Some more thoughts about the Phryne Fisher universes

The main characters of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

After having fun with Historical Women, Female Archaeologists and actually a lot of Ancient Egypt, I thought it was about time that I went back to Phryne Fisher.

As is probably quite obvious from this blog, I love Phryne. I think she is such a wonderful character and both TV and book series are amazing. There are some differences between the two media though which I discuss from time to time in the series of entries I have chosen to call Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries -TV vs books. This entry will be part of that series, but instead of talking about a certain book and its TV counterpart, this one will discuss a more general trend I have noticed that is different.

Up until this point, I have only read five of the Phryne Fisher books and, after a short hiatus, I have just started with the sixth (Blood and Circuses). There are a lot of books that I still have to read, but I think I can still discuss this and there is a chance I have reasons for returning to the subject further on.

In the TV series, Phryne creates a sort of family that more or less provides her with stability in life. Only one of these people is related by blood to her (Her aunt Prudence.). They are a bit mismatched with communists, policemen and strict Catholic girls for example, but they turn out to work extremely well together and also with Phryne. (This is a subject for a different entry though, so I will not go into it so much.) Besides these nine people making up Phryne's family, there is not much consistencies to Phryne's friendbase. People come and go and we hear they have a past with Phryne and some of them might be "old friends", but we tend not to hear about them either before or after Phryne and Jack have solved the case they are part of. There are a few exceptions to this. Most of them related to the over-arching plotlines of each season like Murdoch Foyle in season one and Phryne's father Henry Fisher in season three. In season two we also get to meet Jack's ex-wife Rosie Sanderson who is introduced already in season one (when Jack is still married to her), but is only talked about then. These characters are in more than one episode, because their plot stretches out for more than one episode. Another exception is Lin Chung. He is in two different episodes with two different plots although his part is sort of the same (being Phryne's lover). From what I have gather he is a much more of a recuring character in the books, but I have not got to him yet, so I have to leave it for the time being. (I cannot think of any more minor characters that are in more than one episode. Please help if you come up with someone!)

On the contrary, the books reuse a lot of characters and also plot points. Phryne still builds a family around herself containing mostly the same people. There is no aunt Prudence, but Mrs Butler and Ruth. The latter I will get back to in a bit. Detective Inspector Jack Robinson has a different role in the books and is not as close to Phryne as he is on TV, but I think he still can be classified as a family member. Not least since one of the few times he is mentioned in Death at Victoria Dock is in the context of having given Jane and Ruth a record player.

Then Phryne also has friends who she surounds herself with on a more distant level. She still calls them when she needs them to help her out on a case and she seems to meet up with them from time to time. These characters are reused and we also get to hear how some of the minor characters (both friends and others) do after their plot has been finished. For example Bobby Matthews who we encounter in the very beginning of Cocaine Blues and who we later hear from in Murder on the Ballarat Train in relation to Eunice Henderson and her mother. There are also a couple of characters that I have a small feeling will return later on, but I will not tell you whom since I do not trust you not to spoil me.

'I feel a bit shaken, but I'm all right, Dot, don't fuss. This is not the same as that other time. I didn't see this man die.'

~ Phryne Fisher, The Green Mill Murder, Kerry Greenwood

There are also some mentions of past cases and not just in a recap sense, but more woven into the plots of other books. For example when Dot asks Phryne how she is after hearing Phryne has encountered another murder in The Green Mill Murders. This is a reference to Phryne being shocked and upset by the death of Yourka in Death at Victoria Dock.

Hugh: "Miss Fisher's gone on holiday again Sir."
Jack: "Hm. Anyone dead yet?"
Hugh: "Only one so far Sir..."

~ Murder under the Mistletoe

Jane and Ruth, Murder on the Ballarat Train

I do understand the need to simplify things for the TV adaptation, but the reuse of characters in the books makes book-Phryne's universe feel more real and thriving. In the TV series it sometimes feels as if you either die or kill someone if you do not belong to Phryne's inner circle. The TV series is very good at reusing clothes and accessories though and also in how they are worn. The men, like Jack for example, have a pretty limited range of clothing, but they can vary small things like ties, which makes the male clothing a bit less uniform. When it comes to the minor characters however I would love to see or hear more about many more of them. A lot of them are actually very interesting and some of their stories are left more or less unresolved.

