#late eighteenth century

[weary-hearted-art]

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sarah Campbell, 1777-78

[breakbeatsforbreakfast]

Self Portrait in a Straw Hat

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755 - 1842)

1782

(Source: The National Gallery)

[chiropteracupola]

the doctor is in...

[flintlock fortress is a collaboration with @dxppercxdxver]

[sapphicdancer]

I just wanted to share some of my fav photos from fake stongehenge

[the-busy-ghost]

Warlocks and Witches in a Dance

Do you enjoy classic literature? Do you like reading seasonal stories? Do you want to learn some funky new words? Do you want an excuse to spend the evening in a comfy chair with a hot drink and maybe a plate of shortbread, listening to the fiddle tearing into some reels and strathspeys, and perusing some engaging reading material while the rain and wind howl around outside?

Allow me to introduce you to honest Tam O’ Shanter, who stayed out too late one black night in Ayrshire and got the fleg of his life.

Links to the full poem:

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/tam-o-shanter-tale/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43815/tam-o-shanter

Language help:

https://dsl.ac.uk/ (this is a searchable dictionary of the Scots language both before and after 1700)

https://www.litscape.com/author/Robert_Burns/Robert_Burns_Glossary_S.html

Some Analysis and Textual History to start you off:

“The First Publication of Burns’ Tam o’ Shanter”, B.Dawson

“Burns’s Use of Parody in ‘Tam O’ Shanter”, Allan H. MacLaine

“The Narrator of Tam o’ Shanter”, John C. Weston

“Robert Burns, Tam O’ Shanter”, Murray Pittock

Wikipedia Entry for the old Kirk of Alloway

[knightofdeer]

To be fair I get the desire some progressives seemingly have to whitewash the past in terms of oppression.

It's very frustrating to think that for some fucking reason almost nobody succeeded in changing the system in 10 millennia and then things started working our in the last 200 years. It's also scary to think that if there were material reasons for things being this way, the same reasons may be still extant or may come back. My OCD also plays a role here

It would be comforting to think that things weren't all that bad. That while women lacked rights to hold positions of power and were prejudiced against they still could live fulfilling lives doing almost everything they wished, that gay people could still be their true selves with minimal secrecy and that even prejudiced people were mostly not violent. That ultimately the reason no group did a mass-scale rebellion was because the things were actually not bad enough to risk your life over it, and not because it was impossible or something worse.

Alas, I doubt it being the case

[werewolfetone]

They needed more than you could ever imagine

Before the cost of living crisis gets any worse someone needs to just snap & restart the Whiteboys

[sneakystorms]

Marya dimitrievna looking all old fashioned!!!!!

[brooke121000]

bad cooking • spencer reid

a teeny tiny blurb in which, during a playful argument, reader injures herself in the kitchen. bf!spencer proceeds to tend to her small wound and (lightly) lecture her.

warnings: sharp things, brief desc of injuries/blood

a/n: is it a problem all my writing has been food related lately?

———————————౨ৎ———————————-

“You do not have an oral fixation.” Spencer said firmly, chopping the tomatoes.

“You know what-“ you sighed. “I think that I do!” 

Before long, Spencer had chopped the vegetables and dumped them in the pot, the soothing smell of vodka pasta in the making filling your kitchen.

“Freuds theories are highly debatable. He himself was severely mentally ill- trusting him for advice on child development would be like.. trusting an eighteenth century plague doctor to administer a vaccine.” He chided, watching you strain out the pasta.

“Still, he was a pioneer in neuroscience-“ you retaliated. “He made his theories the same way anyone else did.. pattern recognition! You have to admit there’s at least some validity to the ego and the ID.”

He sighed, turning up the heat on the pan. 

“You have been biting your nails all night because you have an anxiety disorder and one too many glasses of wine- not because you were neglected.”

“I was formula fed! Don’t you think that might be the reason-“” You said, your tone rising a bit. Shaky hands navigated to the drawer, pulling out a large kitchen knife and grabbing a bulb of garlic from the basket.

“Okay, maybe I just need some alcohol. You know- you’re too stubborn for your own good.” He chuckled, shaking his head.

“Now-“ you turned to meet his gaze, and- in your emotion, fumbled with the knife. “I think that’s..”

He winced when he saw your wound- “you’re bleeding.” 

“What?”

As soon as you looked down, your brain became cognizant to the pain. Red hot pain shooting up your arm, crimson pooling on the side of your index finger and dripping onto the cutting board, defiling the garlic.

You huffed in frustration. “Ow! You distracted me, I wouldn’t have-“

He smiled, grabbing a paper towel. He wrapped his arms around you from behind, planting a kiss on the side of your cheek and wrapping your finger, applying pressure.

“We don’t.. need to argue about whose fault it is.”

“Well..” you pouted. “I totally ruined the garlic.”

“The pasta is fine, I promise you onion is perfectly satisfactory. Anyway, it’s almost done.”

He trailed off down the hall, coming back with a bandaid. He wrapped it tight around your finger, oaken eyes meeting yours as you wrinkled your nose at the stinging sensation. “Better?”

“..I guess. Still mourning that garlic.”

“The pasta-“ he sighed. “Is just fine.” Grabbing a forkful straight from the pot, he placed a hand underneath and held it up to you. “Here. For your oral fixation.”

You stuck your tongue out at him, tentatively taking a bite. The soothing tomato flavor calmed your nerves, as did his hand on yours. 

“Wow.. not bad.”

[anghraine]

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

------------

*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."

[dlyarchitecture]

[weary-hearted-art]

John Hoppner, Portrait of the Frankland Sisters, c.1795

[leroibobo]

kruszyniany mosque in kruszyniany, poland. this is the oldest lipka tatar mosque in poland.

the town of kruszyniany was assigned to tatars who participated on the side of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth in their war against the ottoman empire. after lipka tatars settled in the city, they built this mosque, most likely in the late eighteenth century; though there are documents which mention it going back to 1717. the village was settled by repatriates and belarusian muslims following world war ii.

[chiropteracupola]

castlevania, or, the Wrath of a Wife Guy Thwarted.

[aralisj]

Don't mind me, just thinking about how Queen Charlotte is still dressing like it's the late eighteenth century forty years later, how it's portrayed as a deliberate choice with her entourage also echoing the same exaggerated rococo style, how Lady Danbury is shown to have moved on by adopting the regency silhouette, how Brimsley said the Queen's daughters wouldn't leave her because she was trapped in time, frozen...

[the-busy-ghost]

Oh I have just realised another petty grievance lies ahead of me- I want to put all my ‘modern’ literature in the lefthand bookcase, but it’s going to bug me that, reading left to right, the first book will not be the earliest book in terms of time period