(no subject)
rymenhild recommended me Blindspot, by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, by the simple expedient of informing me that it was an eighteenth-century comedy-of-manners pastiche featuring a cross-dressing lady. "SOLD!" said I, because I am an easy sell, and promptly requested it from the library.
My experience of reading Blindspot went something like this:
STEWART JAMESON: Hello! I am a dashing and talented, but fiscally reckess and debt-saddled Scottish painter who is fleeing creditors in England to make a new life in this charming little backwater colony of Boston. So far it is working out pretty well for me! HOWEVER I am having some problems related to my strangely attractive new apprentice boy. I am actually pretty conflicted because -
BECCA, CONNOISSEUR OF CROSS-DRESSING TROPES: Right, right, because you don't understand why you're attracted to a dude and are having agonizing questions about your sexuality?
STEWART JAMESON: Actually, I am totally okay with being attracted to guys. I have slept with plenty of them! I mean, maybe I like girls a little more, basically on the Kinsey scale I'd say I'm somewhere around a 2 - but anyway, the actual problem is that he's still pretty young, and no matter how much he says he's into me I'm his boss and so the power dynamics are kind of sketchy and uncomfortable-making there, am I right? So I figure, better not.
BECCA: Okay, Stewart Jameson, you can stay.
FANNY EASTON/FRANCIS WESTON: I have suffered a Dickensian life of great misfortune, including fleeing a life of privilege and losing a baby and being a prostitute for a while and working in an eighteenth-century sweatshop. Some light-hearted comic gender confusion is sounding pretty good to me now, so I decided to switch genres and become a cross-dressing heroine!
BECCA: Fanny, you are interesting, but - I hate to say it - I'm not sure you really add up as a character. Also, I am really not sure I buy you writing all this out in long epistolary letters to your sheltered childhood BFF.
FANNY EASTON/FRANCIS WESTON: Oh, come on, it's a genre convention, cut me some slack!
BECCA: All right, Fanny, you can stay too.
DR. IGNATIUS ALEXANDER: I was born into slavery, became an Oxford-educated, medically-trained doctor, ended up enslaved again in Virginia thanks to the well-intentioned idiocies of my sometime boyfriend Stewart Jameson, and am now in hiding. I have decided to dedicate my life to eradicating the evil of slavery upon which this whole society is built, but I suppose while I'm stuck here in Boston with you two I can also use my enormous Holmesian brain to fight crime.
BECCA: . . . Dr. Ignatius Alexander, you can stay FOREVER. *___*
DR. IGNATIUS ALEXANDER: Of course, it would be slightly easier if I didn't have to constantly keep reminding Stewart and Fanny that there are more important things going on in this novel than their sex drives.
BECCA: Dude, I couldn't agree more! We could probably cut two hundred pages of padding out of this five-hundred-page book if two leads were capable of focusing on things that were not their libidos. I do appreciate that this is interestingly queer het, but all the same, towards the end, that is kind of a lot of porn when we have an actual serious-business plot to be getting on with, and it makes you two seem more self-involved than I think you really want.
STEWART AND FANNY: . . . we also talk about painting!
BECCA: *stern* The sexy kind of painting?
STEWART AND FANNY: . . . maybe.
DR. IGNATIUS ALEXANDER: Basically, if I was not around, nothing would ever get done.
BECCA: Seriously. So, Dr. Alexander, why aren't you narrating any of the story again? I mean, I like the others okay, but you are twice as interesting, and three times as smart, and have a much angstier backstory, and -
DR. IGNATIUS ALEXANDER: Madam, as I explicitly say somewhere in the middle of the book, I would prefer not to have my personal tragedies appropriated by white authors, so can we simply allow me to continue being the mastermind in the background manipulating everyone to my own ruthless-but-noble ends? Besides, Sherlock Holmes never narrates his own stories.
BECCA: That may be a facile argument, Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky; nonetheless, touche.
My experience of reading Blindspot went something like this:
STEWART JAMESON: Hello! I am a dashing and talented, but fiscally reckess and debt-saddled Scottish painter who is fleeing creditors in England to make a new life in this charming little backwater colony of Boston. So far it is working out pretty well for me! HOWEVER I am having some problems related to my strangely attractive new apprentice boy. I am actually pretty conflicted because -
BECCA, CONNOISSEUR OF CROSS-DRESSING TROPES: Right, right, because you don't understand why you're attracted to a dude and are having agonizing questions about your sexuality?
STEWART JAMESON: Actually, I am totally okay with being attracted to guys. I have slept with plenty of them! I mean, maybe I like girls a little more, basically on the Kinsey scale I'd say I'm somewhere around a 2 - but anyway, the actual problem is that he's still pretty young, and no matter how much he says he's into me I'm his boss and so the power dynamics are kind of sketchy and uncomfortable-making there, am I right? So I figure, better not.
BECCA: Okay, Stewart Jameson, you can stay.
FANNY EASTON/FRANCIS WESTON: I have suffered a Dickensian life of great misfortune, including fleeing a life of privilege and losing a baby and being a prostitute for a while and working in an eighteenth-century sweatshop. Some light-hearted comic gender confusion is sounding pretty good to me now, so I decided to switch genres and become a cross-dressing heroine!
BECCA: Fanny, you are interesting, but - I hate to say it - I'm not sure you really add up as a character. Also, I am really not sure I buy you writing all this out in long epistolary letters to your sheltered childhood BFF.
FANNY EASTON/FRANCIS WESTON: Oh, come on, it's a genre convention, cut me some slack!
BECCA: All right, Fanny, you can stay too.
DR. IGNATIUS ALEXANDER: I was born into slavery, became an Oxford-educated, medically-trained doctor, ended up enslaved again in Virginia thanks to the well-intentioned idiocies of my sometime boyfriend Stewart Jameson, and am now in hiding. I have decided to dedicate my life to eradicating the evil of slavery upon which this whole society is built, but I suppose while I'm stuck here in Boston with you two I can also use my enormous Holmesian brain to fight crime.
BECCA: . . . Dr. Ignatius Alexander, you can stay FOREVER. *___*
DR. IGNATIUS ALEXANDER: Of course, it would be slightly easier if I didn't have to constantly keep reminding Stewart and Fanny that there are more important things going on in this novel than their sex drives.
BECCA: Dude, I couldn't agree more! We could probably cut two hundred pages of padding out of this five-hundred-page book if two leads were capable of focusing on things that were not their libidos. I do appreciate that this is interestingly queer het, but all the same, towards the end, that is kind of a lot of porn when we have an actual serious-business plot to be getting on with, and it makes you two seem more self-involved than I think you really want.
STEWART AND FANNY: . . . we also talk about painting!
BECCA: *stern* The sexy kind of painting?
STEWART AND FANNY: . . . maybe.
DR. IGNATIUS ALEXANDER: Basically, if I was not around, nothing would ever get done.
BECCA: Seriously. So, Dr. Alexander, why aren't you narrating any of the story again? I mean, I like the others okay, but you are twice as interesting, and three times as smart, and have a much angstier backstory, and -
DR. IGNATIUS ALEXANDER: Madam, as I explicitly say somewhere in the middle of the book, I would prefer not to have my personal tragedies appropriated by white authors, so can we simply allow me to continue being the mastermind in the background manipulating everyone to my own ruthless-but-noble ends? Besides, Sherlock Holmes never narrates his own stories.
BECCA: That may be a facile argument, Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky; nonetheless, touche.