I'm almost done with Wuthering Heights. You know what would make this book better? Zombies.

So. Damn. True.

I think there are dead bunnies...that Lockwood mistakes for cats. But maybe Heathcliff killed puppies, too...it seems like something he would do, in midlife, anyway.

I'm almost done with Wuthering Heights. You know what would make this book better? Zombies.

I was kind of hoping for them in the second half...

That second generation is a bit tranquilized, compared to the HeathcliffNKathiforevah!1! arc. I know they are the best hope for a happy ending but still... Maybe P-C sort of got his zombies. IJS. And I'm hoping nobody's horribly offended by my ficification of one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, but if there was fic then, it'd be about them...every fifteen-yo's OTP.

Actually, I think my 15 yo OTP was Dagny and John. I was much much different then.

I don't think there are any zombies, because brains seem kind of thin on the ground.

I've been reading an interesting book about white settlers taken captive by Indians during American history. It's not been the easiest going, because it's apparently something written for the academic audience rather than a more popular audience, and I'm slogging through the formal socio-political analysis that was the standard in the early 90s. I don't know what style historian I come closest too, but I'm not convinced one can apply modern social thinking to events two hundred years past. (Which was my major complaint with "Colonial House" on PBS--people in 1628 had vastly different ideas about social roles than people in 2002, and bitching that you can't be a modern, fulfilled woman in the colonies is irrelevant.)

Anyway. The author found three major trends in the way the stories of the mostly female captives were presented. The earliest, from the first colonizations, were presented as stories of fortitude and survival against all odds, in reflection of the struggles of a new colony trying to survive in the wilderness. The second type, post Revolution, extolled women defending their families and homesteads by whatever brutal means were necessary, reflecting the recent war. The third type, covering the 19th century and Victorian thinking, focused on the Frail Flowers of Womanhood being confronted by dreadful threats to their virtue and gentility, protected only by providence and the occasional "civilized" Indian while the women waited for rescue.

Fortunately for my purposes, the author also included the tale of one woman who, when given the chance to go back to "civilization", decided to stay with the Senecas and the family she had with them, plus the story of a woman from Minnesota who was captured in a raid in the early part of the Civil War. The latter woman was generally well treated, but her primary protector was hung anyway becuase, well, he was an Indian and probably had done something worth being hung for.

It's an interesting study of how history is filtered through the expectations of society, plus showing the preferred portrayal of women through history. Still, I think the author makes too much about the actions of the writers of the earlier stories. She complains that the man who interviewed the woman who stayed with the Senecas said nothing about how she lived as a Seneca woman, made no records of her daily life or how she felt spiritually making the changes between white civilizaton and Indian life. Me, I figured the man didn't care. I may be misjudging him, but I doubt full anthropological concern was his primary motive, and I seriously doubt an early Victorian man was overly concerned with the inner philosophical musings of a woman, especially a woman who willingly chose the Heathen Savages over Proper Civilization.

I haven't read the book you're reading, but the first few chapters of Lies My Teacher Told Me deals with misrepresentation of - eh I'll call them Indians. It talks a bit about people running off to join Indians for several reasons. Slaves running off to join Indian societies as well as settlers, presumably some of them women. Sometimes it was because of the too rigid structure of colonial society, sometimes it was because there wasn't enough food, shelter etc. in the colonly etc.

Got it. Thank you Project Gutenberg and the search function. Chapter XVII:

I knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway; and, blessed as a soul escaped from purgatory, I bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep road; then, quitting its windings, shot direct across the moor, rolling over banks, and wading through marshes:

Connie I've only seen a part of Colonial House but that was when people were rebelling against going to church so the mayor changed the law. Then some lady came and wanted more rights/chances for them women and that pissed me off.

Yes, women's situations sucked in Colonial times but the whole point of the show is to live in Colonial times. There shouldn't be any changing the rules because you don't like the life.

Go team Hecubus...I didn't remember that. So, nobody else here wanted to be in love so hard it made them ill?(Maybe the Bayliss thing was the rule, not the exception.) Just me? Ok, then.