Comments | mousme: Leisurely Saturday mornings...

mousme

Leisurely Saturday mornings...

Sep 02, 2006 09:53

The good thing about being up early-ish on a Saturday morning with nowhere to go until early afternoon is that I get to spend a quiet morning with my cats, who were beginning to feel quite neglected, I think. I spend so much time at work and at my other activities that I'm home really only in the evenings now, and since they don't sleep with me ( Read more... )

books, feline forces of entropy, random encounters, cats, conversations, the sparrow, she, h. rider haggard, public transit, hemmingway

Comments 4

kino_kid September 2 2006, 19:36:14 UTC

Flirting with me about H. Rider Haggard would get a person killed.

Ok. Whatever.

Nice story :)

mousme September 3 2006, 04:14:14 UTC

Uh, what? Why? Do you not like H. Rider Haggard?

I thought it was a nice story too. :)

kino_kid September 4 2006, 02:38:32 UTC

Gee, why would a white chick in deepest darkest Africa bug me?

Or the portrayal of two women as such stark diametric opposites. Two archetypes that are so often used and to such effect in works like She that many people rarely allow themselves to see one woman comfortably embodying the two?

I dunno.

mousme September 4 2006, 13:07:13 UTC

Honestly, I can't bring myself to view the work in those terms, because, frankly, it was written in 1886.

As a modern reader, I read it and thought "Wow, what complete and total arrogance combined with ignorance." It was an interesting read, though, in the sense that it does give one a fairly good idea of how people (well, the British, anyway) viewed the world and its inhabitants at the time.

I'm not sure which two women you mean as start diametric opposites. There are three women in the book, only one of whom is white (that being She), and I found them surprisingly more nuanced than I expected for a work of this nature. I'm not saying that they were incredibly subtle portrayals, but just that She was portrayed as being mostly evil but with a side to her that wasn't completely bad (she went mad over the course of millenia). Then there was Ustane, who for all that she was a "noble savage" (a stereotype that's always gotten on my nerves) was also reasonably complex in her motivations. The third woman, Amenartas, is long dead before ( ... )