(urth) (no subject)

[Jeff Wilson]

On 1/15/2011 12:11 PM, Jack Smith wrote:
> Dorcas did not seem like an optimate to me, since optimates were the
> "best" people of the Roman republic and Dorcas never struck me as being
> what we might call upper or upper middle class.   What Wolfe says in the
> appendix is that "optimates appear to be more or less wealthy
> traders...there are some hints that Dorcas originally belonged to this
> class." (CotC, appendix)   Now that sounds more like it.   Dorcas seems
> somewhat refined (more than Agia) and her father appears to have been
> successful.  But her marriage to the old boatman brought her down in the
> world economically, and then led to her death.  A sad figure.

I got the impression that they were doing okay until she died, then he 
was okay for a while more until he went into a depression and ended up 
working as a boatman so he could keep looking for her body every day. 
I'm judging this on the basis that Ouen has a cloisonne of his mother, 
apparently a self-portrait since the painting business comes down her 
side of the family and Dorcas does various little artisty things while 
she's with Severian. The obsessive boatman wouldn't have wanted to part 
with his last picture of her esp to a child who might lose it, so there 
must have been another for him to keep somewhere. Ergo, if they could 
afford to devote time and materials to multiple portraits of family 
members, they weren't doing too badly.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >