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Random thoughts

Random thought #1: one of the many, many books I'm partway trhough, that I pick up and read a couple of pages in every so often, is Rosemary Baird's Mistress of the House: Great Ladies and Grand Houses, about the women in charge of great English country houses during the 17th and 18th centuries. And when reading the chapters on how the mistress of a house was an accountant, office manager, interior designer, party planner, and patron of the arts, not to mention many other duties if she had to also serve at court, it makes me think.

I wonder why is it that so many Extruded Fantasy Product^[TM] novels star girls who are in roughly this social position, who complain about not being able to do anything or have fulfilling lives*, and who look forward to endless years of being merely decorative, and who complain about not being able to get along with other well-born girls whose brains are apparently vacuous enough that if you touched them their skulls would implode? Yeah, I know, it gets them out of the house and on to their Grand Plot-coupon Collecting Quest, but it'd be interesting for once to read a book in a domestic setting featuring a heroine who didn't mind doing all that, along with the acknowledgement that all these girls were being trained up to be more-or-less capable of handling all that stuff, and a stupid woman couldn't do it.

* I admit, interior designer and patron of the arts are the only parts of that job description that appeal to me, so I have a wee bit of sympathy there, especially since I am lousy at accounting and managerial stuff.

Random thought #2, which is something that I keep intending to post every so often, but since it usually occurs to me in the car I never get around to it.

In the Saiyuki fic that I've read, I think a lot never quite work for me because I don't see people capturing the internal metaphors of the characters when they're writing from that character's P.O.V. - their internal monologues all sound sort of the same, and I never feel that the characters have a distinct voice.

It's not speech patterns I'm referring to -- what I'm talking about isn't anything overt, but like what Lois McMaster Bujold does in her books that are told from the military-mad Miles' P.O.V. She chooses words that have military connotations when possible - Miles doesn't sit in a chair, he occupies it. Things like that. I've never seen Goku written in a way that acknowledges his obsession with food and eating in subtle ways like that - when it's brought up, it's always overt references to being hungry or abandoned or whatever. I don't think he'd read a book, he'd consume it. If it weren't that in canon he specifically refers to Sanzo's hair as being gold and Gojyo's hair as being fire-colored, I'd think that he might refer to those as buttery and cherry or tomato-red - he'd probably see other yellow and red things in those terms.

Gojyo would be similar, perhaps, but with words that refer to the sensual, sexual side of human nature. He wouldn't touch something but caress it, not whisper but mouth the words. Or something - he's harder to come up with stuff than Goku ~~and I have not at all thought that instead of arriving somewhere he comes there, not at all~~.

Sanzo and Hakkai are harder, since their ~~psychoses~~ quirks are harder to get a handle on. But I'm sure there's ways to do it.

[ETA I talk about this a bit more in the comments.]

Mind you, I don't consume significant amounts of fic, so there's lots out there that I've missed, I'm sure, maybe stuff that actually does this.

And if you don't want to read all that, you can just watch Kougaiji copping a feel from Doku.

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I think you just pegged why I don't like many non-Heyer romances. Her heroines are creatures of their time and have goals that match so I'm not having lots of anachronisms thrown at me.

Yeah, I don't like modern sensibilities insinuating themselves too deeply into my period reading. :)

In a book with a setup like the Regency era, when there was a significant excess of marriage-aged women without great dowries so that many of them were facing down long years of genteel spinsterhood, I can see chafing at the reins to be able to put their education and talents to use, but they always seem to want to be Feisty Modern Twentysomethings^[tm] instead of something a bit more period-appropriate.

Another "click" . . . Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books work for me because it is a 20th Century woman back in the romantic past. I guess it's easier for me to accept magic stone circles tossing people centures into the past than young ladies of noble breeding acting as ambitious proto-yuppies.

I wonder why is it that so many Extruded Fantasy Product[TM] novels star girls who are in roughly this social position, who complain about not being able to do anything or have fulfilling lives*,

Theory #1: Fantasy is about as much about the past as SF is about the future.

Theory #2: Extruded Fantasy Product, post-Tolkien, roughly developed in 1950s-1970s, aka the prime years of the Feminine Mystique, in which not having enough to do and all the time in the world to do it with were driving many (middle-class white American) women crazy. Later EFP (1980s-present) is still shaped by its generic forebears and by women rebelling against the socioeconomic conditions of their mothers' generations.

I know that the received wisdom (which is probably true) in the publishing industry is that readers want a viewpoint character whose mindset they're more familiar with than a truly period-appropriate one, but I'm enough of a geek that it really throws me out of the story.

