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thewhitefluffyhat · 1 year

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Ianthe’s Makeover Through a Femme!Harrow Lens

“This seems like a good week to post about how I relate to Harrow as a fellow androgynous-femme,” I say, taking cover behind an industrial strength blast shield. (Joking, joking.)

But in all seriousness, this post has been in my drafts for a while. I’d seen the makeover scene in HtN described as “confusing” when it comes to Harrow’s gender, and I honestly thought it was too on first read.

So I wanted to take a closer look!

Spoilers: I don’t think it’s as simple as Harrow being uncomfortable with wearing dresses in the abstract.

Rather, the main aspect that stood out to me as making Harrow curl up like a shivering wet cat is the loss of control and the sexual haze permeating the whole affair. And I really do want to underline the latter aspect, because even before Dios apate Minor enters the picture, Ianthe herself repeatedly frames what she’s doing in terms of making Harrow more sexually desirable. More fuckable, if you will:

"God, what's this? That's a bit risqué-" You grew desperate. "Let me pick." Harrow the Ninth, p264

"Not even one of the Emperor's fists and gestures could give Harrowhark Nonagesimus a sexy makeover. Sometimes I think you look like a twig's funeral. In the right light, though-" Harrow the Ninth, p264

"You look just good enough that I'm proud of my handiwork, but not so good that I'll be consumed with lust and ravish you over the nut bowl," she said. "I walked a fine line, and I walked it admirably." Harrow the Ninth, p266

But Ianthe also emphasizes: not too fuckable, Harrow shouldn’t misunderstand and become confident in her body, because Harrow is such a pitiful charity case that the only beauty she can ever hope to attain will be scraps distributed at Ianthe’s mercy. She’s… she’s literally doing the High School Mean Girl schtick of “I’ll help you look pretty as a favor, but don’t you dare challenge my place in the pretty pecking order.”

Which, to be honest, probably says a lot more more about Ianthe and Coronabeth and their issues than anything about Harrow! Like, tell me more, Ianthe, how do you feel about constantly being described as the lesser twin to your face? I’m sure that’s never hurt you and you’re not projecting here at all, haha.

But regardless of its effectiveness, to me this strategy reads as an attempt at a very femme-vs-femme power play. You want to talk about gatekeeping femme identity? Surprise surprise, so does Ms. Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss!

As a result, Harrow, being a delightfully contrarian and passive-aggressive little shit even in the depths of having her agency denied, protests this in whatever small ways she can still find:

As an act of meaningless rebellion, you applied the sacramental skull of the Priestess Crushed Beneath the New-Laid Rock, the least beautiful skull in the canon. Harrow the Ninth, p266

“Fuck you and fuck trying to win your rigged game I didn’t even want to play,” essentially.

But note that Harrow doesn't wear a masculine-coded skull to protest Ianthe’s dress. (Are there gendered skulls in the canon? Muir could easily have made one up here, or had Harrow wear a pattern normally used by her father, Crux, or Ortus.) It’s not being seen as feminine or femme that she’s objecting to. Instead, Harrow goes for the ugliest skull, the “I don’t want to be perceived as desirable from any perspective” option.

And this actually reads very true to my own experiences! I’m somewhere between an androgynous and a non-mainstream feminine presentation myself, and I’ve had basically this exact same fight over what to wear at a social event. Right down to finding subtle ways to make myself less attractive to subvert the other person's attempt to control my appearance. Better something ugly that I chose myself than something playing by the rules that femme = signing up to be judged on the fuckability scale.

(Not, to be clear, that there’s anything wrong with pursuing or enjoying sexual attractiveness! Just that being forced into it feels really awful.)

Now, the topic of what does and doesn’t count as femme is… fraught and basically impossible to definitively nail down. But presenting as femme and/or feminine as part of one’s queerness often involves being in dialogue with other forms of femininity, picking and choosing which aspects to keep and which to reject. I’ve seen lipstick lesbians talk about their over the top makeup as a way to mark themselves as different from the heterosexual “natural look” norm. I myself love the gothic lolita look, because I like the idea of being seen as “feminine” in a transgressive way, but also potentially in a way that strikes other people as less sexual. (Though the nuances of lolita fashion could be a whole other discussion…)

Harrow’s presentation preferences aren’t quite the same as mine (she does not enjoy being seen as smaller or more childish), but she seems to share the desire for her unusual femme aesthetic to implicitly deflect from sexual interest rather than attracting it. She’s using her religion as a socially acceptable shield against Ianthe’s advances. Because given Ianthe’s reactions to the subject, flirting with a nun seems to be at least a little as taboo in TLT as it does in our world:

You simply said, “I have always slept alone.” “You don’t say.” You heard the primness in your voice when you said, “I am betrothed to the Locked Tomb, Tridentarius. I slept on a cot in my cell.” “I always forget you were an honest-to-God nun...” Harrow the Ninth, p260

Ianthe is an asshole who ignores Do Not Touch signals, but I think Harrow’s desperate clinging to her nun robes is, in part, another assertion of this implicit boundary. So I read the makeover scene as Harrow having an allergic reaction to being sexualized and objectified against her will (and to the entire idea that correctly performing as femme requires one to aspire to such), rather than disliking being perceived as femme or even feminine in general.

