if you have a chance, would you mind sharing your thoughts on loveday? your idea of what she was like, the whole pyrrha and loveday thing i’m SO intrigued by but wonder if i’ve missed something in the text… i really like the way you talk about the locked tomb!
loveday heptane absolute most character to develop far more of an attachment to than anyone in their right mind should be able to develop off the back of i think, like, maybe ten in-text references, most of which don’t even tell you anything of substance about her character, and i will be taking this as an invitation to simply throw everything i’ve got on her down on the table. so much of this is a composite of 1. reverse engineering via cytherea 2. overreading and 3. probably just making shit up to suit my personal desires if we’re being honest, but. god. here you go. the loveday heptane thesis statement.
so, she is mentioned by name once in gideon the ninth, towards the end, by cytherea to palamedes:
“So you know how it happens. Clever boy! I knew you’d all work it out … eventually. I didn’t want to do it either ... I didn’t want to do it at all ... but I was dying. Loveday—she was my cavalier—she and I thought it could make me live. Instead I’ve just kept dying, all this time.”
so what we get here is a gesture towards one of the series’ broader themes, which i talk about here—that people subject to a particular violence, when imbued with certain social power at another site, persistently choose to reinforce violent power structures from which they can benefit at the expense of others even if their reinforcement is ultimately to their own detriment; that imperialism refortifies itself via establishing a set of internal social logics by which a certain measure of social power is conceded to those who are otherwise underclassed within those logics (ie. the social fabric of the metropole) such that it becomes in the best interests of those subjects to maintain the status quo for the sake of holding onto their own power. the inevitability of cytherea’s death is inseparable from the seventh house eugenicist practices that exploited and fetishised her cancer; cytherea, as a necromancer, holds power over loveday, and as we know from ‘i didn’t want to do it at all’ and the fact that she was the last lyctor to ascend (anastasia excepted), was reluctant to follow through on what that power enabled her to do until, presumably, the last possible minute; the essential setup here, really, is the both of them getting locked into some immensely insane game of chicken wherein neither of them wants the other one to die, the solution to this is for them to die, and all they have to do is convince the other person to let them die, and neither of them will back down until cytherea eventually does. and doing so falls in accordance with the social power she holds (whose enforcement we know to be a crucial tactic of maintaining imperialist relations and creating the conditions conducive to imperialist expansionism). & ofc, doing so also creates the kind of grief that makes the plot of gideon possible in the first place, lol.
besides this, there are a couple of points at which she’s alluded to (i would argue that she’s present throughout, really, in a similar vein to cristabel’s haunting presence throughout harrow the ninth, inasmuch as she’s the invisible driving force behind cytherea’s actions—but—anyway—); most notably:
She said abruptly, “Why did you want to be a Lyctor?”
Gideon mumbled, “Harrow, you can’t just ask someone why they want to be a Lyctor,” but was roundly ignored.
The older woman was leaning against Protesilaus’s arm. She looked extraordinarily sad, even regretful; when she caught Gideon’s eye, a tiny smile tugged on the corners of her mouth, then drooped again. Eventually, she said: “I didn’t want to die.”
which of course foreshadows the first given passage, the irony of this scene being that harrow inadvertently asks cytherea why she became a lyctor and cytherea gives her the same answer as the one she would go on to give to palamedes—ie. that she didn’t want to die, the retrospective subtext later becoming that she and loveday had both thought it was a way to evade dying (the implication being, i think, that loveday was the more agentive of the two on that front; my girl of Complicit In Her Own Oppression <3) and that she was ‘allowed’ to survive whilst loveday had to die because the social rules under which their relationship was operating guided it in such a direction.
what’s interesting is that this passage draws both protesilaus’ puppeted corpse and gideon as the object of cytherea’s present affections into the discursive arena alongside the alluded-to presence of loveday; the thread running between protesilaus and gideon is already interesting inasmuch as it render’s cytherea’s seduction of the latter as discursively similar to her puppeting of the former, inviting us to think of the social practice of cavalierhood into which gideon is inculcated as little different to the totality of control under which protesilaus as a corpse is brought. with loveday there too, we’re asked to think of her, protesilaus, and gideon as three different manifestations of the same material violence; it also directs us towards the fact that cytherea, despite coming to canaan house with intent to prevent the process of lyctorhood, cannot keep herself from participating in and reproducing the social dynamics that make it possible in the first place. so! loveday’s presence here + elsewhere functions as a signifier of a past violence that cytherea is at once continuing to perpetuate and attempting to resist.
