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redscullyrevival · 7 years

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A Monstrous Regiment of Women: Mary Russell Rundown

@sonnetscrewdriver, anything that reminds me to occasionally comment “Oh fuck off Tennyson” is a good book in my book.

Plot/Setting/Narrative

Haha, other than revisiting my own personal hell this was a good time!

I knew it would be with that amazing title.

I love how men always try to condemn and speak poorly of women but actually make us out to sound badass.

“A Monstrous Regiment of Women” - nice!

“She was warned, she was given an explanation, nevertheless; she persisted” - nice!

HAHA dudes be wack.

Anyways.

There is a big ‘ol dynamic in this book and it doesn’t try to hid itself but because of the narrative style it’s a very sleek back and forth that can easily be overlooked among the thrills, tension, and action:

The lighting pace back and forth between Faith/Religion and Reason/Logic is hard to trace, precisely because it’s so perfectly stitched.

Like thread holding two fabrics together we get glimpses of the characters discussing these dynamics upfront on the surface only for them to dive under the cloth and become the structurally important but unseen thread, before rising to the forefront yet again.

Over and under goes Faith and Reason, Religion and Logic (Agape and Eros!), from start to finish and it’s very compelling, very slick stuff.

What’s fascinating is how it feels like it’s all held together with those before the chapter quotes!

What a gambit!

Especially because I’m pretty sure the chosen quotes are meant to be as humorous as they are reflective.

I read the words of Tennyson and Shakespeare and friggin’ Knox and I’m not filled with anger or burning for justice; I laugh. They’re funny.

What isn’t funny is how I also know these men shaped their times, that they are considered definitive and important and are apart of contemporary schooling and social undercurrents - they’re not simply far away melodrama but remain to be part of the day to day world, of my time as well as Russell’s.

The violence Russell is subjected to is unfortunately not extraordinary.

The heroin is elaborate and a part of the Mary Russell narrative surrounding The Temple mystery as designed by King - but women being manipulated, used, and being targeted and subjected to overwhelming power? All that’s common place common day.

You don’t read those before chapter quotes and think “Ah, women had it better when these men where alive.” And you certainly don’t read them and think “Well, it’s gotten better by Mary’s time” - and it’s the realization that the various quote’s undercurrents are still rooted into today that chills their absurdity.

So how do we instigate change?

Mary Russell

How do women gain ground?

Do we go to into the temples men worship?

Do we go into their spaces and ask uncomfortable questions and share our opinions, unasked?

Do we dig into the sacred texts looking for what has been changed in an effort to prove we’ve been included all along?

Do we interpret the text anew and preach our understanding?

OR do we maybe rewrite and/or add to the text and insert ourselves in?

You must see where I’m going with this.

What’s shocking is that all those above courses of action are faith based.

Logic and reason, the truth of women’s rightful place, can’t be grasped until those in power acknowledge we’re here and worth listening to and only pleas of faith can begin to breach that wall.

Which is massively fucked up and the root of all evil.

Bringing it back around, what’s also messed up is how Sherlock Holmes’ canon is exclusively understood as male.

The perception that follows the character is this: Sherlock Holmes is male, written by a man, and those of authority on the character and his stories are male and those fans who are true are male and that’s because Holmes invokes intelligence and reason and thus maleness - the notion being there isn’t anything of female worth to be found in proper Sherlock Holmes.

Barf, right?

Our author certainly thinks so.

King’s disgust for the Holmesian Understanding™ is practically palpable; not for the character of Holmes, but she does (to me) seem to distinctly turn her ire on the aura of his existence as he sits in wider literature’s mind’s eye.

And I don’t even think it’s Russell and Holmes locking lips that’s meant to be the big middle finger, although it is fun; I honestly think it’s as simple as King’s Holmes accepting, trusting, and considering her Russell as his partner in work and then, yes, in life.

Laurie King is working at turning Russell into the Logic and Holmes’ into the Faith.

I’m down with that.

