I would to know about her marriage. Who was her husband? Why did she marry him. What was their relationship like, and how did its tragic end came about?
ahh, thank you so much for sending this in! nwn
just a quick note: i tend to think of headcanons as… fluid, i suppose, and i’m prone to revising them as my understanding of a character changes. this material is subject to change as i go on, but here’s what i know about mr. seward right now!
i believe i should more rightly call him doctor seward, because they met in medical school. (i’m going to refer to him as “william” here, for a first name; i don’t believe there are any other williams on the show… but it’s subject to change if i find a more appropriate one.) as i mention in this headcanon, florence was one of the first women in america to attend medical school, and she was the first female student her alma mater had ever accepted; she was under probation for her entire time as a student–subject to being expelled at any moment–and her position in relation to the male students at her school was… precarious.
as a woman, she was hypervisible, subject to absurd standards of performance, and treated poorly by colleagues and professors. william seward was the exception. he was a brilliant student, her intellectual equal in every respect, and proved himself over her time at school to be the only person she could really count on (“when i was first married, i thought i needed my husband,” she tells vanessa later). he wasn’t looking for opportunities to trip her up, to make her fail. he seemed to really want her to succeed.
it was natural, i think, for her to fall in love with him. spinsterhood would have seemed like a safer option, in terms of her career–to not be tied to a man under coverture laws, to not have the possibility of children who would demand her time… but florence really thought that william was different. she felt she could, had to, rely on him. who else was going to support her career? what other man in the world would be willing to have a working doctor for a wife? (or so she thought.)
(quick note: i’m not sure that they married right out of school. i think it’s quite possible that it took a few years before she would agree–and that she was able to establish some kind of a practice/career with, as i mention in the above linked headcanon, women’s charity organizations or something.)
as florence tells vanessa, “[his abuse] started right after the honeymoon.” the reason was the very reason she’d married william in the first place: her career. she had thought he was marrying her in full support of her work as a doctor; he was marrying her so that she would not become a doctor, believing that once she was married, she would be tamed somehow by domesticity, and that he–of all people–could make this aloof, somewhat arrogant, profoundly intelligent woman into a docile housewife, because, of course, no woman could be truly happy outside the home, could they? the very qualities that made her a fascinating human being–her ambitions, her intelligence–were unacceptable in a wife.
their expectations clashed immediately on their return to new york. florence wanted to resume her work; william wanted to prevent her from doing so. physical violence ensued and began to escalate as florence “failed,” again and again, to perform in the role of housewife. they could afford a couple of servants, so the stuff of day-to-day life wasn’t in serious jeopardy, but she simply wasn’t interested in planning dinners, hosting parties, shopping for pretty things; and while she was willing to provide for william’s emotional/physical needs, her work was always going to come first.
(another quick note: i’m seriously considering the possibility that they had a child–a son?–and that florence essentially rejected her child because she knew that they were fodder for her husband’s attempt to confine and domesticate her. they would have been left primarily in the care of servants and then taken away by william’s family after florence’s arrest for his murder. so if anyone feels like a fresh new OC and wants to make william seward, jr…)
william’s death came about because his violence had been ramping up (after the birth of their child?). florence wasn’t giving in to him. the “good times” were becoming shorter and shorter and their “rough patches” were getting longer and longer, with his moods getting darker and darker, his emotional abuse (attempting to isolate and confine florence) escalating alongside his physical abuse. the night she killed him came after, imo, a trigger that we might consider not that bad, or at least excusable (a party she missed? a group of his friends she didn’t greet/accidentally was rude to because she was running out the door to a medical call?) that nonetheless provoked him to attempted murder. she had failed for the last time. humiliated him for the last time. she was a sign of his failure to tame, to domesticate, to own, and he would kill her for it–but she killed him first. she does not regret it.
send me a topic to write a meta about my muse on.
