June 18, 2021 • 15 mins
Tracy and Holly talk about Lola Montez's relationship with the truth and references to her in the show "Dickinson." They also discuss how du Maurier's novel "Rebecca" has often been mischaracterized as a romance.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello, and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry And this week we talked
on the show about Lola Montes after getting a listener
(00:22):
request that jogged my memory about something past hosts of
the show said more than ten years ago, Which is
weird because I often don't remember anything we have talked
about on the show, and so the fact that this
one thing from an episode we weren't even part of
just stuck in my head kind of cracked me up.
(00:44):
That's how memory works. It surprises you, does its own thing.
I find Lola Montez really fascinating. I mean, she's not
the only person we've ever talked about on the show
who kind of reinvented themselves in some way. And the
fact that she reinvented herself to just be such a
(01:05):
character that was only loosely based on Spanish dance and culture.
Uh Like, I mean I keep trying to think about,
like if you went on vacation somewhere once and then
that became your entire identity. Yeah, she had a very
cavalier relationship with the truth well and uh. And it
(01:27):
was also clear that the people who were reviewing her performances,
especially in like the first European appearances, when it was
like a brief thing that she was doing between the
acts of something else. It was also clear that the
people reviewing her were not really knowledgeable about what she
was supposedly doing it all, um, because different reviewers at
(01:50):
different times have just sort of assumed that she was
doing a range of different Spanish dances, and whether there's
any reality to that assessment is kind of up in
the air. Um. You know, she was definitely using music
that sounded Spanish, and she had castinets, which are associated
(02:12):
with the number of Spanish dances, but like a lot
of it seemed to be like a reviewer kind of
filling in mental blanks with their own assumptions about what
Spanish dances and culture were. Like it's like, you you
don't have cultural literacy. You're just kind of taking this
at face value. Okay, okay. Well, in that kind of
(02:35):
um circles around to the running joke on the Apple
Plus show Dickinson, have you watched this show before? No? Okay,
I don't know. If I don't know that it would
be for you. It is, it would not. That's why
I I don't want a dog on it, because I
know people who love it, but I know it's not.
It's not my show. It's really a show that it's
(02:58):
like if somebody and in a pitch room was like, well,
here's what we think Tracy V. Wilson would like. She
would like a totally irreverent look at the life of
Emily Dickinson, with every episode structured around one of her
poems and a lot of irreverent humor and also drama.
(03:19):
It's like one of the some of the criticisms I've
read of it are sort of like, I don't think
this show knows what kind of show it is because
it's not funny enough to strictly be a comedy and
it's not dramatic enough to strictly be a drama. But
sometimes it's comedic and sometimes it's dramatic, And I'm like,
I'm here for all of this, and I guess if
(03:39):
you are concerned about spoilers, skip ahead maybe one minute. Um.
In the second season of It, Emily's sister Lavinia meets Um,
one of the people that we mentioned in this episode,
who is the person that she whipped in Grass Valley,
and of course I've forgotten his name since some talking
(04:00):
extemporaneously and he references having been involved with this Lola
Montez and says that she shot him. And then from
that point on, for the rest of the season, every
time there's a mention of Lola Montez, Lavinia's eyes just
kind of get this little far away look to them,
and there's a little musical background flourished with some castanets,
(04:23):
and it just it keeps building through the whole season. Um.
And I am glad that I stopped what I was
watching to get caught up on that when I read
in my research that there was a Lola Montez running joke.
If you are looking for a like reverent bio pic
of Emily Dickinson, if it was not clear already, that
(04:45):
show is not that. Uh. It's, as I said, a
show that I really love, though, and I'm looking forward
to the third season of Hooray. Um. Yeah, I think
I would need it a baseline to like Emily Dickinson's
work more to be into it. That's kind of my
(05:06):
hang up on that one. Sure, and it's for sure
a show that can be um discussed along the lines
of whether references are jokes, which is the thing that
that I've seen various people be like if you reference
something and people are like, ah, I get that reference,
that's not the same as a joke. Um. Sure, there
are many references in the show that I find to
(05:27):
be hilarious and funny. So again, someone said, Tracy V. Wilson,
what would she like on on on a streaming service
that she watches on an iPad? See I'm a monster?
And when there are too many like references as jokes
in my head, I go, aren't you clever? Like I
don't find them funny. I've become a shrew and that's
(05:49):
just not intentionally and I'm like, let them have their cleverness.
