Tea at Trianon: Happily Never After

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Happily Never After

From Of Home and Womanhood:

When Sex and the City first aired, it was marketed as revolutionary, four women, unapologetically single, talking about sex like men. It was supposed to be the end of repression, the dawn of honesty. Finally women being liberated to do and become exactly whoever they wanted to be, finally women were free to become truly happy.
**Spoiler. It didn’t work.**
It wasn’t a story about women finding freedom. It was a story about women mistaking disconnection for independence, while trying to convince themselves it’s empowerment.
The show baptized feminism’s third act: the one where the revolution no longer had a goal, only momentum. Where “liberation” meant endless autonomy, endless choice, endless self-focus. The finish line had finally been reached. Feminism had conquered and women finally could be themselves. It took the feminist script reject tradition, reject dependence, reject limits, and tried to convince all of us how this meant a life of luxury and accomplishments.
Carrie Bradshaw became the ideal post-feminist woman: romantic but cynical, independent, sexually liberated but spiritually lost. Her life was a carousel of pursuit without arrival, intimacy without union, reflection without growth. She wasn’t building anything; she was collecting experiences. She was feminism’s perfect consumer, always searching, never satisfied. (Read more.)