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
And to be clear, Shakespeare is absolutely and deliberately using the exoticism of his Italian location to talk ABOUT things in English society with plausible deniability; he is using his setting as a way to throw things into a sharper more dramatic relief, but without either a) actually saying that his OWN nobility (who could, you know, fuck his life right over) were that bad, or b) making his audience defensive and annoyed at his play (which he needed them to come see in order to make money).
Feuding and violent armed brawls in the streets were absolutely a London Problem, but an Italian setting let him ramp everything up to 11, AND avoid the risk of being seen as critical of the powers that actually had control over his life and/or their partisans.
English women were absolutely seen as more robust (wholesomely so) than their Continental and especially Southern European counterparts. Obviously we lack as MUCH documentary evidence for How These Things Are Done at that point in time than we have in, eg, 1750, let alone 1890, but there's no indication that it was particularly shocking for the woman to be the one declaring love and pushing the marriage. To some extent, particularly in eras where war was not an ever-present constant, if it didn't roll out that way it was because bluntly SHE was a more valuable commodity than he was - he might have more power, but given mortality rates for women in childbirth, unless there was a war on frankly most fertile women would have at least two suitors actively pursuing her.
I will note, however, that Juliet does not actually propose; what she says is this:
Three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed.
If that thy bent of love be honourable,
Thy purpose marriage, send me word to-morrow,
By one that I'll procure to come to thee,
Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite;
And all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay
And follow thee my lord throughout the world.
She says if his intent is marriage - if all of his love-pleading is an honourable and morally upright one, seeking a moral and licit outcome, rather than to just exploit her - then tell her where to meet him. And that's absolutely within the bounds of normal.
Now there IS a thing going on with her specific and active and delighted mutual involvement in the love-process, which is a literary one and is Shakespeare basically shit-talking Petrarch (who was at the time a kind of overwhelming Exemplar of Love/Love Poetry/Etc in elite contexts) and saying Petrarchan love (and sonnets) sucked and his own portrayals (and sonnets) were way better. But that's only coincidentally entwined with the "usage of exotic locales to talk shit about local problems without getting called out for it".
(You'd think it would be moreso, given Petrarch is, well, Italian! But no, because Petrarch was Italian of a couple hundred years ago and part of the Intellectual Movement that Defined Elite Everything at that point in time so he wasn't the same KIND of Italian as Those Hotheads of Right Now Brawling in the Streets, because humans are very good at this kind of curly thinking.)
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She says if his intent is marriage - if all of his love-pleading is an honourable dand morally upright one, seeking a moral and licit outcome, rather than to just exploit her - then tell her where to meet him.
Interesting, because to me, a marriage proposal is indicating that you're interested in marrying and asking the other person if they are too, and that seems to be what Juliet is communicating. What nuance am I missing here?
Also, are there any sources you can recommend that would talk about the rituals of marriages and proposals during this period, in some detail?
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:tilts head: So by your definition any time a person says or indicates "I would be interested in marrying you" or "if you asked I would say yes", that's an active proposal?
For me the nuance is: she's not saying "will you marry me?". She's saying "if you're interested in marrying me, I will show up where you tell me to go and say yes". She says this because he has already gone at length in declaring his love and also figuratively pledging faithfulness/indicating he really, really wants to have sex with her. She's saying, yes, I'm amenable to that as long as it's in this Honourable/Correct fashion, so if that's what you want then let me know where I'm supposed to show up and say "yes".
In all of their interactions, he is the initiator; the closest she comes is him overhearing her private musings about how hot and perfect he is. The most she does is first a) not TOTALLY shoot him down/tell him to get fucked when he's approaching her at the party, and then b) vehemently admit that yeah he totally just heard her say all of that, does HE mean he what he just implied about wanting her?
Now in a literary sense, that second part is remarkable and part of Shakespeare's extremely conscious and deliberate deconstruction of Petrarch. (I'm assuming you're familiar with Petrarch and Laura and their Totally Onesided Love Affair ending in her perfect chaste death and his perfection of a sonnet form): Romeo writes stiff and banal Petrarchan sonnets to Rosalind, who could care less whether he's alive, in proper Petrarchan form - until he meets Juliet, who is NOT silent, sexless and remote, but who answers him and answers him passionately and agreeably and - critically - in joint Shakespearean sonnets and is basically as close to the anti-Laura as an archetype as you can get. But Romeo still always initiates, and Juliet's responses are just emphatic "yes I like that and am totally encouraging that implication you've made that you want to marry me and then have a lot of totally licit amazing sex, where did you want me to show up".
