Is Your Soul Okay?

the baddies fw the toxic yaoi

someone probably already made a million post about the thematic relevance of julian’s lecture to the greek clique in chapter 1 in the overall narrative, how so much of what he is saying gets mirrored at various points as the story progresses. after all, this is the lecture that made the greek clique want to perform a bacchanal.

but i just noticed this one little parallel that is making me lose my mind a bit, to be honest.

I always found it peculiar that it was bunny who answered julian here – you’d think he wouldn’t remember the latin name for the erinyes, or that someone else might have said something. yet he is very engaged right now, “his eyes dazzled”.

i think there are two main reasons why bunny is the one who mentions the furies.

the first reason relates to julian’s words before his question. from a narrative point of view, by answering, bunny gets linked to these paragraphs.

“It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.”

bunny, the one often compared to a child, already before and especially after finding out about the murder starts hurting, worrying, and quickly realizes he is the only one to feel this way. the others are not sharing in his worries. they excluded him from the successful bacchanal, henry mocked him in his diary, and no one confided in him. they hid the fact that they murdered someone from him with apparent ease. after italy, suddenly henry is all chummy with richard, and the group includes him even more – and bunny feels like no one understands him, no one is willing to. they treat him like a dumb child, and try to keep him quiet.

the second reason why I find it peculiar that bunny is the one to answer julian is to be found in julian’s segue to bunny’s answer.

the book often mentions dante, who was led through hell and purgatory by virgil. while the number of erinyes/furies is ambiguous in greek mythology, virgil, in the aeneid, mentions three: alecto (endless anger), megaera (jealous rage), and tisophone (vengeful destruction). and isn’t this the core of bunny’s behaviour prior his murder? his anger towards the rest of the group, and especially henry, at excluding him, mocking him. his jealous rage towards richard. his vengeful destruction – almost revealing what the group has done, exploding at henry, mocking charles’s drinking, deriding and belittling camilla and her relationship with charles, being cruel to francis bc of his sexuality, alienating even richard, who didn’t have much to do with any of this, by trying to expose his lies about his past and how much money he has.

in chapter 5, richard wonders how come bunny was losing his mind and turning against his friends post-murder reveal (pls ignore richard being a pretentious baby btw) and we get this amazing insight from camilla.

in julian’s own words, the erinyes/furies drove people mad by turning “up the volume of the inner monologue, magnif[ying] qualities already present to great excess, ma[king] people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it.”

and isn’t that what camilla is alluding at here? as if possessed by the furies, bunny becomes so much himself, or what he thinks the others see him as – stupid, simple, annoying, less sophisticated than the others – that he cannot bear it, no one can. it all magnifies, all that he thinks the others dislike about him, belittle him for, laugh behind his back about.

there’s also something to be said about julian asking about the erinyes/furies by their greek name and bunny answering with the roman one. when it was in rome with henry that it all started to fall apart. but yeah

Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran, and his possible bisexuality. First of all, I'm aware this is a very common concept on the fandom, but I'm still willing to write about it.

Bunny is well known for his deep rooted hate to homosexuality, which in their context makes sense since the homophobia wasn't unusual back then. The thing is, even if we don't consider the fact that he studied the greeks (which we can argue that he wasn't very aware because he got into that career because of Henry), he does give a lot of signals about his bisexuality, repressed, of course.

First of all, and one thing that I don't see people talk about: just the way he talked to Richard first. In their conversation, as soon as Francis was brought up and his homosexuality was implied, Bunny got defensive and claim that what Francis needed was a girlfriend to distract himself; and what did Bunny do inmediatly after? Talk about his own girlfriend.

This could be easly read as Bunny, unconsciously showing that Marion is a distraction of his likings, that he does get the attraction towards men, but he focuses on his girlfriend instead.

And clearly there are a lot of more hints, like his relationship with Charles (which I alredy talked about on a different post), and his need to assert dominance to Camilla when he told her to iron his clothes, emphasizing on his "role as a man", or his clear disgust towards Francis that could be understood as envy since Francis is not repressed as he is.

However, if I were to talk, Henry is the most evident. When Bunny and Henry were arguing loudly (mostly from Bunny's side), he called Henry a lot of things he considered negative: jew, nazi and gay. And after this, he fell sleep on Henry's bed.

All these things, that Bunny considered terrible and negative were meant to be hurtful, and it is obvious that the concept of gay stands out on these other adjectives because Bunny finds to be gay at the same level of being nazi.

He's deeply terrified of his own sexuality, yet he tries to fill this void with Henry's attention. He somehow tries to be as close as he can be to Henry without crossing the line of friendship: whenever he's in trouble, whenever he needs money, whenever he needs comfort (like sleeping on Henry's bed after a fight with him), all these are the clear signal of Bunny taking a partner role with Henry, on his own way. Which, of course, Henry isn't bothered about (as I said on another post, the greek class seems to take something alike a harem-dynamic, where their center is Henry).

10% left

Kill me I am doing something that is so not related to my studies but I HAVE TO finish it

they are kismes— *is assassinated*

I like the fact that Daphne Hardy gave the name “darkness at noon” for Koestler’s book because she was the first one who translate it to English and it also was the only one version of the book left after the original carbon copy was lost. Until 2015 when student found it in archive Daphne’s translation was reading around the world for 79 years. I think this is so beautiful. Oh, I forgot to say they were lovers

1940/2019

Hear me out: The Greek Class as Tarot Cards. Bunny was perfect for The Hanged Man, sacrifice and stagnation are his whole deal.

Can you guess what Henry will be 🤭

Books I’ve read since starting T, 2024

Oil on canvas

24 x 18 in.