I had to stop reading Laura Joh Rowland's samurai mystery series because the protagonist was acting and thinking too much like a modern detective hero, despite liking the setting and the characters. I've read I.J. Peters' Rashomon Gate (#2 in a trilogy) and am partway through #1 - they're set in the Heian era and while the protagonist inspector is a bit modern, he's not so modern as to throw me out of the story.

(I've just finished #1 of Otogi Zoshi (http://www.tokyopop.com/dbpage.php?propertycode=OTO&categorycode=BMG), and it's the dullest manga EVAR. The main character is on the feisty "I want to fence and shoot arrows and all that TOO!" kind, which makes her inappropriately modern and thus germane to this post. WHen book #2 comes out, I'm going to lip trhough it and unless a miracle happens and it actually contains somethign of interest, I shall pass.)

I don't think, in the case of the EFP heroines, that it's even a conscious decision; I think it's people who haven't researched the period (and are going on secondhand or thirdhand redactions from other fantasy novels) and who assume without thinking about it that the historical experience corresponds to their experience much more closely than it actually does.

Probably the same reason you end up with Generic European Medievaloid Setting, or Generic Japanese Medievaloid Setting.

You know, I was listening to the audiobook version of Lost Discoveries (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000CAR5M/sr=8-1/qid=1153151036/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-1561671-7102568?ie=UTF8) a few months ago, and one of the things Teresi mentions is that mathematicians would travel from place to place selling their services (I don't remember the details). And I thought that was the coolest idea evar: I'd love to read a book starring a freelance mathematician. Presumably they'd do auditing-type stuff: what better chance to discover Things Wot People Don't Want Known?

Ah, I see that my library has the book: I think I shall go get it and look that bit up.

I take it back - the book says that those who had acquired the secrets of multiplication with non-Arabic numerals and were out of work could travel as itinerant math performers, basically doing tricks and having people throw coins in your cap for multiplying 27 by 14 and so on. But the setup still works - Arabic numerals were prohibited for being infidel numbers, so merchants and bankers kept secret books that used them in order to balance their accounts, and I'd think that someone scretly hiring an itinerant mathematician to audit someone's books would provide a great jumping-off point for a story.

I don't know how accurate Teresi's book is from a historic standpoint, but it provides lots of fodder for fiction. I love his description of merchants using a secret sign - flashing a zero to another merchant like gang sign to signal that you used the new math.

...ooooooh.

I'm in the worldbuilding stages of a fantasy novel with a dwarf treasurer/accountant as the MC (human-dwarf, not dwarf-dwarf). I may have to borrow that concept of "infidel numbers", although I'd have to either create a Middle East analogue, or set the thing more firmly in historical Europe....

:D If you're having your MC use Roman-type numerals, the method of multiplication used at the time is complicated and involves doubling numbers and stuff that I can't really grasp because ~~I'm not interested enough to care~~ Barbie told me Math is Hard.

The link to Lost Discoveries above leads to a $7.99 version of the hardcover at Amazon.com, and the author is Dick Teresi, if you want to library it. It focuses mostly on non-European science and technology, but the European math bits are on pp 22-25.

It says that in 1348 the University of Padua prohibited the use of "ciphers" in accounting: that prices had to be stated in plain letters, and a century earlier the Florentines banned bankers from using infidel symbols. It says a bit later that there's plenty of evidence of illicit number use* from 13th-century Italian archives, where merchants used Gwalior (aka gobar, or Hindu-Arabic numerals) numbers as a secret code.

And you had to go to Italy to school to learn advanced mathematics like multiplying and dividing.

* There's just something nifty about the phrase "illicit number use" and I can't get the image of merchants throwing gang sign at each other out of my head.

Despite the fact that it was a busy job, I'm sure it was chafing. These women never had a choice with what they wanted to do with life - their role was determined from the moment the midwife pronounced "it's a girl". They were wives and mothers, and only the most extraordinary and/or lucky broke out of that sphere enough to dabble in politics or commerce or much of anything else.

Nor were they given the opportunity to really flex their intellectual muscles. Besides languages and perhaps math, they didn't get any academic training. They didn't have philosophy, or science, or great literature to discuss or consider or study. I sometimes wonder what brilliant discoveries might have been made if women had been trained like men were. There had to have been just as many great female minds as there were great male minds.

However, I would say that there is some validity to the outward appearance of sheeplike stupidity. If playing dumb, fragile, and pretty lands you a husband, you play dumb, fragile, and pretty, regardless of how capable or intelligent you might actually might be. If you always play that role in public, all but your close friends may not know the truth.

