we together make a limb

[lotesse]

It hailed here yesterday, and I was reading Virginia Woolf all by myself with my bones all chilled, and I got a bit blue. So naturally I had to go watch Joss things while I worked on the Thesis O' Doom.

The thing about Mal and Inara, the thing that makes them wonderful and horrible, is their relationship to the Courtly Love paradigm.

Service and protection. Lancelot defending Guenever’s honor in battle, even though it was through his own acts that she had lost it, service rendered utterly meaningless but yet very pretty. Courtly love only protects us from the sins our lovers would have us do. In one way, the explicitness of Inara’s position as a prostitute does interesting and shiny things in combination with the subtext of Courtly Love in the verse—does Mal object to her whoring so much because he’s got her locked into the Petrarchan mode, i.e. the beloved only having value enough to be loved so long as she never surrenders to that love?

Mal’s position as knight in shining armor is a large part of what makes him such a great character—he’s Han Solo, but also Lancelot. Badger says it, in the Pilot: “Only I think
you're still a Sergeant, see. Still a soldier, man of honour in a den of thieves.” That quality sets Mal apart from Han and Dean Winchester and all the other charming bad boys, because his nobility is less subtextual, more surface. It aligns him with Aragorn, and Odysseus, and maybe Edward Rochester?...that co-extant roughness and knightliness, tarnished silver and worn-out velvet.

Joss doesn’t push it nearly hard enough. We need to be terribly aware, throughout the whole of the verse, that Inara’s dual positions as sacred prostitute and courtly love object are closely linked, and always have been, and are so linked for a damn good reason. That it’s kind of really weird, actually, that Mal denigrates Inara for being sexually active, when he himself wants her sexually—she’s supposed to be good in bed for him, of course, but she needs to spontaneously acquire those skills, because her sleeping with other men is not good. I’m making Mal sound terrible here, and I don’t mean to. I don’t think he’s doing it on purpose. I think he’s caught in a rather nasty trap, one that he didn’t make. Possessiveness is supposed to be romantic, right?

Mind, I think Nara’s caught in it too. She wants Mal in an old-fashionedly romantic way, but her profession disallows her access to the Petrarchan. Inara is, in her own way, very weak. Her heart, when you get to it, is delicate and fragile in a way that Kaylee’s or Zoe’s simply aren’t. Kaylee, I figure, would be completely able to court Mal if she was a space whore. But then again, I can’t really imagine someone like Kaylee coming out of the Companion’s temple. She’d be okay in Inara’s position because of her bright openness, but Inara’s training specifically guided her away from that kind of brass honesty.

Poor dears. Patriarchy does mess them up so.

Also? I think the main reason why I haven't started reading the Buffy Season 8 comics is that I kind of can't deal with the fact that Buffy and Angel still aren't back together. It's crazy, how much I need to believe that they'll still happen.

I have to send out my Honors draft tomorrow. Eeep.

Comments

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I think the last vestige of Mal's religious upbringing still hangs around to repress his sexual feelings. You'll notice that he told Saffron that it had been a long damn time since anybody's hand but his own had been on his plow--why? I'm sure he could have found plenty of non-whore gals who'd be glad to tumble him just for the fun of it.

[lotesse]

I'd agree - Mal doesn't seem to want that. Look at his awkward reactions to Kaylee's sexual frankness. It's almost like it freaks him out.

Do we know Mal was brought up religious? Somehow that's not in my head. Did I miss a thing?

[executrix.livejournal.com]

He looks pretty serious when he kisses the cross during the firefight, and he's sort of joking and sort of not when he says they're too pretty for God to let them die, and he refers to the expected air cover as "angels." It's entirely possible that his upbringing wasn't religious but he turned to it as a way of coping with war, of course.

[lotesse]

Oh right. I always forget about that cross, maybe because it feels out-of-place to me. Most of the show's religious iconography is eastern, and the Jesus throws me for a bit of a loop.

(I love that icon so much).

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I think JW was just having fun imagining a society in which, even though Christianity existed, it was really pretty marginal.

In one of the first comments I ever made to a Firefly post, I said that Mal reversed the cliche by *becoming* an atheist in a foxhole. The very sensible reply was that Mal isn't an atheist (which would require believing that God doesn't exist)--he's furious at God, which implies thinking there's somebody there to be mad at.

I can't make up my mind about Simon's religious beliefs--sometimes I think that one thing he and Mal share is that anger, that imploded in Simon in medacad just looking at the awful things that happen to people (even when there isn't a war).

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

This is a lame comment but I had to share that when I read this post the first time I read "Courtly love" as "Courtney Love" every time and had no idea what you were trying to say with that! I was like...there's a paradigm named after Courtney Love? Is Kurt Cobain supposed to be Lancelot here?

[lotesse]

Dude. That is the most awesome thing anyone has ever said on this journal. Oh my god, now I totally want to identify that paradigm. Flannel=chain mail.