Severian's sex Life

Joe Riley · 25 Apr 2007, 20:35 · from 2007-April.txt.gz

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From: whamdoodler at yahoo.com (Joe Riley)
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:35:32 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Severian's sex Life
In-Reply-To: <d716a1c40704101015wf467689w5eeb3182b76a9474 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <392816.40198.qm at web38501.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

I think it's also important to remember that Severian didn't necessarily have sex with all of these women, he only said that he had sex with them.  Remember, this is a 21-year old male, and all young males have lied about our sex lives at some point in our lives.

  Particularly note the way in which he describes the activities.  Severian goes into extraordinary detail when he describes anything which happened to him, and this holds particularly true for his sexual encounters (i.e. with the young prostitute pretending to be Thecla, his first time with Dorcas, and even during the aforementioned boat incident).  

  However with the Chatelaine Thecla, he only briefly mentions that they slept together, and in an offhand manner.  This is not at all how you would expect Severian to describe an event as monumental as his first sexual encounter with his first love.  If anything, it sounds more like a fisherman exaggerating their catch, or a golfer skewing their score (or one of your buddies telling your other buddy that he slept with a girl that he met at the bar, when you know for a fact that he went home alone).  Just one more consideration to wrestle with.

Michael Straight <mfstraight at gmail.com> wrote:
  On 4/7/07, James B. Jordan wrote:

> Additionally, Wolfe
> knows enough about other cultures to know that the idea of male chastity is
> pretty much limited to Jewish and Christian societies, and really mostly to
> Protestant or Protestant-influenced Christian societies. Severian is not
> living in such a society.

Bingo. One of Wolfe's ongoing projects is to try to impress upon his
readers how different other cultures are from ours.

For most of human history in most cultures, Severian's behavior would
not be remarkable. See also, treatment of women, slavery, etc.
Fantasy and science fiction set in the past (or cultures that are
supposed to resemble Earth's past) are constantly giving their
protagonists anachronistic values.

Your reaction to Severian (or Latro) says more about how much our
culture has changed than it does about those particular characters.
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