Secret fangirl agent

When I was in high school, I was once waiting outside of a grocery store for my friend. My cane at this point had a fun moon-and-star/astrological aesthetic design. And, for no real reason, this older Black man came up to me and asked me where I got it, because he thought it was great. I told him it was just something I got offline. He showed me his cane, which was this beautiful hand-carved wooden staff (I can't remember exactly what it looked like, but it was stunning) and he told me about how he got it custom made from a woodcarver in Africa. I never got his name or saw him again, but he lit up my afternoon.

It was a really touching moment for me. He saw a high schooler with a cane and his first thought wasn't that it must be a fashion statement or that I must be lazy or attention-seeking or that it was generally something strange that needed explanation. During this same timeframe I'd also had adults who I'd never met before who would approach me (again, a child) to, essentially, demand I explain to them my personal health issues for their curiosity and entertainment. So it really meant something to me that this man saw me and thought, "What a delightful cane! I also appreciate a delightful cane! I'm gonna ask that kid where they got theirs and show them mine!" without ever needing to make me justify why I as a young person was using a mobility aid.

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

This is what I drew after this situation 👇

This is what I drew after this situation 👇

THOU ART CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

*Gregorian chanting*

13.21

*leper bell ringing*

HIGH MEDIAEVAL FM

*recording of John Lackland sobbing as he signs the Magna Carta*

WHENCE COMETH NAUGHT BUT LITURGIES

LITURGIES

AND MORE LITURGIES

*Templar knights praying out loud*

THIS ISN’T THY GRANDMOTHERES STATION

field trip cancelled

Based off hit tumblr post:

The good thing to come out of this adaptation and its notoriety is, of course, that everyone is re-reading the novel. Both the actual work and the conversation around it have been more (sociologically) interesting than all the film chatter. What’s surprised me in the book-revival discourse is the obsession around getting definitive answers to two things: whether or not Heathcliff was a person of colour, and whether or not the book is a ‘love story’. I think the former question is partially due to us imposing a modern (US-centric) understanding of race and class on the past; we tend to see these things less as shifting social concepts that are highly context-dependent and more as immovable parts of our identity, which is why, for instance, people are so confident in calling multi-millionaires ‘working class’, centring their background rather than their current material circumstances, and why we find it so difficult to understand that people considered POC in some (white-majority) countries might be considered ‘white’ in others, and vice versa. The insistence on Heathcliff as having one certain racial identity is, I think, born of an inability to engage with how the concept of ‘whiteness’ has changed over the last few hundred years, and how literature from that period might be playing with this complexity (and the paranoia it engendered). On the question of whether or not this is a ‘love story’, I suspect this is mostly a misunderstanding of the gothic as a subcategory of Romanticism (a particular literary genre that does not equate to ‘love story’), as well as an inability to imagine novels as multifaceted, thanks to a culture that increasingly reduces literature to single, simple marketing terms and their most social-media-friendly tropes.

The overall issue, though, seems to be a refusal of this book’s ambiguity, which really is a refusal of what the gothic genre is: that is, ambiguous. You are not meant to know the provenance of Heathcliff, because you are not meant to know where you, the reader, or the characters in the book should place him on a class basis, relative to other characters and the social norms of the time. The fact that he is from the streets of Liverpool—at the time a thriving hub for the slave trade, but also a place full of Irish immigrants—is enough for the characters to fear that he has some mixed heritage, and it is that fear that comes across in their descriptions of him, which make reference to multiple distinct racial groups (truly a grab-bag of Orientalism, though, tellingly, the narrative voice never describes Heathcliff in these terms). His arrival amongst the Earnshaws also occurs in the midst of the enclosures, during which there was a new establishment of class centred around who owned land and who had a right to be there, imposed through extreme violence and maintained through both physical boundaries (which did not previously exist) and an aggressive othering; it is not an accident that Heathcliff is referred to as both ‘gypsy’ and ‘lascar’, terms not referring to distinct ethnic communities but to groups defined by crossing borders. His actual racial heritage is much less important than the fact that he is audaciously transgressing these new boundaries, and cannot be subdued by the violence with which these borders are usually policed.

The good thing to come out of this adaptation and its notoriety is, of course, that everyone is re-reading the novel. Both the actual work and the conversation around it have been more (sociologically) interesting than all the film chatter. What’s surprised me in the book-revival discourse is the obsession around getting definitive answers to two things: whether or not Heathcliff was a person of colour, and whether or not the book is a ‘love story’. I think the former question is partially due to us imposing a modern (US-centric) understanding of race and class on the past; we tend to see these things less as shifting social concepts that are highly context-dependent and more as immovable parts of our identity, which is why, for instance, people are so confident in calling multi-millionaires ‘working class’, centring their background rather than their current material circumstances, and why we find it so difficult to understand that people considered POC in some (white-majority) countries might be considered ‘white’ in others, and vice versa. The insistence on Heathcliff as having one certain racial identity is, I think, born of an inability to engage with how the concept of ‘whiteness’ has changed over the last few hundred years, and how literature from that period might be playing with this complexity (and the paranoia it engendered). On the question of whether or not this is a ‘love story’, I suspect this is mostly a misunderstanding of the gothic as a subcategory of Romanticism (a particular literary genre that does not equate to ‘love story’), as well as an inability to imagine novels as multifaceted, thanks to a culture that increasingly reduces literature to single, simple marketing terms and their most social-media-friendly tropes.

The overall issue, though, seems to be a refusal of this book’s ambiguity, which really is a refusal of what the gothic genre is: that is, ambiguous. You are not meant to know the provenance of Heathcliff, because you are not meant to know where you, the reader, or the characters in the book should place him on a class basis, relative to other characters and the social norms of the time. The fact that he is from the streets of Liverpool—at the time a thriving hub for the slave trade, but also a place full of Irish immigrants—is enough for the characters to fear that he has some mixed heritage, and it is that fear that comes across in their descriptions of him, which make reference to multiple distinct racial groups (truly a grab-bag of Orientalism, though, tellingly, the narrative voice never describes Heathcliff in these terms). His arrival amongst the Earnshaws also occurs in the midst of the enclosures, during which there was a new establishment of class centred around who owned land and who had a right to be there, imposed through extreme violence and maintained through both physical boundaries (which did not previously exist) and an aggressive othering; it is not an accident that Heathcliff is referred to as both ‘gypsy’ and ‘lascar’, terms not referring to distinct ethnic communities but to groups defined by crossing borders. His actual racial heritage is much less important than the fact that he is audaciously transgressing these new boundaries, and cannot be subdued by the violence with which these borders are usually policed.

It’s now been six months since I read Wuthering Heights and I still think about this moment every single day. The anguish, the guilt, the spite, the violence. God they’ve destroyed eachother. It’s terrible. It’s in this moment the real tragedy of the story is laid bare; in another life, another time, a place where they both weren’t horrifically abused and crushed by the expectations and systems of their society, they would have been together.

And the way they change within this scene, the way they go through so many different thoughts and feelings. The anger, the regret, the obsession.

I mean like OH MY GOD

“I love my murderer — but yours! How can I?”

FUCK. Akandhwkajhrhe FUCKKKK