Also, are there any sources you can recommend that would talk about the rituals of marriages and proposals during this period, in some detail?
Hrm. So I am not currently aware of any off the top of my head that were like "here is how people in Tudor England asked each other to marry one another"; this is an area where I do articles, primary sources, and of course a huge number of course-packs from when I actually did my degree, which are filled with facsimiles of articles and primary sources. A quick google tells me that the current favourite layperson accessible book is by someone named Carol McGrath, but I haven't read it and tend to squint warily at popular history books whose authors' major degrees are in English.
A quick google reminds me of Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England by Diane O'Hara who I recall threading the needle well between the ideas of individual choice that were present and the community and culture contexts; if you want to keep going with its relationship to these kinds of texts, Marriage Relationships in Tudor Political Drama looks like it might apply. And, of course, there's (careful) looking at the era through its literature, which is by and large quite content with women being pretty clear about who they want (and who they don't) - including women framed by the narrative to be Perfectly Acceptable and Respectable, Thanks, particularly when "common" or "ordinary".
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Yep, that's pretty much the definition of a proposal in my book. I don't remember exactly what words I used to propose to my wife, but definitely not "Will you marry me?" Something along the lines of "You know the Supreme Court decision this week means we could get married." *pause indicating the ball was in her court* I was proposing that we get married if she was game, just as Juliet is proposing that they get married if Romeo is game.
But regardless of semantics, your explanation of the Petrarch deconstruction is fascinating. I am familiar with Petrarch and Laura at a superficial level, but not in any way that involves knowing what Shakespeare did with that tradition.
A quick google tells me that the current favourite layperson accessible book is by someone named Carol McGrath, but I haven't read it and tend to squint warily at popular history books whose authors' major degrees are in English.
Yeah, this is why I always ask for recs if I can. Because I can google with the best of them, but if it's outside your area of expertise, you're as likely to find BS as anything else.
A quick google reminds me of Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England
I will take a look at this, thank you! You are extraordinarily knowledgeable and helpful.
no subject
Hmm. Interesting! By that standard there has never been a point where it was socially improper for women to do something that definition would term a proposal; there have literally always been socially acceptable ways for women in any of the societies I'm familiar with to indicate to men "yes I would be interested in marrying you". Some of them are more restricted than others, or more ritualized; the Regency well-to-do woman would have some particular social dances to make, but that still amounts to communicating "yes you should get around to asking this out loud."
In terms of social expectations I'm familiar with in early-modern (and previous mediaeval), it was expected for the man to make the first public and formally recognized motions, but as the woman it was pretty normal to make it as clear as Juliet does here that the answer will be "yes", and he can just go ahead and DO that. (In a non-covert scenario this would of course involve more than just finding a clergyman to witness; it would also involve talking to her father, hammering down the dowry, posting notice of the marriage with the parish, and so on.) The formal proposal, if you like, the societal motions that put a recognized marriage in process, are definitely male-led and it would seem weird to the audience to have the woman driving that and making those actions happen.
This is something that the Courtship and Constraint will delve into - in terms of understanding early-modern marriage it's important to understand how intensely you were part of a community which universally had its nose in all of everyone's business, so that contracting a marriage even out of individual love-match (or like match, or whatever match, but done by you personally for your own reasons) was still a communal event and involved a lot of communication via behaviours and norms.
And a woman it verbally clear that If He Wants To Get That Started, That's Cool, She's Totally Onboard is 100% within norms; Juliet is totally unremarkable in that part.
Also to be fair to Carol McGrath I have ALSO not found her work being excoriated or screamed about on any of my mediaevalist/early-modernist spots, so my guess is that she wouldn't be terrible as a foundation/starting point as long as one keeps in mind It's Popular History And Probably Simplified. But yeah.
but not in any way that involves knowing what Shakespeare did with that tradition.
So if you imagine Petrarch as the Trope Norm - the idea that he and Laura were the Epitome of Perfect, Strongest, Purest Love, and that this was a literary THING - and you start looking at how often Shakespeare invokes this trope to explicitly then send it up, undermine it, or outright point and mock it, it becomes very clear that for whatever reason, Will found this trope personally irritating and stupid and wanted everyone to agree with him. R&J is merely one of the times that he explicitly sets up "here is a Perfect Petrarchan Swain and His Remote, Disdainful/Indifferent Love! And here's why this is the stupidest fucking thing and my resolution will involve bombing it and then stamping on the rubble."*
*tho ironically his sonnets are not among them, and his sonnet cycle is actually a deeply cynical and dark little story! But they're very pretty.
