This is a great idea. I have “Speak Its Name” as an RSS feed on LJ, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing each new feed pop up.

Thanks – I hope it’s going to be fun!

This really is a clever holiday feature, though. Well done! I shall return . . . if my damned note stays up. :- /

*sore eyes* or is it *paw eyes*?

Charlie

However, from a historic POV, she’s gentry, Jesse is already a criminal, serving 15 years of transportation. He may have been of relative good birth initially, but much has been made of the way he feels no different from the common sailors with whom he ran away to sea; he’s been in jail for some long time, he’s been transported on a several month long journey where he’s been treated like a slave. So I honestly don’t see how he could fail to understand that his status was so lowly that in striking a woman of quality he was committing an act of enormity.

He seems to have this deep rooted lack of awareness of class differences which makes him act and think in a way that makes no sense for his time.

How many of the potential readers need to be told that slavery, colonialism and religious oppression are wrong.

Well, *exactly!* I think that was one of my perennial sources of irritation while I was reading this. I was thinking ‘please stop lecturing me and just tell me a story!’

That’s one I wouldn’t be able to get past and still consider the character at all sympathetic and the guy in the story I’m meant to be rooting for.

Books like this kind of baffle me, because I wonder exactly who the author is preaching to? How many of the potential readers need to be told that slavery, colonialism and religious opression are wrong. Do they really think there are people out there who will think “gosh, I thought slavery was a jolly good idea until I read this book!” It’s very patronising.

The problem was really in the execution. Both Jesse and his sea-captain lover Jan held the exact same opinions on religion, expressed in the exact same way – and it was a way which was more like the way a modern person attacks right wing evangelism than the way an 18th Century person might attack the established church of the time (which was certainly, in England, a very different kind of entity – not necessarily better, but different.)

I would have found it more likely if it had just been Jan – an older man of the world who has knocked about and had time to think deeply about things, and come to his own conclusions. The fact that Jesse too held the identical opinion and used the same modern day phrases in which to express it, made me convinced that I wasn’t seeing characterisation, I was seeing the author’s views.

And yes, Jefferson’s a good example of how an 18th Century man might have been anti-Christian but pro-slavery. I would have found Jesse more believable if he’d had at least *some* of the beliefs of his age, rather than apparently none at all.

“… I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”-TJ Jan. 1, 1802

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”
-Thomas Jefferson, Dec. 6, 1813.

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.” -TJ Mar 17, 1814

“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.”-TJ 30 July, 1816

Then again, Jefferson himself owned slaves, so he had his own set of contradictions.