But then they're to war in my head and I'm
already over Yes. Yes, so I think I said this
in the episode. But I'm pretty sure the most comprehensive
modern biography of her is Bruce Seymour's lowlamantez a Life,
(06:13):
which came out. Um, I'm pretty sure he funded the
research of it by having been on Jeopardy I love. Yeah,
he don't included like traveling and getting access to all
kinds of papers and really trying to filter out like
what really happened versus what is just reporting her backstory
(06:37):
and her account of the events. Um. It is quite
a long book, considering especially that it it details the
life of someone who did not see age forty. This
week we talked about Daphne to Marie. Yeah that and
it was first she pronounced her last name herself in
(06:59):
a very French way, and I felt like trying to
be very French with her pronunciation would just be distracting
in the context of the podcast. Also, this, as we
said in the show, and the episode was prompted by
me having read Rebecca. Uh. The first thing is I
got to the end of Rebecca and I was like,
(07:20):
this feels like it was written by someone who was
maybe repressing some stuff. And then I learned all these
things in her biography that she really seems to have
been struggling with and like trying to figure out how
to understand about her own self and her gender and
her sexuality, and I was like, wow that, I really
(07:42):
feel like a lot of that came through in that book.
Then the other thing was I wonder how I would
have responded to Rebecca had I read it as a team. Yeah,
because like, my first exposure to Jane Eyre was when
(08:03):
I was probably in fifth grade and there was an
adaptation of it on PBS, and I thought it was
an incredibly romantic story. Um. I wonder if I would
have thought Rebecca was an incredibly romantic story if I
have read it as a young person. I guess we're
about to spoil Rebecca. If people have strong feelings about
a nearly century old novel, Uh, wow, I don't find
(08:25):
it romantic at all. I find it horrifying. Yeah, I
have never perceived it as particularly romantic. Yeah. Daphne Dumaria
was definitely like, are you are you all reading the
book that I read? These people that seem to think
it's a a romance, because um, like Maxim Dewinter is
(08:47):
not very nice to the unnamed narrator, Like when he
proposes to her, I think he calls her a little
fool because she doesn't really know what he's talking. He's like,
She's like, are you playing a joke on me? He's
just not very nice to her for a lot of
the book. And then it's revealed that he murdered his
(09:08):
first wife and hit her body by sinking her boat
and told everyone that she drowned in an accident. And
I'm like that this, this is horrifying, horrifying. Yes, well,
and I also wonder if the turn in that right.
This is very spoilery, but you know it's it's then
(09:30):
revealed that the wife may have kind of wanted that,
which gets a little bit into a whole weird thing. Um.
I feel like what's really interesting about this in relation
to the film is that I you really get the
sense reading do Marie. And again, it's been a very
(09:52):
long time for me, but I remember being like, oh,
this is the kind of like plot pacing in the
turns and the reveals are what made Alfred Hitchcock's career
really all because of this person who plotted all of
her books or most of her her writing. To the
(10:12):
best of my knowledge in that way, which is sort
of interesting because we associated with him as an auteur
and like this genius filmmaker, and it's like, yeah, but
it came off the page that somebody else wrote, right,
which is is not to denigrate his work, because he did.
He's a complicated character on his own. Um. And those
films are very, very beautiful and his his shooting style
(10:36):
tremendously beautiful. But yeah, it is interesting to me that
what we associate in many ways with him is really
his source material, right right for sure. Um, we didn't
really get into it in the in the episode at all, um,
But one of the characters in Rebecca is the housekeeper,
Mrs Danver's. The sinister housekeeper is very sinister and is
(11:00):
often very easily in my opinion, read with like lesbian undertones.
And there's some suggestion that maybe she had some kind
of physical relationship with Rebecca, Like there's like that whole
layer of it. Um. And she's become kind of a
camp figure, which is unsurprising. And some of that comes
(11:21):
as much from the Alfred Hitchcock film and the way
she was portrayed there as it does from the actual
text that was on the page in the first place.
I can imagine how baffled she was when she was like,
what do you mean people think this is a romance?
Why why is my publisher marketing this as a romance?
And why do people believe him? I do not understand, um.
(11:44):
I mean, I have theories about why it would have
been marketed as a romance, but they're literally all conjecture, yeah,
which is that it's kind of a purposeful bait and switch,
right of like, no, we'll lure them in with the
idea that this is about a woman who is intimidated
by her predecessors, Aura or whatever, and that seems sort
(12:08):
of romantic on the surface, but of course as it
picks apart, it becomes a very different thing entirely. Um,
and they may be like, you know that, what matters
is they paid for the book, whether they got the romance.
