Brianna (Sophie Skelton), just after she’s been raped (Season 4, Episode 10)
Friends,
Since writing about the first half of Season 4: from Drums of Autumn: the American colonialist past, a book of fathers & ghosts, I’ve watched the whole of Season 3 (from Voyager) night after night, and found it was much better than I thought, and that paying attention to larger repeating patterns revealed the preoccupations of the serial drama (as opposed to the book), and brought out when the film-makers seemed to be treating challenging themes as a serious debate, and when they were providing action-adventure entertainment with a princess-bride and another violated hero at the center.
Roger Wakefield MacKenzie (Richard Rankin), like Jamie in the first and third season, singled out for harsh punishment
There were a number of online essays treating the season with real respect: one writer argued that our central mature couple, Jamie and Claire Fraser, were rare lovers on TV to talk and to listen to one another, and evolve as they interact; another thought Claire’s relationship with and treatment of Brianna, especially after Brianna has been raped, beautiful, a morally exemplary mother-and-daughter; while questioning some aspects of the treatment of rape over the second half of the season, much was done right. On the other hand, one “serious reflection” earnestly argued that this fourth season was a real disappointment because much that viewers had loved about the previous three was gone, especially the centrality of Jamie and Claire’s relationship; and a last said what had been radically exhilarating about Outlander (as a love story) was the full and frank treatment of love-making without presumably becoming porn, the presentation of female sexuality fulfilled, and now that the decision had been made to stop that, the serial drama had just about lost what made it a joy to watch. Maybe I missed them, but it seemed to me the recaps were much less snarky, with complaints mostly centering on the characterization of Brianna (I felt grated upon by the way all the characters but Mr Bonnet seemed to treat her child-like self-centeredness with a reverent worship, even her biological father Jamie when he questioned her behavior as prompting the rape), the picture-postcard landscape and use of sets.
The over-all patterns were fitted into a framework which made Jamie’s behavior and attitude the framework for all that was happening: the season began with him failing to rescue an old comrade from hanging, and it ended with him being required to find and arrest Murtagh, his beloved godfather, brother-in-arms. Claire was marginalized into a devoted wife, career-doctor when home-making (quite literal) gave her time. She never actively defied or openly challenged Jamie, even when he behaved with senseless violence to someone (Roger) he was not sure was the rapist. To be fair, he and she have come to understand one another and they share a set of humane and family-centered attitudes, and have come to support one another trustfully. That’s why they can talk and hear one another. I love this as well as what love-making we did have.
Jamie (Sam Heughan) giving Claire (Caitriona Balfe) a bath
But patriarchy won out again and again. The Indian woman at the end who is ejected from the tribal group for trying to negotiate over the hostage Roger; Ian’s exultation at becoming a “man” through taking violence near the end of the last episode are two examples that come to mind
The basic conservatism of the books emerged strongly – and sometimes appealingly — in the parallel relationship of Fergus (Cesar Domboy) and Marsali (Lauren Lyle); they cooperate and work together when she helped Fergus rescue Murtagh from prison (right there with her cart at the ready, pat). My very favorite sub-plot was the story of the older couple, Murtagh (Ducan Lacroix) and Jocasta Cameron’s (Maria Doyle Kennedy) coming together as lovers. It is so rare for older people to presented as having erotic needs and joys, as courting and going to be with another, and it was done with great delicacy. Unfortunately there were no promotional shots of Kennedy in her long flowing nightgown and loose hair but she was photographed as gorgeous and thoughtfully intelligent repeatedly, as well as passionate and witty and teasing with Murtagh
I thought also that the scene where Brianna is shown giving birth, and learning in the process how dependent she is on others emotionally effective:
More downside to this conservative romance masquerading as subtextual liberal ideas and behavior: the Native Americans did emerge as half-crazy savages, especially in the way they treated Roger and a preacher who had come to live with them and broke their taboos; the enslaved people were treated by the other characters as if they were equals to the principals and looked in wonderful health, beautifully costumed, and were all devoted service. The idea of sublime noble self-sacrifice came out in one pair of people opting to burn at the stake; Brianna as precious white girl was encouraged in her arrogance; Roger’s nearly complete abjection once he goes through the stones, coming back to the Indians to (in effect) die after he has escaped them was matched by Lord John’s improbable obedient behavior (a grown older man) to Brianna. Mr Bonnet’s mockery (Ed Speleers with his usual pizzazz) comes as a relief. The very worst or pits was the recourse to scenes where violence between men, beating one another up, or harrowing someone’s body or pride is seen as affording a solution to a conflict. And some of wha’s depicted is so unreal or improbable. I wished some fugitive from a Mel Brooks parody might mistake his or her way onto one of these sets.
