Thea and Thecla

Jeff Wilson · 08 Jan 2011, 20:14 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2011 14:14:30 -0600
Subject: (urth) Thea and Thecla
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W53FC61C7BCB80A06121F0CF0C0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W53FC61C7BCB80A06121F0CF0C0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4D28C5A6.3020302 at io.com>

On 1/8/2011 1:49 PM, Lee Berman wrote:
>
>> Jeff Wilson:  Whos there - the Katharine maid can't have been been strangled, since
>> she is either alive or some sort of non-neck-dependent robot. And if she
>> and Catherine are the same person, Catherine can't have been strangled
>> either.
>
> Well, depends on how many "Catherines" there are. Borrowing from the Dave Tallman theory,
> perhaps there are at least 4, the Contessa Carina and her three cloned (and beheaded) maids
> from Dr. Talos' play.
>
> Trying to be concise, I didn't qualify this as referring back to my own theory that the woman
> in the coffin, in the opening pages of the story, with dark hair and a pale gown is the same
> woman Severian sees on the Path of Air with the same hair and gown. The strangulation is guessed
> from her livid face and the undue attention paid to one particular torture device, Allowin's
> Necklace.

In other words, a completely different woman than the one named was 
strangled?

> (FWIW, some detect a hint of homoeroticism in Severian's perception of Agilus. For me it is part of a pattern
> of concealed homo- and pedo- eroticism that periodically swerves beneath the text. Surely a theme worth its
> own thread...but for now I'll just ponder how Severian knows what a "catamite" is [I didn't] and how he is able
> to identify one at a glance in the frenzy of battle and flight).

Catamites have been popular subjects of excruciations over the ages, 
Master Malrubius probably mentioned them during school. It's the odd 
bits of common observation that Severian seems to know despite being 
raised in the tower, even before he gets Thecla's memories, that puzzle me.

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

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