rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2022-06-16 11:56 am
rachelmanija) wrote2022-06-16 11:56 am
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So THAT'S what was going on!
There's a funny bit in Biggles Fails To Return in which Ginger, impersonating a Spanish onion-seller in Monaco, shares some bread and an onion with a local. The local nearly spits out the onion, appalled at its sharpness, and asks Ginger where the heck they came from. Ginger is forced to quickly come up with an explanation of why he has English onions rather than the presumably sweeter Spanish ones.
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
no subject
I mean to be fair I should have made it clear that this was an area where that was the perception by English people of Italians (which would have been heavily depending on Specific Stories About Rich Folk itself, as well as a hell of exotification and the combination of Italy Is Civilization and Italy Is Horrible Decadence), so; in terms of definites all I know is that I know in Southern Europe things WERE somewhat different, and my social history grounding in those regions is insufficient to be able to make definite statements, other than a general awareness that among the nobility in the city-states, women were much more cloistered/controlled in their movements, and often married off younger and so on.
But English PERCEPTION of Italy was that Shakespeare could set his play there and have it be a Feud with Creepy Nobles Forcibly Marrying Babies . . . .without it appearing to be him actually saying "English nobility sucks" and getting in shit for it. XD Italy was, in terms of the cultural imaginary, familiar enough to be able to set stories that made sense to the audience, while being foreign enough to get away with things he might not otherwise have been able to get away with (and exotic enough to be exciting).
Having an ENGLISH noble say things like "younger than [13] are happy mothers made" would revulse the crowd to the point that you'd have to, like, somehow have Paris be VILLAINOUS and probably even somehow not REALLY a noble, or else you're implying that Our Own Nobility is somehow very bad (and they'll get upset with you); having an Italian one makes use of the "oh those weird and crazy Italians" enough that it's just a signal that both Capulet and Paris himself (who is a relative to the prince) are selfish and semi-corrupt and care more about their own benefit than about making good choices for the realm (as Paris is enmeshing his family with Capulet's which is going to make it harder for the Prince to properly adjudicate and manage the feud's detrimental effect on Verona; Mercrutio's behaviour and enmeshment with the Montagues is doing the same on that side; and the Prince is doing exactly fuck all to prevent this; thus spreading the responsibility for "this feud is wrecking Verona" around nice and thick).
Were a few of those English nobles probably still marrying and consummating with teenagers? Yeah probably but that doesn't mean anyone would TALK about it or publicly APPROVE of it. Because social norms are different from social approval are different from legality. XD But yeah.
no subject
From what I have read, including those two sources, Renaissance Florence was demographically a lot more like classical Athens in this sense, in that you get the upper class women cloistered, married off at young ages, men having to wait until they were almost 30 to get married, and a lot more homosexuality due to men having far fewer options. The government even came up with state-sponsored prostitution at one point to get the men to stop fucking each other and start fucking lower class women like God meant them to!
Having an ENGLISH noble say things like "younger than [13] are happy mothers made" would revulse the crowd to the point that you'd have to, like, somehow have Paris be VILLAINOUS and probably even somehow not REALLY a noble, or else you're implying that Our Own Nobility is somehow very bad (and they'll get upset with you); having an Italian one makes use of the "oh those weird and crazy Italians" enough
Ah, that makes sense and is not something I would have picked up on! 16th century English perceptions of Italians is too far outside my wheelhouse. I have an idea of who was doing what outside my period (including your points about women as economic actors, the older age of marriage outside the upper classes, individual cases of medieval and Renaissance political marriages, etc.), but what was perceived how by whom outside my period is not something I can speak to. Thank you!
Were a few of those English nobles probably still marrying and consummating with teenagers? Yeah probably but that doesn't mean anyone would TALK about it or publicly APPROVE of it.
From earlier in the century, off the top of my head, Catherine Howard comes to mind (she wasn't a super young teenager, but the age difference was significant), and Mary, Queen of Scots (she was young, but she and her husband were roughly the same age, and the marriage might never have been consummated), and Lady Jane Grey (but she was 16, not 13, and I don't know if it was consummated, and she and her husband were roughly the same age)--was public perception of these marriages (the marriage, not the head-chopping part) that bad? (Oh, lol, I just realized all three were executed. Only one by her husband. :P)
no subject
Haha so. Poor Howard: yes, honestly, except you can’t criticize the king so instead it became important to portray her badly instead so that somehow it’s her fault that she’s in this skeezy marriage. Gotta love it.
The other two as you note were either not big age differences and/or were unclear if they were consummated (and in Mary’s case was Extremely Political).
no subject
Yeah, that checks out. There's a lot of that in all periods.