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inposterumcumgaudio · 1 month ago

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Your thoughts on Madame Wanda or the Thomasina House? If you haven't already ofc.

I've talked a bit about Thomasina House in the Class Structure post and there's a bonus theory I have about it in my post about Gemma Olsen. I might do a post about Thomasina House in particular in the future because there's more to say, but for now, I'll take you up on Madame Wanda and expand that a bit to the Reform Club as a whole.

Gonna disappoint right off, but I don't think anyone is actually having sex at the Reform Club. Sorry. All right, maybe some people do sometimes, like fucking at Studio 54. But that's not actually what the point of the place is.

It is described in the art book as a "punishment club". People go here to be punished for a misdeed they refuse to remember, but becuase they don't remember what they feel guilty for, there's no apparent reason they can't have some fun with it. That the developers have taken this concept and appended fetish play to it confuses the subject, but even then it still makes perfect sense. Fetishes aren't really about sex either so much as foundational (often childhood) memories later re-contextualized in adulthood. Dohoho.

And Madame Wanda is a matron overseeing the discipline of her naughty children.

I would really liked it if she were the Wanda Durbyfield from the "Diary of a Wayward Girl" that you find at the Hippo Club.

In fact, I very much think this was the intention: the Wanda in this diary ends her last entry by saying that, "Some day I'm going to punish them. I'm going to punish them all." And Madame Wanda has a cut diary too, indicating that she would also have been in the habit of documenting her life.

The only problem with this is that Wanda Durbyfield's diary points to her being younger than Margaret Oliphant, which would make her too young to be a Crier. But its a very good story otherwise. A girl unable to raise her child herself and terrorized by the town for it, grows up to find her calling in punishing her fellow Wellies while forgetting just as much as they have why. I think they just couldn't let go of the idea of a Crier running the fetish club because that is also a good concept. Would that they were compatible!

If the cut diary is any indication though, Wanda would have also grown into the role. As Wanda Durbyfield, her punishments would have been a revenge for the rage she was made to endure from the townspeople who were more powerful as a group than her. As Madame Wanda, her punishments are corrections with the understanding that people - children - misbehave without fully comprehending the underlying cause, especially when they have the boldness of a mob obscuring their better sense. This is why you punish them one on one (and presumably a premium rate).

I have a chapter in which I've juxtoposed the Reform Club with the Church of Simon Says and if Wanda Durbyfield was supposed to be Madame Wanda, then the game would have done this as well.

"I don't care if we ARE required to go to church! Those women are lunatics, the way they ganged up on me! You'd think they'd be GLAD I'm giving up the baby. They put their children on the train -- wouldn't they want another child? But no, I'm apparently the worst sinner in the world for sending mine away. Am I supposed to raise it here? Much better for it to live on a farm."

That the Home for Wayward Girls was a religious institution and enforced church-going despite the growing danger it posed would not only place Wanda at odds with the Church of Simon Says on a business level in the future, but a philosophical one as well.

The thing I think is most interesting about the Reform Club is that they are apparently engaging in some sort of resistance efforts, but we never actually get to know anything about it other than that it's happening. And what's more, you only learn this from a line that Sally will soliloquize to herself when walking around in the Garden District.

"I almost miss going to the Reform Club. I bet some of them could help. And they never ask awkward questions. But I'd have to be Naughty Nurse again, and I'm just not that."

I genuinely think, though. that this line is only here to give context to Gemma's bug out bag and not to actually lead into any further supposition about the Reform Club's activities. It's a sort of slight of hand, really, because the thing you're supposed to be focusing on from this statement is Sally's Naughty Nurse act that she just can't bring herself to reprise. Whatever the Reform Club is doing is similar to Mr. Kite in that you are presented it to pique your interest, but you're never permitted to get any closer to it.

And, if we're accepting that Wanda Durbyfield was meant to have grown into Madame Wanda, she even had the sense as a wayward girl know that some people deserved their chance to leave Wellington Wells.

"No one will ever marry her now. Nor me, I suppose. Not unless I can move away."

"Am I supposed to raise it here? Much better for it to live on a farm."

Beyond that, I have a further, wilder theory about the Reform Club and its place in the world.

In Lionel Castershire's quests, he often makes mention of an unnamed client who collects Uncle Jack records, but its in Ollie's act when Castershire asks him to retrieve the Salty Dog from the Lawrence house that we learn more about this client beyond that.