The books are really far more complicated. For me the original frame for Outlander books (seen in the italicized soliloquies, which do carry on and are by Claire even into the fourth book but are hardly there in the films) is that of a woman seeking a personally fulfilling identity and escaping the one her 20th century society had on offer (Claire) and a really truly compelling tragic historical series of events (colonialism in Scotland, Culloden and the clearances). I hoped the Roger and Brianna in the 20th century would be interesting, but after a couple of sequences in the book, which are interesting, even touching, in the film the characters are turned into types which shows no interest or even understanding for real of what might actuate a later 20th century young woman or man: Roger is made into a throw back to mid-century in his attitudes and this becomes a victim-hero of male nightmare. But it still must be an adventure story it seems to me that what happens is Roger becomes part of the heroic individualism in US culture, twisted into a kind of culture of sublime death, with Brianna flailing out senselessly.
Jamie with Ian (John Bell) in the shadows nearby told about the rape of his daughter
It is true that a younger couple often displaces the original pair in popular saga romances, and sudden great jumps in time are common. The killing off of an original set of major characters the reader may have really engaged with. This is seen in the Poldark books: 11 instead of 20 years. One does not have to do this; cycles of books with recurring characters who don’t do this jump in time keep to the same central characters: Trollope’s Pallliser novels is an example here. by staying with the same characters and keeping them central you are driven to delve deep into the human condition over time and subject to chance. Gabaldon does prefer the idyllic: in Drums of Autumn the book a beautiful paradisal moment occurs when Jamie and Claire look for the land they mean to settle in and come across a feast of wild strawberries. I am drawn to this myself.
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Claire comes upon a young George Washington
Some total “jumping the shark” began in the eleventh episode (“If not for hope”) when Roger becomes pure victim, Brianna goes to scold Bonnet (and whacks poor Ian who has offered to marry her), and the “perils of Pauline” action-adventure crowded action took over (though I admit the shots of our friends canoeing down river with the Indians were breath-taking). So for this second and final blog on the fourth season, I’ll detail just episodes 8 (“Wilmington”) 9 (“Birds and Bees”) and 10 (“The Deep Heart’s Core”). In the first Claire meets a young George Washington; and in the second and third Brianna is raped and we experience with her the aftermath of rape is maybe worse.
Season 4, Episode 9: Wilmington
We are now well into parallel stories. For our older couple, they have arrived in Wilmington where a theater is playing a miserable 18th century play (people in oriental outfits and the lines do sound accurate) and all the glittering powerful Brits have come. Jamie and Claire seen with baby (whose name I cannot catch) born to Fergus and Marsali who have also arrived.
Roger and Brianna’s reunion
Cut to Roger on-shore steadily faithfully seeking Briana and lo and behold he hears her voice asking after Cross Creek where she thinks her parents are. Joyous reunion, and into a room where they show they can make love on screen almost as well as Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe. Richard Rankin is shyer than Heughan (not as stiffly acting it as Aidan Turner ….). Now she says she loves him and they go through a Handfast ceremony first.
The secondary story — and I think it is actually secondary although it begins first in the episode — is also now filled with suspense. All has at last been set up. We see a play is about to be performed. Cut to Marsali making food. Fergus to her. How is the bairn?
