Apr 11·edited Apr 11Liked by sympathetic opposition
I re-read the Lady of Shallott recently and also saw a tragic e-girl angle to it.
Before the mirror cracks, she is kind of emotionally dulled. She's not unhappy, really, but living a limited emotional existence. "She lives with little joy or fear," but through the weaving the mirror image, she experiences bursts of excitement. ("But in her web she still delights / To weave the mirror's magic sights.") This isn't joy, but some other kind of incomplete pleasure that leaves her perpetually underfufilled. This is all that she seems to be driven by: "no other care hath she."
The Lady of Shallott archetype seems more like a girl who is in an environment where she is coasting through her emotions by getting basic psychological needs met, but not able to progress past that. This reminds me of people who spend years of their lives being entertained by the Internet, especially through lurking and other parasocial activities, who eventually feel as though they have little to show for it. Instead of building skills, relationships, etc., they feel like they just drifted through time without progress.
The cracking of the mirror is the culmination of her fomo. The mirror (half-existing on the Internet) no longer feels gratifying, but integration into the real world feels unfathomable.
I don't know what Tennyson's original idea was here. There's an alternative take on the "blissful ignorance" of female domesticity (she is complacent while ignorant of her own lack of independence, and upon realizing how she is restrained, she cannot handle the frustration). But I feel like the Lady of Shallott being absorbed into the emotional hibernation of a solitary Content Consumer seems to work for some reason.
I'm now re-reading this a few hours after first coming across it. I probably should have written a comment then, when the associations were still fresh.
First, this is probably not what you meant by literarily ambitious stories, but what came to my mind immediately when I read that phrase is the almost-a-genre of fanfiction that's broadly a modern AU where one or more of the characters are writers/involved with the literary world somehow. They're usually quite meta. Examples:
(Also, I remember you mentioning a writing workshop? What might qualify one to join?)
Your essay, and some of the stories referred in it, resonated with me a lot. I'm not entirely sure I know why. Maybe it's because I've been scouring the internet for comprehensible-to-me information on social dynamics, and I've noticed that once I find a writer in that domain, one of the things I'll do relatively quickly is try to find a picture of them, to figure out how attractive they are. I'm not sure how accurate that perception is, but it seems like an important piece of information to conceptualize someone's opinion on social stuff. Maybe that's just my recent preoccupation with the subject though (I fixed a chronic health problem I didn't know I had, got a bit more attractive as a result, and am struggling to update my social scripts).
Wrt being unfacedoxxed, I suppose not having the information about someone's attractiveness status creates space for people's assumptions and projections, letting the veiled person experience a different dynamic than the one they're normally privy to. Growth experience, "walking a mile in someone else's shoes", maybe?
Relatedly, it's been observed that being (very) attractive isn't always an advantage. I think it was Simone and Malcolm Collins who pointed out that having an attractive girlfriend is such a source of validation for teenage boys/young men, they're unlikely to risk losing the relationship if she engages in suboptimal behaviour. Which might not be good conditioning for the woman.
In this context, the veil trope might be a narrative device to have a beautiful character that also has virtues one might learn growing up without the advantage of good looks? (Humility, kindness,...,?) (I'm not sure I'm explaining this well.) (An alternative device would be to come up with a plausible reason why she grew up ugly, or similar - an unattractive person has to learn how to be likeable without people being primed to like them.)
One thing I'm having trouble parsing is the warrior/malebrainedness thing. Like, is being seen as attractive woman a hindrance to achievement in masculine domains? (I don't trust my observations on this.) One alternative hypothesis I can come up with (not sure if I agree with it) is that it might be a male (malebrained person's) fantasy of having a partner they don't have to struggle to understand (not femalebrained) but who [strikethrough] has boobs [/strikethrough] possesses feminine beauty.
Anyway, thank you very much for writing this, it's definitely food for thought!
I would really push back on the idea of looking to stories for guidance. I actually think this is one of the most reliable ways to make your life worse. Fictional narratives are generally built to sell. That you should not trust them as guides is really obvious if you consider more extreme cases, like action movies and violent videogames. But even accounts of real events are highly suspect. There are billions of people on the earth, and a small sample of their true stories will ever reach you: generally by riding a popularity vector. Which ones spread? Well, the ones that conform to the same requirements as the ones that are built to sell: they're naturally selected. Usually this is stuff that's unusual, dramatic and conflict-ridden. These are not often associated with good outcomes! Stories tend to be effective for transmitting a host of information and feelings, and they are great to study in order to learn how to entertain and communicate but they are really bad for guidance on life-living. This is particularly true of some of the authors whose works you profiled. Tennyson pretty clearly had a lot of problems with women based on like, everything he wrote, and both Shakespeare and his children had unhappy marriages.
I think a much better source is the lives and decisions of your friends, family and acquaintances. Those stories have some bias, but often the bias is in favor of their applicability to your life: these people tend to be similar enough to you that you can often draw conclusions from their choices and consequences. You also tend to get a lot of longitudinal information, and with older relatives and friends you get to see how stuff played out. Where this method has a lot of problems is if most of your social circle is people whose outcomes are bad. In that situation I'd recommend trying to find and associate with a new social circle.
You have actually experienced this yourself in your account of not wanting to sell cookies because of the "jesus said don't turn the church into a marketplace" thing. The story was just not a very good guide; but the guidance from the social circle was much better in terms of your personal outcomes.
I think that historically, this is how people have actually behaved: not by using stories as a guidepost, but by using much more local information. I think the stories tended to serve other purposes.
I re-read the Lady of Shallott recently and also saw a tragic e-girl angle to it.
