If you've been reading W's memoirs lately, she does rather hate on Eversmann, so I can kind of squint and see where you'd get that.
Point taken, though Gutzkow picking him rather than G or S as the mastermind, and presenting them as his evil yet foolish to incompetent stooges is still his choice!
I have to wonder how much of the sheer hate-on is transferred anger at her father that W can't give full expression to. What with W's classism, the fact that hating your parents is not on, and hating and loving your parents at the same time is complicated in any century, never mind the 18th, Eversmann looks to me like a really, really safe target for sheer unadulterated hatred.
Oh, that's very plausible! And let me add that it's also in miniature form the tried and true vehicle for anti-monarch feelings through the centuries - it's really the evil minion/mistress/advisor/favourite who is hateable and responsible for the bad policies under which I'm suffering, not the monarch themselves. I mean, the father/daughter issue is largest for Wilhelmine, of course, but the fact that FW is the King is also there. (Both because she's been raised in a state of absolute monarchy, and because she gets at the time of writing her memoirs a good deal of her self esteem in tiny Bayreuth - where her husband is still part of FW's army due to having one regiment since the wedding - from the fact she's the daughter of a King.)
....and with all that, you still have all those later 19th century and early 20th century editors (like Stratemanns) complaining what a terrible, unfeeling daughter she was to write the way she did about her father.
Meanwhile, Lord Hervey is the outlier in the "blame the minion!" game in that he's fine with blaming Fritz of Wales entirely for being a love rat the worst, and while treating his (Hervey's) successor in FoW's friendship, Doddington, with contempt and dissing on Mrs. Archibald Hamilton and Princess Augusta for not even being that pretty (both) and badly educated (Augusta), he still reserves his supreme bile for FoW. Who wasn't his King but as far as Hervey knew when writing this would be by the time these memoirs got to print. And of course G2 only fares slightly better in that book, with the occasional not awful moment, but his awfulness still outshines that of anyone who works for him.
LOL on Showalter. Does he explain why Fritz dissolves the regiment if the Giants were so useful?
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Re: Reply to the RomCom
Date: 2021-03-06 06:14 am (UTC)Point taken, though Gutzkow picking him rather than G or S as the mastermind, and presenting them as his evil yet foolish to incompetent stooges is still his choice!
I have to wonder how much of the sheer hate-on is transferred anger at her father that W can't give full expression to. What with W's classism, the fact that hating your parents is not on, and hating and loving your parents at the same time is complicated in any century, never mind the 18th, Eversmann looks to me like a really, really safe target for sheer unadulterated hatred.
Oh, that's very plausible! And let me add that it's also in miniature form the tried and true vehicle for anti-monarch feelings through the centuries - it's really the evil minion/mistress/advisor/favourite who is hateable and responsible for the bad policies under which I'm suffering, not the monarch themselves. I mean, the father/daughter issue is largest for Wilhelmine, of course, but the fact that FW is the King is also there. (Both because she's been raised in a state of absolute monarchy, and because she gets at the time of writing her memoirs a good deal of her self esteem in tiny Bayreuth - where her husband is still part of FW's army due to having one regiment since the wedding - from the fact she's the daughter of a King.)
....and with all that, you still have all those later 19th century and early 20th century editors (like Stratemanns) complaining what a terrible, unfeeling daughter she was to write the way she did about her father.
Meanwhile, Lord Hervey is the outlier in the "blame the minion!" game in that he's fine with blaming Fritz of Wales entirely for being
a love ratthe worst, and while treating his (Hervey's) successor in FoW's friendship, Doddington, with contempt and dissing on Mrs. Archibald Hamilton and Princess Augusta for not even being that pretty (both) and badly educated (Augusta), he still reserves his supreme bile for FoW. Who wasn't his King but as far as Hervey knew when writing this would be by the time these memoirs got to print. And of course G2 only fares slightly better in that book, with the occasional not awful moment, but his awfulness still outshines that of anyone who works for him.LOL on Showalter. Does he explain why Fritz dissolves the regiment if the Giants were so useful?