pollywiltse

[pollywiltse]

The painting of Anna Seward on the Claudia Kairoff book looks weirdly like my niece, actually. I think it's the shared ethnicity, though.

I still haven't opened it, partly because I keep getting distracted by trash books online so I have this pile of serious hardcover non-fiction that I mean to read but never get around to, and partly because when I was looking for something else, I stumbled on an excerpt from it where Kairoff insists that Anna Seward being supportive of Honora Sneyd marrying Edgeworth is evidence that Seward wasn't sexually attracted to her and I got pissed off. Again. Especially since I had just seen someone act like Baron von Steuben encouraging his proteges to get married was in no way evidence that he wasn't sleeping with them, and Kairoff is a lit professor, so she's in a field where it's, for example, completely acceptable to claim that some man who was constantly falling in love with women was actually exclusively homosexual because he never married any of them because the only possible reason a man could have been single was because he was gay and if you think this is sexist bullshit, you're either stupid or a homophobe, probably both. But somehow Anna Seward's crushes on men aren't fake even though she never married any of them and if you think this is kind of a sexist double standard, don't you know there are plenty of reasons for a woman to stay single other than her being lesbian and there isn't good enough evidence why don't you care about evidence? Weird.

Though tbh at this point I'm not really in favor of deciding historical women were gay using the same flimsy logic as people keep applying to men, because first of all it's dishonest and the left already has a problem with thinking it can lie for "moral" reasons let's not enable it even more, especially because second I think it will just end up like the slash fic where the canon female love interests would get made lesbian so they can be more easily put on a bus because the authors felt it was a less sexist way of completely erasing the male characters' relationships with them than making them straight total bitches. Which, I mean, I guess it is, but in a sort of being decapitated is better than being hanged sort of way. Like you would see fic that was tagged with an f/f pairing that you wanted to read, but then you'd open it up and it would be all "Arwen and Eowyn had just gone off to a lesbian retreat so Faramir or whoever Eowyn married I don't remember was staying with Aragorn. 'Good morning, darling,' said Faramir", and then you're like, "Fuck you, don't tag pairings that get mentioned once in passing, especially if they're rare pairs that no one writes and also this doesn't count as lesbian representation stop congratulating yourself." (Actually I suspect this is a bad example because the LOTR fandom is big enough that most Arwen/Eowyn fics probably actually involve Arwen and Eowyn, but get into smaller fandoms and you run into this constantly.)

In other words I think it's just going to end up somehow erasing women and benefiting men because it always does. Especially since I've seen multiple instances where it was really clear that someone was only interpreting this woman as queer because they were trying to use it as evidence that some man she was involved with was gay. (I don't think I have ever seen someone claim that a man being attracted to men was evidence that his wife was gay.) Granted these were not academics, but every time I stumble into queer academia, it's the extreme, overt version of the sexist batshittery that you see covert and toned down in real life. There's also the relative of this where people will look at female behavior that seems suggestive but decide it means that the men are gay and the women are straight. Like there's this meme from the turn of the 20th century that women are attracted to feminine men, and after you've read enough of these books, it becomes very clear that calling these men feminine isn't complimentary, but it also doesn't imply that they're gay. It's actually more likely to imply that they're some unacceptable ethnicity, or that they want to spend all their time with their chorus girl mistress instead of heading off to Africa and seeing how fast they can make lions an endangered species like a real man, or that they're capable of having conversations with women instead of standing in the corner hoping the girl they're into will realize they want to marry her by telepathy. So in early 20th century novels, it's like "dumb bitches need to realize what they actually want is a socially awkward Englishman and not this reanimated ancient Egyptian with social skills", and then the "of course homosexuals* exist (*male)" people got hold of the "women like feminine men" meme, but decided the obvious queer interpretation wasn't "women like feminine men because what women really want is another woman and this is the best they can do in a heteronormative society", it was "dumb bitches don't realize this guy is actually gay and what they really want is a manly man who will throw them over his shoulder and carry them back to his cave". I mean, both are unintended by the author, but there's this consistent resistance to the idea of women being gay from people who have no problem with the idea of men being gay. (Also the specific example I'm thinking of is a guy who literally gets described as having the face of an evil woman, and there actually might be an implication that he's maybe somehow a reincarnation of his mother (it's been a while, so I might be wrong), so a queer reading that claims that all the women who are attracted to him are actually secretly gay and the end where he's defeated and Our Hero's fiancee who he's cast a literal spell on is saved and marries her gender-conforming straight boyfriend is about female homoerotic desire being suppressed so the the hero's love interest can take her place as the submissive heterosexual wife of the main character would actually probably make more sense than the people on Goodreads who are like clearly Antony Ferrara is gay. But I forgot, we only do secret homoerotic desire projected onto the opposite sex for men. If a woman is written as attracted to a man, there's no possible way to interpret that as her being anything other than straight. Also, there are have never been any closeted lesbians in heterosexual marriages. Actually at this point I think people are more threatened by female homosexuality than by male homosexuality because how hard people try to explain why it doesn't count and how much less willing they seem to be to reinterpret women in heterosexual relationships as gay than men. It's like they can't bear the idea of a woman a man was attracted to not being into men. How dare you not be male property? You're only allowed to not be male property if no man wants you. Honestly the two groups of people that make me feel like they think a woman's true role is to be some man's property are conservatives and the queer representation people.)

[pollywiltse]

It also really annoys me when people who you'd think should understand how another culture thought because they spend so much of their mental time there are so mentally attached to their modern assumptions that they get stupid. Like one of the reasons I realized that a lot of interactions between male characters from older books that modern people read as gay were clearly not intended that way was because you would see literal brothers say that stuff to each other, and like no, I don't think all these random Victorian popular fiction writers (of both sexes) were secretly writing gay incest because that is not the most logical explanation for why these characters act that way. And yet I stumbled on this idiot's PhD thesis which is insisting that Edith Wharton keeps writing about same sex incestuous desire. Or maybe you and the rest of the English department just have a completely warped idea of human relationships where you think that any emotionally intimate relationship between two people must be sexual, even if they're a parent and child. (It's great because I read a ton of old books, but they're pretty much all trash, but my mother reads actual classics - though she insists that Henry James writes soap operas, not literature - and so when I find these lunatic academic papers I ask her, like "Is Emma about the title character coming to terms with her asexuality" or "Is there same sex male desire in The Age of Innocence?" and she goes "......What are these people even talking about?". Or actually sometimes what she says is that academics need to come up with something new to get grants.)

You know, it actually fascinates me that people who are willing to speculate that other men are gay or bi on really flimsy evidence (like some dude's wife had a super close relationship with another woman who never married, and somehow this is evidence that he was bi) really really don't think Clinton was into men. I mean, I don't either, but I also don't go around thinking that some historical man might have been bi because he was close to a bunch of people who were in favor of marrying for love (especially since I don't think that was rare by the end of the 18th century...) or because a lot of his social circle was progressive for its time (my friend from northern Florida: "because no bi people have ever come from conservative familes") and what I'm saying is I don't think the fact that the evidence points to Clinton being straight is the only reason they don't believe he was queer, and I'm curious what the other reasons are. I assume I will dislike them. (There was an old post I stumbled on where a couple of people were fighting about headcanoning some Hamilton character as straight or not, and the one who thought he wasn't went, "But there are plenty of other characters who are straight (ie you shouldn't argue with people who insist that he must be gay)" and then gave a list of the characters they headcanoned as straight, and it was like, weird, your list consists of all the female characters, the one male character you really hate, and then two male characters who you're indifferent to, and you've noted that those last might be asexual instead of straight.)