‘Cause Mary Russell is my girl.

I’m gonna read all them books.

Sherlock Holmes

Lets stop and take a moment to really bask in the intense and amazing glory that is the throw-away-mention of Holmes’ son.

I know “canon” Holmes does not have a son.

I also know that the character of Sherlock Holmes has directly and indirectly given birth to the most characters ever committed to media’s various forms, which makes him the most promiscuous man I’ve ever read.

For King to solidify Holmes parentage is a very big big big choice - just as big if not even bigger than having him kiss Russell and marrying her.

Man, that must have really chapped some hides.

Oh my god, there are folks I know who would probably burst into flames over such an “OOC” move.

The son implies and seeds many things, not so subtly of which is that Holmes isn’t an automoton and down to get jiggy with it if so intrigued.

What’s more sly is that King knows what she is about and knows what she is doing and is very adamant within the narrative that Holmes is secondary to her character - that Mary Russell is the protagonist and the mysteries of Holmes isn’t mystery to her and we better starting taking her narration as gospel.

So that was a fun kick in the pants.

The romance was, you know, irritatingly thrilling.

Although!

Holmes’ comment, of how he has wanted to kiss Mary since he met her, is a little iffy and not even entirely because she was 15 at the time (still side eye worthy though, obviously) - the issue is that his words imply pure physical attraction even when he didn’t know Mary or her at that point and I’ve been lead to believe their Grand Canyon age gap is inconsequential because their minds are wondrously in-tune and that is what connects their souls.

So that was kind of weird.

Especially from an author usually very tight in her characterizations who is meticulously organized.

Highlighted Passages

“I am having a holiday from the holidays. I am relaxing, following the enforced merriment of the last week. An amusing diversion, Holmes, nothing else. At least it was, until your suspicious mind let fly with its sneering intimations of omniscience. Really, Holmes, you can be very irritating at times.”

Twice I hid from the sound of a prowling horse-drawn cab with two wheels. The second time launched me on a long and highly technical conversation with a seven-year-old street urchin who was huddled beneath the steps to escape a drunken father. We squatted on cobbles greasy with damp and the filth that had accumulated, probably since the street was first laid down following the Great Fire, and we talked of economics. He gave me half of his stale roll and a great deal of advice, and when I left, I handed him a five-pound note.

“I thought that man was going to punch you.” “It’s only happened once, that I didn’t have time to talk my way out of a brawl.” “What happened?” “Oh, I didn’t hurt him too badly.” She giggled, as if I had made a joke. I went on. “I had a much rougher time of it once during the War, with a determined old lady who tried to give me a white feather. I looked so healthy, she refused to believe me when I told her I’d been turned down for service. She followed me down the street, lecturing me loudly on cowardice and Country and Lord Kitchener.”

“I was grateful to that large and noisy man, however. Not immediately,” she added, inviting us to chuckle at her youthful passion, and many obliged, “but when I’d had a chance to think about it, I was grateful, because it made me wonder, Why does he want me to keep silent in church? What would be so terrible in letting me, a woman, talk? What does he imagine I might say?” She paused for two seconds. “What is this man afraid of?

“Here this man is working with God, thinking about God, living with God, every day, and still he does not trust God. Deep down, he doesn’t feel one hundred percent certain that his God can stand up to criticism, can deal with this uppity woman and her uncomfortable questions; he does not know that his God is big enough to welcome in and put His arms around every person, big and small, believers or seekers, men or women.”

“If you want to be logical about it, don’t tell me that the woman was given to Adam as a servant, a sort of glorified packhorse that could carry on a conversation.”

“That was what my loud preacher feared, to be told that he and his cronies had no more right to tell me that I couldn’t speak in God’s house than I had a right to tell the sun not to shine.”

Her attitude towards the Bible seemed to be refreshingly matter-of-fact, and her theology, miracle of miracles, was from what I had heard radical but sound. Oh yes, I should like to meet this woman.