I still have not seen the Alfred Hitchcock film in
(12:28):
full uh, and I have not checked out the new
Netflix adaptation that just came out late last year. Um,
you made a face and I'm like, did you see it?
In half thoughts, So, I'm thinking about the first time
I saw the Alfred Hitchcock one, which was at my
(12:48):
grandparents house on one of the few summer trips we
ever took to visit them, and it came on and
the opening titles came up, and I don't know what
my mom thought it was, but she was like, you
shouldn't watch this. Hits pornography, and I was like, well,
I'm definitely watching it now. I think I was like
eleven or twelve, and I remember me like, where is
(13:10):
the pornography here? Um, which is kind of a strange.
I don't I don't know what film she thought it was. Yeah, well,
like I was really into Alfred Hitchcock when I was
a kid, Like we had some VHS tapes of various
Alfred Hitchcock movies, like I remember watching north By Northwest repeatedly. Um,
(13:30):
and uh, I think Alfred Hitchcock Presents was in syndication
somewhere and I was I would watch that. There was
one year when I tried to be Alfred Hitchcock for Halloween.
Um It, I don't think I could carry that off
as like whatever twelve year old or whatever I was.
But I sure didn't think Alfred Hitchcock was great as
(13:51):
a child. So it just surprises me that somehow this
was a film that I still have managed not to
see at the age of forty six. Well, there are
lots of of Alfred Hitchcock things, so there sure are
You know, maybe your mom also thought it was pornography.
My mom could have very that. That doesn't seem unreasonable. Honestly, um,
(14:16):
I mean gerdainly. There are adults themes to it, and
there are issues around it that I could see a
parent being like, no, this is a little too much
for you, but I don't know why my mom made
that jump. Well, I will look forward to reading some
more Daffy Do Marie novels and short stories and things
(14:37):
in the future now that I have had my my
appetite wedded by Rebecca. There you go. So happy Friday
again everyone. We hope whatever is on your plate this
weekend that it goes well and we will be back
Saturday with Saturday Classic in a brand new episode on Monday.
(14:58):
Stuff you missed in History Class is the production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello, and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry And this week we talked
on the show about Lola Montes after getting a listener
(00:22):
request that jogged my memory about something past hosts of
the show said more than ten years ago, Which is
weird because I often don't remember anything we have talked
about on the show, and so the fact that this
one thing from an episode we weren't even part of
just stuck in my head kind of cracked me up.
(00:44):
That's how memory works. It surprises you, does its own thing.
I find Lola Montez really fascinating. I mean, she's not
the only person we've ever talked about on the show
who kind of reinvented themselves in some way. And the
fact that she reinvented herself to just be such a
(01:05):
character that was only loosely based on Spanish dance and culture.
Uh Like, I mean I keep trying to think about,
like if you went on vacation somewhere once and then
that became your entire identity. Yeah, she had a very
cavalier relationship with the truth well and uh. And it
(01:27):
was also clear that the people who were reviewing her performances,
especially in like the first European appearances, when it was
like a brief thing that she was doing between the
acts of something else. It was also clear that the
people reviewing her were not really knowledgeable about what she
was supposedly doing it all, um, because different reviewers at
(01:50):
different times have just sort of assumed that she was
doing a range of different Spanish dances, and whether there's
any reality to that assessment is kind of up in
the air. Um. You know, she was definitely using music
that sounded Spanish, and she had castinets, which are associated
(02:12):
with the number of Spanish dances, but like a lot
of it seemed to be like a reviewer kind of
filling in mental blanks with their own assumptions about what
Spanish dances and culture were. Like it's like, you you
don't have cultural literacy. You're just kind of taking this
at face value. Okay, okay. Well, in that kind of
(02:35):
um circles around to the running joke on the Apple
Plus show Dickinson, have you watched this show before? No? Okay,
I don't know. If I don't know that it would
be for you. It is, it would not. That's why
I I don't want a dog on it, because I
know people who love it, but I know it's not.
It's not my show. It's really a show that it's
(02:58):
like if somebody and in a pitch room was like, well,
here's what we think Tracy V. Wilson would like. She
would like a totally irreverent look at the life of
Emily Dickinson, with every episode structured around one of her
poems and a lot of irreverent humor and also drama.
