Tumblr crosspost (29 August 2020)
Nov. 11th, 2023 05:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineI was reading an interesting Twitter thread about dealing with the painful historical realities in historical romance and reading the interesting discussion in the replies and then yet again
*screams into a pillow*
#a;djklfad how do you read the pemberley scenes and go 'we just don't know where his money is coming from. let's assume slavery' #i guess w/ bingley there is the very minimal defense that the characters don't literally see the source of his income #but no 'only lives in london' does not automatically mean 'involved in the slave trade' #(also bingley /doesn't/ have a london residence iirc so...) #godddd read another book #even another one by austen. just. something else(#but seriously mp and emma are much more fruitful than p&p if that's what you want to look at)
tree replied:
someone “did a study”? of what? “possible sources of income for fictional characters based on a few wikipedia articles i read and some things my friends said”?
I said:
Right? It’s like—you can speculate based on context (or the text, God forbid), but how on earth would you perform a study?
I do think it’s representative of the way that a lot of fans and critics blur the line between “characteristic of people in similar socioeconomic circumstances” and “characteristic of specific fictional characters” and make it out to be some irrefutable conclusion. People go on about how “the real Mr Darcy” would have done this or been that, and it’s like … there is no real Darcy and Austen was not beholden to the typical.
*screams into a pillow*
#a;djklfad how do you read the pemberley scenes and go 'we just don't know where his money is coming from. let's assume slavery' #i guess w/ bingley there is the very minimal defense that the characters don't literally see the source of his income #but no 'only lives in london' does not automatically mean 'involved in the slave trade' #(also bingley /doesn't/ have a london residence iirc so...) #godddd read another book #even another one by austen. just. something else(#but seriously mp and emma are much more fruitful than p&p if that's what you want to look at)
tree replied:someone “did a study”? of what? “possible sources of income for fictional characters based on a few wikipedia articles i read and some things my friends said”?
I said:
Right? It’s like—you can speculate based on context (or the text, God forbid), but how on earth would you perform a study?
I do think it’s representative of the way that a lot of fans and critics blur the line between “characteristic of people in similar socioeconomic circumstances” and “characteristic of specific fictional characters” and make it out to be some irrefutable conclusion. People go on about how “the real Mr Darcy” would have done this or been that, and it’s like … there is no real Darcy and Austen was not beholden to the typical.