Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion
In a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit DiscussionIn a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Lately I’ve taken to reading turn of the century literature (Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, etc.) and I’m quite proud of myself, to be frankly honest. The kids of stories such as those that I just listed above are often hard to read for most people, such as my father, because of how the dialect and sentence structure has changed in the last one hundred years or so. Myself, I can read them and enjoy them.
But one common thing I’ve noticed in almost all of the stories is that, if these stories can be taken as an indicator of how people were back then, I’m honestly surprised that the human race survived from all the damn fainting that’s in them. Currently, I’m reading Dracula and thus far I have counted a minimum of around seven people fainting or coming close to it. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories I had read, a woman (Watson’s future wife) fainted after hearing that Holmes and Watson were shot at.
In these stories people faint over things which, in this day and age, would merit a pair of wide eyes. And the cure-all for a faint or near faint? BRANDY! I wonder, did it ever occur that people might have been fainting because they were loaded up on the brandy as a cure for nearly fainting? Like I said, I’m surprised the human race survived all the fainting. I’m pretty sure more than a few people must’ve cracked their heads open after hearing about that really bad hangnail Mary got that evening.
One of the problems I have with the novel Dracula isn’t so much the fainting, but more how Bram Stoker, when referring to a child, would use either the words “child” or “it” rather than “the boy,” “the girl,” “he,” or “she.” Is that how kids were viewed to Mr. Stoker? As an “It”?
Other than that, these are good books, which I shall have to return to. I just wanted to do a mini-rant.
~ Damen
(265 votes, average: 2.91 out of 5)
Irregular Times
New Button Designs
67 queries. 0.970 seconds
Top Article Last Week
September 4th, 2006 at 8:06 am
I feel a fainting spell coming on. Quick, someone fetch me a brandy! Sounds good to me. Or at least yummy.
This reminds me of Bones’ curative for Capt. Jim Kirk, as late as the 1960s: it was brandy, wasn’t it?
September 4th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
At least part of it was due to the corsets. Women could barely breathe in those, so it didn’t take much to run short of oxygen and black out. Of course, nobody made the connection. They just attributed it to women’s frail constitutions.
September 4th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
In the book Gone with the Wind, didn’t Scarlett O’Hara’s corset get her waist down to ‘only’ 20 inches? No wonder all the women had to disappear upstairs for a nap in the afternoon (without the corset)which was where everyone else had gone when Scarlett threw the vase at Rhett.
September 5th, 2006 at 7:19 am
Children being called “child” or “it” might be due to the fact that in that time children where seen and not heard?
As far as the corset thing, I wore my mom’s wedding dress 3 mos after having my son, 32in down to 24in, try not to pass out or
kill someone wearing that.
September 16th, 2006 at 8:54 am
I recently read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” from the mid-1800s. I thought it was remarkably readable for that time period and I’ve read quite a few books from back then. I highly recommend it. To contrast what I mean, I like the “idea” of James Fennimore Cooper’s work, but in actuality his books are not user-friendly at all.