[pollywiltse]

You know, it actually fascinates me that people who are willing to speculate that other men are gay or bi on really flimsy evidence (like some dude's wife had a super close relationship with another woman who never married, and somehow this is evidence that he was bi) really really don't think Clinton was into men. I mean, I don't either, but I also don't go around thinking that some historical man might have been bi because he was close to a bunch of people who were in favor of marrying for love (especially since I don't think that was rare by the end of the 18th century...) or because a lot of his social circle was progressive for its time (my friend from northern Florida: "because no bi people have ever come from conservative familes") and what I'm saying is I don't think the fact that the evidence points to Clinton being straight is the only reason they don't believe he was queer, and I'm curious what the other reasons are. I assume I will dislike them. (There was an old post I stumbled on where a couple of people were fighting about headcanoning some Hamilton character as straight or not, and the one who thought he wasn't went, "But there are plenty of other characters who are straight (ie you shouldn't argue with people who insist that he must be gay)" and then gave a list of the characters they headcanoned as straight, and it was like, weird, your list consists of all the female characters, the one male character you really hate, and then two male characters who you're indifferent to, and you've noted that those last might be asexual instead of straight.)

[pollywiltse]

Do you mind sharing how much of a nightmare boss Clinton was?

This is super old because I was like, "I need to dig out the Clinton biography so I can give a detailed answer" and then I kept never getting around to it. (I'm pretty sure I know where the book is.....) So an undetailed answer, hopefully without anything too wrong - Clinton was completely neurotic and had a tendency to get into fights with almost everyone. I think there may have been some level of projection in some cases - like Clinton was feeling insecure about something so he decided the person he was about to pick a fight with believed whatever negative thing Clinton was feeling about himself and get mad at them. There were also a couple times where someone was like, "Hey, do you want this position?" and he did, but for whatever reason he felt like it would be a bad look to say yes, and then it got given to someone else and he resented that guy. And then with André specifically, he was one of the few people Clinton actually liked, so Clinton ended up being really kind of emotionally dependent on him (there's a letter at the back of the van Doren book from Clinton to his sisters-in-law where he threatens to resign if André is executed; granted he threatened to resign constantly), which is stressful in general, but also I think the reason that so many people liked André so much was that he liked and cared about them, so I think that emotionally babysitting Clinton was extra stressful because he wasn't just doing it because it was part of his job, it was also because he didn't want him to be unhappy. (Someone on tumblr was like "I headcanon Clinton and André as having a father-son relationship" and I was like, ".....Isn't that actually canon? If you want to call history canon." Though I think it was sort of a parentified father-son relationship. Actually I was partway through Charles Grey's biography before Internet Archive caught on fire and Grey seems to have quasi-adopted André too.) Also Clinton would throw a fit and try to resign, and if his resignation had been accepted, then André would either have to find a new general to attach himself to or get booted back to very junior captain, and when Clinton sent his resignation in, it had to go back to London and then the answer had to come back to America, so that was several months of André not knowing whether his career was about to get kicked in the face (though given how much Clinton liked him, he probably would tried to make sure that André wasn't hurt by his leaving, the same way Grey kept shoving André under Clinton's nose before he left in the hopes that Clinton would make him one of his aides). And I also think - though this is entirely my speculation - that despite André's ambition, he wasn't going to go trying to make friends with, like, Cornwallis behind Clinton's back just in case Clinton's resignation was accepted because that would have upset Clinton.

[pollywiltse]

I wasn't expecting to turn into the Clara von Platen Defense Squad, but I probably should have been.

Every single time, I get interested in some third-tier historical man, and then I get deeply offended on behalf of one of the women he was somehow involved with. Even if they're truly terrible human beings, which Clara von Platen legitimately seems to have been, but I really think people are being excessive about how awful she was. Especially the way they keep writing her as old and ugly and unattractive in every way and having Konigsmark being all "I think I threw up in my mouth a little" every time he goes to bed with her. Like I realize he spent a lot of time talking shit about her to Sophia Dorothea (and half of Dresden), but this man did not seem to have any impulse control or sense of self-preservation at all (except maybe in battle, since he kept surviving them), and I doubt he was going to go to bed with a woman he wasn't attracted to, especially not more than once, no matter how powerful she was. I realize this makes him seem like a truly horrible person, since the two women he was involved with absolutely hated each other, he spent a lot of time mocking one of them behind her back, and most of his letters to the other one involve him throwing temper tantrums because he heard that she talked to some other guy (because he was, like, the Portuguese ambassador and as the wife of the heir to the throne of Hanover she was required to make polite conversation with him) and he's absolutely convinced she's cheating on him now and meanwhile he's screwing this other woman, but we already knew he was an awful person to begin with. There's a quote from the English ambassador to, I think, Saxony(?) right after he disappeared where the ambassador is like, "He was terrible and I tried to avoid having anything to do with him". (To be fair, Sophia Dorothea also kept being convinced that he was somehow betraying her, plus she would encourage him to go be friendly with Clara von Platen because it was good policy and then flip out at him when he did. So frankly everyone in this dysfunctional little love triangle deserved each other. Also Sophia Dorothea's lady-in-waiting Eleanor Knesebeck claimed that she and Konigsmark weren't actually having an affair, he was just visiting her because she wanted him to tell her everything about his visits to Clara von Platen, who he was sleeping with, which sounds way kinkier than if Sophia Dorothea was just sleeping with him and now I'm kind of into the idea of Clara von Platen and Sophia Dorothea just using Konigsmark as a way to have hatesex-by-proxy with each other. Partly out of spite.)

Plus, while I realize that were exceptions, in general if your career was Official Royal Mistress and you managed to hold on to that position for basically your entire life, you had to actually be really attractive, and hot women don't magically stop being hot the instant they turn 40.

[pollywiltse]

(clearing out some more of my drafts)

Found another excerpt of her novel, because if someone is on Goodreads as an author and a reviewer, it's really unintuitive to get from the author page to the reviewer page, at least on the phone, so I used Google. On the one hand, this is unfair because I'm pretty sure she's self-published. On the other, she's charging money for it. (Also, like, you're really not entitled to have everyone claim your work is wonderful just because you spent a lot of time on it and you can't make a living if people give your book bad reviews.)

Mc looks like he's actually straight, he just has kind of a slash fic character personality. (Or maybe he's bi?) Her writing is really bad though. That somehow didn't stick with me the last excerpt I read - probably because I was too stuck on John André putting his mouth all over some guy's paper cross, which is not a euphemism. But oh boy it's bad on a technical level. Also André is drinking "something caffeinated" from a mug. I'm going to assume it's 18th century Monster.

