Actually, I have very little data, but I'm willing to speculate for hours on the data I have. :P selenak may have more data points, and if so, I will evaluate each one on its own merits and see if I need to revise my opinion. From the data that's been presented to me, though, my evaluation is that Fritz was not actually abusive to her in the way that he was to people like his brothers and successor-nephew.
The *situation* of living in an absolute monarchy, being married off at 17 for political reasons, and having your entire life be subject to the whims of your husband and his family is a form of institutional abuse, but I distinguish between that and "Fritz was personally awful to her." He was personally awful to a lot of people, not to her in any kind of standout way that I have seen. He belittled her, yes, and knowing him there are other examples like the fat-shaming where I would have to tsk at him, but much of the belittling I've seen was of the sort where I feel like you're allowed to have and express opinions about people you don't like.
I keep seeing people observe that he made demeaning comments about her and she never did about him, ergo they dichotomize husband and wife along saint/demon lines. But I'm taking each comment on its own and agreeing or at least sympathizing with some of his, so I refuse to buy into that dichotomy. Nor, as stated above, do I consider social snubbing to be abusive or cruel. (As you know, I myself have cut off my entire birth family one by one and two by two over the years. ;) ) If he were her parent, that would be a completely different matter.
All I know about her is that you have mentioned that she said lots of nice things about Friedrich
So most of what I know about her personally is that she was unassertive/shy, conformist, nice, and warm-hearted. Mostly as queen she was known for keeping a court that observed religious practices with every evidence of real sincerity (she herself wrote religious works) and for engaging in charitable acts. The people who gravitated to her seem to have genuinely liked her. She was politically isolated, but at the center of a social circle that revolved around the Queen and her values and etiquette.
Her court presented itself as something of an alternative to Friedrich's, which was all "mock religion at every opportunity, read lots of secular books and argue about philosophy and science, yay statues and paintings of naked men everywhere, no women allowed." There was a specific class of upper-class educated liberal people, mostly but not exclusively men, to whom that felt awesome and forward-thinking, but to the majority of society, in, say, Berlin, it was still the eighteenth century and you were supposed to be Protestant and heterosexual and not flout so many expectations quite so blatantly. So a lot of people really liked having a queen who behaved herself, as opposed to Mr. "I do what I want, deal with it" at Sanssouci.
With all eyes on Fritz and EC being so isolated, it's hard for me to tell what went on in her head, and I haven't read her correspondence, so the only picture I get of her from here is "willing to be an upstanding eighteenth century woman, conforming to societal expectations and subordinating her own wishes to those of the men in power around her." The role she was forced to adopt may have been fairly ego-syntonic for her, or she may have been silently getting an ulcer, I'm not sure.
Did she think that she got a reasonably good deal?
Reasonably, maybe. Not totally. She was clearly very disappointed at not getting to be a real queen, especially right after Fritz inherited and his first move was "Don't get any ideas, Mom still outranks you socially. (Love you, Mom!) Politically, you're both impotent from here on out. Bye!" Plus I think it's really clear EC wanted a loving marriage, but, also she had married into the Hohenzollerns, so was she aware it could have been way worse? I'm sure she was! I think as time went on she managed to put together an environment that she was reasonably comfortable in and to count her blessings.
I'm not sure how she personally felt about children. She went around saying that Providence had not blessed her marriage with children (aka "I know what you're all thinking, but Fritz TOTALLY slept with me"), but with women being basically receptacles for offspring at the time, of course she would have to say that. It would have looked just as bad for her, maybe worse, if she'd gone around announcing that her husband didn't sleep with her. (Some women would have done it anyway, as part of a battle of wills. She was not the battle of wills type.) Maybe she genuinely wanted babies, maybe society told her she should but she was secretly relieved to have a sexless marriage, maybe she believed society that she wanted babies, maybe some combination of the above, I don't know.
Did she actually like him? Was she scared of him?
I'm going to say, certainly not in the way that SD was afraid of FW. EC was isolated, her position was wholly dependent on the people around her (FW, SD, Fritz), and I think she was very careful not to gratuitously piss anyone off. Plus it must have been impossible to miss how easy that was to do with Fritz. So I think she was, consciously or unconsciously, signalling "I am not a threat to you! I am not a threat to you!" more or less constantly in his direction for fifty-three years. She comes across to me like Sansa among slightly less bloodthirsty Lannisters.
But she also continued to say nice things about Fritz for the ten years after he died. She eulogized him pretty heavily, in fact. Which is not evidence in and of itself: starting in 1740, Fritz proceeded to spend forty-six years doing the bog-standard abuse survivor Stockholm Syndrome thing of talking about how great Dad was and how the abuse wasn't that bad. But if her only concern was placating the absolute monarchs around her...talking up Fritz maaaay not have been the best way to ingratiate herself with his successor. But Fritz took care of her in his will and insisted that everyone had to continue to treat her with the same respect he made them treat her when he was alive, and FW 2 seems to have been more cool with that than with respecting Fritz's wishes about the disposal of his own body, so EC had reason to keep saying nice things about Fritz after his death.