I was moved by Marsali and Claire’s conversation about motherhood. That is very like a woman’s novel; it took contains part of the theme of this episode and the whole season: Claire says you may want to but you cannot protect your child from life beyond a certain point …
Jamie and Claire go to the theater — naturally they are invited by the governor and cannot say no. Who do they meet but young George and Martha Washington. Claire is just so excited and cannot resisting asking him if he has been ‘chopping down cherry trees?” he looks at her puzzled enough she has to make an excuse.
More important another high ranking man, Ferrante has some terrible wound – an untreated hernia — that Claire notices because he’s in pain. She offers to help but who is she? a woman? a healer? what’s that? Jamie learns that these upper class people have placed a mole with our Murtagh who is planning to rob a coach to take back the taxes he and his man consider stolen from them. Jamie dare not go and help but he somehow — we discover — has sent a message via Fergus. Good ‘ole Fergus at the ready, for on the road just as they are about to rob these people Fergus intervenes, Murtagh calls it off. Fergus tells Murtagh there is a mole among his rebels …..
Meanwhile at the theater Jamie prods the wounded man and suddenly Ferrante can’t take the pain any longer; he would have died but that Claire spoke up and suddenly it’s all hospital theater and she performs a minor procedure with thread, hot water and other stuff she somehow gets and gains the govenor’s admiration. He now knows why Jamie so respect her.
Message arrives: the robbery did not happen, Murtagh and his men not taken. Someone had warned them. Who could it be?
The episode uses juxtaposition so much I just can’t repeat it; suffice to say, Jamie and Claire’s story is back-and-forth with Briana and Roger’s.
Almost immediately after the handfast ceremony and love-making Brianna and Roger get into another quarrel. She becomes all riled up. Basically their rooted disagreements come to the surface — and startlingly they part. I admit I didn’t believe this could happen: it seemed improbable, slightly contrived: a deliberate separation to make for more suspense and anxiety. After going to such trouble to find her, he would not leave her. After she knew him and had said they were man and wife and the love-making that happened, would she just go off? By herself and in this dangerous place? It didn’t make emotional or practical sense. Remember they don’t have cell phones to keep in contact.
Still the dialogue is important: he accuses her of being childlike and I begin to think this is the theme and what makes us nervous about her. So what if he hesitated at telling her about the obituary; nothing he has said shows him to be authoritarian; she is twisting his words when he talks of consulting. Apparently she behaved similarly with her biological father, Frank, refusing to listen to reason. She wants what she wants regardless of anything around her and reality. It is true that common sensically in 1967 her parents are both long dead.
Then think about her behavior for this whole venture: She did not take any clothes with her, barely a map and one peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich. Baby comfort food. When she is walking through the highlands and nearly freezing, without food or water soon and is found by Laoghaire we are supposed to have realized why didn’t she prepare? When Claire crossed the first time, she didn’t prepare either but luckily she encountered Jamie …. ‘Nuff said.The second time she came she had a box of clothes, her surgical tools, other stuff.
What emerged quickly in Season episode 1 is Claire is at risk of rape immediately. From not only Black Jack Randall but the troupe around Jamie. Throughout her experience in the 18th century everywhere she is at risk of violence — but she knows this after the first hour, and after she is shown how to use a knife she is wary.
Brianna seems singularly unaware she is in danger – she has been sheltered all her life. She is startled to be taken for a whore and has nothing to counter this — she does not realize she should have her maid with her. A respectable young girl in the 18th century did not go about alone in the streets or into a tavern like this one. The maid did see her go off with Roger and I thought the maid would come to find her and interrupt. But I suppose why should she? she has no idea what her mistress wants and she is supposed to be subject to the mistress.And then when Brianna goes off like that it could be seen as suspiciously wanton by an 18th century person
Mr Bonnet begins to emerge as the season’s villain. He glimpses her when she comes into the tavern; he is gambling and sees him toying with her mother’s ring and pulls out money – which she thinks is a guarantee of respectability. Not so in the 18th century. Respectability is family, and knowledge of your past, all of which give status. Bonnet draws her into another room to make the bargain. Again she seems singularly unaware it is not a good thing to go where no eyes are upon her. But in this case that others know what is happening doesn’t help. It’s like someone in trouble in the streets or on a bus today and no one makes a move. I like to think they would act to prevent rape because it’s high violence, violation and the next step to murder.