He's also evidently a highly skilled tailor with strong opinions about clothes. Ok, he was pretty fashionable, but I doubt moreso than the average good-looking young British officer, and I'm pretty sure if you handed him a needle, and asked him what to do with it, he would be like, "I give it to someone who knows how to use it, like Peter Laune or a woman, hopefully without sticking myself". Just because he designed the costumes for the Meschianza, it doesn't mean he could sew, or that he designed regular clothes, or even other costumes.

It really, really does not mean he could sew, especially actual clothes.

(I had assumed he designed costumes for the theater as well, but there was something in that theater book that made it sound like they might have used their own clothes, plus when he says, "the Meschianza made me a complete milliner", that might imply that he only did costumes for that. Either way he certainly wasn't sewing them. Shadow Patriots (or Patriot Shadows, I forget which; all I remember is it's the one where the author accidentally gave General Howe two penises because that's what happens when you're a bad writer) also had André and the maid who's Agent 355 because we can't let that one fucking go sewing the dresses for the Meschianza and I was reading it like, "You guys know they have professionals for that, right?")

She really did no research, because André was fluent in German. It's supposed to have helped him become a staff officer because he could actually talk to the Hessians and most other British officers couldn't. Also I have questions about the clothes.

Also can we please stop with André the undercover spy and André the working intelligence while he was in Philadelphia?

You can tell they're French because they do wine and cheese stop I'm dying.

And then I found a couple other pieces from her trilogy which are André and the main character having interminable discussions about religion in which André and the main character seem to believe exactly the same things as the author, except André added some Protestant stickers because she's not that out of touch with reality. Strange coincidence. (The funny thing is I'm actually semi-interested in religion during the Revolutionary War era, but not like this.)

Oh weird, she does have a very negative Goodreads review for the terrible Thorland book, which I somehow missed last time I checked, but for some reason she's under the impression that IRL André was bi. Actually I'm curious where she even got this because while it's a constant surprise to me that misconceptions about André's sexuality aren't widespread, I think they're actually really not. (Probably because he's just not that well known, tbh.) Also the people I've seen who do have those misconceptions about André's sexuality also don't seem to believe that he's bi as opposed to gay, probably because ultimately they don't believe in male bisexuality. (I mean, I think they believe that they believe in male bisexuality, but I also think that when they talk about a specific bisexual man, they end up talking about his relationships as if he wasn't really into women.)

Look, there is really no evidence that John André was anything other than a happily gender-conforming heterosexual man. The "evidence" for André being into men is basically that modern people think he's kind of girly, and probably some of the Benedict Arnold fanboys are jealous because everyone likes André and hates their fave who was so much more of a real man because he liked interminable hikes through the Canadian winter instead of poetry. (I really need to find the Meschianza piece from the 70s where the writer clearly desperately wanted André to be a twink. I don't think he knew what a twink was, but he clearly wanted André to be one.)

I mean, he could have been bi, because there are a ton of people who are technically bisexual but for all intents and purposes largely indistinguishable from straight people, sometimes even to themselves, but that's more like if you want to believe he was only mostly rather than exclusively into women, that doesn't contradict the evidence we have, but it isn't supported by the evidence either and the evidence we have really really doesn't support the idea that he was much farther along the line than heteroflexible so maybe hold off on adding him to your Revolutionary War Queers poster. (Tbh he might not even want to be on a Revolutionary War Queers poster even if he was not completely straight because I know a number of people who are bi according to the dictionary definition and are ok with not being straight but not ok with identifying as part of the queer community because if you're bi, especially if most of the people you're into are the opposite sex, you end up feeling more like a straight person a lot of the time, so it's actually really shitty to be told you have to identify as queer/lgbtetc because you're being pressured to identify with a group of people you often don't feel like you have very much in common with, plus they're the ones who keep telling you that they know your sexuality better than you do. Also the other thing with the word queer specifically is that just because some people were reclaiming it in the 70s, it doesn't mean that other people didn't mainly experience it as a slur even later than that. One of my friends grew up in northern Florida in the 90s and early 2000s and he doesn't like the word because everyone he knew used it as a slur. He doesn't complain when other people use it, because that would be pointless, but I don't think he'd ever in a million years call himself queer, so it's really obnoxious when people who clearly weren't around then post things about how only possible reason that you don't like the word queer is because you're a bigot, which I have definitely seen.)

This is another bit of slack you don't get cut when you start charging money for your fanfic. If you want to write slash or André being into BDSM or actually having sex with Peggy Shippen outside an AU (or Turn canon, I guess), I don't care, whatever. (Ok, unless your André/Benedict Arnold fic turns André into an unpleasant misogynist who was never into women and who thinks all the women hitting on him are stupid bitches and he hates them and then I'll be out for blood, especially when you seem to be on his side. Or if you think that a man being unmarried at 26 and wearing his hair in a braid in the 1770s is a sure sign he's gay, and then I'll laugh at you so hard I'll barf.) If it's on AO3, it doesn't matter because everyone thinks fanfic is over-the-top porn/romance where, for example, André is saved from execution because Washington decides to keep him as the American officer corps' sextoy, and then it turns into a slowburn romance where André and Lafayette slowly fall in love while bonding over their abusive childhoods and their autism diagnoses never mind that that makes no sense on multiple levels but then there's a crisis where André turns out to be pregnant with Washington's baby which the reader had no reason to think was something that could happen until now, but after 20 chapters of misunderstandings they end up in a happy polycule and for some reason they talk about polyamory exactly like people from the 21st century America and Lafayette adopts André and Washington's baby and also this is somehow set in the Harry Potter universe and André was in Slytherin even though clearly he's a Hufflepuff. In other words, no one takes fanfiction seriously because they think it's inherently absurd. Whether this is fair or not is beside the point of this post.

But once you start publishing your fanfiction - even if it's self-published, because it's still on Amazon like a real book - people start thinking you did research (especially because all these authors say they did research and they probably did do research, but that doesn't mean it was enough research, or the right research, or that everything in the novel is backed up by research, or that they didn't pitch the research out the window when it conflicted with what they wanted to write) so clearly when your Team Benedict Arnold novel portrays André as actually being into 12-year-old boys but sleeping with Clinton because it was good for his career (that would be John Ensar Harr's The Dark Eagle), that's historically accurate, especially if it fits the stereotypes the reader already has, and then it's a fight to convince them it's not true. So then I start caring, because people have this weird tendency to believe historical fiction authors don't make things up. (There were several reviews of the Thorland book where the reviewer went, "André has a reputation as a nice person, but this book has convinced me that he was actually pure evil because Donna Thorland has a background in history so clearly her portrayal of him must be correct". *headdesk* There were also the Goodreads reviews of Burr where people were like "I liked Thomas Jefferson until I read this book" even though the bits about Jefferson are from Burr's point of view and Burr is a clearly biased narrator and in fact Gore Vidal says in an author's note that "All in all, I think rather more highly of Jefferson than Burr does" like the author explicitly didn't intend you to just accept either narrator's opinions.)

