DEAR READER
#extradirty
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@theartofmadeline
Origami Around
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
ojovivo
if i look back, i am lost
$LAYYYTER
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
JVL
Sade Olutola
đŞź
Stranger Things
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Acquired Stardust
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oozey mess
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seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
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seen from Finland
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Malaysia
seen from T1
seen from Vietnam
seen from Germany
seen from TĂźrkiye
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@plethod0ntidae
me when i like the 2-3h movie: directors should never have to compromise their vision to appeal to something as fickle as people's "patience". anyone complaining about the movie's length is simply a tiktok-addicted philistine.
me when i don't like the 2-3h movie: once i become god emperor of earth anyone trying to make a movie longer than 90 minutes will be shot.
Starting a collection
Big fan of not wearing a bra.
Big fan of not wearing a bra.
Big fan of not wearing a bra.
Big fan of not wearing a bra.
"just retrace your steps" I have adhd. as far as my memory is concerned i teleported here
what people donât understand about how adhd is disabling is that itâs not just getting temporarily distracted from, like, school work or hobbies. itâs getting distracted/being unable to motivate yourself to go to the doctor, eat regularly, do hygiene tasks, etc. itâs not knowing when or how long it will take you to do something, ANYTHING, and in many cases that thing is taking a shower or keeping your house from turning into a biohazard. itâs about being fundamentally incapable of controlling your attention and focus on anything, even and especially things you need to do to survive.
Silly salmonids đđ
@oldguardians making this answer a separate post because itâs kind of interesting*!
ââI cannot bear to hear that mentioned. Pray do not talk of that odious man. I do think it is the hardest thing in the world, that your estate should be entailed away from your own children; and I am sure if I had been you, I should have tried long ago to do something or other about it.ââ
Jane and Elizabeth attempted to explain to her the nature of an entail. They had often attempted it before, but it was a subject on which Mrs. Bennet was beyond the reach of reason; and she continued to rail bitterly against the cruelty of settling an estate away from a family of ve daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about.â
(In the interest of not getting bogged down in legal minutiae, Iâll keep this pretty general. Please note that I am vastly oversimplifying some legal concepts here for the sake of explaining the issue clearly. If youâre an attorney/barrister/whatever, donât @ me - I KNOW itâs all much more nuanced than this.)
Pride & Prejudice is set somewhere around 1811. In the novel, the Bennetsâ ownership interest in the family estate is famously said to be âentailedâ away from the Bennet girls in favor of their cousin, Mr. Collins. This is specifically explained to be because Mr. Bennet has no sons, and thus his estate reverts back to his closest male relative.
In the real world, entailment could (and usually did) work that way. But there is an enormous, glaring issue: English entailments have long been very VERY easy to defeat** through a remedy called Common Recovery. If Longbourn was truly entailed away from the female descendants, as the novel indicates, Mr. Bennet could have hired an attorney (his brother-in-law?) to start the Common Recovery process at any time. Within a few months, the court would render a judgment giving Mr. Bennet the property outright and free from any entailment, allowing him to leave the property to his daughters upon his death*** and make them independently wealthy women. And this wasnât just a possibility - it was a very common legal mechanism that would have been almost expected of a gentleman interested in preserving his familyâs comfort. There are hundreds of cases in the English Chancery records (featuring many families that were much less wealthy than the Bennets!) invoking this very remedy whenever fathers failed to produce sons.
So entailment makes no sense - it had basically no power over landowners by the Regency Period.
Letâs talk alternatives. In 1811, the primary way of keeping property in the male line was through another estate planning technique called strict settlement. To GREATLY simplify a complicated form of ownership, strict settlement had the present possessor of property always hold a life estate interest (they own it only until their death), with their male primogeniture descendants holding a remainder fee tail interest (read: eventual outright ownership upon their fatherâs death). Each generation of life estate owner would then force their young male descendants (the fee tail owner) upon their coming of age to give the young descendantâs unknown future male sons the remainder interest, retaining a life estate for themselves (which they would receive upon their fatherâs death). Thus the ownership system perpetuates down a male line of descendants, each generation demanding the same restrictive ownership system of their own children.
If you followed that - and I donât blame you if you didnât, as this is all very deliberately obtuse - you might think âwait okay. That kind of sounds like the Bennetsâ situation. Austen called it an entailment but maybe it was actually a strict settlement!â Several academics have tried to argue that, but it also fails for several reasons:
(1) With the Bennetsâ seemingly comfortable current income, strict settlement would have provided for significant lifetime income + dowries for Mr. Bennetâs female descendants. But in P&P, itâs made very clear that the girlsâ only possible inheritance is a tiny amount from their motherâs side and nothing from their fatherâs. If they do not marry, they will be destitute. That is extremely unlikely and would be very shameful in strict settlement ownership..
(2) It would have been inconceivable for Mr. Bennetâs father to have forced him to benefit a cousin over his own descendants, even if they were women. One of the fundamental points of strict settlement was to avoid this outcome (aka to avoid the entailment system). People did NOT want a distant male cousin to inherit property simply because there wasnât a primogeniture male descendant - they knew that if anything, their own female descendants could always produce a male heir in their marriages. Plus, Mr. Bennetâs and Mr. Collinâs fathers apparently hated each other (ref Mr. Collinsâ initial letter) - why would Mr. Bennetâs father force his son to benefit the son of a man he himself hates?