"I have a client who likes to… collect things. Very powerful man. He has quite a few employees, but he'd rather they not know about his… private interests."

(As an aside, I think it's very funny that this dialogue implies the client is a taxidermy dog fucker - particularly in view of what I'm about to tell you further - but upon receipt of the quest, you learn he was probably just after the Hope Diamond that should be in the Salty Dog.)

When you return with the Salty Dog, you get one last parting piece of information from Castershire:

"My client is a man you want in your corner. And not in the other."

I like very much to think that this client is the Mr. Cleland that Madame Wanda is expecting when you come upon her as Arthur.

Mr. Cleland is a reference to John Cleland, who wrote Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, more popularly known as Fanny Hill. In it, a wealthy woman recounts in two letters to a friend known only as "Madame" the sexual adventures of her earlier life. It is considered the first English prose pornography and is otherwise notable for its use of euphemism. It contains no vulgarities directly, instead describing its graphic sexual events in very... couched language. So couched you could lose your clover clamps or the key to your safe in it. Also, Cleland wrote this novel from debtor's prison.

So Mr. Cleland and his friends are coming to visit for some Golden Knocking, are they?

I think this is meant to be euphemism, which is doubly hidden because it is framed in a place that is also trading in innuendo. Which is to say, they are implying this is a fetish-y sex thing, but I think it is actually a business transaction and this is is why you want Mr. Cleland in your corner and not the other.

I believe he brings his "friends", people who owe him money, to the Reform Club to get the screws put to them and that Madame Wanda, resident expert in the art, assists him with this. This may even be why the Reform Club is permitted to operate as it does, it enjoys the protection of a "powerful man". Probably makes makes them lean over the chair and watches while Madame Wanda gives them a proper caning. Maybe the tranquilizer darts on the table are so they can walk home after.

Further story elements in the game that dovetail nicely with this idea are the quest "Moon Juice Leach" and Captain Lawrence's unpaid debts and subsequent "accidental" death in "Old Soldiers".

In "Moon Juice Leach", Eddie Coke is remembered as having not having the "common sense that God gave an ordinary bowl of porridge" nor much reason to need "contraband" motilene, but a desperation to try to steal it all the same. This idea that motilene can even be contraband is a whole other ???, but the constables suppose that Lionel Castershire (who we later learn in Ollie's act is perhaps a tad less upstanding than he appears) may be involved in Eddie's fatal caper. If Lionel acts as a buffer between Cleland and his acquisitions, this would make sense. If Eddie got a taste of that Golden Knocker, it would also explain the reckless attempt at theft.

Meanwhile Captain Edward Lawrence is past due on his bills and on notice for shut off from the Department of Water and Power. More motilene-related troubles. Possibly purchasing discounting "contraband" motilene and being unable to pay that bill either?

Rather than (or unable to) meet his obligations, he's chosen to shut himself up in his house and refuse calls.

To great effect:

If this is the work of Mr. Cleland (or more likely his "few employees"), it presents another interesting connection: that he may also have something to do with who has access to the apples from the last apple tree in the Garden District.

Or maybe Mr. Cleland's just wondering why Captain Lawrence is buying a luxury like apples when he owes him money.

That Ollie is asked to retrieve the Salty Dog from his brother Colonel Lawrence's house, after both brothers have died, seems like a case of shifting the debt around. (This is also why I wondered if the Salty Dog wasn't supposed to be Bonny Prince Charlie at a point.)

Dropping a bookcase on Captain Lawrence is a steep escalation, for sure, but if he wouldn't come to the Reform Club, then he didn't leave himself much room to negotiate a payment plan.

Who knows. He might have even liked it.

