forever thinking about that girl at my uni orientation who, after being told to pour out her water bottle before entering an event, looked at me and said "they tell us to stay hydrated and then make us pour out our water, this is like totally kafkaesque" and then poured out what was very obviously an entire water bottle full of whiskey. hope she's doing well.
i'm not normally one to make jokes about dialect or accent. but the way that British people pronounce "lieutenant" feels like an in-joke i'm not privy to
Once upon a time there was the Latin word "locus", meaning "place", which had various different declensions, but somewhere along the line in the vernacular in the areas conquered by Rome it had a strong tendency to shift towards something that dropped the last syllable (so "loc" instead of "locus") and then fucked around with the vowel in all kinds of directions.
But then the speakers of Gallo-Romanic dialects went even further and they got rid of the "k" sound entirely and started just saying the l and the vowel, which eventually got us to the Old French "leu".
Now the thing is, right, that in the old languages the spelling is very much a sort of consensus thing. It's not perfectly phonetic, because it can't be: all of the languages in question had phonemes that weren't exactly the same as the Latin that existed when and where the Latin alphabet was formalized, right? So as people wrote down the Old French vernacular, they basically took the letters they were taught and they used them to represent the sounds they were making.
This happens with all the languages; there's a really neat thing where if you look at Visigothic manuscripts, writing in the area that would become Spain and the vernacular form that would eventually be Spanish, you can see the difference between the sound of "v" and the sound of "b" disappearing, so that there are manuscripts where "Ave Maria" is written "Abe Maria", because to the people reading it, b and v made the same sound.
This is relevant to the question because of a fun little fact about mediaeval orthography! Which is that the characters that we now feel are absolutely separate, different letters - that is u and v - were both used for both sounds. It's not that "u" and "v" were the same letter exactly - they weren't - but that the character you used was the same and which you used depended more (properly) on where in the word the letter came, than which one it was.
So the word "hut" would indeed be written with "u", but the word "university" might well be written "vniuersity".
But it gets worse from here, because the sound of the letter we now call "v" and the letter we call "f" were also often used interchangeably. So it might actually be written "vnifersity".
If your eyes are crossing, remember that we still randomly stick "qu" in places to be "kw" and there's quite complicated rules about when the character "c" says a hard back of throat sound the same as the letter "k" and when it says a soft sibilant like "s" and also sometimes when it does something completely different.
Now as it happens the point of writing is to be able to take words from your head, put them on paper (or parchment, in this case), and then send them much farther away in both time and space to someone who absolutely cannot hear you say these words, and then put those thoughts in their head.
Which meant that you have this sort of weird liminal thing where "leu" could be spelled "lev", because u and v were interchangeable, and then also this thing where v and f were interchangeable, and both were being sent around to various places and read to others who may, or may not, do a lot of reading as opposed to a little, or may be reading in a different dialect than they speak (because remember, we're talking about mediaeval France, which means we're actually talking about a country with two major language divisions - Langue D'oc and Langue D'oïl - which then inside of them have a reasonable fuckload of languages that are mostly mutually intelligible most of the time), and so on, which means that the noise for u and the noise for f meet in the middle and may both be represented by "v" and while we're at it they may all just be pronouncing the word differently, and as you saw in the whole move from "locus" to "leu" in the first place, that can involve ending up in quite a different place through a totally logical means.
We don't know for absolute certain if this is why the word "leu", ported over to English with the Normans and added to our language, changed its pronunciation and spelling to "lief" or "liev". You will note that along the way both to Middle English and to Middle French, it grew an "i" in before the "e" sound, because words do that.
We do have some records of Old French that are spelled "leuf" or "lef"; we also got our Frenchishness from the Norman Conquest, which is to say the brand of French very specifically spoken by a bunch of Francicized Scandinavians who spoke a very specific one of those Langues D'oïl. So we do know that the idea that this word ended in the sound we might associate with the letter "f" had already took up in a bunch of different places.
The original idea of "lieutenant" is quite literally a "placeholder" - it was someone you left in your place. So if you were your overlord's "lieutenant" you were the person who gave other people orders in his place, the person he delegated to. Much like "captain", when these words were first used they did not designate a specific rank in a highly developed system with rigid relationships, but rather were the names for roles that people occupied in relationship to the enterprise/activity/whatever.