Someone even closes the door on them. She is not raped in front of us but in another room. We are in the room just outside and we see no one soul lift a finger to help her. She screams in cries that call for help and we see she realizes no one is coming. That can have the effect of making people take it less seriously.
Then the camera switches to them and in his inimitable witty sardonic charismatic way Ed Speleers gives her ring. To him that she was not a virgin confirms the idea she could be a prostitute. He tells her he is a honest man who keeps his bargains. No he doesn’t– we have seen that before. The hour ends with Briana unsteadily walking away, stunned, hurt, now looking for her maid and room ….
During the whole of last episode and this for the first time I felt Sophie Skelton was up to the part. Hitherto it seemed to me Richard Rankin was so much better than she – he was far more nuanced, more depth. If you look at the stills of her, there is often something stiff or artificial, something self-conscious or self-regarding and it’s still there at moments, but on the whole she came up to the role last time with Menzies as her father and now this.
For 9 and 10, the episode commentary and evaluation continues in the comments.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Season 4, Episode 9: The Birds and the Bees
This was a strange episode — or what I expected was not on offer. I expected a big build-up to Brianna and Jamie finding one another, recognizing with difficulty and then going back to Claire. Instead with not quite the lack of fuss made over Murtagh’s reappearance, and Fergus’s to Murtagh, but much much less than Lord John Grey bringing Jamie’s son, Brianna has no trouble finding Jamie with a few inquiries.
Yes all rejoicing from Claire, but soon this part is over. I find the account by Julie Kosini in Bazaar on the evolving role of Claire and Bree and Claire a bit disingenuous. It’s not true that the mother-daughter relationship developed at length. It isn’t. It’s Jamie who goes off with Bree. Claire talks to Bree and elicits from her a version of Roger’s flight and the rape but that she never tells who raped her shows how brief these are – though they are there.The conversations do not pass the Brechtel test as they are about the women’s relationship to men not women’s lives conceived of separately or in relation to one another. By comparison some of Jenny and Claire’s conversations are about their relationship; we see them doing women’s occupations together.
The Bazaar is Caitriona Balfe returning to her first career for a shooting. She was a model originally and you can see how professional she is as she lets these clothes hang on her.
Back to episode 9: well Elizabeth (the maid) and Ian join the triangle and all go to Fraser’s Ridge. Brianna is uncomfortable, doesn’t know how to regard or approach this biological father and we have a repeat of what happened when young Willie showed up. Jamie goes off with Brianna to gather honey from bees and they bond. At first I thought they were going to kill bees because they have a shooting session. It seems that Brianna is a crack shot. I could wish she wasn’t or at least there was not this emphasis on this skill. This is a central sequence of this episode and its climax Jamie beating the hell out of Roger.
In the second conversation between Claire and Bree Claire sees Brianna’s discomfort is more than being parted from Roger. Brianna believes Roger has gone back through the stones — I went to the book and discovered in fact he had had a very hard time crossing, almost died, so it’s not nothing the way she seems sometimes to imply. It doesn’t take much for Brianna to admit she was raped because Claire has observed that Briana is pregnant, and Briana has to confess it’s not Roger’s. It seems that Roger did not “go all the way” with Brianna (how 1950s this is!). I hadn’t realized that.