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I have ALSO not found her work being excoriated or screamed about on any of my mediaevalist/early-modernist spots, so my guess is that she wouldn't be terrible as a foundation/starting point as long as one keeps in mind It's Popular History And Probably Simplified.
Good to know, thank you!
you start looking at how often Shakespeare invokes this trope to explicitly then send it up, undermine it, or outright point and mock it, it becomes very clear that for whatever reason, Will found this trope personally irritating and stupid and wanted everyone to agree with him.
Huh! Things I did not know. If this was covered in any of my English classes, I have long since forgotten it.
By the way, my 18th century discussion group (hosted at
no subject
Our culture (given I believe you're an English speaker out of the states) tends to think that there are stages to contracting a state we call "marriage", which is a particular kind of pairbonding that we because of our culture and history put HUGE social and emotional weight on. You start in a state of not-married, even if you are engaged in Romantic Partner Behaviours and agreements of relationship with another person. Then there's something called a "proposal" which puts us into a state we call "engaged to be married", that is not a legal commitment but is a huge SOCIAL commitment, so that now we are in this state we are MORE firmly "partnered" with the other person than we were previously even if literally nothing else changes; then we engage in a legal ritual called "marriage" which results in a massive legal and social state change.
"Proposals" matter at all because they're the trigger for that middle state of "engaged", where you're more pairbonded than you were before you were "engaged" but less than when you're "married". What counts as a "proposal" is going to depend on what the people involved (most importantly the two halves of the pairbond, but to some extent also the rest of society around them) consider sufficient to trigger this change from "not engaged" to "engaged".
By and large I would say most people require that to be some kind of active request from one party to the other to Enter This State With Them, answered by the other person with some kind of agreement. I do not think most people would agree that literally any indication that marriage is desired by one party is enough to count as a proposal for their purposes; it's extremely common for people to discuss in detail whether or not moving on to being "engaged" is something they want, and it's frankly a huge TROPE in our culture that women start dropping Huge Clear "Hints" up to and including "are you EVER going to ask me to marry you?" when commitment phobic men have not yet done so, with the very clear indication that they don't consider themselves in that "engaged" state yet, nor such questions to be Them Proposing. (And such questions make clear - and the prevalence of the trope itself makes clear - that there's definitely a cultural understanding that it is the man's job to initiate this state change to "engaged" via the correct form of the question).
On the other hand in terms of any given individual, what counts as triggering it is basically whatever discussion THEY have that they feel is adequate to announce to the rest of the world they're engaged. So could "I want to marry you" be enough to count as a proposal? Sure, if both parts of that pair-bond think it is. This is a human communication and social indicator matter, not a chemical state change, y'know?
But I wouldn't think MOST people would consider their partner just saying that to be "a proposal", and if articles and history or sociology books are discussing things like "was it appropriate for women to propose? No not at all", I would consider myself safe to assume that what they mean is "it wasn't appropriate for a woman to flat out say to a man 'will you marry me?', a question which the answer to either constitutes an agreement to be engaged or a rejection of the proposal/idea outright". I would definitely not assume they mean it wasn't appropriate for women to make it clear that they'd ACCEPT a proposal if the guy made one.
And, coming back around, I definitely would not expect an Elizabethan or Jacobean context to frame the statement "I want to marry you" as a proposal that the person saying it enter into the "engaged" state with the person it is being said to. It's just a statement about their feelings and desires and doesn't even indicate intent; it's as likely to be followed by "I want to marry you, but I can't" as anything else.