Before the mirror cracks, she is kind of emotionally dulled. She's not unhappy, really, but living a limited emotional existence. "She lives with little joy or fear," but through the weaving the mirror image, she experiences bursts of excitement. ("But in her web she still delights / To weave the mirror's magic sights.") This isn't joy, but some other kind of incomplete pleasure that leaves her perpetually underfufilled. This is all that she seems to be driven by: "no other care hath she."
The Lady of Shallott archetype seems more like a girl who is in an environment where she is coasting through her emotions by getting basic psychological needs met, but not able to progress past that. This reminds me of people who spend years of their lives being entertained by the Internet, especially through lurking and other parasocial activities, who eventually feel as though they have little to show for it. Instead of building skills, relationships, etc., they feel like they just drifted through time without progress.
The cracking of the mirror is the culmination of her fomo. The mirror (half-existing on the Internet) no longer feels gratifying, but integration into the real world feels unfathomable.
I don't know what Tennyson's original idea was here. There's an alternative take on the "blissful ignorance" of female domesticity (she is complacent while ignorant of her own lack of independence, and upon realizing how she is restrained, she cannot handle the frustration). But I feel like the Lady of Shallott being absorbed into the emotional hibernation of a solitary Content Consumer seems to work for some reason.
I'm now re-reading this a few hours after first coming across it. I probably should have written a comment then, when the associations were still fresh.
First, this is probably not what you meant by literarily ambitious stories, but what came to my mind immediately when I read that phrase is the almost-a-genre of fanfiction that's broadly a modern AU where one or more of the characters are writers/involved with the literary world somehow. They're usually quite meta. Examples:
Les Misérables:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/1060639/chapters/2126196
Merlin:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/387876 (AO3 account required)
Supernatural:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/18083927/chapters/42744872
I, uh, have read all of those far too many times.
(Also, I remember you mentioning a writing workshop? What might qualify one to join?)
Your essay, and some of the stories referred in it, resonated with me a lot. I'm not entirely sure I know why. Maybe it's because I've been scouring the internet for comprehensible-to-me information on social dynamics, and I've noticed that once I find a writer in that domain, one of the things I'll do relatively quickly is try to find a picture of them, to figure out how attractive they are. I'm not sure how accurate that perception is, but it seems like an important piece of information to conceptualize someone's opinion on social stuff. Maybe that's just my recent preoccupation with the subject though (I fixed a chronic health problem I didn't know I had, got a bit more attractive as a result, and am struggling to update my social scripts).
Wrt being unfacedoxxed, I suppose not having the information about someone's attractiveness status creates space for people's assumptions and projections, letting the veiled person experience a different dynamic than the one they're normally privy to. Growth experience, "walking a mile in someone else's shoes", maybe?
Relatedly, it's been observed that being (very) attractive isn't always an advantage. I think it was Simone and Malcolm Collins who pointed out that having an attractive girlfriend is such a source of validation for teenage boys/young men, they're unlikely to risk losing the relationship if she engages in suboptimal behaviour. Which might not be good conditioning for the woman.
In this context, the veil trope might be a narrative device to have a beautiful character that also has virtues one might learn growing up without the advantage of good looks? (Humility, kindness,...,?) (I'm not sure I'm explaining this well.) (An alternative device would be to come up with a plausible reason why she grew up ugly, or similar - an unattractive person has to learn how to be likeable without people being primed to like them.)
One thing I'm having trouble parsing is the warrior/malebrainedness thing. Like, is being seen as attractive woman a hindrance to achievement in masculine domains? (I don't trust my observations on this.) One alternative hypothesis I can come up with (not sure if I agree with it) is that it might be a male (malebrained person's) fantasy of having a partner they don't have to struggle to understand (not femalebrained) but who [strikethrough] has boobs [/strikethrough] possesses feminine beauty.
Anyway, thank you very much for writing this, it's definitely food for thought!
I would really push back on the idea of looking to stories for guidance. I actually think this is one of the most reliable ways to make your life worse. Fictional narratives are generally built to sell. That you should not trust them as guides is really obvious if you consider more extreme cases, like action movies and violent videogames. But even accounts of real events are highly suspect. There are billions of people on the earth, and a small sample of their true stories will ever reach you: generally by riding a popularity vector. Which ones spread? Well, the ones that conform to the same requirements as the ones that are built to sell: they're naturally selected. Usually this is stuff that's unusual, dramatic and conflict-ridden. These are not often associated with good outcomes! Stories tend to be effective for transmitting a host of information and feelings, and they are great to study in order to learn how to entertain and communicate but they are really bad for guidance on life-living. This is particularly true of some of the authors whose works you profiled. Tennyson pretty clearly had a lot of problems with women based on like, everything he wrote, and both Shakespeare and his children had unhappy marriages.
I think a much better source is the lives and decisions of your friends, family and acquaintances. Those stories have some bias, but often the bias is in favor of their applicability to your life: these people tend to be similar enough to you that you can often draw conclusions from their choices and consequences. You also tend to get a lot of longitudinal information, and with older relatives and friends you get to see how stuff played out. Where this method has a lot of problems is if most of your social circle is people whose outcomes are bad. In that situation I'd recommend trying to find and associate with a new social circle.
You have actually experienced this yourself in your account of not wanting to sell cookies because of the "jesus said don't turn the church into a marketplace" thing. The story was just not a very good guide; but the guidance from the social circle was much better in terms of your personal outcomes.
I think that historically, this is how people have actually behaved: not by using stories as a guidepost, but by using much more local information. I think the stories tended to serve other purposes.