A Christmas Carol is so wild to me because it takes not one, not two, but like four fucking ghosts to convince this dude not to be the biggest douche in the universe. Like, four fucking ghosts came back from the dead, rose from the Goddamn grave to be like, “I came back from the dead because you need to quit your shit.” Fuck. How big of an asshole do you have to be to have four fucking ghosts tell you to stop?
Have you ever met a rich capitalist
Also, one of those ghosts was a rich capitalist douche. He needed to reform Scrooge to work off his own sentence, didn’t he?
Marley’s ghost basically told Scrooge that if he kept being a greedy douchebag he would go to hell and Scrooge still needed convincing and that honestly is 100% believable to me
That an old rich white guy being told “Your going to hell unless you help the poor” would respond by going “I still kind of want to NOT help the poor tho?”
Charlie Dickens knew what was up.
Dickens had to work in a factory hos entire childhood. His father was thrown in a debtor’s prison. Thats why all his stories are about rich fucks getting owned.
The thing I love about A Christmas Carol is that
at the time he wrote it, Christmas, as a holiday, was on par with our Arbor Day. And Scrooge held the Majority Opinion.
Dickens originally set out to write a Very Serious Pamphlet About the Plight of the Poor in Modern Times, with numbers, and statistics, and gruesome details about the state of debtors prisons. And he realized that it would probably not change a single thing, in the end.
So he changed it to fiction, and made it emotional, and focused on the lives in one specific family. And he also self-published it, because he realized that a for-profit publishing house wouldn’t want to touch it. And gave it to friends.
Not only did it help change people’s attitudes toward charity organizations and help reform labor laws, it also (pretty much) revived the whole custom of celebrating Christmas at all.
That, my friends, is the power of a well written ghost story.
I just looked up this to see if this was true and it is!
The pamphlet was going to be called ‘An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’
He decided to write the story because he realised that soap-boxing factory workers and their employers on the importance of educational reform wasn’t going to work on a society-wide scale.
A Christmas Carol is literally a leftist/socialist story about not being a dickwad to your employees because they’re human too, your ‘fellow man’
I find a big stumbling block that comes with teaching Romeo and Juliet is explaining Juliet’s age. Juliet is 13 – more precisely, she’s just on the cusp of turning 14. Though it’s not stated explicitly, Romeo is implied to be a teenager just a few years older than her – perhaps 15 or 16. Most people dismiss Juliet’s age by saying “that was normal back then” or “that’s just how it was.” This is fundamentally untrue, and I will explain why.
In Elizabethan England, girls could legally marry at 12 (boys at 14) but only with their father’s permission. However, it was normal for girls to marry after 18 (more commonly in early to mid twenties) and for boys to marry after 21 (more commonly in mid to late twenties). But at 14, a girl could legally marry without papa’s consent. Of course, in doing so she ran the risk of being disowned and left destitute, which is why it was so critical for a young man to obtain the father’s goodwill and permission first. Therein lies the reason why we are repeatedly told that Juliet is about to turn 14 in under 2 weeks. This was a critical turning point in her life.
In modern terms, this would be the equivalent of the law in many countries which states children can marry at 16 with their parents’ permission, or at 18 to whomever they choose – but we see it as pretty weird if someone marries at 16. They’re still a kid, we think to ourselves – why would their parents agree to this?
This is exactly the attitude we should take when we look at Romeo and Juliet’s clandestine marriage. Today it would be like two 16 year olds marrying in secret. This is NOT normal and would NOT have been received without a raised eyebrow from the audience. Modern audiences AND Elizabethan audiences both look at this and think THEY. ARE. KIDS.
Critically, it is also not normal for fathers to force daughters into marriage at this time. Lord Capulet initially makes a point of telling Juliet’s suitor Paris that “my will to her consent is but a part.” He tells Paris he wants to wait a few years before he lets Juliet marry, and informs him to woo her in the meantime. Obtaining the lady’s consent was of CRITICAL importance. It’s why so many of Shakespeare’s plays have such dazzling, well-matched lovers in them, and why men who try to force daughters to marry against their will seldom prosper. You had to let the lady make her own choice. Why?
Put simply, for her health. It was considered a scientific fact that a woman’s health was largely, if not solely, dependant on her womb. Once she reached menarche in her teenage years, it was important to see her fitted with a compatible sexual partner. (For aristocratic girls, who were healthier and enjoyed better diets, menarche generally occurred in the early teens rather than the later teens, as was more normal at the time). The womb was thought to need heat, pleasure, and conception if the woman was to flourish. Catholics might consider virginity a fit state for women, but the reformed English church thought it was borderline unhealthy – sex and marriage was sometimes even prescribed as a medical treatment. A neglected wife or widow could become sick from lack of (pleasurable) sex. Marrying an unfit sexual partner or an older man threatened to put a girl’s health at risk. An unsatisfied woman, made ill by her womb as a result – was a threat to the family unit and the stability of society as a whole. A satisfying sex life with a good husband meant a womb that had the heat it needed to thrive, and by extension a happy and healthy woman.
In Shakespeare’s plays, sexual compatibility between lovers manifests on the stage in wordplay. In Much Ado About Nothing, sparks fly as Benedick and Beatrice quarrel and banter, in comparison to the silence that pervades the relationship between Hero and Claudio, which sours very quickly. Compare to R+J – Lord Capulet tells Paris to woo Juliet, but the two do not communicate. But when Romeo and Juliet meet, their first speech takes the form of a sonnet. They might be young and foolish, but they are in love. Their speech betrays it.