To take Ruth for example because she is probably the most important character from the books that is not important in the show. She is in the Murder on the Ballarant Train and just like in the book she lives (and slaves away) in the same boarding house as Jane and they are really close.The police finds her grandmother in the end of the episode and she goes away to live with her. But if she and Jane were so close, why would she not come around to the house to see Jane? And would she not fit into the group of flower maidens Phryne trains in Queen of the Flowers? I do not think Jane would stop seeing her and/or that Phryne would not let her. So why can she not appear as Jane's best friend?

I do not expect every minor character to turn up again or Phryne to have any sort of contact with that we get to hear. Some of them are just so fantastic that I find it sad. Besides, we do not even get to know if Jack and his police men were able to catch Lydia Andrews and destroy the cocaine trade after the events in Cocaine Blues.

Justin Kurzel - Assassin’s Creed

Today marked the first time I saw Essie Davis on the big screen in Assassin’s Creed. Her husband, Justin Kurzel, was the director and Michael Fassbender played both main characters Callum Lynch and Aguilar de Nerha.

Callum lives in the present and is a criminal given the death penalty but later wakes up in a medical institution where he gets involved in Sophia Rikkin's (The daughter of a knights templar.) experiments where she tries to find a solution to all the violence in the world by collecting the assassins from the Middle Ages and using their genetic memory.

I have not played the video games and this might be why I found the plot very confusing. The part I did understand though felt rather intriguing and I think the film could have been longer so it had time to dvelve into more detail of the genetic memory and the film would also have gained a lot from exlplaining Sophia's reasearch and the reasons and logics behind her science and experimentations on people. The non-linear storytelling would also have benefitted if the film had more time I think. As it was now, it jumped far too quickly between different time periods and places and made it feel rather messy.

The visual style was beautiful and the actors were all rather good. It also had more women than I would have guessed and they were also quite diverse. I also thought Sophia was far more interesting than Callum. I would have liked to get to know much more of her background. The film does not really solve any plot points either and the ending feels made for a lot of sequels to follow it.

Essie Davis as Callum's mother

Cinema tickets

It is pretty obvious from this blog that I do love Essie Davis! But I am not sure I would have seen Assassin's Creed at the cinema if I had not had free tickets. If she would have been the lead, I would not have hesitated for a minute, but she is in it far too little for me to go straight to the movies to see it. I am glad I had a free ticket I needed to use before Wednesday and therefore got to see it and because of Essie I would probably have seen it at some point. Essie is in less then ten scenes and has only two or three lines in the entire film, so definitely too little Essie! It felt like a vaste of her talents by her husband, but I am still very thankful that they do both have their own careers away from each other. There are a lot of times in relationships between famous actors/actresses and filmmakers where this is not the case and you end up wondering if the actor/actress only got the role because she/he was sleeping with the director/producer/etc.



Picture from here and here.

Historical Women - Merit-Ptah

For this third entry to my Historical Women series I am staying in ancient Egypt, but moving further away in time from Hatshepsut. This woman was called Merit-Ptah and we do not know that much about her other than what can be seen and what is said about her on a tomb in the necropolis close to the step pyramid in Saqqara.

Her name means Beloved of the god Ptah and she was born either during the 2nd or 3rd dynasty in ancient Egypt. Her son was a High Priest and describes her as Cheif Physician which makes her the first woman in history, known by name, that praciticed medicine and she might also be the first known women in science.

She is not to be confused with the wife of Ramose, the Governer of Thebes and Vizier under Akhenaten who shared her name.

Pictures were borrowed here and here. Facts were taken from Wikipedia.

Female Archaeologists - Gertrude Caton-Thompson

Gertrude Caton-Thompson

While thinking of my Historical Women series, I also thought about how many amazing female archaeologists I know of and who also deserves a place in the spot light. Though technically, they can also be viewed as "Historical Women", I have decided to give them their own category. Not least, to present a more varied picture of my own profession.

