More like Willderness, Amirite?

This chapter goes hard. Greaves is demented and this one might be my favorite to date? Not sure, "Everything Must Go" is a really strong piece of writing and feels a lot more sincerely humanist than most of the series. But this feels like the height of the wheels-within-wheels thing she does so well.

We skip New Year's Eve, mostly. That's an interesting decision on Greaves' part, maybe to make the reader empathize a bit more with Rachel? We only learn about Amy's big news after the fact, so Rachel's sense of dislocation comes through a bit more naturally.

This week I read Wilderness, and it's stellar.

I'm going to dip in on "Dudely's Vague Recollections of Kristine Eck" only a tiny bit, and I'm going to largely avoid Discipline-and-Punish-posting, but it's at great personal effort that I'm not asking "what if paperclips are themselves tiny little prisons for paper?"

So, What Happened?

• Dorley continues to force-recruit Rachel.
• The second-years have a rollerskating party!
• The Great Escape comes to pass.
• Elladine wrestles with her conscience, takes inventory of her motives.
• Will winds down a little bit.

Rollerskating

Well I mean, the gang goes rollerskating.

It takes the two of them, and the tacit approval of everyone else nearby — Paige rolling up to observe but cruelly, in Christine’s very loudly expressed view, remaining neutral — but she and Bex manage eventually to get Christine up on her skates and rolling slowly towards the rink.

This isn't a major event, but it stood out to me. It's just a little lighthearted example of how community actually works in Dorley. There are a lot of places where it doesn't work, to be clear:

• The way that Christine is barred from CS
• The way that she's undermined as a student by the community's demands from her
• The notably common practice of sponsor-recruit abuse

So, seeing the actual supposed value of the Hall as a collective enterprise, versus a purely extractive institution, is worth noting when it happens. For Christine, the perks are still synonymous with, or at least Banach-Tarski with semi-coercive social pressure. Six of "we take care of us" and half a dozen of "we force-feminize us" as a mode of operation. Something that's probably worth dwelling on here for a minute is that the outing is ostensibly for the younger sisters but is also very obviously for the older sisters, see above skates. It's kind of a deflated version of whenever the younger women push back on Aunt Bea successfully (non-binary nomenclature, respecting Soon-to-be-Beth, &c.), in various portions of the text. Dorley is, thuddingly obviously, interested in the legitimacy of power structures. And the informal push-back avenues "up the stack" so to speak are shown to be absolutely critical for the maintenance of the legacy aristocracy, whoever that happens to be in a given scene.

I hope to get more of Paige's perspective in the long run, because I think that she and Christine differ meaningfully and interestingly on the question of what the individual owes the community and visa versa, but we spend more time with Christine.

Rachel

Rachel comes back to Dorley at Amy's insistence. She kind of clomps around offending people for awhile. She makes some progress, depending on your definitions of "makes" and "progress." Dorley is kind of an evangelical organization, and kind of a mystery cult, and that tension leads to these sorts of split-minded pursuits. That tension reminds me of the conflict between Dorley's anti-aristocratic bent and its aristocratic backing. The contradictions of Dorley motivate the conflicts of Dorley and I just think it's neat.

Will's Trauma Corner

Will is a spring. She and her environment have wound herself up so tight over the years that her surroundings started being warped by the tension. Will is also going to need wrist surgery if she isn't careful, gotta ramp up that training gradually, girl! Do I just like Will now because of the boxing? Look, who really knows the heart of man, in the beginning was the read, etc.

Escape from Stenordale

I was reading this on the plane, so maybe that's why, but it kind of sneaked up on me. I knew it'd be this or next chapter that they made their move, but it was unexpected all the same. I like the way Greaves writes action. Understated, grounded in the character perspective, has a point.

The physical climax to Sisters was elided, and rightly so. Steph wasn't really up to the kind of catharsis that Val is here, and that outburst was an unplanned eruption. Contra that, it's important to have a sense of Val's interiority as this happens. Because so much of her life has been spent being objectified and stymied by others, her catharsis needs to be expressed for it to really hit home. Here we get to root for her. I might've left Callum's perspective out if it were me writing? But it heightened the suspense of the moment, to be sure.

And, in the aftermath we get a heck of a cliffhanger as Dina goes for the eyes. I'm guessing this is not the last we'll be hearing from Dina.

On-Topic Thinks

Foucauldian Knots

This is not a whole thought. Some things are ruined by too much fuss over them. But:

Pathetic. Sort of tragic, really. He and his friends will never know how it feels to be free.

Faye, at the roller rink.

The pressure is overwhelming. If you don't conform, if you don't do the things they do, then you're not one of them, you're the other thing, the thing everyone's supposed to despise. And if you're not strong, if you're not confident, if you’re most of the way to not being like them already, then you have to go further, just to show them. Just so they won't turn on you.