“You’re a nice girl,” the Lyctor said. “I had a nice girl as a cavalier too … once. She died for me. What can you do?”
mostly i'm just putting this line on here because it makes me deeply Unwell, but i am caught by the 'nice girl' moniker against her earlier having called gideon a 'good girl' and the process of pacifying, almost, that those terms imply; or even, something about the 'good girl' being deployed (during avulsion!) as a pacifier that serves to bring gideon further under her wing and then coming to function as an ironic retrospective echo of 'nice girl,' the latter of which to me feels far more … affectionate? genuine?. that so much of cytherea’s throughline is concerned with how imperialist violence corrupts and distorts grief; that the 'nice girl'-ism & the heavily implied willingness to participate in the social relations that facilitate lyctorhood that is gestured towards with loveday (nb. i suspect the Niceness in particular has little to do with her 'actual' personality and more indicative of a particular affection on cytherea's part; i'll come to what's suggested in the tension between this & the antagonism between her and mercy/john/augustine in a bit; anyway lol) becomes the violence by which cytherea inculcates gideon into cavalierhood. that this is addressed to camilla is also fun, just in that camilla + palamedes are, imo, both heavily paralleled with loveday (at least as far as the dulcinea/cytherea paralleling goes!); again, inculcation, a certain hopelessness, the structures that reassert themselves even as cytherea at one point was trying to dissolve them. (something incredibly … hopeless, about 'what can you do,' and also about this entire passage. what can cytherea do!)
As they fought—and fighting was like a dream, like falling asleep—they could see Cytherea was made up of different parts. Her eyes had been taken from somewhere else, two blue spots of someone else’s fire.
cytherea’s eyes, up until we learn the truth about her identity and about the violence embedded into the process of lyctorhood, are described in a manner that denotes a demure form of white femininity; after she reveals herself, those eyes become ‘radioactive,’ ‘as blue as the death of light’—and, crucially, not hers, but loveday’s. (something about cytherea being ‘made up of different parts’ is setting off some alarm bells for me in relation to this post, but that’s a completely different thing and we are talking about my best friend loveday heptane right now.) the transition of cytherea’s eyes from sites of a particular appeal for gideon to sites of violence is made clear both through their being textually figured as disturbing and through the subtextual presence of loveday (and the violence that her presence signifies) behind them.
so—basically—what we get of her in gideon is an absence, or more like a stand-in for particular discourses that need to be in play at particular points. i have argued before for reading cytherea/loveday as butch/femme; specifically as modelling the ways in which muir intends to abstract questions of butch/femme identity onto the necromancer/cavalier configuration—i think things like the v ungendered, surname-type name, the proximate position to gideon and the fact that cytherea and gideon’s relationship is clearly conducted within butch/femme logics, the subtext of cytherea being exclusively or near-exclusively attracted to butches (figured as her having a thing for cavaliers—‘who had the hottest cavalier’), the ‘knight of rhodes’ title all seem to point towards butchness. & from there you start to see the mobilisation of questions around what it means for those lesbian-gendered relations to be absorbed and instrumentalised by imperialist homonationalist logics & the violence that such a process can engender.
anyway, onto what we get of her in harrow the ninth.
“When they first brought her to Canaan House, I thought there’d been some mistake. You know that I’d been to Rhodes, to see the miracle, but I asked not to see the woman—just so I could be a disinterested party—and of course once I saw that she was necromantic I said yes, she should come to me to be a disciple. She was just shy of thirty then, I recall. And I knew she was sick, but I had no idea how bad it was until Loveday brought her in, looking as though she wanted every one of us beaten to death, and she could hardly walk ... I went to kiss her hello, and she said: ‘Lord, I can’t kiss you back. My lipstick’s perfect and I refuse to smear it.’”