This is why in the books, the Witch King of Angmar is referred to frequently as Sauron's "lieutenant" - Tolkien knew this shit preeeeetty well and liked using words in those contexts.
So in French, they moved along the path of saying "lieu" as the word is said in French today, with no consonant at the end. Their "lieutenant", their "placeholder", maintained that pronunciation. Americans then actively wanted to distance themselves from the British and were at the time buddy-buddy with the French, so they took that pronunciation on.
Meanwhile at some point Middle English - arising from Old English and Norman French - had shifted to the "liev", the one that had a fricative on the end, which was one of the pronunciations attested in the spelling shift to "leuf".
“When Dracula preys on Mina and takes her blood, he is ripping out her agency, her ability to make choices for herself. With each feeding Mina loses more and more of her ability to make her own choices. Does this mean that in some way Dracula is gaining the agency Mina is losing? Dracula is ingesting blood, but he is also taking her essence - what makes her fully alive, what makes her human. Their minds become interconnected in the transfer, enough that he can know her thoughts and so much that she floats in and out of a harrowing trance. There was something in Mina’s spirit that Dracula wanted, craved, desired - he seems especially drawn and determined to be with her. Perhaps it was her spirit, her strength, and self-sufficiency - her ability to give her own life meaning - that drew Dracula to her. He sought Mina’s agency, perhaps because in their unicity, he could know true freedom to choose his own meaning. When Dracula takes in Mina’s essence, and forces her to gorge herself on his death, she becomes one with the damned. This is where Plotinus’ view that a person should be united with The One comes in. The One to Plotinus is totally transcendent and indivisible, beyond all human ability to categorize or understand. Dracula, though, in his imperfection, demonstrates how this unification can go awry. The ever-increasing trance that nearly overtakes Mina’s mind and body ultimately leads to Dracula’s true death at the hands of Van Helsing [sic]. When this happens, Mina is free from being cursed. But when Mina is finally free, she takes back her agency and her own meaning. She must wonder, though “Is he finally dead? Is he really gone?” You see, unicity now becomes a problem…Much like a human understanding of death as “going” somewhere, what happens to the macabre essence of Dracula? Perhaps the final terror of Dracula’s death is not that he is permanently “removed” from life, but that he continues on, both in Mina’s essence as well as in the deepest fears of all who encounter this character because of their connectedness.”
— James E. Willis, III and Viktoria A. Strunk, “They Shall Become One Flesh” in Dracula and Philosophy: Dying to Know, Nicolas Michaud and Janelle Potzsch, eds.
The way that most of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories’ most horrible villains are rich dudes that are abusive to women, in a time such as the 1880’s, compels me.
Yup, there’s a huge number of times where Sherlock Holmes is the ONLY person to take a young woman’s complaint or worry seriously and finds out someone is up to some serious evil. Holmes also shows a lot of compassion and empathy with the victims over and over again. (This is why I find “Secretly a woman” or “Trans” Holmes headcanons much more convincing than “sociopath” Holmes.)
I am never going to shut up about how much I specifically love The Adventure of The Copper Beeches because it is literally Sherlock Holmes listening to a young lady he does not know except as a potential client, agreeing with her that a potential job she has interviewed for that she thinks is SUPER SKETCHY is, indeed, sketchy as fuck and when she says she’s probably gonna take the job anyways because the money is good and she needs it going “OKAY I GUESS but for the love of god please write to us so we know you’re okay we will literally drop everything and jump on a train if you want us to”.
The job turns out to indeed be sketchy as fuck, she writes to them, Holmes and Watson drop everything and jump on a train when she asks them to. I read this story for the first time when I was twelve and it made a HUGE impression.
This is also the basis for a lot of speculation about Holmes’ family life. The idea that he has been a victim of abuse, or his mother was abused (or even murdered by his father.) There’s definitely SOMETHING that makes him very aware of how dangerous isolated families can be, and the dark things that can happen behind closed doors. Plus, of course, the motivation to devote himself to stopping crime. And yes, so much of it is of the personal type.
dude see this is one aspect of the original books i NEVER understand why modern remakes (cough cough) don’t go all in on. Like, in the 21th c we HAVE all the dumb forensic shit that made Victorian Holmes stand out, but we STILL DON’T HAVE uh….you know, compassion for women and minorities, or the willingness to believe them, adequate community support for domestic violence or hate crimes, etc. etc. which you’d think is exactly where a renegade consulting detective would come in handy. A good modern day Sherlock Holmes remake, instead of trying to convince us that Holmes is some super genius for being better than fingerprint analysis or whatever, could have him just be…a good person who helps out people the police can’t and won’t help. There you go. That’s how to write a relevant modern Holmes.