Still, I'm a sucker for a well-written Regency romance, however inaccurate it might be.

Dumb, fragile, and pretty didn't get you as many husbands as Regency romance would have it - men wanted (a) money, (b) connections, (c) someone who could manage the estate while they were off doing whatever, and (d) social savvy enough to create and maintain (a) and (b).

They also *did* discuss politics and literature and philosophy - at this time over in France the literary and political salons, runs by women, were being established They didn't discuss it as much as men *in writing* - their interactions were with other men and women in person, at salons, at court, at house parties, etc.

So yes: they weren't educated and trained as well as men, and had fewer opportunities to exercise their intelligence, and if they didn't make a good marriage and didn't have a good portion from their family they were S.O.L., but it was different than you'd think from all the Extruded Fantasy Product out there.

This is also all at the higher ranks: the new middle class was known for being far more socially conservative than the upper class and a bit closer to the stereotype, but those wouldn't be the sort of people with enough rank and money to end up building and managing estates of the type I'm thinking of.

You are correct about this, though I would argue that (the human male remaining relatively unchanged in three hundred years) men wanted a, b, c, and d wrapped in an attractive, nonthreatening package if they could possibly get it. Looks have been a woman's primary tool for getting ahead in life throughout history, and this time period would have been no different. However, there were certainly enough attractive wealthy girls that the "gorgeous guttersnipe marries nobleman" EFP plots are very unlikely.

I'm not trying to say that there weren't opportunities for a girl to use her brains, merely that it was probably somewhat of a middle ground between the EFP and the book you are currently reading. I imagine it was something along the lines of the "happy 50s housewife" - the majority were happy to be homemakers, but many secretly yearned for something more, and few went out and did it.

The point I'm trying to make is that upper-class women in the book I'm reading were not stereotypical homemakers of the sort you're talking about. Except in the sense that they actually built, furnished, staffed, and managed the houses on the estates. This is not buy-groceries-and-dust work, this is the equivalent of Chief Operations Officer in a corporation. They commissioned the archictects, and in many cases annoyed the hell out of the architects by designing the houses themselves. They hired the staff and served as chief manager, over the staff's physical and financial concerns as well as their moral concerns. They did the household accounts themselves. They did the social networking expected of women in their station, and served as event planners. They commissioned artists and craftsmen, and supervised the furnishing and decorating of their houses. Many times this work was credited to their husbands, naturally, but the wife was doing most of it. There's even accounts of women controlling the purse strings: Sarah, Duchess of Richmond doled money out to her husband, and there's widows who served as financial managers of the full estate until their sons were of age.

And they tended to do all of this for two or more establishments: the country estate, the house in London, and other houses and estates they might buy or inherit.

The fantasy (and romance, too) books I'm complaining about feature aristocratic girls in exactly this sort of position, who by all rights ought to have been trained to do all of this, and many of whom would thrive in such a situation, or at least not consider it so horrible as to run off and start collecting plot coupons without a very great reason.

I'm not saying that *every* woman was like this. Just the ones in this particular social situation: aristocratic and titled (or groomed to marry titles).

* I realized that my biglong reply could be better summed up in one sentence:

I am not complaining about girls and young women in books who are not in the social situation to be able to manage a large household.

This makes me want to read the book. Is it actually entertaining enough to bother trying to locate a copy? Based on the "read a couple of pages every so often" it seems not, but that might jhust bee a function of schedule.

If you like social history, especially of Georgian and Regency England, it's good. Mistress of the House: Great Ladies and Grand Houses 1670-1830, by Rosemary Baird. The edition I have is one Mom bought when we were in England.

It doesn't rely on building up a long argument over the course of the work, so it's suited for leaving on my bed and reading bits before I go to bed, or right after I get out of the shower and don't want to face getting dressed yet, or waiting for the computer to boot up. I could read it in a big chunk at once, but at the moment I can't do that without feeling horribly guilty that I'm not doing something else. :D

And I'm totally going to pimp Liza Picard's books on London (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/102-1561671-7102568?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=stripbooks%3Arelevance-above&field-keywords=Liza%20Picard), which serve as brief introductions to the city's history in different era.

Have you read "Illusion" by Paula Volsky? It's pretty much a fantasy version of the French Revolution, but the opening quarter of the book is set during relatively stable times, and the heroine is a nobleborn girl who very, very much wants the life dictated to her by society (after a period of tomboyish behaviour in her childhood, which she now disdains). It's not a perfect book, but it is kind of refreshing to see the protagonist wholeheartedly pursue fashionably ladylike accomplishments.