Juliet, on the cusp of 14, would have been recognised as a girl who had reached a legal and biological turning point. Her sexual awakening was upon her, though she cares very little about marriage until she meets the man she loves. They talk, and he wins her wholehearted, unambiguous and enthusiastic consent – all excellent grounds for a relationship, if only she weren’t so young.
When Tybalt dies and Romeo is banished, Lord Capulet undergoes a monstrous change from doting father to tyrannical patriarch. Juilet’s consent has to take a back seat to the issue of securing the Capulet house. He needs to win back the prince’s favour and stabilise his family after the murder of his nephew. Juliet’s marriage to Paris is the best way to make that happen. Fathers didn’t ordinarily throw their daughters around the room to make them marry. Among the nobility, it was sometimes a sad fact that girls were simply expected to agree with their fathers’ choices. They might be coerced with threats of being disowned. But for the VAST majority of people in England – basically everyone non-aristocratic – the idea of forcing a daughter that young to marry would have been received with disgust. And even among the nobility it was only used as a last resort, when the welfare of the family was at stake. Note that aristocratic boys were often in the same position, and would also be coerced into advantageous marriages for the good of the family.
tl;dr:
Q. Was it normal for girls to marry at 13?
A. Hell no!
Q. Was it legal for girls to marry at 13?
A. Not without dad’s consent – Friar Lawrence performs this dodgy ceremony only because he believes it might bring peace between the houses.
Q. Was it normal for fathers to force girls into marriage?
A. Not at this time in England. In noble families, daughters were expected to conform to their parents wishes, but a girl’s consent was encouraged, and the importance of compatibility was recognised.
Q. How should we explain Juliet’s age in modern terms?
A. A modern Juliet would be a 17 year old girl who’s close to turning 18. We all agree that girls should marry whomever they love, but not at 17, right? We’d say she’s still a kid and needs to wait a bit before rushing into this marriage. We acknowledge that she’d be experiencing her sexual awakening, but marrying at this age is odd – she’s still a child and legally neither her nor Romeo should be marrying without parental permission.
Q. Would Elizabethans have seen Juliet as a child?
A. YES. The force of this tragedy comes from the youth of the lovers. The Montagues and Capulets have created such a hateful, violent and dangerous world for their kids to grow up in that the pangs of teenage passion are enough to destroy the future of their houses. Something as simple as two kids falling in love is enough to lead to tragedy. That is the crux of the story and it should not be glossed over – Shakespeare made Juliet 13 going on 14 for a reason.
I saw this in my emails and couldn’t see why I’d been tagged in it (all the while nodding vehemently along) and then I saw my tags and ah. Yep. Still forever mad at how badly Shakespeare is taught in most schools.
I find a big stumbling block that comes with teaching Romeo and Juliet is explaining Juliet’s age. Juliet is 13 – more precisely, she’s just on the cusp of turning 14. Though it’s not stated explicitly, Romeo is implied to be a teenager just a few years older than her – perhaps 15 or 16. Most people dismiss Juliet’s age by saying “that was normal back then” or “that’s just how it was.” This is fundamentally untrue, and I will explain why.
In Elizabethan England, girls could legally marry at 12 (boys at 14) but only with their father’s permission. However, it was normal for girls to marry after 18 (more commonly in early to mid twenties) and for boys to marry after 21 (more commonly in mid to late twenties). But at 14, a girl could legally marry without papa’s consent. Of course, in doing so she ran the risk of being disowned and left destitute, which is why it was so critical for a young man to obtain the father’s goodwill and permission first. Therein lies the reason why we are repeatedly told that Juliet is about to turn 14 in under 2 weeks. This was a critical turning point in her life.
In modern terms, this would be the equivalent of the law in many countries which states children can marry at 16 with their parents’ permission, or at 18 to whomever they choose – but we see it as pretty weird if someone marries at 16. They’re still a kid, we think to ourselves – why would their parents agree to this?
This is exactly the attitude we should take when we look at Romeo and Juliet’s clandestine marriage. Today it would be like two 16 year olds marrying in secret. This is NOT normal and would NOT have been received without a raised eyebrow from the audience. Modern audiences AND Elizabethan audiences both look at this and think THEY. ARE. KIDS.
Critically, it is also not normal for fathers to force daughters into marriage at this time. Lord Capulet initially makes a point of telling Juliet’s suitor Paris that “my will to her consent is but a part.” He tells Paris he wants to wait a few years before he lets Juliet marry, and informs him to woo her in the meantime. Obtaining the lady’s consent was of CRITICAL importance. It’s why so many of Shakespeare’s plays have such dazzling, well-matched lovers in them, and why men who try to force daughters to marry against their will seldom prosper. You had to let the lady make her own choice. Why?
Put simply, for her health. It was considered a scientific fact that a woman’s health was largely, if not solely, dependant on her womb. Once she reached menarche in her teenage years, it was important to see her fitted with a compatible sexual partner. (For aristocratic girls, who were healthier and enjoyed better diets, menarche generally occurred in the early teens rather than the later teens, as was more normal at the time). The womb was thought to need heat, pleasure, and conception if the woman was to flourish. Catholics might consider virginity a fit state for women, but the reformed English church thought it was borderline unhealthy – sex and marriage was sometimes even prescribed as a medical treatment. A neglected wife or widow could become sick from lack of (pleasurable) sex. Marrying an unfit sexual partner or an older man threatened to put a girl’s health at risk. An unsatisfied woman, made ill by her womb as a result – was a threat to the family unit and the stability of society as a whole. A satisfying sex life with a good husband meant a womb that had the heat it needed to thrive, and by extension a happy and healthy woman.
