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ramblingrachell · 4 years

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Have You Read This? The Election of 2020

Like many of us, I watched Hamilton on July 4th, 2020 – our nation’s birthday. I met the day with mixed emotions as the spirit and character of our nation as of late did not seem appropriate to celebrate.

As I watched the story about many of the nation’s founding fathers and first leaders unfold, I was struck by the parts of their personal trials and tribulations that went beyond their contribution to the nation. Hamilton was the first politician to be involved in a sex scandal; Layfette – an immigrant, unafraid to step in and become America’s favorite fighting Frenchmen; Washington – a slave owner willing to admit “it probable that I may have committed many errors;” Jefferson – gained wealth profiting from the work of slaves, one of which he fathered six children with after making her his mistress. Burr – the untried murderer of Alexander Hamilton, whom he killed while still holding office as the third Vice President of the United States. In short, a hot mess of moral contradictions. I have been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack ever since my first viewing on July 4th, and realized a number of lines in various songs could be strung together to reflect my perception (key word: my) of the current political climate. Over the last week or so, I finally sat down to string all of those poignant lines together (with a few liberties for relevant context), a lyrical short story I have dubbed, The Election of 2020 (seen further down, further down). The beauty of democracy that is reborn during election seasons is our ability to get a fresh start, gain new perspectives, correct past wrongs, and continually better this land of the free for generations to come. I saw a quote recently that described voting as not so much like trying to find the perfect partner for marriage, but rather like using a bus for public transport. Voting is a map of bus routes that you must choose from in order to get from point A to point B. There may not be one specific bus that is going to your exact destination, but that doesn’t mean you stay at home and give up on travel entirely. Voting is not about waiting for “the one” candidate who is absolutely perfect. Instead, you choose to get on the bus that gets you closest to where you want to be. I know and love many republicans and democrats that have used the privilege of voting to get us all closer to where we want the nation to be. To me, where we are right now does not seem to fit under either traditional party umbrella – no, it’s much more like an umbrella that has been turned inside out and torn apart by a calculated hurricane of divisive and selfish endeavors. Perhaps more than ever before, this is the time to reassess our voting bus routes that will get us from point A to point B. Are we moving from indifference to tolerance? Hate to love? Despair to hope? Chaos to consistency? Negligence to protection? Moreover, before you get on your bus of choice, remember the route is designed to get the whole of our nation where we want it to be. Not just for me and not just for you. For all of US – as in, all of the United States. We will never all agree, I know this, but in spite of these disagreements, I am reminded of the hope that comes from the story of Hamilton. Even 244 years into this nation’s story, despite many dramatic peaks and valleys, the journey to our shared, happily ever after epilogue lives on. It lives on in me, in you, and in every vote cast to get us where we want to be. Regardless of how your vote is cast, the courage to reexamine your route and get on that bus… well, that would be enough.

The Election of 2020

“America, you great unfinished symphony A place where even orphan immigrants Can leave their fingerprints and rise up We’re running out of time Eyes up Time's up Wise up He's not the choice I would have gone with History will prove him wrong Winning was easy for him Governing's harder Welcome, folks, to a dysfunctional administration! He stands only for himself It's what he does I can't apologize because it's true Have it all, lose it all The President is gonna bring the nation to the brink He’s the villain in our history Frankly, it's a little disquieting that so many are blind to this reality He doesn’t have an ounce of regret He accumulates debt, he accumulates power Yet in our hour of need, he forgets Ardently abuses his post It's hard to listen to him with a straight face Watching the tension grow He cannot be left alone to his devices Indecisive, from crisis to crisis Stay alive 'til this horror show is past We're gonna fly a lot of flags half-mast Chaos and bloodshed already haunt us How many died because he was inexperienced and ruinous? We're too fragile to start another fight Where do we draw the line? Someone oughta remind him We're running a real nation Him and his words, obsessed with his own legacy His sentences border on senseless And he is paranoid in every paragraph How they perceive him Let future historians wonder How he tore so much apart And watched it all burn I wish I could say what was happening in his brain He's not very forthcoming on any particular stances Ask him a question: he glances off, he obfuscates, he dances I will not equivocate on my opinion I didn't say anything that wasn't true His father's a scoundrel, and so, it seems, is this dude He is uniquely situated by virtue of his position Though 'virtue' is not a word I’d apply to this situation He seeks financial gain, straying from his sacred mission And the evidence suggests he’s engaged in speculation Why does he assume he’s the smartest in the room? Soon that attitude will be his doom He knows nothing of loyalty Smells like new money, dresses like fake royalty Desperate to rise above his station Everything he does betrays the ideals of our nation See how he lies Look at his eyes Follow the scent of his enterprise If we don't stop him, we aid and abet it Watching him grabbin' at power and kissin' it Somebody has to stand up to his mouth What do we stall for? If we stand for nothing, what'll we fall for?

Be careful with that one He will do what it takes to survive No one knows who he is or what he does His pride will be the death of us all God, we hope he’s satisfied This man has poisoned our political pursuits Destroyed our reputation I can almost see the headline, his “career” is done Ya best go run back where ya come from! This dude is out! You ever see somebody ruin their own life? History obliterates In every picture it paints It paints him and all of his mistakes It's him against us, the world will never be the same He better get ready for the moment of adrenaline Try not to crack under the stress When he finally faces his opponent They’ve fought on like seventy-five different fronts He smacks others in the press and doesn’t print retractions We're breaking down like fractions But when all is said and all is done I have beliefs, he has none Gotta get us out of the mess he’s got us in There’s a reason no one trusts him No one knows what he believes I get no satisfaction witnessing his fits of passion The way he primps and preens and dresses like the pits of fashion Our poorest citizens, our farmers, live ration to ration As Wall Street robs 'em blind in search of chips to cash in He’s askin' for someone to bring him to task While we were all watching, he got Washington in his pocket But the sun comes up And the world still spins I hear wailing in the streets There is suffering too terrible to name This is not a moment, it's a movement Are we a nation of states? What's the state of our nation? The issue on the table: We are engaged in a battle for our nation's very soul I’m past patiently waitin'. Let’s passionately smash every expectation For the first time, I’m thinkin' past tomorrow. We're gonna rise up - time to take a shot This nation better rise up Raise a glass to freedom Something they can never take away No matter what he tells us Look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now But we'll never be truly free Until those in bondage have the same rights as you and me Seek out injustice in the world and correct it Life doesn't discriminate Between the sinners And the saints It takes and it takes and it takes And we keep living anyway We laugh and we cry And we break But can l be real for a second? For just a millisecond? We gotta make an all-out stand Get him out of power So he holds no office We are a powder keg about to explode We gotta stop 'em and rob 'em of his advantages Let's take a stand with the stamina God has granted us We pick and choose our battles and places to take a stand We will fight for this land Summon all the courage that’s required Be a part of the narrative The story they will write someday How we emerged victorious Leaving the battlefield waving Betsy Ross' flag higher No one has more resilience Let’s move under cover and move as one We have one shot to live another day Don’t throw away this shot We will fight up close, seize the moment and stay in it And so the American experiment begins again We bleed and fight for the next generation We'll make it right for them If we lay a strong enough foundation We'll pass it on to them, we'll give the world to them For a strong central democracy We may never all agree, but There's only one man and woman Who can give us a command so we can rise up Throwing verbal rocks at his mediocrities What do you stall for? What was it all for? We studied and we fought For the notion of a nation we now get to rebuild Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness We fought for these ideals; we shouldn't settle for less I don't pretend to know All the challenges we’re facing But this once, take a stand with pride This is not the time to stand to the side Stand with us in the land of the free To get the people that we need to lead We need the votes We need bold strokes When there’s skin in the game, stay in the game We don't get a win unless we play in the game We may get love for it We may get hate for it We get nothing if we wait for it I wanna build something that's gonna outlive me I dream of a brand new start I want real leaders that can save the day We won't be invisible We won't be denied If we get this right The nation can start to move on It outlives us when we’re gone We are the one thing in life we can control We are inimitable, true originals We can’t stand still Or lie in wait We don't wanna fight, but We won't apologize for doing what's right Together we can turn the tide If we manage to get this right They'll surrender by early light We have no control Who lives, who dies, who tells our story But I know that we can win I know that greatness lies within us But remember from here on in History has its eyes on me and History has its eyes on you”

(All Lyric Credits: Hamilton: An America Musical. Performances by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jonathan Groff, Christopher Jackson, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Leslie Odom Jr., Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos Phillipa Soo, and Original Cast Company. Atlantic Records, 2015.)

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cjrae · 5 years

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Dueling Fairytales. Or: Why Lucifer won’t take a Queen.

One of the most popular fan theories is that Chloe will become the Queen of Hell. The appeal is strong on the surface as it does several things;

- It codifies Lucifer and Chloe’s relationship into a formalized, wedded partnership as King and Queen.

- It answers the question “What will happen to Lucifer and Chloe when she eventually dies?”

- It elevates Chloe to a seemingly exalted position, which is coded as a reward.

The trouble with this theory is that if Chloe became the Queen of Hell, that would undermine the major themes of the narrative. To emphasize my point, let me pose a question.

Is the story telling us that Chloe needs to become worthy of Lucifer or that Lucifer needs to become worthy of Chloe?

Actually, let’s flesh this question out a bit more.

Does Chloe need to go through trials that test her commitment to kindness in the face of abuse to be elevated to a higher status in order to receive Lucifer as her reward? Or does Lucifer need to learn restraint, a higher degree of empathy and to be on the receiving end of kindness in order to grow up so that he can learn, not only to give and receive love, but the responsibility that comes with a duty of care?

If these sound like two completely different stories, you’re absolutely right. The first one is Cinderella, the second is Beauty and the Beast. And in regards to the question of the Queen of Hell, they’re both relevant because these two tales are dueling in Season Four with the introduction of Eve.

The Cinderella Story

Cinderella; a girl who has no control over her life, serving a cruel family that takes advantage of her and erases her identity in service of the family’s needs, but whose kindness, compassion and empathy in the face of grief win her friends that help her escape her prison and find freedom.

Fits Eve to a tee, doesn’t it? She’s highly empathic, makes friends at the drop of a hat, even with people who are inclined to dislike her - i.e. Ella and Chloe. She’s kind, but not stupid. She only needs one look at a situation with all the actors in the room before she can pick out what’s going on between Lucifer and Chloe.

What makes Eve’s story highly compelling is watching her abuse her virtues attempting to fulfill the themes of her own story, which ultimately causes her to fail.

The central theme of Cinderella’s story is her commitment to kindness in the face of her family’s abuse. The one thing the Cinderella cannot be, if she is to succeed, is selfish; to allow it would be to invite that poison into her own psyche. That isn’t to say that the Cinderella is doomed to be a doormat either. She rebels by going to the ball (or in Eve’s case, to Earth). However, there is a difference between standing up for yourself, acknowledging your own needs to be valid and worthy of consideration versus prioritizing your needs over the needs of others, irregardless of what they feel.

Which is exactly what Eve does. Her pursuit of Lucifer is highly selfish.

Lucifer is telling Eve “no” in multiple ways, including verbal at the end of 4x04. He doesn’t desire a relationship with her, he’s trying to work through something very painful and he’s not in a good place right now. He is in love with someone else and Eve knows it.

Unfortunately, what Lucifer wants is irrelevant. Eve wants him and she intends to have him because Lucifer is her second chance - Adam couldn’t love her because he was remained in love with Lilith, but this time will be different. This time Eve thinks she can win. So she pushes him into showing her his Devil face and pours balm on the wound inflicted by Chloe when she kisses it.

What Lucifer misses in that moment is that Eve’s easy acceptance of him as the Devil is a giant red flag in and of itself.

The Virtuous Daughter

The Beauty; the member of her materialistic family who prizes practicality, hard work, and making the best of any situation in the face of ruin. The one who will sacrifice herself without hesitation to protect the ones she loves, who puts her needs last.

Chloe is a homicide detective instead of the virtuous, youngest daughter, but the Beauty is often characterized by her devotion to duty - filial duty in particular. Sure enough, who is Chloe emulating? Her beloved father, the cop killed in the line of duty.

Beauty and the Beast is a more interactive tale between the lovers than Cinderella. It is through cohabitation with the Beast and learning about each other that the Beast learns to put others’ needs above his own, rising above his former self absorption while the Beauty learns to accept the goodness within the Beast, not only for his attempts to do better, but for who he is as the Beast.

This is literally the story of Season 4 - of Chloe coming to terms with Lucifer being the Devil and reconciling the fact that she is in love someone she’s been told is the personification of evil. It takes her the entire season to fall in love with the Devil as opposed to the Lost Prince (echoing the earliest written versions), who she’s been in love with since Season 2, and it comes in stages.

