(no subject)
I seem to be on a bit of a classics kick at the moment. After Anna Karenina, I got stuck into Dangerous Liaisons which I just finished a couple-three days ago. (Am I writing in American? What's going on here??) It was the most deliciously indulgent and sexy book I've read for a looong time. I think I properly have a thing for Cécile. It is always very refreshing to read 18th-century books, because you (by which I mean I) always forget how much more explicit and outrageous they are than the 19th-century ones. Madame de Merteuil is just made of awesome - all right, she's pretty awful and manipulative, but you can't help feeling she at least does things her way and it's very nice to see a woman for a change shown as the smartest and most kick-ass motherfucker in the cast. Laclos was very into women's rights, he wrote a big treatise on it in the 1790s. The French government got straight on it, giving women the right to vote a mere century and a half later!
When you put the book down, you can't help feeling a bit unnerved by how sensual it all is - because a lot of what they refer to as "seduction" is what a modern writer would find it hard to avoid calling "rape". Yet he still makes it all seem very sexy. I'm sorry but he does!
I felt a bit sorry for Merteuil at the end. You want to see her punished up to a point, and I relished the whole scene where she goes to the opera and gets shunned by Society, but then was it really necessary to give her smallpox and make her lose a frickin' eye into the bargain? I hate it when books do that. It reminds me of the way you're only allowed to forgive Mr Rochester after he gets disfigured, and something similar happens at the end of Aurora Leigh (anyone else read that? It's awesome).
On a completely unrelated note, I need to correct something I posted about a while ago, when I was talking about the way /l/ becomes vocalised or turns into an approximant. One of the examples I gave was Vulgar Latin chastel > French château. But further research has made me aware that this isn't quite right. In French, /l/ (more specifically a dark-l, as
muckefuckpointed out) only became vocalised before another consonant. Therefore until well into the Middle French period, the singular chastel was still around, and it was the plural which regularly became chasteaus. Later the modern word started appearing as a back-formation from the plural. So it kind of illustrates what I was talking about, just in a more roundabout way than I realised.
When you put the book down, you can't help feeling a bit unnerved by how sensual it all is - because a lot of what they refer to as "seduction" is what a modern writer would find it hard to avoid calling "rape". Yet he still makes it all seem very sexy. I'm sorry but he does!
I felt a bit sorry for Merteuil at the end. You want to see her punished up to a point, and I relished the whole scene where she goes to the opera and gets shunned by Society, but then was it really necessary to give her smallpox and make her lose a frickin' eye into the bargain? I hate it when books do that. It reminds me of the way you're only allowed to forgive Mr Rochester after he gets disfigured, and something similar happens at the end of Aurora Leigh (anyone else read that? It's awesome).
On a completely unrelated note, I need to correct something I posted about a while ago, when I was talking about the way /l/ becomes vocalised or turns into an approximant. One of the examples I gave was Vulgar Latin chastel > French château. But further research has made me aware that this isn't quite right. In French, /l/ (more specifically a dark-l, as
muckefuckpointed out) only became vocalised before another consonant. Therefore until well into the Middle French period, the singular chastel was still around, and it was the plural which regularly became chasteaus. Later the modern word started appearing as a back-formation from the plural. So it kind of illustrates what I was talking about, just in a more roundabout way than I realised.