It's always funny when people write André as acting like he thinks he's hot shit because from what people said about the real guy, one of the things that everyone found so charming about him was that he didn't act like he thought he was better than everyone else.

I was flipping through Finishing Becca again. I really desperately want to know where that characterization came from.

Though speaking of batshit characterizations I need to find that girl on Goodreads again who thought André was a deeply religious Christian and also possibly gay* (he is in her novel but idk if she believes that or just thinks it's hot) and see if she's read any of André's actual biographies yet because boy is she in for a surprise when she finds out there's no evidence for André being either gay or religious. They were all on her to-read list last time I checked. Which didn't stop her from including him in her novel.

She posted a part of her in-progress novel where André finds the main character (who might also be a slash fic character?) making paper crosses and the mc is embarrassed and André's like, "No, it's ok, my one true love is actually Jesus like my mother taught me and I'm just in denial about it and going to all these wild parties to repress my deep love for Jesus" and then he picks up one of the crosses and starts making out with it. It was definitely a take.

Also for someone whose Protestant ancestors were driven out of their home by Catholics, her version of André is really chill around Catholics. Like regardless of whether he was a religious Huguenot (she thinks) or a borderline Deist Anglican (I think), I'm pretty sure he'd hate Catholics.

*Because she's clearly a repressed slash writer and also I'm pretty sure she picked it up from Donna Thorland's awful awful romance novel where André's a sociopathic spy master in Philadelphia and his one redeeming characteristic is his true love for Caleb Cope the 17-year-old youngest son of the Cope family, which is fascinating because their oldest son, John, was 12 when André was in Lancaster, so having their youngest son be several years older than their oldest son would take some doing, and also Peggy Shippen is a dumb bitch who can't tell André can't stand her and who everyone hates even the people who were historically enchanted by her and there's this whole thing where she somehow manages to have André's baby but pass it off as Arnold's even though she didn't marry Arnold until nearly a year after the British army left Philadelphia and she couldn't just wander around being pregnant and unmarried that whole time (also there's this whole thing where André inexplicably makes birth control the sheltered 17-year-old girl's problem even though he claims he didn't want to get her pregnant) and way too many people are convinced this is historically accurate because Donna Thorland has a background in history but frankly after reading this book I'm now worried about what exactly was going on in the part of the Peabody Essex Museum up in Salem where she worked because this book is not winning any prizes for historical accuracy, unless maybe it's a literary equivalent of the Razzies. Also I kind of think Thorland is one of the people who thinks straight men are masterful and dominant and aggressive and their relationships with their one true loves are really kind of antagonistic, and that's why André ended up being gay, because a man who is nice to women is inherently sus. This is of course very depressing because my ideal man isn't Petruchio and of course the people who think like this don't believe in lesbians either. I'm not sure any of the women in that Thorland novel even liked each other platonically, let alone romantically. But to be fair I didn't read most of the book, because it also wasn't that interesting. I was just there to see if she had, in fact, made André Chester the Molester who gets handsy with the 12-year-olds. (I still think she meant Caleb Cope to be John Cope, she just slacked on the research. Caleb was John Cope's father and none of the other kids in the family were named Caleb. The youngest at the time André was in Lancaster was Jasper, who was like a year, so presumably not having a torrid affair with André. This is A Record of the Cope Family by Gilbert Cope, p 32 of whatever edition Google has scanned.) This version might be worse, honestly, because it's sexist but with plausible deniability.

I think Goodreads Jesus girl might have assumed he was from a deeply religious family because the Huguenots were religious refugees, but just because you're from a religious disapora doesn't mean you're super religious and in fact he seems to have been the only child to have been baptized in a Huguenot church and from his oldest sister's birth they were going to Anglican churches because they seemed to care more about social climbing than Jesus, and I'm not even sure how religious the average Huguenot refugee was. There was also this story that a copy of "The Hiding Place" in his handwriting was found in his coat pocket after his execution, but the source seems to be Roger Lamb repeating a story that he heard from someone else who he just says is a "respectable person, a native of America" and no idea how they knew, especially since they're incorrectly crediting André as the writer and even Sargent the Victorian thinks it's nonsense. The actual evidence for André's religious belief suggest that he didn't have very much, though I sort of assume he vaguely believed in Christian mythology on the grounds that you might have had to care a lot more than I think he did about religion to believe in something else if you were from a Christian background living in 18th century England.

[pollywiltse]

Sorry André people, I'm still down this Philip Christoph von Konigsmark rabbit hole. If I had to chose between which one to invite to dinner or to save from a burning building it would definitely be John André though, because Konigsmark was so impressively awful that the only reason he's on my list of dead people I want to invite to dinner is because I want to see if I can figure out why multiple women were so obsessed with him. Like did he give off pheromones? Was he amazing in bed? Was he significantly better-looking than both contemporary portraits show? (18th century men's hair is silly but still makes the average guy look better than modern hairstyles. 17th century men's hair is silly and nearly as unflattering as Victorian men's hair.) Was every other man in 17th century Germany even more unappealing? Was this some sort of "prettiest waitress at Denny's" scenario?

I will admit that from over 300 years away he's sort of endearing because he was just such a total disaster and also despite what some historians might think, based on the translations of his letters I think he was a sincere disaster. I still would only touch him with a three century long pole though, because if he wasn't the most extra person in 17th century Europe I'm afraid to meet the person that beat him (it was probably one of his relatives) plus he seems to have operated under the theory that being told no is for peasants. There's also a biographer of Sophia Dorothea who I think finds his complete inability to spell French charming. (She claims his spelling makes sense if you assume his first language was Swedish. On the one hand, he was from Sweden. On the other, he was nobility.) (This is Ruth Jordan, who I think is mostly reasonable, but if she's going to repeat the story that Clara von Platen gave the milk that she bathed in to the local peasants, she needs a better source than Clara von Platen's ex-boyfriend who was drunk and trying to amuse his friends, and who also hated her because they had an acrimonious break-up after he got her pregnant and she suggested he marry her daughter, plus she and his other girlfriend that he was involved with at the same time and who he was completely obsessed with hated each other, and I don't think there is one. I told you Konigsmark was a total disaster.)

[pollywiltse]

Every time I start reading too much into a character's name I remind myself of the unfinished fanfic where I gave a child molester the same name as one of my coworkers, not because of anything about him personally but because I needed a British last name and his sounded good. (The character was actually American, but in a place and time where he was probably going to be of British descent.)

There's also the thing where my dad gave me and my half-sister the same name as one of his ex-girlfriends (it's my half-sister's middle and my first), but I don't think it's because he's been carrying a torch for her all these years. I'm actually pretty sure it's because she was this girl he met when he was working in the Hamptons one summer so he thought of her name as a classy rich person name.