- 4x02, the ax scene when she realizes that Lucifer’s love for her is genuine, soothing her fear that, once again, like with Pierce, she’s been used as a pawn in a game she had no idea was being played.

- 4x05, when she throws herself between Lucifer and the anticipated explosion. The moment they both realize Chloe would sacrifice herself to protect the Devil.

- 4x07, when Lucifer chooses justice over punishment and brings Tiernan into the station, sacrificing his own need for vengeance and proving to Chloe that the Devil is a good man. Chloe is still bifurcating Lucifer, but she acknowledges that he is both angel and Devil in that critical scene on the balcony.

- 4x09, the traditional recognition of the Beast and the Prince as the same person, when Chloe realizes that his Devil form is a manifestation of Lucifer’s declared self-hatred.

Chloe’s love is not a redemptive object the way Eve wants her love for Lucifer to be. The transformation from Beast to man requires Lucifer to understand and forgive himself - Chloe can’t do it for him. Chloe’s acceptance can serve as a guide on that path, but Lucifer must do the work himself. He clings blindly to the idea that Chloe’s acceptance will either save or condemn him in a single moment - and when he attempts to force the issue he’s unable to accept Chloe’s “I don’t know” as an answer.

The Prince Of Darkness

Lucifer ends up caught in the middle of these two stories as each of them casts him in a very different role. The show frames Lucifer’s struggle between these two opposing visions of who he is as good and evil, but there’s something to be said for the idea that Lucifer would simply like to know which story he’s in, thank you very much!

Is he Eve’s Prince? A static, perfect figure that she will receive as a reward - her vehicle of escape and self-actualization?

Or is he Chloe’s Lost Prince? A man, trapped in a form not his own, battling his own worst impulses in order to regain the original identity he has lost?

And, in a twist, each woman assigns qualities of the other tale to their version of Lucifer - Eve’s Prince is a bestial version - Lucifer as he was in the Beginning. Primal, impulsive and living entirely in the moment with no care for the consequences of his actions. Chloe’s Lost Prince, however, is more of a tragic figure; sundered from himself, split into two - Prince and Beast.

The Beast is a protagonist of his own tale, but both as the Beast and as the Prince he is an object of rescue, which is not something Lucifer needs or wants from Chloe. Lucifer has no desire to be saved - it’s a concept that we’ve watched him actively reject before, when Amenadiel suggests that the return of his wings means he’s been forgiven. Chloe’s role in the tale is to learn to accept the Beast, letting go of the Lost Prince.

As the Cinderella’s Prince, he’s simply an object, not a man. Lucifer’s role as Eve’s Prince is a vehicle to elevate her to an exalted position that will remove her from the prison she’s lived in most of her life to a place where she will be loved.

It’s only after Lucifer rejects both Eve and Chloe’s objectified visions of him that he’s able to look at himself and get to the core of what has been torturing him since, arguably, the beginning of time. He is neither Prince - instead he is a man in nearly unspeakable pain as he sits in Linda’s office, knuckles white as he finally identifies and articulates the problem - his self hatred.

The King and Queen of Hell

Both Cinderella and the Beauty share the traditional raising of status, but in Lucifer’s case it’s worth asking - is becoming the Queen of Hell a good thing?

I would argue that question actually has nothing to do with either Chloe or Eve and everything to do with Lucifer himself and why he became the King of Hell.

Both Cinderella’s prince and the Beast’s royal status are their original identity. But in Lucifer’s case, becoming the King of Hell is the curse from his Father. However you interpret God’s motive for punishing his son, the bottom line is that Hell is somewhere that Lucifer hates. It is not, nor has it ever been, home to him. It’s not a place that he is proud of, nor does he relish the work he does there. He has enough pride to do the job to the best of his ability, but we know he’s delegated out as much as he could, even if Lucifer’s hands are far from clean.

In short, Hell is nowhere that Lucifer wants to be. He certainly doesn’t want anyone that he actually cares about to be there either.

Eve, however, needs Lucifer to be the King of Hell. The first half of 4x07 is, from Eve’s perspective, the high point of their relationship. Lucifer is the most intimate he’s ever been with Eve when they’re lying in bed after punishing Julian.

Of course Eve wants that back - enough that she’s willing to listen to Kinley when he tells her that, if she wants Lucifer to love her, she needs to convince him to go back to Hell. As much as Eve recognizes that Lucifer doesn’t want to rule Hell, it’s where he could “be a King again,” which is exactly how he was acting when he was closest to Eve. And, of course, ruling Hell would be different “with a Queen by his side.”

So she, once again, succumbs to selfishness - and is called on it by Chloe in the wake of it’s consequences. “How could you be so selfish?! Naive!”

Eve had already lost Lucifer, but her attempt to force her ascension to become Lucifer’s Queen only crystallizes that they’re not right for each other, as she’s faced with losing Lucifer’s friendship and respect. He would have to be the one to elevate her to that exalted position and he’d already told her “I don’t like who I am with you!” rejecting the role of Prince to Eve’s Cinderella.

Lucifer’s desire to be his own man, aligns much more closely with Chloe’s desires. Chloe has no need for pomp and circumstance. She’s always been the practical member of this partnership - sensible shoes, boring sedans, Costco runs and reading a bedtime story to Trixie. There is room in her life for desire, but Lucifer’s presence is enough to fulfill that.

In fact, in the moment when Chloe tells Lucifer she loves him and begs him not to leave, she is finally asking for something for herself. The Beauty has learned to allow herself a healthy dose of desire rather than a complete devotion to duty while Lucifer, as the Beast, has learned the value of love, empathy and a duty of care. Chloe and Lucifer have transformed each other into better, more complete versions of themselves.

Presumably, if Hell can be faced and fought in Season 5 and Lucifer released from the burden of the throne, then having the “curse” lifted might allow him to leave the Devil in the past and simply be Lucifer Morningstar, the identity he’s fought for since the pilot.

But, of course, if that happens, then Lucifer will no longer be the King of Hell. Therefore, he has no need for a Queen.

And They All Lived Happily Ever After?

The time for despair has passed - neither Lucifer nor Chloe can afford it. Instead, they (and we) are awaiting the reversal; the change in the status quo that will give them the opportunity to challenge Lucifer’s fate. If they are successful, then there may in fact be a new Queen of Hell, if Lilith comes into play.

But if she appears, she will likely not be Lucifer’s Queen, but a new ruler come to usurp the throne.

Long live the Queen.

#lucifer meta #lucifer analysis #lucifer on netflix #deckerstar #lucifer morningstar #chloe decker #eve #lucifer season 4 #lucifer season 4 spoilers #lucifer season 5 #lucifer season 5 speculation #beauty and the beast #cinderella #long text post

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webby-mogai · 9 days

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haunting the narrative pride flag

[pt: haunting the narrative pride flag /end pt]

a flag for when you're haunting the narrative, whether you're an introject or kin of a character haunting the narrative, or just identify as haunting the narrative. not a gender.

Sister flag to the doomed by the narrative pride flag(link)

[flag id: a rectangular pride flag with 11 equal horizontal stripes. the first 5 stripes are a dark to light blue gradient, and the last 6 are a light to dark teal gradient. in the center is a light teal symbol of an open book with a ghost coming out of it with a dark blue border. /end id]

#haunting the narrative pride flag #haunting the narrative #trope pride flag #trope flag #writing tropes #liom #mogai #mogai friendly #mogai coining #mogai heaven #coining #mogai flag #mogai identity #mogai term #liom safe #liom coining #liom term #liomogai #catherine coins

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aegon · 5 years

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Do you think that there’s a connection between Jamie and Cersei being twins and having a relationship and Arya and Jon being the only ones to look alike in their family and being super close? I ship Jonerys but I feel like in the books Jon and Arya are way too close for it not to mean or add up to anything?? Martins original idea was for them to end up together too

Anon, you’re after my own heart.

Jon x Arya parallels with Jaime x Cersei both on a relationship and an individual character level is one of my favourites to discuss and is so underappreciated.

And I’m always here to rant about what I think Jon and Arya are all about! I have so many, many thoughts about how important their relationship is to their respective narratives.

Buckle in, mate, I’m about to rant to hell. All my bottled up emotions over my faves, here we fucking go:

To start off with, I 1000% think there’s an important connection between both relationships. Jaime and Jon have incredibly specific parallels, as do Arya and Cersei. Like a century ago, I talked about the idea of balance in the series and that for every action, there’s a kind of reaction, so to speak. For me, the counterbalance to Jaime x Cersei is Jon x Arya.

Jon and Jaime parallels (keeping this short as it’s been discussed by others):

Swore vows to organisations created to protect with their lives and remain celibate.

Lord Commanders of their respective organisations.

Where Jaime was the youngest Kingsguard in history, Jon became one of the youngest Lord Commanders.

Break their vows twice each (one being celibacy).

Mother died in childbirth.

Mained/disfigured sword hands. Jon’s hand is burnt while Jaime’s is completely removed.

Nicknames designed to mock, re: Lord Snow / Kingslayer.

Jon refuses Winterfell while Jaime refuses Casterly Rock.

King foreshadowing in both their chapters.

Arya and Cersei parallels:

As children, both dressed in breeches and showed interest in training with swords.

Resent the patriarchal standards set on women and vocally refuse to follow what’s expected of them.

Identify and draw strength from the sigil of their respective houses.

Hold to their grudges. They never forget the ones that hurt their house or their family.

Have had their heads shaved by/for religious organisations, but where Cersei had hers forcibly removed and lost her agency, Arya gained hers by doing it willingly.

Both their ambitions are rooted in gaining a position of influence not often afforded to their gender. Arya asks if she can be a king’s conciliator, build castles and be a High Septon. While Cersei did become Queen, it was taking control over the small council and ruling in her own right that she really wanted, instead of being dictated around by men or the pretty wife birthing children.

Daddy’s little girls that look up to their fathers and attempt to emulate them after their deaths.

Difficulty with one sibling while being incredibly close to another.

Both are told they will marry a king, but misleadingly, not the ones in power at the time. Maggy tells Cersei she will wed the king, but this was long before Robert’s Rebellion and Aerys was in power while Rhaegar was still a prince, so the witch wouldn’t have made sense at the time. Ned tells Arya she’ll marry a king, but it’s Sansa that’s betrothed to the crown prince, so again, it shouldn’t make sense. In both cases, the choice of words is particular but telling.

Another fascinating anti-parallel is their opposite developments in temperament. Arya and Cersei as children are incredibly similar: willful, ambitious, quick to anger. But as the series progresses, through the FM, Arya learns to be humble, to control her emotions, to be patient and listen. Cersei, however, dissolves into anger, impatience, and pride.

These are mostly off the top of my head, but moving on to specific relationship parallels:

Jon x Arya / Jaime x Cersei:

Jaime and Cersei are twins, with classic Lannister features. Arya and Jon are the only children that look like Starks, and look like one another.

Obviously, they’re incredibly close and neither ever stops thinking of the other.

Jon and Jaime have both broken their vows for their sisters. Jaime breaks his for Cersei when he beds her and fathers her children, and Jon breaks his for Arya when he tries riding to Winterfell to save her (!!!)

This is more of an anti-parallel. Jon and Jaime both receive letters about their sister’s needing their help. Jon gets the Pink Letter of Ramsay demanding fArya’s return, and Jaime receives one from Cersei begging him to rescue her. The letter is the catalyst that drives Jon to break his vows, whereas Jaime burns the letter Cersei sends as he grows apart from her. Poetry.

Jon and Jaime compare the women they’re attracted to with their sisters. Jon sees Arya in Ygritte and Jaime thinks of Cersei with Brienne. Oh, and Arya thinks of Jon with Gendry, oof.

Another anti-parallel that’s less obvious: Arya thinks of Jon as being the only one that would want her after her traumatising experiences escaping King’s Landing and wouldn’t care about who she’d become now. Jaime barely makes it back to King’s Landing, back to Cersei, and she finds his disfigurement and the changes to his personality after his own traumatic experiences unappealing and starts keeping her distance.

There might be more but admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve read Jaime and Cersei’s chapters but there we have it.

To answer the first part of your ask - yes, there’s clearly a connection between these two relationships. I like to think of them as two sides of the same coin - but where Jaime and Cersei have all the toxicity you’ll never find with Jon and Arya. Essentially, they’re anti-parallels of each other, evidenced by Jaime and Cersei growing apart where Jon and Arya still very much love and miss each other. So where Jaime and Cersei are doomed to end tragically and aggressively, Jon and Arya’s bond is strong enough to stand the test of time and circumstance.

Jaime x Cersei is not the relationship to aspire to, but to demonstrate what happens when the individuals and the nature of the relationship is twisted to something corrupt. Cersei and Jaime essentially see one another as an extension of themselves, whereas Jon and Arya are one another’s source of support, but still very much their own people. Healthy af, yo.