One thing that annoys me is how much the BBC version of Sherlock (and the fandom around it) focus on police cases or cold cases. In the stories, Holmes’ bread and butter cases had fuck-all to do with the police and in a few stories, he actively works around/against them, or outright lies to them. Of the many, many things I wish that show had done differently, this is one is particularly obnoxious since it’s such a gimme.
There were very few actual murder cases in the Canon, and Holmes handled them either one of two ways:
Option one: The murder victim was innocent while the killer was an abusive bastard, see Speckled Band. Conclusion, arrest and have the killer charged (Or in the case of Speckled Band, indirectly murder him yourself then shrug and go home)
Option two: The victim was murdered to protect someone that the victim was abusing, or for vengeance, see Boscombe Valley, Devil’s Foot, Abbey Grange. Conclusion, Oops, I don’t know who the killer is, I am suddenly incompetent, oh look a pheasant.
#my favorite murder in holmes canon#is when they straight up witness a lady murder her blackmailer#do nothing except destroy his other blackmail material#and then straight up lie to lestrade about it#sherlock holmes#more of this in modern adaptations pls (via @cactusspatz )
Let’s not forget the time Holmes helps a young woman who’s being catfished by her own stepfather to steal her inheritance, and when the villain sneers that the law can’t touch him, Holmes grabs a horsewhip out of sheerest chivalry.
I think it’s also important to note, and complicates our ideas about what the highly patriarchal/misogynistic society of 19th century England looked like, that these stories SOLD
they were POPULAR
the Victorians LIKED reading about women who won out over shitty men in their lives, even when that plotline reaffirmed a woman’s power and agency or put an active sexist in his place (ie Irene Adler besting Holmes)
which is fascinating in light of. you know. [gestures broadly at all of Victorian gender dynamics, laws, etc.]
it’s so funny that so many hobbies are just what humans are meant to be doing. hiking swimming fishing hunting camping running lifting. to a further extent art and storytelling. like this is what’s natural to us instead we have to sit in a building writing emails or pretending to busy in department store
It’s Jane Austen’s 250th birthday today and I just want to yell about how much modern writing (in the English language) owes to this woman.
Jane Austen did things with stories and characters that had simply never been done before. Do you like flawed characters who grow over the course of the story? Jane Austen pioneered the art of doing that in novels. Do you like it when a story is filtered through a character’s perspective, so you can hear their voice in the narration? Say thank you to Jane Austen.
I’m going to very, very generally summarise what novels looked like when Austen started writing. The first important thing is: they were an incredibly young genre. The first English book that everyone agrees ‘this is definitely a novel, not a collection of short stories, or an allegorical fable, or a political commentary’ is Robinson Crusoe, published 1719. Austen’s first book was published in 1811. That’s less than a hundred years!
I’ve read some early English novels, and… from a modern point of view, they are messy. Plot events are often random. Characters are generally stock archetypes. Realism wasn’t much of a concern; characters get abducted, imprisoned, etc, on a regular basis.
Slowly, from about 1770 onwards, you started to get the ‘novel of manners’ – more realistic stories set in the social world of the time. Jane Austen was absolutely not the first to write books centred on young women coming of age and finding ‘Mr Right’. (Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth are probably the best remembered of Austen's predecessors.)
And I’ve read some of these novels, and they’re… fine? I’m generalising hugely, but the characters are still very flat. The women are usually perfect, well-behaved, virtuous, etc; the only character flaw they might have is being naïve. Here’s a passage from one of Burney’s novels, describing the heroine:
Her form was elegant, her heart was liberal, her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding...
It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? And of course it is! Novels were only just starting to solidify as a genre. The idea of making the characters flawed, realistic human beings had barely occurred to anyone. But Austen decided she didn’t want to write flawless protagonists. ‘Pictures of perfection you know make me sick and wicked,’ she once wrote in a letter to her niece.