(3) For many many other reasons, a strict settlement does not match how the family talks about/treats the estate in the novel. Thereâs literally a whole law review article on this topic (cited below), and Iâll defer to that for a full discussion.
So weâre left with two possibilities: the land is entailed, and for some reason Mr. Bennet isnât willing to pay a small amount in attorneyâs fees to undo the entailment for the enormous benefit of his daughters (extremely unlikely, robs the story of all its tension), or the land is subject to a bizarre + shameful strict settlement that goes directly against everything that would have been normal at the time, and none of the characters know that (makes no sense in the story).
And then, of course, thereâs the truth: the âentailmentâ is simply a narrative device that does not reflect actual law or historical transfer of property at death, which is perfectly fine. Jane Austen was not writing a law textbook or even a legal drama. And her underlying point remains clear: Regency-era women were often in economically precarious positions and forced to marry to maintain their social and economic standings.
((If you do want a version in your head that works under the law, maybe we imagine that Mr. Collinâs father actually owned the home but was in debt to Mr. Bennet so he gave him some kind of strange lifelong leasehold interest with income from the property included. And then we ignore the passage saying Mr. Bennet having a son would have âavoidedâ the home passing to Mr. Collins + pretend that the family lied to everybody about the home being entailed to save face))
For additional reading, I highly recommend A FUNHOUSE MIRROR OF LAW: THE ENTAILMENT IN JANE AUSTENâS PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by Peter A. Appel (linked). His analysis reflects my own reading of Regency inheritance law, and I think his conclusions are generally sound. There is significant other scholarship on this subject, but I find Appelâs work the most persuasive.
â-
* At least to me, who admittedly studies this for a living
** For fun War of the Roses reasons!
*** Or much more likely, to a male relative conservator/trustee for their benefit (probably Mrs. Bennetâs brother, the attorney)
So weâre left with two possibilities: the land is entailed, and for some reason Mr. Bennet isnât willing to pay a small amount in attorneyâs fees to undo the entailment for the enormous benefit of his daughters
I don't think this is particularly out of character for Mr Bennet aka neglectful father of the year. I agree that it probably comes down to authorial decisions/plot reasons, but one of those reasons could be to express how bad a dad Mr Bennet is. It seems very in keeping with his general attitude of ignore it and maybe someone else will solve it.
yes yes I know Mr. Bennett is a negligent father. Please read the full article for a more thorough discussion of that: there's a difference between being neglectful (not paying much attention and hoping it all works out) and downright cruel (deliberately creating a situation where your daughters WILL be homeless).
We know he is not cruel, and there is substantial textual evidence that he is not completely negligent either. Upon Lydia's "elopement", Mr. Bennett immediately leaves to deal with the problem and is shown to be highly conscientious of the economics and social politics of the situation. He also is implied to have discussed quite frankly with Elizabeth the economics of saving for their allowances and dowries, suggesting that these issues are at least on his radar and heâs looked at how to remedy them.
In doing this kind of litcrit, you have to look a bit closer and more critically than accepting the trope. Yes, he is somewhat absent from his family, but he is never written to be a cruel man. And in the full context of probate law at that time, you will see that a failure to provide in this way would likely have been considered cruel and wholly unacceptable for a genteel father of five daughters. And there is no textual evidence for Mr. Bennett acting that way.
The far, far more likely explanation is that Jane Austen was writing a clever romance novel and not a law textbook.
yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.
I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.
Is rainbow capitalism deeply cynical in nature and just a way for companies to profit off social movements? Yes, but it was also a pretty good sign when entities focused solely on profit decided it was worth it to try to cosplay as progressive, and deeply concerning how many companies started inching away from it again cause that's a sign that the wind's turning
The Muppets s01e01
Fozzy getting hit on by lots of twinks
Happy Pride Month
Ten years later, this bit still slaps. They made a great pun and realized they could be nice/inclusive with it too.
Salmon Cycle
Julyâs print for print club!
Everywhere I go I'm reminded how much the desire to punish homelessness and migration and other Undesirablenesses make society markedly worse for everyone
like why is the park locked after 5pm so I can't go and sit under a tree after work? to punish rough sleepers for the terrible crime of being homeless and alive
why do I have to buy a drink, beg for a code and fuck around with an awkward keypad for 5 minutes in order to take a piss? because fuck homeless people
why do I need to provide proof of address and photo ID to do everything? because we had to create a really hostile environment for migrants
why can't you sit anywhere? well because god forbid people sleep when they're pushed out of shelter. can't risk that.
every day governments, councils and businesses make your life worse as a side effect of making vulnerable people's lives WAY worse. if you're ok with that you're a fucking idiot and if you're in favour of it you're a vindictive cunt cause again literally the ONLY payoff for your life getting worse is other people's lives getting worser.
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
they should invent a job for autistic people where you get paid for thinking about special interest. At the end of the day your boss comes in hands you a form that asks "did you think about special interest today" & you answer "yeah " & then they give you a million dollar. every day forever.