“Men have other options. Women need the help of their sisters, and in fact, that to me is one of the most exciting things about what we’re doing, when women of different classes meet and see that we share more similarities than differences, in spite of everything. We are on the edge of a revolution in the way women live in this society, and some of us want to ensure that the changes that are coming will apply to all women, rich and poor alike.”

“The vote was a sop,” she snapped. “Granting individual slaves their manumission after a lifetime of service doesn’t alter the essential wrongness of the institution of slavery, nor does giving a small number of women the vote adequately compensate the entire sex for their wartime service—to say nothing of millenia of oppression.”

“But that’s . . . That means . . .” “Yes,” I said wryly, pleased with the effect my idea had on her. “That means that an entire vocabulary of imagery relating to the maternal side of God has been deliberately obscured.” I watched her try to sort it out, and then I put it into a phrase I would definitely not use in the presentation in Oxford: “God the Mother, hidden for centuries.” She looked down at the book in her hands as if the ground beneath her feet had, in the blink of an eye, become treacherously soft and unstable. She turned carefully to the drawer, riffled the gold-edged India paper speculatively, and put her Bible away. She returned to her chair a troubled woman and lit another cigarette. “Is there more of this kind of thing?” “Considerably more.”

“You couldn’t help but want to break his control and see what lay beneath.”

“If all these images can come from the word light, how many more from the word love, a thing invisible but for the movement it creates, a thing without physical reality or measurement or being, yet a thing which animates the entire universe. God is love. God creates, and when He sees His creation, He loves it and calls it good.”

Holmes would have done the matter by telegram, I knew, but I always prefer the personal touch in my matters of mild blackmail.

I felt reassured. If he could be rude, he was reviving.

I then turned my warning gaze back on Marie, who subsided, muttering French curses that I wish I could have overheard more clearly, for the sake of my education.

An accurate throwing arm is perhaps the only truly remarkable skill I possess.

None of that was absolutely true, but it fit the image and laid a basis for my future behaviour, which was to do whatever I damn well pleased, fine.

“The boy has a cup of tea for his mother,” she read, and repeated it, then looked up again and laughed, her eyes shining with the suddenly comprehended magic of the written word. Her teeth were mostly gums, she smelt of unwashed wool, her hair lay lank, and her skin wanted milk and fruit, but for the moment, she was beautiful. Veronica Beaconsfield knows what she is about here, I thought to myself, and took the work-roughened hand and squeezed it hard.

No slick-faced creature with a sharp blade was going to destroy my wardrobe again.

I always hated what Londoners called with such wry pride their “particulars,” their “peculiars,” their “pea soupers,” like the beaming parents of some uncontrollable and pathologically destructive brat.

Blind, stripped to my underclothing, and ill, I thought muzzily. Mary Russell, this is going to be very unpleasant.

He had already let me in under his guard, and I him. Holmes was a part of me, and to imagine myself “in love” with him was to imagine myself becoming passionately enamoured of my arm or the muscles in my back.

“These last weeks, since Christmas, have been odd ones. I have begun to doubt that I knew you as well as I thought. I have even wondered if you wished to keep some part of yourself hidden from me in order to preserve your privacy and your autonomy. I will understand if you refuse to give me an answer tonight, and although I freely admit that I will be hurt by such a refusal, you must not allow my feelings to influence your answer.” I looked up into his face. “The question I have for you, then, Holmes, is this: How are the fairies in your garden?”

The restlessness of the day before was controllable now, and the shame something to be acknowledged and not dwelt upon.

With the ponderous dignity of the profoundly intoxicated, she took up a strategic position across the street from the doors.

I could not do this. The safe was not going to open for me, not in the time I had. Tell it to Holmes, nagged a voice. Watch his brief flare of irritation give way to sympathy, understanding. Live with that, will you?

“I walked into the hall, to find utter panic, of the Oxford variety: tight voices, careful poly-syllables, a certain amount of wringing of hands.”

#Russell and Holmes #year of book #fandom talks #A Monstrous Regiment of Women

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