My impression is that there's this phenomenon whereby proximity to Fritz and getting along with Fritz are in inverse proportion, and that EC probably benefited from her lack of proximity. He was really easy to hero-worship from a distance. I mean, from the vantage point of 300 years and several thousand miles, I think he's great! It should be pretty clear by now that I wouldn't make friends with him irl. :P
I think, if he was going to be forced into an incompatible marriage, someone like EC without a strong will was probably the best bet; I think her constant projecting of "I am not a threat!" worked; we know he made sure she was treated right by other people and largely left her alone himself while letting her do her own thing; and so I think she always had some positive feelings mixed in with the inevitable disappointment. I don't personally think it was solely fear driving her. I think she really wished they could have a closer relationship, because there were things she genuinely admired.
Haha, religion must have been a big sticking point, but she had a tendency to blame people around him rather than him, so I'm betting she spent most of her time wishing she could "save" him, and a lot of time praying for God to be forgiving of him and to help him see the light. (I'm making the last part up, but it's hard to imagine anything else. Something like how Don Corleone's wife is always praying for his soul, albeit without the lifelong partnership.)
Also, one thing that occurred to me just now: EC married Fritz in 1733, at the tail end of his woobie days, when he was still at his father's mercy and marrying her as his get-out-of-jail-not-exactly-free card. The worst of the stories would have been very recent and definitely floating around (the 1730 escape attempt + Küstrin/Katte affair was a big scandal throughout Europe). Most people who knew him during this period felt sorry for him, and this may have shaped her view of him for life.
This is not to say that she would have blamed the abuse on FW, whom she seems to have gotten along with and been more compatible with than her husband. Based on things she and other people at the time said, I imagine she would have blamed people like Keith and Katte for alienating father and son and felt sorry for them both. She also got to hold court alongside Fritz for several years while he was Crown Prince and doing his own thing as best he could, and he was willing to have enough to do with her to 1) placate Dad 2) get money. It was only once Dad died and left him a ginormous treasury that the infamous visit-the-wife-for-dinner-on-her-birthday tradition began.
So my take is that it's quite likely that EC spent her life trying to keep Fritz--I wrote "happy," but maybe "calm" is more accurate--for the sake of her own well-being, admiring him from a distance, and making excuses for him around the parts she didn't like, which were legion.
Also, thank you for continuing to ask me questions in my fandom. It's been a mental lifesaver through this whole medical process that you know about, where my brain won't let me do much but it'll let me ramble about Fritz on autopilot even when I can't concentrate. I got the notification of this question as I was starting to emerge from Side Effect Land earlier today, and it definitely helped me come out of the bad mood swing place. <3
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: Elisabeth Christine?
Date: 2019-09-18 12:36 am (UTC)Actually, I have very little data, but I'm willing to speculate for hours on the data I have. :P
The *situation* of living in an absolute monarchy, being married off at 17 for political reasons, and having your entire life be subject to the whims of your husband and his family is a form of institutional abuse, but I distinguish between that and "Fritz was personally awful to her." He was personally awful to a lot of people, not to her in any kind of standout way that I have seen. He belittled her, yes, and knowing him there are other examples like the fat-shaming where I would have to tsk at him, but much of the belittling I've seen was of the sort where I feel like you're allowed to have and express opinions about people you don't like.
I keep seeing people observe that he made demeaning comments about her and she never did about him, ergo they dichotomize husband and wife along saint/demon lines. But I'm taking each comment on its own and agreeing or at least sympathizing with some of his, so I refuse to buy into that dichotomy. Nor, as stated above, do I consider social snubbing to be abusive or cruel. (As you know, I myself have cut off my entire birth family one by one and two by two over the years. ;) ) If he were her parent, that would be a completely different matter.
All I know about her is that you have mentioned that she said lots of nice things about Friedrich
So most of what I know about her personally is that she was unassertive/shy, conformist, nice, and warm-hearted. Mostly as queen she was known for keeping a court that observed religious practices with every evidence of real sincerity (she herself wrote religious works) and for engaging in charitable acts. The people who gravitated to her seem to have genuinely liked her. She was politically isolated, but at the center of a social circle that revolved around the Queen and her values and etiquette.
Her court presented itself as something of an alternative to Friedrich's, which was all "mock religion at every opportunity, read lots of secular books and argue about philosophy and science, yay statues and paintings of naked men everywhere, no women allowed." There was a specific class of upper-class educated liberal people, mostly but not exclusively men, to whom that felt awesome and forward-thinking, but to the majority of society, in, say, Berlin, it was still the eighteenth century and you were supposed to be Protestant and heterosexual and not flout so many expectations quite so blatantly. So a lot of people really liked having a queen who behaved herself, as opposed to Mr. "I do what I want, deal with it" at Sanssouci.
With all eyes on Fritz and EC being so isolated, it's hard for me to tell what went on in her head, and I haven't read her correspondence, so the only picture I get of her from here is "willing to be an upstanding eighteenth century woman, conforming to societal expectations and subordinating her own wishes to those of the men in power around her." The role she was forced to adopt may have been fairly ego-syntonic for her, or she may have been silently getting an ulcer, I'm not sure.