So what does this mean for Jon and Arya?

From a writer’s perspective, having a character constantly bring up another and how much they love them and miss them and would do anything to be with them seems to be a pretty big red flag that they will, in fact, do anything for them.

It’s why I never understand those that say Arya and Jon’s relationship can be substituted with other characters.

In my opinion, there’s definitely something happening in the future that needs the reader to understand how much these two mean to each other. It’ll culminate in a climax that’s basically going to drive them from that point onwards and be a turning point in their narratives.

In Jon’s situation, we’ve seen the start of such a climax. His constant mentioning of Arya and agonising over her in ADWD comes to a head when he’s stabbed for trying to to save her. Such a moment wouldn’t have had the same impact for anyone else but Arya, because their relationship is the only one convincing enough. In the midst of knowing an army of the dead is coming and the drama with Stannis and the freefolk, Jon can’t stop thinking about Arya. We’ve literally had it hammered into our skulls that he’d do anything for her.

Surprise, surprise - he does.

And in that moment, as we’ve seen from the show, Jon Snow stops being Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch and starts his journey towards becoming the King in the North. Because of how much he loves Arya.

I very much believe the Battle of the Bastards will happen, but differently than in the show. The North is currently rallying behind Arya’s name and when Jon’s brought back to life, he’s still going to be out of his mind with worry for her. And he won’t have any vows holding him back from bringing her home (home being by his side because Jon calls himself Arya’s home and I just want to remind everyone of that, thanks). Fuck me, I’m excited. He’s 10000% gonna go to war for her and I am HERE FOR IT.

In this case, Arya being Jon’s favourite person and GRRM making sure she’s brought up in almost all of his POV chapters pays off.

For Arya, we’ve yet to see it happen, but I’m predicting that it’s the news of Jon’s death that’s going to force her to leave Braavos. We know that she gets news from the Wall from Eastwatch, and she’s struggling to truly become No One as the FM want because of how deep her connection to her family and identity runs. Jon is never far from her thoughts and plays a very important role in who Arya Stark really is.

When disguised as Blind Beth or any of her other identities, she still thinks about Jon. When she finds a deserter of the Night’s Watch, despite the fact that she’s not supposed to be Arya anymore, she still doles out justice for breaking his vows.

So, even though she’s a thousand miles away, Jon and the Night’s Watch are still very present in her narrative.

And we know how much Arya loves Jon. Damn, do we know.

I do believe the news of Jon’s murder is going to spread. And when it reaches Braavos, and finally Arya, it’s going to absolutely shatter her. Arya, like Cersei, does not forgive and forget easily. She’ll never be able to return to her training after hearing about her favourite person’s death, and she’ll be on the first boat out. Probably to go enact some justice.

The foreshadowing is present in this little nugget in AFFC, when Arya is listening to the NW deserter sing:

He is a man of the Night's Watch, she thought, as he sang about some stupid lady throwing herself off some stupid tower because her stupid prince was dead. The lady should go kill the ones who killed her prince.

Which I think is exactly what Arya is going to try and do. She won’t, of course, lots of shit still has to happen before they reunite, but she’s definitely going to try. Fucking p o e t r y.

But the point is, it’ll be her love for Jon that draws Arya back to her true self and sets her on course to reclaiming her identity and returning home. To make it convincing, it makes complete sense to have Arya think of Jon as the only one that ever accepted her for who she was, that loved her unconditionally, that would want her despite all the horrific acts she was forced to commit to survive. He’s the one she’ll willingly and without doubt break her vows to the FM for.

Love is the death of duty.

Jon and Arya’s love for each other could very well be the death of their respective duties to their organisation and vows, and be the catalyst they each need to propel their narratives towards the climax of the story, re: the War of the Dawn, and beyond.

This is why I never understand those that think they’re interchangeable with other characters. They simply aren’t? Everything I’ve mentioned can only ever be applied to Jon and Arya. No other relationship has been so deeply developed, nor as intrinsically integrated into their POVs. Literally everything I’ve said is only applicable because they never shut up about each other.

I don’t think this contradicts Jonerys tbh, but I think it’s an important reminder that Jon and Arya’s relationship is very much as vital to the story as Jon and Dany’s. There’s a reason I ship them as an OT3, and I’m in love with Arya and Dany’s parallels as well. Arya and Daenerys are and will always be the two most important women in Jon Snow’s life, and in turn, he’s just as important in theirs.

I tried answering this as objectively as I could, and I hope this was what you were looking for!

Thank you so much for a brilliant ask!!

#I have a lot of feelings #jon snow #arya stark #jaime lannister #cersei lannister #jon x arya #jonrya #meta #this was waaay longer than I thought it would be #but I have fucking missed writing theories about my darlings #I love them so much #anon thank you so much for the ask!!#anonymous #answered

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starberry-cupcake · 5 years

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Overall thoughts on Les Mis BBC

I decided, after all those summaries I made, to write what I hope can be a more coherent opinion on what I thought of the adaptation as a whole. I wanted to make sure to state that my critical reactions weren’t for entertainment purposes only or exaggerated for the fun of it but based on real concerns I’ll expand in this post. This is like the “serious companion”, if you will.

I don’t know if anyone cares about it at this point, but I feel that even though my summaries helped me go through the immediate frustrations in a (mostly) lighthearted way, it’s the distance from having watched it all what gave me a little bit more clarity to order my thoughts.

I’ve established my opinion isn’t worth a damn, I’m not smart or knowledgeable enough for this fandom and, needless to say, these are all my personal opinions, take them with a grain of salt or a bathtub of it. I’m a worthless nobody and my words have no value, but the internet is still (sort of) free, so here I go.

Introduction: the initial news, Andrew Davies & the PR mess

BBC announced the adaptations of 2 media phenomenons which started as books that I love so much I’m considering tattoos of both. And, for both of them, my main concerns were on the person adapting the script.

On the one hand, there’s His Dark Materials, a book series that made me the person I am today, pretty much. One of the directors is none other than Tom Hooper (what are the odds) and the script adaptation was in the hands of Jack Thorne. Cursed Child Jack Thorne. Yeah, not thrilled about that.

Surprisingly enough, His Dark Materials was given a projection of 3 possible seasons, rather than just one, the 3rd hasn’t been yet confirmed but the fact that the script was made thinking on one season per major book on the series, and that each season has 8 episodes planned, at least gives me a bit of hope, even if the person adapting it isn’t in my favorites list.

Les Mis, on the other hand, went to the hands of Andrew Davies, another person I don’t trust.

I’m one of those folk who was never too fond of the ‘95 version of Pride and Prejudice, mainly because of how Darcy was made into a sort of sex symbol, where his flaws were seen as “attractive marks of broody character” rather than vulnerability and with gratuitous sexualizing fanservice. I know a lot of people love it for that and that’s cool, you do you, but it’s not for me.

Then, when he adapted War and Peace, he talked about adding more sex to it and had the Kuragin siblings shown explicitly sleeping together from the get-go in episode 1 and that’s when I stopped watching (there were other things I didn’t like but that one was my limit).

To make matters worse, it made me weary that Les Mis was getting an overall amount of only 6 episodes whereas HDM was getting a potential 24-ish. That was an odd choice.

So, as you can guess, I knew coming in that Davies writing the script, a script with a limited time-frame for the story, was a huge risk.

But, on the other hand, as the cast was announced, I got excited. Especially for people like Archie Madekwe, Turlough Convery, Erin Kellyman and some famous actors like David Oyelowo. Their filming logs on social media, how nice they all were and how much fun they had filming made me happy. I felt that maybe these great folks could turn around whatever the scrip had to disappoint me.

But then came all the PR stuff.

The more I read Davies & co. talking about the show, the less hope I had for it. Talking very badly about the musical and the 2012 movie, calling female characters “not complicated”, insulting Cosette, saying that Javert’s lack of explicit heterosexual sex in the brick was reason enough to push a homosexual narrative centered on an unhealthy behavior, patting themselves on the back for having a diverse cast as if no other adaptation of Les Mis had ever done it before...even their talks about Fantine’s make up made me weary. And, let’s not forget their ridiculous insistence on not having songs.

By the time the show premiered, my hopes had dwindled. The excitement I had upon knowing there would be another Les Mis adaptation so soon, a BBC one at that, and with a cast I had hopes for, was blurred by all the nonsense of PR and I was more afraid than hopeful.

In the end, after having watched it completely, and as you can see for my summaries, I was heavily disappointed. I’ll try to list some of my biggest concerns, in no particular order.

I can’t be super extensive about it, because there are a lot of points to go over, but there are a lot of amazing opinion pieces out there about specific issues, so you don’t need me for that.

Anyway, let’s delve into some of my biggest problems with BBC Les Mis.

Problem #1: The portrayal of femininity

Solely by the fact that Davies stated that women on Les Mis “are not terribly complicated” you know that things are not going to go all too well on that front.

I’m going to pick 3 characters to showcase how badly women were portrayed in this: Fantine, Cosette and Éponine. I’ll leave other characters for another section.

1. Fantine

I’ve talked about Fantine before, upon receiving some questions on my summaries, but I’ll try to explain it all in a more understandable way.

The lens in which Fantine was seen was sexist from the get-go. The way in which the story was framed made the audience complicit in the choices she was making, choices that were negatively regarded by the narrative perspective alone. Her “fall to disgrace” was framed as her own decisions being incorrect, silly mistakes that were easily avoidable, and never regarded as the result of living in a society that was unable to contain her and see her as a valid human being. But we’ll get to that when we talk about the politics (or lack thereof) on this show.

Like I said in my response before, the way in which Fantine is portrayed, even in the musical itself, varies greatly performance to performance. Patti LuPone performing I Dreamed a Dream after Fantine gets dismissed isn’t like Anne Hathaway performing it after she has become a prostitute and neither carry the same implications as Allison Blackwell in the Liesl Tommy’s Dallas modern production, influenced by her experience in apartheid South Africa.

Still, the key element to developing Fantine’s portrayal, when it comes to sexism and the showcasing of her environment, has two layers: the actual oppression showcased in the source material and the contemporary interpretation or lens in which an adaptation will view it.

In this version, Fantine’s character was toned down in her attitude. She was less reactive than in the brick, a lot more passive, a lot more of a tragic figure, which paired up with the fact that this adaptation covered her entire “fall to ruin”, from meeting Tholomyès onward, made her a victim of everything that happened to her.

A victim of her own bad decisions, though, not of a social context that was failing her.

But the worst part is in how the focus of the show is placed. You can have Fantine being a summarized version of herself, with less spunk, and still showcase through her that the circumstances she was in were permeated by an escalating force of social disadvantage and oppression.

This adaptation made, like I said, the audience complicit in Fantine’s decisions as if she was a princess in a movie, unaware of the threats she was getting herself into by her own naive foolishness.

Tholomyès is blatantly shady, clearly dishonest, not at all charming or in any way trustworthy and Fantine gets a “voice of reason” on a friend who tells her various times that he will eventually leave. There are a lot of red flags, blatant for the audience, that Fantine chooses to dismiss. The show focuses less on why Fantine trusted Tholomyès and more on her making a clear bad choice we all knew was doomed from the start.

This becomes a problem once again when she chooses to leave Cosette with the Thénardiers. They are very clearly shady, very blatantly aggressive and ready to take advantage of her, visibly manhandling Cosette in front of her and asking for more money on the spot, and Fantine again naively ignores all of this.

They do it again when she enters employment in Montreuil. She talks to Valjean himself in this version, and is asked repeatedly and with kindness if she has a family. The scene makes it seem as if she could have easily told the truth, especially because we were previously given a scene in which Fantine hears a speech talking about how Valjean is the Best Person Ever and could potentially help her. Still, she chooses to repeatedly lie and the show makes it seem less for necessity and more for a sense of pride of some sort.

(Also, as a foreshadowing of creepy Valjean to come, there are some insinuations from her co-workers that she could seduce Valjean, which is confusingly placed and awkwardly added where it is.)

Then, after she’s dismissed, there’s a man in a post office who asks her, after receiving letters from the Thénardiers (to which she reacts a lot more passively than in the brick), why she doesn’t bring Cosette to live with her, in a condescending tone, as if he was stating the obvious. Fantine responds again as if she was doing it out of pride. The same man is the one to suggest her to start selling her body and then tell her she should have done it before selling her hair and teeth because “nobody would pay for her after that”.

Every turn we’re met with ways in which Fantine’s decisions are seen as foolish in the eyes of the viewer. It’s like Blue’s Clues or Dora the Explorer when they ask stuff to the audience for the kids to say they shouldn’t do something. It’s patronizing as fuck, is what it is. And, yes, sexist.

