![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Saturday, August 24th, 2013 12:50 am
caroline lamb
Things I Would Love to See As Movies Except They'd Fuck Them Up:
Caroline Lamb - lover then stalker and mocker of Lord Byron, novelist, and successfully mimicked his style so well that publishers sometimes couldn't tell the difference. She got tossed out of society for Glenvale, and her behavior was by any standard fairly scandalous, but her husband refused to divorce her despite pressure from her mother in law and most of the peerage, only doing so at her insistence and left Ireland where was Chief Secretary to be with her at her death.
Movies about women are generally either a virtuous triumph over odds or glittering slide into misery and death (see The Duchess). Their entire lives are summed up by how they died: in deserved adulation or somewhat pitiful yet deserved misery with optional poverty (preferred), and with any kind of luck, scandal and ridicule. Their lives are treated as equations to prove the answer of good or evil, what they did to deserve what they got, as if that's the goal all along, to die a good death, when death's just two words 'the end' and before that they live a life in multitudes
I'd like to see Caroline as she was, intense and obsessed, unbalanced and brutally in love, whose obsession would not just change her life but shot through her world like an earthquake, a natural disaster, leaving nothing as it was before, and enjoyed it all. She may have once been Byron's muse to be discarded for another and forgotten, but that was his plan, not hers; she made sure he never forgot her, not for the length of his life until his death, and society that mocked her, they couldn't forget her, or themselves, not when she wrote a novel to show them exactly who they were. History never will; she wrote herself there, too.
She wasn't a particularly good person, but she wasn't afraid of anything, except perhaps being forgotten. That much, she didn't have to worry about. Mortality is inevitable and comes to everyone, all the stories will end the same, always, we know this; the infinite is contained in the lives that were lived before, the multitudes that we contain while we do it.
Caroline Lamb - lover then stalker and mocker of Lord Byron, novelist, and successfully mimicked his style so well that publishers sometimes couldn't tell the difference. She got tossed out of society for Glenvale, and her behavior was by any standard fairly scandalous, but her husband refused to divorce her despite pressure from her mother in law and most of the peerage, only doing so at her insistence and left Ireland where was Chief Secretary to be with her at her death.
Movies about women are generally either a virtuous triumph over odds or glittering slide into misery and death (see The Duchess). Their entire lives are summed up by how they died: in deserved adulation or somewhat pitiful yet deserved misery with optional poverty (preferred), and with any kind of luck, scandal and ridicule. Their lives are treated as equations to prove the answer of good or evil, what they did to deserve what they got, as if that's the goal all along, to die a good death, when death's just two words 'the end' and before that they live a life in multitudes
I'd like to see Caroline as she was, intense and obsessed, unbalanced and brutally in love, whose obsession would not just change her life but shot through her world like an earthquake, a natural disaster, leaving nothing as it was before, and enjoyed it all. She may have once been Byron's muse to be discarded for another and forgotten, but that was his plan, not hers; she made sure he never forgot her, not for the length of his life until his death, and society that mocked her, they couldn't forget her, or themselves, not when she wrote a novel to show them exactly who they were. History never will; she wrote herself there, too.
She wasn't a particularly good person, but she wasn't afraid of anything, except perhaps being forgotten. That much, she didn't have to worry about. Mortality is inevitable and comes to everyone, all the stories will end the same, always, we know this; the infinite is contained in the lives that were lived before, the multitudes that we contain while we do it.
