English is Weird, Man…
I started drafting this entry while traveling in the UK. And while I am a “native English speaker,” I’m an American, and so hearing the English speak English always comes with some wee disconnects in my brain.
For one thing, posh British accents are so often used in Hollywood to indicate villainy. Have you noticed that? I’m not sure how much of that is the historical reliance on all those theater-trained British actors to play the heavy, and how much is a kind of Revolutionary War holdover here in the former colonies?
This was in my mind when we went to see some Shakespeare at The Globe: a production of Richard III with an all-female/AFAB cast which characterized RIII as a Trumpian womanizer. (“When you’re king, they just let you do it.”) I quite enjoyed the cognitive dissonance of the cross-gendered casting and the way it highlighted the theme of the many female characters in the story opposing him. But I had to remind myself that the British accent wasn’t one of the affectations to make Richard seem even more evil!
The other thing is that so much British English sounds, well, vaguely smutty? I think maybe that’s because so much of the British English that survives in American carries with it a kind of Victorian repression or understatement in it, where non-dirty words are used to stand in for the vulgar ones. The result is that sometimes a station announcement on the Tube produced snickers from not only me, but also, for example, drunk Australians. (“Cockfosters…! Wherezzat!”)
You could play erotic Mad Libs with the names on the National Rail. “He dropped his Hassocks to reveal Burgess Hill. Her Hayward Heath tingled.”
The third thing is that having grown up with so many British children’s books and fantasy books, actual British names just sound made up to us Americans. We took the train from Gatwick to Cambridge for the Cambridge Folk Festival, and after hearing the list of stations, corwin turned to me somewhere between Horley and Hitchin and said “These all sound fake. Those can’t be real places.”
This was not my first trip to England, but it was the first that was not for Harry-Potter-fandom purposes. Perhaps because of that, or perhaps because of how I’ve distanced myself after JKR’s anti-trans outbursts (if you missed it, she just fomented an Internet mob to attack two cis women athletes at the Olympics by accusing them of being trans), it became clear to me for the first time how many things that seemed brilliantly charming or whimsically original in the Harry Potter books are actually just … British?
That feeling struck me often, but particularly inside the Wren Library at Trinity College which is so very Hogwartian… except of course it’s the other way around, what with the Wren Library being there since 1676. I also felt it in Flourish & Blotts Hatchard’s Bookshop. The many nooks and crannies one goes through to find the women’s room in Harrod’s definitely could have led to the Ministry of Magic. I much preferred Fortnum and Mason, which was basically Honeydukes for adults, selling gin and tipples, tea, charcuterie, etc instead of candy.
It was also interesting to be traveling where the British belonged, rather than somewhere their colonial influence shaped, like Singapore. I came to no grand conclusion about it all, but as I’m just now releasing a Victorian erotic steampunk novella, it heightens my awareness of my portrayal of British characters. I stand by my intention in The Blossoms of Summer to both pay homage to the spirit of the adventuring naturalists of the age and also to critique colonialism and exoticization.
Yeah, another erotica piece with dual underlying purpose. I suppose the tension between love and hate just part of what drives my muse. In the end, I just hope people find it hot, though!
Speaking of The Blossoms of Summer…
It’s up for pre-order now, and I’m looking for a few more folks who want to review it? So if you think some nominally het erotic steampunk in which an adventuring botanist is sent to China to retrieve specimens and gets a far more erotic adventure than he was expecting might be your cup of tea, and you’d be willing to review it on Goodreads, Amazon, or elsewhere, drop me email at ctan.writer(at)gmail.com and I’ll send you the ebooks!
Pre-order links if you’d like to support your trusty erotica writer:
Mockups of the cover, not to scale! The actual paperback is only 40 pages thick.
Mirrored from cecilia tan.