And that's Jane, to Rachel.

I love these lines. This is somehow both pretty delicate writing, and fucking savage to the reader, on Greaves' part. What else is there to say, really? I feel like anything I add will be throwing mud on a sculpture. Absolutely vicious work, Alyson, fuck yeah.

Rachel's Whole Deal

Gotta talk about Rachel. Can't be helped, really. Her worries are split up into two or three piles. Obvious objections, bigotry, and weird identitarian anxiety.

The Obvious Objections

it’s a kidnapping ring!

it’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever encountered personally or professionally!

I'm going to gloss over the obvious issues because they're the correct ones and therefor sort of boring. And I think this part is just, already covered from when Lorna had her disclosure. Or whenever I mentioned Beasts of No Nation or Kristine Eck's writing. The most intriguing fact about them is that Rachel has cranial space for anything apart from the obvious objections. Which is strange! They're the colossal squid in the room! I have a little bit of a hard time suspending my disbelief that "this is a disappearing ring" wouldn't just blot out the sun of everything else for a person, but that's the genre I guess?

Briefly, Amy and Rachel both just got forcibly recruited into what amounts to a conservative-bourgeois-revolutionary-organization, so we ought to have some sympathy for them and the compromises they make after that. I am a little bit interested in Amy's vague resemblance to a young Elladine Lambert (aristo-fascist relatives, "do you take referrals?"), but more on that another time maybe. And I'm deeply frustrated by Rachel's underlying attitude.

Are You Happy?

'Are you happy?' What kind of a question is that?

Rachel scowls. 'The kind of question you ask someone who was kidnapped and mutilated.'

I don't much like the character choice to have Rachel be a bigot, just on the concrete-fictional-level. I understand that these attitudes exist in the wild. I see that there's this tense contrast between Amy with her blood-related bigotry and posh extraction, vs Rachel and her established position. I know that there's this potential for a symbolic tension at work, of Rachel the comfortably-queer person and Dorley the novel-to-her queer space. But it kind of feels thin to me. So, I have a hard time taking Rachel seriously as a character instead of a device. I'll write about the Rachel device instead.

The rhetoric Rachel uses kind of becomes a standin for getting brainwashed by tumblr or whatever the moral panic of the day. That's not interesting by itself, but it ties in with the Dorley ecosystem. I think it makes sense to interpret Dorley as kind of a fictional-physical manifestation of Online. Like, of course the Sisters are themselves very online (Steph excluded for whatever reason) but I mean Online as in the plane of existence, not the descriptor. Both here and elsewhere. There are these weird implicit hierarchies and explicit roles, a locus that does not exist but can cause a ton of anxiety, an Omertà, terms and conditions that you didn't really want in the first place, &c.

This is gonna be caveman shit, but I need to set up a thing. One of the things about transmisogyny is that it's misogyny. Me smart, talk good words. Table stakes still, but when busybodies police gender, they can't help but shrink it smaller in what amounts to an infinite recursion. Because they have some platonic category of Woman, it's not satisfying to rest on any coherent definition. Or they would've just accepted "a member of the class of people who are women" and taken a nap instead. So they end up cordoning off broader and broader swathes of human interaction until everyone is either violating a gender norm, in a closet, or both.

So, I think one way to read Rachel and Amy is as two very different tactics in relation to a rising tide of that policing. Rachel did not choose to come to Dorley, Dorley came to her, and now she's implicated in it. The same is, of course, true of Amy. Amy embraces her new sisters. Rachel is suspicious of them. She wants to rely on the broader system, despite its record towards women. In that reading, Rachel is making a (potentially ruinous) error in moral judgment. But you can't really paint one without the other existing, so somebody has to fall on the allegory-grenade.

I don't know if that reading really justifies itself, though, to be honest. This might just be another bit of confusion for me, like in the case of Steph hating Martin so much.

Weird Identity Worries

[H]ow do you know she’ll still be Jane five, ten years from now?

Still kind of a transphobic "Are you happy?" question, but in a less boring way. Identity-creation and destruction is at the core of Enemies. So when someone directly mentions it, I ought to pay attention.

We're inundated with it:

• Beth, as a self-conscious act of creation.
• Will, as a self-conscious act of repression.
• Val, incidentally out of the ashes of Vincent.
• Trevor, remaining himself despite it all.

What you'd hope is something like, "everyone's always improving!" but that's clearly refuted by the text. People stay the same to stave off greater distress. People make decisions that are ruinous to their lives and those around them. People do get better by changing. And they do so on accident. Change is not even a constant in Dorley, just, the possibility of change. So, really, Amy doesn't know Jane will be Jane. She does not know if she would like Jane in ten years' time, either. Or remain Amy. She just knows that she likes Jane right now. But that's pretty much all that she can know, I think; it's early days and maybe it always will be.

