What's up with that, F1? I can believe that she didn't like the one that was born when she was one and died when she was two, especially since he got all the attention that she didn't, but she's being falsely accused of things that happened before she was born!
I wonder if F1's having a memory lapse here, or if something else is going on.
It probably was a memory lapse. My other guess would be projection, but projection of what? The baby Sophie Charlotte had before FW, one Friedrich August, died before FW was born, and she never had any more children. As for F1's own childhood, he was son no.3 himself, with two brothers ahead of him, one of whom died before F1 was born. (The other - Karl Emil! - was one of those he later suspected his stepmother of killing, along with his younger brother Ludwig. Two more (fullL) siblings died as babies. Then came stepmom and all the Schwedt half siblings.
"Knirps" is a bit old fashioned but still in use today, though mostly used for little children.
Wilhelmine the snob: oh, absolutely. Mind you, I suspect this tendency in her was strengthened via the awareness the Hohenzollern were considered as upstarts (what with the very recent kingly title) by the rest of Europe, and of course SD had it drummed into her that she was meant for higher things and FW was completely undignified and no one was to follow his example from the get go. I could also see child Wilhelmine extra internalizing class bias precisely because of Leti, i.e. this woman had been given power over her and abused her, and she clung to her self confidence by telling herself "I'm still better than you, Italian lowlife!"
Which, btw, leads into what you say about servants and the chains of abuse and neglect. Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes. Presumably Leti had had her own experiences, too. (And as Oster points out at the very least must have been well educated, because she did give Wilhelmine a first class education in terms of knowledge, see also the difference between child Wilhemine's letters to child AW's letters to FW in style and maturity.)
I'm also reminded that Byron (the poet) was sexually abused by a nurse when he was ten or eleven. She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - young Wilhelmine
Date: 2020-09-27 04:58 am (UTC)I wonder if F1's having a memory lapse here, or if something else is going on.
It probably was a memory lapse. My other guess would be projection, but projection of what? The baby Sophie Charlotte had before FW, one Friedrich August, died before FW was born, and she never had any more children. As for F1's own childhood, he was son no.3 himself, with two brothers ahead of him, one of whom died before F1 was born. (The other - Karl Emil! - was one of those he later suspected his stepmother of killing, along with his younger brother Ludwig. Two more (fullL) siblings died as babies. Then came stepmom and all the Schwedt half siblings.
"Knirps" is a bit old fashioned but still in use today, though mostly used for little children.
Wilhelmine the snob: oh, absolutely. Mind you, I suspect this tendency in her was strengthened via the awareness the Hohenzollern were considered as upstarts (what with the very recent kingly title) by the rest of Europe, and of course SD had it drummed into her that she was meant for higher things and FW was completely undignified and no one was to follow his example from the get go. I could also see child Wilhelmine extra internalizing class bias precisely because of Leti, i.e. this woman had been given power over her and abused her, and she clung to her self confidence by telling herself "I'm still better than you, Italian lowlife!"
Which, btw, leads into what you say about servants and the chains of abuse and neglect. Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes. Presumably Leti had had her own experiences, too. (And as Oster points out at the very least must have been well educated, because she did give Wilhelmine a first class education in terms of knowledge, see also the difference between child Wilhemine's letters to child AW's letters to FW in style and maturity.)
I'm also reminded that Byron (the poet) was sexually abused by a nurse when he was ten or eleven. She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.
Food question: I'm with you there.