Dwelling into the research history of archaeology, one actually find rather a lot of different women who worked on excavations with or without men (mainly their husbands). It seems to have been particularly easy for American, British and French women to do archaeological work in the colonies. They also seem to have had it easier if they had worked with something that their contemporary society (late 19th and early 20th century) thought of as fitting for a woman. There are quite a lot of nurses among them for example.

Many of these female archaeologists worked in their shadows of their husbands and have become marginalised in the research history because their texts were published in their husbands's names. There were also quite a few women working in archieves and museum storehouses who's work never really classified as archaeology wherefore they are never mentioned in research historical overviews. Quite a few of them, however, did have an obituary. Not least the archaeologist I intend to devote the rest of this post to. Her name was Gertrude Caton-Thompson and she was born in London in 1888. Her interest in archaeology was founded when she visited Egypt together with her mother in 1911 and afterwards also visited Sarah Paterson's on Ancient Greece at the British Museum. She inherited money in 1912 which made her financially independent and studied both a Cambride and University College London from 1921 onwards. Among her teachers were Margaret Murray, Dorothea Bate and William Matthew Flinders Petrie. She participated in quite a few excavations in Egypt during the 1920's. Not least in the Faiyum oasis with geologist Elinor Wight Gardner in 1925.

Part of Great Zimbabwe

Her most famous excavation is that of the remains of Great Zimbabwe close to Masvingo in what was then known as Rhodesia, but that we today call Zimbabwe. The remains had been known by Europeans since the 16th century when Portugese soldiers at the coastal fort in Sofala in Moçambique heard tales of great remains deep inside the heart of Africa. The first European to visit the remains was the German geologist Carl Mauch in 1871 and Gertrude's countryman J. Theodore Bent was the first to do any archaeological work of the remains at the end of the 19th century. Bent interpreted the remains as too sophisticated to have been built by any known "African race". Instead he sought parallels with the Mediterranean and the Middle East, not least with the Phoenicians.

Aerial view of Great Zimbabwe

In 1905, the British Association for the Advancement of Science sent another student of Flinders Petrie to Great Zimbabwe, David Randall-MacIver. He debunked Bent's migration theory of Great Zimbabwe being of African origin. The was not really what the British Association for the Advancement of Science or the white population of Rhodesia wanted to hear. Not least since they used the remains to legitimize their imperialism in the area.

Therefore the association sent Gertrude in 1929. She did, however, confirm Randall-MacIver's theory of an African origin. Not least since she could find similar objects being made among contemporary native craftsmen. For this she became very impopular among the same crowd as Randall-MacIver's but she stood her ground, publishing her results in 1931. She was not totally unbiased though. After having established that Great Zimbabwe had African origin, she talks about the remains in a rather degrading way, but there is no way to deny that her research was important. She used stratigraphical methods and artefact chronology to date the site to the Middle Ages. Dates that have actually been confirmed by carbon dating today.

Gertrude died in 1985.



References:

• Arwill-Nordbladh, Elisabeth 2003. Genusforskning inom arkeologin, Högskoleverket, Stockholm
• Palmer, Douglas & Bahn Paul G. & Tyldesley, Joyce 2006. Arkeologins största upptäckter, Swedish translation by Kjell Waltman, Historiska media, Kina
• Renfrew, Colin & Bahn, Paul 2012. Archaeology. Theories, Methods and Practice, Thames and Hudson, London
• Trigger, Bruce G. 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Picture from here, here and here.

Historical Women - Hatshepsut

Statue of Hatshepsut

I cannot believe I have not done a Historical Women entry since Kristina Nilsdotter Gyllenstierna back in May 2016. Or I did talk about two other historical women in my entry about Johanne Hildebrandt's book Sigrid, Sagan om Valhalla. One of the latter two (Cleopatra VII) can also be considered successor of the woman I will devote this entry to: Hatshepsut.

