![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethWomen are not 'creatures'. It is not the duty of men to control these easily disturbed beings. And as an introduction, describing a woman's body ("her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays") and then being all surprised "The lady is ugly!" is just going to make me whap the narrator upside the head, especially when he continues:
"Her expression—bright, frank, and intelligent—appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete."
On the other hand I've already decided I like her, moustache and all. Sadly I don't figure that for the intended effect. Apparently the mix of masculine and feminine is meant to be disturbing.
... cannot throw ebooks across the room ...
... hmmmm, maybe there's a little graphic of book flinging I could write the title on...
Honestly, it's making me want to go back to Sherlock Holmes. There's any number of women need rescuing from their male relations there too, but Holmes doesn't lech after them.
ETA: Arrgh arrgh arrgh
okay, immediately I have to stop liking her at all, look what he made her say:
"Two young ladies have been staying here, but they went away yesterday, in despair; and no wonder. All through their visit (in consequence of Mr. Fairlie's invalid condition) we produced no such convenience in the house as a flirtable, danceable, small-talkable creature of the male sex; and the consequence was, we did nothing but quarrel, especially at dinner-time. How can you expect four women to dine together alone every day, and not quarrel? We are such fools, we can't entertain each other at table. You see I don't think much of my own sex, Mr. Hartright—which will you have, tea or coffee?—no woman does think much of her own sex, although few of them confess it as freely as I do. "
Sod this, I'm going to find a different book. Where was the one someone recced about lesbian private detectives in New York...
"Her expression—bright, frank, and intelligent—appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete."
On the other hand I've already decided I like her, moustache and all. Sadly I don't figure that for the intended effect. Apparently the mix of masculine and feminine is meant to be disturbing.
... cannot throw ebooks across the room ...
... hmmmm, maybe there's a little graphic of book flinging I could write the title on...
Honestly, it's making me want to go back to Sherlock Holmes. There's any number of women need rescuing from their male relations there too, but Holmes doesn't lech after them.
ETA: Arrgh arrgh arrgh
okay, immediately I have to stop liking her at all, look what he made her say:
"Two young ladies have been staying here, but they went away yesterday, in despair; and no wonder. All through their visit (in consequence of Mr. Fairlie's invalid condition) we produced no such convenience in the house as a flirtable, danceable, small-talkable creature of the male sex; and the consequence was, we did nothing but quarrel, especially at dinner-time. How can you expect four women to dine together alone every day, and not quarrel? We are such fools, we can't entertain each other at table. You see I don't think much of my own sex, Mr. Hartright—which will you have, tea or coffee?—no woman does think much of her own sex, although few of them confess it as freely as I do. "
Sod this, I'm going to find a different book. Where was the one someone recced about lesbian private detectives in New York...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-02-23 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-23 05:15 pm (UTC)Julia, OK, one of my random brain dumps, sorry
no subject
Date: 2010-02-23 05:31 pm (UTC)What I was quoting was Wilkie Collins, "The Woman in White". I've read the ending on Wiki instead and I don't think I'm going to miss much by ignoring the thing.
You're right though about how a lot of the unreadability is because subsequent writing ran the tropes into the ground. We're starting at the beginning of the detective story, and it looks clunky from here, cause they were making up the rules. Conan Doyle wrote Holmes partly because he'd read other people's detectives and thought they cheated with the clues not adding up and the solution coming by luck, or so says the book I was reading yesterday. It had an interesting bit about ideology, about the shift from the idea that the world pretty much just happens and sometimes that includes lucky and basically no one person can understand the big mysterious design, to the idea that one person can put clues together and understand not just the past but the future. Difference between medieval and victorian world views. Interesting theory.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-23 05:45 pm (UTC)I think another part of the problem is that the Victorian detective novelists were largely writing works under the influence of people like Ruskin who advocated for pure imagination as opposed to naturalism and causality; it's a weird guiding philosophy for crime writing but casts a long shadow in stuff like American Psycho.
Julia, crime as metaphor and comment on larger society isn't exclusive of crime as scientific puzzle solving, viz Gaudy Night itself, but that divide persists