Dru before she died
Apr. 8th, 2006 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indriWhat do we know?
Her accent is Cockney-esque (SH).
Her mother used to sing to her. Angelus overheard this at least once (LtM).
She was "pure and sweet and chaste" according to Angel (LtM).
Angel: "First I made her insane. Killed everybody she loved. Visited every mental torture on her I could devise. She eventually fled to a convent, and on the day she took her holy orders, I turned her into a demon." (LtM)
Her mum ate lemons, raw. Maybe. (WML2)
She may have been fond of (or even been) "Little Anne" who ate custard, brandied pears and pomegranates. (WML2)
It's strongly suggested in WML2 that Angelus killed a number of small children whom Drusilla was fond of and probably related to.
Angelus killed her uncle (WML2).
She and her mother were alive in 1860. Angelus was stalking her by then (Becoming 1).
She was religious (Becoming 1).
She was Catholic or Anglo-Catholic (i.e. Very Very High Church Anglican) (Becoming 1).
Her clothing was fairly expensive-looking (Becoming I, DB).
One 1860 vision warned of the death of two miners.
Her mother told Dru that the visions were a curse and an "affront to the Lord" (Becoming 1).
She wanted to be good and pure (Becoming 1).
She can read (Becoming, Part 1).
She probably had at least two sisters, both with dark curly hair (DB).
Her parents dressed respectably -- I'll presume that the older couple seen with her are her parents (DB).
Her family looked happy when Angelus first saw them (DB).
She "had the Sight" at the time Darla found her and before Angelus began to stalk her (DB).
Her family don't take umbrage when she hurries them along the street away from Angelus and Darla (DB).
Angelus slaughtered the nuns at Drusilla's convent rather messily and then cornered her in a room, where Darla joined him. The vampires started to have sex in front of the hysterical Dru. Drusilla was wearing a plain dress and a pair of boots. Darla had thought that he'd already killed Dru (DB).
What can we infer?
Her accent. As far as I know -- and I'd welcome any comment here as elsewhere -- her accent places an upper bound on her social class. A fully middle class woman might well have had a regional accent, but it would be a posh regional accent (such as Edinburgh's Morningside vowels). Her accent also indicates that she grew up in or around London's East End.
Clothing. To my untutored eye, the clothing of Dru and her (presumed) family is of good quality and entirely respectable. This indicates a reasonable income. Despite her accent, Dru's family weren't poor but prosperous. This suggests a social class of the skilled artisan: watchmakers, jewellery makers, cabinet makers and so on. The income of such people could easily be in the same range as lower middle class clerks (30-35 shillings a week on average, more if they were particularly skilled).
Her literacy. This doesn't tell us anything as literacy rates were already high by the 1860s and we already know she wasn't dirt-poor,
Her church attendance. While mid-Victorian Britain boasted much higher rates of church attendance than the present day, it's also true that attendance rates were lowest in London, and its East End had some of the country's lowest rates of attendance of the Church of England (my source estimates a measly 6-12%). I'd expect a respectable upper working-class family to go to church, although I don't have a breakdown of religious attendance by social class (and there may simply be no available data on this).
Her confession.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
peasant_ has pointed out to me that Dru's confession doesn't necessarily mean that she's Catholic; the so-called Anglo-Catholic movement was strong in the mid-Victorian period, and some Church of England congregations took confession. I don't have any statistics on the breakdown by class and geography of Anglo-Catholics, so although I know that most Catholics in England at this time were Irish working-class, I don't know if it's statistically more likely for her to be Anglo-Catholic Church of England or English Roman Catholic. I should point out that most English laws against Catholics had been repealed in 1829, although that hardly stamped out anti-Catholicism.
It's interesting that Dru doesn't seem to expect to recognise the voice of her confessor.peasant_ has commented elsewhere on the rural look of the church, so I wonder whether she was away from home, perhaps visiting relatives on the outskirts of London, some part where she would be more likely to meet miners. It also makes me wonder how Angelus tracked her there, given that it's broad daylight outside.