(03:19):
It's like one of the some of the criticisms I've
read of it are sort of like, I don't think
this show knows what kind of show it is because
it's not funny enough to strictly be a comedy and
it's not dramatic enough to strictly be a drama. But
sometimes it's comedic and sometimes it's dramatic, And I'm like,
I'm here for all of this, and I guess if
(03:39):
you are concerned about spoilers, skip ahead maybe one minute. Um.
In the second season of It, Emily's sister Lavinia meets Um,
one of the people that we mentioned in this episode,
who is the person that she whipped in Grass Valley,
and of course I've forgotten his name since some talking
(04:00):
extemporaneously and he references having been involved with this Lola
Montez and says that she shot him. And then from
that point on, for the rest of the season, every
time there's a mention of Lola Montez, Lavinia's eyes just
kind of get this little far away look to them,
and there's a little musical background flourished with some castanets,
(04:23):
and it just it keeps building through the whole season. Um.
And I am glad that I stopped what I was
watching to get caught up on that when I read
in my research that there was a Lola Montez running joke.
If you are looking for a like reverent bio pic
of Emily Dickinson, if it was not clear already, that
(04:45):
show is not that. Uh. It's, as I said, a
show that I really love, though, and I'm looking forward
to the third season of Hooray. Um. Yeah, I think
I would need it a baseline to like Emily Dickinson's
work more to be into it. That's kind of my
(05:06):
hang up on that one. Sure, and it's for sure
a show that can be um discussed along the lines
of whether references are jokes, which is the thing that
that I've seen various people be like if you reference
something and people are like, ah, I get that reference,
that's not the same as a joke. Um. Sure, there
are many references in the show that I find to
(05:27):
be hilarious and funny. So again, someone said, Tracy V. Wilson,
what would she like on on on a streaming service
that she watches on an iPad? See I'm a monster?
And when there are too many like references as jokes
in my head, I go, aren't you clever? Like I
don't find them funny. I've become a shrew and that's
(05:49):
just not intentionally and I'm like, let them have their cleverness.
But then they're to war in my head and I'm
already over Yes. Yes, so I think I said this
in the episode. But I'm pretty sure the most comprehensive
modern biography of her is Bruce Seymour's lowlamantez a Life,
(06:13):
which came out. Um, I'm pretty sure he funded the
research of it by having been on Jeopardy I love. Yeah,
he don't included like traveling and getting access to all
kinds of papers and really trying to filter out like
what really happened versus what is just reporting her backstory
(06:37):
and her account of the events. Um. It is quite
a long book, considering especially that it it details the
life of someone who did not see age forty. This
week we talked about Daphne to Marie. Yeah that and
it was first she pronounced her last name herself in
(06:59):
a very French way, and I felt like trying to
be very French with her pronunciation would just be distracting
in the context of the podcast. Also, this, as we
said in the show, and the episode was prompted by
me having read Rebecca. Uh. The first thing is I
got to the end of Rebecca and I was like,
(07:20):
this feels like it was written by someone who was
maybe repressing some stuff. And then I learned all these
things in her biography that she really seems to have
been struggling with and like trying to figure out how
to understand about her own self and her gender and
her sexuality, and I was like, wow that, I really
(07:42):
feel like a lot of that came through in that book.
Then the other thing was I wonder how I would
have responded to Rebecca had I read it as a team. Yeah,
because like, my first exposure to Jane Eyre was when
(08:03):
I was probably in fifth grade and there was an
adaptation of it on PBS, and I thought it was
an incredibly romantic story. Um. I wonder if I would
have thought Rebecca was an incredibly romantic story if I
have read it as a young person. I guess we're
about to spoil Rebecca. If people have strong feelings about
a nearly century old novel, Uh, wow, I don't find
(08:25):
it romantic at all. I find it horrifying. Yeah, I
have never perceived it as particularly romantic. Yeah. Daphne Dumaria
was definitely like, are you are you all reading the
book that I read? These people that seem to think
it's a a romance, because um, like Maxim Dewinter is
(08:47):
not very nice to the unnamed narrator, Like when he
proposes to her, I think he calls her a little
fool because she doesn't really know what he's talking. He's like,
She's like, are you playing a joke on me? He's
just not very nice to her for a lot of
the book. And then it's revealed that he murdered his
(09:08):
first wife and hit her body by sinking her boat
and told everyone that she drowned in an accident. And
I'm like that this, this is horrifying, horrifying. Yes, well,
and I also wonder if the turn in that right.