On just these points: first Roger has given up safety, career, everything to follow this girl, and in the quarrel between them (over-discussed last week) he does not bring this up. Further she did go through a marriage ceremony with him where she said until death do us part, and I see no sign she took that seriously. I’ll mention at one time people believed it was natural and right to submit to those we love when they have higher status or authority over us. When do people still believe this? Clearly Brianna doesn’t – to her husband. She thinks her parents have authority over her and one of the emergent themes of this episode is the strength of the patriarchy and anyone who transgresses and is caught will be punished. She misses Roger, she grieves, but she does not appear to comprehend what it is to be married – she has not switched allegiances at all, does not even try to see what happened as he sees it, and takes no concern over what he had given up for her. No reciprocation from her here.
We see that Bonnet manages to persuade by threats Roger to come with him north and Roger agrees to accept some of the jewels in lieu of cash. I wondered if Roger was thinking of going back through those stones? There is a parallel between Jamie and Roger here: in the first and second season no one is punished as horrifying as Jamie — that is, instead of the heroine, a hero is raped, his personality attacked, put in prison, nearly dies and so on. So now again the hero is the one punished most severely. What shall we make of this? It’s really that goodness is presented as weak and again violence is resorted to as a solution to live’s painful problems and evil. And the male hegemony is actually re-affirmed.
It’s a serious problem or deliberate gap that Brianna doesn’t tell her mother who the rapist was until later in the episode. In a third briefer conversation Claire discovers her ring and wants to know where Brianna got it and only then does she find out it was Bonnet — Claire recognizes him if Briana did not. This is an important gap, so important the writers have Brianna excuse herself (in effect) to us by explaining to Elizabeth why she didn’t tell who raped her. She claims that she feared Jamie would go after this other man (Bonnet) once she described him.
This gap in information is important because Claire has felt it necessary to tell Jamie that someone raped Brianna without saying who. now what?
You guessed it: pat, along comes Roger in the woods to seek Briana and just happens to be near the cabin. Ian and Jamie leap to the conclusion he’s the rapist (they’ve never seen Roger) and beat the hell out of him, put him on a horse and are taking him somewhere. I do know they are going to sell this man to the Indians as a slave.
What is the moral of all this? how desperately they could have used cell phones and cameras in 1767? No good deed goes unpunished? (joke alert) – Roger has done many good deeds – or tried to. I remember the little boy we saw so sweet and gentle in Season 2 being brought up by Rev Wakefield. I’ve included a still of the boy in Season 2 staring at Wakefield and Frank Randall in talk. No, the events have been set up to cause this mistaken in identity. This is transparent.
I really regret to see Brianna take central stage with Claire as the secondary character and Jamie the pro-active one; this kind of role exchange partly happens in the later Poldarks. This popular genre refuses to think older woman are potentially far more interesting than young girls struggling (somewhat blindly) against the male hegemony. I foresee this will not modify (from the articles now being published online) and Claire may not become the center again; in the books she even forgoes her role as narrator in some of the sequences where Brianna and Roger are central — though Brianna does not take over and we get an impersonal third person narration.
I’m also again reading the book as I watch these episodes, and find that the interludes of Jamie and Claire – say in the wild green fields among the strawberries, then making love, then their extraordinary dialogue about death and the relationship of death to love, to time as conceived in these novels so they become sort of ghost stories (implicitly) – are just about all vanished. With these the contrivances of the books don’t stand out. Without them, these contrivances become like those of the third season: over-the-top. I do enjoy the explicit sex of the earlier seasons and miss them – but this fits an evolving relationship of an older couple. What I do miss is the focus on Jamie and Claire in conversations and the dialogues, meditations, and her over-voice for subjective narration.
My point is in the book they are there with this new larger familial perspective, and they are omitted in the serial drama – to its loss. It may be in the book the mother-daughter relationship is done more justice to — in the first book, Outlander, the long sequence at Lallybroch where Claire fits in is dropped in favor of male action-adventure.