These narrative choices are sexist because they erase most of the social and political situation which made Fantine vulnerable in the first place, to push the tragic drama as if she was a victim of being “too naive”. It’s sexist because it makes the audience know from the get go that what Fantine is doing is a “bad choice”, easily avoidable mistakes that whoever writes is smart enough to sense are bad but poor naive Fantine can’t understand.

It isn’t just that she’s called a whore a lot of times, that she’s smashed against walls and the ground hard enough that Lily Collins was actually hurt, that she’s shown explicitly being used by a patron on the street. It’s that all of it is done with the added layer of her having “chosen wrong”. That everything is framed as the consequences of actions that the narrative voice, as well as the audience, are smart enough to know are wrong, but poor little Fantine can’t handle.

Like many things in this adaptation we’ll see later, Fantine’s journey is framed more like the tragic end of a woman who didn’t know how to choose right and was punished for said choices rather than the result of an unfair society which didn’t allow women any freedom to choose and didn’t see them as worthy human beings.

2. Cosette

When Andrew Davies called Cosette a “pretty nauseating character” in need of change, I knew I was up against one of those people.

Cosette is probably one of the most underestimated female characters in literature, and adaptations tend to do her dirty very often. I’m not even fond of her interpretation in the musical all that much, which goes in tow with the interpretation of Éponine. I’ve seen my fair share of men on youtube claiming Gavroche should be the face of Les Mis rather than Cosette, I’ve received my fair amount of messages claiming she’s The Worst, I’ve seen it all.

This adaptation does with Cosette something that, out of context, I would have thought impossible. They manage to somehow attempt to make her more “active” (they would call it “strong” but I have problems with that denomination) while making her even more of a helpless victim. It’s a pretty impressive oxymoron.

Let’s begin with little Cosette.

This adaptation does something very weird in that it only showcases Cosette’s storyline as a child when it serves other characters, but then intends to build upon the abuse by mentioning it or making it clear that adult Cosette remembers it well.

So we see Cosette when she’s important to Fantine’s storyline, the Thénardiers’s storyline or Valjean’s storyline, but not much about her on her own, aside from one time she’s looking at dolls and another time when she’s being beaten up by Madame Thénardier, which could be also a moment for the Thénardiers and not solely for Cosette’s narrative.

What I mean with this is that the view on her is reduced to a side character rather than a main one and, with that, her perspective on her own abuse isn’t taken into account. You don’t know how Cosette feels about things, you don’t see her perspective on it, you only see what others do to her but never get to see her side of it. For all the musical erases of her narrative, at least they give her Castle on a Cloud.

It’s with little Cosette where we start to see this weird sense of sexually charged perception towards her relationship with Valjean.

For some inexplicable and highly alarming reason, it’s implied by various witnesses in different occasions that Valjean’s intentions with Cosette may be inappropriate, and I would have let it slide as just people thinking The Worst out of living in a social context in which The Worst is most often the truth, hadn’t that perception carried throughout the series and mixed with Valjean’s erratic and possessive characterization.

When Cosette grows up, she gains a bit more focus, but she also starts to be charged a lot more sexually.

Both Cosette and Éponine are sexualized and objectivized in this adaptation. This will be addressed later, but most often than not this sexualization acts as an accessory to a narrative about masculinity.

Cosette’s virtue, beauty and body are talked about and even exposed in various moments. They tell her she can’t be a nun because that would be “a waste of her beauty”. In that dreadful scene in the dress shop I talked about in summary 4, the shop assistant again implies that Cosette is Valjean’s lover and lets him see her in undergarments through the curtain, with clear intentions. Valjean’s erratic persona is intent on separating her from Marius, explicitly telling her he’s worried that she will be taken advantage of by men, bringing up Fantine’s history to her with that in mind, while putting her in danger and in the company of the Thénardiers again, in more than one occasion.

Adult Cosette has visible signs of the trauma she suffered, which is an interesting direction to go. I haven’t seen an adaptation taking such a big route on her remembering her past abuse, and is a change that worked in performance, Ellie did some great visible responses like covering herself when Valjean wakes her up or going fight or flight every time she sees Thénardier. She is visibly upset when Marius gives him money and looks both angry yet still hesitant when she sees the man for the last time.

But all that kind of loses its importance when the men around her not only don’t give a shit but also do their worst.

Valjean manhandles her, harms her even, pushes her to the limits of her emotional state by taking her to see the prisoners intentionally after she mentioned prison, acting more possessive than caring and more erratically violent than conflicted and concerned.

Marius has a somewhat wet dream about her and then again dreams with her in confusing ways when he’s out of the barricade, with his grandfather talking about her as if she’s a piece of meat even after he meets her and she’s right in front of him.

They tried to make Cosette more aggressive, I think, more reactive, which in some moments worked. But when the lens in which she’s viewed is objectivizing, when she’s being commented on, offered and treated as an object, then it isn’t enough. It makes it worse, actually.

I’m sorry for Ellie, though, she did good.

3. Éponine

Much like Cosette, Éponine’s childhood was all but a few cameos. It’s very often that adaptations try to “tone down” Éponine in order to pull a narrative of her as an underdog in a love triangle, the “friendzoned” girl who tragically dies. The musical does that, for example.

Some of Éponine’s most controversial actions in the brick tend to be most often deleted or changed, except for adaptations in which she’s an “enemy” to Cosette’s narrative of a classic heroine.

It isn’t easy to find adaptations that are able to make Éponine showcase the complexity of her canon character not as a problem but as what makes her character so good and important in the overall story. Hey, even fandom sometimes tends to romanticize Éponine as if she had to be “redeemed” in order to be seen as a worthy character (but that happens a lot with female characters in general).

Éponine doesn’t exist for Marius’s narrative, as the other girl in a love triangle, or for Cosette’s narrative, as an enemy, she’s her own character with her own reason for existing and complex human dynamics that are extremely permeated by the social circumstances she’s immersed in and represents.

I’d say this adaptation is on the group that uses her for Marius’s storyline.

Added to that, it’s one of the worst I’ve seen on that case, because in this one, Marius is complicit of Éponine’s intentions, which are sexualized to a degree I don’t feel comfortable with.

We’ll talk a bit more about the Marius side of things later, but for Éponine, it meant she was reduced to a character that exists to sexually awaken Marius rather than a tragic figure on her own or even a piece of a love triangle. So, basically, this is the worst I’ve seen in a while.

This is clearly seen in that interview when Davies explained why he added that “wet dream” scene, saying:

“One of the best things Hugo does is to have Eponine tease Marius with her sexiness because he is a bit of a prig. So I have introduced a scene where Marius, even though he is in love with Cosette, has a wet dream about Eponine and feels rather guilty about it. I think it fits into the psychology of the book.” Source

Let’s leave out the part where he considers that to be “one of the best things Hugo does” because I cannot deal with that right now. Let’s focus on the other bit.

Like this quote suggests and I said before, Éponine was rather reduced to a tool for Marius’s sexual awakening. In this version, it isn’t only the “wet dream” which precedes more crucial interactions between Marius and Éponine, there’s also a scene where she strips for him through the hole in the wall and another where Courfeyrac is commenting on her and Azelma as Marius moves into the building for the first time.

By the time Marius gives her his money and any sort of bond can occur, it’s evidently clear in this version that Éponine has been teasing Marius and he is fully aware of it. He looks at her through the peep hole licking his lips and then has that disturbing dream where she’s kind of forcing him onto her in a very questionable way.

So, this Marius is by no means unaware of the fact that Éponine was attracted to him in some capacity and has played along her seduction, which makes his dismissal of her and his request for her to find Cosette a lot like he is using her for his own gain and replacing her for another girl.

Éponine’s attitude, much like Cosette’s, tries to be more active at times. She’s confrontational to her parents, seems protective of Azelma and is pleased to see her mother stuck in jail.

However, much like with Cosette, any kind of agency is compromised for having her narrative be serving a male character’s development rather than her own. Her involvement in the barricade is also somewhat modified but, by that time, her journey has already been substantially affected.

Much like Ellie, Erin was a very good Éponine when she was allowed to perform at her best and I wish she had been involved in an adaptation that was able to portray Éponine with more justice.

I’ll talk a bit more about women on the show in general in problem #3 but, for now, let’s move on.

Problem #2: The portrayal of masculinity

1. Javert

I am not the best person to write an essay on Javert, there are a lot of people more capable than me for that, and I may be called out for this and mess everything up, but I can’t write overall opinions without mentioning my issues with his characterization, at least summarized.

Javert is a complicated character. He is, as much as everyone else, affected by the circumstances and a man who goes through a huge emotional impact and sees his values questioned and compromised. His and Valjean’s journeys have a lot in common, in different ways and with different outcomes.

Sadly, Javert tends to be seen as a villain in a lot of adaptations. It’s a way to simplify the plot in the way movies tend to do: something is defined by what the other isn’t, if Valjean is the protagonist, then Javert must be his antagonist. I was worried that this version was going to fall into that trap, because of time restraint and Davies’s tendencies of simplifying complex characters.

Javert’s characterization was erratic, much like Valjean’s. His attitude was blurred by fits of rage and moments of confusing violence, followed by charged pauses in strange cadences which tended to fluctuate. I don’t think his attitude was as all-over-the-place as Valjean’s, but it was certainly not as well defined as other Javerts I’ve seen through the years.

This Javert, however, had a choice made for him that separates him from other versions:

Over tea in central London, Davies tells me that he was surprised to discover that, in Hugo’s 1862 novel, neither character [Javert or Valjean] mentions any sort of sexual experience, leaving the 82-year-old screenwriter wondering, at least in the case of Javert, whether it was indicative of a latent homosexuality. Source

There is a lot to unpack there.

First, there’s this idea of masculinity in which the lack of explicit heterosexual intercourse in canon is directly representative of homosexuality. I’m not gonna delve a lot in the brick but there are a good bunch of characters you can easily read as gay. Hell, there’s that whole thing going on with comparing Enjolras and Grantaire to greek couples. And if you want to write Javert as gay, go ahead, there’s a lot of fanfiction out there who is with you on that and I’m here for all interpretations, no problem at all.

But if you’re going to take that route, you need to be careful with your optics.

This Javert is, at the end of the day, in this adaptation, a gay man of color. He is also explicitly obsessed with Valjean in a way that exceeds his sense of justice. He looks at him undress in prison, is all over his personal space while he’s in chains and later interrogates him believing Marius is his lover, clearly attempting Valjean to confess to him if he was. He receives a lot of comments from an officer who touches him and looks at him strangely in the last episode, prompting an immediate rejection from him.

Everything points to Javert’s homosexuality being in the plot only as a further motivator for his need to capture Valjean, which makes for both a problematic portrayal of predatory homosexuality and a subsequent narrative of police abuse, both very problematic aspects to portray through a gay man of color. The way he acts and the way in which people act around him make it seem like his obsession with capturing him is fueled by the fact that Valjean represents his closeted feelings and that is all kinds of messed up.

He is also clearly not as involved in other aspects of the law as he is in capturing Valjean, since Thénardier ends up being a secondary worry to him, even explicitly knowing he has been mistreating and abusing a child, and he also explicitly doesn’t care about his achievements or the ones of his other officers as long as Valjean is on the loose. He lets Thénardier escape prison on his watch and doesn’t take care of it himself, prioritizing Valjean.

It isn’t about what happens in canon or not but in how all of this, in this version, is framed under this idea that Javert is also gay and has an obsession with Valjean that seems predatory in part, rather than fueled by his beliefs. And that is a dangerous optic to write a gay character under. Especially a police officer who is also a man of color.

I’m not the one to talk about that, it’s not my experience to tell and I’m not going to speak over those whose experience this is, but as a content creator, I’d question if my need to diversify is stepping over the lines of problematic aspects that may ill represent the identities I’m trying to integrate. Just saying.

David’s performance hits some very good moments, especially when Javert starts contemplating suicide. That is a very important scene in every adaptation and a very amazing chapter in canon and David does well in performing the turmoil in Javert’s decision. They also add, as a voice in off, the notes he left to improve the service, which is a great touch.

But, much like the other characters I mentioned, his performance is blurred by these writing choices in which Javert has been added this sort of predatory sense in which Valjean in jail symbolizes also keeping his identity hidden away. Davies would probably say his “desires” because that’s the kind of guy he is.

I hope my opinion isn’t overstepping anyone’s voice and I’ll leave the further of this discussion to someone more appropriate, but I felt it was an important matter to include and something we all, as media consumers, must pay attention to.

2. Marius

I had higher hopes for this boy, I really did.

The good thing this adaptation does for Marius is give him a bit more room than others do. They touch more on his relationship with his father and his grandfather, they bring up the Thénardier connection to his dad, they introduce Mabeuf, and they bring him on as a kid in the beginning, which even though questionable in comparison to him having more development as a child than Cosette and Éponine, at least helped to introduce him as another key character of the whole story.

