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Dec. 21st, 2011 03:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsceitfianna recommended me The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Navigate the Globe. Which she was quite right to do, since, in addition to SCIENCE and ADVENTURES and AWESOME HISTORICAL WOMEN this particular bit of history also features CROSS-DRESSING and as we all know that is my kryptonite.The basic historic facts about Jeanne Baret that seem to be undeniably true:
1. She was the housekeeper and probable-mistress of naturalist Philibert Commercon before he joined an expedition around the world . . .
2. . . . and his plucky botanist assistant 'Jean' while on that expedition.
(COMMERCON, after her disguise was exposed: Gosh, how astounding that my plucky assistant should turn out to have been a girl! Can't think how that happened!)
3. At some point or another on the expedition, everybody pretty much figured out something was up with 'Jean', although accounts are a little conflicted about when.
(CAPTAIN BOUGAINVILLE: Well, here we are on Tahiti, and all of a sudden those wacky Tahitians start telling us that our naturalist's assistant has been a girl this whole time! BIZARRE. Oh well, back to captain-ing.
TWO PASSENGERS KEEPING ACCOUNTS: Well, here we are on New Ireland, and the men on the ship seem to have figured out that the naturalist's assistant is a girl. That was probably pretty tough!
SURGEON VIVES: Hahahahaha come on guys, like anyone ever believed that story about 'Jean' being a eunuch.)
4. Commercon and Jeanne took off at Mauritius and did some more botanizing; Commercon named a bush after her; Commercon died, and a few years later Jeanne Baret married a non-com officer in the French army and got her ticket home.
5. Eventually the government granted her a pension for General Being Awesome On a Famous Voyage-ness which is actually a pretty happy ending for a real-life cross-dressing story, all things considered.
And this is all interesting and I am glad to know it! The problem is that it's not really enough to make up a book. No worries, though! Glynis Radley is more than happy to make up the difference by . . . . wildly speculating about things and then cheerfully assuming them to be true for the rest of the book?
It is fine, for example, to spend a page or two wondering if while on ship Jeanne Baret might have hung out with the ship's astronomer, despite the fact that there are no records to show that they ever spoke. Why not! It's certainly possible. What is not okay is to go from 'people generally say the astronomer was a nice guy!' to 'clearly he and Jeanne Baret were BFF!' and then spend the rest of the book throwing around sentences such as "Like the astronomer, Veron, [such-and-such person] now paid Baret the compliment of accepting her disguise at face value and treating her with respect." Glynis Radley, YOU DON'T KNOW THAT VERON AND BARET EVER EVEN INTERACTED. You don't know that Baret and [such-and-such a person] did either! PLEASE REMEMBER WHEN YOU ARE SPECULATING. And, I mean, I realize this is a petty detail by comparison to other things in the book, but after a while I started feeling irrationally annoyed whenever Veron's name even appeared by the page. It's symptomatic of a certain kind of thinking! The kind of thinking that leads to, for example, "there are sinister accounts of some kind of unmasking of Baret happening on New Ireland! And thirty years later, some other completely unrelated traveler mentions running into a man hanging out with a scientist on Maritius whose last name is the same as one of Jeanne Baret's aliases! CLEARLY SHE WAS RAPED AND GOT PREGNANT AND GAVE HER BABY AWAY TO THIS SCIENTIST ON MAURITIUS THAT SHE HAD JUST MET AND HE AGREED TO RAISE IT FOR HER, IT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE CONCLUSION." And again: I'm not saying there's a problem with theorizing this. As ONE possible theory. But there is I think a fairly obvious problem with assuming from that evidence that it is true!
(And that's even without going into the places where Radley implores us not to judge Jeanne Baret . . . and jumps in to do just that. There was this whole chapter where she tries to kindly explain the (known, actual historical) fact of Jeanne Baret getting pregnant and giving up the child before the whole adventure, and she goes on and on about how sad she must have been and how Commercon must have forced her into it and how she must have hoped she could return for the kid some day, and it made me so angry. Please stop trying to impose your own morals and ideals on historical personages in ways that remove their agency, Glynis Radley! Maybe she just didn't want the kid, and that's okay.)
. . . wow, I was more frustrated than I thought by all of this. I think it's -- well, partly because bad scholarship is frustrating, but also partly because the story in its bare-bone-facts version is such an awesome one -- and one that I am glad to know about! -- and yet this book seems so determined to take away as much awesome and provide as much depressing and angsty and cliched speculation as humanly possible.
AND SPEAKING OF things that are making people angry and frustrated: apparently LJ has fallen into its own ass again and done something to the comment pages? If anyone's switching over to DW who hasn't before, say hi over here/there so I know who you are!
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Date: 2011-12-21 09:45 pm (UTC)And huh, yours is the second statement about LJ that I have heard today; should probably see what's going down over on that Other Social Platform, lol.
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Date: 2011-12-21 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2011-12-22 07:47 pm (UTC)