This is very spoilery, but you know it's it's then
(09:30):
revealed that the wife may have kind of wanted that,
which gets a little bit into a whole weird thing. Um.
I feel like what's really interesting about this in relation
to the film is that I you really get the
sense reading do Marie. And again, it's been a very
(09:52):
long time for me, but I remember being like, oh,
this is the kind of like plot pacing in the
turns and the reveals are what made Alfred Hitchcock's career
really all because of this person who plotted all of
her books or most of her her writing. To the
(10:12):
best of my knowledge in that way, which is sort
of interesting because we associated with him as an auteur
and like this genius filmmaker, and it's like, yeah, but
it came off the page that somebody else wrote, right,
which is is not to denigrate his work, because he did.
He's a complicated character on his own. Um. And those
films are very, very beautiful and his his shooting style
(10:36):
tremendously beautiful. But yeah, it is interesting to me that
what we associate in many ways with him is really
his source material, right right for sure. Um, we didn't
really get into it in the in the episode at all, um,
But one of the characters in Rebecca is the housekeeper,
Mrs Danver's. The sinister housekeeper is very sinister and is
(11:00):
often very easily in my opinion, read with like lesbian undertones.
And there's some suggestion that maybe she had some kind
of physical relationship with Rebecca, Like there's like that whole
layer of it. Um. And she's become kind of a
camp figure, which is unsurprising. And some of that comes
(11:21):
as much from the Alfred Hitchcock film and the way
she was portrayed there as it does from the actual
text that was on the page in the first place.
I can imagine how baffled she was when she was like,
what do you mean people think this is a romance?
Why why is my publisher marketing this as a romance?
And why do people believe him? I do not understand, um.
(11:44):
I mean, I have theories about why it would have
been marketed as a romance, but they're literally all conjecture, yeah,
which is that it's kind of a purposeful bait and switch,
right of like, no, we'll lure them in with the
idea that this is about a woman who is intimidated
by her predecessors, Aura or whatever, and that seems sort
(12:08):
of romantic on the surface, but of course as it
picks apart, it becomes a very different thing entirely. Um,
and they may be like, you know that, what matters
is they paid for the book, whether they got the romance.
I still have not seen the Alfred Hitchcock film in
(12:28):
full uh, and I have not checked out the new
Netflix adaptation that just came out late last year. Um,
you made a face and I'm like, did you see it?
In half thoughts, So, I'm thinking about the first time
I saw the Alfred Hitchcock one, which was at my
(12:48):
grandparents house on one of the few summer trips we
ever took to visit them, and it came on and
the opening titles came up, and I don't know what
my mom thought it was, but she was like, you
shouldn't watch this. Hits pornography, and I was like, well,
I'm definitely watching it now. I think I was like
eleven or twelve, and I remember me like, where is
(13:10):
the pornography here? Um, which is kind of a strange.
I don't I don't know what film she thought it was. Yeah, well,
like I was really into Alfred Hitchcock when I was
a kid, Like we had some VHS tapes of various
Alfred Hitchcock movies, like I remember watching north By Northwest repeatedly. Um,
(13:30):
and uh, I think Alfred Hitchcock Presents was in syndication
somewhere and I was I would watch that. There was
one year when I tried to be Alfred Hitchcock for Halloween.
Um It, I don't think I could carry that off
as like whatever twelve year old or whatever I was.
But I sure didn't think Alfred Hitchcock was great as
(13:51):
a child. So it just surprises me that somehow this
was a film that I still have managed not to
see at the age of forty six. Well, there are
lots of of Alfred Hitchcock things, so there sure are
You know, maybe your mom also thought it was pornography.
My mom could have very that. That doesn't seem unreasonable. Honestly, um,
(14:16):
I mean gerdainly. There are adults themes to it, and
there are issues around it that I could see a
parent being like, no, this is a little too much
for you, but I don't know why my mom made
that jump. Well, I will look forward to reading some
more Daffy Do Marie novels and short stories and things
(14:37):
in the future now that I have had my my
appetite wedded by Rebecca. There you go. So happy Friday
again everyone. We hope whatever is on your plate this
weekend that it goes well and we will be back
Saturday with Saturday Classic in a brand new episode on Monday.
(14:58):
Stuff you missed in History Class is the production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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