I had hopes that this earlier introduction, albeit unfairly unbalanced with Cosette’s and Éponine’s, would allow for his character to develop more strongly, especially since politics were very present in his conversations with his grandfather and the ideals of his dad. I thought that by introducing politics through Marius that would allow his connection to Les Amis de l’ABC be more profound when the moment for revolution came.

Yeah, no, that didn’t happen.

Les Mis is a book where people are the heart and soul of it. With that in mind, characters aren’t like each other, they aren’t repetitions of the other’s attitude, they are diverse reflections of the complexity of humanity. The portrayal of masculinity in characters like Javert, Valjean, Gavroche or each individual member of Les Amis aren’t the same between each other, and neither are the same as Marius’s.

Marius represents a very wide emotional spectrum. He’s sensitive and vulnerable, passionate and driven, but at the same time can take action into his own hands when he has to and fight, even at the cost of his own life. There are layers in Marius. Like a Rogel cake.

I don’t want to generalize but a problem I have often with older male writers is that they see emotional complexity as weakness, especially when it comes to the portrayal of masculinity. There’s this idea in which something that is undefined or conflicting isn’t “strong” enough and therefore requires forcing.

Remember that quote I brought up for Éponine’s characterization? we’re going back to that. To Davies calling Marius “a prig” in need of being seduced.

Like I said, this version made Marius complicit in Éponine’s advances and aware of her sexually charged intentions, and this was made in an attempt to “upgrade” Marius’s masculinity and make him “less of a prig”. Because in order to be a Man, Marius needs to objectivize women. Apparently.

Like I mentioned, the gesture of Marius giving Éponine the little money he had ended up being a lot less effective by the fact that he had already fantasized about her more than once, and with her knowing that. He is taken to a brothel by Courfeyrac and Grantaire in which women pretty much throw themselves at him while he looks for Cosette. The “wet dream” he has is a very eerie combination of idealization and assault, in which Éponine, taking Cosette’s place, forces him onto her (much like Davies is forcing this onto Marius).

It isn’t about sex or eroticism being introduced to Marius’s storyline, is that they appear forced and almost violently thrust upon him in order to validate him in this idea of masculinity the adaptation seems to have, which seems to be very narrow.

And, with that in mind, we’ll move on to the last bit of this section.

3. Valjean

I am unable to write a piece about how many layers of wrong this Valjean embodied.

There are a lot of good tumblr scholars and Les Mis experts talking about it already, they can explain better than I ever could, but we need to, at least, try to glimpse at the mess this was, because this is a post on problems and this was a major one.

There are a lot of interpretations of Valjean, some of which are astronomically awful. He’s a character that can be easily fucked up, maybe because he also represents a very complex range of emotions, a very wide spectrum of masculinity, and is inserted in a wide variety of social contexts and spheres during his lifetime, which permeate his way of living as well as his agency to do things.

Any adaptation of Les Mis from the get go starts with the challenge of representing all of this in a limited time frame and with a limited perspective. It’s very difficult to translate not only all of this complexity but also all the thoughts the narrator can rely, all the feelings and conflicts and internal turmoil that we can get from the book because it’s written.

The musical, in that sense, has some elements from its medium that help, like the soliloquies, the changes of key, the ability for characters to bear their souls through song without interrupting the believability of the story.

Representing Valjean without a medium that allows a peek inside his head is a big challenge. He is a character whose turmoil is most often interior, so showcasing that externally poses difficulty.

Still, you can’t fuck up this much, my dude.

I’ve seen bad Valjeans in my life, this one is...complicated. He’s not good, don’t get me wrong, but he isn’t as clear-cut godawful as others I’ve seen, he’s too erratic to be easily described.

I think this adaptation tried to showcase complexity through visible emotional distress and physical violence. Instead of having a soliloquy or symbolism, we have Valjean shouting or screaming or burning his hand with a coin and staring at it for a while or shouting at nuns or carrying Cosette by force so hard her arm is in pain.

Everything gets even more confusing when everyone around him treats him weirdly.

You get years of exposition clumsily thrown at you via a speech Fantine hears when she arrives at Montreuil and he’s been elected. You get girls looking at him naughtily and suggesting Fantine to try to seduce him. You get inkeepers and Thénardier suggesting his intentions with child Cosette aren’t appropriate. You get women in dress shops thinking his intentions with young adult Cosette aren’t appropriate. You get Javert thinking his intentions with Marius aren’t appropriate. Everyone wants to talk about Valjean’s sex life or something, I don’t know.

His attitude towards Cosette is also muddled by this erratic behavior and the very strange way in which he sees her and Fantine.

He is visibly more worried about men taking advantage of her, of “defiling” her, than other dangers she could be in, like his identity being found out by the police or her falling in the hands of the Thénardiers again. He forcibly removes her from Marius’s presence and has a fight with her about it that ends on him taking her to see the prisoners. He knows she still, as an adult, visibly flinches when she’s approached harshly yet manhandles her when he wants to keep her locked up.

There’s something possessive about this Valjean that ties in to how Cosette is portrayed as an object. He talks about Cosette as if she was something he needs to keep, says Marius will “rob” her, not because he wants to be a good father or see her happy but because she is his to have.

This Valjean feels as if Cosette was his attempt to get rid of the guilt he feels for having failed Fantine more so than anything else. She’s less of a person and more an object he needs to keep for himself like a third candlestick. That’s the impression I got of their relationship with his characterization.

By the time the series ended, I felt upset with Valjean.

I didn’t care if he died, I didn’t care if he suffered. And that’s pretty shitty for a Les Mis adaptation to prompt. He made me feel uncomfortable, uneasy, as if he was the last person I would trust to take care of a young girl. And whatever internal journey he was going on wasn’t developed well enough to understand any of these choices.

I don’t know, like I said, I’m not an expert of the subject of Jean Valjean, but I’m pretty sure this is not how you adapt him.

Problem #3: Diversity without optics

This show hadn’t even started and it was already patting itself on the back for being diverse.

Now, if you haven’t been in the world of Les Mis for too long, let me tell you there are a lot of adaptations which are diverse, and not only of the musical. In itself, it wasn’t a pioneer move, but I was nonetheless happy that they were going to pay attention to that. At the end of the day, Les Mis is about society, about oppression, and adaptations of it should represent the diversity of the social landscape of the time and place they’re created in.

That being said, diversity in a highly political storyline needs to be carefully worked through, because without optics you can make questionable choices. And, you guessed it, questionable choices were made here.

I can’t and won’t go over all of the issues with this that there are, but I can give a few examples.

There is, of course, the always present argument of casting Fantine and Cosette white and the majority of the Thénardiers and Éponine as poc. And of casting the majority of Les Amis as white and the majority or most visible part of Patron Minette as poc. People have discussed this at length so I won’t go over that.

There is also how constantly woc were cast in roles of service, some of which were questionable given the context. Simplice, for example, is cast this way, which I overlooked at the time but as it kept escalating with other characters like Matelote and eventually Toussaint, it grew a bit more complex.

Toussaint was...a very problematic choice.

When you present the character of a “housekeeper” in a period series which is meant to represent France in the 1800s, and she is a woman of color, some alarms start ringing. I don’t specialize in French history, but my instincts were proven correct when I checked various sources on dates, after seeing the episode, and I’m quoting wiki for easier access here:

Slavery was first abolished by the French Republic in 1794, but Napoleon revoked that decree in 1802. In 1815, the Republic abolished the slave trade but the decree did not come into effect until 1826. France re-abolished slavery in her colonies in 1848 with a general and unconditional emancipation.

This series has a weirdly set timeline in comparison to the book but, for all intents and purposes, we’re in the early 1830s at the time she’s first introduced, correct? There was still an unstable situation regarding abolition at the time. The general emancipation hadn’t been yet stated in the colonies and the decree had just been starting to hold effect.

I know this show is casting in a general way as a suspension of disbelief of some historical facts and I’m all for diversity in casting in period dramas, regardless of anything else, if it’s allowing for representation in media.

But, at the same time, you need to be careful with your optics. She could have been cast as anyone else.

I don’t wanna go over this a lot because I don’t know enough about these parts of French history nor is it my story to tell, but the problem is in the erasure of conflicts or racism altogether as a way to prompt a shallow sense of diversity in a story that is directly linked with the subject of oppression.

Let’s continue with another similar optics problem involving “diversity” to exemplify this issue further, so that I can clarify.

This barricade had women on it and didn’t have Combeferre.

Now, here is the thing about that. In the barricade my man Combeferre gives an amazing speech about women and children.

In case you weren’t aware, the 1800s were the moment when European women and children barely started to be seen as separate members of society and not only “men but worse” and “men but small”. There are a lot of good articles about that, including one by Martyn Lyons about the new readers of the 19th Century, which changed the course of the editorial market, those being women, children and working class men, who didn’t have access to literature or literacy before that. The idea of childhood as we know it started then, and the later editions of the Grimm fairy tales was one of the first published books of fairy tales explicitly aimed at children’s education. And since a lot of us, in other places of the world that aren’t Europe, were colonized af or barely getting free from colonial governments in the 1800s, we kinda had to go with the flow, regardless of the social structure of native peoples, because colonialism sucks.

But you all came here for Les Mis so, let’s get back to that.

As this terrible and summarized dive into history implies, women and children were vulnerable to the fucked up state of social strife. Education was scarce and only accessible to some, employment was scarce and only accessible to some, food was scarce and only accessible to some. Most often than not, “some” did not include women and children.

In comes the the sun to my moon, Combeferre, with his speech.

He talks about all of this. Basically he talks to men who are the main providers of families, providers of women and children who depend on them and goes (I’ll paraphrase) “it’s our fault as a society that women can’t be here now, it’s our fault they don’t have the same possibilities and education we do, so at least do them a solid and don’t die today here if they depend on you to live, because the only possibility they have without your support is prostitution”. It was a fucking power move to include that on Les Mis. I mean, the entire book is a call out to the social and political situation, but damn.

So yes, there aren’t women there but the reason for it is that patriarchy sucks and the consequences would be disastrous for them.

Davies & co. pretty much didn’t give a shit about this. But, at this point, considering Problem #1, who’s surprised.

They removed Combeferre, his speech and placed random women on the barricade, as if nothing of that was going on and the patriarchy didn’t exist. Because ~diversity~.

The fact that they thought more woke to put some random women there on the barricade to die fighting instead of acknowledging the existence of sexism altogether pretty much sums up what this whole show thought diversity was.

For them, diversity wasn’t a political and social standpoint born from reality, a way to represent the dynamics of oppression that are at stake even on this day, but an aesthetic.

And, talking about speeches, let’s move on to the next bit.

Problem #4: Where are the politics?

1. The social and political landscape

Les Mis adaptations have a fluctuating balance with politics and social conflicts.

That is, at the end of the day, the very core of the existence of this story, the reason why still, to this very day, it is relevant and quoted, adapted and regarded is the fact that we still need it.

All of us, as human beings living as members of society, are always immersed in political decisions. It’s not only unavoidable, it’s part of our lives as people living together.

In the same way, the personal narratives of the characters of Les Mis are intrinsically linked to this landscape. They are set in different places of the social spectrum and hold different power dynamics and actions that relate to political standpoints.

Adaptations tend to work this in very different ways.

Some focus less on the politics and more on the social strife, with a greater focus on the characters. Others re-insert the characters in other different historical moments with the same levels of social and political strife. Others just copy-paste the situations and put them in another context, without really explaining what revolution it is, what they’re fighting for and why they’re being killed. The focus varies.

It seems, for how this adaptation starts, with Waterloo and a subsequent argument between Gillenormand and Baron Pontmercy about Napoleon, that politics are going to be important. This doesn’t last very long.

My biggest issue with the introduction of these circumstances is that they don’t bother on them but then attempt to use them for gratuitous self righteousness. It isn’t that they abandon them altogether, they overlook them but then attempt to use them for shock value.

There is a constant use of exaggerated, almost cartoon-y, stagings of social depiction:

- You have Gillenormand dining with his boys, in a luxurious and incredibly flamboyant scenery, while dissing political views in an almost comical fashion

- You have beggars downright assaulting Valjean and Cosette on the street right outside the convent, as a means of shock to Cosette’s expectations of the world outside of it

- You have Fantine’s entire sequences as a prostitute with higher and higher degrees of abuse

- You have the streets before the barricades, in some sort of confusing clamor that loses focus in favor of Valjean’s storyline

- You have a god awful last scene which attempts to say something socially compromising by showcasing the kids Gavroche was helping (I don’t think they’re siblings in this version), as a means to say “the revolution wasn’t successful and social strife will always continue” I guess, I don’t know, because it’s not like they gave a shit about it all before, so this kind of Perrault-ish moral of the story at the end makes no goddamn sense

They are exaggerated snippets of things without context, with very little exposition, that are used more as props to shock than they are to actually take a stand on what the original story is trying to tell.

