cents to them!
i was reading dean king's aubreyad companion book "a sea of words" (i have the 3rd edition) recently, and a couple of passages about naval medicine really stuck out to me with how stephen's status as a doctor in the 18th century is really a sort of stunning situational metaphor for his place in the narrative as a whole. i think possibly a facet of analysing stephen's character that i had been missing lies nearly perfectly in his experience with 18th century medicine, and tells us much that we need to know about his motivations as a character!!
the quotes which i cite here are all from section 2 of the book, "Stephen Maturin and Naval Medicine in the Age of Sail" by J. Worth Estes, starting on page 31 and continuing thereon. there's a lot, so stick with me!!
"Maturin and his contemporaries relied largely on bitter remedies, some introduced as many as 2,500 years earlier. In fact, almost all medicines prescriped during the last years of the Enlightenment were ineffective by modern criteria. [...] The pathophysiologic theories on which Dr. Maturin and other physicians trained in the 18th century were unlike our own ideas of specific diseases with specific causes and specific treatments. Several levels of factors were said to cause disease. [...] One or more of these three factors -- predisposing causes, antecedent causes, disturbances in the six non-naturals -- was assumed to bring about a patient's "immediate causes" of illness, the disturbances in body function that produced the symptoms on which a physician based his diagnosis. Disesases were not then diagnosed or classified according to their etiologies, as they were today; instead the patient's symptoms were the doctor's diagnosis."
the chapter then goes on to discuss many specific medicines and remedies 18th century doctors would use, all of which were not so much meant to treat the disease itself but to mitigate or counteract the symptoms only. discussion of the four humors is abound.
"Maturin's remedies were not designed to counteract well-defined disease processes, as modern drugs do. Instead he and his contemporaries used drugs to adjust or fine-tune a patient's internal equilibria, his physiological balances, regardless of what might have disrupted them in the first place. The occurence of catharsis, vomiting, sweating, or blisters after the administration of a corresponding drug simply confirmed that the remedy had indeed altered the humors, tones, and acid-base balance of the body in the intended way. However, few of these treatments could have provided truly effective cures."
it's within these words that i think lies a core facet upon which stephen maturin builds his worldview - the overwhelming idea of treating symptoms but not diseases. i've found myself wondering before why stephen isn't more headstrong about his opinions on authority, inequality, discrimination, corporal punishment and such, and i think this explains it for me. stephen in his own mind opposes what he sees wrong in the world, and as he would view his complacence or agreement as a "symptom" of those evils, for him, merely ideologically opposing it is enough.
later in this chapter there are a couple mentions of physicians having close ties with naturalists in believing nature may run its course, and that a prevailing position among medical doctors of the time was that they didn't treat anything but merely helped nature itself treat their patients. and i think that says plenty too! stephen does not comply with the systems he disagrees with, but he makes no effort to live outside of them either. he will happily sail with the british navy for the relative safety and boundless opportunities it offers him, so long as internally, he reminds himself he disagrees with much of the principles at hand. in post-captain, when he sees the violence which enforces the hierarchy in which dil lives, he makes no move to counter it, but merely tries to "alleviate the symptoms" (as it were) where he can.
it's clear from stephen's established backstory that he might have once believed differently, and pushed a little harder to right the wrongs he sees in the world, but i think it's possible that his failure in those previous attempts might have landed on his psyche as the course of nature, and have dissuaded him from trying to do much more than work within the systems he already has in the future.
i'm really interested to hear if anyone more well-read than i (or further in the series, haha!) has thoughts on this!!!! reading about the philosophical ideas that accompanied 18th century medicine was such an eye-opening event for me that helped me understand stephen's character and motivations so much more, so i'm curious if this has more weight to it.
(also, disclaimer: i typed the text from the book by hand as i read it from the physical copy, so please forgive any typos or oddities!)
I think this is a really interesting post! But it is crucial to remember the two major geopolitical events of Stephen's youth which would have had an enormous impact on his conceptions of what we might call 'ideology' and on outright rebellion.
The first of these is the French Revolution, during which time Stephen was a Jacobin in Paris, in which the noble fight for an ideology turned into the Reign of Terror. The second is the Rebellion of 1798, for which Stephen was in Ireland, and which was marked by particular gruesome punishments, executions, and massacres.
Master and Commander starts in 1800; Stephen has literally just fled from the fall-out, having lost several members of his family and his fiancée. His anxiety in M&C that random officers could have him flogged is not paranoia; as a Catholic civilian he absolutely could be flogged on a slim pretext, or worse (e.g. pitchcapping). During their fall-out in Post Captain, Jack threatens to have him flogged, and is only mostly joking.
Basically, I think your post is brilliant, but very focused on the abstract philosophy of Stephen's characterisation, rather than the more immediate and concrete reasons why he is very 'progressive' but seems relatively content to be part of the British system. By the beginning of the series he is traumatised and severely oppressed on multiple axis (he might be educated, but he is illegitimate, homeless, Catholic, Irish, and racially classed as 'non-white' by many). Without his position and profession as a doctor, he would be on the utter margins of society.
i mean of course!! my question is not so much "what makes him this way" but "what makes him okay with being this way, given all he's done and been through", as well as trying to consider a less watsonian and more doylist perspective about POB writing stephen's experiences as a sort of pseudo-racialised man? if that makes sense? for example how in foreign countries stephen acts as this sort of fantasy idealistic everyman who can blend in racially or socially wherever he goes, or is respected on account of his profession. there's a lot of tension, i think, between stephen maturin as a character and stephen maturin as his narrative symbolic function in the aubreyad? how on a simple level he might embody a contrast between himself and every circle he finds himself in (which is how we get all these facets of marginalization you mention) but overall in a grand scheme he fits in as much of the time as he doesn't, or at least enjoys the benefits and privileges of his position, even if he is socially understood as the other (for example the respect he commands aboard jack's ships as their surgeon, even as the crews and officers don't really consider him one of their own, or how he's a successful intelligence agent and not denied career opportunities even though he is all those things you mention). overall my impression is stephen the character is almost more aware of his marginalization than we the readers are meant to be aware of it? and that for the reader he might embody a very comfortable sort of "other", one who does not have to face his othering all that often, even if that is not true for stephen the character. if that makes sense!
all in all what you have to say is very correct!! but my point in these musings was intentionally geared more towards a philosophical understanding of where stephen fits in narratively and symbolically rather than purely in-fiction analysis.
STEPHEN. "uhhh sorry y'all i have to go. important business lots of things to do and important people to see." and it's an aardvark he wants to draw a picture of
turnnoffyourmind
jbbartram-illu
baratheonpilled
theartofmadeline
origamiaround
snowghoul
kianamaiart
stormborns
dededos