[pollywiltse]

Same guy evidently got asked to contribute a chapter about the stuff he was talking about in this blog post to a book about same-sex relationships in early America, and when he sent the chapter in it got rejected for not having any evidence - not just of same-sex sexual relationships, but of same-sex close emotional relationships - and let me tell you lgbtetc historians will count the most ridiculous (and offensive*) things as "evidence" for homowhatever relationships between men.** (Please think about how many times you've seen people refer to relationships between men as "homosocial" or "homoerotic". Now think about how many times you've seen those terms used for women.) If even they thought he was reaching, he was really pulling it out of his ass.***

Also he unintentionally provides evidence that one of the supposedly gay dudes was very in love with his wife, treats accusations of Baron von Steuben having molested "young boys" as morally neutral evidence of him being gay, and also tries to claim that Washington bitching about how some guy will do whatever he thinks his employers will let him get away with is actually Washington subtly complaining about his sexuality.

Also, you guys, please note that even excessively fashionable men weren't seen as gay in the 18th century and even "effeminate" didn't imply gay, except maybe in some really specific niche examples. Also a lot of the stuff that looks effeminate to us looked normal to them. (Like men having BFFs or liking amateur theater, evidently.) Stop applying modern ideas about behavior to historical societies, especially when your modern ideas are really sexist, actually.

This guy also - and I'm so tired of hearing this - is going around acting like excluding women from society and getting all your emotional fulfillment from men (which somehow always ultimately turns out to be because Women Just Can't Understand) is sticking it to the patriarchy. No it's not, it's extra sexist sexism. Especially because invariably the women are still expected to be devoted to their husbands who are off having homowhatever relationships with other men. (Also, ditching your wife to go off on drinking bouts isn't rejecting the patriarchal ideal of man as provider, it's a substance abuse problem, and people aren't mad at you because you're not conforming to the patriarchy, they're mad because you abandoned your wife and kids to get drunk. Jesus Christ.)

*by offensive I mean if a historical man was having sex with 13-year-old boys, somehow that doesn't mean his biography gets an uncomfortable footnote about how he was a sexual predator, it means we splash his face everywhere during June as a famous gay person in history. Pay. Attention to what the evidence is for your awesome queer representation. A lot of the time it sucks. Also pederasts =/= gay I don't care if you lose two-thirds of your historical men. If the only "men" you have evidence of him being into are teenage boys, that doesn't correspond to any modern sexual orientation and he doesn't count. I keep seeing people who I know aren't ok with adults having sex with kids ignore this because evidently if you wave a rainbow flag their brains switch off. Also by offensive I mean looking at some guy who was into women but was also emotionally sensitive or liked the arts or something and deciding clearly he can't be straight. You don't get to wring your hands about toxic masculinity but then decide every guy that doesn't fit your really really narrow idea of cishet male behavior is queer (especially when his behavior is completely gender-conforming for his own culture, but also I'd like it if queer/ally dudes at work would stop telling me that random male coworkers who subsequently turn out to be completely cishet dress too nicely to be straight). (Actually one of the people who did that I think also claimed that another dude must be secretly queer because he was an anxious workaholic and I have no idea whether that guy was or not, but holy shit cishet men can have mental health problems too. Honestly some of the most conservative ideas about gender I've seen come from super queer people.)

**Women on the other hand require two notarized witness statements of same-sex sexual activity, otherwise we simply don't know and it would be irresponsible to speculate; instead let us move on to wildly speculating whether or not these two very heterosexual men were in fact each other's one true loves because one was very sad when the other died. If you're sensing some bitterness here you're right.

***No I mean I swear to God I saw someone on JSTOR trying to claim that every single American who referred to John André as "manly" were actually just doing it to cover up how limp-wristed he was this is the level of stupid we're talking about. Especially since when they said "manly" they meant "honest" and "brave", which was why they all liked him so much in the first place. If them saying he was manly was a lie, they wouldn't have liked him enough to lie about him. To be fair she might have been literature, which is even less tethered to reality, and not history.

(This was sitting in my drafts for ages because if you don't agree the queer community are the most wonderful people ever you get screamed at, but I saw yet another jackass English professor go, "this guy had multiple crushes on women, but that doesn't say anything about his sexuality because he was super sad when his male best friend died" and I am so fucking done. The queer history/theory/representation people are as sexist as my Edwardian trash writers when it comes to women and even more sexist when it comes to men. I literally spent over a decade not realizing my sexual attraction to women had anything to do with my sexuality and another decade thinking that if I dated women I would be a bad person because clearly I was just a straight chick who was faking it to be cool, and this was entirely because of people who either were lgbtetc themselves or who were really pro gay rights and were all convinced they were feminists, but would twist themselves into ridiculous and sexist mental contortions to claim that any cool historical man and every single historical woman ever weren't really sexually attracted to women, regardless of the actual evidence, and regardless of whether that actually erased someone's queerness. Oh, yeah, and it wasn't mean exclusionary lesbians that everyone likes to shit on for not dating bi women, it was gay men and straight allies. Actually, I have a certain amount of sympathy for lesbians who don't want to date bi women. I don't like it, because my dating pool is small enough already, and I think it's unquestioningly accepting a view of human sexuality that revolves entirely around men, but when you're constantly told by the people who claim to be the experts and also your community and your allies that bisexuality actually means " just likes men but won't admit it" and that just because someone acts like they're into women, it doesn't say anything about their real sexuality, it's hard not to believe them and why would you want to date someone who isn't attracted to you? Also, women who don't want to date the people that they've been told are just pretending to be into them get shit on for being biphobic way more than the men who also go around insisting that bisexuality means you actually just like men. Every time I see people talk about biphobia it just makes me feel worse because they completely ignore how much of it is sexism and "relationships with women don't count", often in favor of complaining that women aren't being nice enough, and I am somehow supposed to feel represented by this. Also I somehow end up feeling like I'm being forced to consider myself part of a community I want nothing to do with. Plus the people at work decided their first example of bisexual erasure in their stupid little ally education series was someone looking at a female couple and thinking they were lesbians instead of thinking they might be bi. Like please, tell me what planet you're from where huge numbers of people don't look at lesbians and go, "yeah, but they might be into men too even if they explicitly say they're not" because I want to move there. This is the other thing that never gets discussed when people are going on about biphobia etc. There's the other stereotype where "all women are bisexual", but it doesn't mean that bi women have it easier (funny how when discrimination against lesbian/bi women looks different from discrimination against gay/bi men intersectionality goes out the window and it's all "women have it easier", btw) because "all women are bisexual" is a porn view of women's sexuality where no women are attracted to other women in a way that excludes men. It's "all women are bisexual" so all lesbians totally want sex with men and straight women are totally up for a threesome with their boyfriend and some girl that he thinks is hot, but only in a way that he's into. It's not bi women (or any women, for that matter) getting to have their own sexuality that doesn't have anything to do with what men want or what the rest of society thinks their sexuality is supposed to look like.)

Um, you guys all know that "intimate" and "intercourse" in the 18th (and 19th) century didn't have sexual connotations, right? Because I was assuming everyone likes the "intimate intercourse" quote because "lol it sounds like they were hooking up even though we know that's not what it actually means but it's still funny because we all like Tallmadge/André", but now I'm suddenly less sure.

I've just read a blog post by an actual published writer who thinks that if two guys are fighting about who owes who how much money and one of them says, "Pay for your servants? I'm not going to pay for your servants! Why don't you ask me to pay for your horse's hay and your friends' hookers while you're at it?" this is a sign that he's jealous about the other guy sleeping with women because they're secretly - or maybe not so secretly? - into each other, so now I'm doubting everyone's reading comprehension.