In Shakespeare’s plays, sexual compatibility between lovers manifests on the stage in wordplay. In Much Ado About Nothing, sparks fly as Benedick and Beatrice quarrel and banter, in comparison to the silence that pervades the relationship between Hero and Claudio, which sours very quickly. Compare to R+J – Lord Capulet tells Paris to woo Juliet, but the two do not communicate. But when Romeo and Juliet meet, their first speech takes the form of a sonnet. They might be young and foolish, but they are in love. Their speech betrays it.
Juliet, on the cusp of 14, would have been recognised as a girl who had reached a legal and biological turning point. Her sexual awakening was upon her, though she cares very little about marriage until she meets the man she loves. They talk, and he wins her wholehearted, unambiguous and enthusiastic consent – all excellent grounds for a relationship, if only she weren’t so young.
When Tybalt dies and Romeo is banished, Lord Capulet undergoes a monstrous change from doting father to tyrannical patriarch. Juilet’s consent has to take a back seat to the issue of securing the Capulet house. He needs to win back the prince’s favour and stabilise his family after the murder of his nephew. Juliet’s marriage to Paris is the best way to make that happen. Fathers didn’t ordinarily throw their daughters around the room to make them marry. Among the nobility, it was sometimes a sad fact that girls were simply expected to agree with their fathers’ choices. They might be coerced with threats of being disowned. But for the VAST majority of people in England – basically everyone non-aristocratic – the idea of forcing a daughter that young to marry would have been received with disgust. And even among the nobility it was only used as a last resort, when the welfare of the family was at stake. Note that aristocratic boys were often in the same position, and would also be coerced into advantageous marriages for the good of the family.
tl;dr:
Q. Was it normal for girls to marry at 13?
A. Hell no!
Q. Was it legal for girls to marry at 13?
A. Not without dad’s consent – Friar Lawrence performs this dodgy ceremony only because he believes it might bring peace between the houses.
Q. Was it normal for fathers to force girls into marriage?
A. Not at this time in England. In noble families, daughters were expected to conform to their parents wishes, but a girl’s consent was encouraged, and the importance of compatibility was recognised.
Q. How should we explain Juliet’s age in modern terms?
A. A modern Juliet would be a 17 year old girl who’s close to turning 18. We all agree that girls should marry whomever they love, but not at 17, right? We’d say she’s still a kid and needs to wait a bit before rushing into this marriage. We acknowledge that she’d be experiencing her sexual awakening, but marrying at this age is odd – she’s still a child and legally neither her nor Romeo should be marrying without parental permission.
Q. Would Elizabethans have seen Juliet as a child?
A. YES. The force of this tragedy comes from the youth of the lovers. The Montagues and Capulets have created such a hateful, violent and dangerous world for their kids to grow up in that the pangs of teenage passion are enough to destroy the future of their houses. Something as simple as two kids falling in love is enough to lead to tragedy. That is the crux of the story and it should not be glossed over – Shakespeare made Juliet 13 going on 14 for a reason.
I saw this in my emails and couldn’t see why I’d been tagged in it (all the while nodding vehemently along) and then I saw my tags and ah. Yep. Still forever mad at how badly Shakespeare is taught in most schools.
Wait but then why does Juliet’s mother talk about being already married younger than Juliet currently is?
Likely because her match to Juliet’s father was an arranged match to solidify family names and houses in order to avoid conflicts or to establish wealth. (It also serves to denote the tragic undercurrent of the play ie love is secondary to wealth and power.)
It wasn’t so uncommon for children of royalty or nobility to be betrothed from birth, or even symbolically married, in order to make alliances. But that doesn’t mean they were engaging in the kind of adult relationship we envision when we think of marriage today.
Which isn’t to say some people didn’t buck the norm and do horrible things
Margaret Beaufort is a prime example of this, which the Tudors would likely be aware of. Her first marriage contract actually happened when she was one year old. It was later dissolved and she was remarried at the age of 12, and her second husband, Edmund Tudor, did in fact get her pregnant before dying himself. She was 13 years old when she gave birth, and it caused major health issues for her and nearly killed her. When she survived it was considered miraculous. Which should tell you just how not normal this kind of thing was thought of even back then.
I agree with absolutely everything in this thread of discussion. Even so, my long-standing fascination with both Shakespeare and late medieval / early renaissance history makes it impossible for me to to reblog without throwing in my extra few cents:
I. Margaret Beaufort
In my mind, there are few cases that better demonstrate the tensions between medieval norms and medieval realities than that of Margaret Beaufort. Like many other women of her time, she had only one child surviving to adulthood:
Henry Tudor (later Henry VII and the founder of the Tudor dynasty). In that, Margaret wasn’t so remarkable: infant mortality made this a common enough outcome, though undoubtedly a tragic one.
Where Margaret’s case was exceptional is that Henry was also her only known pregnancy, without so much as a stillbirth, infant death, or even another pregnancy ever being mentioned in connection to her. In her own time, it was commonly assumed that her experience of childbirth at a very young age was what accounted for her barrenness, and even to us today, it doesn’t seem implausible to assume some kind of physical trauma that prevented later pregnancies from taking place, given all the medical knowledge we’ve accumulated about the risks of childbirth at either extreme of age.
But there was more to this. The vast Beaufort estate that came with Margaret’s young hand
were so valuable that, to 15th/16th century English minds, it perfectly explained Edmund Tudor’s motives for having been so reckless with the health of his wife: having an heir of his own would ensure that her lands would stay with him, in the name of any children they might have together, whereas the lands would pass to someone else if she should die before having a child. Of course, most men in that situation would have waited anyway, as a child whose mother died in childbirth was much less likely to survive anyway, so contemporaries portrayed Edmund Tudor’s actions as short-sighted and foolhardy at best, amoral and cruel and worst. But Fate must have a sense of irony, because Edmund died before his son was even born,
while
Margaret lived, and as aristocratic women tended to do in those circumstances, she was remarried to Henry Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham.
