Even more Hamilton

[metaphortunate]

It occurs to me that if I said about someone "I know that person like I know my own mind" I would mean "I consider my interactions with that person to be a dark and unrewarding quagmire of poorly mapped quicksand, unscalable barriers, and bear traps. Bear traps that randomly catch fire. I know this person like I can navigate the fire swamp, is what I'm saying. If I told her that I love him, fuck knows what would happen. Could be fine. Could be lying. Could be the second half of the Blank Space video."

Angelica's mind is clearly more organized.

Comments

[yatima]

Oh, cosigned SO HARD.

[wired]

I read this as Angelica being (possibly justifiably) intellectually snobbish. All of Eliza's mind is but a subset of Angelica's, for she is the prettiest and the wittiest. I love the furious love that lets Angelica hand this treasure of a brilliant man over to her middle sister, while also noticing that both Angelica and Alexander realize they would be a better match. This seems like yet another of the score of tragedies that pile up to make Alexander. He met his match, and married her sister, because reasons, including it's probable that Angelica was better at long-term thinking. If Angelica were less... filial, less socialized to understand her marital value, less kind to her sister, would Alexander have self-destructed as often? Or did he need someone who needed some degree of caretaking to keep him stable?

Poor Peggy. She can't have been that much dumber, can she? Not like the music suggests? Angelica with her aria of a name, and Eliza only slightly dimmer, and then Peggy, who sounds like the sort of third sister who would accidentally get left off invitations.

[rosefox]

Peggy was snarky, flirtatious, and delightful.

https://books.google.com/books?id=AroTfeaadKYC&pg=PA16

I am firmly a member of #TeamAndPeggy and think it's a real shame that she got such short shrift in the show. Oh well, more room for fanfic!

In the real world, as opposed to the musical world, the reason Angelica couldn't marry Hamilton was that she was already Mrs. John Church.

[metaphortunate]

It is hard to keep straight the difference between the fictionalized characters and the real people! Especially since Eliza's post-Alex life does rely on reality so much to fill in the gaps.

Doing my best to keep it to the characters in the musical, though, I would say no, you can't lay Alexander's self-destruction at Eliza's door. To start with, this is the awful bog-standard "dude wouldn't stray/drink/challenge the entire Democratic Republican party to a duel if his wife was just better at her job" misogyny that always gets thrown at the wives of cheating husbands - and to give up right away on keeping fiction vs. reality straight, please note that real Eliza was absolutely accused of this. ("Art thou a wife?")

Secondly, given just how much shit Eliza got done sans Alexander, under horrible debt, and without prospect of a day job, I cannot describe her as particularly in need of caretaking, or lacking long-term thinking.

But going back to that firstly, really, I think Alexander's self-destruction was his own. Dude grew up with so much to prove; no one could have taken that chip off his shoulder, if anyone could have convinced him to restrain himself, he would not have been the character he was.

[jedusaur]

Wait, you think that if Hamilton had married Angelica, if he had shared his life with someone who totally grasped his intellectual and ideological passions and didn't try to get him to sit his ass down and breathe once in a while, he would have been less likely to self-destruct?

[gool_duck]

I think Angelica is possibly less self-aware about her own mind.
Maybe. And very clear about how her sister is with her.
And 'the back of my hand' would not scan or rhyme.