Thinking more about historical romance — including say DuMaurier’s, Mantel’s, Byatt’s – and now this Drabble book on The Dark Flood Rises, I really regret to see Briana take central stage with Claire as the secondary character and Jamie the pro-active one; this kind of role exchange partly happens in the later Poldarks. This popular genre refuses to think older woman are potentially far more interesting than young girls struggling (somewhat blindly) against the male hegemony. I hope this will modify and Claire become the center again; in the books she even forgoes her role as narrator in some of the sequences where Briana and Roger are central — though Brianna does not take over (as I recall).
Ellen
P. S. Lallybroch is Midhope House, and that’s near Edinburgh. Leoch is Doune Castle, and that’s in Doune.
Season 4, Episode 10: The Deep Heart’s Core
I found this week’s episode fraught with conflicting norms and rage and hurt over the different characters’ ambivalent or conflicting attitudes towards love, sex, rape, pregnancy, authority figures. This episode reminded me of the earlier episode on slavery: it was courageous (even today) for the show to take on this issue and show the cruelty of the US culture at the time. But this was an easy issue. Who is for chattel slavery? And the response to refuse to own anyone the right plot point. It’s not non-controversial in an era of mass incarceration, slavery techniques used in them, massive trafficking of women and children.
The secondary theme was for me more painful and distressing because I have come (more through the book than this serial drama) to care very much for Roger and he is so abused, obviously wholly unjustly. By the end of the hour I wished for him he should go through the stones toute de suite and never return. Go back to Oxford and lead a good life as a historian, forget this woman. And his intense relief standing before the stones suggests he would like to free this madhouse of an earlier era. I know he doesn’t choose this. By the way Neolithic stones in North Carolina are a fantasy – the circles of little piles of stones were even neatly piled.
There could have been more done with this: analogies to a hostage situation, to imprisonment, to destruction of people’s personalities by such treatment. I understand in the book he goes into a deep depression.
For those reading this who just watch the film, I’ve read enough of the book to know this episode (like some of the Poldarks) departs a lot from the book — partly in order to fit all the material of an enormous book into 3 remaining episodes. I much prefer the book for really being nuanced — for example, Roger has a long period of depression and distress once he escapes from the Mohawks and that is skipped in the serial drama.
The fraught attitudes come from the attitudes towards the rape of Briana and this behavior akin to honor-killing that Jamie and Ian enact in response. I also once again was put out sympathy with Brianna instead of Jamie — in reason and from their conduct, I should feel far more alienated by his ferocious assault on a man he has not checked even has done anything wrong. Jamie’s behavior is a version of honor-killing: it is akin to the murderous tribal familial behavior whereby men murder a girl in their family if she has been assaulted or shamed or had sex outside marriage. In Jamie’s world it’s akin to duelling whereby the males fight one another because (again) the honor of the male is wounded when the female he is attacked to is sexually shamed. When he learns he beat the wrong man, his plan is now to kill Bonnet.
There are also his conversations with Brianna and how quickly he suspects that first she didn’t fight the rape ferociously herself, so with lightning speed accuses her of complicity and scorns her, then turns round when he discovers that she did fight, to again accuse of promiscuity because she had sex with Roger when they are not married as yet. His way of demonstrating how hard it would have been for her to throw Bonnet off is a showing off of his own strength.
What the film-makers do though is make the character (Jamie) fall silent and look penitent and offer to do all he can to make up for his mistakes. So there is (in me anyway) a tendency to try and understand this as an 18th century man’s behavior. By contrast, they make Brianna slap-happy: she hits Jamie with all her might and then hits Ian. As in the Poldark episode where Demelza suddenly swings out at Ross Poldark, this is senseless violence. Now in Demelza’s case it’s utterly anachronistic because an 18th century women, much less a wife in love, wouldn’t act that way — it’s out of character with what she is in the book. Brianna is a 20th century woman, what reasons does she present: that no one has the right to be as angry as she not exactly an edifying principle. How dare anyone be as angry as me? wait a minute. Didn’t she leave Roger? didn’t she leap to accuse and distrust him and behave as if she had not gone through a handfast ceremony. Show herself no sense she is in another era and act as if she can direct other people according to her needs whatever they are. Who is she to be angry here? I grant that in a way she shows that she does not look upon Jamie as she did upon her father Frank but there is real arrogance in her as a character and I find it brought out in her behavior. The world does not revolve around her, these people are responding in ways they know how.