[pollywiltse]

I've gone down a temporary Musk and Amber/A. E. W. Mason rabbit hole which has gotten me (re)reading things like Konigsmark and Clementina on the one hand (good) and Cry to Heaven on the other (very very bad and I'm really tired of people whitewashing horrible historical child abuse and misogyny just because someone put rainbow stickers on it).

But anyway this is absolutely Frances Scoble. (Though given what she's like, I should probably apologize to Mary de Cardonnel for using her picture as my mental image for the worst character in the book.) Now if only I could find a painting that was absolutely Julian. (Actually my private joke is that Julian looks like a much younger Samuel Roukin, because once you get past the crazy eyes and the blood and the terrible first season wig, he actually has a very beautiful turn-of-the-century pre-Raphaelite-influenced-angel face. I continue to be surprised that he doesn't get cast as Lucifer semi-regularly. But I can't really see him as Julian. Though there's also a joke about Simcoe's voice being very appropriate somewhere in there...)

(More relatedly to André, I found a couple books in my dad's house about the relationships between Loyalists and Patriots in Revolutionary War New York, one of which looks like it focuses on the DeLanceys, which he let me take back with me because he had forgotten he owned them. (Unsurprising, frankly.) Though tbh I was hoping to find Hall's Tallmadge bio hidden in a corner somewhere, because there are literally like 20000 books in that house, but I was disappointed.)

[pollywiltse]

Ghost stories are traditional for Christmas, so partly-written ghost stories are appropriate for not-yet-Christmas, right?

Later she thought he had been there since Philadelphia, at least, though she hadn’t realized it. He would have been a timid ghost then, too newly dead to realize that the proprieties of the living no longer applied, and she had mostly kept to her bed, and he had been so much in her mind that if, when she left her room, she had felt him nearby, she would have thought it was her own madness and not his spirit. She thought of him more in those days than she thought of her husband, alive and in New York. They said that he had died bravely, that he had gone to his death with as little fear as he would have gone to a ball, but if she closed her eyes she saw him with the same look as her little son, when he thought they had left him alone in the dark.

The distance between them now was greater than it had ever been before, but now there was a chain that bound them stronger than their boy-and-girl love affair, and, she was afraid, stronger than the gold band that bound her to her husband.

She hadn’t known it was him in New York, in the fall, when every room seemed to shrink and become a prison cell and every footstep was a guard’s and her mind sketched a gallows against the bright blue October sky. Even when someone said - it had been a year since he died - and saw her and fell silent, she hadn’t known.

It was in London when she knew it was him.

”Peggy, look!” She was in her bed alone, and the room was empty. She was in her bed, but she was awake and not dreaming and not mad, and she heard his voice in her ear the way she'd heard it in Philadelphia, not so many years ago, bringing her home from a ball in the small hours - “Peggy, look!” - up at the sky, clear and frozen after a snowfall, the stars bright enough to make shadows on the ground - and his hand was in hers again, tugging, and she followed him to the window, and it was cold bright early morning that made everything clean and the sky was pink and gold and luminous gray and he was there beside her. She couldn’t see him, but she could feel his hand, and she could feel his mind against hers. He was glad and relieved and it was all so beautiful, and she couldn’t be scared until later, that she could hold the hand of a man she couldn’t see, who had been dead for two years.

[pollywiltse]

I realized that the reason the scenes with Simcoe being sick and wounded make my skin crawl is because they accidentally gave him a mullet.

[pollywiltse]

Wait, has archive.org finally stopped smoldering? My login through Google button is back.

[pollywiltse]

There were a lot of other things I was going to say and then I got to the end and WTF? That wasn't an ending. You only get away with that abrupt an ending if you're not making people pay for the sequel.

Haha what someone wrote a novel where John's sister Mary somehow ends up in America and becomes Agent 355? I might have to take a Benadryl and get over my allergies to Agent 355 and encouraging bad self-published writers and read this. (Somewhere, Andre: "Oh, you have an allergy to encouraging bad self-published writers? Must have developed after you went and bought Colors of the Times and The King's Fuzileers.")

And Tallmadge is a character and I think it's a romance so I hope this is Tallmadge/Andre's sister I will die. I love crack!pairings.

I'm disappointed it's not Louisa, though. She's my favorite of his sisters because in the miniature in the Ronald bio, she has a very elaborate hairstyle and an expression like she has one nerve left and you're getting on it. Her resting bitch face isn't quite Grodnertal doll level, but it's getting up there. (It's not the demon-possessed Victorian little girl dolls you actually have to worry about stabbing you in your sleep. It's the early 19th century Grodnertals who aren't possessed by anything, they're just sick of your bullshit.)

I think Louisa in the miniature might knee Tallmadge in the Ralph Earl painting in the balls though, so I don't think they'd work out.

There's also a miniature of Mary in the Ronald bio, but it's the worst of the family and she just looks like a dark blob on top of a light blob with two little dark blobs in the middle. Ann(e), who is the third sister, also has a resting bitch face that's not quite as epic as Louisa's.

One of the things I hate about the Ronald bio is that he doesn't talk about what happened to any of John's siblings afterwards. Like I know he was in contact with the family because that's how he got pictures of the miniatures. He could have done more with the rest of John's family.

[pollywiltse]

Actually on second thought the Ralph Earl painting of Mary Floyd Tallmadge also looks like she'd be perfectly willing to knee her husband in the balls if required, so maybe Louisa André/Benjamin Tallmadge would have worked out.

(Mary: "The reason he looks so pleased with himself in his portrait is because he got me pregnant eight times. The reason I have resting bitch face in my portrait is because he got me pregnant eight fucking times."

Ok, to be fair, I think they were at number three when the Ralph Earl portraits were taken and they probably had a very happy marriage, actually.)

Anyway, I remembered I had a digital credit for letting Amazon deliver my tiny chunk of beeswax in three days instead of overnight, so I bought the book.

It is 100% Benjamin Tallmadge/OFC Turn fanfic, and if you want Tallmadge/OFC you can probably get something just as good on AO3 without paying for it, maybe even with André and Simcoe cameos.

I wasn't sure at first, because she's not super great at describing people's looks and for some reason André was blonde, which JJ Feild is not, and she didn't mention Simcoe having a weird high-pitched voice. I briefly thought I was wrong about her ending up with Tallmadge and it was going to be Mary André/Simcoe, but.

And then Mary ended up with the Continental Army for....reasons, and Caleb and his anachronistic beard showed up. Definitely Turn fanfic. Especially when Caleb and Ben start talking about their childhood friend Anna. (I mean, maybe that beard was real, and it was perfect for the character, but the vast majority of 18th century men were clean-shaven so it's anachronistic until proven otherwise. Ok, technically they only shaved every couple days so they were slightly stubbly but the goal was clean-shaven.)

And then they're like, "What's your name?" and Mary's like, "Mary - uh - Floyd. Yeah, that's it, Mary Floyd." And I loled.

