AtDTDA 32: lead soldier, pounded! was Fantasia on a Fantasia pt 3

[grladams at teleport.com]

Michael-I've interdispersed my ideas, observations:
Jill

---
more about Ruperta's change of heart:
right before, she gets Dally involved posing as the Angel of Death
("ever such a treat in store")
upon reflection, maybe not the friendliest gesture, or very flattering at
all...
Dally obtusely takes it @ face value though or transcends Ruperta's malice

Right after her ascension, Ruperta with a "Samantha-from-Bewitched" tiny
gesture
(a twitch of her cigarette) indicates or pollicates or "kapnocates"
a match made for Dally and Crouchmas which though exposing D
to danger, still enriches her and leads to her reunion with Kit...

me:
   I think Dally's been inclined to danger for longer than Ruperta's flick
'o the wrist, why back in Venice she'd been running around with anarchists.
On the contrary, I interpreted the Crouchmas kept-woman vignette as a pause
and relax plateau for her. I interpreted it as a place-where-she-could have
gotten stuck, but there were bigger things in the fates for her. In fact,
put a post it note on page 1080ish to remind yourself to look back at page
914ish. 

michael:
also, Looking at the rather amorphous sex scene betw D & C...
"right out on Northumberland Avenue...herself in expensive deshabille
and a warm fog of self-pleasure..."
so, she and C are right out _on the everlovin' street_ ?! and
she's pleasuring herself for him to watch...
(like in Summer of '42 where the boys think all a woman has
to do is cross her legs...maybe this could be done at a table in Claridge's
or someplace...)

me:
  The text is not in hand, but for some reason I pictured her just after
having pleasured herself, in the post orgasm fog, but the room's
architecture has the bed/couch/chair/whatever positioned at the balcony
just over the street... I have to add, about the Claridge's thing, that it
_is_ possible...

michael:
 Ruperta as a little girl: "had offered him [Crouchmas]
a pound for one of his lead soldiers, and upon his handing it over
she had picked up a nearby cricket bat and begun, rather solemnly,
to pound him with it"
with the bat?  pound Crouchmas or the soldier? mean little
girl anyway (also, that upper-class British solidarity where
they all have stayed @ each other's country houses etc)

me: I got the _Steadfast Tin Soldier_ Hans Christian Andersen tale all
confused in my head at this scene, but dismissed it, until now. About the
scene though, I think she's pounding the soldier not Crouchmas! By the way,
I think "pounding" a soldier is a vignette we'll envision later with
Arturo's infantry model aching for Dally to strap one on a few pages later.
Probably just a coincidence.. Ruperta seems to try to control Dally's life,
and almost succeeds for a little while. Could the scene with Crouchmas
illustrate that for the right price, a controller can buy and destroy an
infantryman? And isn't passive complicitness in being destroyed
unattractive while also being something deliciously masochistic? When he
sells the toy soldier for 1 pound, can we assume this hardens him into the
businessman he is now? Now reexamining the HCA tale, the soldier goes
through an odyssey, returns to the table, is tossed capriciously by the
child into the fire and it melts into a heart. I snipped this from
wikipedia:


Joan G. Haahr writes in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: "The story is
unusual among Andersen's early tales, both in its emphasis on sensual
desire and in its ambiguities. Blind fate, not intention, determines all
events. Moreover, the narrative questions the very decorum it praises. The
tin soldier's passive acceptance of whatever happens to him, while
exemplifying pietistic ideals of self-denial, also contributes to his doom.
Were he to speak and act, the soldier might gain both life and love.
Restrained, however, by inhibition and convention, he finds only tragedy
and death. The tale is often read autobiographically, with the soldier
viewed as symbolizing Andersen's feelings of inadequacy with women, his
passive acceptance of bourgeois class attitudes, or his sense of alienation
as an artist and an outsider, from full participation in everyday life."[1]


end
Jill


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