I am reading a book about her at the moment, The Woman who would be king by Egyptologist Kara Cooney which means that I will probably return to Hatshepsut in another entry in the near future. She is just so amazing and not really so well-known as many other (male) pharaohs (Many people even have trouble saying her name!) wherefore I thought she needed a presentation post as well. There are also other aspects of the book I will devote my book entry to. The Egyptian names can be transcribed in a lot of different ways. I have chosen to use the spelling from Cooney's book in this entry.

Hatchepsut's birth name (upper) and throne name
Maatkare (lower) in hieroglyphics

Hatshepsut was the daughter of the king Thutmes I and his so called Great Wife Ahmes. She seems to have had two brothers who probably died before their father. Thutmes I had, like every other ancient Egyptian king, many other wives besides Ahmes which whom he also had children. However, the royal blood in Ancient Egypt was inheritade from the mother, which is why it was the sons of the Great wives (often also the king's sister - an incestuous tradition which was only allowed for the royal family!) which first and foremost inherited the throne. Because her brothers most likely died, the throne went to a minor wife called Mutnofret's son Thutmes II.

To strengthen the royal blood, Hatshepsut was most likely forced to marry Tuthmes II and with him she had one daughter that survived the baby years called Neferure. With a minor wife called Isis (Just to be clear: To me, Isis is a lovely Egyptian goddess and nothing else!), Tuthmes II had the son Thutmes III. He would inherit the throne when his father died.

Hatshepsut's mummy, found in KV60

Hatchepsuts father had been a strong, stabile king, but his heir was not and he died only a few years into his reign, leaving behind a group of toddlers. As The King's Great Wife, Hatshepsut acted as regent to Tuthmes III before proclaiming herself king after two years. Yes, it is important to say that she was king. Not least since we, today, see the title of queen as lesser to the title king, but first and foremost because that was the title she used for herself.

Sometimes the ancient Egyptian royal names and titles can be somewhat confusing. The names most inportant to know is Hatshepsut's birth name (Hatshepsut) meaning Foremost of noble women and her throne name Maatkare meaning The truth is the soul of Re.

Hatchepsut is not the first woman to rule as king in ancient Egypt. The first that researcher cannot totally ignore being Sobeknefru at the end of the 12th dynasty and there might have been others ruling both in their own name and in the name of their sons/stepsons.

Djeser-Djeseru

While the 18th dynasty in ancient Egypt has a lot of martial warriors, Hatshepsut's reign was peaceful with lots of economic growth. She invested a lot in architecture, not least making Thebes the grand capital of Egypt. Her most famous building is Djeser-Djeseru (Holiest among holy). Her murtuary temple in  Deir el-Bahri. While male pharaos bragged in paintings and reliefs of their military expeditions, Hatshepsut bragged about her much more peaceful expeditions to Punt, a land far south in Afrika.

In the art, she let herself be dressed in the traditional (male) royal attributes like the king's crowns and the fake beard. However, she still has some female traits as well. Her facial features are rather feminine and her chest is not always flat, but you can see female breasts lurking underneath like in the photo of the statue of her above.

Tuthmes III became king when Hatshepsut died. They might also have co-regined for a couple of years before her death. This was pretty common and to smooth the transition of power between kings. In the case of Hatshepsut, she has long seen as more or less "the evil stepmother" who took the throne which rightfully belonged to Tuthmes III. Not least, because he started errasing her name from the monument. To me I would think this was simply because he needed to proclaim he had pure royal blood and therefore had to emphasize his own mother as the King's Great Wife.

As Tuthmes II:s queen, she had a tomb built for her in the Valley of the Kings (KV20). It was excavated by Howard Carter (mostly famous for finding Tutankhamun's tomb) in 1903. It is uncertain if it was ever used. Carter found two sarcophagi for Hatshepsut and her father, but no mummies. The mummy of Tuthmes I was found in the royal mummy cache in Deir-el-Bahri together with 39 other royal mummies in 1881, but Hatshepsut remained lost until 2007 where researcher identified her mummy as one of the two female unidentified ones in the tomb KV60. Studies of her mummy showed that suffered osteoporosis, cancer in her left hip, arthritis and perhaps also diabetes. She did not, however, suffer a violent death.



Hieroglyphic names were borrowed here. The picture of the statue of her was found here, of her mummy here and of her temple here.