It would be ludicrous to say that flawed characters or character-driven plots didn’t exist; of course they did. What are Shakespeare’s tragedies except stories driven by their protagonists fatal flaws? What makes Austen so remarkable is that she was pretty much the first person to take those themes from plays and put them into a novel instead. And so we have Emma Woodhouse, who gets the plot rolling by being self-deluding, meddlesome and conceited (I love her so much). We get Lizzy Bennet, who makes snap judgements that confirm her own biases and has to relearn how she sees everyone around her.
And then there’s Austen’s fucking groundbreaking way of filtering the narrative through a character’s perspective.
Austen was the first writer to consistently narrate in third person, while still filtering the narrative through one person’s point of view. If the protagonist makes a mistake, the narration sometimes just… doesn’t correct it. Take this bit of Emma. All the context you need is this: Emma thinks her friend Harriet is in love with someone, and they’ve just received news that the guy’s controlling aunt is dead, which would make it a lot easier for Harriet to marry him. Harriet is, in fact, not in love with said guy, so the news means nothing to her. But the narration says:
Harriet behaved extremely well on the occasion, with great self-command. Whatever she might feel of brighter hope, she betrayed nothing.
Harriet isn’t behaving with great self-command! She isn’t affected by this news at all! But what Emma thinks is reported as if it were fact. We don’t get to know what Emma doesn’t; her opinion controls the narration. I cannot stress how much this had never been done before.
Or take this part of Persuasion, where the protagonist, Anne, encounters the man she was briefly engaged to eight years ago:
Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary; said all that was right […] the room seemed full – full of persons and voices – but a few minutes ended it.
Look at how closely we are in Anne’s perspective here. She can hardly process what’s going on, so we barely see it. We don’t hear Wentworth’s speech. Time speeds up, the narration becomes a blur, just like the moment is a blur for Anne. No one had done this before!
We all love the Locked Tomb books here, right? You know how closely the narration sticks in each protagonist’s head; how the narration sounds and feels like their voice, how we don’t get to know anything they don’t know? Jane Austen pioneered that technique. What I’m saying is: we don’t get Gideon the Ninth without Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen was a phenomenal writer, who came up with entirely new writing techniques that authors still use, hundreds of years later. So many of the techniques we now hold up as ‘good writing’ were things she did for the first time.
Happy 250th birthday, Jane Austen. Thanks for giving us books as we know them.
__
(The examples here come from What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan, which is an incredible book I can't recommend enough to anyone who wants to know more about the social context around her novels.)
I love this so much. Someone slowed it down so it's not the old-fashioned herky-jerky of old films, now someone colorized it…the past feels like the present because, well, people. Lookit them having fun! *beams at everyone*
Women writers of the Victorian era regarded the fairy tale as a dormant literature of their own. When Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre hears hoofbeats approaching her in the dark, ice-covered Hay Lane, “memories of nursery stories” immediately flood her mind, especially the recollection of “a North-of-England” monster capable of assuming several bestial forms. But the beastly apparition Jane expects turns out to be Rochester, the “master” whom she promptly causes to fall off his horse and who will eventually become her thrall. Rochester himself soon shows his own conversance with, and respect for, powers he associates with the magical women of traditional fairy tales. “When you came on me in Hay Lane last night,” he tells Jane, “I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse. I am not sure yet. Who are your parents?” When Jane replies that she is parentless, Rochester endows her with a supernatural ancestry. Surely, he insists, she must have been “waiting for [her] people,” the fairies who hold their revels in the moonlight: “Did I break one of your rings, that you spread the damned ice on the causeway?”
Here and elsewhere in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë takes even more seriously than her two characters do the potency of the female fairy-tale tradition to which she has them refer. Karen E. Rowe, who has so ably written on that tradition, was the first to show how fully saturated Jane Eyre is with patterns drawn from major folktales such as “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Blue Beard,” and, as a prime analogue for Jane’s developing relationship with the homely Rochester, from “Beauty and the Beast,” the 1756 Kunstmärchen (or literary fairy tale) adapted and popularized by Madame Le Prince de Beaumont.
Nina Auerbach, Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers
She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the creak of the larches as they swayed to it.