In re Shakespeare and Petrarch, it's extremely possible that they never got into it. I was extremely lucky to MOSTLY have Shakespeare teachers
bar one and his was the worst classwho were also rigorous in their scholarship of Shakespeare's context and treated him like an actual living person who spent decades of his life writing plays, performing in and directing plays both his own and other people's, and otherwise being a real human who lived in a real city (and happened to be a sodding genius), rather than some kind of Platonic Writer; it meant they were way more alert to intertextuality and intertextuality that wasn't necessarily "literary" (ie didn't conform to literary theory). It was invaluable to have eg the one who was like "hey did you notice how Romeo starts this play as a not particularly kind satire of a Petrarchan lover, but the minute he's talking with Juliet they're speaking in SHAKESPEARE's sonnet form?" or for that matter the other one who pointed out that we had to remember that just about literally any modern-language version of Shakespeare, or for that matter any version that wasn't literally a facsimile of the First Folio, was going to be a product of editorial choices and sometimes those editorial choices were quite sneaky and influential, because we got our knowledge of these plays from real physical OBJECTS, physical books that we got a hold of, and those books have an object history, and that also matters (and there's some damn weird printing anomalies in the actual books themselves).Then I went into the mediaeval and early modern social history stuff and just kept diving onwards. XD
no subject
Then there's something called a "proposal" which puts us into a state we call "engaged to be married"
My definition is: a proposal is a thing you say that commits you to be engaged and puts the ball in the other person's court, such that if they accept, the two of you are now engaged. A proposal can't enter you into an engaged state, because you can't engage someone else, but a proposal can cover your half of the consent, if you imply that engagement automatically follows if the other person says the right thing.
I guess it comes down to, suppose an exchange went like this:
Partner A: "If you're interested in getting married, tell me when and where and I'll show up."
Partner B: "Okay. I choose tomorrow at 2 pm at the church."
Would they be engaged to get to be married tomorrow at 2 pm? In my world, yes: that's proposal + acceptance = engagement. In Juliet's world, maybe not?
Likewise, if "I want to marry you" (or antyhing else) takes place in a context where it can logically be followed by
*pause to indicate ball's in the other person's court*
Partner B: "Okay!" (or some more romantic or formal way of accepting)
and they are thus engaged, that's a proposal in my book. And my "books", literally--hunting through some of my Kindle selection using the search function earlier, I found a number of things the authors called "proposals" that consisted of one person expressing their interest in marriage with implied or stated commitment upon acceptance, then waiting to see what the other person would say.
I think this is where I got the idea that there are many ways to phrase proposals, direct and indirect. At least some English-speaking authors from the States (you are correct) and Britain also use it this way.
If there are some ways of proposing that are socially acceptable for women to utter and others that are not, then sure, I think we're on roughly the same page.
I was extremely lucky to MOSTLY have Shakespeare teachers who were also rigorous in their scholarship of Shakespeare's context
I am delighted on your behalf and wish I'd had literature teachers I clicked with at all! (I had a couple, to be fair, but only in Classics, which is how I ended up pursuing degrees in Classics.)
sometimes those editorial choices were quite sneaky and influential
Ooh, any examples you want to throw our way?
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. . . .except none of the original sources attribute these lines to Claudio. He's THERE; he's on-scene. But the lines in the actual primary sources are given to Benedick.
Now as an editor you have to make a choice here. It doesn't seem like it makes sense for Benedick to say these lines (it's most of the beginning of this scene), because Benedick isn't the one who needs forgiveness? And we do have other instances where we have far more clear evidence that this kind of thing is a printer's error: there are a couple of cases where we've got multiple examples of the play that are all "good" copies/versions except that in one of them a line is attributed to someone it makes no sense to attribute it to, and we DEFINITELY have plenty of examples of printer's errors in all kinds of OTHER texts.
So it's PLAUSIBLE that this is a printer's error.
. . . but we don't HAVE any other copies of this particular play. So we have no actual evidence for that. All we have is the fact that it's a bit weird that Benedick would be saying these things instead of Claudio.
The prof that first pointed this out went on to note, however, that it's only weird if you're supposed to see Claudio as a sympathetic and "heroic" character; if you're NOT supposed to see him as kinda shallow and kind of a dick, if you're supposed to see his about-turn on the topic of Hero after her death as genuine remorse. If that's what Shakespeare MEANT you to see, if you assume that, then sure: it makes most sense that this is a printer's error and you reassign these lines to Claudio, who clearly means them.
. . . but that's not the only way to read Claudio, and Shakespeare isn't always inclined to portray his "heroes" in the best light. Claudio IS shallow enough to throw Hero off on the strength of a rumour from someone he doesn't even like or supposedly trust, and without any internal conflict about it, and moreover to do so in public in as cruel a way as possible, because it offends HIM that he might not have a pure bride.
Moreover one of the problems that's really solved by this funeral rite and so on is the conflict between Claudio and Benedick. At this point in the play, they're bound by military brotherhood and comradeship and friendship, but Beatrice has also issued her ultimatum to Benedick: if you love me, you'll do what I CAN'T and make Claudio pay for what he's done to my cousin ("oh God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace").