[...]
“I will say this,” said Mercy presently, acting as though Augustine had never said a word. “I never mourned for Loveday Heptane. She did one good thing with her life, and she knew it.”
tamsyn muir give me the seventh house pre-canaan house backstory literally just name your price and i'll pay it. but anyway, the main thing i'm interested in here is the tension between cytherea's account of loveday—'nice girl,' willing to die so that cytherea didn't have to, figured as a discursive pin signifying the 'correct' (gendered) performance of the necromancer-cavalier relationship—and this version of her as delivered by john/augustine/mercy wherein she's a massive cunt. i appreciate that i can’t provide any serious textual evidence for this one but my suspicion is that this tension stems from her having been significantly less deferential towards john et al. and significantly more invested in lyctorhood solely as a process by which cytherea could be kept from dying; ie. that sainthood was not a climacteric of devotion to god but near enough a means to an end. (this squares off with my reading of cristabel & loveday as both being characters through whom the logics of gideon as cavalier is made clear and the holistic version of her internalisation of that subjectivity is completed; the former through their direct narrative parallels and the latter through their dual positioning as cavalier-love-interests to cytherea; with cristabel as the totality of that subjectivity through which harrow/mercy/cristabel/gideon all get discursively played off in htn and loveday as the willingness to die so that your necromancer doesn’t have to. immensely compelled by how loveday and cristabel are figured as somewhat oppositional yet ultimately end up in the same place converging on the same character; v in keeping with this broader sense of like, imperialism as initially inescapable.)
anyway! interested in the antagonism as opposed to indifference; ofc this is a retrospective account of her from people who hated her guts so not exactly reliable, but there’s an implication to be teased out around, like … cytherea as exploited at canaan house in ways not dissimilar to how she was exploited on rhodes? would be my guess. anyway it’s horribly romantic. disgusting.
All three of them fell silent at the altar. The wasted body in front of them would no longer laugh too much, in any case. Augustine said, “Does anyone remember her name—her actual House name? Didn’t she have one?”
The Emperor suggested, “Heptane,” but Augustine said, “No, you’re thinking of Loveday. We’ve forgotten it! That’s unnatural. Who would have ever thought we could forget—a thing like that?”
[...]
“Call her Cytherea Loveday,” she [Mercymorn] said. “That’s what she wanted to be called—and I found it unbearable and glutinous then, and I find it unbearable and glutinous now; but that is what she said ... I never saw her cry except once,” she added in a pointless rush. “The day after. When we put together the research. When she became a Lyctor. I said, There was no alternative. She said...” [...]
He asked, “What did she say?”
The other Lyctor said nothing, for a moment. She cleared her throat: “She said, We had the choice to stop.”
passages that make me scale the walls and climb up into the rafters and start chewing on the fucking rafter beams, good god. the socially sanctioned eroticisation of the necromancer-cavalier relationship depends in part upon the socially taboo realisation or overt expression of that eroticism; cf., of course, magnus and abigail, as characters experiencing a measure of social ostracisation at least amongst the ruling class due to their marriage. (it's unclear, but i think unlikely, if this social taboo existed at canaan house—the text strongly implies that at least mercy/cristabel, cytherea/loveday, and cassiopeia/nigella were romantically involved, with no apparent recourse to stigmatise or discourage this.) this is ofc in keeping with the logics of chivalry to which the social relation adheres. anyway, because of this eroticism that depends upon the tension created by an unrealised potential, there are multiple points where the necromancer-cavalier dynamic is loosely figured in the language of a marriage. cf. for example, harrow and gideon each quoting passages of ruth that are commonly used as wedding vows, or the necromancer's marriage season figuring gideon as the saintly husband to harrow's tedious widow; arguably, even, C— and N— getting married towards the end of nona the ninth, only to become one another's adept/cavalier; that the contours of their relationship was one of the forms from which that dynamic could be extrapolated and translated.
