Reading The Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu (Part 6)

When last we left our heroines, they had arrived in Florence and were being entertained by the Marquis Grimoalti and his lovely and witty wife who take the two to an evening’s entertainment. Alithea dances with the Countess de Rinalto and has a playfully philosophical discussion with her about how men’s jealousy only tends to drive their ladies into a greater desire to look elsewhere for love. Alithea suggests that were the count one of those jealous sorts, she would be delighted to put horns on him, at which the countess appears to take her seriously and lays out the specifics of the necessary Contract for Indemnifying Infidelity she would require, which gives Alithea sufficient excuse for begging off, at which the countess says, “Just kidding!” and they both have a laugh about it with the count joining in. Arabella has had a turn of bad luck this time and is being bored to tears by an old woman’s stories of the court rather than being the object of romantic attention that has been more usual.

With none of the usual near-escapes from intrigue, the two take ship for Spain where more dangerous adventures await them. The spend a few days at Barcelona are once again besieged by love-letters slipped into their hands. Or, not precisely love letters, more in the way of business offers. But their local contact suggests that they beware of entanglements, telling a long and convoluted story of the lengths to which Spanish ladies had been known to go to take revenge on an unsatisfactory lover. Further, they encounter an unaccustomed gender-segregation at social events and, finding the conversation of the men tedious, leave early and determine to set out for Madrid the next day. That evening the two women have a bit of a male-bashing conversation, noting that although men may pay lip-service to women’s wit, good humor, and sweetness of temper, it all boils down to “the gratification of the sensual appetite” and, that being gratified, men soon look elsewhere. But, notes Alithea, “We [women] are condemned to be silly, empty, vain, and whimsical creatures, why should we condemn the men for despising us after we can afford them no more pleasure?” She continues, “It is a most absurd thing to exclaim against the inconsistency of men, and a more absurd thing for a woman who has any spirit, and is not subjected to certain mean and despicable desires, to expose herself to the contempt and perhaps hatred of a man, whose happiness ends with the honeymoon, if it lasts so long.” Though, she notes, it were a good thing for the human species that not all women were as scornful of men and marriage as she is. But to conclude this little scene of apparent misogyny from our heroines (on which more below), we have the following. “I am certain that we ought not to ridicule matrimony, or deter others from it. I wish I were just now a pretty fellow,” cried [Alithea] laughing, “I would improve the critical minute, and persuade the lovely Arabella to propagate the species.” “If I loved the man,” replied [Arabella], “as much as I do you, I believe I might be tempted to yield to his solicitations, though I really have an aversion to that state, and hope I shall never more enter into it.” “But it is now time, my dear,” said [Alithea] “to go to bed, where who knows but we may dream of the pleasures of matrimony.”

To digress from a simple plot-summary for a moment, it is both fascinating and somewhat uncomfortable to untangle the attitudes of the protagonists to affection, desire, and sexual gratification. Men “disgust” them because of their “brutal inclinations” and focus on “sensual gratification”, while women’s sexual desires are apparently “mean and despicable”. This (along with a certain amount of negative feeling for the women they encounter who express sexual desire for their male selves) would suggest an underlying anti-sex attitude of the “nice girls don’t” variety. And yet there is a repeating theme where one or the other of the women indicates that “were I what I appear to be [i.e., male] I’d happily jump into bed with you” without any implication in context that this would result in feelings of shame or regret for being unchaste. The two regularly valorize the emotion they feel for each other above what they imagine male-female relations to be, and yet they presuppose that their relationship would remain elevated and praiseworthy as a male-female couple.

This, for me, is the essence of what makes their relationship ring true as a lesbian one. Neither of them can stomach the idea of a sexual or marital relationship with a man, unless it were the other transformed to a man. Further, these expressions of desire for each other are ?always? (I’d need to review them in detail to be sure) with the one raising the topic expressing desire for the other as a woman, though the other may then concur in that framing and return desire for the hypothetical man. To me this reflects a difficulty with conceptualizing a sexual union between women (though they have no trouble performing a clearly sensual relationship) rather than an expression of transgender identity. In addition to expressing (carefully hypothetical) desire for each other, both women regularly express attraction to other women, even desire for them. Yet, except when interacting “in persona” with men, they don’t express any sort of identification with men as a class. The masquerade is a masquerade, not an identity. I will freely confess, however, that my interpretation of these interactions is undoubtedly colored by what I want the story to be about. And if other readers can read it in a way that makes it about something else, and that something else makes them equally happy as a reader, I won’t protest.

I was going to continue on with the Spanish adventures, but my lunch hour is up and I need to post and get back to work.

Mother of Souls: the research begins

Having identified a number of research topics that I really need to cover before getting too far into the next Alpennia book, I headed off to the U.C. Berkeley library after work today and took out an armload of books on the history of Ethiopia. Ethiopia, you ask? What has that to do with a little invented country in the middle of western Europe? Well, you see, the parents of Serafina Talarico (whom you will meet towards the end of The Mystic Marriage) emigrated from Ethiopia before she was born and settled in Italy. That might sound awfully specific for a character I hadn't really researched in detail yet, but that's what Serafina told me (this was back before she even had a name yet), and a small amount of initial poking around suggested I had enough basis to go with for the brief mention she gets in The Mystic Marriage

To some extent, the background of her character was inspired by a general air of consciousness-raising about "non-default" characters in historic settings, and more specifically by the inspiration of the blog Medieval People of Color, whose mission is to increase awareness of the presence of non-caucasion people in Europe through history. It got me thinking about the cultural mix in Alpennia and what possibilities I might be overlooking due to my own default thinking. At that point, I already knew that Mefro Dominique the dressmaker was a French emigré of African origin originally from one of the French colonies in the Carribean, by way of Paris. I don't think it was particularly clear in Daughter of Mystery simply because she only appears in one scene and the point-of-view characters were too preoccupied at the time to "notice" something they wouldn't have considered unusual. But when I got to thinking idly on the question of which other background characters might be other than white, Serafina waved a hand in the air and said, "Me! Me!"

"But Serafina," I said, "you're 'the Roman scholar'. That's what I have you down as. It says so right here in my notes."

"And this is a problem…why?" Serafina asked, with a characteristic tilt of her head. "I was living in Rome before I traveled to Rotenek, but my parents were from--" and at that point I knew I needed to figure out where her parents were from and what they were doing in Italy. So to brainstorm I started looking through Google Images -- I don't even remember what my keywords were -- and came across a photo of a gorgeous woman from Ethiopia who looked out of the screen and said, "Hi, I'm your Serafina." OK, the geography works plausibly (though the timing is well over half a century too early for the major association of Ethiopia with Italian influence). Now all I needed was a reasonable backstory for how her family ended up there. I didn't want her to be an isolated individual and I wanted a backstory that was less obvious and less clichéd than the African slave trade. Originally I was thinking I might find some sort of merchanting connection that might work, but even my initial browsing through the books I brought home has started me down a different path (involving various reasons why Ethiopian people ended up in Rome during the century or so leading up to my key period) which will be more satisfactory.

I'm going to be a bit nervous about this character -- particularly since she's going to be a point-of-view character in Mother of Souls -- because I have to make her interactions with Alpennian society make sense and feel "real", both as a foreigner and as a woman of color, and I have to do it in a way that contributes to the story, and I have to do it in a way that will make for pleasant and enjoyable reading without glossing over the likelihood that she'd encounter some amount of racial prejudice. But I knew that she was the right character for the job when I realized that being a child of diaspora -- who has never been able to feel "at home" anywhere she's ever been -- gave her exactly the emotional motivation necessary to weave her into the larger story that was taking shape. So wish me luck!