Putting it this way doesn’t really capture the intensity of the feelings because in the 21st century we may feel differently from all these evinced attitudes (I do in part) but we do feel deeply and so I at least get upset watching.
I was very moved by Murtagh’s reunion with Jocasta. Duncan Lacroix and Maria Doyle Kennedy are superb actors — she is very touching especially. The enslaved butler, Ulysses, played by Colin McFarlane behaves in ways that it is hard to believe any enslaved person would. You’d think he was Carson in Downton Abbey with his withering irony over “may I know who is asking to see her? (words to this effect). It is witty but the house is so spic-and-span — the whole thing just so unreal.
All this again has the effect of marginalizing our heroine, Claire — in Drums of Autumn kept the heroine far more steadily. Caitriona Balfe does her best with the moments she has — offering to do a surgical abortion quickly (albeit without anesthesia). I liked the character even more than ever for that. She doesn’t insist on this as a solution; Brianna can have the baby, but if she decides to, Claire apparently thinks she had better go through the stones toute de suite — while still pregnant. Given recent public attitudes towards abortion I was not surprised Brianna chooses not to have an abortion — with the excuse of the slight chance it’s Roger’s. Since it’s improbable anyway that she would have gotten pregnant about one violent imposed bout with Bonnet I guess this new improbability is moot. I did wonder if she will have it in this book or the next? Historically, it would considered unthinkable to be anything other than deeply shameful and degrading for a woman to have a baby outside marriage so this choice is one Claire is aware is risky one for Brianna – her reputation as well as well-being. The assumption is a man protects, supports a woman — I foresee an engagement (if not with Ian who is laughed at…).
Like Jamie, Claire as a character is also made far more silent and passive than usual. It is odd that she contents herself with just one “Oh Jamie what have you done!!!” and some angry looks at Jamie. I don’t expect her to become violent or insist on her rights to be angry, but she seems more like an 18th century female character in this episode than she has been before – which would be to behave as she does, and forgive because these are the norms.
Claire also is presenting as choosing to go with Jamie more because Briana wants this than she sees the wisdom. How did Briana get to be charge? It was she who was not frank about who raped her, how it came about. I understand this kind of reaction, but to feel for her does not mean she is now in charge. The real purpose is the usual one of separating the younger heroine from her mother so she will be a free acting agent on her own but it comes out as making Claire as a character far less interesting and active; her complexity is shelved.
I like Drums of Autumn very much because its basis tone is that of the character of Claire as narrator: she is central consciousness most of the time and has extended subjective narratives as usual (this occurs in the other three books) in italics. All this is lost in this season
But I was fully absorbed as I watched — yes the episode has taken us into a complicated deep heart’s core.
Ellen
An perceptive revealing essay: why academics are interested in the male body in Poldark and Outlander:
https://theconversation.com/why-academics-are-interested-in-the-male-body-in-poldark-and-outlander-42518
I founnd this article in the online journal, The Conversation, eye-opening and accurate, very interesting: while the photo that appears is of Aidan Turner, the article is just as much (and if think of the implications over nakedness) about Outlander and Sam Heughan.
The article published in 2015 takes all its instances from the first seasons of both serial dramas. I am unwilling to post some of the stills with more traumatized images of Heughan as Jamie; I put two on my facebook timeline: one relevant and not distressing to look at: Claire caring for Jamie from early in Episode 2 (Castle Leoch); another image from Episode 2 (which contains the horrifying spectacle of Black Jack flogging Jamie) which reminds me very much of the much discussed image of Aidan Turner working in the fields. Admittedly Jamie does not remove his shirt, but then, hey, it’s colder in Scotland (joke alert)
https://www.facebook.com/ellen.moody.58
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