Since Margaret was Stafford’s first (and only) wife, he would have depended on her to give him any heirs at all, to whom he could pass on the lands he already had, let alone any of Margaret’s own (and it would be logical to assume that the Beaufort inheritance would have been no less tempting to Stafford than it was to Tudor). He must have at least hoped for children from her, and at the time, there wasn’t any reason to expect she was totally barren either: there was the traumatic birth to consider, but she was more physically mature when she remarried, and there was room to hope that widowhood had given her time to recover. And yet, despite all this, it seems few people (if any) were surprised that Margaret did not bear any more children. It didn’t seem to doom her relationship with her second husband either: on the contrary, Margaret enjoyed a happy relationship with Stafford for well over a decade until his death, so if there was any bitterness on his part over his lack of heirs, he must have managed it well. Even in the contemporary sources (who don’t tend to be charitable towards female figures), any blame for her barrenness is laid squarely at the feet of the various men who were her guardians in her early life, who clearly abused their authority over her for their own benefit, rather than to safeguard Margaret’s well-being as guardians are supposed to do (one of them being Edmund Tudor himself… he wasn’t supposed to even be in the running for her wardship, but Henry VI actually outright broke a promise he had made to Margaret’s father to let Margaret’s mother be her guardian in the event of his death).
This indicates to me even more strongly that late-medieval / Tudor people would have not only been sympathetic towards what Margaret and women like her had suffered, but also understood that neglectful attitudes towards the health and happiness of dependents have consequences. Shakespeare’s own words make this clear, at the beginning of the play:
Paris: Younger than she are happy mothers made. Capulet: And too soon marr’d are those so early made.
Tudor audiences would have understood these lines as the words of a benevolent father protecting his daughter from the advances of an overeager young suitor, invoking what seems to have been a Tudor-era trope that early marriages do not make for happy endings… not for the woman,
not for her family or husband, and certainly not for the children she
might otherwise have borne. Because Capulet came off as the “good father” in the beginning of the play, it makes it all the more shocking when his attitude changes and he becomes the all-too-familiar figure of the cold, uncaring patriarch who regards his children only as pawns*.
I imagine the juxtaposition would have invited Tudor audiences to feel
Juliet’s sense of betrayal as if it were happening to them.
* Jane Grey, the famed “nine days’ queen” was also rumored to be such a victim of her parents’ ambition: they also saw fit to force her into a marriage that she seriously objected to, and historical records point a fairly consistent picture of their callous disregard towards her wishes and genuine happiness.
II. Consent in Medieval Marriages
Twelve and fourteen are actually also important numbers in their own right, and Shakespeare’s choice to place Juliet between those two ages has an important symbolic meaning. Late medieval Catholic doctrine defined marriage as a sacrament, like the Eucharist (Communion), or Holy Orders. Many of the sacraments require those who receive them to understand what they’re getting into for the sacrament to have the desired effect. To guarantee understanding (at least from a theological perspective), you would have to be above “the age of reason”, the age at which you were considered to be able to think for yourself. Conservative definitions of the “age of reason” sometimes defined it as the age of fifteen or fourteen (or older), but was later fixed at twelve. Since marriage was one of these sacraments, a marriage where both spouses had not fully and knowingly given their consent was no marriage at all.* Therefore, twelve was considered the absolute lower age limit at which a person could marry without compromising the very spiritual foundation of the marriage itself, while fourteen was considered a safer age at which to assume the person had full control of their reasoning capacities.
The other side of the “consent” coin when it came to marriage was that consent wasn’t just a necessary condition to finalize a marriage, it was also sufficient condition. If a man and a woman had given their knowing consent to marry one another, and if they had intentionally verbalized this promise to one another and consummated their marriage, then no earthly power could invalidate this pact for any reason (outside of a few very specific ones, like incest) without risking damnation. Witnesses were convenient as a way to prove that the marriage had taken place, if a family member or some segment of society disapproved of the match, but they weren’t needed in order to make the marriage spiritually valid.
Basically, the Catholic Church at this stage somehow ended up putting
the idea of consent at the very heart of the idea of what made a marriage valid or not, and this had consequences not only because of the threat of hellfire, but also because Church law was secular
law when it came to domestic matters like marriage and divorce. And
then it came to pass that the English Reformation left this specific
area of the doctrine mostly
untouched, so the Tudors would have had similar ideas surrounding the
question of consent and marriage as did their late medieval forbears.
This theological point is not only the whole raison d’etre for the most central plot device in the play, but also adds an extra note of pathos to Juliet’s situation and an extra layer of moral judgment towards Lord Capulet’s behavior.
If she did not insist on keeping her marriage vow, or if she married
Paris knowing full well that she had already been married, both of those
would be mortal sins
for which she would risk damnation. And by extension, because he used
duress against Juliet to try to make her comply with his sinful wish,
Lord Capulet
has also damned himself (albeit unknowingly, but even so, the narrative
clearly presents forcing his daughter’s marriage as something he should
know better than to do, anyway).