Even the reality Fantine has to suffer is blurred by the fact that the social situation isn’t seen as much as a reality in itself but a combination of Fantine’s “choices” and Valjean’s “guilt”.

But, in order to delve more into the non-political aspect of this adaptation, let’s focus on some specific characters.

2. Enjolras

Well, I’ve seen a lot of Enjolrai in my life (is that be the plural of Enjolras? yes? no? can it be?).

Enjolras has very different characterizations, even within fandom itself, but we can all agree that he’s a) highly political, b) highly committed to the cause and c) extremely charismatic.

And when I say “charismatic” I mean it in the sense that his speeches are so beautifully crafted, so certain and commanding, that you just wanna listen to what he has to say, regardless of your views. They’re political discourse but also very poetic, which is a very interesting literary opposite to Grantaire’s voice, but I digress.

Still, Enjolras doesn’t stand on his own.

He represents a part of a whole, an important part, but a part nonetheless. Les Amis are a very diverse mixture of individuals, and the main triumvirate represents different stances on the same political action that coexist together.

Without others to stand with, Enjolras loses context. Not because he can’t support himself as a character, but because his biggest value is within other people.

This Enjolras is confusing, angry and loses a lot of steam when most of the people who should be around him aren’t really paying attention.

Courfeyrac, although performed really well, doesn’t really get a chance to show his political ideas without Enjolras around, and that makes it seem like he’s being convinced to participate rather than doing it for his own reasons and being one key part of the group.

In the barricade, Enjolras acts as if he doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time, and the other half he doesn’t give a shit about killing soldiers, smiling and laughing while shooting people.

It isn’t just that the scene with Le Cabuc doesn’t exist, Enjolras doesn’t seem to have empathy, which is all given to Grantaire instead.

By taking away Enjolras’s vulnerability, his complexity, they make him seem more shallow overall, and in tow, make his cause lose importance.

And without a clear political standpoint, because his expositions about the situation are very shout-y and unclear, and his speeches are summarized with some actual quotes but without their meaning and true feeling, he seems to be fighting just because, rather than having strong ideals.

Enjolras in the brick is eloquent enough, humane enough, that you understand what he’s doing and why. This Enjolras is a mess that I couldn’t understand at all.

I don’t think people who have never seen, read or heard of Les Mis before will understand Enjolras as a character through this. He’s just a very angry student with weird facial hair (why?) who rants in a cafe while his friends are playing games and making jokes, who is friends with some workers and is the leader because he shouts the loudest but doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing.

And, worst of all, doesn’t seem to care for human life. Which brings me to the next bit...

3. Grantaire

Man, was I excited with this casting choice.

When I heard Turlough was playing Grantaire, I was delighted. And, at the end of the day, his performance was very good, but for a character who wasn’t quite Grantaire at times.

I mean, he wasn’t as off as Enjolras, but he was also so erratically written.

They decided to make Grantaire hesitant rather than a cynic. He didn’t get to express his cynicism or his attachment to his friends (what friends though? only Bossuet had a name other than Courfeyrac and Enjolras) and his involvement with the fight was shown as insecure rather than questioning of ideals.

He is shown conflicted when he decides to fight with them, he doesn’t have any of his long speeches, the Barrière du Maine scene or anything of the sort. He is just...hesitant about death, I guess. About dying and killing people. That’s his conflict.

This has, to me, two big problems attached to it.

First, it’s a simplification of the entirety of Grantaire’s thoughts. It’s taking the cornucopia of drunken philosophy that Grantaire’s voice in the brick represents and replacing it with a single fear, which while very valid doesn’t reflect Grantaire’s true extensive complexities.

Second, it takes away from Enjolras’s humanity. Enjolras is showcased as an indiscriminate machine of shooting soldiers while Grantaire is conflicted about having to do this and, in tow, makes Enjolras’s rejection of him when he leaves and gets drunk like a jerk move of an insensitive asshole.

There isn’t a clear instance of Enjolras giving Grantaire a chance to do something before the barricade and Grantaire failing at it, with all the dominoes symbolism and all the stuff it implies. There isn’t a complementary set of complexities between each other. Grantaire seems to care about human life more than Enjolras does in this version, at the end of the day, because Enjolras’s speeches, even if carrying canon quotes, are inserted in a context in which he laughs while shooting people, knowingly sends Gavroche into danger and chastises Grantaire for being conflicted about human lives at stake.

So, instead of representing Grantaire’s true complexity as a character, they chose to give him something else that they think makes him more dimensional, when, in reality, takes away from his (and Enjolras’s) worth as a character.

All of this is very weirdly intersected with drunken jokes. Sometimes, the jokes and the behavior pays off and is inserted in good moments, sometimes they just don’t know when to stop and they kind of ruin their death scene with them, which is even worse considering it’s one of the few where they’re actually holding hands.

Overall, I think this was a simplification of Grantaire, in a way, a simplification which falls apart without a solid context to exist in. And it’s a pity, because Turlough was good.

4. Gavroche

The only reason I’d want an immediate new adaptation of Les Mis is so we can cast this same Gavroche in a decent one. He’s one of the best Gavroches I’ve ever seen, hands down.

In this case, the problem isn’t with his interpretation or how he was written, necessarily, and all time frame and socio-political simplifications aside, the problem is in how the context reacts to him.

A lot of Gavroche’s agency is deleted in this version.

For starters, his age is kind of all over the place at the beginning. He’s fine by the time of the barricade, but before it’s kind of a mess. As a result, he lives with his parents for a bit longer than necessary and the few times we see him on his own, being his independent self, are in conflict with how his involvement in the main events come to happen.

It feels as if he’s been used in the barricade. When he’s off to find bullets, only Marius tries to get him back to safety, while the rest cheer him and laugh.

His character is well performed and we get to see his personality and his situation when he’s allowed to act on his own, but within the context he’s inserted in, he seems more like a prop than a character.

This makes it so that when he dies, you’re upset more so than sad. It doesn’t feel like a tragic circumstance born out of a lot of layers of social strife which culminate in a dead end for a kid who deserved a better life. It feels like every adult around him, every person he encounters, either neglects him, mistreats him or sends him into danger. It feels, much like with Fantine, like an easily avoidable situation.

And things get worse with this guy:

Like I said in my summary, this David Harbour-ish soldier is the one who is shown to mercilessly kill both Gavroche and execute Enjolras and Grantaire.

This is another layer in the modus operandi of an adaptation who uses social oppression and political strife as shock value rather than commentary and discourse.

By personalizing “evil” in one stern, mean, unreasonable, power-hungry soldier, they’re villanizing (and trivializing) the social context as a whole. It isn’t about how Gavroche got to that point, how we as a society failed so hard that he has to die in that way. It’s just one bad guy.

But then, they try to be fake deep about it, by doing that last scene with his brothers or by placing him alongside Mabeuf and Éponine but not explaining what that means, why those juxtapositions are socially relevant and important to the plot (maybe they don’t know why).

Overall, this was such a waste of a great Gavroche that I just feel really bad. Reece deserved so much better.

5. The barricade

Needless to say, this barricade was more of a mess than you would have expected.

The lack of proper introduction to the political landscape, the clumsy exposition, the out of context shout-y speeches and the erratic behavior of its characters, paired together with the fact that it ends about 1/4 into the last episode, giving more time to personal drama than any of what happens in it, makes it one confusing mess.

It’s also in the barricade where it’s super clear how visually similar this series is to the 2012 movie. A lot of visual choices are extremely similar, even when they didn’t need to be (Fantine’s and Cosette’s hair choices? the shots in the hulks? the scaled down yet very similar camera angles and movements during the entire fight? the color schemes of some particular scenes?), and it’s pretty heightened in this barricade.

Which I wouldn’t care about hadn’t they talked crap about the movie during their entire PR campaign.

Like I said, there were so many issues within the people involved in the barricade. With the women, with the characters, with the soldiers. There was also a very strangely set line between workers and students that they were very clumsy about setting yet didn’t get to do much aside from having the leader of the working class men leave when Enjolras prompted it.

By the way, Enjolras was a lot less convinced about the whole ordeal in this version, which made his characterization even more confusing.

The barricade had a lot of messed up ingredients and not enough time to even simmer. At least the musical, which doesn’t have a lot of time dedicated to the students either, has Drink With Me, which doesn’t only serve as a way to characterize different students and their beliefs and personalities (“Is your life just one more lie?”) but also brings some melancholic change of pace, a pause between the action.

The highlight of this barricade, though, is Marius going apeshit with the torch.

But, all in all, there’s no much we can expect from a barricade born of confused ideas and even more confusing characterizations. This barricade feels less like a climax and more like a thing they had to do because it was in the book.

And don’t even make me talk about how they butchered my favorite speech. I’d rather not have it there at all, tbh.

Conclusion: A writer’s ego

We arrive to the end of this long and boring trip through my thoughts. If you’re reached this point, thank you for your time.

All in all, I feel like a lot of the issues of this adaptation stem from the fact that Davies thinks he’s better than everyone else and other men around him agree so much that they let him do as he pleases, without questioning anything.

I can’t really understand how you’re going through the script of this and see some of these choices (like the dress shop scene, the carriage scene and let’s not even mention the peeing in the park scene) and you go, and I’m quoting Shankland here:

“Andrew’s scripts made these characters feel modern. That was nothing to do with having them speak in a very modern way or changing their behaviour, he just found the humanity and earthiness of it,” Shankland says, recalling a scene in which Fantine and her companions urinate in a Paris park. “I thought, ‘Oh god, they’re going to pee in Les Misérables, that’s exciting.’” Source

That just sums it all up, doesn’t it?

After I watched this, I let some time pass. I watched all 3 fanmade adaptations that are currently out at this moment (back to back), revisited some of the ones I had seen before, read fics, read people’s articles and rants, looked into other adaptations on stage, from the classic ones to the more interpretative versions, and other current tv adaptations being done in other countries.

All of those things are vastly different. Some are more similar to each other, some are widely different, but they’re all different points of view on the same canon.

This is a canon that has some of the wildest possible interpretations coexisting. You can have a play centered on one specific character told through the songs of a specific album, a tv drama in modern times with a lawyer Valjean, a coffee shop au starring Les Amis, a parody comedy set in 1832, all happening at the same exact time.

And that’s great. That’s fascinating. That means this book is still alive because we need it still today.

Some days you’re in the mood for a heavily political adaptation which gives you goosebumps for setting canon in a context that is closer to your everyday reality, other days you just want all the Amis to live and have movie marathons cuddled together. It’s all valid.

But what all of those adaptations have in common is that they aren’t trying to be more than they are. They aren’t acting brand new, they aren’t pretending they’re re-inventing the wheel or that they are smarter than Victor Hugo himself because what Hugo didn’t know he needed in the “psychology of the book” was a soulmate au or a documentary series.

This adaptation, through what they said and how it was written, acted as if it was going to be the ultimate Les Mis adaptation to end them all. It presented itself as smarter than us all, as holding the keys to the meaning of Victor Hugo’s thoughts, as being able to fix his “mistakes”, fix other adaptation’s “mistakes” and deliver the best interpretation of canon possible.

And it managed to be a sexist, socially insensitive, problematic, un-political, homophobic mess.

Which, is a problem in itself, but even more so when the canon you’re adapting should be, first and foremost, against all that. It isn’t about how many brick quotes you use, it’s about channeling the soul of the story.

#les mis #les miserables #les mis bbc #les mis bbc a summary #jean valjean #cosette #fantine #eponine #marius pontmercy #enjolras #grantaire #gavroche #death cw #long post when expanded #luly rambles #bbc les mis

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THE BLAZING WORLD

Creating new narratives to equip us for the new dark ages

I am a teacher at Hotspur Primary School, an inner-city comprehensive school in Newcastle upon Tyne. The school is nationally recognised for its innovative arts projects and high-quality pastoral care for all pupils. In 2019 I led a whole-school art project entitled ‘Utopia Week’, based upon Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 novel ‘The Blazing World.’ The project was pitched as being a memorable and inspirational experience that could raise the aspirations and confidence of pupils. With hindsight it is now easier to see that the project was actually about something different; it was about creating new narratives to help equip the young people to overcome the new dark ages that we may find ourselves in.

‘The Blazing World’ was chosen as the stimulus for a number of reasons:

1. Children really like portals, especially so since the rise of the immensely popular Swedish video game Minecraft. ‘The Blazing World’ is full of portals that allow the Duchess to transport to the Blazing World, a Utopia filled with anthropomorphic animals.

2. As a school we are continually challenging stereotypes. The Science Fiction genre is synonymous with male writers and yet ‘The Blazing World’, a contender for the first Science Fiction novel to be written, was written by the proto-feminist, self-publishing, philosopher, poet and Scientist Margaret Cavendish. ‘The Blazing World’ combines a narrative of a woman in absolute power with a narrative about the possibility of utopian speculation and the liberation of the female soul. If we’re going to need to “woman up” as a society, we could do a lot worse than look to Margaret Cavendish utopian visions for inspiration.

