Dredged-up QoA thought

[m-chant.livejournal.com]

I have one question I meant to ask but kept forgetting. Why do you guys think Attolia was reminded of and really upset by the memory of her breaking her amphora of her favourite? perfume?
Do you think it's because Gen is like the amphora? That she's aligning her mutilating Gen, someone she unwittingly holds dear, with her smashing the amphora, which contained her favourite perfume? That both were actions rashly rushed into out of rage and mistakes to be regretted later? Or am I missing something here?

Comments

[stubefied-by-gd.livejournal.com]

(Wow, do I have a lot to catch up on! This is a great question to start with.)


That's sort of what it seems like as you read the book, but somewhere near the end she mentions that she never wore that hair oil after the amphora broke because the next day her brothers started dying off and she became a Very Important Princess with fancier hair oils. And very soon after that was pulling her Shadow Princess act bottling everything up, and then scheming to kill husbands and save her country.
So I think she is reminded of that smell because it is the strongest impression she has of her of her last day before the craziness, in a way her last day when she had permission to have human feelings, an accessible heart, and for the first time in a long time Eugenides is making her feel again, reaching that heart.

[brandy-painter.livejournal.com]

I had not looked at it in that light before. Excellent point.

[m-chant.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I never thought of that! That's excellent!
Maybe it's also that the pitch of her emotional agitation at both times were very similar. Or, rather, that the amphora incident was recalled because of its proximity to her brothers' death and her succession to the throne, and that this event and her punishing Gen both put her on the verge of her emotional self-control. On that day which, like you said, was the last day she was allowed to have/show human feelings, it must've taken tremendous effort to swallow her grief and fear and wear her Queen's face. That was probably the biggest effort she had to make to hide her emotions, and with time, it became easier, became habit. But the new emotion and trauma that followed cutting off Gen's hand could have returned her to that teetering edge of desperately wanting to show compassion but not being able or allowed to. Is this what you mean?

[ninedaysaqueen.livejournal.com]

Ow, I like this!

[stubefied-by-gd.livejournal.com]

But the new emotion and trauma that followed cutting off Gen's hand could have returned her to that teetering edge of desperately wanting to show compassion but not being able or allowed to. Is this what you mean?

I think I thought along those lines, but then reigned it back in a bit to the just being human/feeling something. I think there's an important distinction between emotions she understood but intentionally hid and ones that she is not fully aware of or does not understand and so cannot fully hide.

[ninedaysaqueen.livejournal.com]

Excellent observation!

[velvetrose09.livejournal.com]

I never looked at it in that light. Very nice!

[ninedaysaqueen.livejournal.com]

Yup, I agree with the above, but I also want add that Irene seems to link smashing the amphora with a compulsion, so I always saw that thought as her admitting to herself that the amputation was compulsive and temper driven, rather than the logical path a ruler should take. My word, that is a long sentence!

[chubbyleng.livejournal.com]

Wasn't it the hanging that was rather temper-driven? I thought she took her time trying to come up with an alternative. I haven't read QoA in a while, but when she sent Gen off to be hung, Nahuseresh pointed out that she was being hasty. So she rethought her options.

Do we know exactly how long it was between the two events?

[m-chant.livejournal.com]

I think there was a difference of mere moments. I think both hanging him and cutting his hand off were temper-driven insofar as they were both rash. The latter involved more thought, but ultimately became cause for regret and Attolia wished she had done the former after all. Both were impulsive and ill-advised, but for different reasons and to different degrees.

[ninedaysaqueen.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking about a day or so... Irene compulsions are a bit odd because they're highly calculated compulsions. If that makes any sense... But even so, the amputation was driven by a desire to hurt Eddis and not so much logic. So, with both events she associates anger.

[m-chant.livejournal.com]

Yea, by moments, I meant moments between her declaration of her verdict and Nahuseresh's suggestion. Whether she actually made her decision when she said it, or the morning of that day, or the night before, we don't know for a certainty, but as ninedaysaqueen says, Irene is very calculated even in her compulsions.

[chubbyleng.livejournal.com]

Well... this is something I've puzzled over many, many times and I never exactly gave it some deep thinking. Lol, for things like these, I just usually see what Sounis has to say.

But now that I'm here, I can't help but wonder: is it the amphora that Gen is being compared, or the perfume that's contained in it?

