#blondel

But that aside, the guy himself doesn't even show up until a big chunk of the story passes, and I actually really liked the build up of the fictionalized Anna (Berengaria's disabled half sister) and Blondel. The way the different perspectives are written are very moving and I love the way the emotions are described. Anna herself and the tropes she falls into reminds me a lot of Orual from Til We Have Faces in her cunning, complicated feelings for her Beautiful but deceptively simple sister, along with the anguish and complicated feelings she has as an "unsexed" woman locked out of traditional scripts of love and desire, and only being able to fantasize about love as happening in the "third person," and the ways in which being in that situation necessitates finding some pride and possessiveness in other areas of skill and passion. I think so far Anna's chapter has been my favorite.

Eleanor's chapter it's funny bc she is struggling with two demons....one is Ableism...the other is Homophobia...but she overcomes her Ableism by getting so pissed off at Anna for normal personality reasons she acknowledges her as an individual person and not just a "cripple" to be automatically disgusted at.

Her freaking out about Richard being attracted to men is also funny bc it hits all that classic homophobic copium of "this is just what happens when military men are cooped up too long!" "This reminds me of my pederast uncle.. which means EYE brought the sin upon him, from my side of the family...NOOOO!!!!" and then finally being like "At least he will now have a Beautiful Wife to Cure Him."

This is fascinatingly complicated by the fact that, and I know this is the way people tend to write Strong Woman Characters in general in ye olde fiction, but her also talking about how she "should have been a man" fantasizing about being and looking like the young knight kneeling before him and taking the oaths, Richard being the ideal of the man that she wished she could've been born as, with specific focus on not just his privileges but on his body and appearance, accidentally self referring as being "the man to do the job...." Not beating my theory of Momson's incredible transgender potentials...

there's a lot of interesting gender stuff going on in the book, mostly from a fairly conventional perspective, and not all of it necessarily historically "accurate" to the period, but I find it pretty interesting. One of the earlier events during Anna's chapter is of course her talking about feeling outside of womanhood, comparing herself to the eunuch, and when Blondel comes into the service of Berengaria, Berengaria staunchly sees him as "not a man" in reference to his subordinate status and her feeling of being unthreatened by him. This angers Anna who tries to make him fit her ideal of a strong and active man not "weakness" by women. Blondel himself also feels this sense of being the subordinate object of service, hence comparing himself to a dog being passed on to a new master when Berengaria sends him to serve Richard.

Hecuba and Polyxena, circa 1814

Thinking about how space is organised around the body, the body moving through organised spaces, architecture and especially stairs. Came across a text on stairs that states:

"Blondel's formula is the only case in architecture where construction dimensions are directly and intrinsically related to human dimensions.

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favorite blonde bimboid moments coming up!!!!