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let’s tell each other stories

followed by the color sketch and the original idea

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[“Sophia Peabody, who married the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1842, is a good example of the nineteenth-century postfeminist. Sophia’s mother had been influenced by the feminist unrest of the late eighteenth century and admired the nineteenth-century women, like Margaret Fuller, who continued to advocate equal rights for women. But Sophia herself believed that a good marriage was enough to satisfy all of a woman’s needs and ambitions. Any woman who was “truly” married, she wrote to her mother, “would no longer be puzzled about the rights of woman.” If there had “never been false and profane marriages,” she claimed, “there would not only be no commotion about woman’s rights, but it would be Heaven here at once.”

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was not alone in her beliefs. By the middle of the nineteenth century there was near unanimity in the middle and upper classes throughout Western Europe and North America that the love-based marriage, in which the wife stayed at home protected and supported by her husband, was a recipe for heaven on earth.

And what a sugar-drenched recipe it was. From a modern perspective, it is tempting to see the syrupy paeans to women’s purity, domesticity, and righteousness that emerged in the early nineteenth century as a sop thrown to women to compensate for their exclusion from the expanding political, legal, and economic opportunities of the day. But many women of that era jumped at the chance to sequester themselves from men’s “silly struggle for honor and preferment” in the larger world and to claim the moral high ground for their lives at home.

The English author Sarah Lewis wrote in 1840: “Let men enjoy in peace and triumph the intellectual kingdom which is theirs, and which, doubtless, was intended for them; let us participate in its privileges without desiring to share its domination. The moral world is ours—ours by position, ours by qualification, ours by the very indication of God himself.” As Sophia explained to her skeptical mother, wives “can wield a power which no king or conqueror can cope with.”

The postfeminist generation quickly internalized the idea of women’s innate purity. Early in the century there was a sharp fall in out-of-wedlock conceptions and births among native-born white women in the United States and Canada. In Britain, rates of premarital pregnancy fell by approximately 50 percent in the second half of the nineteenth century. These declining numbers were as much the result of the new middle- and upper-class ideals as they were of improvements in birth control.

In several European countries, out-of-wedlock births continued to climb among the poorer classes during the first half of the nineteenth century. In some parts of Central Europe, out-of-wedlock birthrates did not begin to fall until the 1870s. But by the early decades of the nineteenth century, middle-class men and women in Europe and North America had become markedly more constrained in their premarital sexual and socializing behavior. Advice books for “young ladies” told them to avoid being alone with gentlemen callers and to make sure they never walked too close, allowed their hands to touch, or accidentally revealed their legs. Women encased themselves in a protective barrier of clothing: By the late nineteenth century the average weight of a woman’s fashionable outfit totaled thirty-seven pounds. It became accepted wisdom in the nineteenth century, at least among middle-class advice writers and physicians, that the “normal” woman lacked any sexual drives at all.”]

stephanie coontz, from marriage, a history: from obedience to intimacy, or how love conquered marriage, 2005

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interesting post about historic feminist movements/ideas ruined by uncritically citing sensationalist bullshit about victorian womens clothing Once aGAIN

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i made a little holmes/watson minizine! i've always wanted to try making those homemade, traditional folded zines, so this was a really fun exercise ^^

you can buy one up on my store today!

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FIRST step to enjoying any media is getting attached to the character whose suicidal tendencies are the most obvious

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perhaps i should not hav engaged there but its literally so annoying to go out of your way to anonymously um-actually TAGS that were clearly A BIT and then not even be correct lmao???

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hello did u make a burner account just to reply to two yr old tags on a post from 2017 which you didn't even read fully?????

I recently reread “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” and realized how hilariously different Holmes’ and Watson’s reading tastes are. Exhibit A, Holmes in the train:

“And now here is my pocket Petrarch, and not another word shall I say of this case until we are on the scene of action.”

Petrarch basically invented the sonnet form, and would also probably take credit for inventing the Italian Renaissance as A Thing. He was very Extra. And Sherlock Holmes apparently keeps a pocket edition of his works (knowing Holmes, probably in the original Italian) for beguiling train journeys with. As far as Watson tells us, Holmes continues to happily read Petrarch for the next four hours. Does he translate Petrarchan love sonnets for Watson? Shippers, make of this what you will.

What does Watson read on the train? He doesn’t say. When Holmes has left him at the hotel, however:

“I lay upon the sofa and tried to interest myself in a yellow-backed novel. The puny plot of the story was so thin, however, when compared to the deep mystery through which we were groping, and I found my attention wander so constantly from the fiction to the fact, that I at last flung it across the room.”

Oh, Watson. Yellow-backed novels were sold at train stations; they were designed for light railway reading, and so the contrast with Holmes’ earlier occupation may be intentionally pointed. Yellow-backs were cheaply issued, garishly illustrated, and intentionally sensationalist (sex! violence! murder! adultery!) Watson’s choice of reading material may slyly foreshadow the soap-opera plot of BOSC itself. Such metafictional reflections aside, I now plan to enjoy imagining Holmes and Watson teasing each other about this more or less constantly, and also going to great trouble to find presents for each other, while explaining to booksellers, with passionate fervor, “It’s not for me…”

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i couldn't not put narvin in this meme

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When the setting’s romantic but he won’t stop reading twilight: breaking dawn :^(

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he flirts…….???

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Bunny in the middle of every story: I’m getting pretty sick and tired of all the crazy things that go on around here. I’m feeling great animosity towards Raffles right now. I’m mad.

Bunny at the end of every story: I love AJ Raffles fiercely, recklessly, without provocation, unconditionally. He could not shake me off with a broom.

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i keep hearing the voices of all the people i've killed #myvoices

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Boredom

I’m sorry if the quality is low, I am not sure why that is.

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stress relief ham commons based on this picture !! ,,i love them marrieds

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ok apparently 'how many miles to babylon' is the title of like at least 7 novels. so sorry to anyone i ever reccomended it to with no further info bc i forgot the author of the one i mean