A second layer to this scene is the slimy cultural aspect to what Ianthe does. If the paint and full-body coverings are the Ninth's version of proper female attire, then Ianthe is forcing Harrow to perform to a very Third ideal instead:

“Will you take off that grotesque skeleton corset?” “No.” “What about your face paint?” “No.” “I do not know why I ask these questions,” she said. Harrow the Ninth, p265

I'm always wary of assuming modern racial dynamics apply to TLT’s universe, but y'all... this scene is a white woman forcing a brown woman from a stigmatized, minority religion to perform a normalized Western standard of femininity. Up to a rebuffed attempt to remove her face/hair coverings. Regardless of how much this dynamic applies in-universe, the real life parallels are not exactly subtle! Harrow could be the most feminine femme to ever gender within her culture, and what Ianthe does would still be extremely gross and coercive.

It’s also another direct callback to GtN - Ianthe forcing Harrow into fashionable Third norms is an inversion of the scene of Harrow forcing Gideon into Ninth facepaint. The same way that Harrow’s demeaning “Griddle” gets a dark reprise in Ianthe’s “Harry” and several other echoes in HtN of Harrow having to endure similar treatment from Ianthe as she once abused Gideon.

Ianthe is insisting that in order for Harrow to meet the dinner party’s standards, she must compromise her own culture’s standards. That Harrow’s own ceremonial robes aren’t expensive or nice enough to pass in a formal setting. She can be a well-dressed femme, or she can be a Ninth nun, but not both. Again, I don’t see Harrow’s objections to this treatment as being in conflict with Harrow having a femme-leaning identity, so much as Harrow being made wretchedly helpless and humiliated by having her Ninth heritage erased to fit Ianthe’s Third tastes.

Still not convinced? Finally, let’s contrast Ianthe’s makeover with the scene of Harrow getting ready for Abigail and Magnus’s anniversary in GtN:

She put on her best and most senescent Ninth robes, and became a skinny black stick swallowed by night-coloured layers of Locked Tomb lace. She fiddled with long earrings of bone in front of the mirror and repainted her face twice. Gideon the Ninth, p168

In any case, both she and Harrowhark turned up, gorgeously gowned in their Locked Tomb vestments, painted like living skulls, looking like douchebags. Harrow clinked when she walked with the sheer multiplicity of bonely accoutrement. Gideon the Ninth, p169

Here, Harrow is dressing purely according to her own decisions, and she actually doubles down on the more stereotypically feminine lace and jewelry rather than aiming for something wholly androgynous. She also does her best to appear neat and presentable here despite being a scruffly gremlin most of the time. Perfectionist that she is, Harrow is still nervous about her ability to perform it, but she’s confident in the specific femme aesthetic that she’s aspiring toward.

(Side note: You know who else wears an excessive amount of jewelry at Canaan House? Coronabeth. Was Harrow trying to look more like Corona, and if so, why? More crunchy gender food for thought…)

Ultimately. if your takeaway from the Ianthe makeover scene was "ah, Harrow would have been more comfortable if Ianthe gave her a suit" …I wouldn’t say that’s unreasonable. You could certainly do an alternative read of the scene as Ianthe force-feminizing a butch or nonbinary-leaning Harrow. (And if someone writes that essay I would love to read it!) But I don’t think that’s the only valid interpretation, and my personal read of the scene is that Ianthe is trying to coerce Harrow into a sexualized and gatekept definition of femme that Harrow strongly rejects.

It’s the pain and powerlessness of being told you’re doing your own gender wrong. Then having someone “helpfully” show you how to perform it right …only to look in the mirror afterwards and recognize yourself even less. And at that point, starting to miserably wonder if you’re even allowed to be your gender at all. Does that make sense?

Well, even if it doesn’t, thanks for reading to the end! 🖤 💀 🖤

#the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #harrowhark nonagesimus #ianthe tridentarius #tlt analysis #my tlt stuff #my ramblings #read more #note: edited a few bits 1.10.23 for further clarity of terms #anyway this seemed like a good segue #from last week’s ianthe-themed queue #into the harrow&ianthe art queue I'm planning to do next

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