3. Margaret Cavendish was The Duchess of Newcastle. Having this shared connection with the local area empowers the pupils and allows them to take pride in their heritage and community. Surely this is a more important and relatable connection than a history of Kings, Queens and conquests. (Incidentally, as well as having a claim to be the birth place of Science Fiction/Utopias, Newcastle can also be seen as the birth place of Dystopias, with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel We being written whilst the Russian author was living in the city. But that’s for another project.)

In the lead up to the project a flashing portal appeared in the school hall leaving pupils curious about what lay behind or would be happening in the upcoming days. An actor playing Margaret Cavendish then greeted the pupils having arrived through the portal. Frazzled after being transported across space and time, the Duchess of Newcastle explained to the children that her Blazing World utopia, once the envy of the Universe, had fallen into disrepair. Animals are squabbling with one another, each claiming superiority over one another, whilst their environment had become neglected and uncared for. Having heard that the children at Hotspur are caring, creative and inclusive she decided to visit the school to seek help.

Fifteen mixed-year group classes were then allocated a different animal from ‘the Blazing World’ to research about and find out what makes them special before creating flags, banners and special boats hats that celebrated their creature. This all took place over ‘Utopia Week’ in which students from Newcastle University’s School of Literature joined us to deliver workshops on Cavendish, Utopias, Science Fiction, Feminism and Woman’s Writing to the Year 6’s who then imparted this knowledge to the younger children. It all culminated with an immersive theatre event on the Friday where all the tribes joined together to parade across the school field.

The parade was inspired by the immersive 1960s theatre group ‘The Welfare State International’, and their mantra of “making audiences of strangers into a community.” The Welfare State International believed in a moral duty of offering art on the same basis as education and health. The procession had the soundtrack of David Bowie’s Heroes and was led by the Duchess waving on a flat bed truck made up to resemble a bubble spewing, steam-punk inspired ship. The pupils congregated at the end of the school field to share pledges as to what each animal would do to save the Blazing World, perform a flash-mob dance, and play carnival music on marimbas.

With the Duchess’s faith restored she endeavoured to use the pledges to bring the Utopia back to the Blazing World. Speaking to the children from a wooden platform ten-feet off the ground, the Duchess went onto say to the crowd:

“the time has come for me to leave you, and you in turn must return to your own world, which is very lucky to have you. I’m sure that in your lifetimes, Earth will face many challenges of its own. Perhaps you will also see divisions, or great change of other kinds. Maybe the weather will turn, or your own animal species will be forced to fight for their survival. It could happen today, or tomorrow, in 12 years or 1200 years. But I have no fear for this planet you call Earth. For even as a brief visitor I have seen that children like you – all of you - will always rise up to fight for what is right and good. And as long as the small people-people of Hotspur are around, the planet Earth will be in the best of hands.”

She then disappeared amongst a cloud of red smoke to the sound of Daft Punk’s Contact and a banner was draped down the front of the wooden platform with a direct quote from Cavendish’s novel:

“I have made a world of my own; for which nobody, I hope, will blame me, since it is in everyone's power to do the like.”

As a species we use stories as the optimum medium to help us understand the world and live within our own fictions. Unfortunately, the stories we have been telling ourselves over the last twenty-plus years have often been based on dystopias and catastrophic apocalypses. These stories are not suitable to equip those who are part of Generation Z or their younger contemporaries as they face the environmental changes ahead. This is the mobilising, metamodern generation who have grown up with constant internet access on their phones and are able to orchestrate political activism on previously unimaginable scale within less than 48 hours. As John Higgs point out in his inspirational ‘The Future Starts Here’, they oscillate between idealism and pragmatism.

Our news coverage, Hollywood films and best-selling novels tell us the same doom-laden narrative of environmental Armageddon. We struggle to imagine a healthy fiction to live inside and have forgotten what Gary Lachman calls the lost power of the imagination. Or as Higgs succinctly puts it, “The failure of the imagination stops us from steering towards better version of our potential future.” Consequently, one of the first activities as part of the week was for all the pupils to design a utopia. As the above quote by Cavendish points out, surely the first stage of creating a better future is to imagine one.

Older narratives of protagonists righteously pursuing their individual liberty don’t seem to be as relevant for Generation Z and their descendants. This is why the collective struggle to restore a Utopia from a dystopia through pledges seemed a good narrative for the pupils to be immersed in. In a moment of synchronicity, a number of the pupils had been at the Civic Centre that very morning to protest against Newcastle City Council’s lack of action on climate change. Their return to school for the afternoon’s procession meant that they were more equipped with merging the performative and spectacle with their activism.

‘Utopia Week’ would not have been possible were it not for the collaboration with producer and writer Beth Coverdale (who also works at Seven Stories Centre for Children Books), the University of Newcastle, a myriad of volunteers, local artists and musicians and the fantastic staff at Hotspur School. However, the stars of the show have to go to a small intervention group of pupils who played an important role in shaping the direction and aesthetics. The aim was to use the project as a vehicle to minimise the barriers of learning and develop emotional wellbeing with a view of improving progress of six underperforming children.

The identified children had gaps in their emotional and social wellbeing as outlined in their Thrive Online screen. Every teacher screens their class on a termly basis and then completes individual screenings for children who are not meeting age related expectations. The Thrive Approach is grounded in the current scientific developments in neuroscience and uses a developmental model to help us understand how we develop socially and emotionally from birth through to adulthood.

The focus group worked together on a weekly basis for 40 minutes per week from January to May. During that time, they would have their own Thrive group action plan based upon their needs and would follow activities as recommended by the plan before working on creative preparations for Utopia week. The finale of Utopia week saw the Thrive children lead the whole school in the procession with a homemade banner, behind the ship that they had also designed. Through exploring the theme of Utopia, the children were given terminology and concepts that were not only applicable to the project, but also to their barriers to learning. The products of their creativity were metaphors to express their feelings and their achievements as a group.

After being re-screened at the end of the project we found that five out of six had progressed from Thinking to Power and Identity, the next stage of emotional development in the Thrive Approach. As well as this half of the pupils made academic progress, moving from working towards age related expectations to meeting age related expectations in one or more of their core subjects. Whilst there are many contributing factors to this progress, including the relationship between the pupil and their Thrive practitioner, the Utopia project played an important part. By creating a safe space for the group to create, make art, reflect and celebrate themselves the children were able to overcome individual barriers to learning. And in doing so they were choosing hope over doom, working within a narrative that they may need to return to during future uncertain times.

#JohnHiggs #Newcastle #MargaretCavendish #TheBlazingWorld #education #creativity #utopias #future #SciFi

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bbclesmis · 5 years

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Daily Beast: ‘Les Misérables’: A Grand, Romantic Alternative to ‘Game of Thrones’

The new 6-episode miniseries, premiering April 14 on PBS, soars—and boasts a star-studded cast including Dominic West, David Oyelowo, Lily Collins, and Oscar winner Olivia Colman.

There are no musical numbers in PBS’s Les Misérables, but that doesn’t mean this new six-part “Masterpiece” miniseries—produced by the BBC, and taking Victor Hugo’s acclaimed 1862 novel as its direct source—doesn’t sing a rousing (figurative) song of angry men. An exceptional adaptation of its classic material, it resounds with heart, horror and complexity, eschewing revisionist flourishes to faithfully recount its fateful 19th-century saga about man’s darkest impulses—and, also, his capacity for redemption.

The price of liberty is high in Les Misérables, and so too is the cost of transformative change, both personal and political. That theme is front-and-center throughout this latest take on Hugo’s tale, which avoids massive alterations in favor of a straightforward and stirring approach. Precisely written by Andrew Davies, previously responsible for the BBC’s Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House and War and Peace (as well as the original House of Cards and Bridget Jones’ Diary), and competently helmed by Tom Shankland, it abridges little of crucial importance. As a result, it allows Hugo’s potent human drama—and sterling performances from Dominic West, David Oyelowo and Lily Collins—to carry it from wretched start to inspiring conclusion.

“Men like us have only two choices: to prey on society or to guard it. You chose the former, I chose the latter,” Javert tells Valjean, thereby establishing his belief that one’s inherent good/evil nature is fixed at birth, as well as Les Misérables’ central conflict. Anyone who’s read Hugo’s novel or seen the smash Broadway musical will know that considerable suffering awaits both, as Valjean will respond to life’s cruelty by pilfering candlesticks from a Bishop (Derek Jacobi) and, worse, a coin from young Petit-Gervais (Henry Lawfull), and Javert will fume over his inability to catch Valjean. Misery will also befall Fantine (Collins), a young seamstress who’s left with child by a callous aristocratic playboy and, to support herself and her offspring, will leave her daughter Cosette in the care of the dastardly Thénardier and his wife (newly minted Best Actress Oscar winner Olivia Colman), whose hunger for money—and fondness for cheating suckers out of it—is matched only by their abusiveness.

Les Misérables doesn’t mess with what works, and at six-plus hours, it has the space needed to do justice to its every incident and emotional upheaval. While a few minor elements are condensed or discarded, Davies’ script is true to Hugo’s tome in terms of basic plot particulars and rousing spirit (a cornier writer might say that the beating of its heart echoes the beating of its narrative drum, but I digress…). Fantine’s misfortune and degradation are depicted in harrowing detail, and made all the more moving by Collins’ evocation of the doomed girl’s initial liveliness and innocence. Her agonizing deathbed scene is one of the series’ high points, and thankfully, the show’s urgency doesn’t flag after she’s perished and the focus shifts to the older Cosette (Ellie Bamber) and her romance with Marius (Josh O’Connor), now a law student thinking about taking part in an impending uprising against the Crown.

This Les Misérables flirts with definitiveness, conveying with passion and nuance the arduous struggles of Valjean and Javert, the former trying to prove (to himself, and society) that a man can be what he wants—for better or worse—and the latter convinced that such a notion is fantasy. West’s magnificent performance leads the way, mixing hope and faith with fear and self-doubt to brilliant effect, and he’s nearly matched by Oyelowo, whose Javert is less a titanic monster than a small, dogged, heartless authoritarian consumed by a desire to “win” by capturing Valjean, which in turn would validate his cynical worldview. West and Oyelowo make their iconic characters not mere representations of themes but living, breathing, fallible adversaries, and they do so with such dexterous skill that it’s hard not to be swept up in their respective plights.

As you may have realized by now, this Les Misérables casts a person of color as Javert, and it does likewise with Éponine, played by Erin Kellyman. Those moves follow in the footsteps of a few stage productions (including, notably, 2014’s Broadway rendition), and they are, unsurprisingly, of no appreciable consequence, except to demonstrate that Hugo’s characters are defined not by their appearances but, rather, by their social marginalization and/or tormented internal conditions. If there’s a shortcoming here, it’s Shankland’s direction, which strives for, and occasionally achieves, a sense of grand scale, yet as with the climactic barricade showdown between soldiers and insurgents, sometimes feels a bit visually cramped. That’s exacerbated by his preference for close-ups, yet unlike with Tom Hooper’s in-your-face 2012 musical film, those turn out to be beneficial for his stars, including a suitably nasty Colman and Akhtar as the Thénardiers.

You’ll be forgiven for involuntarily humming some of the musical’s most famous tunes during Les Misérables’ key moments. Still, Davies and Shankland’s version—scored, mournfully, by John Murphy—stands on its own as a rich, intricate portrait of regret, guilt, rebellion and salvation. It exists in the gritty, grimy muck of the real world, where kindness and mercy are in short supply (especially for women), and brutish nastiness is the order of the day. Moreover, it’s loyal to the dense profundity of Hugo’s work, whose understanding of revolutionary individual and social movements (inspired by God and man alike) proves to be as timely and poignant as ever.

#les mis bbc #bbc les mis #reviews #articles #daily beast #pbs

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ples65 · 3 years

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Rockefeller Christmas Tree

This past holiday season has been one like no other, that is a fact. But is everything really as ugly and dysfunctional as it appears? Not everything.

Chances are the iconic images of the Rockefeller Christmas tree have reached all of our eyes at some point over the years. The annual lighting ceremony has become a Christmas staple in New York going back to 1933, setting the standard for all Christmas trees across the United States if not the world.

In November of last year images of the 75-foot Norway spruce’s delivery to Rockefeller Center started popping up all over social media with less than stellar reviews. Immediately there were the inevitable comparisons to the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, along with an overall sentiment of the tree representing the general state of dysfunction in 2020.

But the reality is that the trees immediate appearance wasn’t all that different from most years past. The annual process of cutting, hauling and installing the tree usually leads to a slightly disheveled appearance at first. Nothing truly out of the ordinary, not really a story.