And reluctantly, he's agreed to do it. The revelation of the whole deception and lie saves Benedick from having to duel his friend as much as it saves anyone else: he's proved himself a worthy suitor for Beatrice (choosing her and her righteous cause over Claudio and his shallowness), and now he's saved from having to (probably, because he's a better soldier/fighter) kill his younger friend. Therefore it's extremely in HIS interests to chivvy Claudio through this whole thing.
We have no other evidence, but who you assign these lines to is going to affect how Claudio is portrayed: is he penitently going through this ritual of apology to Hero's supposed ghost, or is he silently waiting for someone else to get on with it so he can LOOK like he's doing this (so as not to be in conflict with his buddy and, you know, look like a heartless asshole to everyone else in the world) and Benedick is the one prodding him thru, and doing a bunch of it on his behalf?
As an editor, you have to make that decision - and most editions not only decide to give the words to Claudio, they don't even footnote it. Heck even some editions of the First Folio in the original spelling (but as a newly typset thing, rather than a facsimile aka a direct image-copy) "correct" the line attribution without saying.
If you're not lucky with your undergrad profs you don't find this shit until deep into grad seminars, if then. XD
no subject
If you're not lucky with your undergrad profs you don't find this shit until deep into grad seminars, if then. XD
Yep, and if you're sufficiently unlucky early on, you end up deciding not to pursue literature long enough to even end up in those grad seminars.
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I, uh, was the one who brought up the question to mildred about Tudor marriage proposals, and possibly due to the differences in the way we have been culturally exposed to marriage proposals, I understand it (and asked the question) in the sense you mean rather than the sense she does. That is to say, "so, I'd totally be up with this idea of marrying you" is different from the actual question "Will you marry me?" and I'm specifically interested in how one might characterize the latter. Part of the distinction is that I am also talking about characters who have a sense of the "tropes" of the day (and sometimes use them, though more-or-less ironically), so while they have already had conversations in the former sense and have an understanding that they both want to get married, they'd also have some impetus to do whatever sort of contemporary tropey thing was called for. In 21st century US, of course, the contemporary tropey thing would be something like the man getting down on one knee, holding out a ring box with a diamond engagement ring, and saying, "Will you marry me?" This is the kind of thing I'd be interested in -- not how they get to the proposal (for this particular application), but what are specific tropey things that might occur in the proposal itself in this time period. (E.g., Does the man kneel? I understand there are betrothal rings -- which does apply here -- but does he present it as part of the proposal? Are there specific words that one would expect to use from contemporary culture? I don't need a book necessarily! Though the ones you have recommended look neat and I am definitely interested!)
Not to say all the rest of this isn't wildly interesting, because it is and I'm absolutely here for all of it, thank you again! <3
no subject
That's definitely something I would want to dig into before I gave you an answer I felt super confident about, because I'll admit when I was neck deep in this my interests were far more about broader questions of social roles and how the relationships started and reached that point, and so on, but I will say that my sense and my memory is that a lot of it is ironically much less ritualized.
Like modern "proper" proposals are quite ritualized, perhaps because secular culture has so few of them comparatively; ironically, literally as I think of this, a lot of the trappings of it are interestingly feudal and I'm now distracted by a line of thought that wonders if this came out of the Victorian deconstruction of feudal and chivalric tropes specifically and nearly solely into the shapes of courtly romance*.
But that digresses: the point being, this level of EXTREMELY ritualized behaviours around The Engagement is, to be honest, comparatively new as far as I know.
My sense from memory is that there are definitely steps that were most often followed: a private conversation to obtain consent/agreement, either before or after telling the putative bride's family (if this is an independent love-match almost certainly before; if there's more familial or community Interference, very possibly after) in order to get them on-side; there's an exchange of gifts, often but not exclusively rings; there's the posting of the banns; and also there's now a bit more leeway for the bride and groom presumptive to act like they're sexually interested in each other in public without social opprobrium/censure (gossip? probably! negative toned gossip, less so) - nothing dramatic, but walking together publicly arm in arm, or sitting together at church, or whatever. WEARING the gifts publicly, whether it's a ring, or some other kind of jewelry, or garment, or whatever.
And as long as the community on the whole/etc doesn't disapprove for some reason, that will also be acknowledged and accepted. Then after the required amount of time for the banns to be in the parish, you get married.
