Literary couples

[branchandroot]

Okay, this one amuses me. Maya mentioned the issue of literary couples you totally don't believe in, and I have to admit there are plenty.

My all time winner is probably Jo and Fritz from Little Women. Because you know that one day Jo is going to snap, strangle Fritz in his sanctimonious sleep, climb out the window on a rope of torn up sheets and go kidnap Laurie to carry off and become a pirate queen, which bloody well means she can marry them herself.

Of course, this is no doubt helped along by the fact that Fritz is /totally/ a grudge ending on Alcott's part. I mean she even admitted it. End of Evangelion has nothing on Alcott when she's pissed.

Also, some day AIVAS is going to get Lessa alone for a good counseling session on the dangers of co-dependency and have her read a few first wave feminist authors from the databanks, at which point Lessa is going to have a blinding moment of insight about her own wasted life, go turf Jaxom out of Ruatha to go screw around on the south continent the way he really wants, and start a trade school for women. Corana will be her first student. Brekke will re-impress, not a queen, but a bronze, and join her, and F'lar and F'nor will finally admit that they're really best with each other. It will be the dawn of a new age, which does not have the word "dragon" anywhere in the title. The actual dragons will be very self-satisfied with the whole thing, because now they get to have lots of wild sex completely unconstrained by silly human scruples the way they always really wanted.

Comments

[fromastudio]

Ahahaha yes Jo/Fritz. Jo belonged in a more interesting book than she was in, really.

[branchandroot]

*snorts* She totally did. That book is a classic example of the "moral novel for young women", and all of them are absolutely deadly.

[fromastudio]

I think what puzzles me most about Little Women and its author is that Alcott ultimately created a world in which she herself couldn't inhabit, in those novels. Which is well, counterintuitive to me as a writer, at best!

[branchandroot]

Well, initially she set out to make Jo a spinsterly writer. She just made Laurie such a likely suitor that all the teenies wrote asking for a marriage. So, in revenge more or less, she married Jo to Fritz.

[fromastudio]

*nod* I had heard about that. Seemed like a pretty counterintuitive solution to me though - it would have been more subversive for Jo to marry Laurie (with attached ensuing marital chaos); or, if she couldn't manage that, at least write in the ending she wanted.

Admittedly Laurie's a little hard to work with as an interesting character - he is so very much the perfect rakish privilege young man who eventually grows up! - but Fritz is at least eight or nine degrees worse. XD