Treasures of Ancient Egypt

"We cannot find our future if we forget our past."

~ Alaa Awad, modern Egyptian artist

I have been watching this three part documentary called Treasures of Ancient Egypt where art lover Alastair Sooke discover ancient Egypt through 30 art pieces and what he finds is very intriguing.

At a first glance, ancient Egyptian art seems schematic and static and everything is supposed to be the same over thousands and thousands of years. Sooke, however, finds that there are a lot of things that interupts the static and schematic pictures, making them full of life. Some art pieces also goes more or less against the schematic style. I loved the so called ostraka Sooke finds in the worker's village Deir-el-Medina. They are much more free-styled and a lot of them are also parodies on the official style.

As someone who has studied colonialism/imperialism/cultural meating for awhile I do not really see it as strange that the invaders in Egypt after the New Kingdom tried portraying themselves as Egyptian, but also incorporating their own style, creating a hybrid. This is something I have tackled before, here and here but it might be time for a recap. To me, we are thinking too biologically about the concept of culture, one of the many things we have not been able to shake from modern imperialism of the last two centuries. It is extremely seldom that invaders go in and force their own culture on the colonized groups. This is an idea sprung from imperialism during the last two centuries and only one form out of many types of colonialism. Everyone of them were about power, but not everyone of them has been as devestating as imperialism during the last 200 years. Sooke says that maybe the Greek dynasty, the Ptolemies were not so powerful so they could introduce Greek culture into Egypt. I, however, would rather say that they were smart. They seem to have a much better understanding of cultures and how they interact than we do today. By using history and the old expressions of power in Egypt, they legitimized their right to rule over the Egyptians. They sought to build on the sense of eternity and stability presented in ancient Egyptian art, but like all cultures do as they adopt new traits, they interpreted it through their own cultural logic. This is why we actually can see some Greek influences in Egyptian art from this time. It really is like Egyptian artist Alaa Awad said to Sooke and which I qouted in the beginning. We all must look to the history to find our future.


Picture was borrowed here.

The Green Mill Murder - TV vs Book

Phryne

The Green Mill Murder is one of my favourite episodes of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and also turned out to be one of my favourite out of the Phryne Fisher books I have read so far. There are some differences in the plot between the two versions that I intend to talk about here. 
The TV adaptation is loaded with different social topics like interracial marriages and homosexuality. The murder also takes a more central role in the plot there than in the book. The same method is used for the killing of Leonard Stevens (Bernard Stevens in the book. - Seriously, what is up with all the changing of names between the media?!), but things might not have turned out as it was intended in the book. The fact that it also was pretty risky considering how many people could have got in the way is also acknowledged there.

Jack: "I don't know who has the more fanciful imagination. Rodgers for coming up with it or you for working it out."
Phryne: "Jack! Me, obviously!" 

Nerine

The character Nerine is much more awsome in the TV episode where she is already married to Ben Rodgers while in the book, she waits for her lost husband to die before commiting herself to him. 

Hugh Collins och Dot William's relationship however, is pretty well established in the book while in the TV episode, Hugh tries to master up the courage to ask her to the Firemen and policemen's ball. 

"As far as I'm concerned, everybody should be allowed to marry whomever they choose. Though personally, I'm not the marrying kind."

~Phryne Fisher

Jack Robinson has a rather more laid back role in the book than on TV and he gets a chance to both worry for Phryne and yell at her. At the end of the TV episode we also get our first more clear indication of what is called phrack by the fans when he looks at the mug shots Hugh takes of her. In the book he is introduced as: "Detective Inspector John 'Call me Jack, Miss Fisher, everyone does' Robinson", but I have to say that I do prefer how he is introduced in the TV episode. The camera is intended to be him and we hear him excuse himself as he walks through the crowd at the jazzclub The Green Mill up to Phryne and the dead body of Leonard Stevens. 