Is that the book where the grandmother repeats on almost every page, "Yes, truly you are my granddaughter," or some variation thereof? It was an interesting story, but that particular line drove me nuts. :)

(Also, I couldn't help suspecting it might have been originally written as a romance novel set in the French Revolution before being spraypainted with sf.)

It is indeed!

I have rather an unreasonable affection for the book, as it's one that I read obsessively at about the age of thirteen, and then subsequently completely forgot the title and author despite wanting to reread the neat semi-sentient machines (I'm an engineer; I think fantasy fiction needs more machine POV *grin*). So recognising the cover from across the library a decade later was an angels-are-showering-me-with-cherry-blossom-petals kind of moment.

And yes, the fantastical elements are, in many ways, very bolted-on. The order of magicians who conviently don't interact with the world at all, thus allowing the society to happily replicate French history withut inconvenient "why don't they just use magic?" questions...

If it's the one I'm thinking of, I read it when it first came out and hated it because if I wanted to read a book about the French Revolution, I'd have read a book about the French Revolution. :)

Re Thought #2: That's fascinating, and now I'm reexamining my own writing to see when I have and haven't done that, and where I could do it in the future. Hm. Great thought and excellent suggestion, thank you!

:D You're welcome!

I talked a wee bit more about it in reply to

elfiepike elsethread (http://telophase.livejournal.com/613619.html?thread=5204723#t5204723).

I'd remembered Bujold mentioning her technique somewhere, and I also remembered a passage in a historical ~~romance~~ novel by Mary Brown. In that, the POV character, disguised as a young boy, is traveling with a sideshow-type group. The ringmaster of the circus has to take off for Mysterious Errands and gets the POV character to act as a barker for the Fat Lady. She tries to imitate the ringmaster first, who talks aboutt eh Fat Lady in sexual, sensual terms, but doesn't get much response, and realzies that it seems weird for a young kid to be talking like that, and so starts talking about her in terms that any young boy could understand: food.

And that just seems to fit Gojyo and Goku - in a, er, romantic situation horndog-Gojyo might say the forthright You make me hard but Goku would say You look good enough to eat. Hakkai ... I don't have as good a grasp of his character, but he'd probably say something more conventional or that downplays himself, like *thinks hard* What would you like me to do?, and Sanzo wouldn't say a damn thing except Get over here and get to it.

re: 1: it strikes me that diana wynne jones writes books like that. i love her surly main characters, and how pretty much no one is a victim. (so nice, especially after reading lots of mercedes lackey and wanting to punch them all in the face.)

re: 2: i pretty much never read first-person. XD but also, i admit to being wary of writers--especially fanfic writers--who used words that are too specialized-descriptive. i think it's because i'm inherently distrustful that it's going to turn into purple prose at any second. XD i wish i could name something for you, though; the saiyuki fandom is one where i've been really pleased quite quite often.

re: 2: I'm not talking first-person, but tight-third, where the prose is in third person, but filtered through the viewpoint of the character - as readers, we are privy to the character's thoughts and nobody else's in that scene, so that all the information we are gettign is filtered trhught hat character's perceptions.

There's a really good example in Half-Blood Prince, if you read HP. Most of the series is tight-third from Harry's POV, and all the descriptions are how Harry sees the characters. In the first chapter, which isn't from Harry's POV, Snape's appearance is described in a subdued manner, and his hair is described as "falling in black curtains". In the next chapter, from Harry's POV, his first glimpse of Snape is completely different, and Snape's hair is described as greasy. It's not due to Snape skipping showers at school, it's due to the person who is describing the events to us.

And if you notice the words being too specialized-descriptive, it's over the top. They're common, everyday words, in common use. Something like:

Goku looked around the inn bedroom. Plaster was cracking off the white walls.

could be rendered:

Goku looked around the inn bedroom. Plaster was cracking off the cream-colored walls.

You'd never notice that as sticking out, but lots of subtle things like that thrown in during segments from Goku's POV wuld build up a subtle voice, that would seem different when the POV switched to someone else.

Good point on character voice-- it's something I think about a lot, but is hard to do.

In a lot of societies, the woman of the house is also trained to defend it as a last resort, or if the men are out fighting elsewhere. There's your obligatory battle sequence right there!

I think about it, because it's a technique I especially like. And I'm trying to place a finger on why most fic, even when good, just doesn't ring true. So I notice that nobody ever has Goku using food-words to describe things. They mention that he's hungry or that he remembers the solitude on the cave in the mountain, but don't show how those things affect him unconsciously.

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