Pomegranates. Although available, these were still considered exotic fruits in the mid-Victorian period, so Little Anne's fondness for them again suggests that some luxuries were possible for Dru's family.
Madness and visions. When Dru makes her confession, it's her visions that she's distressed about (so Angelus may not have yet started to kill "everybody she loved"). The type of vision she gets is very reminiscent of those of Doyle and then Cordy -- warnings of preventable deaths. Could Dru have suffered from the same physiological effects that almost killed Cordy? The living Dru seems rather sheltered and fragile to me and I do wonder whether this uninvited awareness of sudden death started to unhinge her well before Angelus got to her. Dru's madness (after vamping) is often shown to be due to a sort of simultaneity, where she can't differentiate between timelines or lucidly express her foreknowledge of events. She speaks in bad metaphors all the time. Perhaps her poor brain simply can't process the amount of information that's thrown at it. Firefly's River is an interesting contrast here, as a woman so intelligent that she may be beginning to make sense of vast amounts of precog data.
But I don't wish to underestimate the trauma Angelus inflicted. I believe him when he says he "Visited every mental torture on her that [he] could devise." Look at how much damage he managed to do to the far more resilient Buffy -- without killing everyone she knew.
Relationship with her family. It's hard to know whether some part of Dru still resents what Angelus did, or whether she's simply good at taunting Angel. Her (presumed) sisters are laughing happily away when Angelus first sees them. But it's not all happy families -- her mother's comments about her visions are hardly supportive. But then again, her mother's comments sound like those of a justifiably frightened woman.
Death. We don't know how long a time elapses between Darla finding her and the confession scene, or between the confession scene and Dru's death in the nunnery. I expect the time between the first two is not long but years may have elapsed between the second two, especially given that Darla is surprised to learn that Dru's still alive. Fanon has it has it that Dru was raped before being turned; while this remains plausible, it is not known from the text.
What have I missed? What have I misinterpreted?
Her accent is Cockney-esque (SH).
Her mother used to sing to her. Angelus overheard this at least once (LtM).
She was "pure and sweet and chaste" according to Angel (LtM).
Angel: "First I made her insane. Killed everybody she loved. Visited every mental torture on her I could devise. She eventually fled to a convent, and on the day she took her holy orders, I turned her into a demon." (LtM)
Her mum ate lemons, raw. Maybe. (WML2)
She may have been fond of (or even been) "Little Anne" who ate custard, brandied pears and pomegranates. (WML2)
It's strongly suggested in WML2 that Angelus killed a number of small children whom Drusilla was fond of and probably related to.
Drusilla: Remember? Hmm? Little fingers. Little hands. Do you?
Angel: (shivering in pain) If I could...
Drusilla: (interrupts angrily) Bite your tongue! They used to eat cake, and eggs, and honey. (sweetly) Until you came and ripped their throats out.
Angelus killed her uncle (WML2).
She and her mother were alive in 1860. Angelus was stalking her by then (Becoming 1).
She was religious (Becoming 1).
She was Catholic or Anglo-Catholic (i.e. Very Very High Church Anglican) (Becoming 1).
Her clothing was fairly expensive-looking (Becoming I, DB).
One 1860 vision warned of the death of two miners.
Her mother told Dru that the visions were a curse and an "affront to the Lord" (Becoming 1).
She wanted to be good and pure (Becoming 1).
She can read (Becoming, Part 1).
She probably had at least two sisters, both with dark curly hair (DB).
Her parents dressed respectably -- I'll presume that the older couple seen with her are her parents (DB).
Her family looked happy when Angelus first saw them (DB).
She "had the Sight" at the time Darla found her and before Angelus began to stalk her (DB).
Her family don't take umbrage when she hurries them along the street away from Angelus and Darla (DB).
Angelus slaughtered the nuns at Drusilla's convent rather messily and then cornered her in a room, where Darla joined him. The vampires started to have sex in front of the hysterical Dru. Drusilla was wearing a plain dress and a pair of boots. Darla had thought that he'd already killed Dru (DB).
