Talk:Book:Snuff/Annotations

well, more notes and observations than annotations

p90 Miss Pickings and her companion... Terry has introduced the idea of a gay subculture on the Discworld in previous books: the gender-ambivalent beauticians who attend to Granny Weatherwax (Maskerade), Mr Harris and the Blue Cat Club ("un-natural acts are only natural..." - Rosie Palm) and the ambiguous Pepe, and Bengo Macarona, in Unseen Academicals. It's nicely done: it accepts and acknowledges there are gay people, and that being gay is never all that defines a person - sexual preference is only part of anyone's makeup. So far, though, he's only done gay men: this is the first time overtly lesbian characters have appeared in a Discworld book. Another barrier falls... (Although in this light you do wonder about Miss Butts and Miss Delcross at the Quirm College for Young Ladies, who have a similar Bloomsbury Group aura about them.) if this can be expanded into an Annotation proper, it might revolve around Miss Picking's, er, companion being described in terms that fit the fairly out bohemian lesbians of the 1920's on Roundworld: social historians have speculated that the boom in numbers and visibility of of gay women in that decade was due to the massive change in outlook after WW1, and the stark fact that the male population had been so depleted by the ravages of war that there simply weren't enough men to go round. Social liberalisation and the fact not every woman could find a husband, even if she was willing or inclined, led to the opportunity for many women to find a different way of looking at life. (Josef Stalin ordered a crackdown on female homosexuality in the aftermath of WW2, concerned at the perceived threat to the morality of the Soviet Union posed by the fact so many men had died in the war that there were ten women to every eight men in the 18-45 age demographic... this strongly implies Russia went through a similar understated social upheaval, caused by necessity and sudden opportunity).

"A strict-looking lady with short hair and a man's pocketwatch" implies she had a man's pocket to put it in, ie a certain amount of cross-dressing was going on. This brings to mind notorious lesbians and bi-curious women of the period, such as author and poetess Virginia Woolf and dancer Isodora Duncan. Now if Miss Pickings and friend can be demonstrated to be a Discworld version of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West - who shared a cottage in the Cornwall countryside - it's certainly one for the Annotations, but if not, just a general note to go here. After all, Pratchett is dealing with analogues of famous British authors here who choose to live in rural seclusion - he's just done Jane Austen and given her a Discworld makeover, and I suspect Felicity Beedle is a thinly disguised version of eminent childrens' authoress Jacqueline Wilson, a woman who has been criticised for touching on difficult things and writing books the kids really want to read... --AgProv 02:20, 15 October 2011 (CEST)

The Colonel

An eminent Victorian author, who lived and wrote in a semi-rural setting, was Charles Makepeace Thackeray. As the opening pages of Snuff are liberally peppered with shout-outs to great British authors and poets over the centuries, is this another one to add to Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf/Vita Sackville-West and Jacqueline Wilson (with a hint of Roald Dahl)... Now wait till I find Thomas Hardy, Tennyson, and the Lakeland poets... --AgProv 04:39, 15 October 2011 (CEST)