#madame wanda #wanda durbyfield #mr. cleland #lionel castershire #eddie coke #captain edward lawrence #we happy few #the reform club

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coochiequeens · 2 years ago

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Today In Women’s History Month we celebrate the birthdays of Louise-Florence-Pétronille Tardieu d’Esclavelles and Wanda Hazel Gág

Louise-Florence-Pétronille Tardieu d’Esclavelles, dame de la Live d’Épinay, byname Madame D’épinay, (born March 11, 1726, Valenciennes, Fr.—died April 17, 1783, Paris), a distinguished figure in advanced literary circles in 18th-century France. Though she wrote a good deal herself, she is more famous for her friendships with three of the outstanding French writers and thinkers of her day, Denis Diderot, Baron Friedrich de Grimm, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Mme d’Épinay interested herself in literature and the welfare of men of letters after the breakdown of her marriage to Denis-Joseph de La Live d’Épinay, a financier. She set up a congenialsalon in her country house at La Chevrette, near Montmorency, and offered hospitality to the Philosophes, the leading intellectual figures of the period immediately prior to the French Revolution. Her friendship with Grimm was long and untroubled, and Mme d’Épinay collaborated with him on his famous correspondence. Her association with Rousseau, on the other hand, was brief and stormy: in 1756 he accepted her offer of accommodation in the “Hermitage,” a small dwelling near her country house, and wrote his novel La Nouvelle Héloïsethere. But then he quarreled with his hostess, and the two became implacable foes. Mme d’Épinay was the author of several novels and works on education, but her writings are of interest now chiefly for their autobiographical revelations.

Her Wikipedia page had more information about her works

Her pseudo-memoires are written in the form of a sort of autobiographic romance, L'Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, begun when she was thirty but never published in her lifetime. It intersperses fictionalized set pieces exhibiting the sensibilité of the earliest generation of Romantics,[6] with genuine letters and autobiographical material. Bequeathed to Baron Grimm, a mangled version of the manuscript was edited by J. P. A. Parison and J. C. Brunet (Paris, 1818) as Mémoires et correspondance de Madame d'Épinay with all the names changed to identify the supposed originals: Madame d'Épinay figures in it as Madame de Montbrillant, and René is generally recognized as Rousseau, Volx as Grimm, Gamier as Diderot, who is sometimes credited with major interventions in the text. The work has had a checkered career since.[7] The only accurate edition is George Roth, ed. Les Pseudo-mémoires de Madame d'Épinay, 3 vols., 1951.

Other works

Her Conversations d'Émilie, a dialogue recollecting the education of her granddaughter, Émilie de Belsunce, was published in 1774.[8] The Mémoires et Correspondance de Mme d'Épinay, renfermant un grand nombre de lettres inédites de Grimm, de Diderot, et de J.-J. Rousseau, ainsi que des details, &c., was published at Paris (1818) from a manuscript which she had bequeathed to Grimm.

Many of Madame d'Épinay's letters are contained in the Correspondance de l'abbé Galiani (1818), which provided material for Francis Steegmuller's joint biography,[9] and have since appeared in a definitive redaction.[10] Two anonymous works, Lettres à mon fils (Geneva, 1758) and Mes moments heureux (Geneva, 1759), are also by Madame d'Épinay.

In January 1783, three months before her death, she was awarded the Prix Monyon, recently established by the Académie to honour the author of the "book published in the current year that might be of most benefit to society"; it was her Conversations d'Émilie (1774).[11]

Wanda Hazel Gág, (born March 11, 1893, New Ulm, Minnesota, U.S.—died June 27, 1946, New York, New York), American artist and author whose dynamic visual style imbued the often commonplace subjects of both her serious art and her illustrated books for children with an intense vitality.

Gág was the daughter of a Bohemian immigrant artist. While attending high schoolin Minnesota, she helped support her family by contributing drawings to a children’s supplement to the Minneapolis Journal. She attended the St. Paul Art School on a scholarship, and from 1915 to 1917 she studied at the Minneapolis School of Art. In 1917 she traveled to New York City and entered the Art Students League, where she studied with John Sloan and other noted teachers.

A show of Gág’s drawings, lithographs, and woodcuts at the Weyhe Gallery in New York in 1926 brought her first recognition as a serious artist, and subsequent shows there in 1928, 1930, and 1940 increased her reputation. She was represented in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1939 exhibition “Art in Our Time,” which was presented at the time of the New York World’s Fair. At the suggestion of a children’s book editor, she wrote and illustrated Millions of Cats (1928), which became a classic children’s book. Her subsequent books for children include The Funny Thing (1929), A.B.C. Bunny (1933), Gone Is Gone (1935), and Nothing at All(1941). She also translated and illustrated Tales from Grimm (1936), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938), Three Gay Tales from Grimm (1943), and More Tales from Grimm (1947). Growing Pains: Diaries and Drawings for the Years 1908–1917 (1940, reprinted 1984) is a memoir based on her journals.

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