Jahlee and Merryn

Lee Berman · 07 Nov 2010, 13:05 · from 2010-November.txt.gz

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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2010 08:05:39 -0500
Subject: (urth) Jahlee and Merryn
Message-ID: <SNT123-W84A0F53CA66AB455DD2E5CF4E0 at phx.gbl>

Just reading the part in RttW in which Jahlee and Merryn and Silkhorn and Severian
are together in the Matachin Tower. Some have taken Merryn's statement regarding
Severian, "He's my brother" at face value as a solution to the BotNS mystery of
who is Severian's twin sister, Severa. A simple, neat answer.

I tend to agree with Borski who, in Solar Labyrinth, argues that perhaps it is too 
simple and neat. Actually I think Borski misses some clues in this scene that 
additionally support his candidate for Severa- Jolenta.

Jahlee's mention of Merryn's difficulty with animals and Severian's perception of 
their shared witchiness seems to suggest a connection between these two characters
and generally, I think, between witches and vampires. This connection is supported
if we trace the European witch and vampire legends back to their Greek roots of the
goddess Hecate and her lamia companions.

Just before the cell scene, Jahlee is teasing Silkhorn asking if she'd be better as
a brunette. I think this calls attention the fact that she is currently a redhead (if
I remember correctly). Next she asks if she should give herself bigger breasts and a
smaller waist.

Jolenta (perhaps a stage name) is a red head with large breasts and a small waist. She
plays a character named Jahi on stage, who is a vampiric demon, perhaps with fangs. 
Maybe Wolfe is trying to use a Jahlee/Jahi vampiric association to connect Jolenta with 
witches here to provide clues that she is, indeed, a primary consideration as Severa.

Severian sees an adult Merryn when he is a child and the possible suggestion that she's
had something akin to facelift surgery is evidence that she is too old to be Severian's twin 
(assuming no cloning is involved). The RttW scene also notes that Merryn moves like someone 
"stiff with age", further disqualifying her and elevating Jolenta as a Severa candidate.

[some wild speculation, just for fun- I've been told by people of the time period that
The Exorcist, book and movie, had a huge impact on American Catholics. That story involves 
a battle between Father Merrin and the wind demon, Pazuzu. In Babylonian mythology, Pazuzu
was in conflict with a witch/vampiric demon named Lamashtu. Possible Wolfe inspiration?]

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