Jack excuses himself through the crowd at the Green Mill

While the TV show focuses on social issues, the book seems much more interested in the First world war (called The War to end War) and the effects it still had, ten years after it was finished on the people involved. (They bring up that homosexuality is a crime, but does not dwell as much into it as the TV episode does.) The character of Victor Freeman gets back from the war shell-shocked (Today we call it Posttraumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD). The TV series does tackle this subject as well. It is a recurrent theme in many episodes and we meet a lot of characters who suffer from it (There are even small hints that Jack might be one of them.) and Victor Freeman does move out into the wilderness because of it. It just does not deal with it so much in this particular episode. The book is far more thorough and Bert and Cec tell Phryne and Dot over dinner about their experiences during the war in both Gallipoli and Pozières. (There is a very good podcast about the former campaign by the Missed in history website.)

Because everyone else does,
I'm not commenting much on
the clothes. However I just
love this outfit!

Besides Phryne, the most interesting characters in the books are the three remaining members of the Freeman family. In the entry about the book, I did proclaim my love for Victor Freeman. He is a far more complex character in the book than on TV, but even though I find his mother horrible and appalling, I find her interesting. 

On TV they are all old friends of Phryne. Victor is an aviator and used to take Phryne up in his airplane. He also told his brother Charles, he was going to teach him how to fly, but then he left for the war and Charles is now trying to sell his plane off to Phryne. Contrary to his brother, book Charles is far more unpleasant. He is one of those people I talked about in my book entry that does not care for the things he has no understandings of or interest in. This has devastating results for himself.

Book Mrs Freeman is an extremely terrible person who abuses both of her sons. It is even hinted by Bobby Sullivan that she takes Charles to bed with her and Charles says that his mother has taken away his ability to love any other person. Neither her nor her husband (who is dead before the beginning of the book) seem to understand the seriousness of Victor's condition and Mrs Freeman also seems to turn both sons against each other. TV's Adele Freeman (I do not remember and have not been able to find any first name for her in the book.) is far nicer. A mild-tempered woman who seems loving, caring and understanding of both of her sons. Just like in the book, however, she does keep the fact that Victor is alive a secret from Charles.

I find certain similarities between Mrs Freeman and the character of Lydia Andrews in Cocaine Blues. They are both women who never have had the chance to live independently and provide for themselves. Mrs Freeman's husband also rather donated all the money to charity than putting his wife in charge of it. Both Lydia and Mrs Freeman feel they can do business better than their husbands and in the end they feel entitled to "go bad" because of it. This also makes them stand in stark contrast to book Eunice Henderson from Murder on the Ballarat train and not least Phryne herself.


The photo of Phryne in her flapper costume was borrowed here.

Andrew Lloyd Webber - Phantom of the Opera

Yesterday, I went to see the Swedish production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's famous musical Phantom of the Opera at the teather  The musical is based on the book Le Fantôme de l'Opéra by Gaston Leroux which was first published in 1910.

It tells the story of the opera in Paris in the 19th century where the young preformer Christine has been given song lessons by a mysterious figure for quite some time before the show starts.  As it turns out, the mysterious figure is the opera's notorious phantom who wants to replace the opera's star Carlotta with Christine.

The opera gets new owners and one of them turns out to be Christine's childhood friend Raoul, vicomte de Chagny. They fall in love and a love triangle occurs which more or less turns into a destruction for the opera and more or less everyone working there.

I find both the love story and the character of the phantom wonderfully complex.

He is an abused child and it is said not even his mother wanted anything to do with him. She only gave him a mask to cover up his deformed face. He was then trapped in a cage and was forced to travel around being shown of to people just because he was defigured. This aspect of him is what I find to be the main theme of the show. What happens to someone who has been abused his whole life?

I know there has been an increasing number of pop-cultural expressions in recent years that says that we always have a choice how to act and this is true to a certain extent. You can always choose to treat people badly. However, as for someone who has been abused his whole life, I do think it is important to actually think of it from another perspective. The phantom has always been mistreated. No one has ever been close to him and no one has probably ever loved him. The society at the time was extremely nasty to people who did not fit into the norms. His only lasting relationships seem to be the one he has with the ballet teacher Madame Giry and Christine. What is also important to know about the Phantom is that he does seem happy to keep a distance towards Christine. Loving her from afar so to speak. Christine also seems to trust him completely, believing he is the angel of music her dead father has promised would come to her. This, I would say, indicates that they have had at least a fairly good relationship up until the point where Raoul shows up.

