Posted by The Mysterious H.C on September 16, 1997 at 23:31:10:
In reply to Interesting New View Point, but still wrong :-) posted by Nora on September 16, 1997 at 19:54:22
Now....if you had not said that Henry was a jerk, we could be allies
Oh, come on -- don't you think that Henry Crawford and Lady Susan is a match made in Heaven?? ;-)
Now however you are siding more towards Bertramites. Fanny belongs with Henry, She needs to live a little.
In saying that Edmund is less wrong for Fanny than Henry is (and that's all I'm doing), I'm not going out of my way to praise Edmund at all. I'm not claiming that he's a passionate novel-hero of a more conventional type.
But -- what you think Fanny needs is probably not what she thinks she needs, or is intuitively seeking -- namely a safe zone, where her confidence can be built up among people who understand her, and won't casually cause her unnecessary pain.
If you admit that that there is potential that Henry could be a good person, than we can call you our allies.
There is plenty of potential for Henry to be a good person in some ways (though the will to do so seems to be somewhat lacking) -- but even so, that still wouldn't necessarily mean that he's right for Fanny...
But...you must also shun inbreeding
Despite what some people now think, 1st cousin marriage isn't really that incestuous -- it's been allowed in England for 400 years (and before that too, if you could get a dispensation from the Pope), and even right now it's legal in about half the states of the U.S.
First cousins share 1/8 of their genes (so they are only 1/4 as closely related as siblings); I don't think that the greatest probability of genetic problems occurs in isolated 1st cousin marriages. The situation in which there's most likely to be problems is when the two parents both come from a population (isolated village, Pacific island, etc.) where there has been a regular pattern of breeding within the community for a number of previous generations -- and the parents don't have to be related as closely as first cousins for problems to occur in this situation, either....
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