Until this point, Juliet’s marriage is characterized as an impulsive decision such as only foolish youth could make, but ironically, in that confrontation with Lord Capulet, this slip of a young girl is now portrayed as conducting herself with far more spiritual maturity and grace than any of the adults around her. Her parents are failing in their duty towards her by putting their dynastic concerns ahead of her health and happiness (when it’s been made clear they already know this is a Bad Idea), and her Nurse, who actually knows about the secret marriage and all the reasons why it cannot be taken back, is actively pleading with her to just forget it and pretend Romeo never was. Juliet’s choice here is monumental, because it involves not only disregarding her parents, but also an active decision to completely break with the woman who has been with her for literally everything in her life up to that point, a break so thorough that even Nurse herself doesn’t know that it’s happened. This dramatic turning point is a bittersweet portrait of the girl losing her innocence and growing up into an adult, from one angle, and from another angle it’s a paean to the pure-hearted idealism (different from the limpid innocence of childhood in that it’s willful and risk-taking, and fiery in quality) that can only be found in the young. Either way, it does Juliet’s character AND Shakespeare’s dramatic talents a massive disservice to portray her situation as something so simplistic or reactionary as lovelorn pining after an absent boyfriend, or rebelling against her parents, or “staying true to her own heart”.
This wasn’t just a plot device for the stage: many real-life lovers leaned on this feature of the Church’s teachings, when faced with the opposition of their families and communities, and in many cases, the Church was indeed forced to side with the couple, however reluctantly. Margery Paston, the daughter of a genteel landowning family
in the 15th century, and Richard Calle, the Paston family’s longtime housekeeper, were one such case of a real-life Romeo and Juliet: they mutually fell in love, and married in secret when they came up against heavy opposition from Margery’s family. The Pastons responded by separating them, firing Calle from his job and having him sent to London, while Margery remained in Norfolk under house arrest. There, she seems to have been subjected to ongoing and intense pressure to walk back her marriage… if the couple had been married formally in church, this would not have been possible, but secret marriages were vulnerable to challenges like this because they were secret. A witness would have helped her and Calle’s case and made it more airtight, but even if the couple had had any, apparently the Pastons had succeeded in intimidating them into silence.
But even though the Pastons seemed to be winning, it’s hard to believe that bystanders wouldn’t have objected to at least some of what the Pastons were doing to try and get their way. Otherwise, Calle could not have written Margery in 1469, during their separation, saying
“I suppose if you tell them sadly the truth, they will not damn their
souls for us”. Their situation was objectively quite bleak.
For the months they were apart, it was made very clear to both Margery
and Calle that, if the
couple continued to insist on their marriage, the Pastons would disown Margery and throw her out of the house, therefore leaving her with few options for survival, let alone to find her way to Calle over a distance of a hundred miles.
He mournfully acknowledges that their gamble might fail, and their worst fears might come true, but there is also defiance in his resignation, as he concludes, “if they will in no wise agree [to respect our marriage],
between God, the Devil and them be it.”
Margery, for her part, was no less determined. When Margery was finally brought before the local bishop, he turned out to be sympathetic towards the Paston family, and gave Margery a long speech about the importance of pleasing her family and community (so much for the theological importance of consent, but then, clerical hypocrisy was nothing new to medieval people). But Margery remained steadfast (in fact, I am inclined to think from her next words that the bishop’s words only goaded her to greater resolve) and when she spoke, she not only continued to insist that she had said what she had said, but according to her mother she “boldly” added, “if those words made it not sure […] she would make it surer before she went thence, for she said she thought in her conscience she was bound [in marriage to Calle], whatsoever the words were.” Her wording left absolutely no room for doubt in the mind of even the most flexible theologian. And when Calle was cross-examined and his testimony found to match that of Margery’s, the bishop of Norfolk had no choice but to rule in the couple’s favor.
Margery’s mother did indeed make good on her word: she did both disown Margery and throw her out of the house. She seemed to have done it more to save face, however, than to actually punish her daughter, since she does seem to have made arrangements behind the scenes for Margery to stay with sympathetic neighbors. In the end, Calle was right, the Pastons were not willing to risk their own souls. Margery and Richard Calle got their happy ending, and had at least three children (and we know about them because we know Margery’s mother left them money in her own will).
*
This also meant that Edmund Tudor actually would have been Margaret Beaufort’s first
husband, not her second. It was true that she had already been “in a
marriage” before being married later to Tudor, but strictly speaking, it
was only a precontract (what we today would think of as an engagement)
with signficance limited to the secular realm; there are a lot of
reasons this would not have really been considered a marriage at the
time, but the most theologically pertinent one is that the bride’s
consent could not have been involved, because she was too young to be
able to give it. Consequently, this paper marriage was easily
dissolved as soon as her guardians thought it more politically expedient
to marry her to Edmund Tudor.
And for all intents and purposes, Margaret Beaufort herself considered
Tudor to be her first husband, not John de la Pole.
tl;dr: the study of Shakespeare cannot be separated from historical and societal understanding of the times he lived in, and frankly, it’s a terrible shame that English classes don’t emphasize this more, because then you’re throwing out about 80% of the meaning his works actually hold.