Raoul at first seems to be a better choise than Phantom. He is confident and handsome. He is rich and has a title. He and Christine also has a history, but one that is further back in history when they were children. This is actually part of the problem I see with their relationship. It is actually explained by Raouls part in the song Think of me and the Swedish translation I would say captures it much better. The original is: "Long ago. It seems so long ago. How young and innocent we were. She may not remember me, but I remember her." The Swedish translation however is: "Vad hon ändrats. Hon är inte mer, den barndoms vän som lekt' med mig. Vi har inte setts på länge. Men nog minns jag dig." ("How she has changed. She is no longer the childhood friend who played with me. We have not seen each other for long, but I do remember you.") This I think is the main problem! They did know each other as children (and probably also had some feelings for each other back then). However, they have grown up now and as our identities change with experience and time, we are never the same people as adults as we were as children. Since there is literally no time for them to form trust and get to know each other (like Christine has with the Phantom), I do think they are more in love with the memory of the child version of each other than of each other.

The second problem I have with Raoul and Christine's relationship is the fact that he neither listens to her and feels himself entitled to decide everything for her. This shows an extreme amount of disrespect and is not a quality that establishes trust in a relationship. This too is very well exemplified by their first meeting in the show. She has just preformed and also seems to have made herself ready for bed when Raoul shows up. She tells her of her mysterious song teacher, but he is not at all interested in what she says. Instead he tells her that she has two minutes to get ready because they will go out. The same goes for when Raoul tells of his plan to capture (and kill) the Phantom during the performance of his Don Juan. She says she will not preform it, probably both because she knows it will not work and because it is obvious she cares for the Phantom. However, Raoul more or less forces her to do so.

The Phantom, on the other hand, does show a great matter more respect for her. As I said above, he is really content watching and loving her from afar. However, as he realises that Raoul is a big threat for Christine's attention, he is triggered to show himself to her. The main problem is that he does not know how to handle other people. This is why it all goes downhill. But the only time he hurts her physically, he also shows remorse afterwards. This is important and why I do feel like the Phantom is a far better partner for Christine than Raoul.

The photo of the programme was taken by myself before the show. The other was borrowed from here.

Fröken Frimans krig

Fröken Frimans krig (The War of Miss Friman) is a Swedish TV series written by Pernilla Oljelund and it has been sort of a christmas tradition. It tells the story of Dagmar Friman at the beginning of the 20th century. Together with her friends Kinna, Alma, Emmy and her sister-in-law Lottie she starts up the female cooperation Svenska hem (Swedish homes) selling groceries. They want to teach women about food and in the long run propagate for their right to vote.The third season has just been broadcasted and dwells a into the problem of prostitution and that prostituted women got to take all the blame for the spreading of sexually transmitted diseases.

Vad är det som är så skrämmande med tanken på att en kvinna kan ha ett värde och rättigheter precis som en man? (What is so scary about the thought of a woman having value and rights just like a man?)

~ Lottie

The plot is a fictional version of the real suffragette movement in Sweden and Svenska hem was a real all-female cooperation founded in 1905 and connected to this. Dagmar is a fictive version of one of its founder Anna Whitlock and among the stock owners was famous Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf. A lot of wholesalers during this period cheated, selling bad meat, milk and such to a better price which led to diseases being spread among the people in town.

This year, there was also a documentary made about the real Swedish suffragette women. Signe Bergman, Karolina Widerström, Ann Margret Holmgren, Frigga Carlberg and of course Anna Whitlock and broadcasted in connection to the show. All these women deserve blog entries in their own right, because they have such interesting stories and were all so very important. Therefore I cannot not recommend anyone understanding Swedish not to see it (The same goes for the TV series too.). However, how the production team have treated the scholars is appaling! They have not been mentioned at all and the production team does not really seem to understand the big problem with this. There is a Swedish proverb saying äras den som äras bör (honour the one who should be honoured) that seems fitting due to the situation.