So why does it bother Rachel so much? I'm reminded again of getting "lapped" by my former-libertarian friend. Rachel's been out for a long time, it must be disorienting to see her social circle change so much so suddenly when she'd placed them in a mental box.

In any case, that fixation on real identity isn't rare, it's everywhere. And why not? There's the confounding pair of facts that we recognize objects over time, and that some days we feel not ourselves. So "which is the real person?" is a natural, if not helpful, question to ask. That discrepancy is kind of the dual of Greaves' embodied consciousness elsewhere. You have to be/become to feel-like, in a lot of the text in this series (and, again, very probably in reality as a general case.) So, what is a person to make of that change-in-feeling and change-in-being? There is a subject, a mind, and it is only moved and changed by objects, inputs and bodies. Since we're each a subject we're all subjects, more or less. So, I think Rachel's anxiety here is ultimately rooted in objectification. Go figure. "Mark" was the name for the sense impressions that Melissa left Rachel with, before Melissa existed. And that name is just a bias made out of memories. That proprietary instinct about people and things is a dangerous bundle of feelings.

The Great Escape

Not to be a binarist, but there's a sort of a mirroring in Stenordale. For a cast of characters, we have:

• Frankie: a traitor and a penitent.
• Callum: a traitor and a penitent.
• Val: a survivor.
• Trevor: a survivor.
• Dina: a once rapist and now victim. Captive to Jake.
• Jake: some kind of "turbo-rapist," basically an ogre with a glint of cruel craftiness.

I don't want to make too much of it, but we've got a cast of Friends here in Stenordale and I wonder if that's intensional?

Honestly, my, I guess parochial interests, make me feel that this is a happy ending for Callum. He was too weak of character to do the right thing until it was almost too late, and he repented at the end, seemingly at the last moment when it could have mattered. He should have done better, but so should everyone. Helping set right his past failures was his best real hope, and where would he even have gone from here? To work for Elle Lambert I guess? One could write more on the man, but he expressed his conceit of his gender role, basically. Got the lady's favor and died violently. Sad curtailed existence of this man only good for violence.

He shares something with Frankie. Both change their minds too late. Maybe Frankie goes on to live a long and fulfilling third act, but she's haunted by what she did, and I don't know that she will ever forgive herself. She's her best friend's captor, roughly speaking, and I don't think you come back from that very easily. Also, the best character in the series to date, maybe? I seriously love Frankie, she rules, she's such a goddamn goblin. Also of course, Frankie and Callum both feel something for Val, even if for Frankie it's a deep affection, whereas for Callum it's an infatuation.

Val and Trevor are both survivors, of course. I guess that's pretty surface-level, but, y'know, needs must. I'm guessing Trevor survives, anyway. I know he's bleeding in the back of a truck right now, but it'd be a weird payoff for him to die unless it vaults us into the events of book 4 or something.

Where I think these comparisons get a little more interesting, if a little more hand-wavy is with Dina and Jake. Stenordale is Dorley with the dial turned to 11. An exaggerated mockery of an institution trying to shake out its contradictions. Stenordale, as an insult to good taste, good breeding, and good sense, can only intentionally pair two people up through abuse. So there you have it, a subject and an object, two ways. Physically, Jake controls, acts, determines (until the end) while Dina submits. Psychically, we get a sliver of Dina's perspective at the end. She acts, and Jake is acted upon. The violent agent becomes the object of violence. Maybe that's a stretch. Can't really say until the next chapter. But either way, the act of being inverted means that the two don't quite form an equilibrium. More Wretched of the Earth there than Identity and Violence, I guess you'd say.

I hope Val sticks around. As much as I've disliked much of how horrid Stenordale is, I've really enjoyed her and Frankie and Trevor.

I truly don't know what to think of Dina now. She's suffered so much, and that suffering has been at the hands of someone so cruel. The text is acting as though this is no longer Declan, and that kind of fits in with the amphibious-beings/embodied-minds thing of it. Declan does not exist because the experiences and the meat that made him have changed so radically, been so re-contextualized. Who is this new person going to be, I wonder?

Why Does Anyone Do Anything, Really?

Elle's perspective portions are fascinating. Her motives are compromised, selfish, venal, and her semi-belief in her own altruism is deeply unsettling. You want her to be altruistic because the alternative is that she's just another trout-fucker, basically. And she wants that, she wants to be uncommon. Another great character, another perfect example of the kinds of contradictory layers people can maintain, for awhile. All of this tension begins to feel like it has to unravel by the end of the series, but maybe it just, won't. Unsustainable situations can continue for a long time.

I think Jan must represent why Elle is still doing this after fifteen years. Maybe not, maybe there's some Rube-Goldberg economic machine that turns washouts into cash infusions for the vieux riche. But right now, I think it's Bea's personal magnetism that's defining Elle's motivation. Like, yeah, Elle is down bad of course, but also Bea is aloof in a way nobody else is for her. I think that suggests a potential conflict if/when Val shows up?

