There be spoilers in these here reviews

[chocolatepot]

I ordered She Rises from the library because I'd heard it was queer historical fiction, and that's generally enough to tempt me.

It's set in 1740, in southeastern England, and begins with a dairymaid, Louise, who lives with her destitute mother and unsatisfied sister being taken off by her employer's brother, a sea captain, to work as a lady's maid in a small port city. Her father and brother abandoned the family long ago for the sea from Harwich, and the mother asks Louise to try to find out anything she can about Luke. This storyline is told in second person, which is soon revealed to be mentally aimed at Louise's mistress, the captain's younger and prettier daughter, Rebecca, a woman Louise is attracted to immediately.

But! There is a second storyline! Told in third person, it starts with a young man who's been pressed into service on a warship. He's terrified, quiet, not a sailor, and he introduces himself when forced as Luke. Of course: Louise's brother, this is the story of what happened to him.

But! Eventually it becomes clear that this is not the case. The main hint was pretty early: Luke goes to the ship's surgeon, who takes off his (Luke's) cap and frees his hair. Luke had earlier had a "I should tell them something - why didn't I tell them??" internal conflict when he was forced to sign onto the ship, and in the moment it seemed like he was supposed to admit to being too young to be pressed or something, but hair falling out of a cap + having a secret (+ not talking around the other men) = girl in disguise, which is properly revealed around the halfway point. But that's also not quite it, because both storylines also make it clear along the way that this person is transmasc.

I loved how this was handled. Unlike a lot of historical fiction, this book is drenched in the atmosphere of the period - Worsley is not writing a modern person in a costume. Luke doesn't know what transness is, doesn't have a pattern for this (until he meets another transmasc after deserting the ship), and only gradually discovers himself through his experiences. After Luke gets back to England, now secure as a man, he finds his love and takes her away from her straitened life to live as his wife in the country - but the sea still calls to him, as it so often does in Age of Sail stories, and he abandons her just like his father abandoned his mother. As much as I love a happy ending, I never got the sense this story was heading for one - everything was always bittersweet from the start, as complex as real life. Rebecca's a selfish and lazy beauty, Luke's sister comes to the city to become a sex worker, the brash sailor who appoints himself Luke's "sea daddy" goes from being the coolest guy on the ship to an outcast, the cultured surgeon turns out to be a rapist.

I have to admit that I wasn't enamored of the clothing descriptions - after a certain point I realized that it felt like Worsley doesn't know too much about the details and was avoiding saying much about the clothes beyond the fabric itself. Which isn't such a bad thing, but it made me wonder how much of what had been coming off as intense historical detail elsewhere was actually just a thin layer of vocabulary over a good vibe. BUT! That is still better than 99% of what's out there.

I watched Poor Things mainly because I enjoyed The Favourite, and I hoped it would be more like the latter.

To summarize the movie: a scientist finds a dead pregnant woman, transplants the baby's brain into the woman's body, and reanimates her; this baby-woman slowly matures, but despite her infantile ways men are captivated by her beauty. When she's about to marry her father's student for her protection(? I think), she's seduced by a lawyer who takes her out into the world to have a lot of sex, but she uses the journey to learn and become polished. Eventually they end up in Paris with no money, and she leaves him to become a prostitute for a while. When she comes back to England, she finds out that her body's husband wants her back, but he's a terribly cruel, cold man. She triumphs over him, he gets his brain replaced with something else, and she settles down with her big found family (including the fellow sex worker she met in Paris who is the only person to be sexually involved with her in a positive way).

Friends have remarked that it's a very straight-man take on female sexuality, and it is. Definitely feels voyeuristic, an excuse to have Emma Stone be hot and naked, with little thought given to how entirely fucked up it is for grown men to fuck a woman with a child mind - like, the men who do it are not supposed to be good people, but it's kind of a sardonic disdain for their folly rather than "what??????" and I think the former is easier to achieve if you see her as a symbol rather than the main figure you relate to.

However, it reminded me really strongly of classic picaresque novels, only with a female protagonist, which is Something. They definitely didn't do that in the 18th-19th centuries, and they don't tend to do it now, either.

Comments

[m_of_disguise]

I've been chewing on Poor Things since I saw it a couple of weeks ago, and I can't decide whether I like it or not. The excessive sex is off-putting, but I like her journey of discovery as she moves through her life. I also liked that it was filmed and staged very much like a movie that would have been made in the early days of film, with some of the lens choices and pretty much all of the set designs looking like something from the turn of the century, just in color. I just wish it wasn't so male gaze-y.

[chocolatepot]

Yes, I loved the production design and cinematography! I did think it dragged at a few points, but it was always fun to look at.

[sanguinity]

I really loved the complexity of She Rises, and as you say, that the characters' inner lives and queer identities were of their time. I also felt that we got as happy an ending as the novelscape was likely to give -- if nothing else, people living lives of their choice (or at least partially so). Which is a lot, given how tragic so many surviving queer histories tend to be.

[chocolatepot]

Yeah, it is a happy ending in that sense! I love this era we're in, where queer characters are allowed to live as themselves by the end of their stories.