*So this is a tangent: in courtly romance the knight is almost always either directly feudally - that is, militarily - sworn to either the Lady in question, or to her husband. (the latter theoretically not being a problem because the courtly romance is supposedly chaste**) This feudal relationship has specific rituals attached to it, not least of which is the kneeling in homage that is part of the specific declaration of military fealty and loyalty. In its original form, this chivalric and feudal context is actually a significant factor and part, and plays into the politics and the concepts of the whole, in ways that are easy to miss if you're looking at it through the wrong lens, which the Victorians often/usually did.
I would have to follow this up but I am now having some DEFINITE thoughts about the way that the Victorians took what they understood about mediaeval fealty, essentially stripped it of context down to a simplified set of courtly gestures, and then focused those gestures in particular around ideas of male and female romance, and so ported the rituals of homage into the rituals of courtship wholesale.
**Narrator: Actually, this caused many problems.
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I definitely had the impression that private sexual behavior was fine for betrothed couples who weren't nobility -- would this also be true for higher-class (but non-royal, non-arranged-marriage) couples? (The couple in question would both be children of knights -- one from an old family, one a merchant family fairly recently knighted.) In either case, presumably kissing, necking, etc. (that is to say, sexual behavior that is well short of causing pregnancy) in private is considered reasonable?
This feudal relationship has specific rituals attached to it, not least of which is the kneeling in homage that is part of the specific declaration of military fealty and loyalty. In its original form, this chivalric and feudal context is actually a significant factor and part, and plays into the politics and the concepts of the whole, in ways that are easy to miss if you're looking at it through the wrong lens, which the Victorians often/usually did.
I would have to follow this up but I am now having some DEFINITE thoughts about the way that the Victorians took what they understood about mediaeval fealty, essentially stripped it of context down to a simplified set of courtly gestures, and then focused those gestures in particular around ideas of male and female romance, and so ported the rituals of homage into the rituals of courtship wholesale.
Whoa. I hadn't thought about any of it this way and this is wildly interesting to me. I would like to know more about these thoughts!
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I definitely had the impression that private sexual behavior was fine for betrothed couples who weren't nobility -- would this also be true for higher-class (but non-royal, non-arranged-marriage) couples? (The couple in question would both be children of knights -- one from an old family, one a merchant family fairly recently knighted.) In either case, presumably kissing, necking, etc. (that is to say, sexual behavior that is well short of causing pregnancy) in private is considered reasonable?
I mean it will depend a bit on exactly when, and what the currents are around them, and also their own, like, sense of what's proper - a bit like now, tbh.
The Moral Ideal, of course, is that you have None Of That until you are legally married, because that's bad; some people will even be that kind of Dedicated, and there's certainly the possibility of SOME people tutting if they think there are indications that the couple are fooling around before the vows, even if there's no actual penetrative intercourse going on.
And of course beyond some kissing, only p-i-v is moral ANYWAY, so. (And that's EXTREMELY wide as a cultural attitude, much more so than the variety of attitudes to how bad having sex while betrothed but not married might be.)
But like, there's a difference between "officially" socially allowed, and "this will probably get you tutted at or maybe even scolded by some, but will be considered natural and par for the course by others, and still more will pretend 'they don't know'"; and even more between that and attitudes of "well we all know we're not SUPPOSED to fuck until we're actually married but also we all know that's stupid and nobody actually DOES that, and nobody's gonna give anyone else shit for it either". And which of those it's gonna be will also change depending on whether there's a general or localised bout of Moral Reforming going on, and so on.
That said OVERALL yeah nobody's going to be like SHOCKED!!! and APPALLED!!! or otherwise find it totally outside the norm if they're making out in private, although even betrothed it's quite possible there's only going to be SO long that they're actually going to be left alone in private before someone's keeping an eye on. You've got a reasonable range of potential attitudes from other people from "literally nobody is ever ACTUALLY a virgin - either sex - on their wedding night if they've lived in the same town as their betrothed, don't be stupid, why would they be" to "I DON'T CARE IF YOU'RE BETROTHED THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS" and everything in between to play with, with the bulk of people being definitely around "it's totally normal for an engaged couple to go mess around behind a tree when they think nobody's looking, bless them."
The different families might even hold different attitudes, or different PARTS of the family. But Officially, of course, you're not supposed to do any of that before you're properly married, that's wicked.
XD The Victorian use of the distorted mediaeval mirror in their own sense of self and of history would take way more than I have time for here, but yeah it's something I'm now pondering.