Sorry to keep reblogging this long post but holy shit this is an excellent addition. Thank you for taking the time to write all that up.
i am eternally aggreived on behalf of people who were clearly never taught what literary analysis can be. people who were never shown the incredible satisfaction when you see something in a piece of literature and you can /prove/ it’s there, the slow and careful tugging at an image, at chasing implication and meaning, at pushing and pushing until it all falls into place.
sometimes that looks like catching a “throwaway” line in a novel (“[the drawings] remembered Beardsley”) and chasing that single image until you have five thousand words about attempted freedom, conformity, and inescapability.
sometimes that looks like noticing a motif of reused roman ruins and going through and through until you can argue about colonising gaze and welsh devolution.
sometimes that means reading a novel where every chapter tells a story of someone telling a story and proving that that is an attempt at catharsis that fails.
it’s not all “the curtains are blue therefore the character is sad”
and besides, that’s actually “this character seems sad but the author never says so > how does the author create that? > oh hey there sure are a lot of washed out or cool colours in this scene > wait hold on the furnishings are almost obsessively described > does that say something about material culture? can i parallel that against appearances vs reality? > “in this essay i will argue that this short story interrogates arts and crafts aesthetic ideals by portraying an obsession with furnishings that ultimately leads the main character into despair. In order to do so let me first demonstate the connection between the furnishings and the emotional state of the main character”
If I may add on to this: I study English lit at uni, and I struggled with it for a little while because I didn’t truly understand what I was writing about. There would be little glimmers of things that caught my eye and excited me in my essays, but a lot of it was just regurgitating other people’s arguments. And a lot of my class felt the same way, they kept saying that they couldn’t have their own opinions because they had to back everything up with sources, and how everything felt like a reach. And I will admit i did, and sometimes still do, refer to essay writing as the academic circlejerk. It seemed like everything was just grasping at circumstantial evidence to back up an argument made in the 70s!
But THEN, I think the moment it really clicked for me was last semester. I was taking a class on gothic literature which I was really excited about, and I pushed myself to read all the extra material, which was really easy because I actually enjoyed it and engaged with it! I was chewing through heavy theories and as I read then I was making connections back to my notes and actually really enjoying the process. I would show up to class like a conspiracy theorist with red string links between x theory and y text and z cultural phenomenon. So when it came to writing my essays I already had things that fascinated me enough to dig into.
I wrote about how Kristeva’s theories of abjection (how horror can be created by transcending physical boundaries, and how the (cis) female form is inherently abject due to its childbirth abilities) permeated the female driven narratives of the texts we studied. How it intertwined with theories of the grotesque and reinforced the otherness of the characters. How the stories reinforce or subvert the marginalisation of these women through these devices.
I spent months of that class arguing with my teacher and my class about the way witchcraft is represented in british folk horror, and so I took that frustration and I turned it into another essay. I wrote about the way witchcraft is used as an easy signpost for evilness and otherness in these stories, and how it is often removed from its historical context and yet irrevocably linked to it, so by showing witchcraft as a simple force of evil which threatens rational peoples despite the fact that it was a way to oppress marginalised groups, we reinforce that cultural knee jerk response to otherness, prioritise ‘British rationality’ which is constructed through stories like these, and never challenge the preconceptions of the readership. ‘Why should we fear otherness?’ I ranted, backed up with academic sources, ‘look at the society we have created through this mentality’.
I ended up getting some of the best grades of my life that semester. Every assignment I did across the board got a 1st degree grade. That’s not a brag, it was a breakthrough for me, realising that if I let myself enjoy the process and get experimental and write about things I cared about, then that would be reflected in the work I was producing.
It has opened my eyes as well, and I see these connections in everything I read. Some people say it ruins books to read them like this, but it makes them all the more wonderful to me. Critical analysis of text trains your brain to make connections and unearth meaning, and it helps you reassess or reinforce the way you look at the world. The way literature shapes it and reflects it. For two and a half years I thought my classes were just a fun piss take, and I’m so sad that I didn’t appreciate them more and sooner.
Tl;dr – listen to your English teachers!
As a recovering English major, I endorse this post.
Also: The kind thought this process primes your brain for is one of the most undervalued skills in our society today. We laugh at English majors and Art history majors, because poetry and novels and paintings are “merely decorative,” and have no bearing on The Market – like Statistics and Engineering do.
But once you learn how to follow the thread of an idea through a story (or multiple stories), and articulate its political implications in the culture at large, then you can use those same skills on politicians’ speeches, and advertising, and all the other ways language is used to leverage power.
There’s a reason “The Pen is Mightier than the Sword” is a truism.
Everything We Do Is A Narrative.
This includes things like Science and Engineering: they turn numbers into stories.
Understanding how the human mind creates narratives will help you understand how scientific theories are developed – and the hidden assumptions they contain. It will help you understand how and why structures and systems are designed, and heir failure modes.
Everything We Do Is A Narrative.
Precisely.
Here’s an excerpt of an essay I wrote on Storytelling some 20-ish years ago (edited to fix spelling errors, and to bold my thesis statement):
Humans are the only [creatures] I’ve
seen who gather in large groups and focus all their attention on one
among them, who, alone, does all the speaking. The crowd falls silent.
Their eyes get wide. Their jaws go slack. And, except for inching
forward to the edge of their seats, they remain motionless. In other
words, humans are the only creatures I’ve seen that engage in storytelling.
Even babies and toddlers who have not yet mastered speech sit still
longer for a story than for other activities. It’s not a phase we
outgrow, either – to our dying day, we find joy in telling and
listening to stories. And, just as there is no time in our individual
lives when stories do not move us, there is no human culture on Earth
without its own, unique body of stories. Since it is both unique to,
and universal among, humans, I cannot help but think that is
storytelling, rather than language, per se, that separates us from other animals. Perhaps our languages became so complex and varied because we needed
them to be in order to tell better stories. You can tell simple
stories, after all, without any language, by acting them out, or drawing
a picture. But with language, you have the tools of metaphor, idiom,
inflection and rhythm – all features that give each language on Earth
its own distinct beauty, and all features which draw in an audience’s
attention and holds it.
When we gather for a story (whether
literally, as around a campfire, or figuratively, as when we go to the
movies, watch T.V. or buy a book), we surrender our imaginations to the storyteller’s control.
