So this first passage is about how Victorian literature is from a time and place that, on the surface, rejects this philosophy out of hand -- it's a time when people outright said everything about you was determined from the moment of your birth by your genetics
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
Not just that a man is born a man and a woman born a woman, but that an aristocrat is born an aristocrat and a commoner a commoner, that your skull shape or your posture or whatever was a physical marker determining how you'd go on to speak, dress, act, work and live
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
But, as always, repressive essentialism contains within itself the possibility of its own defeat, because it's simply not true By insisting on things that aren't true and insisting we believe them, Victorian ideals actually make their own norms really easy to attack
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
Because they insist that it's just a FACT that EVERYTHING about an aristocrat is aristocratic from birth -- even as obviously contingent, changeable things like how people dress and talk -- it's really easy to fuck with a Victorian audience just by dressing up and acting
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
So, for instance, this paragraph refers to the fortune-teller episode in Jane Eyre -- the whole premise of Jane Eyre is about this unbridgeable social gulf between Jane's station and Mr. Rochester's, but Mr. Rochester dresses up as a Romani fortune-teller just to mess with Jane
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
Mr. Rochester in this moment becomes someone who's the *opposite* of himself in every possible way -- a woman, non-white, an "exotic" foreigner, an outcaste permanently excluded from the Victorian social hierarchy
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
And yet it's in this guise, when he's "not himself", that he's *able to speak most honestly as himself* -- to say all the shit about the other members of his household that he can't say normally, to honestly express his feelings for Jane
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
It's just one example, and maybe not the strongest example, but it's a demonstration that 1) Mr. Rochester does *change something* very important about his identity when he dresses in drag as a fortuneteller, 2) he's still *himself*, in some real sense he's not *lying*
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
That this time period and culture that's supposedly rabidly essentialist and therefore anti-performativity is actually obsessed with it Victorians were really into the concept of disguises, secret identities, slumming and drag
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
At the same time, of course, you can't say that this whole two-faced at-war-with-itself nature of Victorian social norms means the norms weren't really norms That's what the second paragraph means Playing around with drag in fiction is *kinda* pro-self-ID but also anti-self-ID
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There's always an "unmasking" moment, a return to "normal" The scene with Rochester as the fortune-teller is *kind of* pro-trans -- it's presenting Rochester adopting a female identity in a sort-of-positive light -- but ultimately not really
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
The point of the scene is Rochester unmasking himself, taking off the disguise, letting Jane "see underneath" to the "real self" Any of these stories about "masters of disguise" assume the disguise is something that can be and must be taken off
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
The story always comes back to a "true self" that can be seen when you wash the makeup off or pull off the hairpiece/veil to see your real hair or pull open the clothes to see you naked The idea that there's still an ultimate definition of who you really are based on your body
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