And then she comes back to Philadelphia and Simcoe reveals his true socially awkward excessively stabby Turn-self. It was a bit weird having André and/or Mary be upset about Simcoe bayoneting American soldiers in their sleep. Like, Paoli? Baylor?

Ok, to be fair, the level of massacre at Paoli seems to have been significantly exaggerated. Also Charles Grey seems to have gone AWOL. I like to think he eloped with Peggy Chew, since she's not around either. As usual. André's one true love is Peggy Shippen, also as usual.

William is also inexplicably back in England, though I do like the idea that André thought he was shipping his brother out to America and ended up with a sister instead. ("Yes, but I bought him the commission.") Though I think she's supposed to have come out earlier than William did, but I'm not sure if that makes sense logistically. Mary is also way too young. Find-a-grave has her born in 1752, which makes her the oldest of his sisters and also absolutely not "less than twenty" or "almost twenty" or whatever in 1777. She may have ended up the real Mary Floyd's birth year? (Though Ann André's find-a-grave has her born in 1754, which conflicts with Ronald claiming she was baptized in 1753, but I might believe the gravestones more than Ronald. Also how come John seems to be the only kid without a middle name? Mary Hannah, Ann Marguerite, Louisa Catherine, William Lewis, John Two Names? What, Are We Made Of Money?. Actually he might have a middle name but no one talks about it. I though one of the modern biographers actually quoted his baptismal record, and it was just "Jean André", but I checked and they don't.)

Also, weirdly, Peggy Shippen is at the Meschianza and neither she nor André are participating in the tournament. The author might think it was like a Renn Faire, I'm not sure. Actually I'm not sure Mary wouldn't be participating in the Meschianza if she was there. She does steal André's Wharton-house-decorating gig. André gets too much credit for the whole thing as usual. He and Montresor might be the only two managers? So I assume there was this Highlander there-can-only-be-one thing going on in the background and André has already killed the other three/four in single combat. (Actually that might explain why the names of the managers don't quite match up in the two contemporary accounts - three are the same but the fourth is different. Unless I'm misremembering.)

Mary's case of "not like the other girls" is frankly tedious. Please stop whining about how all the other rich girls only talk about frivolous boring things and author please stop making all the other upper class women timid and narrow-minded and being shocked at Mary going out and asking soldiers what's going on. Having Peggy Shippen be the only nice rich girl is a new one. (Ok, actually it's a very old one; it's a (probably unintentional) throwback to 19th century André fanfic, where Peggy is the female mc's sweet and innocent bff, though in those books André and Peggy aren't in love with each other.)

Also writers stop doing the thing where you get like one cool girl other than the mc if that and then every other woman is a bitch and most of her friends are guys. And I say this as someone most of whose friends are guys, but that's because I work in a majority male field, not because women suck. And actually it's become more evenly split since I moved to a less male office. (The camp followers are maybe marginally better portrayed than the upper class women, in that they're not completely useless, but they're still all total bitches who don't help her at all even though she shows up with nothing except a horrible leg wound and then think she's a whore when Tallmadge buys some frying pans for her, except for one woman who's nice. Stop. Doing. This. Having your mc and maybe her one friend be Strong Female Characters isn't feminist if you make the rest of the women suck, especially when you can somehow manage to have multiple sympathetic male characters who all have different personalities.)

Mary's entire personality is "I don't want to be a mere ornament for men", which you'd think would make her sympathetic except it's her entire personality, so it's annoying. Also, while André the anachronistic feminist would make me throw things and I'm sure he actually did going around feeling like men should protect women from the more sordid parts of life, he's a little too one-note protective older brother who doesn't take his sister seriously. Which is bad from a technical standpoint, but I suspect it's not accurate for André specifically either, because the women his name has been linked with were not stupid or submissive women when we know anything about their personalities, and I suspect the women of his family weren't either. (My crackpot theory based entirely on that one line from Edgeworth's memoir is that André's major non-financial dating problem was that he kept being attracted to girls who were too smart for him.)

It's not clear why she goes around randomly spying on the British Army for her own personal amusement, because that's a really weird hobby, but the author completely ignores what that might say about her, and it seems to exist entirely so that it can come in handy when she meets Tallmadge. It's also weird that Tallmadge finds out that she has a ton of papers with very detailed information about the British Army and immediately assumes she must be a British spy come to find out information about the Americans. Why would a British spy be carrying information about the British Army?

Ok, I actually can think of some reasons, but the most obvious conclusion is still that she's not a British spy. This is just Tallmadge holding the Idiot Ball so he and Mary can have extra conflict before they realize they're in love with each other. At least it's not as contrived and stupid as the André/Peggy conflict in Turn?

Though Tallmadge's weird anti-British prejudice is contrived and stupid because it seems like the officer classes of both sides went around being "more in sorrow than in anger" about their opponents (ok, the British also went around being "lol peasants"), and hatred tended to be directed toward specific British officers that had a specific reputation for brutality, not random British girls who showed up with massive leg wounds. Also Tallmadge was a gentleman. He's not going to be jerk to a lady, or even probably a mere woman. Though I realize I'm talking about the real Tallmadge and not Turn!madge.

It's also weird - and someone on Goodreads pointed this out too, but then they also complained that she didn't have PTSD which annoyed me because most people who experience trauma don't develop literal PTSD - how she just randomly decides to spy for the Americans for basically no reason, and she's not supposed to be a bored sociopath who decided to betray her brother for the lulz. This book would be a lot more interesting - and possibly make a lot more sense - if she was. Like I realize she gets almost raped by deserters from the British Army, but they were deserters. That makes it especially easy to be all #notallBritishsoldiers, plus her brother and most of the men she knows are in the British Army, plus all her friends are Loyalists. Plus it's not like deserters from the American side would be nicer. Why's she totally ok with the idea of potentially getting her brother and most of the men in her social circle killed? Why does she seem more worried about the Americans even when she's known them for only a month, the women are jerks, and Tallmadge flips out at her at the least provocation? Because a couple of deserters attack her? Oh yeah, and she walks in on her brother having a drunken hooker party and one of the guys thinks she's a prostitute, and then Simcoe promptly descends on him like the fist of angry God? And then André goes "bUt mEn hAvE nEeDs", which is terminally annoying but it's more likely to drive you to knee the speaker in the balls than to go over to the enemy which also thinks mEn hAvE nEeDs. Like these do not seem adequate reasons to betray your country, especially when it's going to put the lives of people you know at risk. At least Benedict Arnold wanted a shitton of money.

(Also re: André's drunken hooker parties, given that his idea of a fun party IRL seemed to involve him reading satirical essays about reincarnation, I have questions about accurate Turn's portrayal of his extracurricular activities are, exactly. "God I'm so drunk-*vomits in the fireplace* "-wanna hear some poetry?")

TBC unless I get distracted.

Haha what someone wrote a novel where John's sister Mary somehow ends up in America and becomes Agent 355? I might have to take a Benadryl and get over my allergies to Agent 355 and encouraging bad self-published writers and read this. (Somewhere, Andre: "Oh, you have an allergy to encouraging bad self-published writers? Must have developed after you went and bought Colors of the Times and The King's Fuzileers.")

