Petticoats, corseted fishnets, oh my!

It’s Aidan’s fault.

She’s the one who introduced me to Sockdreams. This petticoat is delightful:

I was going to get the cheaper lace one in pink, but I saw that it was more of a hot pink and was depressed for a few moments, and then I saw the option for a layered tulle one in a paler pink. Seriously, how cute! I can wear it over jeans or under skirts, for foofy fun goodness. I do have a pair of fairy wings at home to add to the outfit, but they’re more purplish. Maybe I’ll just buy myself another pair of wings.

And then I saw these:

How much love are these, honestly! Corseted fishnet thigh-highs! With the bows! Goodness knows when I’ll ever have an occasion to wear them, but they were too adorable to pass up. I suppose they will have to wait for a deserving boy.

This concludes Faye’s extraneous and completely unnecessary purchase of the week (at least she’s saving money by cooking her own food this year!).

-frolicks and flounces-

In defense of “happiness”

We’re told time and time again that each story must have conflict lest it be boring to read, that a hero or heroine must overcome hardship and obstacles before the happy ending occurs (if at all). Novels are good at narrating plot, conversation and social interaction, but what of happiness? If happiness is mostly silent, not physical but psychological, where is the space for asocial tenderness in a book?

Some may argue: at the very end of the novel, just before the curtain closes. But even then, the author provides only a snippet, deciding to let the readers “fill in the rest with their imagination.” A perfectly reasonable line of thinking—it’s always better to leave possibilities open than to burden the reader with the ends too neatly tied, the plot supersaturated. So many endings only glimpse briefly through a window into the continuing world where nothing ever happens but everyone lives happily ever after.

As some of you may know, I am taking a Victorian literature course this semester. The professor is completely riveting, and brought up this question while discussing Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which I am positive I would loathe in its entirety without his insightful lectures. He introduced the mondanité (wordliness) vs. pleasure (rêverie) dichotomy, where the main character Julien is a social climber trapped in 1830’s France and all the social codes that accompany it. His patron’s daughter, Mathilde, is in love with Julien despite his humble origins. She has a moment where she is at the opera bored out of her mind, and then she hears an aria:

I must be punished, I must be punished,
I love him too much.

Mathilde is deeply touched by this moment, though she had not paid attention to the opera beforehand. It is clear that she experiences pleasure, despite the moment being selfish, completely internal and not analytical in the slightest. Nothing here has been learned, and nothing has been done to advance the plot. It exists not at the diegetic level, but the discursive. The scene merely provides these intermittent sensations of identification.

This idea of “pleasure” or “happiness” is striking to me because identification is a large reason why I enjoy reading—identifying with a character. Especially in bildungsroman novels where one person equals one book. And the act of reading itself, is directly analogous to Mathilde enjoying the opera—it provides an interlude of happiness in our busy lives, allowing us to withdraw into the pleasure of reading.

And perhaps moments like Mathilde’s are rare in books overall, the virtual intimacy of the narrator-reader connection does exactly this. I’ve heard several debates on what novels—especially young adult novels—are supposed to do, and in my own belief their chief function is not to educate, or turn us readers more worldly, but to induce rêverie. Who does not spend much of their time daydreaming while reading a book, wondering what could or could not be?

But the fact remains that authors seldom let their characters within the novel experience this childlike pleasure. Directly after Stendhal wrote Mathilde’s scene, he inserted a huge parenthetical statement stating that Mathilde was an imaginary character, “conceived well outside the manners and mores which, in the pages of history, will secure such a distinguished place for our nineteenth century civilization”—so he would not be attacked by “prigs and prudes” for “indecency.”

It just goes to say that, in the wise words of Rilo Kiley,

No one wants to pay to see your happiness
No one wants to pay to see your day to day
And I’m not buyin’ it either,
But I’ll try sellin’ it anyway.