ANYWAY, that's what i think is being done in this passage as well, if we consider the use of surnames against marital conventions of taking one's spouse's last name. that the first surname misapplied to cytherea is heptane, ie. loveday's, introduces the possibility by alluding to marital surname convention; following this with cytherea's surname of choice being loveday's forename renders the lyctoral process akin to a marriage.
obviously also a lot to be said for how this slots in with broader themes concerning names + naming in the text; that this is presented to us as an act of grief and commemoration that is then taken up by ianthe as someone who cared very little for her cavalier, that cytherea naming herself contravenes john's extension of ownership and control via naming, that the insertion of loveday's name into cytherea's mimics the process of lyctoral absorption by which the cavalier doesn't straightforwardly die, but continues to exist as an instrumental force that makes the lyctor—'cytherea loveday' as distinct from her numerical surname on the seventh house—possible.
and finally, that the tension in this scene between cytherea's love and grief and regret and her complicity in the continuation of lyctorhood as an imperialist social relation + the fact that the social relations of the ruling class of the nine houses are the sole templates from which she can make conceptual sense of her relationships (which was, ofc, also her driving contradiction in gtn!) is being brought to the fore throughout but made clearest at 'we had the choice to stop,' in turn laying the groundwork for everything that happens with harrow but also just being a deeply upsetting expression of grief.
You did not say, I am sorry; you did not offer empathy. As with many mysteries, this one had turned out to be sad and dull: the Emperor of the Nine Houses had someone, and then, like all his Lyctors, the Emperor of the Nine Houses had lost someone. It was your story. It was Ianthe’s story. It was the story of Augustine, and of Mercymorn, and of Ortus. It was Cytherea’s story, and that of all the Lyctors who had died over that long dark sheaf of years.
relatively little to say about this one, except that it’s a very pedestrian gesture towards cytherea’s grief that manages to hit the same notes as the far more emphatic ones given above. she had loved someone and she had lost someone. what’s interesting is this positioning of harrow, augustine, mercy, gideon the first, and cytherea’s relationships to gideon, alfred, cristabel, and pyrrha respectively as discursively identical to that of john to alecto; that john/alecto, i think it’s safe to say after nona the ninth in particular, is conceived of as a site of abuse, and is now (here and at several other points) made into the model by which these other relationships with ostensibly good intentions towards one another are made to operate is compelling to me.
i think that’s all i’ve got. to summarise: i’m compelled by what she does in the narrative as less of a character in her own right and more of a representative of the discourses that need to be passively present at particular points in order for the broader thematic fabric of the text to start unfolding; i think she has the stupidest fucking gender ever and i’m in love with her; there is something v tragic to me about the thread which runs throughout just about every Doomed Relationship in these books but somehow lands a particularly cutting blow with cytherea/loveday, wherein the demands of the social context moulding their relationship and the various sites of oppression and violence to which they are subjected and/or within which they are complicit create full-scale tragedy to the point where cytherea’s grief makes sense of itself through the fetishisation of cavaliers that eventually translates into her seducing a teenage girl and also doing a lot of murder whilst being powerless to enact any material change at all; i think the interpersonal dynamics gestured towards between loveday & the other early canaan house disciples are immensely Fun.
realising i didn’t actually address the pyrrha/loveday element here so here’s why i think it’s compelling: 1. hot; 2. that cytherea/loveday is written to be this very Precise performance of the necromancer/cavalier dynamic, so something about pyrrha/loveday as being on far more equal turf lends something interesting to the interpersonal possibilities there, especially if played as like, a very lowkey Thing happening in the background to the main event ie. she is gearing up to throw herself on the proverbial iron spike for cytherea—it’s conceptually fun; 3. their insurmountable Gym Bro energy creates an irreplaceable eroticism; 4. augustine would be SO mad about it. Ok thanks im done now
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