The tree lighting ceremony went on as scheduled, and was as beautiful as any other year before (except for the lack of public attendance). Yet, the image taken out of context continues the narrative of doom and gloom. Almost as if the nation as a whole is battling a depression that’s feeding off of negative energy. How long will this be the lens in which we view our society?

January 6th, 2021

There is no way around it, the events that took place at the Capital Building in Washington D.C. on January 6th 2021, were filled with some of the most compelling images of the past couple of months, if not the past several decades. And there is defiantly no shortage of images to pick from that day to explore. I chose the image of a man carrying a Rebel Flag through the Capital Building because it hit me a little differently than it might most of my Southern California class mates.

Being raised in Kentucky I am no stranger to the Rebel Flag. There is an entire clothing line where I grew up marketed to young women called Dixie Girls with the flag prominently displayed. I even have a cousin who named his band Rebel with the Rebel flag as their first album cover. I never thought much of it until I went back to visit after living in Los Angeles for several years.

I started asking questions about what that flag meant to them and why it was important. For the most part I got the same answer; it was about heritage and southern pride not about slavery or racism. It made since to me, I didn’t view my friends and family as racists, so I took their explanation and moved on. I failed to truly consider the trauma that flag represents to so many others, simply dismissing it as a misunderstanding.

I would be willing to bet that the man carrying the flag in the photo does not consider himself a racist, just part of a marginalized southern group, most likely Christian, fighting for its rights. But it doesn’t really matter when it comes to what that image represents to the rest of America/ the world. Their fight against a perceived liberal oppression automatically gets thrown into the category of racist with the use of that flag and understandably so given its associated history.

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keenainthecity · 4 years

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9 Things to Know About the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a Black cultural, social and artistic phenomenon which peaked in the 1920s. While the movement is centered in the Harlem neighborhood in New York City, the movement was a national and international explosion of Black arts that was “encouraged and directed by leaders of the Civil Rights establishment for the paramount purpose of improving race relations” (Lewis) and eventually spread through the United States and reached as far as Paris. Termed as “the New Negro Movement” by scholars of the time period, the Renaissance spans literature, music, dance, acting and artistic outputs. Here are 9 things to know about the Harlem Renaissance.

#1 Black Literature prior to the Renaissance was in a huge decline: Prior to Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) and Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932), most Black literature was centered around slave narratives and far less on fiction or poetry. Because Charles Chesnutt was unable to secure a firm living from his writing, and Paul Laurence Dunbar died of tuberculosis at the height of his creative output, literature by Black authors were generally non-fiction. Until 1922 with the release of Claude McKay’s (1889-1948) book of poetry Harlem Shadows, there was no other poetry volume since Dunbar’s death in 1906. W.E.B DuBois (1868-1963), civil rights leader and the first Black person to receive a PhD in America, wanted to see the creative outputs drastically improved in the forms of fiction and poetry as he felt that “until the art of [Black] folk compels recognition, they will not be rated as human” (Lewis). This encouragement and eventual support among Black organizations (see #4) lead to an abundant Black output of fiction and poetry.

#2 The Great Migration was an integral contributor to how the Renaissance came to be, but so was the ending of World War I: The migration of Blacks from the cruel segregation of the South to the West, Midwest and East for opportunities in the industrial factories was a significant contributor to the “Great Migration” of Blacks to places such as Harlem. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) cemented legal separation of the races and doomed any hope of the government supporting increasing freedoms for Blacks, especially in the South. In addition, an uptick in lynchings as reported by Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) in her book the Red Record (1895) due mostly to Black businesses becoming competition for white businesses and the lack of law enforcement to protect Black people from white terror, Blacks wanted to move where there was a promise of freedom. However, another major contributor to the Renaissance was also the end of World War I in 1918. Returning Black soldiers from the war were increasingly defiant to dealing with segregation in the South which lead to violence against soldiers. A new air of change was desired by Black people and they were determined to seek that out. By 1918, more Blacks had ventured from the South, began opening businesses, attending and graduating colleges, founding affluent Black areas of cities (such as Greenwood in Tulsa later known as “Black Wall Street”) and working very diligently to attain wealth in an increasingly hostile country.

#3 The Harlem Renaissance spanned roughly 18 years and took place in three “phases: Of course, with any literary movements, it can be difficult to pinpoint the specific dates, but scholars now have placed the years of the Harlem Renaissance as 1917 until March 1935 with the Harlem Riots. There were three major phases that happened during that time:

The first phase was from 1917 until 1923. Some of the major works that came from this period was McKay’ s militant poem “If We Must Die” (1919) and his book of poetry Harlem Shadows (1922), Jean Toomer’s (1894-1967) Cane (1923).

The second phase was from 1924 until mid-1926. The major texts of this period were Jessie Redmon Fauset’s (1882-1961) There is Confusion (1924), Walter Francis White’s (1893-1955) The Fire in the Flint (1924), and Countee Cullen’s (1903-1946) Colors (1924).

The last phase was from 1926 until 1935 and was the most prolific. The major texts from this period were Langston Hughes’ (1902-1967) The Weary Blues (1926), Not Without Laughter (1930) and The Ways of White Folks (1934), Alain Locke’s (1885-1954), “The New Negro” (1926), Fire (1926) edited by Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) and his novel The Blacker the Berry... (1929), Nella Larsen’s (1891-1964) Quicksand (1928), Rudolph Fisher’s (1897-1934) Walls of Jericho (1928) and The Conjure Man Dies (1932), Arna Bontempt’s (1902-1973) God Sends Sunday (1931) and Black Thunder (1936), and Zora Neale Hurston’s (1891-1960) Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

#4 The biggest output of the Renaissance was spearheaded by the National Urban League and the NAACP as a means of literary activism: One of the most surprising aspects of the Harlem Renaissance is the fact that civil rights organizations such as the National Urban League and the NAACP used their magazines The Opportunity and The Crisis (respectively) to catapult new writers and to charge writers with being true to themselves and working in the vein of activism for the culture. Orchestrated by W.E.B. DuBois and the National Urban League’s editor Charles S. Johnson (1893-1956), many amenities were made for writers to be able to submit their work for prizes. This also allowed writers to have the opportunity to easily publish their work and receive attention from patrons and publishers to be paid for their works or financially supported. Many award topics included themes of black pride and cultural assertiveness and to share this in creative works such as fiction, poetry and drama. Towards the end of the Renaissance, new writers wanted to have the freedom to not only write about activist topics but to just freely be able to create; there was sometimes a rift between the establishment of the civil rights leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois versus many of the younger artists. In order to regain control of the movement, DuBois wrote an essay entitled “The Criteria of Negro Art” in order to set the record straight for some of the younger writers what was to be expected of this output during the Renaissance.

#5 While Marcus Garvey wasn’t considered a part of the Renaissance, his message of Black nationalism and pride through his written output contributed to the tone of racial assertiveness of the time: Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), a follower of Booker T. Washington, began building his Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) in Harlem in 1916 with the largest growth occurring during the years from 1918-1921. In 1918, he began publishing the organization’s newspaper The Negro World which eventually was internationally distributed and translated into Spanish, French and Caribbean-patois. He began each issue with a section where he could speak to readers about Black nationalism and giving the Black race many emblematic symbols of liberation such as the flag of liberation (red, black, and green) and many different songs he wrote for the organization. In August 1920, his organization hosted the First International Conference of the Negro Peoples in Harlem hosted at Madison Square Garden; 25,000 people attended the conference and culminated in a huge parade. Several of his essays such as “Africa for Africans” and “The Future as I See It” spoke of revolution and connecting to the African roots that had been denied to the people due to slavery. Unfortunately, Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois were bitter enemies to the point that they insulted each other in writing; this was due to W.E.B. DuBois being said to have been jealous that Garvey could energize the common Black person and many saw the NAACP as a middle class and white organization that did not speak to whom Garvey could. DuBois completely looked down upon Garvey as being uneducated. In addition to that, Garvey was a fierce supporter of Booker T. Washington’s ideology and thus did not cower from W.E.B. DuBois. It is said that DuBois did play a part in Garvey’s takedown by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI which sent him to prison and subsequently diminished his movement significantly. Despite the fact that Garvey did not directly participate in the Renaissance, his work definitely contributed to the tone of revolution, racial assertiveness and organizing that was quintessential to the Renaissance.

#6 1919 was a seminal year that lead to the biggest and most prolific output of the Renaissance: The year immediately following the end of “The Great War” (WWI) was a very violent one. Infamously known as “The Red Summer of 1919″, that summer saw outbursts of mob violence and lynchings across America. The name ��Red Summer” was coined by NAACP field secretary and Harlem Renaissance writer James Weldon Johnson. That summer, 97 reported lynchings occurred which led the NAACP to hang its iconic “A Man Was Lynched” flag outside the window of their offices each time a person was lynched. Several cities dealt with race riots including in Elaine, Arkansas, and Washington, DC; the people of these cities saw horrifying deaths that seemed to be lead by white servicemen in some cases. The militant poem from McKay “If We Must Die” was produced in response to this violence. The year ended with the NAACP establishing James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Evr’y Voice and Sing” as the Black national anthem. Many stories that sprang from the Harlem Renaissance years later told the stories of lynchings, violence and cultural turmoil seen from the Red Summer.

#7 While men were the headliners of the movement, women writers had huge contributions within the fabric of the movement: While the movement was spearheaded and led by a plethora of male voices, women were extremely instrumental within the movement. Beyond musicians like Bessie Smith and dancer Josephine Baker who both were international superstars during the Renaissance and the patronage of A’Lelia Walker (see #8), there were many women writers who contributed heavily. Zora Neale Hurston was very instrumental in naming many ideas that came about during the time-- in 1926, when Fire! was released as a collection of works by the younger writers, she nicknamed the group “The Niggerati” to show a shift from the old idea of activism propagated by DuBois. She produced stories in dialect that represented the people of Eatonville, FL as an anthropologist and produced many essays that evoked pride such as “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” and several volumes of short stories. Georgia Douglas Johnson (1886-1966) was one of the poets of the time that told distinct stories of the Black woman’s experience in poems such as “The Heart of a Woman” and “I Want to Die While You Love Me”. Jessie Redmon Fauset not only produced two novels (see #3), but was the literary editor of the NAACPs The Crisis magazine and was a highly decorated and educated intellectual in Harlem. Other notable women of the time were novelist Nella Larsen, poet Gwendolyn Bennett and the eccentric artist Augusta Savage. The women of the Renaissance are showcased in the anthology The Sleeper Wakes by Marcy Knopf-Newman.

#8 A’Lelia Walker is credited as the chief African American patron of the artists of the Renaissance: A’Lelia Walker, daughter of millionaire business woman Madame CJ Walker, was a huge fixture during the Harlem Renaissance. Her brownstone in Harlem (designed by Black architect Vertner Tandy who was also a founder of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity), first served as a gathering space for the musicians, actors, dancers, writers and artists of the movement. She eventually converted her top floor as a salon affectionately known as “The Dark Tower”; Walker hosted the most lavish parties and was a favorite patron of the creative circles. She afforded them the opportunity to fellowship, converse, and critique upcoming works that was being produced in Harlem. Her death in 1931 was the end of this collaborative time among artists and the African American affluent being able to truly support the output of the Harlem Renaissance writing, leading to the end of the movement in 1935.

#9 The “Talented Tenth” idea was developed by WEB DuBois and featured many HBCU graduates who drove the movement: The Black “affluent” that included physicians, educators, lawyers, preachers, businesspeople, etc. “formulated and propagated a new ideology of racial assertiveness” (Lewis) led by W.E.B. DuBois who firmly believed the Black race would be saved by “its exceptional men” (DuBois). Some 10,000 men and women of a total population of ten million Blacks in 1920 was considered “affluent” and thus charged with being the examples of what Black people really were. In 1905, W.E.B DuBois in the World’s Fair in France presented an exhibit of Black excellence through photographs of the well to do and highly educated as a way to dispel the stereotypes that plagued Blacks after slavery. Of course, with the influx of Historically Black Colleges and Universities being founded in the period from 1850-1915, most of the affluent Black people were educated at HBCUs, especially for Bachelor’s degrees. In 1917, 2,132 Blacks were in colleges and universities with no more than fifty (50) attending predominately white institutions. The majority of the Black educated class attended HBCUs and those who were college educated and participated in the Renaissance were educated primarily at HBCUs such as Howard, Fisk, Lincoln, and others or were professors at HBCUs.

Works Cited and References:

DuBois. “The Talented Tenth”, 1903.

Lewis, David Levering. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, 1994.

Gates, Henry. The Norton Anthology: African American Literature, 1997.

#HarlemRenaissance LangstonHughes DuBois HBCUs Garvey NationalUrbanLeague NAACP

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