And Tallmadge is a character and I think it's a romance so I hope this is Tallmadge/Andre's sister I will die. I love crack!pairings.

I'm disappointed it's not Louisa, though. She's my favorite of his sisters because in the miniature in the Ronald bio, she has a very elaborate hairstyle and an expression like she has one nerve left and you're getting on it. Her resting bitch face isn't quite Grodnertal doll level, but it's getting up there. (It's not the demon-possessed Victorian little girl dolls you actually have to worry about stabbing you in your sleep. It's the early 19th century Grodnertals who aren't possessed by anything, they're just sick of your bullshit.)

I think Louisa in the miniature might knee Tallmadge in the Ralph Earl painting in the balls though, so I don't think they'd work out.

There's also a miniature of Mary in the Ronald bio, but it's the worst of the family and she just looks like a dark blob on top of a light blob with two little dark blobs in the middle. Ann(e), who is the third sister, also has a resting bitch face that's not quite as epic as Louisa's.

One of the things I hate about the Ronald bio is that he doesn't talk about what happened to any of John's siblings afterwards. Like I know he was in contact with the family because that's how he got pictures of the miniatures. He could have done more with the rest of John's family.

[pollywiltse]

Haha what someone wrote a novel where John's sister Mary somehow ends up in America and becomes Agent 355? I might have to take a Benadryl and get over my allergies to Agent 355 and encouraging bad self-published writers and read this. (Somewhere, Andre: "Oh, you have an allergy to encouraging bad self-published writers? Must have developed after you went and bought Colors of the Times and The King's Fuzileers.")

And Tallmadge is a character and I think it's a romance so I hope this is Tallmadge/Andre's sister I will die. I love crack!pairings.

I'm disappointed it's not Louisa, though. She's my favorite of his sisters because in the miniature in the Ronald bio, she has a very elaborate hairstyle and an expression like she has one nerve left and you're getting on it. Her resting bitch face isn't quite Grodnertal doll level, but it's getting up there. (It's not the demon-possessed Victorian little girl dolls you actually have to worry about stabbing you in your sleep. It's the early 19th century Grodnertals who aren't possessed by anything, they're just sick of your bullshit.)

I think Louisa in the miniature might knee Tallmadge in the Ralph Earl painting in the balls though, so I don't think they'd work out.

There's also a miniature of Mary in the Ronald bio, but it's the worst of the family and she just looks like a dark blob on top of a light blob with two little dark blobs in the middle. Ann(e), who is the third sister, also has a resting bitch face that's not quite as epic as Louisa's.

One of the things I hate about the Ronald bio is that he doesn't talk about what happened to any of John's siblings afterwards. Like I know he was in contact with the family because that's how he got pictures of the miniatures. He could have done more with the rest of John's family.

[pollywiltse]

It's always funny when people write André as acting like he thinks he's hot shit because from what people said about the real guy, one of the things that everyone found so charming about him was that he didn't act like he thought he was better than everyone else.

I was flipping through Finishing Becca again. I really desperately want to know where that characterization came from.

Though speaking of batshit characterizations I need to find that girl on Goodreads again who thought André was a deeply religious Christian and also possibly gay* (he is in her novel but idk if she believes that or just thinks it's hot) and see if she's read any of André's actual biographies yet because boy is she in for a surprise when she finds out there's no evidence for André being either gay or religious. They were all on her to-read list last time I checked. Which didn't stop her from including him in her novel.

She posted a part of her in-progress novel where André finds the main character (who might also be a slash fic character?) making paper crosses and the mc is embarrassed and André's like, "No, it's ok, my one true love is actually Jesus like my mother taught me and I'm just in denial about it and going to all these wild parties to repress my deep love for Jesus" and then he picks up one of the crosses and starts making out with it. It was definitely a take.

Also for someone whose Protestant ancestors were driven out of their home by Catholics, her version of André is really chill around Catholics. Like regardless of whether he was a religious Huguenot (she thinks) or a borderline Deist Anglican (I think), I'm pretty sure he'd hate Catholics.

*Because she's clearly a repressed slash writer and also I'm pretty sure she picked it up from Donna Thorland's awful awful romance novel where André's a sociopathic spy master in Philadelphia and his one redeeming characteristic is his true love for Caleb Cope the 17-year-old youngest son of the Cope family, which is fascinating because their oldest son, John, was 12 when André was in Lancaster, so having their youngest son be several years older than their oldest son would take some doing, and also Peggy Shippen is a dumb bitch who can't tell André can't stand her and who everyone hates even the people who were historically enchanted by her and there's this whole thing where she somehow manages to have André's baby but pass it off as Arnold's even though she didn't marry Arnold until nearly a year after the British army left Philadelphia and she couldn't just wander around being pregnant and unmarried that whole time (also there's this whole thing where André inexplicably makes birth control the sheltered 17-year-old girl's problem even though he claims he didn't want to get her pregnant) and way too many people are convinced this is historically accurate because Donna Thorland has a background in history but frankly after reading this book I'm now worried about what exactly was going on in the part of the Peabody Essex Museum up in Salem where she worked because this book is not winning any prizes for historical accuracy, unless maybe it's a literary equivalent of the Razzies. Also I kind of think Thorland is one of the people who thinks straight men are masterful and dominant and aggressive and their relationships with their one true loves are really kind of antagonistic, and that's why André ended up being gay, because a man who is nice to women is inherently sus. This is of course very depressing because my ideal man isn't Petruchio and of course the people who think like this don't believe in lesbians either. I'm not sure any of the women in that Thorland novel even liked each other platonically, let alone romantically. But to be fair I didn't read most of the book, because it also wasn't that interesting. I was just there to see if she had, in fact, made André Chester the Molester who gets handsy with the 12-year-olds. (I still think she meant Caleb Cope to be John Cope, she just slacked on the research. Caleb was John Cope's father and none of the other kids in the family were named Caleb. The youngest at the time André was in Lancaster was Jasper, who was like a year, so presumably not having a torrid affair with André. This is A Record of the Cope Family by Gilbert Cope, p 32 of whatever edition Google has scanned.) This version might be worse, honestly, because it's sexist but with plausible deniability.

I think Goodreads Jesus girl might have assumed he was from a deeply religious family because the Huguenots were religious refugees, but just because you're from a religious disapora doesn't mean you're super religious and in fact he seems to have been the only child to have been baptized in a Huguenot church and from his oldest sister's birth they were going to Anglican churches because they seemed to care more about social climbing than Jesus, and I'm not even sure how religious the average Huguenot refugee was. There was also this story that a copy of "The Hiding Place" in his handwriting was found in his coat pocket after his execution, but the source seems to be Roger Lamb repeating a story that he heard from someone else who he just says is a "respectable person, a native of America" and no idea how they knew, especially since they're incorrectly crediting André as the writer and even Sargent the Victorian thinks it's nonsense. The actual evidence for André's religious belief suggest that he didn't have very much, though I sort of assume he vaguely believed in Christian mythology on the grounds that you might have had to care a lot more than I think he did about religion to believe in something else if you were from a Christian background living in 18th century England.