What can we infer?
Her accent. As far as I know -- and I'd welcome any comment here as elsewhere -- her accent places an upper bound on her social class. A fully middle class woman might well have had a regional accent, but it would be a posh regional accent (such as Edinburgh's Morningside vowels). Her accent also indicates that she grew up in or around London's East End.
Clothing. To my untutored eye, the clothing of Dru and her (presumed) family is of good quality and entirely respectable. This indicates a reasonable income. Despite her accent, Dru's family weren't poor but prosperous. This suggests a social class of the skilled artisan: watchmakers, jewellery makers, cabinet makers and so on. The income of such people could easily be in the same range as lower middle class clerks (30-35 shillings a week on average, more if they were particularly skilled).
Her literacy. This doesn't tell us anything as literacy rates were already high by the 1860s and we already know she wasn't dirt-poor,
Her church attendance. While mid-Victorian Britain boasted much higher rates of church attendance than the present day, it's also true that attendance rates were lowest in London, and its East End had some of the country's lowest rates of attendance of the Church of England (my source estimates a measly 6-12%). I'd expect a respectable upper working-class family to go to church, although I don't have a breakdown of religious attendance by social class (and there may simply be no available data on this).
Her confession.
peasant_ has pointed out to me that Dru's confession doesn't necessarily mean that she's Catholic; the so-called Anglo-Catholic movement was strong in the mid-Victorian period, and some Church of England congregations took confession. I don't have any statistics on the breakdown by class and geography of Anglo-Catholics, so although I know that most Catholics in England at this time were Irish working-class, I don't know if it's statistically more likely for her to be Anglo-Catholic Church of England or English Roman Catholic. I should point out that most English laws against Catholics had been repealed in 1829, although that hardly stamped out anti-Catholicism. It's interesting that Dru doesn't seem to expect to recognise the voice of her confessor.
peasant_ has commented elsewhere on the rural look of the church, so I wonder whether she was away from home, perhaps visiting relatives on the outskirts of London, some part where she would be more likely to meet miners. It also makes me wonder how Angelus tracked her there, given that it's broad daylight outside. Pomegranates. Although available, these were still considered exotic fruits in the mid-Victorian period, so Little Anne's fondness for them again suggests that some luxuries were possible for Dru's family.
Madness and visions. When Dru makes her confession, it's her visions that she's distressed about (so Angelus may not have yet started to kill "everybody she loved"). The type of vision she gets is very reminiscent of those of Doyle and then Cordy -- warnings of preventable deaths. Could Dru have suffered from the same physiological effects that almost killed Cordy? The living Dru seems rather sheltered and fragile to me and I do wonder whether this uninvited awareness of sudden death started to unhinge her well before Angelus got to her. Dru's madness (after vamping) is often shown to be due to a sort of simultaneity, where she can't differentiate between timelines or lucidly express her foreknowledge of events. She speaks in bad metaphors all the time. Perhaps her poor brain simply can't process the amount of information that's thrown at it. Firefly's River is an interesting contrast here, as a woman so intelligent that she may be beginning to make sense of vast amounts of precog data.
But I don't wish to underestimate the trauma Angelus inflicted. I believe him when he says he "Visited every mental torture on her that [he] could devise." Look at how much damage he managed to do to the far more resilient Buffy -- without killing everyone she knew.
Relationship with her family. It's hard to know whether some part of Dru still resents what Angelus did, or whether she's simply good at taunting Angel. Her (presumed) sisters are laughing happily away when Angelus first sees them. But it's not all happy families -- her mother's comments about her visions are hardly supportive. But then again, her mother's comments sound like those of a justifiably frightened woman.
Death. We don't know how long a time elapses between Darla finding her and the confession scene, or between the confession scene and Dru's death in the nunnery. I expect the time between the first two is not long but years may have elapsed between the second two, especially given that Darla is surprised to learn that Dru's still alive. Fanon has it has it that Dru was raped before being turned; while this remains plausible, it is not known from the text.
What have I missed? What have I misinterpreted?