Swedish land-owning women did actually have the right to vote between 1718 and 1772, but then we had to wait longer than any of our Nordic neighbours. The decision was made in the parliament on the 24th of May 1919. The first election where they could vote was therefore the one in 1921. So we might have been the last Nordic country to give women the right to vote, but we were the first one to get a professorial chair in Women's history and the first one to get it was fittingly enough Gunhild Kyle, the mother of the actress Sissela Kyle who plays Dagmar Friman.




Pictures were borrowed from here.

Terry Hayes - I am Pilgrim

I cannot recall anytime when I have been as confused by what to feel about a book as I was about I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes (I read the Swedish translation by Örjan Sjögren.).

The plot surrounds "the Pilgrim". He is a super rich white American secret agent traveling the world catching bad guys. His "archenemy" is an islamist that he has to capture. Both of their backgrounds are explored in detail. I mean, there are even backstories to the backstories!

I had a teacher once who had worked as a taxi driver. He sometimes told us anecdots about the clients he had had during those days and what he had learned about people from them. One of them, reagarding male and female conversation did I find particularly interesting for a description of the writing in I am Pilgrim.

My teacher said that, based on conversations he had overheard from the backseat of the taxi as he was driving people around he could decipher two types of conversations. One could generally be ascribed to men and the other to women. The male one can be seen as a pretty straight line (one topic). It might from time to time deviate from it, but always got back to that first line pretty soon afterwards. The female conversation however is rather unstructured, meaning women tend to jump much more between topics and might also be discussing many topics together at the same time. If ever they do go back to the original topic, it can take quite awhile, when every other subject has been discussed. Since he told my class this, I have thought about it watching others have conversations and often find it to be true. What is interesting about I am Pilgrim is that it is written rather much like a female conversation. There are a lot of different anecdots from different times in the main character and his archenemy's lives, not always told in chronological order and after a while you start wondering when it is ever going to return to the bathroom with the dead girl that opens up the entire book.

One of the back stories within the backstories turned out to be the most interesting part of the book for me. It is when the Pilgrim tells us a story of how he and his adoptive father visited a lesser known concentration camp, Natzweider-Struthof, on the border between France and Germany in his youth. The Pilgrim talks about how emotional he got by a photo of a mother and her children as they walk to the gas chambers and I think we can all relate to that. Photos of the Holocast tend to leave a sense of horror and emotions in most of us. As an archaeologist however, I find his adoptive father's reaction to the pile of everyday items even more intriguing. The adoptive father says something about he never knowing how powerful simple things can be (Because I read the Swedish translation of the book I won't quote it because as can be seen by Google Translate Sings on Youtube, translation back to the original language might not work so well.).

Archaeology is all about researching how people are interaction with materialities. We have always interacted through them and we continue to do so. They are history in physical form. They make us remember. They make us reflect. They make us feel emotions. They can even make history more human and close! In a word that turns digital and immaterial more and more by the minute, I think it is important that materialities are used to keep us grounded in "the real world". I am not against digitalization. I think there are a lot of benefits. However it happens too quickly and unreflectively. I rarely blog about my profession, but this is something I think even non-archaeologists should be aware of and reflect upon from time to time.

But back to I am Pilgrim. Even though it got me hooked, I still cannot shake the fact that it is very much a tale about a white man written by a white man. Even the title indicates as much! It is good that Hayes tries to make him more "human" by having him react to a photo of Holocaust victims and he says he has no problems with female being the hitmen and he shows sympathy for the Romani people (Because I read the Swedish version I have no idea if the more degrading term for them was used in the original book as it was in the Swedish.). Hayes also give the islamistic sort of "archenemy" a (too) well-described backstory with a thoroughly explored motivation for going all extremist. It felt refreshing against the all too normal Hollywood "because they are evil"-approach. However as he describes himself as a super rich, super intelligent, super competent super secret super agent who makes a lot of mistakes (seriously every other chapter ends with him telling about a new one), but who people still think is the best at his job and who is the youngest boss the super secret super agent bureau has ever heard of, I cannot help thinking he would be completely dismissed as a Mary Sue character had he been a woman.