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...I'm kinda realizing that I have read WAY too much Victorian or Victorian-inflected fiction where even kissing between an engaged couple is like WELL WE CAN'T SHOW THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENING, WOULD BE CORRUPTING TO THE YOUTH. So I appreciate the sanity check!
And of course beyond some kissing, only p-i-v is moral ANYWAY, so. (And that's EXTREMELY wide as a cultural attitude, much more so than the variety of attitudes to how bad having sex while betrothed but not married might be.)
Oh wow! This I didn't realize. (Though
I'd be quite interested if you ever get around to articulating more about the Victorians looking in a mediaeval mirror!
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Fiction would have us believe that just about nobody in the 1890s so much as swore; reality is we have literal notices from baseball games of organizers begging people to remember that LADIES might be present so STOP CALLING YOUR OPPONENTS "FUCKING CUNT FACED ASS LICKERS" ACROSS THE PITCH.
Fiction(alized memoire) would have you believe that Laura Ingalls' father didn't want his girls going near the rail camp because they'd hear Shocking Language; in reality (and we have this attested in her actual journals) it was because they knew damn well that was a great way for girls to get assaulted. Fiction's great for telling us what people would accept in their fiction when it was published, and that's NOT unimportant! Buut.
ANYWAY that's a tangent: basically, if you WANT to have some influences in their life be REALLY STRICT about Proper Behaviour, that's definitely something you CAN attribute to a guardian, and even subject probably the young lady of the two of them to Lectures about Chaste and Virtuous Behaviour. On the other hand if you'd like things to be a bit more relaxed, you can also do that; it'll just be a matter of, like, how ELSE you're portraying the others around them. If there's a particularly sanctimonious aunt or uncle, they'll probably have Views; on the other hand the knights that are their fathers are probably mostly like, could you make sure she's NOT visibly pregnant when we actually have the ceremony, That's Awkward.
And there will be gossip! But there will literally be gossip regardless. So much gossip. So much. XD In every direction. Gossip if they do too much PDA! but also gossip about "well what kind of marriage is that even going to be, anyway, I mean how do you end up with heirs if they can't even bother to hop into bed?" if there's not ENOUGH PDA.
In re kinds of sex: yeah anything other than PIV will be viewed as unnatural and gross and perverted and did I mention gross? some "fondling" as foreplay yeah okay but even too much of that speaks to, you know. Ugh. Pervert. It's often less a conscious moral thing and more of a matter of disgust. I mean, we still have that today; we have hundreds of sex educators out there patiently explaining to people that the wide variety of sex act desires humans can have is very neutral and no enjoying this, that or the other kind of sexual contact more than p-i-v sex doesn't mean anything about you, it's fine, relax, you're not "broken" or bad or dirty, etc . . . because we need them, because this is the previous absolute set of beliefs we inherited.
Of course that doesn't mean people didn't DO it, or even rapidly find out once they started messing around that they kinda preferred it, or even tell themselves stories about how eg they were still a virgin as long as they hadn't actually had a penis in their vagina but these other things could be done, whatever, any more than it does now. Humans are human; as a species we're pretty sexually motivated and we're very good, on a case by case basis, at solving our cognitive dissonances by twisting everything into Special Logic.
But it's still going to have that cloak of the Illicit and the Wicked and the Perverse that means that usually at best it's a kind of naughty secret (my husband does this THING with his HAND that's AMAZING but fuck knows I wouldn't talk to ANYONE about it because I'd die of shame, etc etc, in either direction . . . except sometimes you talk about it to your very CLOSE friend or worldly friend, the on you know won't judge you . . . ) and moves down the various levels of the weird ways humans are about "shameful" pleasures from there. And there is not going to be ANYONE, anywhere, providing any actual social push in the other direction; everything that people are going to be willing to say out loud and admit is going to be Only Potentially Progenitive Sex Involving One Penis going into One Vagina Whose Owners Are Lawfully Wed Is Acceptable. There is NO other licit narrative that will be actually owned or admitted to by the powers of culture.
The official Morals were all sex outside of marriage was Very Very Bad, but people were often pretty pragmatic about it because life held relatively few pleasures anyway, and also well you could always MEAN to be getting married and so you weren't really Bad and Wrong in your HEART, right, so that's fine, it was all fine. (Right up until it WASN'T and your whole life collapsed.)
