Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frances Hodgson Burnet’s A Lady of Quality, which is interesting in part because it is such a contrast to Emily in The Making of a Marchioness. Emily’s chief quality is her good cheer, her patience, and her massive, massive gratitude once her Marquis proposes to her.

I get why she’s so grateful - she was looking at a long and lonely life and a probably-poverty-stricken death otherwise - but still, sometimes I just wanted to say to her, “Have a little self respect! Or at least do something to make me think there’s more to your relationship with the really rather selfish marquis than the fact that you are so, so grateful to him?”

Clorinda, the heroine of A Lady of Quality, is quite the opposite. She comes into the world shrieking like a banshee, and by the age of six her terrific willpower (and lung capacity, and willingness to kick and hit and shriek) have terrified all the servants into doing her will despite the fact that her father takes no interest in his children. But then he meets Clorinda, and makes a pet of her because he is so charmed by her fury and her beauty.

Clorinda’s beauty. Oh, man, Clorinda’s beauty. Like Cedric’s incredible handsomeness in Little Lord Fauntleroy, Clorinda’s beauty gets described every other page. I don’t even think I’m exaggerating. And in both books it gets so repetitive, I kept hoping Cedric or Clorinda would fall off horses and break their noses or do something to mar their looks, but nooo. And doubtless they would have been beautiful with broken noses, anyway.

(And then a bunch of other stuff happens to Clorinda: her childhood is actually rather a small part of the book. It’s a very odd book, perhaps especially for a Victorian book, although I don’t think a standard modern heroine could get away with some of the things Clorinda does. At any rate, I can’t remember the last book I read that presented the heroine beating a horse into submission as a sign of her own high spirit and willpower.)

What I’m Reading Now

Les Miz, for the foreseeable future. Javert and Valjean are playing cat and mouse through the streets of Paris.

Also also, I’m reading Maria Cummins’ The Lamplighter, which is a sentimentalist bestseller from the 1850s about a little girl named Gertie, who lives a terrible and squalid life, unloved by anyone, until she is taken in by the lamplighter - who is named, with one of those wonderful mid-century novel names, Trueman Flint. He is from New England. His name is the most New English of names.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have been thinking that as this summer I am taking French class, I should make this a Summer of French: French class, French classics (all the Hugo! more Zola!), French movies, and of course French desserts.

I need to decide which Zola novels to read, because he wrote approximately five zillion. Does anyone have Zola opinions?

Firefly Wednesday: Jaynestown

One of the few things I like about Mal is his relationship with Kaylee. He has a sort of older-brotherly or perhaps fatherly air toward her, in a gentle, caring, not-at-all-overbearing way. The scene in Jaynestown where Kaylee and Simon are hitting it off in the bar and Mal is all, "It's time to go!" Priceless.

Kaylee: But things are going well! (Significant Look at Simon. He's just told her that she's pretty, in his awkward Simon way. )

Mal: Oh. I...will leave you here to...look after Jayne, then?

Kaylee: (nodnodnod)

Of course, I think it says something about Mal that he is only capable of forming this relationship with the one person on his crew who not only would never question his authority, but views him with the trusting awe usually reserved for small children toward their parents: there's an earlier episode where Kaylee is all, "Cap'n said he'd take care of it," and it's clear that in her mind, when Mal has said he will do something, God himself could not stop him.

I think this child-like quality is both part of the reason I like Kaylee so much, and part of the reason that I have reservations about her relationship with Simon. Although oddly it does not bother me with regard to Kaylee/Inara. Possibly because Kaylee is never like, "INARA, your fancy-schmancy ways make me feel inadequate/feel like you think I'm inadequate, and therefore YOU SHOULD CHANGE."

Whereas this is one of the keynotes of her conversations with Simon. I feel like "I want you to change a lot!" is never a good starting point for a relationship.

Of course, Inara doesn't give the impression that she thinks she's better than other people, whereas Simon is so awkward that he totally gives that impression, even when he doesn't actually think that. (And I bet he does sometimes feel better than other people, although probably not better than Kaylee in particular.)

...And most of the rest of the episode is about Jayne. I must confess, I have never particularly cared about Jayne. In show, I find it baffling that Mal didn't think he needed to find his crew a tank who will actually be loyal.

On a more meta level, I find it exasperating that the show keeps flirting with the idea that Jayne will totes betray them, even though it is clear that the gods of the narrative will never allow Jayne to successfully betray anyone (and no one seems to hold his attempts against him, either). The show wants to have the frisson of danger that a possibly traitorous character can give, without actually dealing with the fact that this would be massively disruptive for ship camaraderie.