Did she think that she got a reasonably good deal?
Reasonably, maybe. Not totally. She was clearly very disappointed at not getting to be a real queen, especially right after Fritz inherited and his first move was "Don't get any ideas, Mom still outranks you socially. (Love you, Mom!) Politically, you're both impotent from here on out. Bye!" Plus I think it's really clear EC wanted a loving marriage, but, also she had married into the Hohenzollerns, so was she aware it could have been way worse? I'm sure she was! I think as time went on she managed to put together an environment that she was reasonably comfortable in and to count her blessings.
I'm not sure how she personally felt about children. She went around saying that Providence had not blessed her marriage with children (aka "I know what you're all thinking, but Fritz TOTALLY slept with me"), but with women being basically receptacles for offspring at the time, of course she would have to say that. It would have looked just as bad for her, maybe worse, if she'd gone around announcing that her husband didn't sleep with her. (Some women would have done it anyway, as part of a battle of wills. She was not the battle of wills type.) Maybe she genuinely wanted babies, maybe society told her she should but she was secretly relieved to have a sexless marriage, maybe she believed society that she wanted babies, maybe some combination of the above, I don't know.
Did she actually like him? Was she scared of him?
I'm going to say, certainly not in the way that SD was afraid of FW. EC was isolated, her position was wholly dependent on the people around her (FW, SD, Fritz), and I think she was very careful not to gratuitously piss anyone off. Plus it must have been impossible to miss how easy that was to do with Fritz. So I think she was, consciously or unconsciously, signalling "I am not a threat to you! I am not a threat to you!" more or less constantly in his direction for fifty-three years. She comes across to me like Sansa among slightly less bloodthirsty Lannisters.
But she also continued to say nice things about Fritz for the ten years after he died. She eulogized him pretty heavily, in fact. Which is not evidence in and of itself: starting in 1740, Fritz proceeded to spend forty-six years doing the bog-standard abuse survivor Stockholm Syndrome thing of talking about how great Dad was and how the abuse wasn't that bad. But if her only concern was placating the absolute monarchs around her...talking up Fritz maaaay not have been the best way to ingratiate herself with his successor. But Fritz took care of her in his will and insisted that everyone had to continue to treat her with the same respect he made them treat her when he was alive, and FW 2 seems to have been more cool with that than with respecting Fritz's wishes about the disposal of his own body, so EC had reason to keep saying nice things about Fritz after his death.
My impression is that there's this phenomenon whereby proximity to Fritz and getting along with Fritz are in inverse proportion, and that EC probably benefited from her lack of proximity. He was really easy to hero-worship from a distance. I mean, from the vantage point of 300 years and several thousand miles, I think he's great! It should be pretty clear by now that I wouldn't make friends with him irl. :P
I think, if he was going to be forced into an incompatible marriage, someone like EC without a strong will was probably the best bet; I think her constant projecting of "I am not a threat!" worked; we know he made sure she was treated right by other people and largely left her alone himself while letting her do her own thing; and so I think she always had some positive feelings mixed in with the inevitable disappointment. I don't personally think it was solely fear driving her. I think she really wished they could have a closer relationship, because there were things she genuinely admired.
Haha, religion must have been a big sticking point, but she had a tendency to blame people around him rather than him, so I'm betting she spent most of her time wishing she could "save" him, and a lot of time praying for God to be forgiving of him and to help him see the light. (I'm making the last part up, but it's hard to imagine anything else. Something like how Don Corleone's wife is always praying for his soul, albeit without the lifelong partnership.)
Also, one thing that occurred to me just now: EC married Fritz in 1733, at the tail end of his woobie days, when he was still at his father's mercy and marrying her as his get-out-of-jail-not-exactly-free card. The worst of the stories would have been very recent and definitely floating around (the 1730 escape attempt + Küstrin/Katte affair was a big scandal throughout Europe). Most people who knew him during this period felt sorry for him, and this may have shaped her view of him for life.
This is not to say that she would have blamed the abuse on FW, whom she seems to have gotten along with and been more compatible with than her husband. Based on things she and other people at the time said, I imagine she would have blamed people like Keith and Katte for alienating father and son and felt sorry for them both. She also got to hold court alongside Fritz for several years while he was Crown Prince and doing his own thing as best he could, and he was willing to have enough to do with her to 1) placate Dad 2) get money. It was only once Dad died and left him a ginormous treasury that the infamous visit-the-wife-for-dinner-on-her-birthday tradition began.
So my take is that it's quite likely that EC spent her life trying to keep Fritz--I wrote "happy," but maybe "calm" is more accurate--for the sake of her own well-being, admiring him from a distance, and making excuses for him around the parts she didn't like, which were legion.
Also, thank you for continuing to ask me questions in my fandom. It's been a mental lifesaver through this whole medical process that you know about, where my brain won't let me do much but it'll let me ramble about Fritz on autopilot even when I can't concentrate. I got the notification of this question as I was starting to emerge from Side Effect Land earlier today, and it definitely helped me come out of the bad mood swing place. <3