Tumblr crosspost (7 February 2021)

I reblogged a meme saying "Say some nice things about the person you reblogged this from in the tags" from ameliarating:

Tagged: #always interesting and thoughtful! #also the write three sentences reblogs help keep me on track :)

Tumblr crosspost (7 February 2021)

An anon asked:

Love what you write about Darcy/Elizabeth! Just curious, what do you think of Jane/Bingley? Do you think they would be a good couple?

I replied:

Thank you very much!

For Jane/Bingley, I think it depends on what you mean by “good.” They’ll be … fine, I think? There’s no real reason for them not to be.

But—well, I’m pretty resistant to the versions/interpretations of Jane/Bingley that I see now and then that are like, “well, actually, they’re very compelling as written and it’s suggested they would have a complex, ultra-passionate relationship!” Different people find different things interesting, of course, and have different headcanons, but … we never really see them interact and IIRC they don’t exchange a single line of dialogue. It’s hard for me to latch onto that as anything but plot and characterization device.

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15k!

The title of this post refers not to a fic but to this single, still-unfinished chapter of my dissertation. The 15k does include the citations (which are extremely time-consuming to manage) along with notes for topics/quotes I want to cover and longer passages I have written but not yet integrated into the overall chapter, in fairness. I'm not a very linear writer! The fully integrated and continuous section of the draft that begins at the beginning and flows without gaps to where I am now is a mere *squints* 9k, about 28 pages in my document (the completed citations for this sections are 1.2k words).

On the one hand: I have so much left to write ;_;

On the other: I am having NO difficulty hitting word count goals, lmao. Thank you for being a profoundly interesting playwright, John Webster.

Indirectly, also thanks to 100 years of bad Webster criticism! I spent 2k of those words just getting into the various pitfalls of Webster criticism wrt Ferdinand specifically and many of them are way worse wrt the Duchess. For instance:

On the other hand, the twin sister who pushes Ferdinand’s turbulent nature beyond the limits of his restraint is not wholly innocent.

(A line literally published in PMLA in the 70s; the article it's from is "The Moral Paradox of Webster's Tragedy" by Robert F. Whitman. The diss is more like "It is not entirely clear how the Duchess pushes Ferdinand's nature, turbulent or otherwise..." but internally I'm just FUCK OFF.)