October 04, 2006

Your Wednesday Dose of Camille

Paglia, that is. She's written an article on our current rediscovery of Marie Antoinette and parallels to our own time--frankly, it goes further toward explaining the weird feelings of surreality I've been experiencing over the past few months than anything else I've read.

The first half of the article is a pretty straightforward reviewing of the current spate of Antoinette-themed media offerings; skip to the bottom half for the interesting analysis.

Enjoy.

Posted by Big Arm Woman at October 4, 2006 01:19 PM
Comments

Well, she definitely thought more highly of that PBS special than I did, though I agree completely about Schama. And not just because of my antipathy towards him. I didn't think it was bad, but it certainly had no business being two hours long.

I had noticed there was a lot of Antoinettism of late, but chalked it up to how historical interests concentrate in bursts quite often especially when there's a big-budget movie involved. I hadn't considered there may be other reasons for the burst other than coat-tailing. It's too easy to do read into things, that I sometimes err too far in the other direction by purposely trying not to.

Posted by: marc at October 4, 2006 01:35 PM

Yeah, and Camille pretty much gets paid to read stuff into things. Still, I thought it was a pretty interesting take on all this.

Posted by: BAW at October 4, 2006 03:22 PM

I thought so, too. And it made me re-evaluate automatically dismissing or avoiding any considerations of such things. Well, at least until I realized again that I'm lazy.

Posted by: marc at October 4, 2006 06:04 PM

The French Revolution was sparked by women's magazines.

Posted by: Ron Hardin at October 4, 2006 06:14 PM

Now, Ron. Everyone knows it was popular revulsion with the bombe furniture style that set it off.

Posted by: PersonFromPorlock at October 5, 2006 07:47 AM

Well, that and the fact that the crepes being produced at the time were entirely too limp.

Posted by: BAW at October 5, 2006 09:45 AM

And all this time I thought it was caused by women who didn't realize their place. The "march of the women" was sparked, not by want of bread, but because they heard there was a baby in Versailles, and their natural need to go snatch it took over.

I have several carefully transcribed and cherry picked studies to prove this.

Posted by: marc at October 5, 2006 12:13 PM