But the taboo about "gross" kinds of sex is gonna be a bit deeper, because there's NO version of reality in which you were supposed to have (or want) that kind of sex.
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Okay, this is super useful to me too, thank you! Because I had, in the course of my reading, encountered all these different mindsets in different places, and figured they coexisted (just like different mindsets have coexisted in all periods), but it's helpful to have it spelled out explicitly by someone who knows what they're talking about, so I can stop second-guessing whether I'm piecing the evidence together correctly.
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Cf, well, things like Mercrutio's lengthy discourse about Rosalind's meddlars: this was NOT an Allusive and Complex reference to the vulva, this was like making really really obvious jokes about large roosters and lovely cats, and while yeah, Mercrutio's being coarse as hell (and would have been viably in for being punched in the face if Romeo had wanted to take offense), this isn't considered Too Lewd to be in a play that was performed widely and incredibly popular, and performed for the court and all the worthies of the land.
One will have the occasional story like the idea that Anne of Cleves was too ignorant of sexuality to know that the king had to do more than kiss her and then sleep beside her to end up with her pregnant, but the honestly relevant part of that story is the extent to which literally everyone around her was " . . . . . . " about her being that ignorant - whether true or not (and it might have been), what's fairly obvious is that her level of ignorance would have been extraordinary and strange.
The prudery around TALKING about the subject would come later, mostly.
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It certainly hadn't come by the 18th century. It's hilarious and kind of a trip to read prefaces written by 19th and early 20th century editors of 18th century texts: they either defend their decision to bowdlerize their text as sheer decency demands, or they defend both their decision not to bowdlerize as well as their subjects' respectability. "She was totally a lady! Ladies could talk about these things in those days without being seen as coarse! It was just a less refined age." You can see these editors reaching for their smelling salts.
And not just sex, but bodies in general (menstruation, sweating, bowel movements), as well as men being over-the-top emotional. "He was extremely masculine!" protests the poor editor. "It was just the fashion to read sad poetry and cry all the time." Things that we as a society still haven't gotten to the point of being to do and talk about as openly as they did all the way up to the 18th century, but we've at least come far enough that editors don't feel the need to be so dramatic in their efforts to convince their readers that this is not a reason not to read whatever it was they just edited.
Of course, the "It was the times!" protest continues to apply to "He was extremely het! Heterosexual men just professed undying devotion to each other in those days" to this day. The problem, of course, is that it's true: 18th century correspondents did write elaborate phrases of devotion to each other with no more genuine emotion than us writing "Dear Hiring Manager" today (the anonymous hiring manager not being especially dear to you), but also many of them were extremely gay and those were totally love letters. And there was also a whole lot more socially acceptable middle ground allowing things like "romantic friendship" to develop and be expressed comfortably.
All of which makes it easy to whitewash all passionate declarations of love as totally platonic if you're so inclined, and difficult to sort out who actually was attracted to whom even if you're looking for it.
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unless it's Lehndorff we're talking aboutno subject
For those who don't know, Lehndorff was SO openly bi in his diaries that one of his descendants went through the texts with an intent to publish them, tried changing the "he"s and "him"s of his love declarations to "she"s and "her"s, then gave it up as a lost cause. The diaries were not published until later, with "he" and "him" left in, along with obligatory "everyone was this emo then!" disclaimers. To quote from Selenas's write-up:
I have to tell you, the introduction is worth reading because that, too, is a document of its times. The Editor (writing in the year 1907) tries to be gentle and prepare his readers for all that rococo shamelessness, saying he’d have cut it but for historical considerations, for lo, it seems that (Fritz-derived) image historians had of the Prussian court only turning sensual and adulterous once FW2 the playboy got on the throne? Is wrong! The Fritzian court was not a bastion of chaste stoic Prussian masculinity after all. On the other hand, we’re told to keep in mind everyone is emo in those days, so Lehndorff bursting into tears when his beloved Heinrich isn’t around for a few days is UTTERLY NORMAL. Oh, and about 800 letters from Heinrich to Lehndorff have never been transcribed. (As of the publication of these journals.) „Doubtlessly,“ the editor tells us, „the King himself bears some of the blame, due to the nature of his married life. We have suppressed some names and cut the worst passages, though.“
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There is NO other licit narrative that will be actually owned or admitted to by the powers of culture.
*nods* Yeah -- I think the way that fanfic and fandom, bless them, make all kinds of sexual acts perfectly reasonable and admissible subjects to talk about was, at least for me, extremely useful.