Aunt Jeanine, is she or isn't she?

Alice Turner · 14 Jun 1998, 11:04 · from urth-v0013.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Alice Turner" <al at interport.net>
Subject: (urth) Aunt Jeanine, is she or isn't she?
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 11:04:33
Message-ID: <urth-v0013-0044 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0013/0044.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Robert Borski is fond of his theory that Aunt Jeanine is actually an abo,
and to that end has "hung fifty pounds of theory on nothing." I had
considered a point by point refutation, but I really don't think it's worth
it--the theory is just too fantastical, especially when, on her very first
appearance. we see Aunt Jeanine manipulating a tool, the large key to her
room. Her withered legs aren't evidence of anything.

Moreover, we're told over and over that she is #5's aunt, that Maitre is her
brother, that Mr. Million started the line. Actually, though Maitre is
technically her brother, she seems to be considerably older than he, and
could belong to the generation ahead of him.

Here's a little chart:

GW1 =3D Mr. Million (#5's great grandfather, we have no reason to doubt)
GW2 =3D gramps + Jeanine
GW3 =3D Maitre
GW4 =3D #5          + David

Why the disparity in numbers? Why indeed? Jeanine alludes to it too: "That
number's either far too low or too high." It's one too high.

Jeanine seems to be in her 60s when introduced (#5 is 12). Maitre is "almost
50" (according to Marsch) when #5 is 18. Jeanine is thus in her late 70s or
about 80 when she dies (#5 is 27).

>Here's what I feel is the strongest point in my argument--my contention
>that Jeannine is the baby in the picture of the photo, which would make her
>140 years old.
>
>>Notice how when he sees the picture Number Five assumes the child is a
>male, but has difficulty >seeing the face because it's nearly smothered by
>white wool blankets.
>>Recall as well Number Five's description of Aunt Jeannine as the Black
>Queen
>>in chess: "a chess queen neither sinister nor beneficent, and Black only
>as distinguished from
>>some White Queen I would never encounter." The White Queen Number Five
>never encounters, I >submit, is the real Jeannine--clearly linked by color
>with the white wool blanket that smother's the baby's face in the picture.

What an argument! Because Jeanine wears black and the baby white they are
one and the same! Well, Robert, Jeanine is showing #5 *his own* mother, not
hers, and the baby is thus clearly Mr. Million, the head of the line.
Jeanine, like David, is an "outcropping," not a clone, with a separate
mother. Pfffft, splat, there's your theory. What's your Vironese name?

-alga-

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net