Underneath or overlaid on the lust and vengeance and force of routine, I wonder if Elle feels a sense of delight in being a sort of a traitor to her class, too. Or if she even feels like she is such a thing. She's still, you know, doing the aristocratic PMCs-and-forced-feminization thing, so, kind of in the family business, no?

Reactionary Camp, Again, Somehow

This body.

This mind.

This man.

Good for nothing but violence.

It's kind of tired and shabby to claim that right-wingers are all secretly-gay or trans, whatever. So tired, in fact, that the culture has shifted enough to move the claim from "closet-case" to "egg." And, the defect there is in assigning a flaw's origin in a benign difference.

Nevertheless, there's something in common between what Will was doing, what Jesse "sitting in front of a screen makes you a woman" Watters does, and presumably whatever I was doing when I started boxing. And, I think, between where Will is trending and where I have? So, reason to hope basically.

I've linked Samantha Hancox-Li's essay on reactionary camp in right wing politics like, 40 times and here I go again: anchor tags are free. I'll even pull out an early section for those averse to clicking:

The internet offers a psychedelic dreamscape of gender, perfected. Men with bulging pecs and gleaming biceps. Tradwives bursting out of their cottagecore dresses, slowly whipping batter and cream. You know the aesthetic I'm talking about. You see it on the news every day—or on YouTube, or Tiktok, or wherever visual content is sold. We are all drowning in it.

I call it reactionary camp. Fox News Face, the pancake makeup and bleach-blond hair that every female Fox News anchor is required to adopt. GearBod, the puffed-up look men get on too much synthetic testosterone, veins writhing beneath their skin like grey worms.

It's not enough to just be a man or a woman. You have to crank the dial up till it breaks. Every stereotype must be magnified to the utmost technologically possible. And I do mean technologically. I'm just saying what everyone knows.

Anyway, I will keep linking it as often as it keeps being relevant when reading Dorley, which is to say, often. I think, there was something resembling a hallucination in Will's past. The "can't" idea, what she describes as a religion of "no."

I started working out because I hated my body, more or less. There's a lot that I like about them now (both my body and various methods of sweating.) Just being honest, I was motivated almost entirely by self-loathing at first. Kill this punching bag, for real. The enjoyment came later, and I am very lucky that I found things about it that I liked. Things like the hobby of it, the diverse kinds of friends you make in sports, the feeling itself of being sore, the slot-machine of progress and regress. I hated the way people didn't look at me. I hated the way I felt after walking up a flight of stairs. I hated that I felt waxy and restless all the time. I hated being sick (unavoidable, still a hated motivator.) I hated that my father thought that I was a weak sluggish pig-boy devoid of masculine virtue, and I really hated that I kind of agreed with him if I was being totally, completely, honest. So I started running with my older sister, I started hitting the bag which is heavy and properly boxing. Track. Cross country. All of this came with a side of loathing for awhile, for myself and for my dad. Eventually though, I wasn't really scared of my dad any longer. I wasn't so disappointed by how I saw my reflection in other people's eyes any more. If I had been, if I had stayed that way, if I had actually gotten worse, I would be so messed up about it.

The idea of putting all of that work in, seeing the results you thought you were supposed to want, and then it not working internally. Becoming, only to know that it was a failed project. You'd go lunatic. Break the lever off. Be an instrument of pure wrath. I don't know what a person could possibly do with that.

I think I can sort of get a sideways peripheral glance at how Will must have felt, then, through those memories and the nauseating feeling of watching reactionary camp expand so rapidly. I'm not going to argue that things were better or people were better before; who can tell and who cares? But there was a less publicly vulgar time not very long ago and the change has been disorienting.

All troubles and questions obliterated in an act of violence, after which only bliss and clear purpose remain. They want to unsoul you.

What I see Will doing in "Wilderness" then, is beginning to work through these things and maybe to come back to her senses. Not to conflate the two texts, but Will's body cannot keep her soul held captive; it breaks back in while she works the heavy bag. It's meditative to do something like that, even though we don't quite get to that sense of things here. This moment felt like a turning point to me, even so.

Because first you're just taking it out on the bag, in almost a pre-linguistic way. Then you're thinking about it, addressing the bag and the object of your discontent. And before you know it you're actually working a combo or a pattern or a drill or something, and that focus can bleed out all of the poisonous rage that goes with this abstracted violence. You're not killing the bag, you're working on the bag. This moment of self-loathing simply cannot continue forever for Will, because now she's exposed her pain to people who care about her and understand that pain.

Errant Thoughts

Dad Moment

Whatever happened with Christine's professor earlier this semester, anyway? Does nobody else have a pervasive anxiety over Christine's GPA?