I can't remember, and I'm too lazy to go back and get the book. But it might be two different analyses. For one thing, the amphora contained not only any perfume, but her *favorite* perfume. Can we say that at this point, that if we are comparing Gen to the perfume, she had any preference towards him as a person? All we know is that she'd seen him as a threat, and rather feared what he could do, so to me, it might be a little bit of a stretch to say that she 'favoured' him in any way.

Although, seeing as she cut off his hand and it was the amphora that she broke, maybe Gen's more like the amphora, lol. However, the amphora contained the perfume. Maybe it's just a foreshadowing to show... now that Gen's been 'broken', he'd lose all the things that made him gentle. Later on, we see he's become more ruthless.

I guess we can relate this to Attolia, because while her main goal is to keep her throne safe, perhaps she had not been intending to steal innocence and hope from others (except for her traitorous barons... whom may not be innocent at all anyway). And maybe she now sees in Gen what she had been on that day she broke her amphora (which stubefied by gd remarkably explains). Her (and his) life has changed within a stroke of a few words, and now are colder people because of it.

And maybe that makes her sad. Though she is cruel and merciless, I doubt Attolia wanted the same fate for others that she had to go through.

[m-chant.livejournal.com]

If we take the smashing of the amphora as analogous to mutilating Gen, then I think the amphora AND the perfume both represent Gen. Or, to be more precise, the amphora CONTAINING the perfume. Hm. New thought. Maybe it isn't that the value of the perfume stands for any favour for Gen--I think at this juncture, she doesn't like him at all. Maybe it's that in her rage, she momentarily forgot that the amphora held that favourite perfume, or misjudged how precious it was to her when she smashed it--you know, sometimes when you're at the extreme of some emotion, you decide, 'To hell with it!' and go all out with judgment totally defenestrated?...and only when it spilled did she realise "Crap, I just spilled my favourite perfume. I'm gonna regret that..." So possibly it's that feeling of venting her rage and subsequent rue that connected the two events in her mind...Er, not perfume. Unguent...
But at the same time, it's hard to equate a jar of oil with a flesh-and-blood young man...Is such a comparison supposed to exalt Gen, because she really liked that oil? This seems kind of absurd. I'm sure that to us, comparing a person with a bottle of perfume is rather degrading.
I wonder how this can be reconciled with what stubefied by gd said, about the memory's proximity to the day that basically altered her life. I'm sure somewhere in there, she was reminded of the incident because of how emotionally vulnerable she felt.

[m-chant.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting comment about Gen losing his gentleness. I think, though, that it'd be more accurate to say that he just acquired a ruthlessness. He's still gentle beyond the reach of the public eye :D. But your comment reminded me of what Elizabeth Taylor said about Montgomery Clift after his car accident, that he'd lost a delicacy in his face--that gentleness (he broke his nose and it didn't heal perfectly...hm...much like Sophos). Except that Gen's lost mildness was not simply in his face, or hand.

[stubefied-by-gd.livejournal.com]

You know, this "now he is broken like me" - not like the amphora - idea is interesting, too. It makes me want to go back and look at the specific times she recalled the smell.

[savithny.livejournal.com]

I think its pretty clear that she didn't smash the amphora on purpose. She threw a shoe while pitching a fit, which smashed her favorite amphora with her favorite hair oil.

That day turned out to be the last day of her childhood, and the end of her innocence. She becomes a pawn in a political game in which the losers can -- and do -- DIE.

And what she did to Gen was to take innocence from him. As she remarks, he's still just a boy -- but after that sword comes down, his whole life has changed -- what seemed to be a game to him before (sneaking around, leaving cute notes and gifts) has a real, hard consequence, and it's not just childhood play anymore. It's real life, the stakes are high, and death is one of the possible outcomes.

The scent and the broken amphora are sense-memories for an awareness of a passage from childhood to adulthood that is one-way, no return. You can't put everything back the way it was. Attolia tries to "go back where she was happy," (as my parents used to say, referring to people who tried to recreate their youths too hard) when she tries to bring her old nurse to the capital, and discovers the woman is terrified of her and won't come. Once childhood things are broken, you can't go back.

[m-chant.livejournal.com]

I like this! Clearly, I need to reread. I totally forgot about the slipper.

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

Hm, doesn't the book say that it was the amphora that was her favorite, and that it held hair oil, not perfume? I don't think it says that the hair oil was her favorite, just that it had a scent that had lingered and that she still remembered. And that she had never used it again.

[m-chant.livejournal.com]

...Yea, I definitely need to reread.