We abandon, for a while, our private worries, speculations, and
daydreams, to experience a vision created by someone else. A skilled
storyteller can hold and shape our attention, knowing when to fan the
flames of our emotion, and when to let them die down, until the balance
of energy is just right, until that focused energy is released with the
final word. This ability to share our visions, to hold and guide the
attention of our comrades must have helped us hunt animals bigger
and stronger than ourselves, to plant and gather our crops, and to
build our shining cities. The world we live in today has been shaped by
the stories told in our past. And the world of our future is being
shaped by the stories of today.
I was quite glad to receive this post in my dash because for the past three weeks of 11th grade I’ve come to realize how random English in is taught in America. In my AP English Language class, half of the students who had this one teacher in 10th grade, knew grammar really well, while the other half were absolutely lost. However, above all, the number one problem for everyone was that no one could really say that they knew how to write an essay or analyze text. For years of my life, my english classes were always repetitively, memorize vocabulary, read a book, take a test on vocabulary, take a test on the reading, random essay here and there, every single year. I don’t remember ever once understanding how to truly write an essay. An essay that is more than just words in a sentence on paper, but one that can grasp my reader. I don’t ever remember really understanding the complexity and the depth of the words of the author. We were always thrown into doing all of these things without ever being taught how to do it in the first place. Similarly to what is said above, I do not understand what I am arguing for when I write an essay. I’ve come to realize how inept I am when it comes to creative writing, especially after realizing that I want to make a comic. This is partly due to the fact that for years it was always academic writing only. No room for creativity. No room to explore. None. After finding my newfound passion for story telling, I’ve found many more topics that I’ve become interested for the sake of story telling. I want to learn creative writing. I want to learn how to improve my writing. I want to learn the skill of literary analysis. If anyone has tips, advice, or materials/sources to recommend to me please freely message me.
hey gyns let me plug a book for a second. its a childhood favorite of mine, but its also one of the best fairy tale books for little girls, imho. its called ‘the serpent slayer: and other stories of strong women’, and its a collection of fairy tales from around the world whose main characters are women. some of my favorite stories from it include:
neesowa and the chenoo – when an injured chenoo (an evil, cannibalistic monster) stumbles upon neesowa’s camp, she throws the monster off balance by treating him with kindness and sharing her home with him as he recovers, which pays off when another chenoo attacks her camp.
grandmother skull – a young woman, neruvana, marries a man who kills her entire family and abandons her. thankfully, the skull of her grandmother comes to life to teach her how to survive and to help her get revenge.
beebyeebyee and the water god – a young woman, beebyeebyee, falls in love with a water god who is slain by the envious people of her village. she gets revenge.
three whiskers from a lions chin – maria wants to help her husband, who returned from war a changed man, and the local bruja sends her off to get three whiskers from a lions chin, apparently a key ingredient in a magic spell that will bring her husband back to himself. when she brings the whiskers back to the bruja, the woman explains that there is no magic spell, but that with time, and the same patience she used to get the whiskers, she can help her husband recover.
the old woman and the devil – a brilliant old woman faces off with the devil in a bet to convince him to leave her spot in the shade. she outwits him, and undoes the harm he did as well.
duffy the lady – a version of rumplestiltskin where a housekeeper who cant knit or spin accepts a deal with a devil who will do the tasks for her for three years, if she will marry him at the end of the three years if she cannot guess his name. spoiler alert: she can.
sister lace – a creation myth about the stars, when the emperor hears of sister lace’s incredible lace-making abilities, he has her brought to the palace and ordered to marry him. when she refuses, he has her imprisoned unless she can spin him a live rooster. her skill and blood bring the bird to life, but she remains imprisoned, until, eventually, she finds her way out.
a marriage of two masters – a very intelligent young woman who speaks only in riddles meets a man who sees the world the same way, and as they decipher one anothers riddles, they fall in love.
clever marcella – marcella, a genius, fascinates the prince, and they agree to marry, provided she not interfere with his rule. when she feels compelled to challenge a ridiculous ruling he made on a case, he orders her to take whatever she likes from the palace and then leave. she solves the problem as anyone in love would, compels the prince to see the error of his ways, and becomes the kingdoms chief justice.
the rebel princess – to escape an unwanted arranged marriage, judith and her ladies-in-waiting take to the open sea. when they come across a ship of pirates who decide they will each marry one of the women, the crew steal their clothes, their treasure, and their lives. by the end of the story, judith has been crowned king in place of an heir-less king who drowned.
its just a really, really good book, with a portrayal of women that most fairy tales dont have. theyre kind and wise mentors and teachers, not wicked stepmothers and ugly hags, and an undeveloped marriage to a man isnt their be-all and end-all. i really encourage you to get a copy for any little girls in your life, especially who enjoy fairy tales.
Sounds awesome!
THE ILLUSTRATOR IS TRINA SCHART HYMAN WHO WAS A FANTASTICALLY COOL LADY THAT YOU SHOULD READ ABOUT AND ADMIRE AS MUCH AS I GREW UP DOING AND WHO PROBABLY DESERVES HER OWN WONDERFULLY ILLUSTRATED FAIRY TALE
me externally: lit teachers arent pulling text analysis out of their asses
me internally: the reason people and especially students like to blame English for seemingly making up meanings where they cant see it is because literature is an art and art is widely regarded as ‘easy’, ‘anyone can do that’, ‘its stupid and useless’ unlike math and science which are widely regarded as difficult but important subjects so while students will readily admit that they have trouble with math or science they’re more likely to shift the blame when they dont understand a more artistic subject, seeing it as a sign of weakness that they dont get something thats supposed to be dumb and easy rather than seeing it as an important topic that’s just as crucial to their knowledge as any stem subject and just as difficult and in-depth as any math or science can be
“As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don’t like. For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.”
