soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2012-07-19 10:20 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2012-07-19 10:20 pm
Cotillion, by Georgette Heyer
Continuing my series of posts on books I read ages ago and then failed to post about EVEN THOUGH I've already written up all my thoughts, here is COTILLION, aka yet another Georgette Heyer. WHAT. Heyer's kind of addictive!
This book was fun and enjoyable! I do love Kitty and Freddy, and they are very well suited to each other, and I like how Freddy is not really at all the standard Hero of a Romance but he's AWESOME.
I spent a lot of the book, though, pondering Dolph (who is -- augh, I don't actually know the appropriate way to talk about it. The wikipedia page entitled "Mental Retardation" talks about the "euphemism treadmill", and yeah. It suggests "intellectually challenged" or "intellectually disabled" as the current term usually deemed appropriate? So. Dolph is intellectually disabled) and how he's treated by the characters and by the narrative.
The characters treat Dolph in about the way I'd expect of people from that era, and that's fine. But the narrative seemed to approximately approve of how they treat Dolph: of the perspective that to be a good person one must treat Dolph kindly, but really nobody can be expected to actually LIKE him or want to hang out with him or even think he's, like, a worthwhile human being.
The one who comes closest is Miss Plymstock, but even she -- well. She's a very ruthlessly pragmatic person, and I actually like her a lot. But it seems to me that she's marrying Dolph because she'll get a good life out of it, with freedom to do what she wants, and a decent living, and a respectable title, and all that. She thinks of Dolph with a kindness, of course, and she treats him very well and is very patient with him, but I'm not convinced she likes him, to say nothing of loving him. I think she pities him. I think she thinks herself better than him.
And it is clear to me that Heyer thinks Dolph is a lesser brand of human being, because she marries him to Miss Plymstock, a woman who is VERY DEFINITELY low-class. Heyer has opinions about class! So if Dolph (who is, after all, a LORD) is allowed to marry a common woman, that means that his intellectual disability cancels out the respectability that his title affords him and he is no better than a commoner himself. Which is problematic no matter how you look at it.
Heyer is problematic in a number of ways (Classism! Racism! all that stuff!) and one of the ways she's problematic is to do with neuro-atypicality. Cousin Kate, for example, has a character with a mental illness -- Torquil, who everyone in the family is afraid of/ashamed of. And he's basically just, like, evil or something, iirc, and at the end he kills himself and everyone's just like YEP THAT'S THE BEST THING THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED TO HIM. The treatment of Dolph is better than that but it's still not actually good.
So yeah. It's a thing that I'm always being reminded of, as I read Heyer: she's a great writer and a lot of fun, but her books HAVE ISSUES, YO.
This book was fun and enjoyable! I do love Kitty and Freddy, and they are very well suited to each other, and I like how Freddy is not really at all the standard Hero of a Romance but he's AWESOME.
I spent a lot of the book, though, pondering Dolph (who is -- augh, I don't actually know the appropriate way to talk about it. The wikipedia page entitled "Mental Retardation" talks about the "euphemism treadmill", and yeah. It suggests "intellectually challenged" or "intellectually disabled" as the current term usually deemed appropriate? So. Dolph is intellectually disabled) and how he's treated by the characters and by the narrative.
The characters treat Dolph in about the way I'd expect of people from that era, and that's fine. But the narrative seemed to approximately approve of how they treat Dolph: of the perspective that to be a good person one must treat Dolph kindly, but really nobody can be expected to actually LIKE him or want to hang out with him or even think he's, like, a worthwhile human being.
The one who comes closest is Miss Plymstock, but even she -- well. She's a very ruthlessly pragmatic person, and I actually like her a lot. But it seems to me that she's marrying Dolph because she'll get a good life out of it, with freedom to do what she wants, and a decent living, and a respectable title, and all that. She thinks of Dolph with a kindness, of course, and she treats him very well and is very patient with him, but I'm not convinced she likes him, to say nothing of loving him. I think she pities him. I think she thinks herself better than him.
And it is clear to me that Heyer thinks Dolph is a lesser brand of human being, because she marries him to Miss Plymstock, a woman who is VERY DEFINITELY low-class. Heyer has opinions about class! So if Dolph (who is, after all, a LORD) is allowed to marry a common woman, that means that his intellectual disability cancels out the respectability that his title affords him and he is no better than a commoner himself. Which is problematic no matter how you look at it.
Heyer is problematic in a number of ways (Classism! Racism! all that stuff!) and one of the ways she's problematic is to do with neuro-atypicality. Cousin Kate, for example, has a character with a mental illness -- Torquil, who everyone in the family is afraid of/ashamed of. And he's basically just, like, evil or something, iirc, and at the end he kills himself and everyone's just like YEP THAT'S THE BEST THING THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED TO HIM. The treatment of Dolph is better than that but it's still not actually good.
So yeah. It's a thing that I'm always being reminded of, as I read Heyer: she's a great writer and a lot of fun, but her books HAVE ISSUES, YO.