Lolo314

Her mom and dad return and give her iPad on first request. She plays with it peacefully while adults talk. Mom moves to take it away for bedtime and it’s immediate tantrum. Screaming and crying tears. The screaming continues all the way to bathtime and bed. Mom and Dad have to cajole her with a snack and lots of attention for about twenty minutes before her crying stops.

Now, I want to be fair to these parents: toddler is overwhelmed by Mom and Dad returning from a, by her standards, “long” time away. It’s getting late, toddler is tired and maybe actually did need that snack. Toddlers also just act different around babysitters than they do mom and dad.

But for a toddler who was a pleasant and attentive kid for three days to dissolve into tantrum of that length as soon as she is reunited with and then separated from her iPad freaks me out. She is not a teen upset she can’t communicate with her friend. She’s not even a grade-schooler who didn’t save their Minecraft world. She’s a toddler who is distressed by being separated from an overstimulation machine.

Her parents have convinced themselves it’s a tool and a convenience by handing it to her and gaining silence at mealtimes and car rides and every request when she’s a bright kid who can spend just as much time with a book as with a screen, with much less distress at separation.

Meanwhile Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters:

What I love about this story line is it seems to solve what Anne Brontë with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and other authors were trying to figure out in their feminist works: how can you prove that a woman has done all she can to fix her marriage before leaving a terrible husband? It's hard to argue against, "She did everything perfectly and still died for it." I feel like when the woman is still alive, people want to argue that she could have tried harder, or done something better instead of accepting that no woman is obligated to or really able to fix a man. Or they want to see a groveling reconciliation between the couple no matter how unrealistic that may be.

Also, it's a far better repudiation of the mercenary side of arranged marriage to have someone who has been there and done that and now rejects it, rather than having a whiny teenager who dreams of true love. Her family's political schemes aren't worth more than the death she knows is coming.

I love this narrative. I love watching a woman follow all the stupid, hollow rules that society created and failing anyway, because it turns out that it was always a lie that being a perfect wife would somehow produce the perfect husband. I love women waking up from that lie, and from their death, and changing the entire narrative to alter their circumstances. And I love the writers screaming at every defender of the patriarchy in the audience.

If Anne Brontë lived today, I feel like she would have appreciated these stories.

The day-to-day Markham family life is so funny and so familiar. Almost everything they’ve done so far could be so easily transposed to right now and be considered incredibly normal 21st century family behaviour.

To start, the things that have amused me:

1827 Gilbert despondently and ineffectually trying to console himself about his job he doesn’t like when he’s walking home in the pissing rain, absolutely filthy, after a day of running around doing things he doesn’t like. His consolations include things such as “ Farmers are really important. It’s a good, stable career. Surely *getting increasingly less certain* mankind will be bettered by me looking after my sheep.”

Narrator Gilbert immediately denouncing his 24 year old self as immature.

We meet Fergus as he tries to pick a fight with his older brother. Very 17 year old, youngest sibling behaviour.

Mrs Markham asking her sons, “what did you get up to today?” and Gilbert providing a list of the various difficult tasks he had to do, one task he had to do because of the incompetence of a coworker. Fergus just says, “I was doing dumb shit all day”

Mrs Markham’s eyes glazing over as Fergus goes into all the details of his dumb shit. Then as soon as Fergus pauses for breath, Gilbert interjecting with “Get a job.”

Rose choosing violence by saying “Well I saw your girlfriend today, I really can’t wait for you to get married--” knowing full-well Mrs Markham does not approve of Eliza Millward.

I really, really enjoy the constant sibling teasing.

Fergus clearly thinking he is the funniest person in the room. Then inhales his tea laughing at his own joke (that no one laughs at) and has to run outside and try not to puke in the garden.

Gilbert repeatedly remembering Fergus inhaling his tea and therefore being incapable of drinking his own because he starts laughing each time he lifts his cup.

Fergus surreptitiously trying to needle Gilbert in the middle of a sermon. Gilbert stomping on his foot and internally vowing to defer “further vengeance till we got out of church”