— W.H. Auden, A Certain World
What about 6, I can see this is trash and with perseverance I might start to like it; 7 I can see this is good and while I like it now I might not like it if I keep seeing it; 8 I can see this is trash and I like it now but probably not forever; 9 I can see this is good but it has problematic aspects which might make me change my mind later to think it’s trash (and I like it/10 don’t like it/11 may grow to like it/12 may grow to dislike it); 13 I can see that this is trash and contains good elements which I may later think more important (and I like it/14 don’t like it/15 may grow to like it/16 may grow to dislike it).
16 possible verdicts.
**What we consider good and trash can change over time, likes and dislikes may change over time
**Auden neglects to add that disliked trash may grow to be liked b/c of a moralistic implication that if it is trash, it is bad, and if it is trash and bad and we dislike it, we should not “persevere” in trying to like it b/c it is bad and trying to like bad things makes us bad… One hot take.
I’m up late working and watching a documentary on Netflix in the background about Steampunk (Vintage Tomorrows, for anyone interested) as a social movement and while a lot of it is very cool, valid and punk, I just heard the words “appropriating our culture” and I had to pause what I was doing, pull the tab up in full and rewind cause there was no way I heard that right, but no.
There’s some people out there thinking kids dressing up in grunge goth gear from Hot Topic is cultural appropriation.
Bonus point for epic fail: it was said by a white mad with dreads.
Yikes.
Like he had me before, he had some really good points about diversifying the genre and wanting to make the world better through a new wave of steampunk ideals, surrounding ingenuity and freedom to create and just general punkness.
And then those words fell out of his mouth and my whole brain stopped so hard it flipped over the handlebars of my reasoning and now I’m just sort of mentally sprawled out and stunned, because what.
Also, I’m sorry, but not everyone can afford to custom build their own aesthetics or to pay the cost of an etsy seller.
Not all of us have the time, the money, or even the physical means to look like we just waltzed out of a retro-future-scape to stick it to the man. But we still love the aesthetic, we still want to be part of things. Should we be excluded because our $20 t-shirt was mass produced? Or should you be re-evaluating the accessibility of this innovative culture you’re so concerned about being tainted by filthy casuals.
Like is it a cultural movement seeking to change the way we view technology and our access to it, or is it select cosplay group for able bodied people with time and money to spare?
Which is it?
I used to custom make a lot of my own steampunk gear, and what I could not make, I used to source from skilled sellers. But y’know what, my hands stopped working the way I wanted them to, so I had to give all that up. I also lost a lot of income when that happened, which meant I could no longer afford to buy things from more unique sellers. But I still want to be part of something that used to feel so welcoming in my early 20s! I still want to partake and enjoy the aesthetic, and if my only way of doing that is a $20 t-shirt from redbubble and a pair of goggles from eBay, I refuse to be made to feel bad over that!
You can talk a big game all you like about sustainability and innovation and saving the world through higher ideals, but when your movement is tailored to a specific aesthetic that is extremely expensive to create and buy, you are not being part of an accessible cultural shift. And you are most certainly not being punk.
“How dare these people take an interest in our culture.”
A culture based around a sub genre of science fiction? A sub genre with problematic roots in the idealization of colonialism, cultural eradication in the name of science and “progress” and innovations of industrialization on the backs of the common working man?
The culture you are referring to, in terms of being appropriated, because someone bought a t-shirt from Hot Topic because they liked how it looked?
That culture.
I see.
No.
You don’t get decide who is punk enough. You don’t get to gatekeep something like this, especially something built on the back of subversivefiction. You do not get to discourage people from exploring something new, or to put them down because they cannot afford to do it to your exacting standards.
Everyone starts somewhere in exploring new ideas. Not everyone gets the same starting point in life as you.
It takes money to live comfortably with nothing. It takes financial and social security. It takes resources and time and physical capability.
And I’m sorry if that offends you, and I’m sure it’s hard going through life with your head stuck up your bottom like that, but the punk solution is not to alienate the people trying to become involved with something new, but to make your ideals and culture more readily accessible and less daunting to engage with.
And less heaped in a side helping of prideful hubris and snobbery.
Maybe I’m fixating too much on this, maybe he didn’t mean it and was just having a bad day, but this is the first real comprehensive documentary I’ve seen about steampunk as a cohesive movement and not just a type of fiction with gears on, and we’ve got this walnut right smack bang in the middle trying to keep the other kids from playing with his favorite toys, which is not what this kind of thing should be about.
You want to tall about subverting the norms, you want to be progressive and overthrow an unjust world, you want to talk about the problematic origins of XYZ and how to make them right, and you want more people to be awake and aware that there is more than just one way to live this life: then you god damn extend a hand in friendship. You invite them in, you make your world tangible as much as you can, and you make it for others to enjoy too, not just you.
“You can’t play with us, you’re just doing this cause it’s cool”, is not the way to do that. And for being a movement about innovation and ingenuity, you think they’d be better at realizing that.
“We regularly ask teenage girls to read books in which characters degrade women, expecting them to understand that the book’s other merits outweigh its misogyny. To set such an expectation and not consider its effect on young women is foolish and hypocritical; we rarely expect young men to do the same, and hardy ever expect young white men to read extensively in traditions where their identities aren’t represented or are degraded. We need to reflect on the way the literature we celebrate supports the idea that women who are sexually frustrated create problems for themselves, while men in the same situation create problems for the world. Though the links are subtle, our celebration of a canon of sad white boy literature affects the way we think, and how much tolerance we offer to men like [Alek] Minassian and [Elliot] Rodger.”
Queer Fiction Writer 