Suddenly it became clear that flight, and instant flight, was the only thing conceivable. The longing to escape, to get away from familiar faces, from places where she was known, had always been strong in her in moments of distress. She had a childish belief in the miraculous power of strange scenes and new faces to transform her life and wipe out bitter memories. But such impulses were mere fleeting whims compared to the cold resolve which now possessed her.
Subject Matter & Themes : A character study concerning identity, this novella is about the shaping of it, the exploration of it, and the stifling of it. It's about the class divide, the divide between country and city life and people, the limitations faced by women and the results that can come from exercising agency outside of societal expectations. Content warning for abuse (emotional, psychological, & verbal), alcoholism, an age gap relationship, classism, incest, misogyny, pregnancy, sexism, and sexual harrasment.
Genre & Prose : Though a realistic depiction of the usually idealized country, this has a rural gothic feel to me—the horror is in the *bleak reality* the protagonist faces. The loveliest prose throughout (whether general writing or descriptions of the scenery) contrasts with the subject matter of its plot.
Setting & Plot : In early 1900s New England, young adult Charity Royall wants more than anything to get away from her rural town of North Dormer. Taken from a life of poverty in a mountain community nearby, no one ever let her forget those origins. The man who raised her, Lawyer Royall, wants to marry her. Her interest in Lucius Harney, an architect in town for work, ends in horrible consequences.
Characterization : I think Charity Royall is one of the more complex protagonists I've read. Her emotional vulnerability is wrapped in and protected by a fierce personality. She has a strong sense of pride both despite and to compensate for the treatment she received from her community, but ultimately believes in her inferiority. A stubborn sureness is often behind her actions and forming her opinions, but she is naive and flexible to manipulation. She wants more than anything to be independent, is aware of the obstacles she faces and the hard things she would have to do, yet still holds hope for a good outcome until the very end—until her fate is sealed.
Conclusion : Summer was ahead of its time in its themes, the subject matter it covers, and the characterization of its protagonist. Wharton set out to write a story that displayed the rot within the idealized country and did so perfectly. As a woman who grew up in a working class family in a rural town, it really stuck with me.
Do you know of any books or poems about Bluebeard? I read the Bloody Chamber and loved it.
Yes, The Bloody Chamber is delightful, and so vividly written. Here are my suggestions to go further with the Bluebeard archetype:
Bluebeard (Barbe-Bleue), Charles PerraultBluebeard (Blaubart), The Grimm BrothersBluebeard, Carol Ann Duffy, in Duffy/Supple/StillBluebeard’s Egg, Margaret AtwoodBluebeard (Barbe-Bleue), Amélie NothombThe Seven Wives of Bluebeard (Les Sept Femmes de Barbe-Bleue), Anatole FranceWomen Who Run With Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola EstésBluebeard, Francesca Lia BlockWaiting for Bluebeard, Helen IvorySecrets Beyond the Door, Maria TatarMr. Fox, Helen Oyeyemi& of course :Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, and a few works on the question:
- Bluebeard and the Beast: The Mysterious Realism of Jane Eyre, Jessica Campbell- Tradition and Transformation: Fairy Tales in the Victorian Novel, Jessica Campbell - Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and Its Progeny, Heta Pyrhoenen
“If you want to understand any moment in time, or any cultural moment, just look at their vampires,” says author Eric Nuzum. Our vampires are not like the remorseless Victorian vampires, who had a taste for the blood of babies and did not seem to feel badly about it. Our vampires are conflicted. Some of them go hungry rather than feed on humans, and some of them drink synthetic blood. “Almost all of these current vampires are struggling to be moral,” the journalist Margot Adler observed […] “It’s conventional to talk about vampires as sexual, with their hypnotic powers and their intimate penetrations and their blood-drinking and so forth,” she reported. “But most of these modern vampires are not talking as much about sex as they are about power.”
Power, of course, is vampiric. We enjoy it only because someone else does not. Power is what philosophers would call a positional good, meaning that its value is determined by how much of it one has in comparison to other people. Privilege, too, is a positional good, and some have argued that health is as well.
Our vampires, whatever else they are, remain a reminder that our bodies are penetrable. A reminder that we feed off of each other, that we need each other to live. Our vampires reflect both our terrible appetites and our agonized restraint. When our vampires struggle with their need for blood, they give us a way of thinking about what we ask of each other in order to live.
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