Sliding in with a very late #fanartfriday for Pride! Thank you so much Ackrvi, I love how dynamic and detailed it is! Obviously it is for Pride because the Cobra is bi, I don’t listen to those rumours about Lord Marius… in fact I’ve never heard any…
Nothing will be funnier than reading "your poor little meow meow is built like a brick murder house" in an epic fantasy book, because you're absolutely right that IS a little meow-meow born to be a berserker bound to his vows 😌
She knows not what the curse may be | Caracalla and the Lady of Shalott
The Lady of Shalott', is a 19th century poem by Alfred Tennyson, based on Arthurian legend of an unnamed woman* who is cursed to never be able to leave her tower, but who falls in love with Lancelot from afar. In the poem, she dies without ever meeting him.
The poem starts out by describing the area where the Lady of Shalott lives:
The lady's home calls to mind the four wings of Ancilley manor, as well as the clear demarcation between the life, and constant change outside the walls, and the everlasting doom within.
The poem tells us how far away the lady is from the city:
And what she spends her time doing, and why:
Weaving is a repetitive, appropriately feminine action that demands most of the lady's attention. The patient weaving and waiting in isolation also calls to mind Penelope waiting for Odysseus to return.
The poem also tells us that the Lady's circumstances discourage her from thinking too much about them, or from imagining a different life for herself.
The Lady must remain cloistered in her tower but her her heart's hopes depend on a faraway knight that she catches glimpses of in her magic mirror:
Said knight is desribed as... very shiny.
And eventually, comparing the knight's freedom to ride away, to her own entrapment leads to the lady admitting that what she's been doing up to now is never going to give her what she wants from life.
And to take decisive action to leave the tower.
And the curse rears its head in this absolute banger of a verse:
The lady decides to float down the river in a boat towards Camelot, despite knowing that she will face the consequences of the curse. By the time she reaches the city, she is only a mysterious, beautiful corpse, though Lancelot himself is drawn to her.
The Lady of Shalott 'knows not what the curse may be' and when you first meet Caracalla, you might be forgiven for thinking she doesn't feel the full weight of her family legacy. While her mother and Marius are preoccupied with propriety and inevitable doom, Caracalla is busy imagining the Cobra sweeping her away and all those bitches at court being jealous of her. She recruits Ink to be her best friend with the perfect self-obsession of a privileged sixteen-year-old. Eumenida and Marius may consider Valerius manhood as something that must be struggled against but is never overcome, but Caracalla believes in her brother utterly. As far as she's concerned, they're a happy family (bar her terrible dad) and the genre is coming-of-age.
But it doesn't take much digging to see that Caracalla is also not immune to generational trauma. The most she can hope for from the Cobra as a husband is that he will find her somewhat desirable and appreciate her company, not that he will ever be faithful to her. (He can have lovers, she's cool with it. She's trying so hard to be cool with it.)
And when she's talking to Lucius after the Cobra rejects her, it becomes clear that part of her knew she would never escape her fate through marriage. The Valerius curse is one of inevitable, gendered violence; the men keep killing until they are finally killed, while the women stay unobtrusive to avoid death at their hands. (Arguably Marius has taken the first step towards change by refusing to actually kill their father).
Caracalla's mother has taught her that this is not a cycle that can be broken, and Caracalla knows she cannot abandon her mother, or persuade her mother to abandon her duty. The Caracalla who died in the previous two iterations of Time of Iron was only able to change things inasmuch as she chose to die like a male Valerius (with sword in hand), rather than waiting passively for death.
In the conversation where Caracalla agrees to help Lucius with his plan, there's an undernote of bitterness that she can't pretend any more. All the work put into propriety and weaving is useless; the mirror breaks because illusions are no longer enough. She's lived her whole life 'imbowered' in a house with a monster in the basement and the blood of dead women staining the walls. The Valerius curse has come upon her, and the only way out is to destroy the manor and the patriarch that uphold its traditions.
The Lady of Shalott dies without ever meeting her knight, but she chooses the possibility of the curse over the certainty of never getting what she wants. In response to the Valerius curse, Marius has taught himself never to want at all, but Caracalla has taught herself that she can fantasise all she likes, until the time comes to face the curse, and pack her childhood dreams away. When she's told her destiny is to burn with the manor, she's ready to be brave.
But in the end it's Eumenida who faces the god, and wrenches the cycle out of joint by dying like a male Valerius. Caracalla may not have everything she dreamed of, the knight may never be hers, but she gets to live, and to keep wanting.
*the Lady is unnamed in the poem but the story is that of Elaine of Astolat
Two other bonus classic lit references in chapter 17:
Eumenida is frequently referred to as the Last Duchess, a reference to the gothically creepy Robert Browning poem 'My Last Duchess', about an aristicratic man who totally didn't kill his wife.
And the internet informs me that this reference is frequently attributed to Shakespeare but is actually from Walter Scott's 'Marmion'.
(All screenshots from the poems mentioned, or from chapter 17 of All Hail Chaos)
